The Ambulance

How much do you know about ambulances? The past few months have made me first realize how precious little I knew about them, and then (after promising my team mates that I'll get us the ambulance) to learn more about them than I ever thought I'd do …

The first question was: If we want to give an ambulance to a hospital in Mongolia, where do we get it from? It turns out that ambulances really aren't any different from any other light commercial vehicles, and are sold and bought just like for example pickup trucks or vans. So I started browsing second hand vehicle web sites to learn what was available on the market, but the more ambulances for sale I found, the less I knew which one to buy.

The next question then became: When there are so many different kinds of ambulances out there, which kind do we really want? I had no idea. But by pure coincidence, I then got to know that an acquaintance of mine, Peter Wärnberg, happened to have worked as an ambulance driver for ten years, so I wrote him a long mail explaining what we were trying to do and asking for his help and advice to choose an appropriate vehicle.

Peter was happy to help and answer my questions. As a one time owner of a close-to-indestructible Volvo 740, I had been looking especially at Volvo ambulances and he could confirm this to be a good idea. So last Friday, I finally found an ambulance for sale that was what I now knew to be what we wanted and for which Peter found the listing to look good and believed it to be a vehicle in which we would be able to reach Mongolia.

So we in team Ambulance To Mongolia are now the proud owners of this beauty:

Thomas insists we name her HMS Dreadnought.

The Volvo 965 ambulance is supposedly one of few ambulances on the market that was purpose-built as an ambulance directly at the factory and has a chassis especially constructed for this. (We hope that this makes it sturdier than vehicles that were converted to ambulances, after leaving the factory as normal cars and vans.) It is equipped with the Volvo Modular engine B6304S, which was developed in a cooperation project with Porsche / Weissach and produces 204 hp to make the 5.7 m long and 2,680 kg heavy vehicle move swiftly. The automatic transmission is supposedly also not the same that was used in normal passenger cars but a custom version made for the ambulance, somehow made tougher and more reliable. Our ambulance was built in 1998, making it one of the last cars ever built of the safe and exceptionally reliable and repairable Volvo 900/700 series.

Visa

On the way to Mongolia we will cross a dozen countries, many of which have very strict and sometimes rather complicated regulations that govern how foreigners can enter and move around. Coming with your own car doesn't simplify things either.

Once we leave Europe, every country on our path requires us to have a visa in order to enter. Without the proper visa, we'd simply be turned away at the border in most cases. Most visas have restrictions: they are valid only for a certain amount of days, allow only a limited number of re-entries (usually one), have fixed entry and exit dates (that you sometimes cannot choose freely), or fixed border crossings (never change your plans).

Some visas are valid for as few as 5 days. Combined with fixed entry and exit dates, this requires very accurate trip planning. Some visas are valid for 90 days, but the 90 days start running at the day the visa is issued, requiring very accurate planning when acquiring the visa. Single entry means that once you leave, you're not allowed to re-enter even if you have days left on your visa. I don't think this will be a problem for our trip, as we're visiting every country only once.

In most cases, visas come in the form of stickers and stamps in your passport. To get these, you have to physically mail your passport together with a complicated application form to the embassy, and wait until it comes back, hopefully with the visa. This can take between 5 days and 6 weeks, depending on the country (and your luck), and they can refuse with no explanation. This also means you cannot do the applications in parallel, and you cannot travel while your passport is "traveling". Some visas can be gotten "on the go" (in the embassy of a neighbouring country, for an extra "express" fee) or directly at the border (also for an extra fee, of course).

Some countries require a Letter Of Invitation ("LOI") together with the visa application. This was probably meant to make sure you are hosted by somebody while you are there, but in fact it's just another source of money for local tourist agencies (who will happily write you such a letter for a certain fee, usually also coupled with booking a hotel). Some countries even require your fingerprints, a detailed itinerary, confirmations of booked hotels, a recommendation letter from your employer (!), and a letter explaining the reason for your travel.

