Up to the Caucasian Challenge

Kanwal Preet bought herself a special tent, one that opens out with a single strong tug, before she headed off to participate in her first car rally. Driver designate Rohit Kumar purchased a sturdy towing cable while Shivali Yadav rushed off to get an extra pair of pink shoes from Carrefour; she admittedly loses one on every trip.

The three Indian nationals then flew from Dubai to Hungary to participate in the Caucasian Challenge, a minimal assistance motor rally that starts in Budapest and ends 6,250 kilometres away in Yerevan, Armenia, after traversing daunting war-torn areas. Fourteen arduous days later the trio, under the team name “Indie Crusaders” won the rally. So how did it all begin? The novice rally drivers share their winning story

It was after a trekking trip in India last year that Kanwal Preet, marketing manager Sanofi, decided she must follow her dream. “I always wanted to be a rally driver and of course speed rally is not something I can enrol in now. So when the idea of endurance rally popped up, I’ve had these two as friends for a long time, so I asked them and they decided to join in.”

As avid travellers, husband and wife duo Rohit Kumar and Shivali Yadav knew journeying through the Commonwealth of Independent States or CIS Countries (formed after the break-up of the Soviet Union) was a once in a lifetime opportunity. “The rally was actually an excuse for us to travel to some of the most interesting countries by road,” admits Yadav, marketing manager at 3W Networks. For Kumar, sales manager at TIBCO Software, it was about meeting like-minded individuals and exchanging travel stories.

So on August 11, alongside 14 other teams from across the globe, the Indie Crusaders revved off at the Caucasian Challenge to experience their first motor rally.

Touted as “The Last Great Adventure Race”, the route cuts through the heart of conflict zones across Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh, while crossing Hungary, Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Armenia. The rally offers minimal assistance, which means participants do not have access to back-up vehicles, mechanics or rescue teams.

So choosing a vehicle is crucial for a safe finish, and the Indie Crusaders had to zero in on a car prior to reaching Budapest. “Initially we didn’t even know how to get a car, so Rohit was sitting and translating Hungarian from different websites to figure out what car we can buy,” Yadav recalls. They finally zeroed in getting a Mazda 626 in Hungary as transporting a vehicle from Dubai was proving too expensive for the self-sponsored team.

Kumar then busied himself reading repair manuals, while the girls waded through an enormous bulk of documents including visa requirements and immigration laws for each of the 11 countries. But when they landed in Budapest, the adventure had only just begun.

“I had read all the manuals for the Mazda and when we reached we found due to some paperwork issue, we got a 1993 Volkswagen Passat,” Kumar says.

The car model was least of the problems, its age proved otherwise. “Our car had issues on almost a daily basis. But it was just great fun meeting local people and trying to do dumb charades in order to communicate what the problem was,” Preet says.

In fact the entire journey proved to be a feat in non-verbal communication, especially prior to ordering meals. “We don’t eat beef so we had to actually draw a cow to identify what we did not want to eat. Or we had to act it out or make sounds such as ‘moo’, ‘baaaaa’,” laughs Yadav.

But the real challenge was the gruelling journey itself, where within a fortnight they witnessed all four seasons of the year, where fear for safety was as much reality as the dense fog, steep winding high roads and narrow dirt tracks. Where the warm hospitality of strangers made them long for more time and where the astounding beauty of the landscape collided brutally with the silence of deserted cities.

“Driving through no-man’s-land between Armenia and Azerbaijan was a very surreal experience, there were miles and miles of just destroyed houses, there was not even a single person you could see. It was like a very strange experience. There were sign boards which said ‘Mines’. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous, stunning, you could imagine there were people who must have lived here in these houses some 20 years back and today you can’t even spot a single person,” Yadav says.

Part of winning the rally lay in solving geo-caching riddles, a skilful high-tech hide-and-seek game which uses GPS coordinates to find hidden objects. “The way it worked was they would give us a sheet with different co-ordinates with riddles or puzzles that had to be solved at every single co-ordinate, so that automatically added two to three hours to our journey, because for some reason Shivali would refuse to give up, I was somewhere in between and Rohit was losing it on us!” Preet says.

The perseverance paid off; the Indie Crusaders cracked the maximum brainteasers, and won the coveted trophy. They will now be participating in the Central Asian Rally next year.

Shahana Raza is a UAE-based freelance writer

MUSIC TO THE EARS

Despite the hassles Indie Crusaders faced due to their Indian passport at various border check-points, they were in for a pleasant surprise when some Russian soldiers requested to hear Indi-music. “Near no-man’s land we met this bunch of Russian soldiers while we were clicking photographs. As soon as they realised we are from India they come up and asked if we had this Bollywood song from a 1982 film, Jimmy Jimmy, and imagine this I was carrying only 500 songs on a USB and I had that song! So we actually played it and they shook a leg,” Kumar says.