ROMANIANS AT MONGOL RALLY Dracula Khan - Retracing the Silk Road in a city car

Three adventure seekers will set off for Mongolia in a city car, running in the marathon Mongol Rally, and another set of three friends will drive the little vehicle back from Ulan Bator to Bucharest, where it will roll with all the competition signs on it all the rest of its life.

Dracula Khan, one of the three Romanian teams participating in the Mongol Rally, has six members (three for the outbound, three for the back trip). Here are some figures about Dracula Khan: eight visas obtained in three months, a car three metres and a half long, an average age of 37 (the youngest team member is 28, the oldest is 47), 28,000 kilometres lying ahead of them on two continents and 14 countries to drive through in an estimated 50 days, starting on July 22 from Prague.

Team Dracula Khan is made up of: Radu Manea (40, manager), Ovidiu Niculica (47, architect), Razvan Mosneag (38, architect), Radu Mocanu (39, trainer), Teo Grigore (28, a civil engineer) and Marian Boanca (40, graphic designer).

"Mongol Rally became a dream of mine after I read a book and thought that maybe I'd get to do this too one day," says Radu Manea. This trailblazing book was the journey log written by photojournalist Mihai Barbu — "I Sell Kilometers" to document his travel to Mongolia.

Manea adds that the idea of a trip to Mongolia has been haunting him for four years now. Watching the Romanian teams that embarked on the rally the motto of which is: "If nothing goes wrong, everything has gone wrong!" Manea persuaded his friends to participate in this year's adventure, and as soon as the entries opened last August, he paid the participation fee.

Because this year, unlike previous editions, the cars in the rally will not remain in Mongolia, but will...