So I decided to participate in a shorter edition of the Mongol Rally. Together with 100 teams, we go trough various routes from Czechia to Georgia. The catch: It needs to be in a crappy vehicle.
In Czechia, there was a pretty epic kick off party in an old missile facility. Theme: mad-max.
There was a willy throwing contest where I ended up 4th out of 16.
More on twitter: https://twitter.com/mongolrallylive/status/1548608805906399232/photo/1
The idea of the rally is to get to as many poles of inconvenience as possible. I joined some other guys that also where on a scooter, and we headed to a sunken church in Romania. My spark plug wire fell of, but that was quickly fixed. We put on camp on a camping in Slovakia and the next day we started a race from Budapest. I took the highway that would do more kilometers, they went for the smaller roads, but with less kilometers. Long time, it was unclear who would get there first. But then, in the end, I ran out of engine oil and lost 2h30 just to get new oil. During this time, some nice Romanian girls came by to check if everything was ok. I even did some Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CgMFo5NMoqdjLo3T5A4EKRrquQIuWbgBNiW3OM0/
Now I check my oil every 500km and regularly add some.
The next day my scooter was making a strange noise, so I let it be checked. Apparently getting a repair is fast in this country. Within 2 hours, I found a great repairman, got my cylinder opened up and my oil changed.
Next up was a nice piece of Carpathian road:
40km of questionable road quality 
Pretty happy surviving 
Perfect bivak spot
A road not to be forgotten!
After that I had to pump my tires again to 1.9bar, it got my top speed back from 85km/h to 100km/h.
An other stall
In Bulgaria, my cylinder got ungracefully fragmented, 10km out of a small village. I supported the local economy by getting picked up again. Great. So now that I left my scooter in the garage, I had to carry most of my stuff to find a place to sleep for the night. The locals did not like I would put up tent up in a forest and honestly did not feel quite safe at that time too. The sun was already down, so I went to a hotel in the evening. Lazy me!
Now the garagist is installing me a whole new cylinder, one that goes faster then the one before, but one powerful enough to break all other parts of the engine. Oh well, I can always try to ride slower than possible.
This gave me the time to write this blog post, thanks for reading! 🙂 See you in an other blog post!
Read further in part 2! https://emilesonneveld.be/road-to-georgia-part-2