AKIPRESS.COM - A group of friends hope to help patients thousands of kilometers away by driving an ambulance to Mongolia. Twin brothers Matthew and William Wild, Oliver Hayes and Megan Hampton, who are all 23 years old, will make the epic 16,093-km journey from Ilkley later this year, Yorkshire Evening Post reports.

The team, who go under the name "One Steppe Beyond", will be flying the flag for Yorkshire in the 2016 Mongolia Charity Rally – a pan-continental road trip for charity across mountain ranges, deserts and more barren and inhospitable lands.

For One Steppe Beyond the rally involves buying a vehicle which can be used as an ambulance in the UK and then, on July 8, driving it from Yorkshire to deliver it to a hospital in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia – in a bid to alleviate a shortfall of emergency vehicles.

Matthew Wild, a graduate civil engineer in Sheffield, said: “In rural areas of Mongolia access to primary healthcare is severely limited by both the scale of the country and poor existing road infrastructure. Providing an off-road ambulance to Mongolia will enable local hospitals to engage communities further afield whilst helping to meet the current shortfall of ambulances.”

The rally is part of charity Go Help’s Ambulance Project. The team is raising money for the ambulance, medical equipment and a donation to Go Help.