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Long Way for a Wave
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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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Gm...w=w840-h630-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Cs...I=w840-h630-no This is Jamie. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/2z...M=w840-h630-no Our trusty steed, Dyna Rae, has been beat pretty hard with the Africa stick, but she's still kicking. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/dR...=w1116-h628-no 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. |
ready for blast off folks? here we go...
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Viking Shore
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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. http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...ABAAEAAAIBRAA7Jamie 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Nv...M=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/uE...w=w748-h561-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/1F...M=w711-h561-no The guy also happened to have the coolest Harley Davidson motorcycle collection I’ve ever seen. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/8Z...Y=w739-h561-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/yz...c=w748-h561-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/hj...s=w998-h561-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fG...Q=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Lq...g=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/AJ...k=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Ax...g=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/bQ...zVMfi4=s561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/wg...s=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/YW...g=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/5y...w=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/v-...U=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ti...Y=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/lJ...s=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Pw...8=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HE...Y=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/B0...k=w723-h561-no 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 beer 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Xu...E=w705-h561-no https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/v9...0=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/8s...c=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HT...c=w748-h561-no After a few days surfing in Hoddevik, I continued north through the fjordlands toward Trondheim, hopstotching islands along the ‘Atlantic Road'. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ZO...s=w748-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Gx...s=w998-h561-no 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/CO...0=w748-h561-no 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. |
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
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Reunion of the Fellowship
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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. http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...ABAAEAAAIBRAA7After 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-N...0/P1080145.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...0/P1060864.JPG Sirens called from the roadside, but I stayed the course. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...0/P1080152.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4...0/P1060907.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-A...0/P1060928.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...0/P1060897.JPG 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! https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-I...0/P1060887.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2...0/P1060891.JPG After a day in the city, I was refreshed and ready to get back on the road and into the woods. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...0/P1060883.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1...2/P1060951.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...0/P1000023.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T...0/P1000026.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...0/P1060966.JPG 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! https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_...0/P1060978.JPG 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? https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-E...C-10-small.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...0/P1000141.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...0/P1000108.JPG 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! https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L...0/P1060991.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-a...0/P1080168.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...0/P1080173.JPG 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? https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m...0/P1010807.JPG 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? https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-W...0/P1080191.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-X...0/P1000150.JPG |
Georgia on my Mind
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As usual, we were slow to get moving the day we rode out of Bucharest. http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...ABAAEAAAIBRAA7 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s...6/P1000133.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...0/P1000148.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...0/P1000157.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-y...0/P1000158.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1060995.JPG The only danger we found through the mountains were packs of wild puppies that took a particular liking to Mike. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...2/P1000124.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...0/P1000166.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-I...0/P1060996.JPG 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 beers, cook up a storm, and bed down beneath for the night. We got absolutely eaten by mosquitoes. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...0/P1070002.JPG 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!). https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_...2/P1070021.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-y...0/P1070018.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...6/P1000180.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Z...0/P1070034.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p...on%2525202.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...0/P1000207.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...0/P1000210.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...0/P1070054.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O...0/P1070071.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...0/P1000243.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-P...2/P1000253.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...0/P1000243.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g...0/P1000303.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-i...6/P1000334.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...0/P1000270.JPG 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. |
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! |
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The Stans Without a Plan - Part I
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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. http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...ABAAEAAAIBRAA7 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1070102.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...2/P1000353.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1080199.JPG Broken in Beyneu https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...2/P1000367.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-v...2/P1000396.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1000378.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-K...2/P1000385.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...2/P1000388.JPG 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? https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1000403.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1000364.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...2/P1070131.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-M...2/P1000420.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1000426.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1000435.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1000442.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-K...2/P1000459.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t...2/P1000465.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1000466.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-e...2/P1080211.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1070110.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1070122.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-j...2/P1070120.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1070136.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-a...2/P1070148.JPG The ladies all sat at a separate table and tended the huge cook pots. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1070155.JPG Semile invited us to stay at his house for the night. I shared some bowls of beer 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...2/P1070158.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...2/P1000476.JPG |
The Stans Without a Plan - Part I
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.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...2/P1070204.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-f...2/P1070184.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Z...2/P1070189.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...2/P1070193.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...2/P1070167.JPG 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.. |
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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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. |
The Stans Without a Plan - Part II
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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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...2/P1070204.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...2/P1070212.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-4...2/P1070220.JPGWe 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-i...2/P1070226.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...Ic42/Image.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...ge%2525201.jpg 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-j...2/P1070275.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1000534.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1...2/P1070229.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1070231.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1070237.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1070255.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p...2/P1070236.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1000512.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0...2/P1070284.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1080306.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-j...2/P1070281.JPG 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. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...2/P1070264.JPG |
The Stans Without a Plan - Part II
The following morning brought a continuation of cliff side riding with epic vistas and creek bashing.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s...2/P1070269.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...on%2525202.jpgThe road eventually turned into a smooth two track that we could just flow along in second gear, crisscrossing the turquoise stream periodically and railing through a turn here and there. There was no other traffic at all other than two cyclists that we saw going the other direction. Even with our broken spring, it was a super fun road to ride – pretty much the perfect sort of terrain for a dual-sport bike. We found an epic camp spot for the night in a patch of lush grass right beside a crystal clear stream. By the time we’d made camp, a light rain had started, but Mike and I stood outside anyway, cooking dinner and drinking whiskey. This was what we'd come for. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1080267.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1070307.JPG The next morning, the two-track riding continued and the spot of rain had swelled the mud puddles somewhat. While I took the easy option around, Mike opted for a glorious blaze through the puddle. I should mention that two days prior he did manage a solid wheelie on the Tenere, fully loaded with Rebecca on the back when he rolled on the throttle to escape a pursuing dog. So such a blast through a puddle should be no problem, really. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q...2/P1080287.JPGhttps://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L...2/P1080295.JPGThere were no rocks below the surface, only slippy mud that sent Mike spinning and then down. The whole village turned out to see the subsequent yard sale once we extracted the bike from the brown water. As always, they were very friendly and we felt bad turning down their invitation to stay in the village for the night. This soggy business was all good practice, as we knew that a difficult creek crossing was coming up. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...2/P1080359.JPG It wasn’t so much as the depth of the water or swiftness of the flow that provided the difficulty, but the huge cobbles that made up the stream bed, perhaps half a meter in diameter on average. My ride across was about the least graceful feat on a motorbike you could imagine, which convinced Mike to walk the Tenere across. We’d both made it safely across without another dunking and we were stoked. The cows on the far bank gave no acknowledgement of congratulations whatsoever. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1080332.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1080328.JPG We found a spot for lunch and Mike put the Tenere down for an afternoon nap. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1080340.JPG We rode through a few smaller creeks en-route to rejoin the Pamir Highway. There was still no tarmac, but the rocky road we ascended was now graded. Both our bikes had been running like total crap due to the altitude, which generally stayed above 3000m (about 10,000 ft). We also hadn’t cleaned our air filters since we’d spent hours eating truck dust riding away from Dushanbe. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-X...2/P1080351.JPG At the next steep ascent, which began above 3800m (12,500 ft), the Tenere killed and wouldn’t restart. We found that the plugs were carboned up like the inside of a chimney from running rich at such high altitude and the air filter was caked through with dust, so we were pretty hopeful we’d be able to get the problem sorted out. Sure enough, when we cleaned the plugs and the air filter the bike started right up. Hoorah Tenere! She didn’t make it very far though before she killed again. We feared that another electrical gremlin might have crawled into the Tenere. It seemed as though the normal stuff we’d done had gotten the bike going again. Could it just be that she’d reached her altitude limit for the way the carburetor was set up? https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g...2/P1080365.JPG We were running out of things to try and we were in the middle of the mountains on a ‘highway’ that we’d seen only 1 truck pass in three hours. The closure at Khorog meant that there there was very little traffic coming our way and the clock was ticking -we only had two days left on our Tajik visas. Team Tenere had already endured an odyssey to continue the journey from Kazakhstan and we were resolved that it wouldn’t end here, but first we had to find a way somewhere else. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...2/P1080372.JPG |
