Alex on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

It has been an exciting day for the Rusty Rhinos! Alex got the opportunity to be interviewed live on The Jeremy Sallis Show on BBC Radio Cambrideshire.

Alex got 12 minutes of airtime to talk about the Rusty Rhinos team and our rally events. The show was themed on xerophobia, the fear of dryness, drawing parallels on some of our thirst quenching adventures. Alex talks about some of our destinations and more challenging interesting moments on the trips.

You can download and listen to interview here. There is also a link on our downloads page on the Beijing Rally 2014 site.

Alex with Jeremy Sallis at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire

Jeremy Sallis broadcasting live on Friday 20th December 2013

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire studios

Rusty Rhinos live on BBC Radio Cambridge

Alex will be live on BBC Radio Cambridgeshire between 3pm and 4pm on Friday 20th December 2013.

The Jeremy Sallis Show will be hosting Alex for a short interview. The show will certainly have an interesting theme to it and will give us the opportunity to promote the Beijing Rally 2014 and our fund raising for Mercy Corps.

You can listen to the show live tomorrow either on the BBC iPlayer or via the BBC Radio Cambridge website at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001p96t. Remember to tune in at 3pm GMT.

We're taking the ferry to France

With every rally comes the question, 'How do we leave this island we are on?'. Unless you get very creative, the two typical options, if you have a car, are the ferry and the Eurotunnel. As we debated the pros and cons of each mode of transport, we quickly realised that despite the Eurotunnel being a faster way of getting across the Channel, we actually prefer going over the Channel rather than under it.

Getting out of the car to stretch your legs whilst enjoying a (non-alcoholic) drink and taking in the view of the White Cliffs of Dover at you sail away beats being in a dark tunnel every time.

So we're all booked and we're taking a P&O ferry on our launch date of Saturday 21st June 2014!

Beijing Rally 2014 launch date set

The time has come for us to fix our launch date for the Beijing Rally 2014. The big day will be Saturday 21st June 2014. It is on this day that we'll embark on our most ambitious adventure to date, aiming to reach Beijing in China in 28 days in Red, our half a century old Land Rover.

Mercy Corps are our charity of choice for this rally and we're hoping to raise funds for them to support all of their activities, including their emergency response and relief activities in the Philippines following the disastrous impact of Typhoon Haiyan. Please support the Mercy Corps and our charity drive to Beijing by making a donation of any amount on our fund raising site www.justgiving.com/beijingrally.

Our rally planning has been underway for sometime now, with two key activities. Car maintenance and entry into China. Red will be getting some new leaf spring suspension, our previous driving experience in Kazakhstan in our Suzuki SJ410 in the Mongol Rally 2007 tells us that having solid suspension is a good idea. In 2007, we snapped our leaf springs 6 times and if we're going to get to Beijing in 28 days, we need to reduce that 6 to a 0! We're also working on our entry into China as we can't just pitch up at the border between Mongolia and China and get our passports stamped. We will need various permits and licenses to be able to enter China.

Soon, we'll also start to look at how we can ship our car from China back to the UK, but we've got enough planning to get through at the moment. With just 215 days to go till the launch date, excitement is really starting to set in. The final 6 months leading up to a rally launch always seem to fly by!

The Beijing Rally 2014 website has launched!

In August 2013 we announced the Beijing Rally 2014 and we have finally launched the website. We've posted the details of the charity we'll be fund raising for in the near future (if you guessed Mercy Corps you'd be right) on our charity page. We've also put some information up on our route from London to Beijing as well as some photos of Red, our now 50 year old Land Rover.

The Beijing Rally 2014 is the 5th Rusty Rhinos rally. We decided that as this is our 5th rally and Red is now half a century old, we'd need to push the limit a bit more compared to any previous rallies. As a result, we've now got to drive all the way to China!

We're very excited about the upcoming rally, although it is certainly going to be a challenge. We're aiming to drive from London, England to Beijing, China in 28 days. We're expecting this to require us to drive a minimum of 10,000 miles (16,000 km). Although Red has a maximum speed of around 65 mph, the reality is we need a tail wind and downhill to achieve those speeds as well as tarmac to drive on.

Our route to Beijing will include taking on both Kazakhstan and Mongolia in their entirety, that means no tarmac roads and speeds of 20 to 30 mph will be an achievement.

The launch date has not yet been set but we're expecting a launch around June or July 2014. The fund raising activities also haven't started just yet but our fund raising website is up and running.

The actual event planning is still in the very early stages, although we have 9 months to go and quite a bit of planning ahead of us. Unlike the last 2 rallies, we have a number of visas that need to be obtained as well as arranging Red's return back to the UK from China. We're at the beginning of the road for an awesome adventure to come.