Article originally written for the Poole Grammar School yearbook and AutoSimSport magazine.

After 6 years studying at school. I decided to take a gap year before University, leaving me with plenty of free time and a thirst for adventure. I discovered the Mongol Rally, a car journey across the globe from London to Mongolia to raise money for charity. I loved the idea, and despite initial resistance from my parents I began making plans...

A year later I found myself in a slightly rusty and totally inadequate 20 year old Nissan Micra with my friend Matt, leaving Hyde Park with almost 200 other cars who started the rally.

In the first 32 hours of the rally we drove 950 miles, in a desperate bid to make it to the party in Prague. We were only a couple of hours late, and arrived in style, after getting hopelessly lost and no doubt breaking all the rules in the Czech Highway Code.

2 days later we were in Poland, visiting the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, and what an incredible experience that was. That same day, our exhaust failed under the car, making it unbearably noisy for the short drive into the city. We had it repaired for $20 the next day, and we were on our way. Later that week I was caught speeding in Ukraine, and was made to pay a $15 ‘fine’.

The most frustrating and time consuming part of our journey was no doubt all the border crossings we had to sit at. Waiting to enter Ukraine was one of the most exciting and yet boring few hours: tired and on edge, we sat nervously at our first ever customs checkpoints watching the military officials search everybody car. Suddenly we were very foreign and regarded with much suspicion by the locals. However, it wasn’t long before we were experiencing the heat of the world’s largest landlocked country, Kazakhstan, and on to Uzbekistan a few days later.

The road into Uzbekistan is absolutely awful, first starting with an unfinished road in Kazakhstan, which gave us the occasional stretch of 4ft deep sand to cross, which even the occasional Russian 4x4 would appear to struggle across. Digging our car out of the cement-dust-like sand at 22:00 with nothing but and a flip flop was quite an experience! We eventually rolled into the next town to finally get some sleep by 03:00. The following day, we drove across 50 of kilometres of camel track and a 5 hour border, which was followed by the most horrendous road ever known to man, which I can best describe as like driving over thousands of speed bumps laid one after another… Constantly. For 14 hours.

The whole of the route we took through the Middle East and Asia was incredible. Kyrgyzstan has amazing roads, although the car did misfire quite a bit at 3000m altitude in the mountains because the air was so thin and the mixture too rich. We travelled in a group of 3 cars, for safety, and all chipped in with our food, spare parts and company to keep spirits high through the long days. The whole journey lasted 5 weeks and we drove 8550 miles.

Mongolia is perhaps the most beautiful country in the world and is completely unspoiled due to there being very few roads, which also makes navigation extremely difficult. At one point we did become lost and drove into the Gobi Desert, not realising our mistake until we had reached a waist deep river. Not wanting to turn back we drove 40 miles north, following the river off the beaten track (and getting stuck in mud, grass and sand). It took 6 hours, but it was one of the highlights of the trip for us all.

I’m now back to work studying Motorsport Engineering at Oxford Brookes University… Looking forward to my next adventure!