Day 11: Marathon through the mountains
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A 6,200-km adventure
Follow Laurance Yap's progress from Moscow to Mongolia through his blog:
Day 1: Moscow madness
Day 2: From Russia with Lexus
Day 3: Post-Soviet shopping
Day 4: Final preparations
Day 5: They're off!
Day 6: Stuck in the muck
Day 7: Checkpoint stop
Day 8: Ready for off-road
Day 9: Police checks galore
Day 10: Bumping over potholes
Day 11: Marathon through the mountains
Day 12: At the Mongolian border
Day 13: Punishing ride for tires
Day 14: The greatest adventure ever
Day 15: Rally drivers face frustration
The End: Crashing out of the rally
Aug 09, 2007
Special to the Star
Through the wonders of modern technology - a BlackBerry world phone and GSM towers - I'm filing this report from a campsite on a riverbank in the Altai mountains, about 100 km north of the Mongolian border.Remarkably, the cell-phone service here is excellent. It's also an amazing natural landscape: mountains behind us, a river in front and, thanks to the bug spray, me relatively comfortable.
The drive today was another marathon, over 800 km from Novosibirsk to where we are in Kosh Agash. But thanks to the changing landscape - which quickly went from flat to hilly, and the excellent winding roads - it was far less of a slog.
Tomorrow, we cross the border into Mongolia and the real competition begins; over 2,500 km of special stages still have to be run, enough, Kees and I hope, to make up our 11-minute deficit to leader Armin Schwarz.
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