My girlfriend Jamie and I are taking the scenic route back to California after finishing a loop of Africa (see Round Africa with a Surfboard), where I spent most of the time running around looking for waves to ride.



We’ll follow part of the ancient Silk Road, riding from Eastern Europe to the Caucuses, cross the Caspian Sea to tour the Stans without a plan, rip across the grasslands of Mongolia, all the way to far side of Russia, and hopefully find a way down into China.


This is me.




This is Jamie.



Our trusty steed, Dyna Rae, has been beat pretty hard with the Africa stick, but she's still kicking.



Finding waves to ride in off-beat places has made for some of the most memorable experiences on the road. There are surfers in the Arctic Circle of Norway, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, even far eastern Russia and the South China Sea. Hardly a surf trip, but more of an excuse to look around between the two coastlines of the largest landmass on the planet. It’s a long way to go for a wave, but at least it’s on the way home.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

ready for blast off folks? here we go...

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

The next moto hobo initiative is a trek to the other coastline of Eurasia, but before heading east, I aimed north. While cooking in the hot hot heat of Africa, images of tubing waves in front of snowcapped mountains at the mouths of gaping fjords had captured my imagination. Jamie was headed back to California for a few weeks and I was headed towards the Arctic Circle. No one told me that this was the coldest and wettest May that Norway has seen in the last 20 years. Suppose I could have looked that up. Instead, I just started riding.





I didn’t make it very far out of Belgium on the first day. I tagged along with our Belgian friends to a gathering of behemoth-truck-loving overlanders. The guy who owned the place builds these incredible earth-crossing machines from scratch, with comfy living quarters built upon beastly, Congo capable 4x4 bodies. They are impressive to say the least, but not really my cup of tea. I like a vehicle that fits in a dugout canoe.








The guy also happened to have the coolest Harley Davidson motorcycle collection I’ve ever seen.














With travel costs growing as I headed north, I was relegated to wild camping wherever I could find a spot in the woods. In the north of Germany I found a great spot and got ready to cook up some rice when I realized I didn’t have any water. I’ve gone into the woods for the night, with no water. Without Jamie along it seems I can no longer be trusted to basic tasks to ensure survival.





A good friend from graduate school called Lauren had moved to Copenhagen 5 years ago and we’d since lost touch. I tracked her down and let her know I was headed her way. I severely underestimated the time it would take to get there. To save 50 Euros, I rode the long way around rather than taking the more direct ferry. This seemed like a good plan before it started raining. After 3 hours on the highway in the rain it seemed like a less good plan. Before long it became clear that the rain was not the type of passing storm that we had become used to in Africa and Turkey. This storm system was planted over top of Denmark and making itself comfortable.





My boots are now about as waterproof as a spaghetti strainer and eventually, the rain soaks through everything else as well. My trapezius muscles kept winding themselves up painfully tight as my body retreated into itself trying to recoil from the biting cold that never abated for a second. When going slowly through a roundabout I noticed a new vibration in the front end of the bike transmitting to the bars. Then I realized that the it was not the bike vibrating the bars, it was me. I’d been shivering for hours now on the motorway, but when I slowed down I became aware just how hard my body was working to stay warm. I had nothing to do but keep riding.
The pinnacle of the trial came near to Copenhagen in the form of the longest bridge I’d ever seen. It surely must be one of the longest in the world. It was a steely, cold apparition that emerged from the gray void I was hurtling through. The bridge shot up from the white capped ocean surface below. To me it seemed that the bridge and the storm and the ocean below were all part of the same cold spikey creature. I did not want to cross that thing. I’d been riding for 7 hours in the driving rain and Lauren’s warm apartment with a warm dinner was across that bridge.





I managed to not get blown from the bridge and arrived to the center of Copenhagen to enjoy the best hot shower in memory and a great dinner courtesy of Lauren and her boyfriend Jacob. We drank wine and talked old times, when we were new graduate students. We were so excited about what we were working on back then. We used to drive to San Diego State together every day and Lauren would constantly refer to me as ‘Carpool Gary’ just to be sure no one got the wrong idea that we were dating and I would mess up her action. It was funny. The next morning Lauren showed me around the super bicycle friendly and bakery blessed city of Copenhagen.





When the rain took a break I left the cozy Copenhagen apartment and rode for Gothenburg in Sweden. I’d had some nagging issues with the bike that seemed to just be getting worse – a clanky noise at idle, and a kind of stuttery power delivery. I’d replaced everything in the drive train except for the chain. I met a couple of great guys at Johan’s MC in Gothenburg who had a listen and took a ride and gave me their opinion. They reckoned it was a clutch basket issue, as you could make the noise go away while idling by pulling in the clutch. Now comes the fun part.


Sweden is expensive. Not exactly a top moto hobo destination. I can’t actually pay for the gurus here to do anything, and the boss of the garage didn’t want me exploding my scene in front of the shop.





So now here’s the bike, fully loaded, laid over on its side in a parking lot, trying to keep as much oil in it as possible with the clutch cover off. Oh, and the best part was that it was going to rain any second. I needed to inspect the clutch basket for wear and check to see if the bit nut that holds it on was torqued properly. The only problem was that I don’t have a torque wrench. The last time I reinstalled the clutch without a torque wrench, I no longer had a functioning clutch. The guys at Johan's MC have a torque wrench. But it's about to rain and I’m a full scene in this parking lot across the street trying to soak up excess oil with the last of Jamie’s passport photocopies (sorry Jamie, Dyna says thanks). I put my jacket over Dyna’s exposed entrails to block the rain and ran back across the street to beg these guys for a torque wrench. They smuggled me out the wrench and some big sockets, no problem. Phil and company, you guys are legends.





Back across the street, and I now realized that I need to try to keep the rear wheel from turning to properly tighten the clutch basket nut (not so easy with the bike on its side and the rear wheel rolling free). I end up doing this contortionist routine, jamming the toe of my boot between the tire and the swingarm, while leaning over to yank on the torque wrench, all the while waiting for the first rain drops to fall. I tightened the clutch basket nut another 5 N-m within the specified range and managed to get her buttoned up and back together in the next hour before too much rain hit the ground. I managed to save the current gasket and reuse it (very good, since I’ve only got 1 spare). When I took off for a test ride I had the same stuttery power delivery as before and the same clattery noise from the gear box. God dammit. I was too tired to care too much. At least I didn’t break anything new, loose anything, or fill the gearbox with rain. I’m gonna call it a win.
I never seemed to learn the lesson very well that my Dad tried to teach me a long time ago in basic mechanics - exhaust the simple solutions first before you jump to ideas about bigger, more costly things that may be wrong. I’d mistakenly conflated the noise at idle with the stutter in the drive, but they were separate problems. My chain had run 22,000 miles from South Africa and it must have developed a stiff link. When I replaced it, the stutter in the drive disappeared. There’s still bit of rattle in the clutch basket but at her age, I suppose she’s allowed a few moans and groans.