The Stans Without a Plan - Part III
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Dyna Rae was sputtering and coughing as we climbed into the stratosphere of Tajikistan and despite our efforts, the Tenere still wouldn't start. Our fading hope was that the blue beast was just suffering her own bout of altitude sickness. http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...984e046a2c4fcd https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1000558.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-P...2/P1000589.JPG The only place worse to be stuck with a bike that wouldn’t run would have been where we had just come from or where we were about to go. We’d descended from the muddy, creek bisecting, high mountain track to reach the gravelly stability of the Pamir Highway. The trouble was that there was absolutely nothing but mountain wilderness between us and the next town, called Murghab, a 5 hour ride north. Fortunately, there was some kind of outpost nearby with a family living there who let us know that there would be a mini bus coming by that night which could carry Mike and Rebecca to Murghab. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1000570.JPG Jamie and I rode off leaving Mike and Rebecca behind, hoping to make Murghab before dark, but we weren’t even close. Within an hour, a storm rolled in and landed on us like a hammer. I was optimistic that we’d outrun it, but it was soon clear that idea was pure folly. Now we were splashing through one track of a deep two track and I could barely see where I was going. I had my visor up to see better, squinting through the million pinpricks of raindrops on my face. The clouds were so dark and thick that it seemed the sun must have already set, but it was still back there somewhere. We should have made camp while we had the chance, now there was nothing but steep slopes of loose scree on either side of the road and the storm only seemed to be gaining intensity. As we rode on I gritted my teeth and cursed my poor judgment that had put us in this spot. There was nothing to do now but continue riding through this high mountain maelstrom and try to stay upright. Finally, after another hour the storm found a break and a flat spot appeared at the roadside. I pulled off the road and exhaled for the first time in an hour. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...2/P1000568.JPG The Tenere’s symptoms had been disturbingly similar to a failure of the CDI unit that we’d already replaced in Dushanbe. From Murghab, Mike got onto the internet and found that the same shop in Osh, Kyrgyzstan that had found a spring to fit the DR650, may also be able to either replace or repair the Tenere’s CDI unit. Stoked! We just had to get the bike to Osh. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G...2/P1000599.JPG Did you know that you can fit a Yamaha Tenere in the back of a Mitsubishi SUV? We didn’t either. It turns out that with enough convincing man grunting, she’ll slide right in. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-e...2/P1000605.JPG After receiving a bit advice about the roads from some friendly Polish motorcyclists coming from the other direction, Jamie and I hit the road for Osh, once again chasing down team Tenere that sped ahead of us. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_...2/P1000623.JPG The ride into Kyrgyzstan was pretty astonishing, crossing 4 high mountain passes and rounding the shores of crystal alpine lakes. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t...2/P1000620.JPG The highest pass was 4,559m (15,285 ft), which I think is the highest we’d ever ridden. While she runs terrible at high speed up at this altitude, she never looses torque at the low end, and since the road was really rough, she rode just fine. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-h...2/P1080393.JPG There were a few more creek crossings to negotiate on the way up to the border. They turned out to be pretty easy, but it was hard to tell by looking at them, so Jamie jumped off and hop-scotched to the other side, just to be safe. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...2/P1000662.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1000651.JPG There is a 20km section of no-mans land between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, with a terrible road connecting either side. It’s one of the longest gaps like this I’ve ever been through. Diplomatic relations between the US and Kyrgyzstan must be fantastic, because it was among the easiest border crossings we’ve ever done. No visa needed, no questions asked, just a hearty ‘Welcome to Kyrgyzstan!’ and we were off again. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...2/P1080384.JPG We didn’t make it far past the border before it was time to find a camp, and Kyrgyzstan didn’t disappoint. We turned off the road onto a track that wound into the hills past widely spaced yurts with flanked by the herders’ flocks of cows, horses, sheep, and goats. This place is like sheep heaven. The Kyrgyz people traditionally lived as nomadic herders, completely outside of cities until the mid-ninetieth century when the Soviet Union came into the picture and collectivism helped to create larger villages and cities. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, some have returned to nomadic life and others practice it during the summer months. It feels fantastic up here surrounded by this landscape and the animals, looking over the plain spotted with yurts. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-W...2/P1070318.JPG Riding towards a snowy mountain peak, we turned off the track to ride cross-country straight up the grassy hills. The grass was trimmed short by the furry munchers and the ground was solid, so we didn’t really need a track at all. It was like a dream rolling up and down those hills. Once we were far above the yurt settlements, we found a shallow depression in the hills that gave us some privacy from all directions but still provided a clear view of the mountain. The grass felt nice on our feet and the air was cool. It was one of the most epic campsites we’ve had the whole trip. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1000672.JPG In the morning we the bounced down from our grassy mountain nest and headed into Osh, where Mike and Rebecca were already waiting for us. Mike and I set off for the MuzToo workshop owned by a Swiss guy called Patrick. MuzToo is exactly the kind of place that travelers like us hope to find on the road. He let’s travelers work on their own bikes at the shop and use the tools, and if you need help he’s a great mechanic himself and mechanic work from his workers comes at a reasonable cost. He managed to find a spring that would fit our DR650 and measured it against a DR650 that he had stored there to make sure it would fit. He also has the most Yamaha XT’s I’ve ever seen in one place – about 35 in total that he uses for his tour company. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-v...2/P1080406.JPG I tore into Dyna Rae to extract her noisy, broken shock spring. It’s not too much trouble on the DR, just take out the air box and the shock mounting bolts can be removed. I soon had the beautiful new shock spring, with a slightly heavier spring rate than our current one slid on to the shock and she was about good to go. I was so stoked - after more than a thousand miles with a broken spring through Central Asia and the Pamirs we would finally have a fully functional shock again and Jamie would be getting launched skyward a bit less often. If not for Patrick, we may have been nursing the bike all the way to Vladivostok. If you need help with a bike in Central Asia he's the man to find. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...2/P1080414.JPG The guys at the shop got out the multi-meter and confirmed that the Tenere’s problem was indeed the CDI unit. The replacement that Mike bought was used and perhaps didn’t have much life left in it. Unfortunately, this CDI unit was injected with rubber, making it irreparable, and plugging in spare CDI’s from one of the XT’s didn’t work either. Removal of the stator cover revealed that the Tenere’s stator had a couple design differences that meant the CDI units weren’t interchangeable between bikes. Given Mike’s schedule, it would take too long to get another CDI bought and shipped from Europe, meaning that this was the end of the road for Team Tenere. Mike sold the bike to Patrick for slightly less than he had bought it for and that was that. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1080408.JPG Mike and Rebecca had gone through so much to make it this far and we were all bummed to have the journey cut short when the Tenere decided she was ready to call it quits. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q...2/P1080412.JPG Mike would fly to Ulaanbaatar from Osh, and Rebecca planned to head back the way we came, running the high altitude section of the Pamirs between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. She needed a way to carry her stuff, and at the time of our departure idea at the top of the list was to buy a spirited donkey at the Osh animal market. I really hope that happens. A lot. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1000705.JPG Patrick pointed us towards the best tracks to ride in Kyrgyzstan and Jamie and I headed off north back into the mountains. The roads were very slow going in second gear and we made a wrong turn onto a road that was still being built, which required some backtracking. We were headed to a lake called Song Kul, winding high up into the mountains once again where the air got nice and cool and the landscape looked like paintings on a wall. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q...2/P1000696.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p...2/P1000700.JPG At Song Kul we found a symphony of clouds in action, colliding above the lake. We made camp on a grassy plain absolutely filled with cow pies. It looks pretty, but we were literally camping in a sea of manure. The storm that built during the afternoon raged all through the night and we were happy to be snuggled up dry inside of our tent. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1070333.JPG The lake basin was vast – much larger than the lake itself and absolutely filled with lush grass. You could probably fit ten times the number of families’ yurts and flocks of animals in this place and they would still barely be able to see one another. Riding out in the morning, the rain was light but persistent as we reached the basin edge to descend a muddy, rutted track back down to lower elevation. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...2/P1000722.JPG In the capital city of Bishkek, we met up with our friend Mahsa and her riding companion, Charlie. We’d last seen Mahsa in Addis Abbaba, Ethiopia. She’d come a long way since then, riding her Yamaha XT through Oman, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Stans and was now on her way back home to Spain. But I think she’ll soon be dreaming up the next adventure. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1000728.JPG Jamie and I had a long way to ride across Kazakhstan – nearly a thousand miles, so we reluctantly left the comforts of Bishkek behind and got moving again. We wild camped our way across Kazakhstan, finally outrunning the heat after three days of riding. One night camping near a necropolis, we were visited by a pack of wild horses that came right over to have a look at us. Jamie tried to communicate with her best horse whinny and I swear she got a response. As dusk fell, when we should have been making dinner, we just kept staring at the horse antics. Wild horses. Couldn’t drag us away. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m...2/P1000793.JPG Mike flew back to California two days ago and is already back at work. By now, Rebecca should be just about geared up for her traverse of the mountains back into Tajikistan, this time on foot. Her donkey ownership status is currently undetermined. We’re certainly going to miss having Mike and Rebecca on our wing for the upcoming journey through Mongolia. Between luggage debacles, bike breakdowns, and detainment by a tyrannical regime, they’ve had a full-on adventure the last few months. It couldn’t have been easy to maintain a positive outlook while enduring this little odyssey, but that was what they did. Mike has however threatened multiple times that next year he’s going on a cruise. Via con Dios Team Tenere. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-f...2/P1000543.JPG |
as always great photos of an epic adventure.
