It took many months to finally manage to get in touch with the right people to talk to, but today we had a long and fruitful meeting with
Volvo Switzerland. The representative from their PR team,
Alain Juon, was wonderfully friendly, and I believe that the deal was sealed when we told
The Story about how my acquaintance the ambulance driver advised us that a
Volvo 965 ambulance in his opinion was the most likely vehicle to both get us all the way to Mongolia and then also remain useful there for years to come. I can hardly think of a better way to reinforce the image of Volvo cars as being utterly reliable and nearly indestructible.
Volvo’s first action as our now official
Main Sponsor was to book a time slot tomorrow afternoon in their own garage to give our ambulance a full service work-over, preparing it in every possible way for the 20,000 km journey ahead. (If you ever owned any car yourself, you’re probably used to your garage booking you a time slot sometime next month, if you’re lucky when you call them. Apparently it’s quite different when the call comes from headquarters.) We know that the ambulance is in good shape already, so this overhaul will probably give it
superpowers enough to defeat such obstacles on the way as the ferry across the
Caspian Sea, the altitudes of the
Pamir Mountains and the vastness of
Siberia.
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| Our Volvo 965 ambulance, the HMS Dreadnought |
