DHL: Don’t Help Little Kids

DHL: Don’t Help Little Kids
Beijing, China
December 7th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

Hey Friends,

As you may know (see previous post) the cars are broken and we urgently need a small box of parts to be sent from Hungary before we can do repairs. Unfortunately DHL want $1,000 to send the box. We politely asked for a small discount, seeing as this is a charitable venture, and they politely gave us a stream of spurious nonsense about why they couldn’t help (see email trail below).

If anyone fancies firing off a quick email imploring them to help (come on it’s a Friday, you’re not really working), and maybe calling them tight-fisted corporate ball bags, then the kind lady in charge is:
Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
Cessalie.Bruce@dhl.com
Her US number is: 954-626-2678

If you could link this to any other blog sites that would be smashing.

Here’s the story so far:

When our great friend and supporter Michael Moore originally asked DHL for help, and outlined our trip, this is what he received from Mrs Bruce.

Dear Mr. Moore,
Thank you for making DHL aware of the Trabant Trek. Unfortunately, this is not an activity which we are able to support at this time. Please understand the decision in no way reflects the quality or caliber of the event. It is based solely on our available resources.
We do, however, appreciate your interest in DHL and extend our best wishes for your success.
Regards,

Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US) Cessalie.Bruce@dhl.com


So Mike sent this:

From: Michael Moore
Date: Dec 6, 2007 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: Need Help from DHL to Complete Round World Charity Rally
To: "Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US)"

All we are asking is to get about 60 lbs. of spare part from Hungary to China or bangkok.. All 3 cars are now out of commission... Please, we need help.. even if it is a discount on the freight.

Thanks

Mike Moore

And she replied:


On Dec 6, 2007 2:42 PM, Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US) wrote:

Mr. Moore,
We are still unable to offer you a discount. If a discount were offered through our office, we would have to absorb some of those costs. Regrettably, we are not able to do so.
Regards,
Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
954-626-2678

So I did a little research into her excuses, then I sent her this:

Dear Mrs Bruce,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to our requests, and offering you best wishes for our success. Unfortunately your best wishes won’t help our little box of bits get to Bangkok, wont help our little cars get to Cambodia, and wont help the little children there who are relying on us.
All we are asking for is a little discount on getting our parcel of spare parts out here, so we can fix the cars and complete our charitable mission. At the moment you kind folk are asking for $1,000 to send a 60 lbs box from Hungary. We’re terribly over budget, and these costs are threatening our project: we have a budget for living expenses of about $7 per day.
We here on the Trek (and most of the people in our Beijing hostel) find your reasons for rejecting our plea a little flimsy.
I did a bit of research to see if I could support your claim that DHL would be ‘unable to absorb some of those costs (of a discount)’.
Well 2006 was a pretty good year for your German parent company, Deutsche Post World Net. According to the 2006 Annual Report (the latest one available) revenue was up 35% to EURO 60,545,000,000 (count the zeros). That’s $88.4 billion. (http://financialreports.dpwn.com/2006/ar/thegroup/ataglance.html)
Of course, the profit from operating activities (EBIT) was just $5.6 billion. And these are last year’s figures, so I suppose this could have been a terrible year for the logistics industry.
But surely the cost of knocking a few hundred bucks off a small shipment in the name of charity could be absorbed? Sorry Mrs Bruce, don’t buy that one.
Oh but you ‘don’t have the available resources’?
6,500 offices, 420 aircraft, 76,200 vehicles, 1.5million shipments a year to 120,000 locations in more than 220 countries and territories. (www.dhl.com/publish/g0/en/about/network.low.html)
That’s a lot of resources.
You employ more than 285,000 people across the planet, not you personally Mrs Bruce, you are responsible for ‘corporate citizenship’.
Being unfamiliar with this important sounding title I looked up ‘corporate citizenship’: “The role of a company in considering its responsible involvement within the wider community”. (www.ccd.net/resources/guide/glosary/glossary1.html).
Well as a company with a global reach, I think in this case the wider community certainly stretches to the needy kids in Cambodia. And maybe your responsibility is to look a little further than the profit when you can help out a worthy cause.
And if it is vital to have the ambitions of DHL furthered by this charitable gesture, we would happily put your logo on our cars, on our website, on our t-shirts, on a documentary, on our webisodes, and on our blogs, which are read by thousands, and have appeared in newspapers across the world from the Washington Post to the Mongol Messenger.

I’ve put a copy of our correspondence on our websites (www.trabanttrek.org, www.myspace.com/trabanttrek, http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com) so that the tens of thousands of people supporting us can see how DHL have helped.

