When did my brother David and I start talking about the Mongol Rally? I can’t put an exact date on it, but it was an idea we first tossed around in 2014 when we were both eat, pray, loving our ways through Southeast Asia. We were both (ig)noble expat NGO-workers, working for higher causes and putting down not an insignificant amount of the uninspired beer native to Cambodia and Thailand. Maybe the idea seeped in a week through adventuring in Myanmar together, a sly and holy realization that:
a. as much as we were loath to talk to each other when we were wee bilingual babes in grade school, we had come to be friends, and ones that traveled well together at that;
b. and that the itch to see was a shared family one, dating back to a lost Chinese great-grandfather arriving in Guayaquil certain he had landed in Lima, and a very American well-traveled grandfather wearing an impeccable suit in a tiny bar on the outskirts of nowhere.
The idea grew its own legs, rearing its head in idle conversation while David finagled his way through graduate school and I finagled my way through twenty-something employment. Summer 2015 found us in Boston & San Francisco, chatting idly about the year to come and realizing that next summer was shaping to be The One. With a quick and impetuous wave of my credit card (why is it so easy to use those things?), I signed us up on The Adventurists’ website (the company that organizes the Mongol Rally every year.
I ran the idea past our dear grandmother KK in August, expecting some shock, awe and outright disgust at our life choices. Proving to be ever surprising, she nearly yelped with excitement, exclaiming she would follow us in her large atlas book, staying close to our journey. Then, as grandmothers tend do these days, she Wikipedia’d ‘Mongol Rally’ and read about the near deaths (ahem, actual death) and arduous journey involved. Her enthusiasm dimmed quickly (and has soured into a quality sour beer). Ah well. With her by no means explicit endorsement, we were/are off.
a. as much as we were loath to talk to each other when we were wee bilingual babes in grade school, we had come to be friends, and ones that traveled well together at that;
b. and that the itch to see was a shared family one, dating back to a lost Chinese great-grandfather arriving in Guayaquil certain he had landed in Lima, and a very American well-traveled grandfather wearing an impeccable suit in a tiny bar on the outskirts of nowhere.
The idea grew its own legs, rearing its head in idle conversation while David finagled his way through graduate school and I finagled my way through twenty-something employment. Summer 2015 found us in Boston & San Francisco, chatting idly about the year to come and realizing that next summer was shaping to be The One. With a quick and impetuous wave of my credit card (why is it so easy to use those things?), I signed us up on The Adventurists’ website (the company that organizes the Mongol Rally every year.
I ran the idea past our dear grandmother KK in August, expecting some shock, awe and outright disgust at our life choices. Proving to be ever surprising, she nearly yelped with excitement, exclaiming she would follow us in her large atlas book, staying close to our journey. Then, as grandmothers tend do these days, she Wikipedia’d ‘Mongol Rally’ and read about the near deaths (ahem, actual death) and arduous journey involved. Her enthusiasm dimmed quickly (and has soured into a quality sour beer). Ah well. With her by no means explicit endorsement, we were/are off.