I rode north and camped in the park in Oslo and no one seemed to mind. From there I was headed for the fjordlands in the far west of Norway. The great thing about Scandinavia is that you can camp just about anywhere without hassle. In fact I only paid for two nights of campsite accommodation during two weeks in Scandinavia. The carte blanche camping would actually be far more attractive if it weren’t raining and freezing and I wasn’t on a motorcycle. Arriving at camp cold and wet and unpacking a wet tent to crawl into for the night just wears me down after some time. I had two equipment boons to help me through it though: I now had both Jamie’s and my sleeping bags, and I’d bought a $23 tent at the discount camping store in Belgium (Jamie brought ours back to REI in California for exchange). I never dreamed that this wonky-designed tent would be completely waterproof, but it never let in a drop.





My route choices were less good than my equipment choices. I took a road that climbed over a high mountain pass where the rain soon turned to snow and the lakes were frozen solid. I continued riding, the snow got heavier and my visor began to fog badly, a crust covered my windshield, and I was flying blind through the white haze. The route went through rough-hewn tunnels with very little or no lights and I felt just about snow blind every time I entered one. For the first time in a long time, I felt as though I’d gotten myself in over my head. When some cabins appeared, abandoned for the season, I started thinking about breaking into one of them to wait this mess out. The only options available seemed like bad options.





I’ve never been so happy to see rain on my visor than I was after a few hundred meters of decent from that pass. I found a campsite, unrolled my soggy tent, lay down and tried to unwind myself inside. Spring is feeling decidedly un-sprung at this latitude.






Once near the west coast, I began to trace outlines of fjords for hours on end and enjoyed the gift of a sunny morning. For the most part it was an awesome day of riding, filled with stunning ice-carved vistas. After the previous day of riding, a few hours of sun on my back felt absolutely fantastic. It was some of the most dramatic landscape I’ve ever ridden through. With very little traffic, you can really ride the roads that meander the fjord margins.






The Norwegian road system in the fjord lands is an engineering marvel. This is some of the most rugged terrain you could imagine traversing with a road and they’ve opted to blast through the peaks and ridges more often than not. I must have ridden through hundreds of miles of tunnels. One of them was 16 miles long! It was actually very nice with all the rain I got to spend a substantial amount of time riding indoors.





Though the roads are fantastic, riding out to the Stad peninsula still feels like heading off the edge of the map. I’d seen some awesome looking photos of the waves in this labyrinthine region in the far west of Norway. A couple of days delay in Sweden due to the bike trouble along with the dropping temperatures and constant rain had convinced me to stop short of the Arctic. As usual, travel took longer than expected and I was exhausted when I got to the top of the ridge, but stoked on what I saw below. There were waves. And surfers.





It was a long weekend and there were a bunch of Norwegian surfers up from Oslo and other places camping out at the surf spot. It was a comforting sight. I rode down and immediately got to talking with a few of the guys. I quickly had a in hand and was offered a board and suit to use from the hospitable local crew as we watched the surf in the dim twilight that seemed to last forever.








The rain started that night and pretty much didn’t stop for 2 days. I spent most of the time in the two square meter space of my tent waiting for a break to jump out and cook some food or have a look at the surf. I’m not sure I’ve ever appreciated the importance of shelter than I did during those two days. And this was nearly June! The Viking peoples that historically inhabited this region must have been some tough characters. I’d say surfers that brave these elements for a wave are a pretty hearty breed as well.






The landscape is stark, the water is frigid and the storms never seem to abate, but there are some really good waves that the local surfers have been riding for decades now. Only recently has the larger surfing world begun to pay attention to Norway and the hidden gems at the end of these fjords. The biggest and most consistent swells arrive in winter, but there isn’t much daylight to surf by. Further north from here above the Arctic Circle, the days pass in nearly total darkness in the winter, but that’s where some of the best waves are.





After a few days surfing in Hoddevik, I continued north through the fjordlands toward Trondheim, hopstotching islands along the ‘Atlantic Road'.





Now, the amount of daylight was just becoming silly. The sun would set around 2 AM, and kind of hover in a sunset/sunrise mode for a few hours, then appear once again above the horizon.






As I turned east, I knew that I’d be moving into higher country, and the memory of my last mountain pass made me apprehensive. Sure enough, I started to climb. It was evening already, but I figured that I would reach the top of a pass and descend again, but once reaching the snow line, the road just kept undulating along right above it. At around 11 PM, the light that crept in through the trees began to attenuate. Looking off to the side of the road at the snow banks I just couldn’t bring myself to find a spot to set up my tent in that snow after riding all day in the cold, so I just kept riding. I was cold and tired, but the decent to lower elevation I was hoping for just wasn’t coming.






Again I wondered if I were getting myself in too deep. A huge figure loomed in the middle of the road in the dusky light. It was a moose. I’d never seen one before in the wild. I stopped the bike about 15 meters away and it stood there looking stately in a shaggy brown coat surrounded by a calm that mirrored the silence of the landscape. The anxiety that had started to build in me a moment before floated out of my mind and was lost in the forest. The moose had a look at me, then slowly lumbered off the road. From the snow bank, he looked back in my direction and in my imagination, with a slow drawl he mouthed the words ‘You’re gonna make it’ and trotted off into the brown tangle of trees. I must have looked silly sitting on the bike in the middle of the road grinning, but with the endorsement of my moose I was sure the decent to lower terrain wasn’t far ahead.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Brrrrrr I got cold just reading that Gary! You are really adventuring to some far-flung destinations... hope you find some warmer weather soon.

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Wow the adventure continues, good luck on the next stage. I can't wait to see what waves you find

I love Finland. I don’t really have a good reason for loving Finland other than when I woke up in the morning the sun was shining. After weeks of rain in Scandinavia, a cloudless sky was a welcome reprieve. I broke my camp, loaded up the bike, and started burning south, headed for warmer climes.


I finally reached Helsinki where I caught the ferry to Tallinn in Estonia. The ferry was completely full with folks returning from the weekend, but I managed to convince the girl at the counter that a svelte motorbike such as my own was barely more than hand luggage and she found me a corner to wedge the bike into. Somewhere across Finland, my girl turned 60. A bit long in the tooth, but the old girl still has plenty of kick left in her.





