We, Team Desertaxi, drive in the 2008 Mongol Rally, starting July 19th finishing August 26th. This is our story.

Team Desert Taxi - Mongol Rally 2008 on Vimeo.
Check out the rest ouf our Team Desertaxi 2008 Mongol Rally videos on YouTube

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TDT returns at 10 am filled with blind hope and a determination to get the taxi out of the graveyard. We bypassed the fuel injectors with a wire and got the car going upon the advice of a taxi mechanic in London, but the alternator wasn’t fixed. We asked the mechanic’s son why it took [...]

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At 10am, after a pretty good omlette breakfast at an Altai restaurant, we arrive at the garage which we discover is a graveyard for Mongol Rally cars. There are 8 of them.

 A Mongolian who works at Air Mongolia during the week,  but moonlights on Saturdays as a mechanic,  says our alternator which charges the battery [...]

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Our task for today was to make it the 160 miles to the next "major" town, a distance that would normally take us under three hours on decent roads.The journey ended up taking 8 hours, at an average speed of 20 mph! The roads were unbelievably bad,  sometimes we had to go less 5 mph [...]

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Our last precious minutes in Taxistan were spent getting the much coveted Mankini shots for our sponsors, with great success. Reluctantly we struck camp and took down the stars and stripes and the union jack from the flagpole and joined the queue. The guard who had initially refused our requests for a doctor on the [...]

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Team Desertaxi and the great micronation of Taxistan has been spotted, and written up in the London Evening Standard….  Read…

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BULLETIN:
The fledgling State of Taxistan was created today due to a clerical error.
On the 12th of August, Team Desertaxi members were denied entry to Russia until Saturday.. They were also denied re-entry to Kazakhstan.
Two of the team members, James Walker and Edward Monckton,  had Ruissian entry visas dated August 14th and 17th, respectively and were [...]

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Yes, we’d been warned the roads in Northern Kazakhstan were bad but nothing could have prepared us. Pot holes were more like meteorite craters and impossible to avoid without going off into the fields. With a sleep deprived Jimmy at the wheel, running only on a boiled egg,  we headed for Semey, our final stop [...]

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It seemed like an ordinary border crossing  when the Iranian Customs official holding our Carnet de Passage, that lists all our vehicle numbers, came out to inspect our Taxi. After all we were not worried, we had  crossed twenty two borders without a problem. We opened the bonnet, he knelt down and said "The chassis [...]

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We love to share good news and this cannot be better. We have an angel. He is David Mahoney whom I met while teaching in Mongolia.
Halo goes here

David has made a wonderfully, generous, challenge – he will match every donation of $50. or more up to a total of $1,000. We are so grateful. Please [...]

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We’ve done just that! While much of the first half of the trip through Europe and into Iran may be on smooth, comfortable highways, the rest will be ….well…..rocky to say the least as we cross 3 deserts. Enter the sled.
Neither rocks, nor boulders shall strike us from below……hopefully.

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