Gengis Khar has been pimped for this great occasion. We thank Sdk Italia-Sandrokanfor the set up.
Real Sponsors
Luckily, we don’t have fake sponsors only. Three new companies have just joined the ranks of our sponsors, contributing with their donation to supporting our charities, Fondazione Paracelso and Gohelp. They are sms.it, since 1996 a leading Italian advanced messaging services company, Grey Head Business Solutions and callmehe.re, an innovative application which allows talking with everybody, from anywhere, even without data connection.
Do as our sponsors, and support our mission here.
Fake Sponsors
In addition to our main sponsors, which will be shown prominently on our Gengis Khar, we have a number of fake sponsors, bizarre companies or products which will be shown on our car. The market desperately needs these products. While the picture of each and every logo will soon be published, here are the names of some of our sponsors:
Scratchnatch: the first application which creates other applications
Eversnatch consulting: Solutions for problems you don’t have
Same Same but Different: Clothing for siamese twins (intended as twins from Thailand)
How I met your Mother: Embarassing dating site
Whetherforecasts.com: we know whether that particular thing will happen
Sole Mate: the dating site for singles who want to stay single
The Carnitarian: Restaurant with vegan-inspired dishes for meat eaters: try their lamb salad or their ham fruit salad
Table Football Manager: the first videogame simulating the career of a table football manager. Create your team from dusty bars to the Table champions league
Unhandyman.com. Unskilled technicians available 7/24
friendzone.org. Website to find escorts who will refuse to do that particular performance because they see you as a friend
Dunno.com. An application whose functions are still unknown
The logos will make our car more beautiful. And many more unique sponsors are about to come. Stay tuned.
Updates
After a long hiatus, we are back with some news. Unfortunately, that beautiful ambulance won’t be the Gengis Khar due to some technical difficulties. We have however a beautiful van, whose pictures we will soon show.
While our visa adventure also seems to be close to an end, we have closed our first campaign which, thanks to all of you has reached EUR 2,305 which we will give the two charities we are supporting.
We will post the names of the contributors in the next facebook post and on this website with a huge thank you!
Meanwhile, we have launched a new campaign which will end as soon as we (hopefully) reach Ulan Bator.
You can donate here
Support our mission
As the Gengis Khar gets ready for the great endeavour, we have launched our fundraising on indiegogo (click to open the link). Although Francesco, Raffaele, the Donald and the Gengis Khar will have a lot of fun in doing it, the real purpose of this travel is to raise funds for the two charities that we support: GoHelp, the charity chosen by the organizers of Mongolia Charity Rally and Fondazione Parcelso. For more on this, please visit our the project section.
The Gengis Khar is home!
After a long trip from Lithuania (just a preview of what will come), the Gengis Khar has arrived in Brussels. Francesco was there to welcome her.
We will now pimp it up and make sure that she is ready for the journey
Habemus macchinam
It’s almost certain. We now have a vehicle. It’s not the kind of vehicle we were initially thinking of, but we believe it is much better!
It is an ambulance. We have made this choice for two reasons.
First, we are basically nuts. Therefore, nothing fits more than an ambulance to take us (and Don) to Mongolia.
Second, we will donate the ambulance which will help the population there, thus enhancing the charitable purpose of our travel.
So, let’s get ready. The travel is about to begin!
Three Steppes Ahead & Sunthetic – Our energy during the travel
We are pleased to announce our second sponsor: Sunthetic, the all-in-one: sleek design, 140% battery life, the best solar panel, light and protective case. During our route to Mongolia we will surely have long travels in desert roads with no places to recharge our iphones. We now know that, with this innovative cover we will never be out of power and we will be able to post our travel news.
Borders and Visas
We have now reached the stage where we must struggle to plan the visas for all the countries we will visit. Apparently, obtaining a Turkmenistan visa is quite complicated and requires a lot of bureaucracy, including finding a guide who will be with us throughout our journey in Turkmenistan. Furthermore, apparently the drone may not make it in Uzbekistan and our friend the Donald cardboard is afraid of the Iranian border.
We will cross 14 borders, across what was the greatest empire in history, and I am sure that there will be a lot of waiting.
As I was checking the paperwork for the first visa, I couldn’t help thinking of something Kapuscinski wrote about borders
“People are not made to live in borderline situations; they avoid them or try to flee from them as quickly as possible. And yet man encounters them everywhwere, sees and feels them everywhere. Let us take the atlas of the world: it is all borders. Borders of oceans and continents. Deserts and forests. Precipitations, monsoons, typhoons, cultivated land and fallow land, permafrost and bog, rocky soil and clay. Let us add the borders of the Quaternary deposits and volcanic flows, of basalt, chalk and trachyte. We can also see the borders of the Patagonian plate and the Canadian plate, the zones of tropical climates and of Artic ones, the borders of the erosions zones of the Adycha watershed and of Lake Chad. […]
And the borders of monarchies and republics? Kingdoms remote in time and lost civilizations? Pacts, treaties and alliances? Black tribes and red? Human migrations? The borders to which the Mongols reached. The Khazars. The Huns.
How many victims, how much blood and suffering are connected with this business of borders! There is no end to the cementeries of those who have been killed the world over in defense of borders. Equally boundless are the cementeries of the audacious who attempted to expand their borders. It is safe to assume that haf of those who have ever walked upon our planet and ost their lives in the field of glory gave up the ghost in battles begun over a question of borders.
This sensitivity to the border issue, this untiring enthusiasm for constantly marking them out, widening them, or defending them, are characteristic not only of man, but all animate nature, of everything that moves on land, in water and air. Various mammals, in defense of the borders of their grazing lands, will let themselves be torn to pieces. Various beasts of prey, so as to secure new hunting grounds, will bite their adversaries to death. And even our quiet and meek kitten, how he labors, how he compresses and torments himself, to squeeze out a few drops with which to mark, here and there, the borders of his territory.
And our brains? Encoded in them, after all, is an infinite diversity of borders. Between the left and the right hemispheres, between the frontal and the temporal lobes, between the corpus callosum and the cerebellum. And the borders between ventricles, meninx, and convolutions? Between the lumbar region and the spinal cord? Notice the way in which we think. For instance, we think: That’s the limit; beyond that – no. Or we say: Be careful that you don’t go too far, for you will overstep the mark! Moreover, all these boundaries of thought and feeling, injunctions and interdictions, are constantly shifting, crossing and permeating one another, piling up. In our brains there is ceaseless border movement – across borders, near borders, over borders. Hence our headaches and migraines, hence the tumult in our heads; but pearls can also be produced: visions, dazzlements flashes of inspiration, and – unfortunately more rarely – genius.
The border is stress – fear, even (significantly more rarely: liberation). The concept of the border can incude a kind of finality; the doors can slam shut behind us forever: such is the border between life and death. The gods know about such anxieties, and that is why they try to win adherents by promising people that, as a reward, they will enter the divine kingdom – which will have no borders. The paradise of the Christian God, the paradise of Yahweh and Allah, all have no borders. Buddhists know that the state of nirvana is the state of blissful happiness without limits. In short, that which is most desired, awaited, and longed for by everyone is precisely this unconditional, total, absolute – boundlessness.
(Ryszard Kapuscinski)
The drone
We have tested the drone that we will use to film our car crossing Central-Asian roads. The result has been far from exciting. Hopefully, we will learn how to use it before we start… And hopefully we will not break the toy before we actually need it…
Three Steppes Ahead 