The old town of Tallinn in Estonia is renowned for its beauty and I found plenty of tourists hopping about the place taking pictures. Personally, I had seen enough cobbled streets, churches, castles, and forts to last me a lifetime. I spent my time in this beautiful tourist destination holed up in the McDonalds. Sad, I know, but they had a good wifi connection and I was trying to coordinate a reunion. At least the McDonalds was housed in a beautifully well-preserved centuries old building. I honestly just didn’t care what I was missing outside, beyond the golden arches. I was tired of being a tourist and was now just riding to get somewhere. I blew through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania with hardly a glance at a castle or fort. Jamie would be waiting for me in Romania and I couldn’t really get there soon enough. I rode, ate, slept in the woods, got up and did it all again.





Sirens called from the roadside, but I stayed the course.





In Poland I met a young guy who spoke English (in a McDonalds) and asked what I shouldn’t miss in Poland. His looked sort of perplexed for a moment and then responded that there wasn’t much to see. Rather than take his opinion as youthful ignorance, I treated it as expert advice and burned straight through Poland as well.





I finally slowed the pace to have a look around Budapest, which was well worth the trouble. It’s a gorgeous city rich in history. After so much riding it felt great to park the bike for a day and have a wander along the banks of the Danube.








In Budapest I met a guy called Mihai from Romania riding around in a Ural with his wife and daughter stuffed into the sidecar. A long trip on a Ural is a radical move. Riding around in a Ural with a family in tow takes the prize for bravest moto adventurer I’ve yet to meet. Mihai has done lots of big rides on his own and is rather well known in Romania for his exploits along with writing and photography. I love meeting folks like Mihai who make the effort to keep adventure in their lives even when things like having a family changes the game dramatically. Rock on brother!








After a day in the city, I was refreshed and ready to get back on the road and into the woods.






I was riding to Jamie in a town called Cluj Napoca, in the Transylvania region of Romania. The character of Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s story is reportedly based on a 15th century ruler in this region, Vlad the III, Prince of Wallachia. He was posthumously dubbed ‘Vlad the Impaler’ for his reputation for cruelty and impaling his enemies on spikes. I arrived in Cluj about dark and as I descended the hills into saw the most blood red moon that I’ve ever laid eyes upon rising above the town. Then a bat buzzed me. It was already feeling distinctly Transylvanian.





Jamie arrived with a new haircut, a new dress and was accessorized with a lovely new DR650 clutch. I think it went very well with the dress. As she’s done several times before, she’d severed her braids for donation to the Locks of Love organization. The new hairdo is helmet friendly.







After a night cracking ourselves up walking around talking like cartoon Count Draculas, it was time to motor on to Bucharest, where our friend Mike from California was waiting for us. That’s right, he’s back. Once again off for the summer, Mike somehow managed to find a 1989 Tenere for sale in Bulgaria for $650 and thought it would be a good idea to try to ride it to Mongolia. So now that’s happening.





Mike's old Tenere was probably in better shape than mine. My fork seals had blown out again, the fork bushings were done, the head stock bearings were shot, the carb needle nearly worn through, I was leaking oil from gaskets and o-rings, the brake pads were toast, and most disturbingly my engine noise that I previously dismissed as a rattling clutch basket had worsened, so I’d have to get into the engine case again. Mihai had hooked us up with a suspension guru in Bucharest called Cesar who runs the Grant Racing Garage. Cesar ordered parts for both myself and Mike and was going to help us out with the bikes. I had the idea that Mike and I would be busting knuckles all day in the shop, but Cesar and the guys spent the entire day on the bikes. Mike just needed new sprockets, chain, tire, and brake pads. But my fork seals and head stock bearings were substantial jobs. After all of this work, Cesar didn’t even charge us a thing for all the time that he and his guys spent on the bikes. How’s that for Romanian hospitality!





We left Cesar’s shop with both of the bikes feeling much healthier and the next day it was time for me to get my hands greasy doing the rest of the work. I’d met a Romanian motorcycling couple called Jon and Anna via ADVrider who’d invited us to stop in Bucharest on our way east. Jon and I had been messaging back and forth for months, but it wasn’t until I was standing in their living room looking at photos on the wall that I realized I already knew who they were. Years ago I’d seen photos of their adventures across Africa, which actually helped inspire me to get moving myself. They’ve got a fantastic blog with some epic photography called IntotheWorld. Some of you have probably already seen their story. Funny enough, just as I write this I realized that they were featured on the cover of the issue of Overland Magazine in which I published a story just a few months ago. Recognize these guys?





They have a cozy shop where Jon’s KTM 690 and Anna’s Suzuki DRZ400 live and Dyna Rae was invited to spend some time. Jon is great mechanic and has about any tool I could need, so it was the ideal place to work on the bike. In fact, it was probably the best place I’ve had to work on the bike the entire trip.









While in Bucharest Jon and Anna actually left us in their apartment on our own while they stayed with friends. They really know how it is to being on the road for an extended time and it was quite a luxury for Jamie and I to have our own space for awhile. The Romanian hospitality never ends. Thanks loads guys!





After getting the easy stuff finished, I tore into the bike to try to figure out what was wrong inside the engine. In addition to the entire clutch assembly, Jamie has also brought with her a new clutch cover gasket, so that we could get her sealed up tight again. What I found wasn’t actually a problem with the clutch at all, but with the primary drive gear, which sits right next to it. The nut that holds it on was spinning free and the gear was sliding back and forth on the spindle. Jon has a nice big torque wrench, that we used to tighten the gear back on.





In the process, that gear had been contacting the aluminum clutch basket and taking out some nice gauges. The result was a nice slurry of aluminum paste in the gearbox. The clutch plates and thrust washers were still fine, but I replaced the whole clutch with the newer one just for good measure. My re-usable stainless steel oil filter was filled with the aluminum and seemed impossible to get properly clean, so I chucked that out and bought some paper filters. After running the bike a hundred miles I did an oil change to flush out the remaining aluminum. Our girl now sounds better than ever.





We have a new addition to the expedition this time around. A year ago in Africa, we’d met a girl named Rebecca who was running around the entire length of Lake Malawi. Twenty-six miles a day! Remember this chick?





As it turns out, she was still rambling around the world and we invited her to come along for the adventure to Mongolia. We stopped at the bike shop on the way out of Bucharest to get Rebecca some riding gear, she and Mike bungeed everything to the bike, and were ready to roll. The Tenere all packed up with their gear was truly a sight to behold. Have you ever seen a more adventure ready machine?





