The Lost Kiwis - Mongol Rally 2015The Lost Kiwis – Mongol Rally 2015 » Author » Scott

Preparing the Car

Scott — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 23:47:54 +0000

So we finally acquired a little hoon-box that is suitably unsuitable enough for the 20,000 kilometre sprint. Featuring a stonking great 0.996 litre engine, this little monster is capable of getting to 100km/h in as little as 16.7 seconds and can reach a jaw-dropping top speed of 140km/h downhill with a tail wind.

Presenting our 1998 Suzuki Wagon-R+ in baby blue.

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Now before I continue, it wasn’t easy securing ownership of a car in the UK from New Zealand. Thankfully I have a cousin, Derek, living in Surrey who just happens to be a mechanic. Ideal! So we sent Derek around to test drive the car, after which I imagine there was a lot of head shaking and the word “idiots” used like it was going out of fashion.

We set Derek a task to transform this nana-spec joke of a car into a road-destroying, moment-inspiring, experience-creating, soul-enhancing, little monster. And here’s photos of the progress he’s made.

First of all, a roof cage and LED flood light are fitted. Look at that thing – the power of 1,000 suns!

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Next up an essential piece to protect the car’s guts. If we bottom the car out and it rips off our sump plug, we drop all our oil without knowing and roast the engine. An oil sump guard is cut and fitted to the front, and a fuel tank guard fitted to the back. Come at us rocks!

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It’s going to get hot in the Gobi Desert. We’re talking +50°C. As mitigation for the added strain on the cooling system, Derek has added a second electric fan. Smart man.

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Another important addition for long stretches between villages is a jerry can for fuel, and spare tyres. One spare came with the car and Derek’s on the hunt for two more. The jerry can has been mounted to the side of the car – Mad Max style!

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Some more ingenious mods are a gear net for keeping our stuff secure and out of the cabin, a flag pole for flying the silver fern (and victory bras), a safe to be mounted under the passenger seat to protect our vital documents and stacks of pinga, and last but not least a banging stereo to keep the lads entertained on the journey.

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Still to come are the custom liveries and sponsors’ stickers!

Until then,
Scotty and The Lost Kiwis

The inaugural route planning – Session #2

Scott — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 07:29:09 +0000

Alright fellow followers. Update time.

We have revisited the first draft of our route which we planned out during Session #1 – the one we’ve been parading around on our website for the past while. Doing the calcs, this route would have seen us journey 21,151kms of roads and questionable terrain. This means we would need to average 503kms of travel per day and use a whopping 1692 litres of fuel, worth $3367 at NZ prices.

The implications of the planned 21,000+ kilometre route meant that if we broke down and lost a day, which is inevitable by the way, we would need to spend a whole day or night in the car to catch up. We also had no contingency days planned.

After much deliberation and anguish, it was wholly agreed to bump a few of Europe destinations off the hoon-path. Our reasoning was that we are much more likely to return to this part of the world later in life.

So! Out go Italy and Croatia which reduced our path to an average of 473kms per day, totalling 19,851kms.

Another significant change we made was to deviate from travelling across Afghanistan. Our source of advisory for this change was information gleamed from Afghan taxi drivers during work trips. Warnings of Taliban and bandits, roads that range from very bad to non-existent, and unexploded land mines left over from the Soviet-Afghan War were more than enough to elicit a resounding “nope” from The Kiwis.

This gives us the opportunity to journey north though the Ahal Province of Turkmenistan. 260km north of Ashgabat in the middle of the Karakum Desert is the site of a natural gas fire that has been burning since it was lit by Soviet petroleum engineers in 1971. The photos really show why the locals call it the “Door to Hell”, and I bet it’ll be just as impressive in person!

Signing off for now, I’ll leave you with the updated hoon-path. Keen to hear your comments!

~Scotty

Driver Profile: Brad Cooper

Scott — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 22:32:46 +0000

Brad brad brad… where do we start?