bad luck with the tenere |
Thanks for the update, that's some trip you're on. Central Asia looks absolutely immense. Definitely next on my list!!!
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Making Tracks across Mongolia
Making Tracks across Mongolia
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L...2/P1000911.JPG Looking at the map, it seems that we’re about as far from an ocean as we could possibly be anywhere on the planet, about 500 miles northeast of the Mongolian border in Barnaul, Russia. It must be more than 2000 miles in any direction to find an ocean coastline. The Stans had turned out to be kind of a bigger deal than we thought with searing deserts, landslides, flooding, and broken bikes. I suppose it’s silly to presume to judge what any place holds just by examining the outlines of its borders, but they just didn’t look that big on the map! We’ve got a hell of a long way to go to the other side of Asia and summer is fading fast. Winter is coming. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1080509.JPG Barnaul is our waypoint en route to Mongolia where I had a set of tires shipped to replace our badly worn set that have been on the bike since Croatia, more than 14 thousand miles back. We rode off from Barnaul without a clue what we’re headed into, just because we had tired of looking stuff up and figuring out where to go. We headed into Russia’s Altai Mountains on some brand new knobby rubber. Our plan was to simply blast to the Mongolian border as quickly as possible, but as we rode, the landscape turned lush and beautiful as the road wound along a river. We kept seeing awesome camp spots by the riverside and finally just had to stop to make one of them our home for the night. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1000839.JPG Jamie made friends with the tiny locals. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1000761.JPG I got woodsy. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...2/P1000856.jpg The rain dumped on us all night, finally abated in the morning long enough to pack up and get riding, but not for long. The Altai is a beautiful place if you don’t mind enjoying the views a bit soggy. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...2/P1000873.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1000874.JPG We mostly camped in cow pastures and have gotten rather used to being surrounded by cow patties. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-X...2/P1070343.JPG The cows played coy at first, but in the end kept creeping up on Jamie. We think they were planning something nefarious. Sneaky little buggers. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1080584.JPG After spending several days more than expected in the Altai, we finally motored up to the Mongolian border, where we found our cage driving counterparts in line. The Mongol rally participants racing from London in the crappiest cars they could duct tape together were already kicking up the dust in front of us, ready to tackle Mongolia’s tracks in comically inappropriate vehicles. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...2/P1080591.JPG Jamie got down with some maps to figure out the best way across a thousand miles of the wild Mongolian steppe. We forgot to bring a map. They laughed at us. We took photos of theirs instead. Problem solved. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1...2/P1080593.JPG Unfortunately we’d arrived to the border at about lunch time, which turned out to be a fairly drawn out affair. It was pretty annoying since we only needed one more stamp to get moving. We were less annoyed when we looked outside the office and saw that it was snowing, and no longer felt like riding anywhere. This didn’t bode well for our crossing of Mongolia along the northern route that had lots of creeks that could swell to flow levels that made them uncrossable on a bike. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1000887.JPG At the border, we’d met up with a Swiss rider called Jonathan on a KLR who we’d first met in Kazakhstan. The three of us rode together; taking a detour to bypass the biggest river crossings that we’d heard had caused two riders to turn back the day before. At every meadowy stop, the local band of horses seemed to find us and come over for a look. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1000894.JPG The Mongolians are virtually born on horseback and can just about ride before they can walk. They ride everywhere and seem more comfortable in a saddle than standing on the ground. We eventually learned that the bands of horses we found roaming around everywhere always belong to someone, and have been trained for riders. They are allowed to roam the grasslands freely until needed by an owner. They aren’t really wild, but they seem to lead a pretty close-to-wild existence out here on the steppe that’s wonderful to see. Back home I never really understood some people’s fascination with these creatures, but after so much time watching them in Mongolia I now do. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1010078.JPG Outside of a few hundred kilometers of Tarmac, mostly laid down on the approach to the capital city, Mongolia doesn’t really do the road thing. They’re into tracks. Lots of tracks. The dirt tracks spill down hillsides and snake off into the valley as far as we could see. The pale green canvas is framed by low mountains and is only occasionally marked by the herder’s white gers, what we would call yurts, and their continuously munching livestock. The vastness of it all just fills your lungs with air and lightens heavy thoughts. A journey through this landscape can’t help but feel epic in scale. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t...2/P1000963.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-i...2/P1000989.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1000930.JPG We rode with Jonathan all day, traversing north from the town of Elgii towards the northern route and the town of Ulaangom. He rode faster than us and was soon out of sight. The route is often a dozen tracks wide and we couldn’t possibly always select the same one. Usually they converge with one another, but sometimes they don’t. At some stage we lost each other and we never saw him again. We had a long break on a hillside above a lake, so we figured he couldn’t still be behind us and rode on figuring that we’d eventually find him in Ulaangom, but he wasn’t there either. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-f...2/P1000906.JPG We hoped everything had gone OK for Jonathan, but by noon the next day it was time for us to ride on. There were a few creek crossings and mud pits created from the rain of the past few days, but it was usually possible to find a way around any obstacle through the grass. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1080743.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1000991.JPG I’ve never ridden anywhere like Mongolia. It’s mostly fast two track that alternates from flowy dirt with whoops and bowls to bank off of, and faint tracks through the short grass. Some sections seriously feel like you’re ripping straight across a golf course. The dirt tracks are generally smoothed from the rain and when they get too bumpy or rough from a truck getting stuck in the mud, someone makes a new track. Lots of the time, you don’t really need a track at all. The only place where you can normally ride cross-country like this at a good clip is in the desert. Here, you get that same riding freedom, but don’t have to deal with extreme heat or lack of water. Even loaded and two-up, it was some of the most fun off-road riding I’ve ever done. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1010057.JPG For the first time in months we weren’t cooking in the desert or freezing in the mountains, the storm front had moved on ahead of us and we had nothing but clear blue skies. We were riding about a hundred miles a day and good camping spots were always easy to find. We could see a spot way up a hill or across a valley from a track we were riding and just blast cross-country towards it. It was so cool. Mongolia feels like a motorcycle play land. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p...2/P1070353.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...2/P1070351.JPG At camps far away from gers or animals, we were surrounded by the stillness of the steppe. A falcon flew overhead and I could hear every beat of its wings clear as a bell. I even managed a bath in a stream. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1080733.JPG The Mongolian people are usually friendly and curious about us, but generally more reserved than those we met in the Stans. In Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the kids would hear us coming down the road and there would be a stampede of them out to the road waiting at the ready to slap us a high five. I never got tired of that. But here we were generally left on our own unless we happened to camp right where a herder was grazing his animals. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1070416.JPG Mongolia is a hard place to live. The whole country is situated on a plateau with an average elevation of about 5250 feet (1600 m) resulting in very harsh winters where the temperature drops below 40 C and a blanket of snow covers the grassland. The climate doesn’t allow the Mongolians to grow much in the way of grains or vegetables and there isn’t much food available other than meat. Most people out in the countryside depend wholly on their animals for survival. They eat their meat, wear and make shelters from their hides and fur, and drink their milk. We encountered animals we hadn’t seen before: yaks (which look kind of like gigantic dogs), and two humped camels, better suited for the cold weather than the single humped variety we’d bern chasing all over the road in Africa. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...2/P1010024.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...2/P1010041.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...on%2525202.jpg |
