Trabant Trek

After months of delays, the team is still struggling to depart from Budapest, Hungary. Team leader John Lovejoy and his band of vagabonds quickly get to know one another and learn that their plastic cars will be a handful for the next 6-months.

Dan wakes up with a mean hangover after a drunken night in Romania. A Romanian Trabant club is quick to discover numerous little problems with the team's shabby autos. It is still early in the trip and already Lovie's leadership is being questioned.

Trabant Trek arrives in Istanbul at the height of the summer tourist season and scrambles to find accommodation.

Despite being warned, Trabant Trek enters Georgia at night. They scour the streets for a place to sleep and wake up in the manic seaside resort of Batumi, a playground for drunk Georgians, Mafiosi and ex-KGB bodyguards.

The team wakes up early in an old soviet-era apartment block in the outskirts of Yerevan. While trying to get through Yerevan traffic, tensions start to run high.

Dodging cows and sheep on the highway Trabant Trek steams towards the Azerbaijan Capital of Baku in hopes of catching a ferry across the Caspian Sea.

After struggling for days to catch the ferry toTurkmenistan the team settles in for a 12-hour relaxingride. The next morning they receive news that their 12- hour ride will take days as the ships line up in the Caspian Sea.

Dan's drunken mishaps continue to hold the team up. Time is running out and the Mercedes still needs to be fixed. Lovie patches it with duct tape, which barely gets them to the Uzbekistan border.

The team limps into Tajikistan and one step closer to the Pamir Highway. Climbing over 15,000 feet is a dauntingchallenge for the Trabants. Unfortunately troubles plague the team before they even get to the capitol of Dushanbe.

With the scraps of parts they have left, Tony miraculously manages to put the axle back on Fez. This allows the boys to get over Anzob pass and into Dushanbe to reunite with the rest of the team.

With Günter finally out of the picture everyone is hopeful of making it the last 200km to Khoreg in a day, but Megan has had enough and mentally prepares herself to go home after they cross the Pamirs.

Although Lovie, Tony and OJ have made it over the Pamirs, there's still over a thousand kilometres before they'll meet up the rest of the team in Bishkek. They stop for a night in Osh only to discover the next morning that not only have the cars been vandalized, but they've also been robbed.

Now that the decision to drive North is complete, the team bundles up for the cold and passes into Kazakhstan. In the middle of the night a tyre falls off ofDante forcing the team to camp on the side of the road and look for it the next day.

After two nights of Russian hospitality, the team waves goodbye to their Siberian friends. More 24-hour driving shifts are in store if they are going to make it to the Mongolian border before their Russian visas expire, butthe Siberian winter is rough on the cars and their frozen passengers.

Despite the -20C temperatures, the team settles in to Ulan Bataar and prepares the cars for their next big challenge, the Gobi desert. Just as the team is running out to get their Chinese visas, Dan arrives.

The road disappeared where the Gobi Desert began. They were told to follow power lines, cars and train tracks southward to find China. No one told the team that there would be multiples of each! With no maps or GPS device, and two compasses that don't work, the team quickly gets lost in the frozen expanse.

Trabant Trek picks up a new team member: their Chinese guide Edmund, who quickly proves his worth by wading through the formidable Chinese bureaucracy. The team has less than a week to get all the way to the southern border, but must first detour 400km east to obtain local driver's licenses and number plates for the Trabis.

It's almost Christmas, and Lovie shows up at the Lao border with a gift for the other boys. With a box of engine parts they get to work on repairing the cars.

Five drivers and two Trabis now continue south for Cambodia. Eager for a party, the boys opt to take a slight detour to the legendary tubing town of Vang Vieng. It's their last stop before heading into Thailand and finally Cambodia. To their own disbelief the boys make it across the border!