Mongol Rally Prep Pandemonium

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Added by debndave on July 7, 2011

It is always the week before any great adventure that is the busiest and freakiest. It is the time when everything seems to go wrong and all the last minute details start piling up. I don’t handle stress that I cannot control well. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep and I have a constant headache. I am not pleasant to be around.

Dave can put things out of his mind and compartmentalize. He can be of use to society and get his work done, enjoy conversations and have a great sleep. Me, I fret and worry, and right now, I am definitely fretting.

Let me Tell you about our Mongol Rally Pandemonium During Preparations for the Mongol Rally.

Big Problem

We get an email earlier this week from AllWays Rentals in New Zealand telling us that their contact Danny in England thinks that the guy that they bought the car off of didn’t send the V5 in to the DVLA in London.

What is a V5 and the DVLA?

The V5 is the document of ownership change that lets us out of England with our car. If we don’t have that, there is a chance that we can’t leave the country, there is a definite chance that we can’t get out of Western Europe and there is an absolute chance that we can’t get into Mongolia. The DVLA is the motor vehicle license beaureau in England. We’ve called and emailed them and they have no record of our V5, but tell us that doesn’t mean anything because they won’t know if it has been sent in until it is processed.

We can’t get a hold of the seller to ask him if he sent it in. We only get a direct to Vodaphone voicemail that seems out of order, and AllWays has no other way of getting in touch with them. If this guy was a dealer that had his car up for sale online, wouldn’t he have to have an email address to go with it? This is all so confusing my head is spinning.

Adventurists

Dan at The Adventurists (The Mongol Rally organizers) has been incredibly helpful. We emailed him to inform them of our dilemma and he was back in an instant calming our nerves and giving us options. There are options that are too complicated to go into detail here, but at they involve driving as far as the Ukraine and having the V5 posted to us or leaving England late or trying our hand at driving as far as we can until we get stopped.

It’s not ideal, but at least we can still participate in the Rally. We initially thought, that’s it. All this hard work down the tubes.

Danny in London…

I have called Danny (the nice man storing our car) in London to ask him his thoughts and he seems like a super nice guy. We feel bad putting a stranger through all of this. He has driven 100 miles to pick up a car from a guy that seemed to have scared him silly and is now storing our car 100 miles outside of London waiting for us to come and take it off of his hands.

He isn’t 100% certain that this seller “Tom” didn’t send in the V5, but his gut feeling is that he hasn’t and since we bought the car at the beginning of June and it is now the first week of July and he still hasn’t received any documentation, I think Danny is right.

Bigger Problem

Visa Machine

We sent our Passports away, way back at the beginning of May to a company in England called The Visa Machine. It seemed like the best thing to do since we needed 5 Visas for the Mongol Rally.

Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia and Uzbekistan.

Between the letter of invitations and intentions that we would have had to organize, it was much easier to send our passports off in one shot and have them take care of everything.

Sounds Great in Theory…

We now don’t have Dave’s passport and we fly out one week from today! Mine was returned via FexEx last Tuesday and Dave’s is still sitting somewhere in the Kazakhstan embassy in London, England. We fly next week with no word as to where Dave’s passport is. If the Visa Machine doesn’t return our emails soon, I am going to go up the wall.

We’ve sent 3 emails in 3 days with not a peep from them.

I am sure that at this point they are getting a lot of emails from Rally participants desperate to get word on their passports, but surely they would have been prepared for this? The Mongol Rally happens every year and every year I am sure that there are last minute freak outs about passports not being returned. If we don’t get our passport back we eat a ticket, I fly to England without Dave and we pay for a hefty last minute flight.

Visa Machine Please Get Back To Us! We’re Dyin’ Here!

Happier News

On the plus side..

Afternoon Tea is happening this Saturday for Mongol Rally Fans and participants around the world. If you are in Philadelphia this Saturday July 9th, get yourself over to Union League, a Dapper gentleman’s club downtown Philly. Where you will have the chance to see Charles Brewer-Carias speak. An extraordinary man that has lead over 200 expeditions, written countless books and has over 30 plants and animal species named after him. Now that’s impressive!

140 South Broad Street,
Philadelphia,
PA 19102.

For More information and tickets head over to the Afternoon Tea page at the Adventurists.