So here we are, four moto hobos ready to ride across Asia on two clapped-out bikes. I can’t believe we’re doing this again.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

As usual, we were slow to get moving the day we rode out of Bucharest.
Team Tenere packed and repacked the bike a few times, Rebecca still needed to find some riding gear, and I wanted to buy a can of can of chain lube. The breeze on our faces was a relief when we finally rode clear of the baking Bucharest traffic and into the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. With a late start, we ended up hurriedly hunting for a camp spot after darkness had already fallen. We got lucky and happened to ride up a dirt track leading to a perfect groove and grassy hills to make our camp.





I did another oil change to clear out the last of the mangled clutch basket aluminum from my gearbox. As it happened, the less than pristine wilderness provided a perfect makeshift oil pan.





It took all of one day for things to start breaking. The rear rack of the Tenere was piled high with gear and slightly less resilient than we hoped. We stopped for gas and the attendant, who was astonished when we said that we were riding these bikes to Mongolia, directed us to a dude down the road with a shop. The owner proudly led us to view his collection of restored WW2 and Soviet era MZ bikes. The guys in the shop patched up the Tenere and we were quickly on our way. They wouldn’t even take any payment for the help. It was just another fantastic gesture of Romanian hospitality from the wonderful people here that we’d become accustomed to.








We rode alongside the peaks and streams of the gorgeous Carpathian Mountains. It felt as thought the journey had finally begun in earnest and we were stoked.





The only danger we found through the mountains were packs of wild puppies that took a particular liking to Mike.





We rode into Moldova and spent the next night in a farmer’s fallow field and were a bit worried that he’d have something to say about it when we heard him bouncing along the track just before dark. He didn’t seem to be bothered about us in the slightest and simply went about his business and threw us a wave from the window of the truck.








It was a quick crossing of Moldova and into the Ukraine where we found a lovely lakeside grove of pines to turn up the music, crack some s, cook up a storm, and bed down beneath for the night. We got absolutely eaten by mosquitoes.





Our original plan was to ride all the way east through the Ukraine, which as it turns out is a rather bad idea since the eastern Ukraine is currently engaged in a war with pro-Russian rebels. The usual inadequate research and planning on our part meant that we learned pretty late in the game that we would probably be detained somewhere in the eastern Ukraine before the border. This meant that we would have to make a massive detour north from Kiev and into Russia. The new route meant that an opportunity to look for some surf on the Black Sea near the Russian town of Sochi was no longer be an option (boooo!).





We crossed into Russia without too much trouble, rode through the hot days and slept through hot nights. Pretty much all we did was ride for days. All that was in straight in front of us was a flat, boring road that was slowly baking us through. It seemed that every night we talked about what lay ahead in Georgia. The thought of the snowy peaks and cool mountain streams drove us forward, as many miles as we could manage in a day.





We felt a bit bad in our encounters with friendly Russians when they asked us how we liked Russia and we had very little to say since mostly all we’d seen was a strip of tarmac beneath a white painted line. We occasionally fielded questions like “Why do Americans think bad of Russia?” and did our diplomatic best to foster good relations. We were occasionally reminded that were in a very different place, like when Mike came into the restaurant and announced, “There’s a 6-year old outside smoking a cigarette”. Generally, encounters with the locals kept our spirits high. In central Russia the locals warned us about travel in the Caucuses, saying that we shouldn’t get off the highway any more than necessary. As it happened, all people in the Russian Caucuses did was buy us coffee and take photos with our bikes and us.





The storm finally passed, the sky lightened ahead, and we could now see the Caucusus Mountains in our path. In true moto hobo fashion we spent the night in a crater in the middle of the forest that could only be described as a dirt quarry.





We’d built up Georgia so much in our imaginations that we were ripe for disappointment. But Georgia delivered. On crossing the border, we immediately rode into a gorgeous mountain landscape. Stopping at a town called Kazbegi, where we met some other bikers, a British girl and a Polish guy, who had been living in the Georgian capital of Tibilisi. They showed us an awesome campsite along a dirt track up a picturesque valley.











The rain came and went, but the cloudbursts were short and sweet. The hills were lush and the creek had kind of a grey cast to it that reflected the composition of the underlying bedrock. The next morning, we bid farewell to our camp mates as they bounced off on their 20 year old BMW, and we followed not far behind.





The next day we made our way up to a monastery perched high above Kazbegi. The walk ended up a bit tougher than we’d thought and didn’t bring enough water to drink on the way. The trail was steep and rocky, difficult to get too many steps up without sliding a few backward. We finally reached the top and were treated to a stupendous view of the surrounding mountains.





There are hardly any tourists in Georgia and relics like centuries old forts are totally abandoned. We just rode the bikes right into the middle of them to find some shade behind their walls. We descended the Caucuses for the wine country to the town of Sighnaghi, staying at little place perched at the edge of a ridgeline with a precipitous drop to the valley floor below. The road snaked down from our perch to the valley where the temperature began to climb.









By the time we crossed into Azerbaijan, headed for the Caspian Sea, the temperature was nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. Both the bikes and their cordura-clad riders were reaching their limits of comfort and once again were dreaming of Georgia’s cool mountain air in our faces rather than the blow dryer provided by the lowlands of Azerbaijan. We made quick time to the capital city of Baku, given that they would only issue us a 72-hour permit for the bikes before they had to be out of the country. Our plan was to catch a boat from Baku across the Caspian Sea to Aktau, Kazakhstan. It just happened that the European Games were happening in Baku at the time. It was quite a big deal with top European athletes from every Olympic sport running about Baku, elaborate decorations through the city, heavy security detail, and a grand spectacle of the closing ceremony.





Our 72-hour limit for the bikes complicated things slightly, since the boat has no set schedule and we have no idea which day it may be sailing. The day that our permit ran out in Baku, I woke up with some stomach sickness that had me curled up into a little ball and a 15 hour-long boat ride was not the most inviting thought. Now our only alternative to avoid a fine was to deliver the bikes to the customs office somewhere in Baku. Unfortunately no one seemed to have any idea where this was. I visited one building after another, trying to get the concept of ‘customs office’ across using hand gestures to little avail. The concept of customs would seem to be a universal thing at any border or port in the world but I may as well have been asking where to buy a giant watermelon. One office seemed to know what I was talking about, brought me in and sat me down, took my import permit and documents and carefully filled out some form and handed me a little slip of paper. After a few hand gesture questions, it was apparent that this office had nothing to do with customs.





