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Ride Tales Post your ride reports for a weekend ride or around the world. Please make the first words of the title WHERE the ride is. Please do NOT just post a link to your site. For a link, see Get a Link.
Photo by Lois Pryce, schoolkids in Algeria

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Photo of Lois Pryce, UK
and schoolkids in Algeria



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Old 30 Dec 2011
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Australia
Posts: 51
Europe and the Americas - Video reports as I throttle round the world...

At least 2 years, 4 continents, 1 bike, and a few broken hearts... I make about 1 video blog a week and have been since I embarked on this adventure 3 months ago.


So far I have held out through a typhoon in the Philippines, trained in Martial Arts in China and taken the Trans Mongolian railroad across Russia. Now I am in London where I have bought an F650GS Twin to ride Europe. Since I am on 2 wheels now it is time to start a ride report.



You can see the video blogs so far at www.thegreatgallivant.com - they are on average around 10 minutes in length.

On top of posting the video blogs I am going to put together the ride report here with a bit of written detail on the technical side of things so anyone wanting to do something similar can learn the gritty.

Getting a bike and getting it insured was a pain in the ass. Here is the run down on my experience.

I realized early on, as other have that if you are from outside Europe then it can be very difficult to buy a motorbike in the UK. Buying is the easy part, all you have to do is hand over your cash - insuring the bike is the hard part.

I found as many have and will, that pretty much no insurance companies in the UK will insure a non-UK resident or someone without a UK license. I am lucky and have a British passport through my mother who is British. That only made thing slightly easier. Other people who I spoke to had to get 2 year work visas just to exchange their Australian licenses for British licenses. You don't have a choice and have to exchange the Aussie license for a British one. The DVLA (Department of transport) in Britain is a bureaucratic nightmare. To do this you have to be resident, or at least be able to fake it.

Once I got the license I could get insurance but I needed to also have a copy of my Australian license or my travel insurance wouldn't be valid without one. This meant 'losing' my Aussie license and getting a new one and then miraculously finding the old one.

Once I got here, as expected, getting the bike was easy. Insurance quotes were out of whack. Normally in Australia 3rd party insurance is cheap, but here it isn't 3rd party was 550 GBP that is roughly 900 USD/AUD. Comprehensive was 700 GBP so I went with that given it was only slightly more. Other companies quotes from 1500 GBP to 3000 GBP... I went with eBike as a lot of others have.

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www.thegreatgallivant.com - video blog of my current year long trip around Europe on the F650GS Twin
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