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46 Responses to Mongol Rally Prep Pandemonium

Oh man so sorry you have to deal with all of this! Hang in there! It will all work out, I’m sure and we will see you in Belgium and dull your stresses with beer and wine

Alison July 7, 2011 at 9:29 am Reply
- Thanks Alison, I cannot wait to laugh about all this in Belgium. Hopefully we’ll see you soon!
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 11:07 am Reply
- Just wanted to say that the Adventurists got back to us and worked like mad to calm our nerves and fears and we will be receiving our passport by Monday.
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 1:57 pm Reply
Hope you get Dave’s passport soon. Maybe we should all start tweeting @theadventurists to respond to you!

Roy | Cruisesurfingz July 7, 2011 at 9:30 am Reply
- That is a great idea Roy. I am going to send them a tweet now. If only they would just let me know the progress. Even if I got an email saying, we’re looking into it, I would feel so much better.
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 10:50 am Reply
Maybe all of your loyal fans should e-mail The Visa Machine to let them know how much potential business they stand to lose if they mess this up. I’ll be first in line if you want.

Deb, I’m like you- I worry, worry, worry. My boss says that’s why I’m good at my job. He says if something goes wrong I’ve usually looked at all the worst case scenarios.

Erik July 7, 2011 at 9:36 am Reply
- Haha, Thanks Erik. If I don’t hear from them by tomorrow, I may take you up on your offer. I just wish they would acknowledge that they received my email. Dan of the Adventurists has been great at getting back so I cc’d him hoping that the Visa Machine would get back to us.
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 10:51 am Reply
Hello chaps, we’re looking into this now for you, what you describe is very unusual and definitely not standard practise for the visa machine – please hold off on your mass tweeting campaign while I look into it this afternoon!
Cheers,
Dan
@DanAdventurists

Dan Wedgwood July 7, 2011 at 11:14 am Reply
- Don’t worry Dan, I wasn’t going to start tweeting unless I didn’t hear anything from anyone. Our frustration was not hearing anything. An email would have been great. Just to say we are looking into it for you. You are so amazing and got right back to us, we appreciate it.
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 11:18 am Reply
With so much to think about, and so much that could go wrong, you guys are doing an amazing job of keeping it together!! Good luck with the car and the passport!

Gillian @OneGiantStep July 7, 2011 at 11:55 am Reply
- Thanks Gillian, your support from the beginning of this adventure has been amazing. It’s comments like this that help keep our chins up. Cheers!
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 12:48 pm Reply
Hi Guys,

I had a root around into this to see what happened. You emailed on Tuesday 5th and the Visa Machine aims to get back to all emails within 24 hours even in really busy times.

They totally understand that anything to do with passports and visas within striking distance of the Mongol Rally launch is enough to make you wake up screaming in a cold sweat, with the image of their team mates heading off from the start line without them, laughing maniacally stroking a white cat in one of those weird nightmare-ish Dr. Evil ways…

By way of explanation on their behalf (not an excuse) the time difference means that your emails can sometimes arrive well after our working hours are over for the day as it’s our night time here in the UK, but of course for you that counts as a day from the point you sent it wandering where your passport is.

Plus there’s been a surge of last minute requests with not a lot of notice (often none!) from some of the fine ralliers who have changed their travel plans (they’re of course doing everything they can to accomodate them even where there’s no notice). Combine this with what you might call unexpected diplomatic, bureaucratic and occasionally political obstacles that have had to be solved and the email you would have got on Wednesday 5th wasn’t sent to you.

The standard day at the Visa Machine is focused around getting the actual visas for the first part of the day and responding to emails and phone calls in the afternoon so they have the latest info from the embassies to put in their replies. So I think from the Visa Machine end it’s taken them 2 days to get back to your email instead of the usual 24 hours. Most of the time emails are actually answered faster and replies are sent on the same day.

Apologies for that delay. They do of course anticipate the busy periods, the Visa Machine has processed something like 12,000 visas since it started and this year alone there are more than 800 separate orders and something like another 3000 visas being processed. They employ extra staff to cover the huge spike in application volumes at this time of year and negotiate special arrangements with many embassies to get applications processed as quickly and cheaply as they can to try and make the process as painless as possible for the ralliers.

At your end, the delay until the third day since you sent the email probably felt like a rather long time but I’m glad to hear that barring any unexpected queries on your final visa your passport sounds like it will be out of the final embassy tomorrow and on it’s way back to you in time for your flight, which is splendid news.