Making Tracks across Mongolia II
After days of riding the tracks with no sign of any other riders, let alone our Swiss riding companion, we were stoked to find two other riders, Anthony and Jenny from Israel, both riding Honda CRF 250’s that they’d been riding all the way from Europe for the past five months.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-E...2/P1070443.JPG As we rode east, trees appeared on the hills and the four of us found some fuel for fires at night while we talked story of bikes and adventure. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...2/IMG_5439.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-X...2/P1070471.JPG We turned north to find one of the few Buddhist monasteries that survived the Soviet purge of the 1930’s. The track followed a valley and was rougher than what we’d been riding out on the open steppe. The final obstacle was a wide creek. We couldn’t judge its depth the whole way across until a truck came by to show us the path along the shallow gravel bar. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...2/P1080765.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6...2/P1070456.JPG We found a campsite in the saddle of a ridge high above the monastery and bedded down for the night with our usual cadre of four legged neighbors whinnying and neighing into the night. We packed up the next morning and bounced down the hill to check out the monastery as the Tibetan Buddhist monks-in-training went about their morning chants wrapped in robes burgundy and gold. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t...2/P1070485.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-t...2/P1070481.JPG Approaching Ulaanbaatar, the tarmac returned along with the towns and cars and it was as if waking from a week-long dream in the grassland. The air became was tinged with diesel, a car horn honked, a mini-market appeared, and the spell of the steppe was broken. Given half an excuse I would turn around a ride the same route right back the other direction. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T...on%2525203.jpg When we arrived at the default overlander flop house in Ulaanbataar, we finally found Jonathan again. A week prior, when we’d last seen him, he’d ridden way up a track that just went to someone’s ger. We’d taken somewhat different routes to Ulaanbataar, but arrived within hours of one another! His front tire was wearing through to the steel belting a week ago, so he sawed off some of the rear tire knobs and super glued them to the worst spots on the front. The prosthetic knobs stayed put during the whole journey. How’s that for a backcountry bodge! https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...2/P1080769.JPG Before arriving in Mongolia, we’d grown a bit road weary and thinking of home, but the time out on the steppe has re-forged the will to wander. I can’t wait to find the next spot to pitch our tent. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...on%2525202.jpg |
That steppe! of the way looks amazing, breathtaking scenery and so unspoilt:scooter:ride on
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Siberia, Interrupted
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Siberia is big, and we had a whole lot of its bigness to get across. A carpet of forest stretches to the horizon rolling up and down over the hills. The uniformity of green was rarely broken, other than by the railway and the highway on which we rode. To us, the road was civilization. It was solid. There were other people on it. When we rode just half a mile off the highway and down a muddy track, the forest swallowed us up, as though the trees closed in behind us. It was always something of a relief to return to that tenuous tarmac interruption of the forest. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-W...2/P1070501.JPG We’d left Ulaanbaatar with 2400 miles (4000 km) to ride to reach the other side of Russia. We enjoyed a final night of camping out on the open Mongolian steppe before crossing the border where the grasslands slowly graded into pine forests. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1010132.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-X...2/P1070538.JPG We only ride about 200-300 miles a day, so it would take us more than a week to get across Far Eastern Russia. We started off slowly with a stop-off at Lake Baikal. By volume, it’s the largest freshwater lake in world. Which is precisely why we went there, and no other reason at all. We’d heard it was a beautiful place, but we found it unremarkable in every way and basically indistinguishable from any other massive lake that you might run into. We stood and looked at it for a while, felt the water, then got back on the bike and rode away. The beautiful places must have been on the other side. Did I mention that we visited the biggest lake in the world? Yep. Totally touched it. Forgot to take a photo though. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-P...2/P1010161.JPG When we finally did get into the forest, it was difficult to find campsites because the trees and undergrowth were so thick. It was the first time since West Africa that I truly wished for a machete strapped to the saddle bag. Our favorite sites ended up being clearings made for rock quarries. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1070521.JPG The birch forests usually had more closely spaced trees and thicker undergrowth than the pine forests and we would thread the bike through the trees looking for clear, flat spot to camp. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1070559.JPG We usually had plenty of food, but good veggies were hard to find and we had to resist the urge to forage in the woods. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1070595.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...2/P1070608.JPG We did our best to find nice picnic spots, but they were as few and far between as nice camp spots. We were quickly missing the outdoor playland of the Mongolian steppe. Here in Siberia, nature was a little more intrusive to our comfort. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-J...2/P1010147.JPG The road itself is truly a marvel. To keep the forest at bay and avoid the sucking mud that comes with melting permafrost, there are literally thousands of miles of road tiered up well above the forest floor with tons and tons of gravel. Sometimes we found ourselves riding amongst the treetops, 5-10 meters above the forest floor. The amount of rock that had to be quarried to do this for so many thousand of miles is just astounding. We met friendly Russians the whole way along who always asked where we were from and where we were going, sometimes wanted to take photos with us, and usually invited us to drink some vodka. One nice guy working at a gas station called us over to his little maintenance shed so that we could do an oil change. He offered us tea and from the shed produced tools and an oil pan for me to use. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-y...2/P1010151.JPG Our constant companion was the Trans-Siberian Railway steaming along beside us. At one stage we found a town 10 miles down a dirt track off of the highway. There were markets and banks, offices and apartment buildings; all in what seemed to us to be the middle nowhere. It felt surreal, like an episode of the Twilight Zone. It just seemed mad for all of this to exist down a long dirt track surrounded by forest so far from the highway. But this town was built in the age of the railway, not the highway. The whole town was virtually built around the rail station. We couldn’t help but think how the construction of the rail line must have changed life out here, where the ground is covered in snow for half the year and a muddy bog for the other half. Before the rail line, it would have been incredibly difficult for anything or anyone to get in or out of here. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-P...2/P1010167.JPG Eventually it seemed that everywhere that wasn’t the road was a swamp. We had to check carefully what the surface was like before we rode down off the highway to be sure that the undergrowth wasn’t hiding a bog that would have us hopelessly mired. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1010164.JPG With the water came the mosquitoes and they came in droves. Our last camp was so bad that Jamie kept her helmet on until we finally dove into the sanctuary of the tent. Anytime I uncovered the cook pot for even a second, hundreds of them would kamikaze to their deaths into the food. The whole thing must have been a comedic site, both of us bundled like ninjas, Jamie running around in her fogged up helmet, screaming ‘breach’ every once in awhile when a mosquito found its way inside, and me trying to stir a pot with the lid still on and regularly smacking myself in the face. As the sun got lower they got worse. I’ve been in places with bad mosquitoes before, but this was another level. It was difficult to breath without inhaling a cloud of the little suckers. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-r...2/P1070629.JPG We rode more than 400 miles the next day to reach Vladivostok rather than camp in another mosquito cloud. The last time I touched the Pacific Ocean was in California and now I got to dip my toes in on the other side of it. I’d been hopeful to find a surf shop and some waves to ride near Vladivostok. The hope of it had spurred me forward on plenty of days. We found some great cobble reef/point setups where I’d seen photos of pretty good waves on the Internet. However, it seems that you’d have to be pretty lucky to get a big enough swell here in September and we only saw the most micro of waves peeling along the raised bars of cobbles. