Wondering sailors need mad rally partner

Wondering sailors need mad rally partner

Wanted: an adventurous person with a warped sense of humour with the time and money to join a rally team from the UK to Mongolia; ideally this person should be someone who is a little bit mad, who doesn’t mind being shot at or haggling with border officials, a person who enjoys driving through deserts and mountain ranges for 12 hours a day often going no more than 20 km an hour, someone who doesn’t mind not showering for a week and it would be handy if they could pull a half shaft out of a vehicle and put one back.

Aucklanders Ian Wallace and Gary Briden, the only New Zealanders in this year’s Mongolia Charity Rally, are looking for another adventurer to join their Wondering Sailors team.

The Wondering Sailors have planned a journey from the UK to Mongolia which they are confident will be tougher than any of their competitors. Their aim is to have as many adventures as possible while delivering a tough road vehicle to raise funds for the Mongolian Children’s Development and Save the Children funds.

The Mongolia Charity Rally is organised by Go Help, a UK charity set up by unpaid trustees who have all either organised rallies to Mongolia or participated in them in the past. Each rally team must raise one thousand pounds for a charity to take part in the rally and at the end of the trip every vehicle used in the rally will be auctioned to raise funds for the Mongolian Children’s Development Fund.

The rally, which starts on 11 July, will take the Wondering Sailors through 18 countries, five major mountain ranges, two deserts and 16,000 km of roads. They aim to be in Ulaan Baatar by 28 August , but because of their challenging route, they fully expect to be the last vehicle to make Mongolia.

The New Zealanders met while racing yachts - Ian on the end of a laser tiller doing battle round the buoys and Garth as a race officer running the races. Garth is a computer programmer and in charge of navigation and communication for the venture. Ian says their rally name ‘wondering sailors’ was devised because they will be doing much wondering on their journey.

It will be Garth’s first “oe” (overseas experience) but Ian is not new to adventures. Recent travels have taken him to South America, Kashmir, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Mynamar. Although in his fifties he has usually travelled the hard way using public or free transport and this has seen him sitting on sacks of rice on trucks while climbing through Pakistani peaks and once being thrown off a truck that was commandeered by the army. He has seen polo played on the highest ground in the world, tramped through the Annapurnas in Nepal, hitch-hiked during a blizzard in the Kashmir and travelled through gorges and places where few tourists have ever ventured.

Brought up in Zambia, he emigrated to New Zealand in the 1960s and became a farmer in the Waikato. He is now a partly-retired commercial property owner living in Hillsborough who spends a lot of time on his laser yacht.

Ian says he has always wanted to go overland from Europe through Asia and when a friend told him about the rally he knew immediately he would go on it. “It’s the perfect opportunity for me to see more of Europe and Asia, learn more history and have some great challenges and adventures along the way.”

Out of consideration for his French partner Chantal he has chosen a route that now doesn’t include Afghanistan, which would have been his first choice. Instead the Wondering Sailors will go through France, Germany, Austria, Croatia, Herzegina, Servia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajistan, Kyrgyzstan via the Pamir Highway, Kazakstan, the Altay Mountains and through Russia to Mongolia.

It will be the first proper rally for the pair apart from a little social rallying that Ian did in his younger days around New Zealand. While Ian can be handy with a piece of number eight wire and bailing twine, Garth Briden, who had a bad motor-bike accident in his 30s that put paid to a racing sailing career, will be the technical whiz for the rally team.

‘All this knowledge and experience should see us be able to deliver any vehicle in one piece,” Ian says. “All we need now is a third mad adventurer to join our rally team and make sure we make it to Ulaan Bataar.”

If you want to join the Wondering Sailors’ rally team or would like to donate funds to their chosen charity - Save the Children Fund - please go to their website www.justgiving.com/wonderingsailors

Ends

© Scoop Media