RUSSIA

By landmass, Russia is the largest country in the world. Top ten in population. We spent a whopping day and a half there. Broken up into equal parts driving, sleeping, and drinking vodka. Alright, mostly driving and sleeping. We barely tickled the toe of Mother Russia - but it was a good introduction.

After a lovely afternoon drive through pastoral Russia, we arrived in Barnaul and scarfed down some dinner at America's number-one fast food chain, Subway. Man alive did that taste good. They had free wifi, so we got online and found the only hostel in town. On the way there we were intercepted by some enthusiastic young Russians. They pulled up next to us on a two-lane street and rolled down their windows. Hello! Where are you from?! Please pull over! They seemed harmless, so we stopped to chat. Talk about a warm reception, all they wanted to do was help us, and insisted that they guide us to our accommodation.

The hostel was lively. The parking lot held a few rally cars, and we were greeted outside by a handful of drunken ralliers. There aren't that many options for crossing into Mongolia by land from the west, so no matter the route from England, most Mongol Rally teams end up funneling through the same few border crossings. It was the beginning of the bottleneck, with all roads leading to Ulaanbaatar. Our Russian guides were excited to meet more foreigners, but after helping us check-in and tweeting a group picture, they took off. We spent the rest of the evening partying with the mish-mash of people in the hotel bar, and swapping stories with the other teams. We'd had our fair share of hold-ups along the way, but it was becoming more apparent that out of the 300-plus cars in the rally, we were towards the back of the pack. Thirty-five days on the road, and it had all seemed to go by so fast, yet we were still lagging. 

I was up early the next day, and spent a good chunk of the morning listening to a drunk Russian girl named Olga have a one-sided conversation with me. I really didn't know what to say, especially since we coudn't actually communicate. But it was 8AM and she was wasted, so that was interesting. 

We were on the road by 10. The landscape beautified after lunch, providing us with an exciting and dramatic build towards our final country. This is how I had imagined Mongolia, and the excitement grew with the light at the end of the tunnel. We drove through mountains and paralleled a river for most of the afternoon. The roads were smooth and traffic was light. Evening approached, and a warm sunset chased us through a narrow canyon into a chilly twilight. Ominous clouds hung above the earth ahead, and snowcapped mountains loomed on the horizon. The oncoming storm looked menacing, so we pushed on, hesitant to stop and set up camp under dark skies. We drove into the night, somehow avoiding the front, stopped for food in a one-street town, and continued on to look for a place to pitch the tent.

Then we hit the border. It snuck up on us sooner than we anticipated. And suddenly we were staring out into the darkness towards Mongolia. We'd made it! Well, almost. We still had hundreds of miles to go, on some of the roughest roads (or lack thereof) that we would encounter throughout the entire journey.

The border wasn't open, but a few semi-trucks had already started to line up, so we joined the queue, and slept in the car. The next day we would enter our last and twentieth country of the Mongol Rally... Mongolia!