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Aug 15

Rick Steves Podcast

On Saturday, August 13th, 2011 – Travel With Rick Steves aired our interview about the Mongol Rally! Christine from Just A Steppe Away and I met Rick at his studio late last year to record the interview and now it’s available for you all to listen to. You can download the show for yourself from Rick’s podcast page. Or you can listen to the embedded link below. Our segment starts at about the 14 and a half minute mark. I’m streaming directly from his site, so there’s no fast forwarding, but the first interview about the Berlin Wall is well worth listening too anyway.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Aug 13

One Year Rally Anniversary and Rick Steves Radio Interview

Baatar Hero fans and friends!

Yes, it is true, our Mongol Rally adventure is already over 1 year old and we look back nostalgically at the same time as this year’s rally is under way. We’ve been fielding questions from this year’s teams and relaying our stories of derring-do. For example, 1 year ago this week we arrived in Baku having braved the Azerbaijersey countryside and its extortionate “law enforcement”: http://rally.roamgreen.org/2010/08/10/

This year’s teams will soon be driving through the Mongolian Gobi desert, visiting Mercy Corps aid sites supported by the amazing fund raising you all helped us achieve last year. All of you and our sponsors donated almost $15,000 in cash and over $5,000 in vehicle auction and equipment donations… over an amazing $20,000 total for Mercy Corps, 4 times our original goal, and the biggest fund raising team for Mercy Corps in the 2010 Mongol Rally!

We wanted to take this milestone opportunity to thank you again for your amazing support, and remind you that you can relive some of the adventure with us this Saturday, August 13th. Earlier this year Rick Steves recorded an interview with Brian and another Seattle rallier from one of the teams we caravaned with. That interview is airing on Travel With Rick Steves this weekend!

Travel With Rick Steves airs at 2pm PDT on your local NPR affiliate. There are several ways you can tune in:

- Find your local NPR station and listen live http://www.ricksteves.com/radio/whereitairs.htm

- Listen Live online via KUOW’s website http://www.kuow.org/

- Subscribe to Rick Steves podcast and download the show after Saturday at http://podcasts.ricksteves.com/ricksteves.xml

I will post this to the website as well, so you can always come back to rally.roamgreen.org and listen later.

As Rick would say, Happy Travels!

Sep 23

Back In Seattle

Our Mongol Rally ended just over two weeks ago as we pulled into Ulaan Baatar and donated our two tiny Fiat Puntos to The Adventurists For Development. It’s taken a while for all of us to get home, to get over our jet lag, and get back into the swing of things. But we are all back in Seattle, safe and sound now.

We are still going through the thousands of photos and hundreds of hours of video we took along the way, and at some point we’ll definitely have a welcome back wrap up party with slide shows and stories to tell you all, so keep your eyes open for that invitation.

In the meantime though, we have thrown together a quick little video to show you all where your generous donations are going. During the last week of our journey, we joined a Mercy Corps project coordinator on a tour of several sites which were recipients of Mongol Rally 2009 grants. It was amazing to see how just a few dollars can really change somebody’s life and provide an opportunity to start a business that will sustain itself for years to come, or achieve an education that would be impossible otherwise. This is what the rally was really all about for us! Thanks to Glenn Bell for providing the soundtrack.

With your contributions, we more than doubled our initial $5000 goal. We could not have done this without all of your amazing support, including the fund raising efforts of Ed Roberts, Real Networks and Microsoft Employee matching programs, and massive fundraising efforts by F5 Networks employees all over the world.

If you still wanted to make additional contributions, or if you have not had a chance to donate yet, don’t worry, you can still make a donation that will count towards the Mongol Rally 2010 total this week! Please go to http://firstgiving.com/baatarhero and make your final contribution now!

Thanks again to all of our amazing sponsors: F5 Networks, Honda & Toyota of Seattle, TerraPass, Red Star Travel, Sisalwood, Rescue Tape, SatellitePhoneStore.com, Keen Footwear and eKit.com for all your support!

Aug 21

Aral Sea Pan

Drag around this VR panorama of the Aral Sea @ Muynaq. I will create a higher rez version when I get home, but for now I’m rationing bandwidth, posting this via satellite from our camp ground in the middle of nowhere Kazakhstan

Aug 20

Photo & Video Update

A new batch of photos just posted to Flickr!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/autarken

And a quick video clip from the Aral Sea!

Aug 13

Salam Alaykum Turkmenistan

There is a glow a few kilometers to our East. It’s an unmistakable warm orange-red glow of fire, but this fire never goes out. It’s been burning for the past 40 years or so.

We are in Darvaza, Turkmenistan, camped out in the middle of the desert after returning from the flaming gas pit that’s been on fire since the Russians were drilling for gas here. A sinkhole opened up and swallowed up some of their equipment in the process. They attempted to burn off some of the “waste gas” that was bubbling on top of the crater, and it has been on fire ever since.