They are also costly. While each single visa is not outrageously expensive (on the order of 50-150$ each), it sums up. We will require between 7 and 10 visas (depending on how our plans work out).

Fortunately, my fellow travellers are Norwegian and Swedish, and I am Swiss, and therefore we don't need visas in Europe, and have similar restrictions outside Europe (this makes planning a bit easier).

We will make use of http://www.thevisamachine.com as much as we can, though they cannot get all required visas and permissions we need (and they cannot speed it up, it still takes months). The rest we'll have to get ourselves or with the help of another travel agency.

Staying Connected

This nifty little device (it is surprisingly tiny) will allow us to keep you up to date even when no internet or telephone connection is available:

The SPOT connect periodically sends our current position via a satellite, and draws the track on a map that you can view online. This means you can track our progress towards Mongolia in real time, no matter how far we are away from civilization. Additionally, it allows us to send short text messages which will automatically be posted to twitter and facebook, so we'll even be able to let you know what we are doing. It's main drawback is that it requires (non-rechargable) lithium batteries, so we'll have to bring two dozen batteries to make it last 2 months.

We also have a SPOT messenger:

This is basically the same thing, but lacks the bluetooth functionality (and thus can only send one of 3 predefined status messages, "OK", "Help", and "SOS"). Instead it has much longer battery life and is more robust. The OK button logs the position with status "OK". The Help button is meant to notify people of non-life threatening issues (In my opinion this is a rather useless button. I doubt we'll ever use it). The SOS button on the other hand can be extremely useful. It is connected to the International Emergency Response Coordination Center (IERCC) which will forward the distress call to the appropriate agencies (depending on the location). We plan to save it for real emergencies when we're in serious trouble and we ran out of batteries for the SPOT connect, or when the SPOT connect fails.

Ivan's Video from Last Year

Ivan just sent us a 3 minute video summarizing their journey to Mongolia last year:

http://vimeo.com/36036395

Rabies

In the final months of 1998, my brother and I spent a lot of time at the vaccination clinic at Lund University Hospital in preparation for our first journey to Southeast Asia. A source of amusement at the clinic was the list of available vaccinations, in which the vaccination against rabies stood out by being the by far most expensive treatment available.

When we finally had gotten all the vaccinations the doctor thought we needed for the journey, we had spent so much time talking about the rabies vaccine, which the expensiveness of the treatment and the imagery of rabid dogs by now had made utterly irresistible to us, that we just had to get it no matter the cost. But the poor doctor talked us out of the idea, explaining that it would be a waste of money because the vaccine only increased the resistance to rabies but didn't provide any immunity and that the effect of it only would last a limited time and not for life, so unless we planned any encounters with rabid dogs in the foreseeable future the treatment would be useless. We went to Southeast Asia without having taken rabies vaccine, and to this day we haven't met any rabid dogs, but the memory of that exotic treatment still lingers.

Today I visited the Travel Clinic at the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at Zürich University, the preeminent place to go in this city before travelling to any exotic locations, to talk about our route through Central Asia and what vaccinations I should take before and what medicines I should bring along. Normally, these days I've been travelling so much that I'm most often already vaccinated against whatever evil a new country has to offer, but for the six weeks through Central Asia I was in for a treat: The methodical Swiss doctor ended up writing a list of vaccinations so long that it filled all available space, including the margins, of the form, both with vaccines I should take again and vaccines I've never had before. And it included rabies!

Apparently there is a vaccine, Rabipur, that gives increased resistance to rabies, for life, and according to the Novartis web site it was introduced already in 1984. So either they were a bit behind and didn't have this thirteen years ago in Lund, or more likely the doctor there saw the chance to bend the truth a little to talk two young male students out of wasting the resources of the public health care on playing macho. I can't say I really blame him ...

But apart from this trip down memory lane, they today gave me shots against polio, hepatitis B and tick-borne encephalitis as well, together with a schedule of when and what they'll give me in the next few months. (There was apparently a lot of stuff that shouldn't be administered the same week as rabies ...) It seems I'll be a regular customer there.

