We're team No Reservations and we are about to get this adventure started. Let's go!
The Mongol Rally is an event where a bunch of people that just want to get away
from the mundane everyday life, they buy a junk car and drive it from Czech
all the way to Ulan Ude, Siberia and see where the adventure takes you.
Me and Dan originally signed up for this and we know we travel really well together.
We've known each other all the way since high school and we had met Pete last
year in Vietnam. When we met Pete we thought he would just be like a good
third person to add and kind of mix it up a little bit.
"We're gonna do this Mongol Rally are you in?" And he's like "we're driving a car ten thousand miles
all the way from Europe to Asia, into Siberia." And I'm like "I like that!"
"So do I get up do I get a trophy truck?" And he's like, "no you get out a piece of crap Fiat Panda."
And I'm like "That's a challenge! All right, I'm in."
With the Mongol Rally it's basically a no-rules kind of thing. The only rules they do have is, the car can't
be over 1.2 liters. It's a whopping 40 horsepower.
The whole point is to drive something that probably won't make it or shouldn't make it.
I don't know what to say. It's the most crappiest car you can get.
We don't really have a plan for when our car breaks down
because it's gonna break down. It's gonna happen.
We bought the car a couple months ago but it's taking everything apart, changing up parts that
were broken. So we got a good understanding of what this car is and how to repair it.
I think we'll be okay or we're just gonna put a thumb out and attach to somebody else and get a tow.
We basically just have a small cook set and a tent and we're gonna try and rough it
through everything and just take on whatever challenges we can.
We already have been living off rice and cut-up wieners out of a can because
we're spending a lot of time driving and so sometimes you get into a town and it's closed.
So wherever we land, we land.
We've already, up to this point, camped in the middle of a cornfield.
Creature comforts aren't needed, especially for something like this.
The Mongol Rally, their general idea of getting from point A to point B, is called "The Unroute."
You can choose whatever you want; north, south.
We're doing the southern route which is gonna take us down through Istanbul, Turkey,
Iran and up through the Stans, back up to Russia and then down to Mongolia.
So it's kind of the longest and most difficult route and we chose this just
because it's gonna push us to our limits to see what we can actually get through.
And give us some of the most diverse culture in the world.
We're doing 26 different countries including Iran, which, right now, is a little controversial.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" That's a questions that we get every day.
The culture is a beautiful culture and Iran in the Middle East and then going through the Stans so,
the ideas is that we're gonna see a whole different world than what we see in mainstream media.
We were having the hardest time coming up with a team name and we kept kicking things around.
We wanted something actually means something to us. And we're really inspired by Anthony Bourdain
and the way that he travels.
And with him passing last year we thought it'd be a really cool thing to do homage to him
and name our team after his TV show.
With this whole rally, aside from the adventure and creating memories,
we are creating a short film documentary to showcase the the beauty of these countries
that not a lot of people have seen or have seen but see in a very different view.
We want to push our travels out into the world, to get other people to open up
that it's okay to travel anywhere in the world. That people are amazing everywhere you go.
It's not a big scary world out there.
For us to make and document this crazy adventure it's really, honestly, challenging because
you have to balance with; we can't have too much weight in the car because it's so little.
Nor do we have the room but we also want to have quality.
Nobody wants to watch a crappy video. So for us, shooting on higher quality gear,
having stuff that we know isn't going to fail.
I've had experiences in the past where I bought a cheap memory card or something
like that, and it goes bad on you. And all of a sudden like you just lost day's
worth of stuff because you it might be a week or two before you can upload things
to the cloud or back things up. And so if you don't have quality stuff and it just disappears on you,
you've you just lost a whole chunk of a very important story.
We know that with Kingston we're able to capture this moment
and know that we don't have to worry about that in the end; that all of our images,
all our films will be safe. Kingston is everywhere and that means we can be in any environment.
The route takes us through so many different places that we kind of experience almost every terrain,
every type of weather.
Depending on how much of the road is done in Mongolia this year almost, 50% of our driving will be offroad.
Our car is never not bouncing. If you have a traditional spinning hard drive it's not gonna work.
That hard drive will be bad by the time you get somewhere
because it's a non-stop just bouncing the whole time.
So the pre-launch for the Mongol Rally is in a place they call Junk Town.
We had no idea what to expect. But yesterday we pulled into the the launch party
and we pull in and it's just a post-apocalyptic theme park which was incredible.
It is Mad Max...it's more than Mad Max. It's crazy!
The people are such amazing artists. there's cars everywhere that are just destroyed
and it just it matches the attitude of the rally so well.
And just being out in the middle that Czech Republic in a derelict run-down junk town
is it's just such a cool setting.
The area itself is really cool because just for the event
you get to meet so many people from all around the world
and we're all on common ground. We're driving to Mongolia.
The world is actually filled with amazing people and we have an opportunity to interact with people,
experience different cultures on a whole new level.
We honestly do not know where this adventure is gonna take us.
We don't even know where we're going later today, so it's gonna be just an adventure every day.
We're not here to see all the tourist spots. Were here to observe and experience the culture.
There's no better way to experience a culture than being with the people.
And I think it's just gonna be incredible to see everything that we're about to embark on.