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1010185.JPG The last couple of days on the road, Dyna Rae had been trying to bog at about ¼ throttle. I assumed that it was some gunk clogging a jet in the carburetor. On the night that we rode into Vladivostok it had gotten bad enough that she was pretty difficult to ride in city traffic. I was happy to make it to a guesthouse and collapse for the night. When we packed up to move to a cheaper place the next morning, she died under any throttle. Fortunately it wasn’t far to the other guesthouse and the first half was downhill. Unfortunately the second half was uphill, and so there Jamie and I were, grunting and heaving the fully loaded bike against gravity inch by inch, towards a massive soviet-era submarine. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1010189.JPG I took the carburetor apart and cleaned it up shiny but was dismayed when my efforts had no effect whatsoever. I puzzled over it for a day or so before I resolved that something mechanical must be going wrong with the fuel delivery. I had a close look at the needle that I’d replaced in Romania and found it and the spacer very worn. When I compared the needle to the old one I’d replaced, I noticed that its taper was slightly thicker at the end, allowing less fuel into the chamber. It seemed that as the spacer wore down, the unexplainably thicker needle eventually stopped letting enough fuel in to keep her running. I put the old thoroughly worn needle back in, the bog disappeared and she roared back to life. It’s amazing that this didn’t happen in the middle of the Siberian forest mosquito hell. She was tired and coughing, but somehow just didn’t quit until we made it all the way to the finish line at Vladivostok. Thank you Dyna Rae. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-a...2/P1010191.JPG We’d run out of east to ride so it was time to turn south to head for China. As nicely as we asked, the Chinese simply would not let us go riding our bike around willy-nilly across their country. We’d need to have a full time guide, a Chinese driver's license, and a bunch of other stuff that made the whole escapade far too structured and costly for our taste. The smart thing to do arriving in Vladivostok with a clapped out bike and nowhere to ride would be to sell it, not to haul it back across an ocean, but I just couldn’t manage to let her go. This little machine has been home for two years and carried Jamie and me back and forth across three continents more than 60 thousand miles. Her chain is sagging, sprockets worn down to the nub, rotors scored, bash plate thoroughly dented, front wheel wonky from our crash in Tajikistan, tires nearly bald, carb bodged together, and she’s still carrying a quarter pound of dust from the Sudan Desert. She’s no spring chicken and drinks some oil as the parts in her worn cylinder head begin to show their age, but just keeps thumping along. I know every nuance of every sound she makes and how it changes when the temperature or the altitude rises, her valves get loose, or her air filter is clogged. I can feel the difference in how her gears mesh together when the oil gets dirty. I’ve put every scratch on her and twisted every bolt myself. I love her flaws and quirks as much as her attributes, because they all add up to my bike. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T...2/P1010175.JPG I cleaned her up and arranged to get her in a container headed for Vancouver at a cost that makes no sense given the state of the bike. Now we’re on the bus. No dust in our face or mosquitoes in our dinner. No sore behinds. We climbed a mountain and my face didn’t get cold and when a rain shower passed we didn’t get wet. I didn’t smell the trees when they changed or feel the bumps in the road. It was comfortable. How lame. |
I am very glad you didn't sell the bike. No explanation needed. It's absurd that a motorcycle can become your home, but it really can.
Happily the story isn't yet finished. |
but it does feel more like a comedy now :-)
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The Slow Road through China
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China wins no points in the moto-fun department, refusing to let us enter with our beloved motorbikehttp://advrider.com/index.php?attach...c98cd1d33472ad, forcing us to endure the four-hour bus ride from Vladivostok, Russia to Hunchun, China. We drove over the landscape in a sealed container barely awake, rather than riding through it with our senses alight. We needed to fix this situation, whether China was onboard with the moto-hobo lifestyle or not. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-3...2/P1010229.JPG The cheapest thing that we could find was a little moped looking thing. She’s 48cc’s of fire breathing Chinese muscle. Two of those ought to do for us, but the shop only had one. Two-up on a 48cc across China – was this even possible? We were determined to find out. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G...2/P1010223.JPG Buying stuff in China is pretty cheap. They invented stuff-making here. We got the bike, along with a shiny top box, two helmets, and a lock chucked in, all for a song of a deal. I still don’t even know the make of the bike. We grabbed a couple backpacks to stuff our stuff, I assembled a comprehensive tool kit (mostly zip ties and duct tape), and that was it, ready ride across China. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1010232.JPG On our diminutive machine, wearing our Chinese helmets with sunglasses on, we’re virtually undetectable as foreigners, so we fly under the radar at any police checkpoint. They don’t even look twice at us as we ride right by. Before we arrived I’d read on a website written by an American expat in China that you don’t need a Chinese license or a plate for a bike under 50cc’s. I don’t really know if that’s true or not, but so far everyone just ignores us. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2...2/P1010240.JPG You might think we’re being a bit cavalier about all this and you’d be correct. Even after all we’d gone through on this trip up to now, wobbling off on the little bike felt half insane. I didn’t even know if we could make it up a hill with the both of us until we got to the first one 30 km away from the town. She’ll get to the top of a mild grade but she’s none too happy about the climb. We’re basically about half a rung above a bicycle on the vehicle hierarchy. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...2/P1010297.JPG For the first three days riding, something broke every day. We just hopped from one little shop to another. Little bike shops are absolutely everywhere and there is always someone to help out. Within the first 200 km the rear tire delaminated. We retreated to a shop to get a new one that is surely better quality, but it was bigger and rubbed the fender every bump we hit. We absolutely mangled the fender to provide some more clearance and iteratively stopped at one shop after another borrowing tools to mangle it even more. Finally, with the pre-load on the springs cranked all the way up, an over-sized knobby tire, and a rear fender that looked like a piece of modern art, we had a fully off-road capable machine. Mostly because I can just lift it up to carry it over any really big bumps. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m...2/P1010250.JPG The first few days of riding we spent most of the time winding through lovely, mountain roads with very little traffic, flanked by trees ablaze with the colors of fall. I was in a state of disbelief that this was actually working; that we were really going to ride this thing, carrying everything we needed, 3 thousand miles across China. When a storm came through we found our first hard day of riding ducking under bridges as the showers came and went during the day. We donned the rain gear that we bought in Hunchun for $3 dollars each. I looked like I was wearing a set of hefty bags and Jamie looked like she was about to be sent off to the school bus carrying a Hello Kitty lunch box. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-D...2/P1010269.JPG As this trip has progressed, I’ve become increasingly more useless to get where we’re going and Jamie has become ever more essential. In Russia, Jamie learned the Cyrillic alphabet so that we could read signs and she even made a fair stab at learning Russian. The first time we got into an elevator in China, Jamie started speaking Mandarin to the lady next to us. My girlfriend speaks Chinese!? Jamie had lived in Taiwan for two years, so I figured she’d picked some up, but I still couldn’t help being amazing standing there listening to her. I can say hello. That’s it. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1010264.JPG Additionally, Jamie is now the route planner and navigator, since I no longer have the phone mounted up on the front of the bike. So pretty much all I do now is drive the bike and say hello a lot. Ni Hao. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1010287.JPG Planning routes in a huge country on a slow bike is a lot more complex than a big bike, since we have to take care to avoid the major roads where we’d quickly be mowed down by trucks. We pretty much have to plan as though we were on bicycles, following the smaller provincial roads through the countryside and trying the skirt as many of the big cities as possible. Riding all day long we can only manage about 200 km a day. We make about 40 km per liter of fuel (100 mpg), but the tank only holds 3 liters. At the first gas station, we found a 4-liter plastic container, which has been our auxiliary tank ever since, giving us a range of nearly of about 280 km. