No Money, No Worries, No Sense

Following the great success of London-Tashkent 2005 and 2006, the 2009 event is now open for registration!

According to The Times Online, it'll cost you about £2000 for a two day trip to watch the Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea in Moscow on 21st May 2008. We have a better idea: put away your domestic football differences, save your money and fast forward a year.

It's as simple as it could be: Buy a car for £100, drive it 5000 miles to Central Asia, to watch Kazakhstan play England in the 2010 football World Cup qualifier. Taking in the Nurburgring race track, Auschwitz, Chernobyl, Stalingrad, a Desert, the Aral sea (or lack of), a working space launch site, various pubs/hangovers, various countries, various cities..... donate the car for charity and fly home. The perfect 19 day holiday.

Since the first Plymouth Dakar Rally, several events have been popping up and offering a more adventurous and more accessible option to the high profile, corporate sponsored and immensly expensive Paris Dakar and the likes. Alongside us there is also the Mongol Rally Taking silly little cars all the way to outer Mongolia, The Monopoly Roadtrip offering a mad adventure across the US, and the mad boys at Extreme Trifle, who, well, go look for yourself.

Along the lines of the Plymouth Dakar Rally, the London Tashkent does not really start from London and does not end in Tashkent. It will set off from wherever you push-start your car, and will end in Almaty (or wherever your vehicle decides that this time, it really has had enough...).

Also following the principles of Plymouth Dakar, the cars must be worth less than £100 to participate. The kind of cars your neighbor wouldn't drive to Tesco. A real banger. So bad, it is good. Look at this as an opportunity to celebrate our motoring heritage - when was the last time you saw a MG Montego?
You will be dashing across Europe to your first rest day in Kiev in about 4 days, from where you may wish to take a detour to Chernobyl (the only thing in Europe more polluting than a convoy of 1980s bangers...). From there it's a short 300-mile dash to the missile silos of Dnipropetrovsk before winding into Russia and enjoying your night out in Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). Passing by the delights of Astrakhan we then arrive at Atyrau, on the northern edge of the Caspian Sea, and pause briefly before attempting the largely unsurfaced desert road to Aqtobe. It's then flat-out all the way down Kazakhstan, pausing only to take in the ship graveyards of the Aral Sea and to enroll as a space cadet at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. If all goes to plan (which it won't) we'll arrive in Almaty 16 days after leaving the UK.

Will the car break down o­n the way? It might
Will you get lost? Most definitely.
Will you have the most amazing experience of your life? Absolutely!

If you like the sound of this and are ready to throw everything aside and go raid the local scrappie, then think of a team name and register now. Remember - places are limited.

If you are not too sure yet and still need to ask your mother, register for the news group and follow the exciting preperation for the event.

London Tashkent 2009 - setting off May 2009.