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First off, we finally uploaded some photos on shutterfly!!!! Go to our website teamflatlanders.com and just click the link and you can see all the shenanigans we've got on film so far.

This draft was actually started in Russia, so I'll finish this one, and then you'll get the Mongolia story shortly after.

It's amazing to me how quickly fortunes and moods can change on this journey. Just a few days ago spirits were riding high (despite the theft), and now it seems we're barely plodding along. We got great news from our Danish friends, who I think deserve a bit of mentioning. Soren is a special effects worker in Denmark who specializes in working with explosives. If you're familiar with dynamite surfing, that's some of his work. He also specializes in picking up women online, and actually has to give a speech to a convention on the topic when he gets home. Kim is somewhat more reserved, but is an incredibly nice guy who currently lives in Sweden. I've learned from him that drugs should not be used to quit other drugs...he chose smoking a few years ago to quit something worse, and he was up to 3 1/2 packs a day before he finally managed to throw away the cigarettes. Wonderful people, but there's a little insight into the drivers of the Batlimo.

So their good news was that the Russian embassy granted them a 6 day transit visa, and that we would be able to get them to Lake Bikal (with a few days of all-night driving), and then to Mongolia before Kim had to be back at work. We were absolutely elated at the news, and after eating a light meal, headed out on the road around sunset to try and make it to the Russian border. I rode in the Rubix cube with Tim, and we cruised along into the night. I managed to get a little rest, and switched to driving around midnight. The cube is a tiny little fiat seiscento with a .899 engine, but it is worlds better than our saxo. For one, it has great working brakes (I believe we have no back brakes anymore, and one of our rotors is scarred up). It's also nearly silent, unlike the roar of our mufflerless exhaust that rings in your ears. It also has power steering! Wow. So we drove until about 330, then stopped to sleep. We'd obviously gone past some time zones, because the sun was coming up, but it was freezing. I laid out in the back of the limo with most of my cold weather gear on, and we slept into the morning.

I woke up feeling awful. The combination of lack of sleep for two days, a hangover, and a small amount of suspect food the day before led to horrible times for me. I spent most of the day sleeping, just trying to block out the pain in my stomach, while Andrew trucked onwards toward the Russian border. In the late afternoon we stopped at a little restaurant in some small city in Kazakhstan near the border, and I believe the only reason we stopped was because the waitress was beautiful. It has been so long since any of the 6 of us have been in real contact with women that just getting to lay our eyes on one for a brief period is a wonderful respite. We're surrounded by smelly men all day long. I ate a bit of food, which made me feel a little better, but I was still in bad shape. it looked like we were finally going to hit the road, but as I walked to the car, some Russians came in asking if we wanted vodka. I sat down in the car for a nap, thinking they'd be along soon, but apparently they drank for about 2 hours.

The drinking consisted of anywhere from 6-9 shots of vodka with these Russians, and it was only Soren, Joe, and Andrew partaking. At one point the Russians brought out a special delicacy for the guys, fermented horse milk. It was a think yellowish white, with yellow chunks floating at the top. Soren barely had it to his lips before he spit it back in his cup, ran to the bathroom, and vomited sashlik all over the sink. The Russians laughed and laughed about this, because apparently drinking this stuff makes you big and strong. Joe and Andrew managed to chug theirs all the ways down, but they were the only ones (other than the Russians of course). By the time they all got to the car they were completely inebriated.

As soon as we got to the border crossing, the drunk boys fell asleep in the cars while we waited. We didn't wait long, though, and then they had to do the crossing wasted. Joe was in the worst shape, and since the car is also registered to him, he had to go through all the customs stuff. This made things incredibly entertaining, especially since he had a neck pillow shaped like a pink pig that he refused to take off. He took the hat off the first guard, pulled out money, and asked if he could buy it from him, but the response was, "hey, give that back!" Once inside the border, all the guards were wearing doctors masks because of swine flu. At this point Joe kept pointing to his pillow and saying, "swine flu! Swine flu!" He then asked if the female guard wanted to kiss the pig. We jumped through most of the hoops, then had to wait in line to get our passports stamped. There was a whole tour bus waiting to cross the border, and Joe had them all rolling when he pointed at one blonde girl who resembled Lady Gaga and kept announcing to everybody that Lady Gaga was there. He also started singing "show me that smile again" to the border guard, who sheepishly pulled her mask down and gave him a rosy-cheeked smile. We were all in stitches, and I think only Joe can get away with this behavior.

The Russian border wasn't too difficult, and we camped in a field shortly after crossing. We awoke in the morning and began driving east, hoping to cover as much distance as possible. We ended up driving into the night, and when I took over for Andrew, the car was really starting to sound awful, and we spent hours driving around Novosibirsk trying to figure out how to get out of the city. At sunrise I pulled over to fill the tank with gas, and when I started the car, I started hearing the unmistakable sound of crunching metal. Andrew was in Joe's car up ahead, and the drive up to them was painful. We pulled the car over before the wheel fell off and tried to figure out what to do. Joe ended up calling his friend George from Georgia (the country) so that he could call people in Novosibirsk which was over 100 km away from where we were. He eventually got a tow truck to be sent out, and we were hoping to find a scrap yard to get rid of the car responsibly, so that I could come back to Russia at some point in the future. What we really wanted to do was blow the car up, but that would prove tricky with customs.