Mr Bradley Cooper is a scraggly-haired lad from the dirty deep south of the South Island. Hailing from Makarewa near Invercargill, Brad has had a world of freedom at his fingertips from day one. During his early years going to school at a small-town High School brad would chase the girls and pull their hair. A real ladys’ man in the making.

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I had the privilege of meeting Brad during our first year of study at the University of Otago in Dunedin. We quickly became bff’s (no homo) and got down to the business of sinking as much booze as possible. We coined the manoeuvre “Mains and Cheese” that we used at bad parties or shitty gigs. If it was well-deserved, one would locate the mains power box and flick the Mains switch, remove the main relay, then Cheese it as fast as possible down the street. Not only would the party be without power, but there would be no turning it back on until the morning!

Me, Brad, Simon, and another cobber of ours decided to flat together in our second year of study. There was always a crate full of big-bots and zero veggies in the fridge. We quickly discovered that yes, you could get away with fireworks in the shower, writing on the walls, half-height doors, burnt couches, and a generous stack of knicked firewood in the backyard.

Anyway, Brad decided one day that he wanted to become a ‘Hydrographic Surveyor’. I put that in inverted commas because none of us know what that actually is, nor can we be bothered googling it. Brad currently resides on a boat off the coast of Perth for a large portion of the year doing who knows what.

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Bradley brings a positive attitude to the Team, albeit a bit stubborn. He will be the first one to volunteer to run 20kms when we run out of fuel, and the last one standing at the end of the night.

Buckle up, lad.

No one dies on my watch

Scott — Tue, 02 Dec 2014 03:02:10 +0000

All things being fair, it must be said that New Zealand is a relatively safe place to live. Putting aside, of course, our often ridiculous choices we make about personal safety. We have no notable poisonous insects or nasty animals. Also, humans in NZ generally (generally) want to be nice to other humans.

The same cannot be said for some of the regions we will be travelling through! We realise that the dangers of getting stung, shot, bitten, beaten, broken, bashed, bruised, or any combination of the aforementioned are very real. We will be brushing shoulders with military and extremist groups of all types as we pass through some of the areas worst-struck by conflict. SafeTravel is a travel advisory website run by the NZ government (link). Many of the destinations we are planning to visit fall into the ‘Extreme Risk’ category and travel is ill-advised.

To prepare for crappy situations, I’ve just completed 3 levels of First Aid courses including Pre-Hospital Emergency Care (PHEC). St John say that this course “provides the knowledge and skills required to deliver immediate advanced first aid assistance in any situation”. The chances of getting an ambulance to drive a million kilometers into the Gobi Desert are slim, even our Comprehensive travel insurance can’t guarantee that we’ll get help in time.

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I’ll be encouraging the lads to up-skill in their own First Aid knowledge so we can provide competent care, should a ‘health event’ occur.

Euphemisms aside, no one dies on my watch.
~Scotty

The inaugural route planning – Session #1

Scott — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 08:44:44 +0000

After our freak out of the couple of dozen countries on our visa list, we’ve locked ourselves into a weekly meet up where beers are dinner and Scotty is left staring through his camera. Puzzling with each other over how to start nutting the route planning, we printed and sellotaped a few A3s worth of map covering Europe and Asia practicing some skills that will surely come in handy on the side of the road.

With the crafted map, Google searches like “Burning hole in Turkmenistan”, and 27 blue dots, we stuck-off a good list of the places we could be going. The places we were gleaming to see, and the places we’d need to stroll through, left us with some nice talking points about the almost-route we’d plotted.

Northern or Southern Europe? Across the Caspian Sea or through Iran? Squeeze ourselves through Russia for a double Visa or head through China? Yes, no, sounds easy.

Our new site is LAUNCHED!

Scott — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:28:18 +0000

We’ve been working super hard to get our site and social accounts set up and we’re finally done! Phew, that’s one less thing to do. Next steps? Try to get some sponsors!

Oh, and sorting visas, flights, route, timeframes, and a car too…