At 2 a.m. on day 29 of the Mongol Rally, Kara stood in a narrow hallway on the Professor Ghoul, a Soviet-era cargo ferry somewhere in the middle of the Caspian Sea, staring into a toilet that had just overflowed. The AC had been off for hours. The water jugs had turned out to be filled with air conditioning condensate, brown chunks floating at the surface. What was supposed to be a 17-hour crossing had stretched past 30. This is what it actually looks like to drive a converted school bus from Europe to Central Asia, and the 78 hours surrounding that ferry are the kind of thing you only laugh about later.
Kara and Nate, along with their travel companions Rick, Charlie, Beck, and Sarah, were already rattled before they reached the port in Alat, Azerbaijan. Their bus had spent 10 days in the hands of a shipping company that lied to them daily while transporting it from Georgia, and upon reunion in Baku, the crew discovered a growing list of stolen items: a toolbox purchased in Prague, USB charging cables, a refrigerator liner, a small water pump, a camping pillow, a collection of country-specific lighters Sarah had gathered across the trip, eight specialty oil filters they had ordered from the United States, and two bottles of cognac Rick had bought at a wine tasting in Moldova. The theft that stung most was a bottle of Moldovan sparkling wine that Rick and Beck had secretly purchased for Kara, who was eight weeks pregnant and had missed a winery visit, intending to give it to her when the baby arrived. It was gone from a cupboard. Someone had looked everywhere.
Twenty hours at the port before the boat even arrived
They reached the ferry port expecting to wait up to three days, since the boats run on no schedule and depart only when full. What followed was a tour of contradictions. A ferry called Professor Ghoul appeared on tracking websites as incoming but was declared by one official to have already departed. Ticket windows sent the group in circles. A barbed-wire holding area they initially called jail turned out to be the standard pre-boarding zone, which offered no toilet access within 300 yards and required a stern negotiation to leave. Other Mongol Rally teams had been parked inside it for two full days in small three-seater cars. Nate set up a Starlink dish and Kara got work done. They made ramen in the parking lot at 1 a.m. They slept on hard benches in a building Kara described as looking like a morgue. The Professor Ghoul finally arrived at the port exactly 24 hours after they did, sat motionless for another two and a half hours while trucks unloaded, and began loading vehicles at 2 a.m. Rick fell asleep in the bus by accident, which turned out to be fortunate since someone had to drive it onto the ramp and hand bags out through the window to the rest of the group.
They boarded at roughly 4 a.m., 31 hours after arriving at the port. Their cabins had AC, actual mattresses, and pillows, which Kara called a big bright side with some genuine relief. Other members of the group had bunk beds stacked in a room barely wide enough to walk through sideways, with a sink but no toilet and a communal bathroom that Rick filmed and described as one of the most foul-smelling he had encountered anywhere.
When the 17-hour crossing became 42 hours at anchor
Breakfast was soup, a plate of pickles, bread, and an orange Fanta. Nate’s portion of noodles came topped with what he described as a boomerang-shaped piece of ligament that bent and snapped back. Lunch was buckwheat and chicken. Afternoon tea was a single wafer, which someone called the best thing they had eaten on the boat. Dinner was skipped entirely because the kitchen staff, who delivered every meal with what the group agreed was the energy of a legal requirement, decided they could still be in port for another five hours and did not bother. The final meal was tortillas with banana, no peanut butter.
The toilet situation collapsed completely around 10:30 p.m. when the system backed up, the bowls filled, and the water had to be turned off. The crew started using a drain hole instead. The AC cut out for the final stretch. At 4:30 in the afternoon on the second full day, a crew member told them the engines might start in four or five more hours and laughed when asked. Kara put it plainly from a sweaty bunk: ‘We’re in jail and no one cares. No one here cares.’
The boat finally moved. Land appeared. The port in Turkmenistan turned out to be newer and cleaner than anyone expected, and a skilled tugboat operator nudged the Professor Ghoul into position without grazing anything. Turkmenistan was still requiring a COVID test for entry, nine people at $266 total, the swab barely touching anyone’s mouth. Visas cost $635 and required sitting in a hallway for two hours. Nate, whose name was on all the vehicle documents, spent an hour and a half moving between offices across multiple buildings before the final stamp came through.
The champagne that was supposed to be a surprise
Exactly 78 hours after arriving at the port in Alat, the group drove out of Turkmen immigration and officially entered the country. It was 2 a.m. They had a two-hour drive to their hotel. Someone in the group had a portable cooler with cold beers. Beck had already made ramen from a camping chair outside the immigration office while everyone waited for Nate.
Back in the crew’s narrative, somewhere between the overflowed toilets and the stolen oil filters, the missing bottle of Moldovan sparkling wine kept coming up. Eleven million bottles produced annually, 70 percent of it sparkling, and the one that was meant for Kara was sitting in a cupboard on a bus in a Georgian shipping yard while she was eight weeks pregnant and missing wine tastings. It was gone before the ferry ever left the dock.
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