With my stomach still doing backflips I hadn’t eaten all day, and in the extreme heat I was barely keeping it together riding from one frustrating encounter to another. I was just about to give up when I tried a final office at the ‘new port’ about 7 km away. A bald man with a small grey mustache and a formidable belly led me into an office with a couch turned into a bed and a television playing a movie with sword fighting and damsels in distress. The big boss likes to make himself comfy. He took my import permit form and tapped away on his computer for 20 minutes while I stared at the swashbuckling heroes flying about the screen in that rainbow double vision you get with poor reception. The longer he spent, the more hopeful that I’d come to the right place, but I’d been fooled before. After the computer tapping was finished, he photocopied my documents and seemed to indicate that we were finished… with something… But I had no idea what. We went outside and I did my best to get us on the same page with hand gestures that I was going to leave my motorbike there and walk away. When Mike went to the same spot to drop his bike off the next day I was relieved to hear that mine was still there.





Now we all wait at the ready in Baku for our boat. Each day we call at noon to find out if a boat will be leaving at 3 PM from the port in Alat, two hours away. But we can only buy tickets and retrieve our bikes at customs here in Baku, so the only way to do this is a last minute race for the boat. Every day we pack everything up to be ready for the mad dash to grab our bikes at customs at the new port, get back to the old port to buy tickets, then ride to Alat to catch the boat. After all of that running around to catch the boat, it will take 15 hours to go like 200 miles. Today we called at noon and were told that the boat actually left early this morning. This has got to be the most retarded ferry system in the world. It’s just about July now and time is ticking away for us to meet our visa schedule and get to Mongolia before Mike has to fly back to the US. We’re going to need a boat to show up pretty soon.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Thanks for the updates ... yes ... your fans are out there reading away!
Surprised it's SO HOT out there???

Stay cool! Ride safe!

PS: How is the DR doing? any bad sounds? Hope the oil changes did the trick!

thanks Dog! Bike is good as new. Sort of :-) We've been lost in the desert for a couple weeks now - but update on the way...

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

We really had very little idea about where we were headed after leaving the Caucuses. The extent of our information was something like this: Kazakhstan is enormous, it’s really hot in Uzbekistan, there is an awesome road called the Pamir Highway. First though, we had to get ourselves across the Caspian Sea.



Days gone by
Day after day we were told the same thing by the company that handles scheduling for the shipping company that crosses the Caspian Sea, “No boat today, but definitely tomorrow”. Each tomorrow came and went with another reason why we weren’t on it. One day it left early in the morning when were told that it would leave in the evening. Another day the boat was only taking rail cars filled with oil and there was no room for motorbikes. The day after that it was too windy to sail. One day when we were told that the boat would sail, we took a taxi all the way to where the bikes had been quarantined in customs, only to learn that the plan had changed and we couldn’t retrieve the bikes at all. Each time that Mike and I headed off to customs or to the ticket office, the girls would pack everything up and be waiting at the ready for the dash 70 km south to Alat.


After a week in Baku, the stars finally aligned and we got our tickets for the boat. The only problem now was that the customs guy noticed that the official at the Georgian border where we crossed into Azerbaijan had mistakenly written an ‘L’ in my license number instead of a 1. It seemed like a simple problem to solve, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Apparently, this was a massive clerical error on the grandest scale of bureaucratic oopsies. The suggestion by the official was that I should ride back across Azerbaijan and Georgia to the same border post. In their assessment, the only way this could be solved was by me riding 5 days the wrong direction to sit down in front of the same guy who made the mistake. This was just idiotic. After much discussion (mostly with our hands) and hours worth of driving around from one office to another, we finally sorted it and out with no time to spare in getting to the boat, we rode for Alat.


Adrift
After all the madness to get my errant “L” sorted out and rushing to the boat, we were excited to finally be on our way. We weren’t quite breaking any speed records - toting a hull full of railway cars, our ship moved at the breakneck pace of about 13 miles an hour. But no matter, were finally on the way! Then, lying in our bunks, we felt the deep rumble of the diesel engines cease. We had stopped moving. I got up and looked out off the port side to see the lights of Baku. Eventually the info came down the chain of command that there was a fierce wind brewing and we would be sheltering in the lee of point Baku until it passed. Seven hours of travel and boat logistics had gotten us exactly 10 miles offshore of where we’d just spent a week waiting. Just to be clear, this wasn’t a storm, it was a bit of wind. This must be a seriously tippy boat to warrant such caution. It was a day and a half before we heard those engines rumble to life again, when we all gathered out on the deck watching and we finally slipped by the tip of point Baku.





We’d met some other travelers on the boat. Two English guys on Yamaha Tenere’s, another on a Suzuki DRZ, a German on a DR650, and another Englishman on a bicycle. We swapped all swapped travel stories and shared our plans for routes and ultimate destinations. Everyone else on the boat seemed much better prepared than us. Our bikes and gear were a pretty sorry sight compared to theirs.


Asphalt dreams
By the time we finally arrived in Aktau at 1 AM, we’d been on the boat for 3 days and 3 nights. We began the process to enter Kazakhstan, which turned out to be one of the most difficult customs odysseys of the entire trip. We were sent riding around from one building to another seeking a coveted collection of stamps on our documents that could secure our release from the port. When we thought we’d gotten it all done at about 4 AM, we learned that the clerk that needed to receive a $10 fee wouldn’t be in until 8:30 AM. Everyone was exhausted by that point, except Rebecca who seemed to have an endless supply of Snickers and peanut butter fueled energy. When there was nothing left to do, we all collapsed straight onto the parking lot as the day began to break.







I don’t think that I ever would have thought to use motorcycle boots as part of my bedding before this night. We all slipped into a few minutes or hours of semi-unconsciousness, until we could feel the sun begin to beat down on us in earnest. After we were allowed to pay our fee, we were directed to the same buildings that we’d already visited to acquire another round of stamps. A collection of about 15 or so of the colorful stamps finally seemed to satisfy the guard at the gate so that by 11 AM, we were finally escaped the port. The whole crew, 6 bikes strong was quite the spectacle riding through the streets of Aktau. Ollie, one of the British Tenere riders kept doing wheelies. We motored to a café and then to a cheap guesthouse to collapse for the day.




Broken in Beyneu



We slept most of the afternoon and through the night and then got moving by 5 AM the next morning, trying to beat the heat. We rode a rocky, bumpy road, headed for the town of Beyneu, where we would turn southeast to head towards Uzbekistan. The Tenere luggage setup had worked on the tarmac, but now items were periodically making their escape from the bungee-cord nest as the bike bounced along the bone-shaking road. Rebecca's book collection disappeared into the dust her running shoes tried to go on a run without her.