Obviously it’s a spot of extra stress you guys didn’t need as you’re getting everything together for launch, but hopefully my ramble gives you a bit of assurance that they weren’t just ignoring your email / don’t have the right set up for this time of year, but that their response time slipped by a day from their standard set up.

Good luck with the rest of the prep, we’ll see you soon for the launch day and thundering east for 10,000 miles in a completely unsuitable car…

Tally Ho!

Dan
@DanAdventurists

Dan Wedgwood July 7, 2011 at 12:52 pm Reply
- Thanks Dan, much appreciated, Yes, we emailed on Tuesday thinking that we would hear back from them on Wednesday by the time we got up since it would be well into England’s afternoon.. So when we didn’t hear we emailed them again first thing on Wednesday morning thinking that they’d get back to us by the end of the day or even by thursday morning. When we emailed again this morning, it was already afternoon on Thursday in London, so it had been a full Wed and Thurs without a peep from anyone.
  Tomorrow is Friday and we felt that we had to get firm to get anyone to respond before the weekend. All we wanted was a response saying that they were looking into it. I don’t think it was too much to ask:)
  Sherry said that she received regular updates from the Visa Machine while she was waiting for hers and Rick said that he heard quickly as well whenever he emailed. So we thought it was odd that we hadn’t even been acknowledged. Thanks for looking into everything and thanks for having them return our emails.
  We aim to tell the trials and tribulations of all our travels on this blog, so we can’t leave out the details of any preparations. People want to know what it is like to take part in the Mongol Rally, even the not so fun stuff.
  We really do appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule as I can imagine how crazy things must be for you too. Thanks for calming our nerves and taking charge of things for us. This week feels like I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown:-) Yes, I am a drama queen:)
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 4:00 pm Reply
Yikes guys, hope everything works out for the best! What a mess.

Candice July 7, 2011 at 8:46 pm Reply
- Thanks Candice. As far as the Visa is going, it looks like things will work out. Thanks to Dan, the Visa Machine got back to us. Now the car is another problem…One thing at a time I guess. Tomorrow we shall fret about the car some more:)
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 9:29 pm Reply
It’s always so fascinating to read about your adventures! I feel like I’m living them with you; it’s what reality tv aspires to. It’s your candor that makes me love your blog (plus awesome photos), and I really hope you head to San Francisco at some point. In the meantime, good luck at the rally!!

Anis Salvesen July 7, 2011 at 8:56 pm Reply
- Thanks Anis. I sometimes wonder if I share too much these days, but I always put myself back to when only friends and family were following and I was writing for about 25 people. We started this to write about our experiences and challenges in travel as well as all the fabulous times and adventures. If we start censoring what we say now, it defeats the purpose of the reason we started blogging. So I write and hope for the best:) It feels better when we get a comment like this to remind us that it is ok to be honest.
  
  davendeb July 7, 2011 at 9:28 pm Reply
I don’t blame you for being a bit stressed, I’d be totally freaking out. I’m sending positive vibes your way in hopes that everything works itself out and you head off on the Rally without a hitch–because I’ve been looking forward to following your adventures for months now!

Gray July 7, 2011 at 9:43 pm Reply
- Thanks Gray. The car is a worry, but at the moment we are more stressed about the Visas. It’s now friday late in the day in Europe and our visa is still sitting on the hour glass. It looks like we will have all weekend to stress. Just what I need.
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 9:53 am Reply
i t really sucks when you face visa problems

Zablon Mukuba July 8, 2011 at 3:30 am Reply
- Agreed, that is about the word for it. It sucks. I hate it because it is out of our control. If our passports were in CAnada, we could drive to the embassy, but they are somewhere in Europe. We heard they were in Brussels from the Embassy in the UK. Now were very concerned.
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 9:50 am Reply
Chin up folks, got everything crossed for you. We’re still waiting on loads of ours too.

Matt July 8, 2011 at 7:11 am Reply
- Thanks Matt. When do you fly? If ours isn’t sent out by the end of today, we’re in a big pickle since we can’t leave Canada without it and we fly next week. Yikes!
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 9:49 am Reply
That all sounds very stressful! I get stressed out before any trip, but, wow, this seems off the charts! Crossing my fingers that all the documentation comes together just in time… You are both very resourceful so even if it doesn’t you will figure out something!

