Day 20 – Mongolian Border

So this is what prison feels like?  I think I toured through my hometown jail once for scouts or something but I’ve never actually felt like a prisoner…until now.

We woke up early and got through the Russian side of the border with no real problems, other than the problem I have with it taking 2 hours for someone to compare my face to the face in my passport.  Interestingly, between the Russian and Mongolian sides there are 20 kilometers of no man’s land.  We were tempted to stake it as Team FNV Land, but upon realizing we’d have Russia as a neighbor, we thought better of it.

We hit the Mongolian side sometime around 1:00 p.m. local time.  They processed our passports and customs stuff, but they wouldn’t pass the Trackers through customs.  They gave us no information, but told us to move them to the impound lot.  As we complied with their requirements we were surprised to see about 15 other Mongol Rally vehicles in the impound lot and a small, tent city not far away.  This was not good.

We immediately got the story from some of the other teams.  Some of them had been there as long as 5 days.  They couldn’t get their cars through because of some administrative issue with the Mongolian government, or at least that’s what the Rally organizers told them in the beginning.  As we spent our time there and talked to the border officials and also to the Rally organizers, who were very unreliable and shifty in their responses, a clearer picture surfaced.

Every vehicle that enters Mongolia for purposes of being sold for profit or donated to charity must be assessed a tariff.  In years past the Rally organizers had successfully persuaded the Mongolian government to waive the tariff.  But the Mongols, apparently sick of receiving old, beat up cars every year and sick of cleaning up the ditched Rally vehicles wouldn’t waive the tariff this year.  By proceeding without the tariff-waiver the Rally organizers were in a serious pickle, and the participants, us, were paying the price in terms of time wasted at the border. 

The Mongolian border officials and government were simply not going to budge – they needed a tariff on each vehicle and the Rally organizers were on the hook.  During our first night at the border the organizers began wiring money to release vehicles.  Our team, unfortunately, didn’t make the first round.  So we stayed the night in tent city and now face a long day in confinement tomorrow.