By Robin Ewing
July 6, 2013. Day One: London to Cologne. 590 km/367 miles
And we’re off! The London launch was brilliant, as the Brits like to say.
About 13 teams showed up at Horse Guards Parade at Whitehall in central London, a parade area where Henry VIII held jousting tournaments and Elizabeth I threw her birthday parties. Nowadays, it’s mostly where tourists go to photograph the changing of the guards. Today, instead, it was a motley assortment of people driving cars decked out in stickers and flags and passing on advice about the best way to get to Mongolia.
Helen Rand, Tarquin and Boni Baldwin, Dean Cox and Florina Trosca helped put the finishing touches on our van, and then we all drove across the mall in a long parade of honking vehicles. Kristi Johnson and Frankie Flores came out to wave us off. It was very special to have so many friends there.
I also finally met some of the other teams:
1. Alpha Badger, who has been scaring me with incredibly organized Facebook posts for the last few months, is a friendly dad from Oxford named Antoine Cutayar. He showed up with a satellite phone, his own team t-shirts (we have them too, thanks Jamie) and the most decked out van there including his own flag and hood-mounted GoPro camera. All of his stickers were perfectly aligned and smooth (he even posted his mock-up diagram with proper dimensions online ). Our stickers, however, are all cattywampus and full of bubbles from applying them 5 minutes before leaving. Dean had to duct tape some of the magnets on.
2. Swallow Clan is a travelling family team of six. When their youngest was 2, he didn’t even know he had a home in Ireland. He thought he lived in a camper van. Now 10, he sat on top of the family van for the launch.
3. BangerandSmash Ride Again from Otley is John Calvert and his wife who are having their daughters meet them for a few weeks along the way. His truck was packed with paper to be donated to schools in Mongola and John was dressed as Where’s Wally.
4. Brighton Bandits (from Brighton surprisingly) are three boys doing the same route as us. They turned the back of their van into a bedroom so all three of them have to sit up front together for 8,000 miles unless one decides to sleep in the cave-like back.
Though the rally launch was officially today, the trip actually started for me last week when I met Dean in Sweden. We took a train to Germany to pick up our van and met up with Dean’s friend Albrecht, also a journalist, who kindly hosted us in Hamburg.
Albrecht gave us a tour of Hamburg, the best city in Germany he says, which included Reeperbah Street in the red-light district and a bar a serial killer used to visit in the 70s with a bedraggled lot of down-on-their-luck people including Rolf who had a Vietnam flashback mid-conversation, a smiling woman in a wheelchair decorated with colorful bath scrunchies and a sweet-natured toothless woman wearing a t-shirt that read “no touching, only looking.” After dinner we dropped Albrecht off at a church where he spent the night guarding Libyan and Ghanan refugees from neo-Nazis.
Apparently, neo-Nazis have also made it to Mongolia, where recently the Guardian reports that several neo-Nazi groups have become environmentalists, harassing foreign-owned mining companies for proper paperwork and while referencing Hitler and Nazi-style uniforms with swastikas.
The adventure continues tomorrow…