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1010279.JPG People in China generally drive like idiots; going the wrong way on the shoulder, launching up onto the road without even slowing down at the intersection, weaving all over the lane in a three wheel cart while talking on a phone, performing a left turn by slowly mowing through oncoming traffic. In some ways the demeanor on the road has a distinctly African feel. All of this said, there is rarely any mal intent or aggression behind any of it. People are used to lots of motorbikes everywhere and are genuinely mindful of us on the road. Unless they need to turn left and you happen to be coming from the other direction – in that case, avoiding them is your problem. It’s taken me about a week to get into the swing of things and to stop being the angriest white man in China. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...2/P1010233.JPG I wanted to come to China because I thought it would be strange and so far I’ve not been disappointed. One night we set out in a town looking for food and found a lady frying up tofu in a street cart. Awesome! Except when it was ready, she slathered it in some gray brown sauce that seriously smelled like it had come from a break in the sewer line. This was my introduction to a Chinese classic, called ‘Stinky Tofu’. The stink has nothing redeemable about it like stinky French cheese for instance. It seriously smells like an outhouse. It’s radical. I can’t believe people eat it. Another night, we checked into a hotel and quickly noticed that it was cooking hot everywhere in the building even though it was cold outside. It seemed that we’d inadvertently checked into some spa-hotel place with the idea to cook the ailments out of their guests. Every time we left the lobby, we had to check our shoes in and head upstairs in funny little slippers. I wasn’t into it. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-K...2/P1010283.JPG The reason we ended up at Hotel Hotness was that we’d been told that only certain hotels are licensed to serve foreigners. When we’d tried to check into a simple guesthouse in a small town, the police quickly arrived to tell us that we had to leave the town. The place they wanted us to go was 80 km away and it had just started getting dark. We flat out refused to go on the grounds that it was too dangerous to ride off now. They said that we were in a disputed autonomous region called Liao Ning Province and it was for our own safety that we should leave. So, leave, and go hurtling through the darkness on the highway on our tiny little bike. Safely. That made perfect sense. We went back and forth a few times until the police finally agreed that they would call a truck to drive us out of town with the bike. A free ride - stoked! These guys really did want us out of town! During the time we were waiting for the truck, half the town had turned up to the hotel to meet the crazy foreigners riding the silly little bike. No one seemed the least bit threatening to our safety other than a guy who tried to make us eat some chicken feet. Those looked pretty dangerous. We’ve since learned that such a license to serve foreigners used to be needed, but no longer - the requirement was revoked in 2003. However, some local police still tell guesthouses that they need this license, which doesn’t exist. It’s all down to the whim of the local police and we’ve also learned some local jurisdictions have outlawed foreigners from being in their cities altogether. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1010306.JPG With a population more than 2 billion strong, China is utterly filled to the brim with people. We run into big towns and full-on cities constantly. For us, it’s been a dramatic change from the sparsely populated regions in Mongolia and Siberia. Signs of the fastest growing economy in the world are everywhere from massive infrastructure projects to huge housing developments. Explosions of fireworks regularly punctuate the afternoon as fireworks heralding the completion of a new building. The first time it happened nearby I nearly ran for cover. We rode beneath expressways tiered up with more pillars that we could count spanning massive wide valleys and saw the skylines of town after town edged with scores of brand new skyscrapers and more on the way up. All of this growth requires plenty of energy, but they do seem to keep their nuclear power a bit close for comfort. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1010389.JPG Sites that preserve China’s heritage persist right alongside the boomtowns. Riding towards Beijing, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go for a hike along the Great Wall. It had taken us more than a week to reach Beijing riding from the Russian border and we were more than happy to spend some time moving on our feet rather than on our butts. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...2/P1010354.JPG We set out up onto the wall from the village of Gubeikou, where the wall is in a pretty ruinous state, but there are no tourist crowds like there are at some of the restored sections of the wall. It was a harder hike than we’d guessed climbing and dropping along ridgelines on an uneven surface of cracked and dislodged stones that formed this wild section of the wall. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-N...2/P1010336.JPG Along the way, we met an Australian couple Dan and Nadine, also hiking the same section of The Wall, on a trip out from their home in Kuala Lumpur. They were the first foreigners we’d seen the entire time in China. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...2/P1010365.JPG We hiked towards a restored section at a place called Jinshanling, before retreating the same direction that we’d come just before dusk. On the way out, we’d scoped out a good guard tower that we’d commandeer for the night. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-I...2/P1010385.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-y...2/P1010379.JPG We’d sent our warmest sleeping bag back to California with the bike, and the temperature dropped low enough that we spent a cold, angry night trying to find some warmth at bottom of our sleeping bags. I had both of our raincoats over top of my sleeping bag in an effort to retain some heat. From 2 AM onwards, Jamie and I were both barely in and out of consciousness and just waiting for sun to rise. Finally the stars began to fade as the sun rose behind the hills. As tough a night as it was, it still felt worthwhile when we caught the morning view of the wall in the golden glow of sunrise. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1010378.jpg We’d ridden more than a 1200 miles to reach Beijing and still have double that distance to go to reach the other side of China. Jamie is practicing her Chinese and I’m trying to learn to navigate our minuscule moto through the city chaos like a Zen Master rather than a confused tourist. The journey has slowed to a snail’s pace, but at least we’re back on two wheels with the wind in our face. It still seems like a long way before I’ll get some bugs on my board again. |
Really enjoyed reading your posts on your a endure shame
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This is really becoming surreal. I thought you were following the bike and now you are riding a gruesome moped across China? You spent the night on the Great Wall? My head is spinning. Nothing is impossible. I feel fairly certain you will soon cross paths with Salvador Dali who isn't actually dead but tonking around a village in China, unbeknown to us all. Please keep taking pictures or nothing will be believed.
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I thought it was strange to find a dude with a pointy 'stache speaking Spanish in the middle of China!
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Edges of Africa - Part II
Hey guys - forgot to post up the latest video installment of the Africa journey - please enjoy..
https://vimeo.com/135750542 https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s...1%252520PM.png |
Long Way for a Wave
I love the way you went for a 49cc moped after the 650. This is a proper epic ride report!
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"We’ve since learned that such a license to serve foreigners used to be needed, but no longer - the requirement was revoked in 2003. However, some local police still tell guesthouses that they need this license, which doesn’t exist. It’s all down to the whim of the local police and we’ve also learned some local jurisdictions have outlawed foreigners from being in their cities altogether."
Who ever told you that is wrong.It is a legal requirement enforced in certain parts of China.Same as when you are given foreign expert work visa and your employer has to take you down to the local police station and "introduce" you to the local police powers that be in certain parts of China. They are partly right that it can be up to the local police whether they are going to enforce it.Small towns will be more of a problem than bigger cities . You stand out like dogs balls as two foreigners who have just bought a shiny new motorcycle travelling through China to me. China what one person/ Govt dept says one day/week can change very quickly goes through out China. Enjoy China. |
Well, we certainly stand out - most of the town seems to know we're there withing a few hours. But the bike is no longer shiny :thumbdown:
Our understanding is that hotels must register us with the local police in all cases, but that there is no longer a special license required for them to be able to host foreigners. This expat teacher of 10 years is fluent in Chinese seems to have gone through quite a lot of trouble to get to the bottom of this non-existent license: https://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/chin...tion-tutorial/ According to her research, the license was revoked by the Two Parties Congress of 2003, and now, most hotels have the nationwide standardized system for registering hotel guests. Indeed, we have seen the exact screenshots of the registration system for foreigners from her blog post behind the counter of the many hotels that turn us away. All that said, I'm sure the local police have the final say anyway, so who the hell knows. |
"nationwide standardized system" in China yeah right.
