While some will be tanning at the beach this summer, a Binghamton University alumnus will be driving 10,000 miles from across continents in a beat-up, old car to raise money for charity.
Paul Shively, a BU graduate from the class of 2005, and his friend Scott Partenheimer will be driving from London to Mongolia in the fifth annual Mongol Rally. The Rally has attracted 500 teams who will travel from Hyde Park, London, to Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaan Bataar, to raise money for charity and for the sheer adventure of the experience.
“The point is not to see who can get there first, but to actually have an adventure,” Shively explained.
The teams are allowed to take any route they want to get to Ulaan Bataar, and once they leave London they are on their own.
Participants must abide by several requirements in order to enter.
“The criteria for the cars we have to drive — it has to be a typical city car in Europe, less than $1,000 and a 1-liter engine,” Shively said.
The second criterion involves raising $2,000 to be split between two charities. The first is Mercy Corp. Mongolia, an organization that works with rural Mongolians to help with their needs. The second can be a charity of the team’s choice. Shively and Partenheimer chose the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation, which aids inner-city children in Mongolia.
“The greatest part of the rally is not only that we get to have an adventure where we can’t use a GPS and have to be in really small cars traveling the mountains, but we get to see the charities in action when we get to Ulaan Bataar,” Shively said.
To raise the money for these charities the team has been fundraising and accepting donations from friends and family. They have no official business sponsors other than the places that allowed them to hold fundraisers.
“I bartend at the Cedar Lounge and Grill in Binghamton and was allowed to hold an event,” he added. “We put the money towards charity, raising around $350, making us just about at our goal.”
The two friends named their duo “Two Small Guys-One Small Car.”
“It plays on a few things,” Shively said. “I am only 5 foot 7 inches, and Scott is 5 foot 5 inches, and the car will be small as well. It also has a figurative meaning, huge open desert traveling 10,000 miles, of course we are small,” he says.
The two have faced slight challenges in their preparations so far. Since teams are from all over the world, some have decided to transfer cars from their home countries, but Shively and Partenheimer plan on looking on Auto-trader to find a car while in London.
“We are leaving on June 24 through Dublin to go to London. We have contacts in London and will stay with them and look at cars and dealerships,” Shively said. “We will get the car fixed beforehand, and get extra fluid and spare tires.”
The team is buying their car from England to keep things adventurous. The steering wheel will be on the opposite side of the car that they are used to, so in countries that drive like Americans, the passenger will feel like he should be driving.
The limited mechanical knowledge between them should be interesting when something goes wrong.
Shively and Partenheimer are leaving a lot unplanned to add to the adventure, but some things need to be taken care of before the trip.
“We haven’t procured our visas yet, we have to get a tourist visa but we were thinking there was some way to go on a transport visa to Russia, where you pay at the border and have a certain amount of days to travel a given amount of miles,” explained Shively.
Delays at the borders can turn into a few days of waiting, Shively said, so the team decided to take care of the tourist visa ahead of time.
The team is spending a lot of money to make this the adventure of a lifetime. Altogether the team is looking to raise a total of $4,000 — half for the charities, while the remainder will go to gas and other expenses.
The only thing that is left up in the air is the trip home.
“We don’t know how we are getting home because once we get to Mongolia we have no car available to us,” Shively said. “We could get on a Trans-Siberian railway to get to Moscow and get another visa, or we can go in China to Beijing but the Summer Olympics are there.”
The two plan on videotaping some of their trip, and blogging their adventures whenever possible on their team Web site: mongolrally08.theadventurists.com/index.php?mode=team√É¢√Ö†’=display&name=onesmallcar.