After an hour or so, Team Tenere disappeared from our rear view mirror. We stopped to wait for a spell before turning back to find them fussing with the luggage setup again. The rack had given out again and the rear box of the Tenere, ever-blooming with dry bags, backpacks, and shoes was hanging off the back. We had no idea what was ahead, so our only choice was to turn back and stop at the first settlement to look for a welder. We were in luck and found a guy straight away. The rack wasn’t actually made for this model Tenere, so there was no place to bolt the rack down securely. Our new welder friend set about fabricating some brackets that he welded to the subframe, and within a couple hours she was solid as could be.








We weren’t allowed to leave without trying a dose of fermented camel’s milk and letting our welder friend have a go on the Tenere. He was a short guy and the Tenere is tall, so the only way that he could get on the thing was by climbing up onto the well, which meant he wouldn’t be able to stop the bike until he got back round to that well. We watched in horror as he jerkily let the clutch out and thought that he was surely going to dump it. He ripped up and down the road and we let out a sigh of relief when he managed to return safely return to the well to dismount.





The sun climbed and the temperature rose as we rode on for hours. We ran out of water. We hadn’t ridden in a remote desert like this for a long time and had become complacent about carrying enough water. There was no shade to be found and we took refuge in the occasional culverts beneath the road for some reprieve from the sun. It was a culvert party. Can you feel the heat?







We finally reached the town Beyneu where we found water and a place to hide from the sun. We were stoked. After the sun went down, Mike and I rode off to gas up the bikes a few miles away in preparation for an early departure the following morning. Riding back from the gas station the Tenere killed and wouldn’t restart. It had been intermittently shutting down all day and we had no idea why. In the open desert we weren’t going to try to figure it out, so we applied the tried and true method of ignore it and hope it goes away. Not so this time. It was dark and we were exhausted from the day, so we decided to get the bike back to the guesthouse and figure it out in the morning. When I tried to start my bike to go get the tow strap, it wouldn’t start either. Perfect. Both bikes just happened to give up at the very same moment in the dark and the end of a very long day. I guess they were fed up with the heat as well.





We managed to push start Dyna Rae, so that I could go get the tow strap. The last time I’d towed a bike was in the middle of Abuja, Nigeria and it wasn’t the smoothest affair. I’d since learned that a better way to do it would be to connect the strap to my right foot peg and the Mike’s left foot peg. It worked pretty well considering that we were riding on a bumpy gravel shoulder in the dark and my headlight wouldn’t even turn on.





The next morning we got into the bikes. My battery had gone flat, so either the battery had died or it wasn’t being charged properly. If it wasn’t being charged properly it could either be the stator, the regulator/rectifier unit, or broken connection/wire. If it was anything but a broken wire or connection I would be out of luck as there was no way to get a replacement part. When I removed the reg/rec unit I hit the jackpot – a wire had pulled right out of it. I was lucky - it was an easy fix.


The Tenere was getting gas, the air filter was clean enough, but when we pulled the plug and grounded it against the frame to check for spark, we saw nothing. It could be either something in the wiring loom, the coil, or the CDI unit that handles the ignition control. A local guy who was magic with a multi-meter came over and started checking for continuity down the line and eventually got to the CDI unit. It was toast. This wasn’t good, since the only way that the bike would run was to find a replacement CDI unit. Mike started looking online to find a shop in Europe that would ship something out to us.





In the meantime, the rest of the crew from the boat had caught up to us. It seemed that the desert had been no kinder to them than to us – they arrived with broken racks and torn panniers. The German rider on the DR650, Marcus, got online and to a Yamaha dealership in Germany that he knew to ask about shipping our a CDI for an 89 Tenere. They could send one via DHL, but it would still take about a week to ship. Our schedule was getting super tight, so we devised to put Team Tenere on a train to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, while Jamie and I rode through Uzbekistan. We’d have the CDI unit shipped to a hotel in Dushanbe. It was a lengthy process to figure out whether there was a train to Dushanbe and whether they could bring the bike along, but finally determined that it was possible. Dyna towed the Tenere to the train station and the next morning Jamie and I set off towards the Uzbekistan border.




Kindness in the desert
The track to Uzbekistan from Beyneu is a very rough 60 miles of dirt, after which the road improved to broken tarmac. There was no shade and the temperature was soaring above 40 degrees C (105 F). We met two cyclists hiding in the shadow of a telephone pole, which was the only shade we saw for hundreds of kilometers. Traversing this desert on a bicycle seems like complete madness to me. There was not a building, not a tree, absolutely nothing for a few moments of shelter from the sun. It was difficult to stop for a rest or to drink water when we would just bake in the sun. In the late afternoon I felt the rear tire squirm a bit and stopped to find that it was going flat beneath us. We managed to make it into a truck compound near a railway bridge – they were the first structures we’d seen for ages and we were happy to have the shade of a shade to fix the tire.





Truck dudes came over to help immediately as soon as I had the wheel off of the bike. Rather than my wimpy tube patches they insisted on using one of their burly truck tube patches. Their truck tires run tubes and they seemed to have done this a million times before, so I let them go about it. Everyone got in on the act.








When we got back on the road, we ran into Chris, the Brit from the boat on the DRZ400, who continued the journey south with us. Unfortunately, the burliest truck tube patch in the world only lasted about 50 miles before we found ourselves deflated again just before dark. I didn’t have it in me to start working on the bike for a second time after all day in the sun, so I pushed the bike down a few meters down a side track and we all set up camp right there. To make matters a little more difficult, all day in the sun had left Jamie with a case of heat stroke and she was decorating the desert with her lunch.





It’s quite a thing to wake up in the morning, roll out of bed, and immediately start wrestling a motorcycle tire off of a rim. No breakfast, no coffee, no shower, just some morning knuckle bashing. By the time I’d gotten the spare tube installed and the wheel back on I felt like a chicken that had just given myself a dust bath.





We rode off with Chris to get gas and when I crouched down to peer at the oil level window I couldn’t believe what I saw through the frame – the shock spring had broken in half. Shock springs aren’t supposed to break. They are supposed to spring. Sometimes the shock seal blows out, but the spring on a bike rarely breaks. We’re just lucky I suppose. So now we had a bigger problem than flat tires.






It’s noisy as hell and it sounds like we’re riding around on a dodgy motel bed, and we've got kind of a raked-out chopper vibe happening, but at least we’re still moving. Jamie needed a rest and I wanted to get online to find out what options we would have for a shock spring, so we rode a shorter day to the town of Xiva – a beautiful walled city in the Uzbek desert. While Jamie recovered from her UV overdose, Chris and I wandered the colorfully tiled towers in the glow of the sinking sun.











We left Chris behind in Xiva and rode headed toward the town of Bukhara. This time we were more careful about stopping to drink water. Trees once again appeared on the landscape and I’d never been so happy to see them. Like Xiva, Bukhara was another important stop on the ancient Silk Road, but our pace of travel left little time to appreciate the attractions.






