Mongol Rally update: local duo half way through trip of a lifetime

ATHLONE-based duo Niall McHugh and Kieron Sloyan, who are taking part in the Mongol Rally, are half way through and all is going to plan.

The two men are aiming to navigate a third of the earth's surface in a 1992 one-litre Toyota Starlet and raise €10,000 for the Lough Ree RNLI in the process.

The tough challenge is to drive the 23,731km route through Ireland, across the UK, through Europe, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, navigate across the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in central Asia, head for the border of Mongolia and take on the Gobi desert in an attempt to reach the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bataar and finally reach the finish line in Ulan-Ude in Russia.
They have to reach the finish line between August 12 and 15.

There have been some blips along the way, but, overall, they are happy with their progress.

At one stage they had to turn back and drive 26 hours from Georgia to Turkey to find paperwork that had been left behind.

They hit a problem in recent days, said Niall. “We were on track to complete up till now, but we have a problem now in Iran as their currency is very unstable at the moment. We cannot withdraw any money from the banks and now we can't use their local money or US dollars to buy fuel so we are now hoping that we can negotiate some way to get fuel to make it to the next border as we may be stuck in limbo,” he said.

They have got help along the way which has been invaluable, he added.

“The car has suffered some minor blips up until the mountains of Armenia where we lost the exhaust on the car due to little or no roads and steep travelling up mountains. But we managed to find a local guy who kindly got up out of bed in the middle of the night to weld our exhaust back on. This was great because we had to be on the Iranian border the very next morning,” he said.

Anyone wishing to donate can do so via www.justgiving.com/LoughReeRNLI-MongolRally or check out their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LoughReeRNLIMongolRally18/