The day has come, now that it’s here I don’t know where to start … I’ve been living my alter ego life the last six months, feels weird to write about Truck the World life again.

Rikki and I parted ways back in Mongolia August last year with the agreement to meet back in Mongolia in May. It was a moving, man-tear moment that parting, hopes and dreams suddenly up in the air. As I write this, it’s seems to be time to rendezvous, put money where mouth is, ante up, get back on that horse, roll that shackle wagon out the ol’ store house, fire up the ol engines, or perhaps just drive around looking cool in our truck.

I wonder how the ol’ girl is, Gorki I mean, the GAZ66, I haven’t seen her since august, and Rikki is waveringly vague about the exact state of the truck. But the truth of the matter, is that I’ll find out in about 2 days, yup, that’s right … me and Rikki are meeting back in Mongolia on May 11, and this time, it’s for keeps. The real deal, for real, we really mean it this time, we’re gonna drive that old truck somewhere … anywhere is fine … but we’re shooting for Africa.

I’ve been in Aussie making bucket loads of cash the old skool way, throwing fruit, and those melons have replaced the stuff I got stolen in Mongolia, and have put a good sum back in the bank, which, by the time I get to mongolia, and the truck is rolling, will be slightly smaller (hard drives, tents etc) so we’ll see how far it will get us. For the record, I bloody love farm life in Australia, living in cities is for mugs.

I’m sure as this site develops in the next few months, a few other financial ideas will begin to emerge, but truth is, we forgot to go and get sponsors (or maybe we just aren’t that sure we can do this) and are doing it old skool. Work with what you got. I believe Rikki’s gonna sell some t shirts on the site, translators gonna tattoo for cash as we go, and I’m going to set up a gypsy type fortune tellers booth outside the truck when we pull over, happy ending guaranteed.

But in reality, money is the least of our concerns, the real pressure on Rikki and I, is from the big bad Mongolian government. I’d like to say we got in a little trouble for something awesome like smuggling gold, but it’s not, it’s just for overstaying, Rikki did this on his visa last time he was there (even though all the dudes he was bribing in immigration told him he’d be sweet). So Rikki has to be out of Mongolia in 30 days, it’s been his home for the last four years, and we were hoping to have longer, but those governments, they just don’t bend on some stuff, I reckon we might find out about that a bit more as we start crossing borders.

So ‘yay’ is what you’re thinking. ‘They’re finally doing it!’ ‘Holy-bouncing –catheter-bags’ is what we’re thinking, ‘are we really going to do this?’ We’ve been planning this almost three years, and it’s not as though life hasn’t moved on in that time, we’ve both probably asked ourselves many times in the last six months if we still want to do this. Now on top of that, lots of things are changing, like getting on the road very very fast, and not being able to go round Mongolia before we go start crossing borders and venturing wild.

Thinking a lot also about the website, content, and how to share this journey, how to record it in a beautiful way for a doco later. We’ve had so many different ideas for potential avenues, we’ll just have to see how it goes I think, but I am thinking that with the recent purchase of an iphone (my first mobile in five years) wherever we have 3g coverage, we should be putting up photos and blurgy stuff pretty often. We still wanna put out cool little movies and that, and were hoping to make some kind of audio podcast, but we’ll see how we go. But we think with something like this it’s cool to stay on top of it and put out even a little something every couple of days … even if it’s just a photo of the boring ol’ Kazakhstan mountains.

So thats the long and the short of it, I am on a plane out of Thailand tomorrow, and Rikki is in Korea, waiting for his flight to Mongolia.

Talk to you from the land of blue skies and Ghengis Khan, Mongolia, it’s the beginning!

Alex