We rode on again from morning to night stopping for a break during the hottest hours of the afternoon. Exhausted and hungry, we turned off the road into a grove of trees that we thought we might camp in, but inadvertently rode straight into a village Ramadan feast. While trying to turn around, folks motioned us over to them. We got off the bike and were led straight over to a place at their table as if it had been set and waiting for us. During the Muslim practice of Ramadan, no one eats from sun up to sun down, so the evening meal is a real event. The teacher in the village, named Semile, spoke some English and everyone took turns asking us questions via Semile’s translation. It was all pretty surreal, but wonderful.





The ladies all sat at a separate table and tended the huge cook pots.





Semile invited us to stay at his house for the night. I shared some bowls of with the local neighbors and the ladies got some hot water ready for Jamie to bathe. It was amazing - all of our immediate concerns had evaporated simply by taking a wrong turn. In the morning, we bid farewell to our generous hosts. Unfortunately, we had very little to leave them other than a pack of cards for the children that Jamie had packed.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

After days of riding through the desert, we finally left the kind folks of Uzbekistan to cross the border into Tajikistan. We were headed south towards the mountain pass that still stood between us and Dushanbe, and looking forward to some cool mountain air on our faces. Near the beginning of the ascent, we passed through a small town called Ayny, where the day took a radical turn in an instant.




Ready for launch

Rolling through a roundabout I only saw the car headed straight towards us for maybe a second before impact. It was long enough for a few thoughts to pass. The first was there is nowhere to go. I got on the brakes and figured that the front tire is the squishiest thing we have, so that’s what we’re going to hit this car with. My second thought was darn, the trip is over. We hit the car head-on and Jamie and I got launched. We landed hard on the ground and Jamie smacked the tarmac with her helmet. I heard Jamie start screaming and I wasn’t thinking about the bike or the trip anymore. What had I done? My thought was that she was hurt badly. I got up and tried to do all the right things but was completely panicked on the inside. When she got up and moved my alarm decreased somewhat. She was cradling her arm and I was now worried that it was broken. She was in shock and still screaming. A crowd gathered. The bike lay in the middle of the intersection amidst scattered broken orange plastic next to the car that hit us. The guy had decided to save half a second by going the wrong way through the roundabout to make a left turn.

Jamie calmed down and my guess was that her arm wasn’t broken, but she was super shaken up. I pick the bike up and pushed it to the side of the road and when I turned around Jamie was gone. Someone had taken her to the local clinic. I freaked out for a second not knowing where she’d gone and then followed in a different car. At the clinic, the doctor squeezed and moved here arm and confirmed that it was just bruising and soft tissue damage. Apparently I had landed on Jamie’s arm when we met the ground again. My relief was overwhelming. The rest just seemed like details.

We finally made our way back to the scene and the bike it started right up. All the broken orange plastic I’d seen before was from the car - the mighty Dyna Rae had broken the car’s turn signals and it’s license plate off. The front wheel of the bike may be a bit out of true, and I had to wrench it back into alignment with the bars, the hand guard was jammed into the front brake lever, but the forks weren’t bent, and otherwise, she seemed fine. I was amazed. The police who had showed up on the scene seemed to understand that the accident was the other guy’s fault and we were able to get on our way as soon as I freed the brake lever from the hand guard. A man at the scene man who presumed to be very helpful but ended up being a massive pain in the arse really didn’t want us to go. He finally acquiesced to our wish to be on our way, but not before insisting that Jamie take a gift with her. So now we have this funny little red hat as a memento of getting launched from the bike by a very nice local man.





We’ve found lots of wonderful people in Tajikistan, but overall, they are idiotic drivers. We’ve had plenty of close calls in lots of different places and our number finally came up in that village. We were lucky - no one was going all that fast and we were fine. It’s truly maddening that such very nice people can constantly act in a way that put others lives at risk. I’m sure that man was genuinely sorry for hitting us, but I bet he’ll do the same thing again tomorrow.





Thankfully, we didn’t have far to go on the highway before turning off onto a track that led to Lake IskandarKal, where we planned to camp for the night. I rode very slowly trying to make sure that nothing was off with the bike as we rode. I honestly couldn’t believe that we were back on the bike and riding off to find a camp. Hours ago, all of this was most likely finished in my mind. And now we were both fine and could continue the journey. Pitching our camp that night was the same lots of nights before, but given the events of the day, there was a definite sweetness to getting the camp chores done. We been given a reminder of how fragile all of this truly is.







Mike and Rebecca’s train from Kazakhstan should have already arrived in Dushanbe, but we’d heard nothing from them as of yet. We feared that something may have gone wrong. Jamie and I had found more Central Asian adventure than we could handle in the last week and I never imagined that Team Tenere’s story of getting to Dushanbe would top ours. Turns out we were wrong..

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Wow Gary, that is a ton of misadventures all piled on top of each other! Hallelujah the crash turned out OK, all things considered. And what's up with that shock spring, is that aftermarket or stock DR? Best wishes for smoother sailing...

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I think the blue spring is a stock spring. (???) Could be all the beach riding in Africa caused the rust and corrosion shown on the spring. I'd be checking out all the link bearings too. Salt water is HELL on bearings.

You may be able to weld the Spring but probably would not last too long as movement would "work harden" the weld and it may crack.

I have a FREE stock KYB DR650 spring sitting here if you need it ... but for that set up I'd go 8.0 kg. spring at least. (stock is something like 6.5 kg.)
Eibach spring!

Good luck! Safe Riding!

Thanks for the words of concern Mark and mollydog. I'm pretty darn happy how everything worked out.

That's the aftermarket procycle spring - 7.6 kg. Ya, pretty weird, springs don't really break on bikes from wheat I've read. I've heard this chirp in the suspension for more than two years now and I thought it was my tool box contacting something once in awhile. About a month ago the sound got much louder. My guess is that it was a tiny crack in the spring created on manufacture that took a very long time to get bigger and then finally fail.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches

Jamie and I woke from our lakeside campsite, high in Tajikistan's Fann Mountains, washed the dust from our faces, and headed for Dushanbe. We were due to meet up with Mike and Rebecca there, but hadn’t heard a word as to the fate of our companions.[ATTACH=full]352058[/ATTACH]


It was a relief to have finally reached the mountains as the desert had taken a toll – Jamie had been launching her lunch after nearly every day of riding with heat sickness. Day after day, she had soldiered on for a thousand miles. The mountain air was cool, allowing us to slumber in our tent far later that we had during the last week in the desert, where the sun would begin baking us alive shortly after sunrise. We descended from Lake IskandarKul then began the long, dusty climb up and over the pass through the surrounding peaks that would lead us to Dushanbe.