Video shot with VadoHD provided by eKit

Standing at the edge of the crater, hot blasts of air hit your face and twisters spin up out of nowhere as this place creates its own micro-climate. The blasts of air are not unlike the conditions while driving through the desert. With no air-con we have to drive with the windows down, if for no other reason than to prevent the windows from acting as lenses refracting the sun into the car.

Other than the 110 degree heat we have been loving driving through Turkmenistan. Our ferry from Baku crossed relatively quickly, but we had to wait a day outside the port for room to open up for us to dock. All told: 31 hours at sea. Let us know who won the pool at the Microsoft Office team. The border guards at port were *really* nice. I may not have mentioned this yet, but the Turkmen Consulate in Baku was really nice and helpful as well, which gave us hope that was definitely not misplaced. The guard processing our visas asked who was in charge of our group, which turned out to be me, he called me “Chief” and said I looked like an actor. After we figured out he meant “Lost” when he was talking about the “teleserial ‘Staying Alive’” he laughed and said he thought I was Matthew Fox. One of the members of our group had a misprinted passport number on the invitation, clearly a typo, and the guard joked that he wouldn’t let him in… but then said “bad joke, sorry” and we all laughed. No shake downs, just a lot of forms in triplicate, all very official and time consuming. Clearing immigration and customs: 6 hours. It was 7 am before we found a place to stay, camping out on the beach with a bunch of Turkmen families. We grabbed just a few hours sleep and woke up by taking a bath in the Caspian, cool and refreshing.

Driving to Ashgabat took ALL day, on paved roads that had been melted in the heat and driven on hard by big trucks, turning the blacktop into waves of tar that rolled our cars across the desert at a max 80kph clip. We were pulled over 4 times again, but the cops here are friendly and really just want to say Hi and ask about the rally. They shook our hands instead of our wallets, and sent us on our way. Nice change of pace. Azerbaijan, you could follow this example. We are like celebrities here, *everybody* can tell we are foreign and the cars draw a *lot* of attention, even from hundreds of meters away cars flash their lights at us, and everybody stares and waves.

Ashgabat was this strange place, somebody said aptly a combination of Las Vegas and Pyongyang. There are hundreds of fancy looking buildings, but not enough traffic to justify their existence, and inside many of them are empty or downtrodden. We stayed at what looked like a really fancy hotel – inside it reeked and the carpeting had gaps with concrete below… the power was inconsistent and destroyed one of my adapters. We were pretty anxious to leave the city and head for Darvaza after getting some supplies… an exercise which took 4 hours because there are no ATM’s and the banks are extremely slow to process a cash advance. The other thing that doesn’t seem to work is my cell phone. It’s not compatible with any network here, and nobody will sell me a pre-paid SIM since I’m not Turkmen. So, no updates from eKit until we make it to Uzbekistan I think.

We hooked up with several other rally teams at a gas station on the way out of town, joined the caravan north, and finally found our way to the gas crater at about 10:30pm, brilliantly lit up in the dark and clearly visible from miles away.

I’m sure I’m probably forgetting something, but my video has just finished uploading and we are on the satellite again, rationing our data. I’ll let the video speak for itself and our next transmission will probably come to you from Uzbekistan

Jul 19

F5 Releases Article on MicroScope.co.uk

A big thanks to F5 & Alex Scroxton for posting this article about us in MicroScope.co.uk. Check it out!

http://www.microscope.co.uk/blogs/network_noise/2010/07/ill-call-you-back-im-in-mongolia.html

Jul 16

Naadam In Seattle

Every July 10th/11th Mongolians celebrate Naadam, a Mongolian Olympics of sorts. Naadam is a celebration of the 3 “manly” sports and the military traditions they represent: archery, horseback racing, and wrestling. Tom, Jean and I were joined by some friends out in Redmond’s Farrel McWhirter park last Sunday to check out the competition. When we were originally planning our trip to Mongolia I was really looking forward to Naadam, but the rally schedule obviously has us leaving after it’s over, so it was a treat to experience the event at home before we depart.

We didn’t see any archery or horseback racing… but we think Muugi’s son pictured above is just about old enough to be a champion racer. Seriously, little kids just a little older than he is do compete in horse racing… and win. Just ask our friend Urtaa, he was a champion racer at 5 years old! It was great to see Muugi and Urtaa one last time before Tom and I fly off to London (tomorrow!!).

Jul 08

The TerraPass Footprint

Baatar Hero was just featured on TerraPass’ blog, The TerraPass Footprint!

The write up explains a little bit about the Mongol Rally and details the multi-facted approach we are taking to reducing our impact, including carbon offsets, solar power, UV water purification, and sporting Keen’s sustainable hybrid footwear.

Thanks to TerraPass for helping us reduce our carbon footprint. When we are on the road status posts will include miles traveled, MPG, gas consumed and carbon output at regular intervals.

And congrats to TerraPass for being honored as #1 carbon offset company for the 2nd year in a row by Greenopia for the quality and transparency of their portfolio.

May 26