Hamiltonians Kip Bardsley, Simon Miles and Jim Pepper have embarked on the Poles of Inconvenience car rally.
Hamiltonians Kip Bardsley, Simon Miles and Jim Pepper have embarked on the Poles of Inconvenience car rally.
Three weeks of getting lost and stuck in different countries sound like a nightmare to many, but to four Hamiltonians, it is the ultimate adventure.
Jim Pepper, Simon Miles, Kip Bardsley, Cody Findsen and eight of their friends are amid the unsupported car rally Poles on Inconvenience, which sees participants taking 1200cc cars for a trip around Europe and northern Africa to seek out inconvenient locations chosen by the rally organisers, The Adventurists from the UK.
The rally only has a set start and finish location near Prague, Czech Republic, as well as a total of 87 poles in inconvenient places that participants can pick from - everything else, including routes, accommodation, food, visa, insurance and how many poles to head to, the rally drivers have to sort out themselves.
“We’re pretty worried. We expect things to go wrong, but that’s the fun of it. For us, it’s all about having an adventure,” Simon told the Waikato Herald ahead of the event.
Jim, Simon, Kip, Cody and their friends are all “outdoorsy” people, they say - a lot of them are hunters, some are volunteers at Land Search and Rescue, they all love hiking and are into cars.
Most of them have a job in the trades - Jim is a fitter and turner and Simon is an engineer - so the quartet thinks they are well-suited for the trip.
The Poles of Inconvenience car rally sees participants seek out inconvenient places with 1.2 litre cars - or smaller.
“We’re always up for an adventure. A few years back, we were thinking about doing something for the Christmas holidays. One of our friends ... said that Queenstown was cool, so we decided to make the trip down - from Hamilton - on 50cc scooters,” said Jim.
It was on that trip that they heard about the Poles of Inconvenience rally. A stranger at a gas station in Christchurch suggested that the boys check it out. When they did, they were hooked immediately.
“It’s one of the best adventures of our lives,” Jim said.
“We are never going to be as care-free, mortgage-free and kids-free as we are now,” Kip added.
Simon said: “We’re doing it for a laugh. It’s more interesting to us than sitting on the couch. Just doing what everyone else is doing is not us.”
Poles of Inconvenience: Simon and Jim with a rally mate in Spain.
Because the group of Kiwi friends is so big, they split into teams of three. Jim, Simon and Kip make up the team Game of Tows. In total, there are 70 teams from around the world participating in this year’s rally - seven are from New Zealand.
Since the rally organisers have not created a set route and lots of things can go wrong along the way, Game of Tows haven’t bothered planning too much. One thing is certain though: they are definitely not sitting on a couch a lot.
“We [are] going off the beaten track as much as possible. The idea is to go from the Czech Republic to northern Italy, France, Morocco, [the] western Sahara, maybe Albania, Bosnia and Croatia,” Simon said.
“We want an original experience that no one else has had and to come back with stories that we will keep on telling for a long time,” Jim added.
The rally kicked off on July 15, and people can follow the teams’ journeys online via The Adventurists’ website. Jim, Simon and Kip, like the members of a lot of other teams, also share their journey on their Instagram pages.
Game of Tows mostly stuck to their rough schedule, having driven past Milan (north of Italy), Montpellier (south of France), Malaga (Spain), Agadir and Dakhla (both Morocco), just to name a few milestones along on their way.
They are currently in Bari, Italy, and have clocked up close to 13,000 kilometres while driving to 15 poles of inconvenience.
As expected, not everything is going smoothly: so far, spark plugs needed changing, several tires got damaged and a wheel bearing needed replacing, all while the trio is battling heatwaves.
“In Morocco, [it was] over 55 degrees! We have no aircon, so we are using a spray bottle of water to wet ourselves and wear wet t-shirts to keep the temps livable in the car,” Jim told the Waikato Herald during the journey.
The purple line is Game of Tows' route. The blue dots with the numbers are the locations of the poles of inconvenience set by the rally organisers The Adventurists.
All teams have until August 8 to get back to the finish line in the Czech Republic, so there is a bit more time for Jim, Simon and Kip to get stuck in inconvenient places.
“When we told people, ‘We are going to do this [rally]’, some told us, ‘You are crazy, you’re never gonna make it’, but that just made us think, ‘We’re gonna show them!’ We are all in and we’re gonna make it,” Kip said.
The Poles of Inconvenience rally supports the UK-based charity Cool Earth, which protects endangered rainforests. Every team has to raise a minimum of £500 for this charity.
