Pages

Monday, July 22, 2013

THE MONGOL RALLY


Right now I’m driving a third of the way around the world from the UK to Mongolia, in a 1.2 liter engine Hyundai Atos, with two dudes who are both taller than me...

After a handful of years in advertising, followed by a good stretch of traveling, I decided to chase a new career and go back to school for a masters degree in journalism. I got into NYU and started last fall in a program that focuses on multimedia storytelling and adapting journalism to the web. After our first year we were expected to find a summer internship, but with my perpetual traveling itch, I couldn’t ignore the urge to leave the city, go on some adventures, and tell some stories! I’d heard about this annual excursion called the Mongol Rally, and after looking into it, decided that it sounded awesome. And while it wasn’t exactly an “internship”, I thought that if I approached it from a journalistic angle, it could be a good learning experience - and an epic adventure! It didn’t take much convincing to get my classmates and friends, Derick and Johannes, to jump on board, and our team was formed. We approached the Brooklyn-based digital publishers The Atavist about working on a project together, so when we return to school in the fall we’ll be producing a multi-media ebook about our journey. Hopefully it will be most excellent.

It’s taken a lot of planning - we launched a successful Indiegogo campaign to help raise the funds, Johannes’s parents, who live in Germany, helped us acquire a car, and we scrambled up to the last minute to get our visas lined up. But here we are, on a 10,000 mile road trip around the globe, in a rally with over 300 cars! The ebook won’t be done until later in the year, but you can follow our journey here on my blog. And I’ll start with England...

No comments:

Post a Comment