I wouldn't be to worried about being not allowed to stay at certain hotels it's going to happen if your going the back roads route. I would be more concerned about riding across China with no Chinese C1E license no insurance and the bike probably registered in someone else's name. Have an accident be it your fault or not and human ATM comes to mind. Enjoy China |
actually, its not registered at all :eek3:
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Kung Fu Riding in the Middle Kingdom
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Between daily servings of diesel dust we’ve found some places in China worth the work to get there. But with the regular visits of the local police to our door, truck backups, and an endless supply of cities, it isn’t exactly the overland adventurer’s dream destination. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1010457.JPG We couldn’t leave Beijing without a visit to the Forbidden City, home to emperors and the political center of China for centuries. It seemed like about half of China had the same idea, and we spent the day in the midst of thongs of Chinese tourists. During the city’s heyday, only the servants and councilors of the emperor were allowed in the city and some of the emperors spent their entire lives within the city walls. It was a cool place, but hard to appreciate from within the crowd. As soon as we procured our Vietnam visa we motored out of Beijing, heading southwest. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...2/P1010461.JPG Despite the challenges, China is a very moto-friendly place. The road usually has a massive shoulder and in the cities there’s nearly always an entirely separate lane with a curbed divider for bicycles and scooters. In the cities, you’ve got grandmas, 10 year old girls, and couples with a little kid hanging off the back or a baby chilling in the front basket; all zipping around on little scooters. Most people are on their phones and don’t seem to be paying much attention and hardly anyone wears a helmet, but they ride pretty slowly. Drivers are very used to having motorbikes and scooters around, so they’re pretty good about watching out for them. With so many fewer cars, it hugely alleviates traffic and parking problems in big cities like Beijing. China is light years ahead of the U.S. on this front, where it seems to be the default position that everyone should be driving around in a massive truck, but we make a few concessions for fanatics and daredevils that want to get where they’re going on two wheels. Now without our tent and the weather still a bit cold at night to sleep out in the open, we’re constantly searching for a place to stay. Accommodation is great value when you can find it, with comfortable rooms usually available for less than $20 USD. The problem is finding one that will take us since most places don’t seem to serve foreigners. One night we spent 5 hours looking, tried a dozen hotels, and were turned away by all of them. We gave up and started looking for a building site instead, figuring that we could just sleep the night in some unfinished concrete structure. Every place we tried, we were met with a barking dog from the darkness that convinced us to turn around. We were exhausted and on our way to just pass out in the bushes, when we finally ran into a place that let us stay. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1010472.JPG With Jamie’s tutelage I finally learned to say a few things in Mandarin, but it honestly gets me into more trouble than it’s worth. Saying my one thing I know how to say usually prompts the other person to start rattling off in Mandarin. It gets really funny when they start writing things down in Chinese characters to help me understand. I look down at random arrangements of elongate apostrophes grouped together in cubes, and they look up at me expectantly. I mostly sit there nodding with my eyebrows raised and smiling stupidly; the most confused white man in China. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-M...2/P1080916.JPG The level of development in China is like nothing I’ve ever seen in the world. Every town we pass is a big town and most of them have a whole bunch of 20-30 story buildings going up. The road infrastructure is way overbuilt with far more lanes than are needed for the cars currently on the road. It’s just unbelievable. They’ve really planned a lot of the cities out well. The country highways, however, are a different story. We spend days at a time in a sea of trucks, all of them the same open-bed style, carrying I have no idea what. There are literally thousands of them. Without the trucks there would be hardly any traffic on the rural roads. The only thing that I can think is that they are carrying either coal or road-building materials. We arrive everywhere with our faces covered in diesel dust, looking something like Alice Cooper during his glory days. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q...2/P1080908.JPG I don’t think that there are any right of way rules, or if there are, no one knows them or follows them. Every intersection is a slow game of chicken. The only way anyone ever makes a left turn is to mow through the oncoming traffic until they can kind of merge into the opposite lane. No one ever stops before entering a highway. If there isn’t a vehicle directly in front of them, the standard procedure is to just launch up onto the road regardless of what’s coming. A blind corner in the middle of a traffic lane however is a perfectly acceptable place to stop for a chat. We see near misses constantly. When there is a collision, both drivers get out and start yelling at each other. With no rules for who gives way, I’ve no idea how you might determine who is at fault. I suppose that’s why they both yell. On the Suzuki, we could use our speed to squirt us out of potentially dangerous situations, but now our only defense is slowness. As long as we move slow enough we can usually rely on the fact that someone won’t intentionally run us down. Usually. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1010483.JPG We’ve had some hard days on the road riding this little bike slogging through one city after another or navigating the truck-scape. Most days we do nothing other than ride all day long. Progress is slow, and some days I’ve just ended up cursing China altogether at the top of my lungs as we putted along. One day we didn’t even make 100 kilometers as we got stuck in the middle of one huge truck jam after another. The first one went for at least 5 kilometers and the trucks were wedged so tightly together that the only way we could get through was to take both of our packs off the sides and wear them while we threaded through them. It was super not fun. We ran into another truck jam that went on for 12 kilometers. Some of the cities won’t let the truck pass through during the day, so they’re just lined up waiting for the entire day. There are moments that China has drained my adventure spirit altogether. Jamie takes it all in stride better than I do and keeps us on track. After five days of riding, we arrived at the Shaolin Monastery, birthplace of the martial art of Kung Fu. The temple grounds were shrouded in the mountain mist and the air was a still as a Kung Fu master's mind. Since I still carry my 12 year-old-self around with me, I thought this would be the coolest thing ever, because Kung Fu is rad. According to Chinese legend, it originated during the semi-mythical Xia dynasty, some 4,000 years ago. The Shaolin style of Kung Fu is regarded as one of the first institutionalized Chinese martial arts. I’ve since learned that in Chinese, the term Kung Fu doesn’t refer to the martial art exclusively, but to any skill that is acquired through learning and practice. So you can do some Kung Fu cooking or be a Kung Fu programmer. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g...2/P1010517.JPG The young students of the local Kung Fu schools punched, kicked, and flipped at one another demonstrating their mastery of the art. Everybody was Kung Fu fighting. Those cats were fast as lightning. Our display was slightly less impressive. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-B...2/P1010532.JPG On the way down from visiting the Shaolin Temple, the mist turned to rainfall and showed no signs of stopping. Our $5 rain gear was beginning to disintegrate. I had a massive hole ripped in the crotch of my rain pants that I didn’t know about until I started feeling like I’d wet my pants. There’s also a big rip up the side of one of the legs from kick starting the bike that I tuck into my sock to keep it from flapping in the breeze. We’re both wearing our Keen sandals, since they’re now the only shoes we have, so our feet get soaked right away, but at least our socks are wool. Wearing two pairs of wool socks is now my version of motorcycle footwear. We’ve been traveling non-stop and have only one pair of pants each, so our clothes are constantly filthy. In our tattered rain gear, inappropriate footwear, and heavy metal diesel face paint, we’ve got a distinct zombie apocalypse look. I don’t think our bike can outrun a zombie though. Sometimes I have to push it. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1080926.JPG The clutch on the bike had started sticking and it picked the moment we were entering a city, on a bridge to get stuck completely. The arm attached to the engine case was jammed so that it wouldn’t engage the engine at all. Here we were on a bridge in the midst of city traffic and getting soaked and I can’t even get the bike moving. It’s moments like this that I wonder why in the hell we’re doing this at all. The only way I could manage it was to use my right foot to kick the clutch arm free while giving some throttle at the same time. The first couple tries I just did a quick wheelie as the clutch popped free and then killed the engine, but I got the hang of it. Once we got off the bridge and moving I just matched the revs to the gearbox and shifted without the clutch, but every time we came to a stop and had to pull the clutch in and it would stick again. After a bit of Kung Fu riding we made it into town and found a guy tinkering in little scooter garage to unstick the clutch lever. