Further on the road we came upon a bridge in bad repair,  with a large chunk missing, leaving a harrowing view of the river below. A family in a 4×4 had, to their detriment, not noticed the small rusty sign indicating that the bridge was broken, and their car was hanging ominosly of the end of the bridge.With all seven members of the team pushing however we managed to rescue the car. Leaving the happy man and his family to carry on up the road.

Keen to make up for lost time yesterday, we set out early and soon caught up with the St Andrews team, who had lost a steering rod 50km outside of Khovd, after helping them remove the second part of the rod with a blowtorch and a hammer we set up to find the other half of their team, who had hitchhiked their way into Khovd to try and find a replacement. The idea was to provide them with the second part of the rod so they could hopefully get the part repaired. Getting in touch with the team turned out to be difficult however, with Mongolian phone networks proving to be unreliable.  We did eventually we managed to meet up with the St Andrews team and return the part.

In Khovd, we also took the opportunity to restock, buying a wheel spanner that was sorely needed after the demise of our previous one as well as food. We also got our tyre puncture repaired, we are averaging one a day at the moment, so we need to get them repaired as quickly as possible! Greg also had quite the market experience, with a local man deciding to punch Greg hard in the arm, before his girlfriend dragged him away. Confused and amused, we carried on with the shop.

We managed a few more kilometres after Khovd, thanks to some actual tarmac! We found a small stream to camp by, as we were all keen for a wash, but this was quickly abandoned when swarms of mosquitos emerged from the grass around the stream, and setted down further away surrounded by nothing but mossie free sand.

The first task of the day was to fill up the vehicles wit diesel, a challenge complicated by our lack of local currency. We visited five petrol stations, waving US dollars at the attendants before we got the thumbs up to fill Adventure and Endevour. Our attendants filling the vehicles were good fun and displayed their expert command of English by telling us all the swear-words they knew. They were also happy to dance along to Katy Perry with us, as it took 20 minutes to fill the vehicles due to the rubbish pumps!

It turns out that in Kazahkstan that it is illegal to drive without your lights on, even during the midday sun. Thirty seconds after leaving the petrol station, we were flagged down by a Kazakh cop with a massive hat who pointed at our lights and demonstrated that they were off. We pretty quickly gathered that they were after a bribe. Using all of our anti-bribery techniques including talking English very quickly, giving them all of the wrong documents, and being reeeeally friendly, we managed to knock down their first request of $50 (incidentally, the only English they seemed to know) to a grand total of $2. Although it was our first cash bribe of the trip, paying $2 didn’t seem like too big a loss.

The rest of the days driving turned out fairly uneventful; with smooth road, a huge 25,991 kazahk tenge shop (thats 120 of your finest british pounds) and the only potential interesting event was Endevour narrowly missing an eagle that chose to cross the road without looking both ways.

We settled down 80km from Astana to camp in the endless Kazahk grasslands to have a well earned beer and some dinner.

The majority of the roads were in very good condition and we averaged about 50 mph all day long. Mid-morning we drove past the mountain ranges of Kyrgystan, with the first sighting of snow capped peaks. Later in the day we reached the incredible Central Asian steppe, rolling grassland reaching to the horizon in every direction. The roads in the plains were bit dodgy, with all the heavy lorries creating deep rutts and the ambulances bottomed out a few times, luckily all damage was swiftly repaired!

Coming out of the plains we went along a road for about two hours, where we saw what only can be explained as a long tyre graveyard. Every 50m there was a discarded tyre that we can only assume comes from lorries. Intense bordom lead to the invention of the tyre counting game… we counted over 100!

Eventually at around 8 o’clock we saw the massive lake we’d planned on camping at, we took the first road from the main highway down to the shore to jump in and have a wash. The feeling of clean skin was much appreciated by every team member. We were then accompanied by an awesome red full moon whilst we cooked dinner.

We were unfortunately joined by some unexpected visiters for dinner, who’s idea of a good meal… was us! Swarms of mosquitos drove us into our mossie-proof tents for the night at an early 9 o’clock

Due to travelling North, the daytime temperatures thankfully don’t rise above 35 degrees and now we can actually sleep in our sleeping bags during the night. We are all enjoying a cooler night for a better nights sleep after the scorching temperatures of Romania through to Uzbekistan.

