Back tonight w/more details…

Our Tent Village!

The team packed our backpacks and set up our tents in eager preparation and practice for the rally.  Here are some pics of Camp Baatar Hero!   We all fit snug as a bug in a rug, errr. . . I mean in our tents.  Thank you to Mike Warner and Mr. Starr for your generous donation of tents for us to use on the rally.  And a huge thank you to everyone who has donated to us so far!  You helped us purchase our third tent, sleeping pads, chairs and stove and we can’t wait to put them to great use on the steppes of central Asia.   But mostly we look forward to donating them to Mercy Corps at the end of the rally!

The inside of our newest tent, compelete with sleeping pads!

Space Planning: 6 weeks, camping supplies for 3 people, 70 gallons of cargo space in one punto. It fits!

I am flying out to London this week, heading up to Manchester to collect both vehicles, and driving them back to secure storage in London where they will lie in wait for their preparation to become Mongol Rally cars!

In July the 6 members of team Baatar Hero will transform these perky little city cars into desert consuming beasts of glory ready for the 10,000 miles of pot holes and sand dunes we are sure to encounter… at least as soon as we depart the ferry in France.

Can’t wait!!

Thursday morning:
We purchased our first car! eBay Motors UK and a few international phone calls later, and we are now the proud owners of a 2003 Fiat Punto Active 1.2 liter with 40k miles on it. 1 down 1 to go!

Then we dashed off to a sponsor meeting with F5 Networks.  They are excited about the car, and found us a place to park it near London!  They’re providing us with a lot of logistical support in addition to a communications platform, and will be helping us wrap the cars in logos, add gear, etc between now and July.  They even gave us racing jerseys! We are super excited about the collaboration and support F5 is providing.

Thursday afternoon:
We got our Russian Letter of Invitation.  And then we ran into our first Russian bureaucratic snafoo.  After downloading our visa applications from the Russian consulate website and diligently filling them out, I was told at the consulate in Seattle that those forms… the ones I JUST DOWNLOADED from THEIR website, are out of date.  We had to pick up their new forms and fill them out. I would formally like to invite Russia to the internet, and let them know they can upload their latest visa application form to their website BEFORE they print them out and make them available physically.

Thursday night:
We got off to a late start departing for Boulder, CO.  Kim and Jean and I loaded into our Honda Element bound for I-90.  First obstacle: I-90 eastbound ramp from I-5 was closed.  We aren’t even out of Seattle and we’re taking detours.

Friday:
We drove all day through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming & Colorado to Estes Park to meet up with other rally teams for Afternoon Tea with The Adventurists.  The drive took a little longer than expected, but we finally made it.  The mad dash continues as we are taking off now for Tea, will update with photos/video/etc when we get back!

70 days and counting down!!

We can’t thank everybody enough for their generous support.  These donations, both financial and in kind goods, along with all the enthusiasm and energy in the room touched us personally and provided us with a boost of confidence to continue working hard to make this endeavor a reality.

With the help of The Snow Leopard Trust, as well as items donated by the local Mongolian community, we held a silent auction which proved very popular. Crafts handmade throughout Central Asian republics from Mongolia to Kazakhstan were auctioned off with proceeds benefiting not just us, but also going to The Snow Leopard Trust which is protecting the endangered snow leopard in that region.

We were especially excited to present the Mercy Corps story and talk about them at our fund raising table because a few people from their local office came down after their own holiday party and joined us for the night. Donations for Mercy Corps have continued to pour in through our FirstGiving page after the event!

The Morin Khuur performances by Urtaa and his student Robert were a highlight of the evening.  They played both traditional Mongolian music and contemporary pieces that everybody was more familiar with.

This first event was a huge success by any measure.  We had so much fun and can’t wait for our next event.  With everybody’s help we are well on our way to Mongolia! Check out more photos of the event at Flickr.

See you at our next event!

- Team Baatar Hero

The time has come again when Kim and I set about taking another long and far flung journey around the world.  And this time we are taking you along for the ride! Literally.

Over the past several months we have gone from just knowing we wanted to go to Mongolia, to finding out about this event called the Mongol Rally, to registering for 2 teams to participate.

And we want you to be involved!

Here’s the basic idea:
* next summer (July/August) we will drive 2 small cars (what the Adventurists call “unsuitable”, but I don’t really understand all their British slang) from London to Ulaan Baatar.
* Raise at least $2000 per car for Mercy Corps in Mongolia.
* Donate the vehicles to the charity when (if) you arrive in Mongolia.

We have set a few extra “rules” for ourselves as well:
* make the trip sustainable by reducing our impact (vehicle fuel efficiency, reducing air travel where possible, purifying our own drinking water, using solar power, etc)
* additionally donate the gear for the trip rather than shipping it home (tents, sleeping bags, camping supplies)…
* We are forming a non-profit organization dedicated to advocating for sustainable travel, so we plan on making this adventure the first of many similar endeavors.

How are we taking you along?
We are literally taking some of you with us!  We have 2 teams registered, which means a caravan of 2 cars. We have already sought the help and advice of some friends and family to make sure we complete this journey safely. There is potentially (limited) space for more people to join our team. If you are interested, please contact me for more details.

Obviously not everybody can join us in the cars, but we would be thrilled to have you involved by possibly meeting us along our route. We’ll be traveling through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Central Asia, Russia, and of course Mongolia. There will be many opportunities to make your own journeys coincide with ours.

Of course traveling is also not an option for everybody. We will be filming this adventure and documenting it in as real time as possible with audio, video and photo blogs along the way.  We would love for you to virtually join the trip from the other side of the world.

