Charities and News

Hello.

This will be my first ever blog entry, in a world where the internet rules lives, and the CIA knows anything that you post online, i have always been a little reluctant to write about myself online. Not that i am planning on blowing up parliament or hijacking Air Force 1, i just believe in personal privacy to an extent.

Anyway, here i am, writing about myself to have it eternally boxed in an archive somewhere, in black and white (or maybe green if i decide to play with the text before i post this!). If i ever become prime minister i hope i don’t oppress a minority with some crude comment, to have it dragged all over the News of the World at a later date (yes, i know the chances of me being in a position where the general public gives a shit what i say is unlikely, but what’s wrong with covering all bases right!)

So i have now set up a Just Giving page for all you great people to donate lots of cash to! Jenn has also set up a page on the same platform as follows:

If you would like to donate to the page i have made and give to Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), please visit:

[http://www.justgiving.com/indy-students2](http://www.justgiving.com/indy-students2)

If you would like to donate to the Christina Noble Childrens Foundation (CNCF), please visit Jenn’s page:

[http://www.justgiving.com/indy-students](http://www.justgiving.com/indy-students)

For information on these charities go to:

[http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/](http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/) for Doctors without Borders

[http://www.cncf.org/en/home/index.php](http://www.cncf.org/en/home/index.php) for CNCF

So, now the naked pleas for money are out of the way, for those interested, i will give a brief run-down of what’s going on:

Jenn and Greg have their visas organised, Russian and Kazakhstan for Jenn and a Mongolia one as well for Greg (As a yank citizen Jenn gets free entry to Mongolia due to lots of aid work the USA has done there over the years!!).  Jim and me are still waiting for various bureaucratic systems to kick into place and allow a little bit of paper be stuck in our passports. For those who have not applied for foreign visas before- they are pesky and time consuming processes, whereby even a misplaced staple can void your £70 application! (NO JOKE).

Our car is now purchased as mentioned before, we have gone for a European brand to truly limit the chance of finding spare parts once in Asia (I feel our team name abbreviation from ‘Totally Independent Travelling Students’ coming into force quite accurately here). However, I feel we got a good buy with our chariot: A Vauxhall Agila 973cc! (due to the rules of engagement stating a car less than 1.2 litre must be purchased!). It’s basically a postman pat style granny wagon, but she has lots of space in the engine bay for mid-desert pit stops to change a radiator and there’s LOADS of room inside due to the boxy shape (that excludes the boot, which just about holds a roll of toilet paper!)

Jim is our official mechanic/engineer/bodger, so he will be tasked with creating a cage/ roof-rack for all our junk over the next weeks as well as changing the cam belt and tinkering with her to ensure she is ship shape for departure in 21 days!

We will be visiting various scrap yards in the coming days to beg/steal/borrow bits from other Vauxhall wrecks such as spare wheels (we will need many on the desert gravel roads with 4 people and half a tonne of crap keeping our noddy wagon LOW to the ground), suspension bits, radiator, oil sump etc. From there i will be raiding Amazon’s supplies for maps of Russia and Mongolia, though i don’t hold out much hope for either where detail is concerned. Russia has a phobia of divulging any information to the filthy capitalist pigs that are us westerners so many roads may be missing, and Mongolia, i think just lacks the population for people to be too bothered to create a decent road map structure!

We also need tents, air mattresses (come on, give me a little luxury please!), sand shovels for when out bicycle thickness wheels get stuck in the desert, and lots of dried bulk foods for when the roads turn into wilderness and civilisation means there are no more McDonalds or Yurt’s selling sheep testicles.

Car insurance is turning into a small nightmare though i may have made a breakthrough today with an Ozzy company specialising in campervans. Lets just hope that we don’t need to use it, especially in Asia, where our policy is not valid. Therefore we must buy 3rd party insurance on the borders, where i fear they may not be worth the paper they are written on, however this seems the best option excluding paying x thousands for some sort of specialist rally/explorer insurance.

I am in a constant dilemma where kit is concerned, do i buy good stuff which is likely to last and which may serve some Mongols well once i leave it there, or should i just buy crap and hope it will last, and bin any broken bits on arrival. I won’t be driving home as we donate our car to Mongolia so i can’t buy good stuff to bring home and use forever!!?? Costs are rising day by day and as a tax dodging student, a compromise must be made.

Well these disjointed paragraphs should give you a good idea on how preparations are going and i hope to keep you updated when we get to any internet stations, which will be few and far between the further east we go.

I will leave you with a YouTube clip indicating the driving spirit we are going to need to cross the Russian Aral mountains, thankfully we will be travelling in the dry season and rivers should be lower, however to our postman pat wagon, they may seen an equal contender!

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lym_fL6KMhA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lym_fL6KMhA)