MyWestworld

Driven to Destruction

Posted on 06. Sep, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog, Westworld Writer Interviews

Mike Vaughan and Jason Minvielle were in a remote section of eastern Turkey when they decided to stop for the night by the roadside. As they began erecting their tent, a tank and armoured personnel carrier pulled up. The tank aimed its cannon directly at the two Regina travellers. “Soldiers with machine guns jumped out and surrounded us,” says Minvielle. “The major started yelling, ‘You can’t camp here!’” It turns out they had stopped in the middle of a terrorist zone. “He told us that Kurdish rebels hide above in the mountain caves and pick off people as they drive past. We could have been in their rifle scopes for a couple of hours.”

The incident was just one of the misadventures that Vaughan and Minvielle experienced during their five-week, 16,000-kilometre odyssey in the 2007 Mongol Rally, an event that requires teams to drive comically unsuitable one-litre engine vehicles from from London, England to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaan Bataar. Entrants slog across windswept deserts, chug up steep mountain ranges and navigate some of the worst roads on the planet with no crew support or high-tech aids. Besides battling topographical terrors, past participants have been robbed at knifepoint, arrested as spies and chased by bandits. And unlike conventional car rallies, there is no winner. All teams receive the same reward no matter where they finish—which is nothing.

Run by the profit-making, but socially conscious League of Adventurists, this oddball motor challenge requires all participants to raise money through private and corporate sponsorships for charities that aid needy children in Mongolia and Eastern Europe. Vaughan and Minvielle also raised funds for the Canadian Cancer Society. The decision to enter the rally was a radical leap for both men, neither of whom had ever travelled overseas. Minvielle, a 37-year-old insurance broker, had mused for some time about injecting some excitement into his life. When he read about this “crap car rally” it seemed the perfect fit. He found a willing accomplice in his neighbour, Vaughan, a 36-year-old waste management sales manager, who was intrigued by the madcap scheme. As he notes, “Where else can you see 21 cities in a month?”

Team Saskatchewan’s mode of transportation was a 1993 Geo Metro purchased from Vaughan’s mother for a loonie that they dubbed the Hosermobile. The pair, who both have young children, spent nine months acquiring visas and upgrading their aging rust bucket, which had already logged 286,000 kilometres and reeked of dog and cigarettes. They would spend close to $25,000 on the trip, a sum that included transporting the Hosermobile by container ship to England. “We’re the only team to ever ship a car to the race,” says Minvielle. “I think it’s also the first time in history anyone has shipped a Geo Metro across the Atlantic.”

Despite carrying an array of car parts, tools, duct tape, hockey sticks and Cabbage Patch dolls that Vaughan’s daughters wanted them to photograph at various landmarks, they were woefully unprepared in other ways. “We had two maps and one guide book of Turkey,” says Vaughan. Getting lost became routine, especially since Team Saskatchewan chose the toughest route possible–through Europe to Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia, before the final trek across Mongolia to Ulaan Bataar.

To save money, they camped most nights, using an Impi roof tent donated by the Great Canadian Expedition Company. The company also supplied them with a compact dry toilet and a hot shower system. Hot showers were rarely needed, as the Balkans and central Asia were gripped in a fierce heat wave that saw temperatures soar into the mid-40s and beyond, eventually reaching a blistering 54 degrees in the Karakum Desert, which they crossed, suffering from dysentry, faces covered in bandanas, while listening to a Neil Young CD.

Their flags and decals, their rally lights and Saskatchewan plates drew curious crowds wherever they went. “Suddenly we knew what it was like to be Brad and Angelina,” says Minvielle. The adornments also made them easy prey for crooked police in the Czech Republic, who repeatedly pulled them over and issued fines for imaginary traffic offenses. But that difficulty paled in comparison with a nightmarish, 19-hour ferry ride across the Caspian Sea with a crew of thuggish ferry workers who refused to sell them food or water and would not allow them access to their car to get their own supplies. The decision to book a room to escape the heat and hassling offered scant relief. The room was hot as a furnace, the beds were full of red mites and the sheets were stained with blood.

As tough as the trip was, the pair also experienced some tremendous highs: the way the eyes of poor Turkish children lit up when they were given stuffed animals, the beauty of the Turkmenistan capital of Ashgabat and its friendly people, and the visual thrill of a night spent camping under a brilliantly clear sky in Kazahkstan in which they saw shooting stars, satellites and the Space Shuttle attempting to rendezvous with the International Space Station.

Although Vaughan and Minvielle made several logistical mistakes, only one proved fatal. After reaching a junction on Mongolia’s western border, they opted to take the northern route to Ulaan Bataar. After hours of banging over a moonscape of jagged rocks, craters and rivers without finding any semblance of a road, they returned to the junction, only to discover a huge gash in the Metro’s fuel tank. The fuel pump was destroyed as well. With heavy hearts they left the Hosermobile with a local family, caught a ride to the airport at Olgij and made the last 1,300 kilometres of the trip by plane, eventually walking into Dave’s Bar in Ulaan Bataar, the rally’s designated finish line, 23 days after leaving London. They were the 26th team to arrive of the 180 that began the race. Although grateful their diarrhea was finally abating, the Regina duo was bone-tired and disappointed they had to abandon their beloved Metro short of the finish.

“The real celebration occurred when we got back home and reunited with our families,” says Vaughan. And while he admits that the trip “gave us a new appreciation of the professionalism of the RCMP, the people who make sure our food and water is safe, the good roads, the social safety net and the drive-through Tim Horton’s,” he also says: “I would suggest that everyone do something like this at least once in their lifetime. I hope to do it again with my son when he’s old enough.”