You can also be part of our home based team if you would like to help us with fundraising or have any advice (logistical, vehicular, etc) for us.

Why are we doing this?
I could write another whole email about why we chose Mongolia (look for that in a future blog post).  Instead I’ll focus on why we are doing the rally.   We have been reading all about Mongolia’s compelling history (I highly recommend Stanley Stewart and Jasper Becker’s books) to prepare for this trip.  Nearly 70 years of communist control followed by a rapid fall have been chaotic and destructive to the economy and culture.

The last 20 years have seen some of the fastest growth of a young democracy and economy ever, but it has left most Mongolians behind.  With their indigenous herding culture disrupted by the Russians and lacking the knowledge and experience to operate most of the industries that are growing now, many Mongolians are unemployed and extremely poor.  Some families are so unable to provide for their children that they are forced into homelessness.  Mongolia has a wealth of natural resources, but they are managed by foreign operations that know how to extract them (and most of the profits are thus sent elsewhere).

We’d like to see these resources managed by Mongolians who will use them responsibly and preserve their land to restore their indigenous herding culture. Mercy Corps directly addresses these problems by giving homeless children shelter, building schools to educate them, and finding employment opportunities to stimulate a sustainable locally owned economy.

We want to see the beauty of Mongolia for ourselves while we help to preserve the land and the culture for future generations… and if a little adventure is involved there is no harm in that.

Fundraising
All of this of course requires a lot of time, planning, and money to organize.  Everybody on our team has committed a lot of time and money already to this adventure, but we can not do this all ourselves.  We can take care of our own plane tickets and travel expenses (we do not expect anybody to send us on vacation), but we still need to raise money for the vehicles and equipment, all of which will be donated, that will be required to complete the 10,000 mile drive, in addition to the direct contributions to Mercy Corps.

We really need your help to raise this money.  I know that everybody’s budget is tighter right now, but remember that even as our own economy starts to rebound, Mongolia’s commodity based economy is suffering the delayed effects of falling prices around the world.  The smallest amount we can give will go very far to help a child there develop the skills they need to build a thriving economy of their own.

We can also reach our goal by spreading the word to as many people as possible. If we can each only give small amounts, but reach enough people we can raise more than enough to make this happen. Please consider giving even just $5 or $10 to help us reach our goal. No amount is too small. If you are able to give more or to make a monthly contribution then we can reach our goal that much sooner.

If your employer matches charitable contributions, Mercy Corps is a tax exempt 501(c)3, and we are also currently registering for our own non-profit status (we’ll update you when this is complete). Over the next year we will be organizing several exciting fund raising events for you to attend, so stay tuned for more info! In the meantime there are 3 ways to contribute  here .

I hope you can be part of this journey with us in one way or another.
Please visit our site http://rally.roamgreen.org
Join our Facebook group
Follow us on Twitter
And spread the word to everybody you know.

Thank you!

–
Brian Shrader
http://roam.autarken.net
http://rally.roamgreen.org
http://twitter.com/baatarhero
http://facebook.com/baatarhero

Starting around some time late last year we knew that we wanted our next big trip to be Mongolia, but when we started planning we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.  Our original plan was to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia and trek by horseback over the Mongolian steppe.  We also wanted to be involved with some kind of volunteer opportunity during part of the trip.  After a few months, in the course of my research, I discovered this video of the Mongol Rally.  Adventure. Culture. A good cause. It took us about 2 seconds to decide this was how we were going to Mongolia.

Little did we know that we had just scratched the surface of such an epic undertaking.  We’d have to raise thousands of dollars for Mercy Corps; arrange visas and permits; acquire a vehicle; outfit said vehicle for a 10,000 mile journey over mountains, desert and Siberian tundra from London, UK to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia; and all of this before we’re even out of the starting gate.  We soon learned that all of this would be moot if we couldn’t even get into the event.  Apparently there is quite a queue just to register.  Last year all of the available spots filled up in just a few minutes.  So we joined the mailing list and waited to find out more details from The Adventurists about when to register.

The summer crept by, and we watched this year’s rally unfold. We planned a mini-rally of our own through the American West.  This was in part a way to get to my cousin’s wedding in New Mexico, in part a vacation to parts of the US we had never seen, and finally, partly a test of our endurance.  A 3,800 mile drive (granted, over well paved roads) in 7 days would surely test our ability to log long hours in the car together and start memorizing whole episodes of This American Life. Also of course this would provide for us our first obstacle: word came down from The Adventurists, registration would be on the 2nd to last day of our road trip… at 6am PST no less.  So it was that we had to make sure we stopped at a hotel in Salt Lake City, UT with a reliable internet connection and wake up  at 5am this morning to register.  We had a feeling that we would want to assemble a team larger than could fit into 1 car, so we registered 2 for the event.  This meant we had 2 laptops hitting their website as it slowed to a crawl under the traffic that bombarded it from would be adventurers around the globe.  Kim and I both thought at several points in time we were getting frozen out before we could complete the registration, but we somehow were both successful before all the slots filled up.  Before we could celebrate, we packed ourselves up, jumped in the car, and I drove over 900 miles in 14.5 hours from Salt Lake City to Seattle, if for no other reason than to somehow prepare myself for this crazy journey.

Now we are back home, and the reality of what we’ve undertaken is setting in.  Now the planning really begins.  We must finish forming our team, Baatar Hero! We need to start fund raising.  We need some cars…

First step down… about 9,999 more to go.