ROMANIANS AT MONGOL RALLY Mamaliga Warriors or how four bohemian Moldovans got on Mongol Rally

Four Moldovans with a giant cask on the roof their car want to get to Mongolia.

It's not the opening to a joke, it's the beginning of a new adventure for four 30-year-old guys that have banded together under the name of Mamaliga Warriors (e.n. Polenta Warriors) in the race to Ulan Bator. The four have names befitting of the story: Mihai Focsa — The Navigator, Oleg Gnilenco — The Navigator's Driver, Igor Cepoi — The Immortalizer and Radu Pozneac — G-Clef. The four Republic of Moldova have decided to be one of three Romanian teams that is participating this year in the Mongol Rally, an event that gathers adventurers from around the world.

Mongol Rally was founded in 2004 by a group of friends for which travel and adventure were daily routing, calling themselves The Adventurists. The rules are simple: drive from London to Ulan Bator, the sole restriction being engine capacity, that must not surpass 1,000 cubic centimeters. How and what path to take is up to each team. They have six weeks to reach their destination.

In 2004 six crews took part in the rally and in 2013 — 297. The motto of the adventure is "If nothing goes wrong, everything has gone wrong!". Oleg, the team's only driver, up to now, is rubbing his hands with joy at every utterance of the motto — "I can hardly wait".

Among the stories the four have heard of past rallies are some of a car that broke in two pieces and a team that turned back because the friends that had set forth in the adventure argued so hard that they couldn't continue the trip. "After something like this... either everything will be broken, or we become blood-brothers", says jokingly Oleg, who at the mini-concert the team held on Wednesday in IOR park in Bucharest was Igor's...