Reaching the top of the pass took far longer than we expected, with long rough sections of road and switchback turns that were filled with the finest of dust. Moving only as fast as second gear for long stretches we were happy to be up high, back into the cool air.





Jamie was still suffering from stomach sickness that now seemed as though it was a combination heat sickness, anxiety from our crash, and food poisoning. Every bump down the mountain on our suspension-challenged bike sent her stomach roiling. By the time we descended the other side she had about had it.


We were almost to Dushanbe now, where we were sure to find some comfort and good food. We took some time to enjoy the view from a meadow on the way down.





In Dushanbe we found weird, massive Soviet-era hotels that were terribly overpriced given their severely dilapidated condition. When we got access to wifi, we learned that Mike and Rebecca’s trip had become slightly more complex than they had hoped when the train took a turn into Turkmenistan. They didn’t have a visa for Turkmenistan. We’d left them at the train station in Beyneu, Kazakhstan, under the impression that they would speed across the Uzbek desert arriving in Dushanbe ahead of us. The bike was hoisted 6 feet up from the platform with pure manpower and placed into a cargo car with nothing for company but a pile of AK-47’s, and they were off. When they realized the train was approaching the Turkmenistan border, they tried twice to get off the train, but weren’t allowed to do so. The second time, someone called ahead to the border officials who assured them that there would be no problem, since no passengers are allowed on or off the train during the transit through Turkmenistan.





As soon as they crossed the border, Turkmenistan officials boarded the train and Mike and Rebecca were forced off the train along with the bike. The train workers who had assured them that they would be fine to transit through didn’t seem to be around anymore. Turkmenistan is not really a place that you want to be detained by the military with no one knowing where you are. There is no access to the internet. Turkmenistan ranks second in the world for oppressive governments (runner up to North Korea) and has a similar cult-of-personality style worship of their leader. The previous dictator up until 2006, Turkmenbashi, did things like re-name the months and days of the week after his family members and outlawed playing music in a car. He erected statues of himself and plastered his image everywhere. They were stuck in this place under the pretense that they had entered the country illegally, held in a small office and never let out of the guard’s site. The guards followed them to the bathroom, and shooed away any of the local village kids that came to see who the strange foreigners were. There was some food provided by the guards, but like me, Mike eats vegetarian, and they weren’t exactly given a menu to choose from. They burned through the stove fuel boiling water to drink every day. Over the 4 days of their captivity, they ate every bit of food that they were carrying and found every way imaginable to entertain themselves in a little room.





Things improved when Mike was finally able to get in contact with the US Embassy in Turkmenistan. They held an emergency meeting and got in touch with the Turkmenistan officials, after which Mike and Rebecca’s treatment improved markedly. Apparently, they shouldn’t have been yanked off the train at all, so the officials had either screwed up, or decided that a couple American tourists would be some good entertainment for a few days. The US Embassy finally was able to secure Mike and Rebecca emergency visas that would allow them to get back on the train towards Tajikistan. We found them at the train station in Dushanbe a day later, dirty, dehydrated, and about 10 pounds lighter. But we were glad to have 'em back.





We retrieved the CDI unit that we’d had shipped to the Hyatt Hotel in Dushanbe and spent an afternoon running around looking for some electrical connectors. When we plugged in the new CDI, she fired right up and we both breathed a sigh of relief. After all that it took to get here, we couldn’t wait to get riding into the Pamir Mountains, but first had to wait for our permits to enter the area. Unfortunately, we’d run into the end of Ramadan holiday and would have to wait three days for them to be issued. In the meantime, a landslide and flooding had closed one of the main roads into the Pamirs, and there was talk that the other road may also be shut. At a hostel filled with crazy cyclists, also keen to ride the route through the Pamirs, we waited on pins and needles for any info coming out of the Pamirs that would tell us whether we would be able to pass. By the time we all had our permits in hand, the best information was that we should be able to make it, so we stocked up on food and headed into the mountains.


Dyna Rae was still riding low with a broken shock spring, and making it the whole way through the Pamir Highway was going to be a bouncy affair. The spring was turning and wrapping in on itself, so we were getting shorter by the day. I keep having to find deeper and deeper holes to put the kickstand down.








We got a late start from Dushanbe and ended up camping in a farmer’s field as darkness fell. The road had started out as pretty good tarmac, but degraded the further we got from Dushanbe. We ate truck dust and dodged road craters all day long as we ascended higher following the path of the most chocolate flavored river I’ve ever seen. There was just truckloads of fine sediment coming down this river.








The road was rougher than we’d expected so far, but our slow progress wasn’t the worst thing in the world given the incredible vistas across the valley. We were blown away by the landscape and had only just begun to ascend into the Pamir Mountains. The road wound high above the valley floor and barely clung to the cliff side. This is the only road in and out of this region and so many sections look as though a small rock fall could make the way totally impassable.








Nature wasn’t gentle this summer in the Pamirs. Before we reached the town of Khorog, we came to a dead stop with a line of trucks and a huge pile of debris in front of us. Two days before, a debris flow had come barreling down from the valley opposite from where we stood and made its way all the way up the valley wall on our side. In total, the violent slurry of mud and boulders killed 10 people. Our timing was good, both because we missed the carnage of the debris flow and because a crew had been busy constructing a culvert and makeshift roadway for the last two days. We had only to wait a couple hours before we were underway again.





The main Pamir Highway (m41) was closed about 15 km outside of Khorog due to a landslide-induced flood that had obliterated an entire kilometer of road, so we knew that we weren’t going that way. There were two options left to us – via the Wakhan Valley, or a lesser traveled, higher elevation route between the main highway and the Wakhan Valley. With time on our Tajik visas running out, we chose the shorter, less traveled path through the middle.








We were riding through an autonomous region of Tajikistan and our path traced the border with Afghanistan, which lay just on the opposite side of the valley. Across the river, we watched people go about their days tending their fields and their cattle, very much the same as they did on our side of the river. I would imagine that the people were as friendly to strangers as those we met on this side of the river. Looking across the river it was strange to think that our two countries have been at war for nearly 14 years now.









As darkness neared one night, we found a camp for the night just before a unit of Tajik soldiers found us. They seemed slightly confused at why we wanted to camp there and got on their walkie-talkies to find out if we were OK to camp there. We had no idea if they were worried about who we were or our safety given who may be on the other side of that river. After 20 minutes or so of waiting the answer came back over the radios that we were good to pitch our tents and cook up a storm.

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two wheeled wave hunting dispatches