Monday, 23rd

 

We left our apartment in Prague on Monday morning, to officially check in our car for the rally at the Dinitz cafe, the place of the party the night before. On our way there the car broke down because the fuel pump was dead. Luckily we had a spare, so Jonas walked to the cafe, while Siegfried fixed the car. There we teamed up with another father & son team in a Polo, and two girls in a Micra to form a convoy. That day we drove through Czeck Republic and Slowakia. At the border to Hungary a couple of teams got busted for not having paid the road toll sticker. They did manage to get away with it after some talking, though. Maybe it helped a bit, that Brian (from Team Hammongolia) showed them his british Police Staff ID.

In the evening we reached Budapest. While it would have been great to get to see more of the city, we figured that it was late, and we didn't want to spend much time to find a hostel, so we set up camp next to a field in the backlands.

 

Tuesday, 24th

 

Departing from our camp near Budapest, we set off for Romania. As we drove through stop and go traffic at temperatures around 38 degrees C, our car began running like crap. We found out, that it was running on only two cylinders again, and also that it would build up a lot of pressure in the cooling system. The problems became worse during the day, as we finally had to drive up a hill during a traffic jam on only one cylinder. No better way to kill the clutch. As there was no way we could proceed like that, we checked in at a nice campground at Klausenburg. Since the engine was building up pressure in the cooling system, we figured that the problem could only be a blown head gasket, so we proceeded to replace it on the camp site that evening. Since the gasket we used was an odd one, made out of copper it didn't quite work. Well, not at all actually, with coolant spilling all out of the engine block after starting. At that point we figured the only solution for the moment was to join the other teams in their drinking, and have another try the next morning. Which we did.

 

Wednesday, 25th

 

On Wednesday we got up very early in the morning, so we could install a proper head gasket before the other teams would set off. Since we had practice from the last try, and since a Wartburg engine is about the simplest conceivable design, we were done in about half an hour, so we could set off happily with a properly tight head gasket.

However, after a few kilometers we figured that our problems weren't quite gone. While we no longer got excess pressure in our cooling system, but the engine ran just as crappy as before. Frustrated, we stopped to figure out what was going on. We checked the ignition for that cylinder, but everything seemed to be set up just fine, and the ingnition coil was brand new, since we just replaced it a couple of days earlier. Should our trip have come to an end at such an early stage, because of a broken engine block or something?

We decided to call Wartburg specialist Daniel Schulz for advice. He told us to try replacing the new ignition coil anyways, since Wartburg inginition coils are very sensitive, especially when hot, and are the cause for many troubles. So we checked to coils, and, quite indeed, the new ignition coil was the source of our problems. After we replaced it, the car ran just fine again. Our only worry is, that given the fact that the last one lasted just a couple of days, that we would run out of spares before we reach Ulan Bator. But for the moment, that shouldn't concern us.

We had lost our convoy during all the trouble, so we drove on alone. While the car is running well, we can move much faster that way, since we don't have to wait for the whole convoy pass trucks, and when it's working on all cylinders, our Wartburg actually outruns the Polo and the Micra.

We went through the Transilvanian mountainside via very small sideroads, and the scenery was absolutely stunning. Beautiful mountain landscapes, scattered with small, simplistic villages, lots of animals on the road and many people driving around in horse carriges. We decided to drive into the night, to make up for the lost time due to the car troubles, and set up camp by some small field when we were to tired to go on.

 

Thursday, 26th

 

We reached the border out of Romania on thursday morning. We weren't actually sure which country the border would lead to, as our map showed it right on the corner between Moldova, Romania and Ukraine. Against our hopes, the border post led us into Moldova. Even though there's about 100km of common border between Romania and Ukraine, there seems to be no direct crossing between the two countries.

Moldovan border officials like getting "presents" from people passing, and don't hesitate to openly say so. we bought our way in by giving the official a couple of ball-point pens from our local newspaper, Westfälische Nachrichten.

Our actual route through Moldova was only about 30km, but it was enough to get an impression of live there. There area seems to be very poorly structured with people leading very simple lives, even more so then in Romanian backlands. When we stopped by some wall at the roadside to cook some coffee, we figured out that that wall was actually a ramp for people to drive their cars onto, and do an oil change, indicated by a big puddle of old motor oil and a pile of old filters on the ground.

At the border out of Moldavia we were asked for presents again. We ended up paying three dollars to get out, to proceed to wait over two hours to get into Ukraine. The border guards seem to be quite efficient in doing nothing, and smoking cigarettes while looking at the cars piling up at the gate.

When we finally reached Odesa that evening it was quite late. We drove around looking for a camp site for a long time without any success, when our ignition started to cause troubles again. At this rate of ignition coil death we will never be able to get far, so we'd have to think of something soon. We decided to park at the beach and get a look, which turned out to be a bad idea. Our parking space was actually a big pothole, and when we fell in, we saw that a) we wouldn't be able to get out without any work, and b) our exhaust had broken off. So there we were with a troublesome ignition, broken exhaust, and a stuck car. And still about 10000km to go. We did what any self-respecting men would have done, and went to the next bar at the beach to eat some steak and get drunk. We post-poned the problems to the next day, and ended up sleeping in the car.

 

Friday, 27th

 

After a short night of sleeping in the car, and some bathing in the black sea, we went to look at our problems. It actually didn't turn out to be all quite as bad as we thought. Getting the car out of the hole was easy be piling up some rocks as a ramp, and the exhaust wasn't actually broken, but could be stuck back together. So we still had the problem with the ignition coils. We can't just go on replacing them as they die, because we'd run out of spares way to soon. Since the problem always starts to come up when the coils get hot, like in stop and go traffic, we figured we'd need to cool them somehow. We came up with an improvised ignition cooling system, consisting of a fan built for sticking it to the cars windshield, and some extra "acceleration holes" for venting, which we hammered into the cars hood with a screwdriver. A perfect piece of german engineering. Happy with our accomplishments, we went on, and right now I am sitting typing this on a nice beach we found, 40kms before the russian border. Some locals are camping here, so we figured we'd do the same. The people we met in Ukraine seem to be very friendly, but it's usually impossible to communicate anything, other then our plan to drive to Mongolia and the funny fact that our car has only three cylinders, which seems to amuse everyone a lot ("Tri cilindri? Hahahaha! )

 

Saturday, 28th

 

Today we crossed into Russia. The border crossing took a long 6 1/2 hours of waiting in the heat. Once you were at the front of the queue, the process of entering Russia was rather bureocratic, involving lots of paperwork for us and registering the car. The entry process itself was pretty straightforward and unproblematic, though.

Once we were in, we ran into the first police stop right after the border. We ended up paying 500 rubles (about 15 Euros) because it is forbidden to have stickers on our car. Yeah, right. We figured that this was way too much for bribes (and there wasn't even a real reason to bribe here, since the crime we were accused of obviously didn't really exist), so we spent the next hour of driving discussing our strategy for future police stops. We'll see, if it works out better the next time.

Right now we are in a hotel (for a change) in Rostov on Don, and plan to move on east after getting some breakfast in the morning, so we could be in Kazakhstan by Monday.