we did it!         we reached the finish-line in ulaanbaatar on the 16th of august 2014!            have a look in our logbook for pictures and stories about our adventure!

The Logbook

Farewell-Party

Unser Abschiedsfest war sehr gut besucht - vielen Dank an alle, die gekommen sind!

Wir haben den ganzen Abend über die Rally, das Auto und generell Abenteuer geplaudert und gelacht, Probesitzen im Auto veranstaltet, und auch die Benzinkassa etwas gefüllt ;-)

Hier noch ein paar Impressionen des Abends:

    Die Baatarnators besprechen die Route

    Day 1: London calling

    We started!

    Today at 8pm we started our adventure - but not eastward to Ulaanbaatar! We will drive westbound to London, where the start of the Mongol Rally 2014 will happen on sunday! :-)

    We will keep you posted with new entries here in the logbook and on facebook.com/thebaatarnators, and our GPS-tracking-device will send our coordinates to the Map, where you can track us at all times and even send us short messages!

    So long: See you in Ulaanbaatar! :-)

    Die Baatarnators
    Our living room for the next 6 weeks! (© Volker Weihbold, OÖN)

    North, south, east, west?

    Because of current developments in regions along our route we did recheck the feasibility of our plans. Especially in Ukraine and in Tajikistan there are some troubling developments.

    We did stick our heads together to come up with a genious plan: Just drive around those "dangerous" regions :-)

    We will adapt our route as follows:

    1. The eastern part of Ukraine is to be avoided, so after reaching Odessa we will head north to Kyiv, and cross over into Russia there. Sounds safer to us.
    2. According to caravanistan.com the border next to Samarqand is closed for foreigners, so we will go a little bit further south and will cross over near Dushanabe.

    These changes should not affect our timetable, and otherwise will not cost any fun along the route.

    Along with working on our route we came up with another decision: How we will navigate around one third of the earth! We will leave our navigation devices at home, and will only use our newly arrived paper-based maps to travel east! And the codriver will never be bored again ;-)

    Here are some pictures of our route-genious map-moments:

      The Baatarnators plan their Route

      GPS-tracking of our route

      We have purchased a Delorme InReach SE GPS-tracking-device, which enables you to follow our journey.

      The device sends our current GPS-coordinates to a satellite every 10 minutes, and with that you can see our current position on a map on our website!

      The Delorme InReach SE has even more functions: We can send short messages to our girlfriends and families, and in case of an emergency there is a big red "SOS"-button which alerts international rescue teams.

      Delorme InReach SE
      The Delorme InReach SE

      We will link the device and messages to our Facebook-page facebook.com/thebaatarnators, where we can post new status updates via the satellite-connection. Cool, right? ;-)

      All infos about where you can find the map on our website and where we post messages will be up here in our logbook shortly before the rally starts on the 20th of July!