We do appreciate your interest in Trabant Trek and extend our best wishes for your success.

Regards,

Dan Murdoch
Trabant Trek
+86 150 471 87602


If you fancy bombarding the good lady with emails, and linking this terrible slight to other sites, that would be beautiful.


Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

The Cars are Broken: Episode 382

The Cars are Broken: Episode 382
Beijing, China
December 7th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

"Only when the tunnel is in the most absolute dark can you see the light again."
According to Carlos a Chinese Proverb, translated into Spanish, then English.

THE cars are broken.
All three of them- kaput. Fez gave up in Xilinhaote, Dante gave up just outside Beijing, and a few days ago Ziggy refused to start.
Engine problems all round.
It’s frustrating. We have crossed blazing deserts, the icy steppe, some of the world’s highest roads, some of the world’s worst roads, we’ve chugged through traffic in stunning cities, and bombed along deserted highways, dealt with a Siberian winter, a Turkish summer, and always, always managed to scrape the cars forward.
But now we hit China, and what fucks it all up?
A couple of tanks of dodgy petrol.
Can’t believe it. It wrecked the engines in Fez and Dante, chewed up the spare engine we put in Fez, and now something’s wrong with Ziggy.
We don’t have enough spare parts left, over the last four and a half months we’ve gone through or ditched so much stuff, we’re down to the bare minimum.
And we have already overstayed the cars’ Chinese customs papers, which expired a week ago, so we have no choice but to try and get out of the country as soon as possible, rather than attempt any repairs here.

All three of the cars have been boxed up and loaded onto trucks bound for Kunming, about 3,000km south of here. It should take a week for them to get there, then we have to try and get them trucked the last 900km to the border. Personally I don’t think we’ll get them out of the country for another ten days, maybe December 17th?
Seventeen days late. It’ll be interesting to see what customs have to say about that one.
Probably a lot of arguing and some fines. But so far the Chinese officials have been great, so there is hope.

In the mean time the gang is separating again.
The plan, which is always liable to change, is to get the parts we need shipped to Bangkok (See DHL blog). Lovey is hoping to fly there to collect them in the next few days, then he will head back through Laos to meet us at the China border. Tony will soon fly to Laos to scout out a workshop and try to arrange something to tow us there from the border. The remaining three of us, OJ, Carlos and I, will head down to Kunming and find a way of getting the cars from there to the Laos border.
Hopefully we will all reconvene at the border, us with the cars, Lovey with the parts, and Tony with a tow truck.
Mental isn’t it?

So once again the stage is set for separation. The last time this happened, in Khorog, Tajikistan, we didn’t see each other again for three weeks.
This time?
There’s plenty to go wrong. We could struggle to get the cars from Kunming to the border- I'm not sure how much traffic there is on that route.
But I think the most likely delays will be at Lovey’s end. We’re relying on an unreliable Hungarian mechanic to source and ship the parts to us. Then we’re relying on Lovey getting them from Bangkok to the China-Laos border ASAP.
Bangkok is a big city full of distractions, it’s easy to get sidetracked for a few days. And once he’s on the move, he will need to get a few buses, which could take three maybe four days.
So there’s a high chance we’ll be stranded in some two-bit town in the underdeveloped northern part of Laos. But it’s a beautiful country, with great people. And it should be warm.

China. It’s all south from here right? The final leg yes? Easy now ok?
Not a bit of it. The cars are broken, this could be should be our lowest ebb. But strangely, morale is high. We’re in an amazing city, we’re staying at a great place, and surrounded by travellers who think what we’ve done is awesome.
The cars are broken, but not our spirits.

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Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Crossroads: An Update

Crossroad: An Update
Bishkek, Dushanbe
October 9, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

"The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; the optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
Winston Churchill

WE ARE scattered. The team is spread across two countries and three cities in and around Central Asia’s craggy, imposing` mountain ranges.

Lovey has spent the last ten days in Dushanbe trying to sort out visas for our American contingent. The Tajik capital is currently hosting an international conference and every hotel in the city is booked, forcing J Lov to prostitute himself to find a place to stay. The poor chap has spent most of his days queuing and arguing at embassies, walking the same streets between the internet café, consulate and his accommodation.