We took the opportunity of the large city to stock up on provisions. This also included a dash across a main road dodging a torrent of Daewoo Matizes. Uzbekistan has a plague of these little abominations racing through the streets overtaking, undertaking and cramming in every little gap in the traffic. It also turns out most of their drivers are blind and have no qualms in driving full pelt at pedistrians crossing roads.

Having restocked we made our way to the closest border crossing to Kazahkstan. Unfortunatly a lot of the borders crossings were for pedestrians only requiring us to drive almost back to our morning campsite to find a vehicle crossing. On reaching our third border we found that the guards were taking a lunch break which required us to stop just short of the gates. When the guards finally opened the gate to the customs area, Endeavour required it’s usual push start. This was promptly followed by the Immobiliser in Adventure refusing to deactivate, causing us to push the second ambulance through the gates as well, much to the guards’ amusement.

Our time at the border did give us a chance to try and sort some of the problems that were plaguing us. The immobiliser turned out to require a small amount of soldering in the no-mans land between the Uzbek-Kazahk borders, much to our relief.

We watched another Mongol rally team go through customs where the guards insisted on them taking there bags out to take through the Xray scanners. We had little concern of having to make this effort as the state of the ambulances would require a search and rescue team complete with sniffer dogs and climbing ropes to find our personal belongings.

Just as we had thought the guards took one look in the back, laughed and waved us through. They were however fasicinated by Rich’s hair trimmers which they were very insistent on sorting out Neil’s ‘Hair Problem’, much to his dismay.

After passing through successfully after four hours at the border, we spent a further hour driving in Kazahkstan before camping in field next to the main road with some donkeys for company.

Before we left for Toshkent, we also scoped out some garages, and after exchanging just $10, we had a fully working shock. The roads in Uzbekistan are pretty poor, and it was slow going to the capital. It did give us time to realise that every car in Uzbekistan is either a Daewoo or a Chevrolet, with hardly any cars from other manufacturers! Even Ladas, which had been a common site since Azerbaijan were hard to find here.

We settled down to camp a little way from Toshkent ready to hit the town, and then the Kazakh border the next day. After dinner we were joined by a couple of local Uzbeks who had come complete with bread and COLD BEER! With no fridge in the ambulances we were accustomed to drinking warm beer, and to drink cold beer was a welcome luxury.

Incredibly satisfied, we got back on the road, expecting to make considerable progress on the good roads. Alas, the quality deteriorated quickly and we were reduced to a crawl for several hours. No matter, we knew there was room in the schedule for this, so we just carried on until it started getting dark, then pulled off onto the endless scrubby plain for another beautiful sunset.

The Bulgarian border force merely glanced at our passports before ushering us through. We then drove flat out the entire height of Bulgaria, hugging the coast. It was another very hot, sweaty journey for the SDOP team.

The Turkish boarder was a lot more strict and took more time as we had to get car insurance and Visas. After initially accidently trying to get enter Turkey illegally and without any of the required documents, we parked the ambulances and spent roughly an hour getting the Visas, Insurance and Customs documents. Due to the unusual nature of our vehicles we created quite a queue of people behind us whilst trying to sort out documents. The customs official wanted to search our vehicles, but a glance of the messy and smelly ambulances cut his search very short.

As soon as we passed the boarder we switched the drivers to Berry and Rich for their first stint of driving on the rally. Because they were not insured for europe, they had been navigating and passaging until now. The road into Istanbul was wide, flat and empty, so a perfect opportunity to ease them in……….until reaching Istanbul.

Insane, Chaotic, Anarachic. None of these words come close to descibing the Istanbul driving experience. It is every man for himself with few road markings, and even less drivers willing to obey them. Adding to this, for the first time on the rally, our Open Street Maps – a sort of wikipedia for maps, where all the mapping is done by volunteers – failed us, with Istanbul turning out to be poorly mapped. We spent about two hours in the city, first trying to find an inner city campsite that turned out to be a campus, and then fruitlessly trying to leave the city for some more camp friendly greenary to set up camp in.

We eventually found a lay-by, and managed to get some food on, but just before heading to bed, some Turkish locals turned up, demanding money to stay the night where we were. After deciding to move on, with some of the team already asleep in the ambulances and rolling around the ambulance floor in their sleeping bags during the drive, we headed further out, a found a more secluded spot to camp, and at 1am, we finally settled down to sleep.

Berry enjoying what is either a local custom or a practical joke in Romania…

We also have two ambulances, ready and waiting for their epic journey! Check out our Gallery for pics!

The Six Degrees of Procrastination team