Staring into the darkness, I wondered if people died out here. We were lost. With a broken down car. Somewhere in the Gobi desert.
The horror... the horror.
"I love the smell of petrol in the morning" I had said, only the morning before.
"Smells like... victory."
Ulan Bator, our final destination, loomed. We had gambled that our beloved car - Oddy - would survive the treacherous drive from Western Mongolia to the capital city and the finish line.
After three days, Oddy seemed unstoppable. He had plunged through rivers, climbed snow capped mountains and flown over rutted desert tracks.
In contrast, the Spanish ambulance in our convoy had struggled. In order to ensure that I made the flight home for my sister's wedding we had been forced to leave it behind. Team M3 was alone again.
Only 800km before the finish line, we felt confident. Cocky even. At least Chris and I did. Marta, as usual, was more cautious.
This cautiousness meant that we had to wait until she was asleep before filming Oddy tearing back and fourth across the desert (video below). Not since Western Europe had we dared to push him so hard.
Half an hour later, Marta suddenly opened her eyes.
"What the hell was that?" she said angrily.
"It's nothing" Chris and I assured her, trading worried looks.
It wasn't nothing.
The noise was our left back suspension smashing.
"It was probably a cumulative thing" Chris wisely pointed out to Marta.
Her reply isn't as repeatable, but in summary she expressed some dissatisfaction with the production methods involved in the shooting of our short film.
No longer the world's fastest Mongolians, we now crawled across the barren landscape at 10km an hour, stopping to steer round ruts and bumps. (
for photos of the Kiwi rally team in Mongolia.)
The map said that we were 200km away from the next town. If we could just make it there, then we could find a mechanic. We planned to drive all night.
To keep ourselves warm, we began to sip Kazakh cognac. We turned the stereo up. Chris climbed onto the bonnet. A butterfly flew passed us. Team M3 was back.
Until, once again, Marta had to go and ruin it.
"Guys" she said, in that tone of voice that instills dread into the hearts of men, "when was the last time we passed another car?"
It was a good question. Even for Mongolian roads it was odd not to see another vehicle in two hours.
Other good questions might have been "why have we been heading in a north easterly direction instead of directly east?" and "why did the dirt road deteriorate into a series of disused trails a few hours ago?"
Just as we were beginning to debate the answers to these riddles, a loud bang and fizzing noise interrupted us. Over the music came the sound of rushing air and expletives.
To minimise weight but still allow space for essential white pants and red shirts, we only had one spare tyre. Most other teams had between two and four.
It was 11.30pm and we decided to call it a night, not wanting to risk hitting another rock in the dark. Since our suspension had smashed six hours earlier, we had travelled 50km.
None of us said it, but we were all thinking it. We were in serious trouble.
That night, in the dark, sinister desert, we pitched our tent in silence.
In the morning, we threw on the spare and prepared for a long day. But it seemed Oddy was still annoyed about his exploitation in our video. When we turned the key, he didn't so much as cough. He was utterly dead.
We popped the hood. Our sulphur belching battery (the inside of the car always smelled like Rotorua or petrol, depending on how fast we were moving) was finally completely dead. We shook our heads and looked at our shoes.
Ten minutes later, after failing for the third time to push start the car, we heard a humming in the distance. It would understate the point to say we were relieved when a Russian-made van appeared on the horizon.
"Run!" we screamed at each other.
"Show the jumper leads!" I yelled, as Chris sprinted away.
It seemed our luck had changed. Minutes after getting the jump start, we rolled into a small Ger camp - a cluster of small circular white tent-like structures that Mongolians traditionally live in.
There we found the ubiquitous man working on a truck and showed him our suspension problem.
He shook his head, unable to suppress the hint of a playful smile.
"Ulan Bator?" we said, hopefully. Again he shook his head.
"You fix?" we said, pointing to wire and bits of wood lying around the place. "Ulan Bator! Ulan Bator!"
A sparkle flickered in the old man's eye as he wiped the grease off his hands with a filthy black rag.
Soon a crowd of men were gathered around the car, smoking our cigarettes and drinking our vodka.
After much debate they decided to insert a section of wooden fence post into the back left spring, to keep the wheel from hitting the car and rupturing the fuel line.
An hour later, holding my breath, I tested the wheel. Unlike the first attempt, where the wheel had buckled in immediately, it held. Everyone cheered. We gave them some more vodka and roared off - still at a prudent 10km/hr.
In the village we had discovered that somewhere the day before we had veered off the main track and were now well south of where we should have been, explaining the bad road, lack of vehicles and compass direction.
Over 150km lay between us and the next town.
Progress was painful, but a day later we rolled into Bayanhongor, where we treated Oddy to a mechanic and welder. It had taken us 32 hours of driving to cover the 200km.
We were tired, but elated. It was late at night, but we had emerged from the darkness, and knew that the finish line was ours.
Two days of relatively uneventful driving later we would triumphantly roll into Ulan Bator.
Final Statistics
Kilometres – 15,288
Days – 45
Countries – 19
Time Zones – 8
Breakdowns – 16 (including jump starts)
- Matt Kennedy-Good
Click here for photos of the Kiwi rally team in Mongolia.
Click here for the official website and to donate to the charities.
Princess Diana stayed there, and now so have I.