Nate was squeezing Big Bertha, a retired Colorado school bus carrying nine people, through a tight corridor of 18-wheelers at the Turkey-Georgia border crossing when he heard it: a crunch. The truck driver started yelling. Nate pulled over, opened Google Translate, and stood on the side of the road trying to negotiate with a furious stranger in a language he did not speak, while his teammates were somewhere on the other side of the border walking through passport control. This is what 72 hours in Turkey looks like when you are midway through the Mongol Rally, a 5,000-mile self-supported drive from Europe to Asia in vehicles that were never really built for the journey. The stakes are real, the navigation is improvised, and the bus is held together, in significant part, by duct tape.
A pink lake nobody warned them about
The team had not planned to stop at the salt lake. They were on the bus rolling south toward Cappadocia when someone spotted the color through the window and they just pulled over. The lake, which is the second largest in all of Turkey, turns a vivid pink in sections where a salt-loving algae produces the hue as a protection mechanism. The hard-to-reach southern shore, roughly an hour and a half from Cappadocia, was completely empty. No other visitors were visible in any direction. One member of the group dipped their hands in the water and watched a thick crust of salt dry over their ring within minutes. ‘I just don’t know how there aren’t massive tour buses of people here,’ Kara said, genuinely puzzled, standing at the edge of a lake that looked, up close, like it could not possibly be real. The unplanned stop ended up outranking nearly everything else on the itinerary.
From the lake, the bus continued to Cappadocia’s Love Valley, where the famous fairy chimneys rise from the valley floor in their unmistakable shape. The hard cap rock on top resists erosion and shields the softer pillar beneath it, which is why the formations look the way they do. A drone flight over the valley triggered a memory: Nate had crashed his very first drone in almost exactly this spot nine years earlier. That evening, the group accepted a tea invitation from a local restaurant, the tea turned into shisha, and somehow the night ended with Rick starring in a Turkish commercial being filmed at the same venue. ‘I don’t know what’s happening right now,’ Nate said, ‘but apparently we’ve ended up in a Turkish film.’
The border crossing that cost $400 and one truck mirror
The hot air balloons over Cappadocia were canceled the following morning due to high wind gusts. The team had camped on a ridge specifically to watch them rise, and Kara, Nate, and Charlie, the only three who had been to Cappadocia before, were the most disappointed on behalf of the group. The bus pushed on, covering a massive drive day through the Pontic Mountains, passing cows on cliff faces steep enough to make everyone stare, and driving through a 14.5-kilometer tunnel described as the longest in Turkey.
At the Georgia border, the entire group had to exit the bus and walk through on foot while Nate drove alone. Threading through a corridor of parked 18-wheelers, he misjudged the height clearance on a truck’s side mirror, clipped it, and folded it back. The driver, whose truck it was not and who said he would be charged for the damage, looked the replacement mirror up on his phone: $400. After five minutes of yelling and several rounds of Google Translate, Nate handed over the cash. ‘The team leaves me for five minutes,’ he told everyone when they reunited on the Georgian side. The Georgian border guards, meanwhile, were so delighted by the school bus that they waved it through without checking much of anything, taking photos and calling it ‘very nice bus’ and ‘the best American traditions.’ Nate later reframed the $400 as ‘a $50 entry fee into Georgia’ and announced he was going to win it back at the casino.
Rick, holding a parking spot with his hands
In Batumi, finding a place to park a full-sized school bus proved its own ordeal. When the hotel they had targeted turned out to have no viable parking, Rick got out, found a street spot, and physically stood in it, hands on a Mustang that tried to roll into him, holding the space while the bus circled for an hour. He held it.
The 72 hours in Turkey that began with a surprise pink lake and ended with a $400 crunch at the border were, by the group’s own assessment, exactly the kind of thing the Mongol Rally is built for: nothing goes to plan, everything becomes a story, and Big Bertha keeps moving.
