Some history, pt. 2

It's been an exciting two days: the car was just delivered to southern France (where some slight vehicle modification will be performed), the vehicle registration documents have been delivered, and we just received our last visa. The passports may even be back tomorrow!

This post is going to focus on all the planning and logistic management that's been completed. Instead of trying to put together some sort of roughly chronological narrative, I'm going to break it up into individual categories/areas/factors/etc.

The Route

Selecting the route has been one of my favorite aspects of Rally planning. There are two main Rally routes: north or south. The northern routes tend to pass through Belarus, the Ukraine, and Russia. Some northern routes might even dip into Russia. Southern routes head through Turkey and usually feature trips through Central Asia.

The southern route tends to be more challenging. There is much less infrastructure and the terrain is much rougher. Naturally, this was the route I had my heart set on. The Pamir Highway immediately captured my imagination I knew it would be one of the trip highlights. At this point, I had a rough idea of the countries I wanted to pass through.

It was now time to do a massive amount of research and actually construct the route. Prioritizing was key: it's easy to find useful information on Western Europe, but it takes time and money to find information on Central Asia. I used three main tools to gather information: Google, maps, and guidebooks. Each had plusses and minuses. Quality Central Asian maps? Long out of print. Finding the mileage between two cities was almost impossible. The time it took to cover said distance? Much easier to find. It was a symbiotic process - individually, each information source lacked a crucial piece of information, but with enough cross-referencing the answer could be found. My single most valuable resource? Lonely Planet's Central Asian guidebook. The bus timetables turned out to be worth the price of the book.

Now it was time to commit the route to paper. I printed two sets of calendars (July, August, and September) and lined up my maps. Using my maps and guidebooks as a reference, I penciled in the rough stopping point on each date. To make things easier, I decided that we would attempt to stop in or near a city/town/village. Once I had something that worked, I double-checked it and made another copy in pen. The calendar is extremely important, and plays an important role in obtaining visas.

Even with all the time and effort invested in route planning, it's still no more then a suggestion. Flexibility is key, especially when traveling in a region like this. What if the road is closed? What if the map is wrong and there is no road at all? That's why it's important to focus on the journey and not the destination.

Here is a rough map of our route.

The Vehicle

We had to deal with two major constraints when selecting a vehicle: age and engine size. The Rally rules state that the vehicle must be a 2001 model or newer and must have an engine no bigger then 1.2 liters. After some consideration, we decided that the perfect vehicle would be a left-hand drive Suzuki Jimny. This would give us four-wheel drive capability, which would allow us to tackle tougher terrain.

We then had to determine where to buy the vehicle - the US or the EU? After our experiences shipping trucks back from Panama, we quickly ruled this out. Further research revealed the fact that the United Kingdom is the only nation in the EU that allows non-residents to register vehicles. We would have to find our car in the UK and find someone willing to let us use their address to register our vehicle.

As luck would have it, my very first Google search produced some fantastic results. We found a left-hand drive, 2001 Suzuki Jimny for sale in Shropshire, England. It was exactly what we were looking for! It even had all the bells and whistles - removable hard top, air conditioning, and a tape deck.

It took roughly a month and a half to purchase the vehicle. We initially contacted the seller in mid-April and the vehicle was delivered to our agent in France on June 20.

It looks like I lied in the opening paragraph - this entry has been longer then expected so I'm going to post this content and attempt to tackle one of the most frustrating aspects of travel: visas.