Three College Buddies Girdle the Globe in Old Taxi, Smashing Record, Windshield
Caught in traffic in New York's Times Square, Paul Archer watched the taxi meter climb to more than $100,000.
The tangle of cars and cabs and pushcarts was undaunting. "We've seen worse," says the 25-year-old from Gloucester, U.K.
Over the past 13 months, Mr. Archer and two college buddies, Leigh Purnell, 24, and Johno Ellison, 28, have traveled more than 32,000 miles around the globe from London to New York, and points beyond, in a 1992 LTI 2.7 liter diesel FX4TK, better known as a London Black Cab—which they've christened Hannah. (click below to read more)
Three friends came up with a crazy idea in the back of a taxi -- to break the record for the longest cab ride. After a year in a cab, they've handily surpassed the previous record. In New York, they spoke with WSJ's Angus Loten. Photo: Johno Ellison.
As many cabbies do, they've taken the scenic route.
Since leaving the U.K. in February last year, the team has plowed into a snow bank inside the Arctic Circle in Finland, dinged a fender on a lamppost in Dunhuang, China, blown the radiator at an Iraqi border crossing, dodged the Taliban, and ran afoul of police officers, military personnel and armed mercenaries from Moscow to Tehran to Texas.
They were also forced to take a thousand-mile detour around much of the Middle East during the height of the Arab Spring—avoiding Libya, Egypt and Syria for a "safer route" through Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, as Mr. Archer puts it.
So far, the team hasn't had a serious accident. Along the way, they've picked up countless fares, though none were actually charged for the ride.
"We're licensed to drive a cab in the U.K. but wouldn't want to get into trouble with any local cabdrivers," says Mr. Archer, a business school graduate whose goal was to set a new world's record for the longest taxi ride, while raising cash for the British Red Cross, mostly through corporate sponsorships.
The previous record was a 21,691-mile, four-month taxi ride from London to Cape Town, South Africa, and back, set in 1994 by Jeremy Levine and Mark Aylett, of the U.K., and Carlos Arrese of Spain, according to a spokesman for Guinness World Records Ltd. The trip ran the meter up to $64,645.
Mr. Archer and his friends were leaving a British pub a few years ago when one of them wondered how high a taxi meter could go. Soon after, they bought the 19-year-old cab on eBay Inc. for $2,000 and started planning the trip.
After hitting the road, they discovered they left all their maps at home, relying on laptops and mobile devices for the rest of the journey. Apart from advice from local residents, the team relies on a GPS unit and Google Maps to navigate, though outside of big cities the routes tend to be pretty straightforward.
"Most of the directions were 'go a thousand miles down this road, then turn left,' " says Mr. Purnell.
The journey has been logistically complicated in other ways. When they ran out of land between Singapore and Darwin, Australia, the cab was loaded onto a cargo ship at a cost of $3,000. The trip from Sydney to Oakland, Calif., also in a cargo ship, cost $6,000, and the cab was held for nearly two weeks.
Mr. Archer and his team surpassed the old record four months ago along a dusty road in the foothills of the Himalayas. While in Tibet, they decided to set a second record—for the highest ever taxi ride, driving to a base camp below Mount Everest. "It got a little bumpy," says Mr. Purnell, adding that they weren't able to find any previous altitude record, so cannot officially claim the title.
By the time they reached Sydney, Australia—smashing the windshield in the Outback in a collision with a large, unidentified local bird—the team had secured enough funding to keep going. Loading the cab on an ocean liner, they arrived in San Francisco in early March to begin a 12-state cross-country tour. They hit New York Sunday night.
As proof of their total mileage, the team keeps a logbook tracking every destination, a guest book of witnesses along the way and data from a Global Positioning System.
And, of course, the meter is always running. Around 2 p.m. Monday, that meter hit £69,329.40, or $109,954.
Exhaust from the motor occasionally ventilates into the cabin, filling the passenger-side seat with warm, gassy air. In the desert, the front seat was unbearable, adds Mr. Purnell.
Indeed, the few times a second team member does sit up front it's to help the driver navigate big-city traffic, mostly as a second set of eyes out for cyclists, rickshaws and tuk-tuks.
Driving down Broadway at times seemed no less harrowing. With a Napoleon Dynamite bobblehead doll glued to the dashboard, and the steering wheel on the right, Mr. Archer cut over several lanes to turn left onto Canal St., prompting a fleet of yellow taxis to honk their horns.
Later in Brooklyn, a squad car hit its siren and lights as he tried to pull a U-turn on Flatbush Avenue to get back to the Brooklyn Bridge.
"Where are you guys going?" an officer yelled from his car.
"Around the world," Mr. Archer replied.
"Well you keep on going," the officer yelled back.
Refueling, especially in remote areas, has been a challenge, says Mr. Archer. In Tibet, a trucker charged them $15 to siphon gas from his rig on a stretch of seemingly endless highway.
So far, Turkey has had the highest prices at the pumps, charging upward of $12 a gallon, he adds, while prices in the U.S. are the lowest.
"Americans don't know how good they have it," he says of gas prices here.
Of all the obstacles, Iran came closest to ending the trip.
The team passed over the Iranian border in mid-August, about a week after President Ahmadinejad blamed a dry August on the British. From Tehran, Mr. Archer and Mr. Purnell flew to Dubai to pick up a visa to enter Pakistan. On their return, they were denied re-entry and sent back to Dubai.
A few days earlier, they say, the Iranian secret police had searched the cab, accusing Mr. Archer of being a Jewish spy (the team accidentally camped in a field of antiaircraft guns in the open desert the previous night). He now believes they flagged his Irish passport.
"They got it in their heads that I was Israeli," he says. "They kept asking why? Why were we driving such a bad car in the desert?"
Instead, Mr. Ellison, who already had a visa to enter Pakistan and stayed behind in Tehran, was forced to head for the Pakistan-Iran border without the other two. But he wasn't alone. A heavily armed escort followed him to the border, leaving him in the Baluchistan desert—an area of drug-smugglers and bandits where Pakistan had tested nuclear weapons little over a decade ago.
"I've never been so happy to see a cab," Mr. Archer says of reuniting with Mr. Ellison on the Pakistan side of the border.
From New York, they plan to ship the cab by airfreight to Israel, rounding off the trip with a final overland drive back to the U.K.
That's if they can get back uptown. Along East 42nd Street, a yellow-cab driver pulls alongside the team to marvel at the cab. As it happens, his two passengers are from Manchester, U.K.
A whirl of sirens end their chat, and Mr. Archer drives past the yellow cab and into a spot in front of Grand Central Terminal. A firetruck knifing into the same spot blasts its horn, and Mr. Archer ferries back into traffic. "Uptown is north, right?" he asks.
By the end of their trip, Mr. Archer and his team will have traveled nearly 50,000 miles through 39 countries, four continents and a blur of time zones, crossing more than 40 international borders.
And once they reach the finish line? "I guess we'll have to get real jobs or something," says Mr. Archer.
When hailing a cab on the road, take a position where there is a obvious position for it to quit so that it isn't required to prevent visitors.
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