Buying Motorbikes in Mongolia and back to Europe !
 

Hello fellow travellers,

I am planning to travel to Mongolia with a friend of mine at the end of May, borders will hopefully open on May 1st.

Our plan would be to buy a motorbike in Oulanbaator and to ride the bike back to Europe via the Silk Road (Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tadjikstan via Pamir, Turkmenistan or ferry to Baku, Iran, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and back to France !)

Our original plan was to buy a Royal Enfield in New Delhi, we had a contact to have it registered, and come back to France through Pakistan, China and the Silk Road but the sanitary situation in India is getting worst so we decided to have a try in Mongolia which seems "less affected" by Covid.

Do you think we can buy reliable bikes in Ulanbaator to make such a trip? We are not looking for 500$ Chinese Bikes but preferably Royal Enfield or any other Trail bikes !

Thank you for your help and hope to hear from you guys soon =)
Adrien & Tim

Are you on advrider? IIRC there's a uk expat (ukAdventurer?) who lived in Ulanbataar maybe he can answer your question. From what I understand the common bikes overthere are chinese no-name with questionable parts and assembly quality.

I dunno; Claudio von Planta might disagree with you there.

I'm not saying all made in china bikes are bad but no-name is a suspect. The way their industry operates that you can walk into factory and buy a crate of their prime model at half price. It will be assembled out of 3rd tier subpar parts and they won't put their name on it either.

As for Claudio.. wasn't he on russian bike? or was it chinese?

Are you EU citizens? As soon as you reach the EU border, you will have to go through the customs import procedure, paying VAT + customs on those bikes. Furthermore, they probably don't have an EU type approval certificate, which means that (depending on the country) they either cannot be registered at all, or you will need to go through a one-off type approval certification.

And any bike that you buy locally in Mongolia will already be more expensive by the cost of shipping it to Mongolia and then paying Mongolian customs fees on it.

TLDR: I would not bother. If you want to fly to Mongolia and ride back - find something that's on EU plates already there, the bike of a traveler from your country who drove to UB and wants to fly back.

Thanks for your answer guys, it is going to be a bit tough indeed to buy bikes out there. We've actually just bought brand new Royal Enfield in France and are planning to go East in few weeks now !

Then you also need a lot of paperwork ( legal notice from lawyers ) that you can cross borders with a bike, which is not registered in your name

Another possibility:
Buy a cheap bike, and in Europe store it at the customs yard or destroy it under customs clearance.