Travelogged July 8, 2011 at 9:50 am Reply
- Thanks Liz. I just heard from Dan at the Adventurists and he said that they are sending it out this afternoon. Whew!
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 1:27 pm Reply
Holy cow that’s a lot of stress! One thing, my best friend didn’t get her Indian visa on time a couple of years ago, and the airline was *completely* understanding and moved her flight by a week for just a $100 processing fee, but no fee for the difference in flights or the last minute nature of it. Crossing my fingers that doesn’t happen, but it may be worth calling the airline and asking some questions!

Shannon O'Donnell July 8, 2011 at 11:05 am Reply
- That is good to know Shannon, if it ever comes to that, we now know we can talk to the airlines. As it turns out Dan from the Adventurists has emailed us and let us know that the Passport is being sent out this afternoon. Feeling better now.
  
  davendeb July 8, 2011 at 1:29 pm Reply
deep breaths!!!
I hope everything turns out ok for you guys!!
good luck!

Cailin July 8, 2011 at 11:45 am Reply
- Thanks Cailin. I know it will, you are right. I just have that personality where I tell it all. yikes, it can definitely get me into trouble:-)
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:58 pm Reply
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Funny that I’m reading this just as I posted something about not stressing over the things we cannot control. I am bad about that too, and I have to constantly remind myself not to let it take over.

Good luck with getting the kinks worked out. I look forward to reading about the adventure.

Stephanie - The Travel Chica July 9, 2011 at 12:35 pm Reply
- I will have to check out your post about not stressing about the little things. We’ve had a lot of little things pile up and start to feel like one big thing. If I could just stop, take a breath and think of them as one little thing at a time, life would be much better. Thanks for reminding me.
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:55 pm Reply
Bureaucracy is the worst part of travel for sure…I hope the machinations of bureaucrats don’t keep you away from those awesome machines.

Vago Damitio July 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm Reply
- Yep, if only we could all travel without having to get Visas.
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:53 pm Reply
Hey guys I am sure it will all come together for you probably the day before you are due to leave, the best adventures always have the biggest obstacles to success. I will keep my fingers crossed until you cross the start line and look forward to hearing from you along the way. Going to be an amazing adventure.

Iain Mallory July 9, 2011 at 5:54 pm Reply
- Thanks Iain, much appreciated. You are so right, it wouldn’t be a very interesting trip if everything went completely as planned. Cheers and thanks for the support.
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:51 pm Reply
So sorry to hear about all this! You have a lot of us praying, thinking and rooting for you. I’m sure everything will fall in place! Stay strong and determined, guys!!!

Idelish (Jeremy & Shirlene) July 9, 2011 at 7:11 pm Reply
- Thanks Jeremy and Shirlene. Looking at it now almost a week later, I was certainly coming off as quite whiney. It has been stressful, but it does all come together eventually. Thanks for thinking of us. That is the great thing about writing in the moment, people get to see the roller coaster of emotions when taking on an adventure, no matter how silly we look:-)
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:50 pm Reply
It wouldn’t be an adventure without obstacles. Imagine how boring this would be if everything went according to plan. I’m just hoping we encounter most of our obstacles before the rally actually begins. I’m so glad I’m on your team!

Cheers!

Rick Griffin July 9, 2011 at 8:26 pm Reply
- Thanks Rick. It is all going to be so much better once we are all together in London. See you soon!
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:48 pm Reply
Oh dear. Good luck, guys! Hope it all comes together in time!

lara dunston July 10, 2011 at 5:02 am Reply
- Thanks Lara, it looks like everything is starting to come together already. Just like when I used to write in my journal, writing down thoughts and feelings always makes everything better:-) Thanks for the well wishes.
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 7:47 pm Reply
Hi guys,
It’s possible that you might be able to get an emergency travel document from the Canadian gov’t. Friends of mine (brits) did that when their passports weren’t returned to them prior to travel. If you CAN get the emergency travel doc, then tell the Visa Machine to hold Dave’s passport, and you’ll pick it up in person.

Good Luck!

Mandy July 12, 2011 at 8:47 am Reply
- Thanks for the heads up on that Mandy. That is a great recommendation for future reference. The Visa Machine came through for us in flying colours and we have our passports back, but that is very good to know for when it happens again as I am sure that it will happen again in the future. Visas are a pain to get and we have to thank the Adventurists and the Visa Machine for all their help. Cheers and thank you again for the information. That will be very useful for future readers and Mongol Ralliers too!
  
  davendeb July 12, 2011 at 9:57 am Reply
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Mongol Rally Prep Pandemonium

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