They say that charity starts at home, and for David Toal and Illiana Ivanova, home for three weeks this summer will be a clapped-out old Skoda and the open road. The duo call themselves Windmill Giants, and they are a husband and wife team undertaking this outlandish misadventure for a good cause known as the Mongol Rally. This year marks the fourth annual event, which raises money for global charities through sponsorship of a 10 000-mile road trip from London, England to the Mongolian capital of Ulaan Bataar in an utterly unsuitable one-litre engine car. The couple is one of 200 teams that will leave London's Hyde Park on July 21, and pilot their humble vehicle over a scarcely-paved quarter of the earth's surface to raise at least 1000 pounds for Mercy Corps and The Christina Noble Children's Foundation.

"The greatest challenge in all of the Mongol Rally might have been convincing Illiana that this would be a fun way to spend the summer in the first place," says Toal, a 30-year-old hotel manager in New York City. Ivanova, an architect, will turn 30 during the three weeks the two have taken off from their jobs this summer to attempt the trip. The couple's planned route covers 19 countries, and includes a homecoming stop for the pair in Ivanova's native Bulgaria, where Toal spent a year researching the country's tourism industry on a Fulbright fellowship.

While the couple does expect to have fun, they are well aware that they are likely to face extreme situations along the road that wouldn't be anyone's idea of a good time. Their route will expose them to freezing temperatures in the mountains and steppes, and scorching 50°C summer days in the desert. Previous teams have been chased by armed bandits, and others arrested on suspicion of being spies. Roads along much of the way will be bad at best, and the official rules require that the car be grossly underpowered and completely inappropriate for such a gruelling journey.

"We're going to break down, probably often, but that's what is going to make for the best stories," Ivanova says with a smile. The Mongol Rally organizers do not provide any kind of support for teams once they've left London. Each team must fend for itself and rely entirely on wits and luck to reach Ulaan Bataar. No prize is awarded for arriving at the finish line first, though arriving with ridiculously large and useless objects such as ironing boards and stuffed gorillas is applauded.

As a US-based team, Windmill Giants was faced with the additional challenge of just getting a car to the starting line in London.

Rather than incur the high costs of shipping an essentially worthless car Trans-Atlantic from New York, or face the uncertainty of turning the key on a lemon bought through eBay in the UK, Illiana turned to family in Sofia for help. Her father Georgi was charged with the dilemma of finding an utterly unsuitable vehicle that he could yet somehow trust to carry his daughter safely to Mongolia. The search ended when his other daughter's boyfriend, "Gaspi", offered up his family's 1994 Skoda Felicia at a reasonable price.

The car, dubbed "Rustinante" as a play-on-words tribute to Don Quixote's noble nag, is more accustomed to dodging pot-holes in Sofia than braving the long stretches of unpaved road that it will face en route to Mongolia. While the team intends to hold true to the Mongol Rally requirement that the car be "generally considered crap", they do plan a few modifications. In anticipation of more than 1,000 miles of unpaved roads, they plan to raise the car's suspension, protect the underside with a sump guard, and fit the vehicle with four new all-terrain tires. Of course, they will settle for nothing less than the best damn shock absorbers that money can buy.

The Skoda's modest 1.3-litre engine is already considered a bit of a suped-up workhorse by Mongol Rally standards. Because the car breaks the 1-litre rule, which potentially reduces the fun of being stranded miles from anything remotely civilized, the charities will benefit from an additional ?100 fine for each 0.1litres of engine displacement.

The car will be given a thorough road test before the Mongol Rally officially sputters to a start, as Illiana's father will complete a miniature rally of his own, driving roughly 1500 miles (2400 kilometres) from Sofia to London to deliver the Windmill Giants their noble steed in Hyde Park. After the keys are turned over, the couple will essentially turn around and drive back to Sofia, stopping only for a big party with the other teams in Prague.

"As charming as Europe might be, we're just going to blow through it as quickly as our little engine will carry us. We'll slow down when the tarmac runs out and all the country names end in -stan", says Toal.

The pair will take some time in Bulgaria to again service the car for the long haul and stock up on supplies before setting out for more unfamiliar territory. Also, they are currently working to organize an event in Bulgaria to welcome other teams taking the same route and showcase some of the finer things that the country has to offer.

After leaving Bulgaria, Windmill Giants will blaze a trail through Northern Turkey, crossing into Georgia en route to Baku, Azerbaijan.

From Baku, they intend to catch a sporadically scheduled car ferry across the Caspian to Turkmenistan, should they manage to arrange the elusive visas for this country. In the event that they are shut out of Turkmenistan, the team has arranged dual entry visas for both Russia and Kazakhstan, which will allow them to circumvent the Caspian and still make their way to Uzbekistan. Here, they look forward to scrambling around the rusted hulls of ships that bear witness to the receding Aral Sea that has abandoned its port towns. They'll then traverse the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand before passing into mountainous and vowel-deficient Kyrgyzstan. Then they descend to the wide-open steppes of Central Asia, where they will "make benefit the glorious nation of Kazakhstan" before heading north for a brief jaunt into Russia. At long last they will cross into Mongolia, only to face over 1000 miles of unpaved road between them and the celebratory cup of fermented horse milk awaiting them in the capital Ulaan Bataar.

Before the team can even begin facing the challenges of the road, they must take on the monumental task of preparing for the trip.

David is working to attract sponsors and enlist support from the media to spread the word about their folly. Illiana built the team website and is navigating the complex bureaucracy of securing visas for the many former Soviet Republics along their route. While no team could ever truly be prepared for what awaits them along the way, they plan to brush up on basic Russian and learn a bit about auto repair prior to setting out into the unknown.

Foremost on the "to do" list is finding a way to pay for it all; after all, the corrupt officials they'll probably encounter along the way aren't going to just bribe themselves. Windmill Giants is campaigning to attract financial support to meet the Mongol Rally's charitable donation requirements and fund the considerable expense of the trip. The couple must buy and service the car, purchase pricey visas, and secure transportation to London and back to New York from wherever they might ultimately break down. They are actively seeking both private donations and corporate sponsorship through their website, and hope to soon have a good excuse to cover the Skoda with the logos of generous donors.

The seeds for the Mongol Rally were first planted in 2001, when Tom Morgan of Great Britain and a friend sought to dispose of a faltering Fiat 126 by driving it to the most ridiculous place they could think of. The sheer distance from the UK and the notoriously poor quality of roads along the way made Mongolia seem a sensible choice for their plans. While visa trouble prevented them from reaching their destination, they were inspired to try again, and so the idea for the Mongol Rally was born.

Last year's rally saw 167 teams set out, of which 117 avoided stranding themselves hundreds of miles from civilization or landing themselves in crumbling Soviet-era prisons. Teams took a wide range of routes to reach "the land of the blue sky", exploring areas north of Arctic Circle and venturing as far south as Afghanistan. Overall, last year's participants succeeded in raising over ?200,000 for charities such as Send a Cow and Mercy Corps. For more information on this year's folly, visit www.mongolrally.com. To support Windmill Giants in their madcap approach to making the world a better place visit www.windmillgiants.com.