We had really resigned ourselves at this point that the car was not going to make it, and we began unpacking all of our things, and putting them into the Bat Limo to get the rest of the way to Ulaan Baatar. We were upset about our car, but we knew we were going to ride in executive class in the back of the limo with two fantastic people. We got towed 120 km to a Peugeot dealer in Novosibirsk for less than 100 dollars, and the day suddenly got worse. We found out that we would be charge around 5000 dollars if we didn't take the car out of Russia. The dealership told us that a new part would take a week to come from Moscow, and that they could put a different part onto the car, but that it would only be safe to be towed, not driven. Then we got an email from The Adventurists telling us that although they had promised that there would be no problems getting the Bat Limo into Mongolia, and that they really wanted to see it in UB, there was now no way that it could get in. The email said, "we know you put a lot of time, effort, and money into this, so we apologize." They couldn't even give the courtesy of a phone call, or an offer to reimburse them for at least their entry fee. Then those guys had the problem of having less than 72 hours to drive all the way across Russia into the Ukraine. They would have to go non-stop to get out before their visas expired. We later found out that they made it, being stopped by police 12 times, and one finally wrote them an official letter saying the car had been thoroughly searched for drugs and weapons, and to let them go. They never found their compound bow apparently...

We were incredibly disheartened by all this news, and glumly made our way through traffic to find a hotel, thinking we would only get the basic repair on the car, and then attempt to tow it to the first emergency drop-off point 100 miles over the Mongolian border. We decided to go out to eat before showering, and met two beautiful Russian girls who showed us where we could get some Sashlik (shish kebab). We jokingly told them to join us, and they ended up agreeing, and sat with us the rest of the night. We communicated between their limited English and our even more limited Russian by drawing pictures and laughing a lot. For some reason they kept us company, even though we were all filthy and drinking away our sorrows, and they weren't drinkers themselves. We ended up meeting a guy in the bar that had done the rally 2 years ago, and he was visiting his russian girlfriend. We shared stories of his engine falling out of his old car twice and landing on the axle, and then he had his girlfriend write us two very nice notes in proper Russian. The first was for the police, saying "we are university students with no money, so please do not expect bribes. We are on a charity rally, so would you like to donate to our charity?" This would get us out of any trouble by the sheer audacity, and the other note said, "we are on a rally and need this car to be repaired in any way. We do not car how it is done, just make it work again." With our new notes, and the complete confidence of a past rallier, we figured we might actually have a chance to make it all the way to UB. We said our goodnights to our Russian friends, then headed back to the hotel for some much-needed showers.

The next day we headed down to the dealership to see if they had done any repairs on our car. We got even better news than that. It turned out that the owner of the dealership was learning English and thought it would be a huge game to help out the English-speakers. He was jet-setting to Moscow for 12 hours, and he was going to search out the spare part that we needed to fix our hub-bearing, then fly it back at 6 in the morning. We were elated...the car might actually make it. We had to spend another night in Novosibirsk, so we headed back to the hotel.

In the parking lot of the hotel we saw another rally car, and it turned out that his three teammates ran out of time and had to fly home, and that he was determined to make it all the way. His name was Andrew, from Seattle. We told him he was welcome to convoy with us, but that we had to get our car repaired the next day. We decided to celebrate with a nice meal and vodka, and on the way to the store we met a bunch of locals who were already drinking. We had a few drinks with them, but the three Russian guys that were there got so unbelievably intoxicated it was embarrassing. It was amazing to see the rate at which they would chug a bottle, but the end result was depressing. We took a picture of one guy falling on the ground, but one of the guys told us no pictures because they were "Russian Mafia." Who knows if they were, but we were finally able to ditch them to hang out with the lovely other people that we met, including a charming girl with brilliant English named Olga.

We went to a bar to meet some of her friends and stayed there and chatted for awhile. After a bit we headed off to another bar, and Tim texted the girls we had met from the night before. We had a few more drinks, and eventually Tim and I left with the two girls from the previous night, and Joe and Andrew left with the girls we had met that night. Tim and I headed off to a dance club and "cut shapes" into the wee hours with the two girls, having an absolutely brilliant time. Andrew and Joe ended up having dance parties in the middle of the street all over town with the other girls, blasting Michael Jackson out of one of the girls' car. We all had wonderful evenings dancing with new friends, then headed back to the hotel to get some sleep, so that we could continue the journey the next morning.

Andrew from the Seattle, driving a Skoda, followed us down to the dealership to pick up the car. We were elated to see the car in the lot, working again, but we found out that we no longer had rear brakes, and that we had a leak in the transmission. We were told just to drive slow, and that the leak wouldn't be a huge issue since we were just going to drop the car off in Mongolia. We all hit the road and drove through the night. At one point we all got stopped by the police, and we got to witness Joe's favorite tactic for dealing with authority, tickling. I was in the car behind him and all I saw was an arm reach out the window. I could barely contain myself, as I knew what was about to happen, and sure enough, Joe started tickling the cop's fat stomach which made all three of the officers at the checkpoint crack up. The reasoning behind this behavior is that with such a huge language barrier, we all basically revert back to children, and so Joe treats the police in this manner. It is amazing to see what Joe can get away with. We camped in a field that night, then headed the rest of the way to the Russian/Mongolian border. We originally thought that the distance should be around 150 miles from Novosibirsk, but this turned out to be 600... We finally arrived at the Russian border on Monday evening around 4, and got in a massive line behind around 25 other rally cars. We had a great time meeting new teams, and reuniting with old friends, and the vodka and beer flowed like wine. People ripped up fence posts and made a huge fire, which was necessary because it was the absolute coldest night that I experienced on the whole trip. Even though I put on every last bit of clothing I spent the entire night shivering, as I no longer had a sleeping bag. I maybe got about an hour of sleep in the whole night, and I welcomed the morning, rested or not. Around 9:30 the Russian border reopened, and we began our next great adventure of crossing Mongolia from the western side.

Tomorrow should be the next installment of our journey, so thanks again for reading. I'll try and add pictures tomorrow as well, so stay tuned.

---Team Flatlanders---