Driving the Trans-Siberian in a £300 Ford Sierra

Date of road trip: 03 May 2003. Vehicle: 1.8 litre £300 Ford Sierra with 100,000 miles on the clock. Length of journey: 11,514 miles from UK-Vladivostok. Duration: 6 weeks. Hotel : 2 nights.  Slept in the car: 45 days.  Did they meet many freaks? Many. Robbed? Nearly. Was it an adventure? ….Oh, yeah!

Driving from the UK across Russia and Siberia to Vladivostok along the Trans-Siberian Railway in a 1.8litre £300 Ford Sierra with 100,000 miles on the clock  was all too irresistible. Our family and friends thought we had finally lost the plot when we told them about our idea of driving to Vladivostok. They thought we were taking this new lifestyle of ours a little too far. OK, so maybe we were going a bit over the top. I mean, just because we had driven across the US six months before, it didn’t really give us the right to worry everyone or give us the confidence to play fools and take on the world with this massive overland adventure. We hadn’t even met anybody who had been to Russia before, let alone driven across it. Were we kidding ourselves? You could say it would be suicidal to even attempt such a journey, especially as we hadn’t spent weeks researching the roads, or invested money on the correct equipment that would be required for such a huge expedition. Of course, we made sure we had oil, a few spare tyres, a GB sticker and an SAS Survival Guide, which Simon bought from Oxfam for 50p, but apart from this, we took the attitude that we’d just see what happened along the way. A few weeks before our departure, we jumped on the internet to see if we could find any websites by fellow adventurers who had driven along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. It was quite worrying as I only found a few. They were driving huge 4×4’s and both had been heavily sponsored. It showed pictures of them driving over dusty potholed roads and crossing deep rivers. It looked impossible, and neither of them had managed to complete the journey to Vladivostok without putting their vehicle on the train. What really put doubt in my mind, was the fact that there appeared to be a 650 km section of highway called the Zilov Gap in Eastern Siberia between Chita and Khabarovsk that was still under construction. What chance did we have if the highway was still being bulldozed? How would we be able to make it across Siberia without a 4×4? I mentioned this to Si in passing, but he just shrugged his shoulders and told me not to worry. Deep down, I knew that if we were going to do it we might as well take the bull by the horns and go in blind. Adventurers: Simon Raven & Chris Raven.

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