Out of Office

One of the major disadvantages of having full-time employment, is that one cannot simply disappear from the office for two months ...

Today I got the formal approval for my two months' leave of absence! Mongolia, here I come. We estimate that we'll need around six weeks for the actual journey, then one week for preparations before leaving and then some margin at the end (for unexpected things will happen), so two months away from work it'll be. Special thanks goes to my manager, Vladimir, for supporting this and to Google in general for being a company where the statement "I'd need two months' leave of absence in order to drive an ambulance to Mongolia" gets the response "Of course, we'll keep your desk warm for you when you return". (N.B.! That's a literal quote from Google HR.)

The Route

So we spent the past weekend in Novi Sad, where we between liberal amounts of Serbian food and drink (for which I have to admit having a very sweet spot ... roasted meat, chicken liver wrapped in bacon, ćevapčići, sausages, sauerkraut ... fresh and pickled vegetables ... fresh cheese ... sweet red wine ... lager beer and šljivovica ...) got around to actually make tons of decisions about the adventure that lies ahead of us. Most importantly, the route:

This map sketch is now our general plan, but it has two major question marks.

First, entering into Central Asia by crossing the Caspian Sea with the ferryboat from Baku to Türkmenbaşy (Krasnovodsk) is a classic way to begin a journey through Central Asia. In his Tibetanska Äfventyr (1905), Sven Hedin writes:

Kanske ni föreställer er att det är med en känsla af välbehag man efter en lyckad, men stormig färd över [Kaspiska] hafvet sätter sin fot på Asiens kust, då man går i land vid Krasnovodsk eller »de röda vattnen»? Nej bevars, denna stad är ungefär motsatsen till ett jordiskt paradis. Tänk er en liten håla med hvita envåningshus med platta tak, ett par anspråkslösa kyrkor, en omgärdande ring af sterila söndervittrande berg och gula sanddyner, ej ett träd, ej ett grässtrå, nej icke ens en droppe sött vatten! Sådant hitföres i stora träkar med tågen inifrån landet. Det vore en deportation att behöfva bo i denna bedröfliga ort, som låg där och stektes i glödande solgass.

But while this route might be the obvious choice for anyone who has read too many old adventure books, it has two major disadvantages today: The ferryboat services are said to be both irregular and expensive, and Turkmenistan is said to be one of the countries in the world where getting a transit visa is the most complicated and expensive. Very discouraging. So we'll need to investigate this more deeply before making a final decision. Apart from the classic ferryboat ride across the Caspian, the possibility to visit the Door to Hell gas deposit in Derweze also makes this route very tempting despite its drawbacks.

Second, driving through China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Uyghuristan) would be a wonderful thing to do for many reasons, not the least that China builds great roads also in the most remote provinces and that a new border crossing between China and Mongolia recently has been opened at Altay. But maybe more importantly for me personally is that when I lived in Shanghai, I soon learned that thousands and thousands of Uyghur also lived there and that the city had a wealth of Uyghur restaurants in which I became a frequent visitor, so I've long wanted to visit Kashgar, Ürümqi and the deserts around.

Here you can see Comrade Piotr, visiting me in Shanghai in 2002, helping the house band in a Uyghur restaurant with the drums while forever regretting that he was too cheap to order the Spicy Camel Feet.

But the Xinjiang route has a major drawback in Chinese bureaucracy, which is world famous for a reason. No foreign driver's licenses are valid in the People's Republic and the paperwork needed to get all necessary permits for a foreign driver to drive a car with foreign license plates through the country promises to be more than challenging. Very discouraging. So we'll need to investigate also this more deeply before making a final decision. Apart from the roads and the Uyghur, the sheer bragging rights of having driven through China also makes this route very tempting despite its drawbacks.

There we are now. We'll keep you updated on how our investigations regarding the route proceed. Stay tuned.