Rally

Adventure has gone a little soft. Organised tours let you see the sights while shuffling between your air-conditioned coach, and your four star hotel. Travel is losing its adventure. We can fly cheaply and comfortably from London to Singapore without touching the lands and people in between. Even Bear Grylls travels with a posse of camera-holding-assistants loaded with survival gear.

Enter the most fantastic charity event in the world -The Mongol Rally

A 16,000 kilometre dash from Europe to Mongolia, across deserts and mountain ranges, through a landscape ranging from steppes to alpine valleys, and towering minarets. All this is done for charity, with no set route, guides, and no support crew, all in a tiny car designed to take nanna to shops.

And rules are…

The rally was started by two blokes who came into possession of a Polish Fiat, and were wondering what to do with it. Then one of them said “Let’s drive it to Mongolia!”. In keeping with the very first misadventure and its spirit of optimistic minimalism, the rules are:

• The car has to have an engine 1.2L or less
• Teams drive from London (UK), or Prague (Czech Republic) to Ulan-Bataar, the capital of Mongolia.
• There is no set route
• At least £1000 (that’s about $1600AU) needs to be raised for charity
• There is no prize for coming first, just an afternoon tea for arriving.

In short, this is no guided tour. It’s an adventure, and a slightly crazy one at that.