OJ and TP, the other surviving members of Team USA, are in Khorog, high in the Pamir Mountains. Both of them are under house arrest, closely guarded by the Tajik KGB. It is illegal for foreigners to be out without their passports, which Lovey has in Dushanbe, and the pair were repeatedly arrested during their first few days without documents.
You would think a six-foot-three goliath of a Yank and a moustachioed Mexican with a Mohawk would be able to escape attention in a small Tajik mountain village. Maybe the brightly coloured German cars blew their cover?
Whatever happened, I’ll find out soon, but I know they have been subjected to constant police harassment and are now bound to their homestay, where, thankfully, the owners have taken pity and begun to feed them for free each night.
I'm not sure what curious cabin fever their enforced proximity has created, but during a recent Gmail chat both complained to me, quite separately, that the other smelled.
Team Europe, Carlos, Zsofi and I, are in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek, staying in what may have been the inspiration for Prisoner Cell Block H, but without the lesbians. Actually we are probably Prisoner Cell Block Q or R, nothing as luxurious as H, where I hear they have their own shower.

Our continuing mission: to get to Cambodia, has taken some violent twists in the last few weeks. Crippled by a series of breakdowns on the Tajik-Afghan border, we were forced to stall the Trek to confront a number of burgeoning visa crises.
Between us we need new visas for the next four countries along our route: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia. This being former-Soviet territory, any brush with authority puts you at the delightful whimsy of former-Soviet bureaucracy, and the visas have been a handful, setting us back a week, and they are still not finished.
But the delay has thrown up an even greater hurdle- looming large in the distance is China, an undoubted highlight of the trip, a booming country and culture we are all desperate to taste. But also a system of paperwork and officialdom that makes Turkmenistan look like a Parisian hippy community of liberal utopians.
To get a visa for our expedition in China takes has taken three months and is costing us $8,000 for the documents for three cars and six people. Our points of entry and exit are fixed, as are the dates, and the Chinese insist we pay to have a guide with us for the whole month. Hence the ridiculous costs involved.
The problem is we are almost undoubtedly going to miss our fixed entry date. But what we find infuriating is that we are actually on China’s western frontier right now- both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have open borders with the country. But the Chinese are refusing to let us change our point of entry. This means we have to circumnavigate the whole of north west China, a trip of thousands of kilometres up the length of Kazakhstan, across miles of Siberian wilderness, and down through Mongolia, a country that has more horses than cars.
Of course this was our original route, but, judging on previous form, it will probably take three weeks to a month. We have two weeks before we have to enter China, according to the terms of our visa.
Not gonna happen.
So we apply for a new visa? It takes at least two months to do and will mean another $2,000 deposit. No one can afford to sit in freezing Mongolia, where it was -14c yesterday, for two months.
So we have to seriously contemplate an alternative to China. We still haven’t paid $6,000 for our Chinese visas, so we have $6,000 to play with to find a way of avoiding the country.
“Blue sky thinking people, lets think outside the box here.”
Or something like that.
So far our ‘best idea’, and I use that term loosely, is to ship the cars through or around the country.
We’ve had to get our atlases out, but one option is to drive to Vladivostok, Russia’s icy eastern port, and get a ferry from there to the northern part of South Korea. We then drive down the Korean peninsular to the southern port of Pusan where we would get a cargo ship to take us around China- possibly to Singapore. From there we could drive north through Malaysia and Thailand, and east into Cambodia.
Crazy.
The other option is to drive to Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, and try to get the cars onto a freight train to take them through China, possibly to Bangkok, Thailand or Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We would either go along with the freight or sort out individual visas (a much easier process) and travel behind. Then collect the cars and continue to Cambodia.
Mental.
Both options mean taking on the challenging drive to the north east of Asia almost a month later than originally planned. The weather is closing in- it is freezing here already- and it will mean tackling snow and ice, which we hadn’t anticipated. This area is also the most isolated part of the trip, a terrible place to break down, and if we go through Mongolia there will be few roads.
The shipping option could also involve a couple of weeks at sea.
A third option is to try and get the cars onto a train to Ulaanbaatar from here in Bishkek. If it is possible there is a slim hope we can still make our Chinese visa and would miss the terrible drive around the borders of China.

So there we go. We are in contact with freight and shipping companies (if anyone knows of any in the region, please get in touch) and await their replies to see if any of these ‘plans’ are even feasible.
Hopefully Lovey will fly back to Khorog tomorrow and Team USA can begin the trip over the Pamir Mountains. It’s maybe a week’s drive till they get here to Bishkek, then we need another four or five days to sort out final visas and make our decision.

Our route and our trek could soon be changing dramatically. Personally, I'm excited. I love change, and I love the idea that we can tackle the Chinese challenge by doing something completely ridiculous like taking to the sea with the Trabbis.
I'm up for the shipping option.
I wonder what Korea is like in November?

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs go to: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or trabanttrek.org