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1010550.JPG It was slow going as we headed for the pits of the Terracotta Warriors. We rode for a couple more days towards the city of Xi’an and we froze when we gained a thousand meters of altitude. We just don’t have the gear to ride in the cold anymore, and once again we've found ourselves trying to outrun the winds of winter. When the rain started in again, we were just too cold and had to hole up for the night after only making 80 km’s for the day.The terracotta warriors are these exquisite figures were made to protect the first emperor of China, Ying Zheng, in the afterlife. More than two thousand of them have been exhumed since a farmer digging his well discovered them in 1974, and they’re still digging more out. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1010569.JPG They stand in row upon row within the very pits that they were buried. There are archers, infantryman, charioteers, and officers; each of their faces distinct from one another. It’s sort of an eerie sight; all of them lined up like that, seemingly assembled for their duty in the afterlife. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-z...2/P1010581.JPG Every time I look at the map I grossly overestimate how far we can ride in a day. It’s difficult to wrap my head around how slowly we’re moving, and when we get lost, have some mechanical trouble, or can’t find the way across a river it just feels like we’re not getting anywhere at all. One morning I came out to find a deflated rear tire squashed beneath our beastly machine. We just pushed the bike around the corner to the local scooter shop to put in a new tube and change the oil while we were there. A scooter shop never seems to be more than a block away and the value is fantastic. A new tube along with a liter of oil and the mechanics work came to a total of 60 Yuan, which is about $9.50 USD. There are faster and easier ways to get across China, but I can’t imagine a cheaper one. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-f...2/P1010537.JPG In the North, practically all we ever see being farmed are small cornfields. It’s fall here, so the corn has been picked and husked (by hand about everywhere we’ve seen) and now every surface available is occupied by corn drying in the sun – driveways, public squares, highway lane dividers and even entire traffic lanes have all been taken over by the local farmers. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1010609.JPG We’ve spent so much time riding through really uninteresting landscape in China it was great to finally find somewhere that made us excited to walk up a hill. Zhangjiajie National Park is filled with sandstone and quartzite spires all standing at attention amidst the gaping abyss. The scene is truly otherworldly and reminiscent of the the digital worlds created for Hollywood movies like Avatar or Maleficent. The place feels prehistoric, as though a pterodactyl gliding amongst the pillars wouldn’t seem out of place. We walked along a stream valley, slowly ascending into this freak of geology. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-h...2/P1010654.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1010651.jpg Tiny enclaves of vegetation perched at the top of the pillars and spilled down the vertical pink and white rock to the jungle below. I can't imagine a landscape better suited to a set of wings. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1010670.JPG In Chinese, the word for America means the Beautiful Land, and China is known as the Middle Kingdom. China certainly feels like the center of the world with all of the people here and there are some beautiful places to be found between the city slogging and truck dodging. Foreigners are a rare sight most of the places we've been riding, but people have been very kind to us the whole way along. Our little bike has pushed us to about the middle of the Middle Kingdom, and we’re just hoping it can keep pushing us to the southern edge of it. It’s a lot to ask of a meager 48cc’s of displacement, but at least it’s faster than pedaling. Barely. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1010469.JPG |
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I've seen them do more than yell at each other after an accident. It's easy for them and the police to determine if they have an accident with you who's at fault. |
Manufacturiing Stoke in the South China Sea
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We rode south towards the Nan Mountains and as the temperature rose, the cornfields that had been a constant element of the scenery slowly transformed to rice, cotton, and sugarcane. http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...bbbebaf4093b8c https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T...2/P1010603.JPG We shot by storefronts piled high with cotton drying in the sun. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2...2/P1010594.JPG The good new is that the bike is still running. The headset keeps coming loose, the fork travel is notchy, I constantly need to adjust the clutch, the headlight burnt out, and the rear springs produce a horrendous racket. I asked half a dozen places for a new oil filter before I learned that there is no oil filter. She’s a delicate little machine and anything plastic breaks off with the slightest bit of force. The drum brakes feel like I’d do better just putting my feet down to stop us and I have to get the revs just right to convince her to change gears. But even with all of her faults, she’s been plugging along for thousands of kilometers now, which is honestly more than we’d hoped. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-y...2/P1010678.JPG The other good news is that we finally left behind the never-ending lines of trucks and cities packed so close together that the outskirts of one always seemed to touch the outskirts of the other. Open country lanes wound out in front of us, with ornate little bridges leading to villages, and pointy pagodas flanking the road. Even on this bike, it was fun railing through turn after turn on a road that snaked up a river gorge. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Z...2/P1010696.JPG The perfect tarmac that we’d become accustomed to disappeared and was replaced by old concrete roads with ditches and ridges across the entire lane. Every one that we hit too fast jarred us to the bone and made me wonder how big a hit the bike could take without bending a rim or cracking the frame. Eventually the concrete and tarmac went away all together and we were left with a rutted, muddy, gravel road. We moved at an absolute crawl trying to avoid the biggest of the holes and wincing at the ones we couldn’t. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-d...2/P1010684.JPG Crossing one rickety suspension bridge was a hair-raising affair. I could hear each board slap against the steel below as though it was trying to find a way to slip down into the underlying abyss and I could feel the whole thing swaying beneath me in the wind. I was fully puckered when I saw sections ahead with boards missing and just hoped there wasn’t a big enough hole to swallow my front tire. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...2/P1010704.JPG We went out for a distinctly Chinese dining experience called ‘hot pot’, where you cook your own food in a little pot with a stove inset to your table. First of all, in China when anyone asks you if you want something ‘la’ (spicy), don’t say a little bit. The correct answer is no. A little bit makes you feel like you need to run around outside in the cool night air with your mouth open. Within the first few bites my tongue was numb. I had trouble regulating my little table stove, so that my pot was constantly roiling vigorously and I was talking to Jamie from behind a cloud of steam. I didn’t do a very good job cooking, but by the end of the meal my pores felt remarkably clear. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...2/P1010693.JPG Lots of things in China are funny to western eyes. Sometimes they make us cry, but mostly they make us laugh. Here are a few: Celebrity status. There just aren’t very many foreigners around in China, so we catch people staring at us all the time. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I catch someone taking a photo with their phone. I like to imagine they think we’re famous people. Lugis. Spitting seems to be the most popular way of sharing with your fellow citizen. People spit everywhere – into the public sink, at the restaurant table, next to your feet – it makes no matter, there is a universal aversion to swallowing your own saliva. Smokytime China is a seriously smokey place. Nowhere is safe. People light up in the elevator next to you. Duck herders. I did a double take the first time I saw an old guy walking on the road with a long stick behind a massive flock of ducks. It kinda made me happy. Big Brother. When the police aren’t keeping tabs on us I’d swear that there is someone on the other end of the internet tube looking in. Access is chronically slow everywhere and I always imagine a little Chinese man in a little room manning an enormous internet switchboard examining every page I’m trying to load and deciding whether it's fit for viewing. Vegetarian stuff always has meat in it. There is no direct way to say to someone in Mandarin that we eat vegetarian. Jamie always tells people that we don’t eat meat, but the word for meat in Mandarin means pork. So that essentially communicates that we’re cool with cow, chicken, lamb, snake, dog, whatever. The next approach is to say ‘we eat vegetables’ and point to a menu picture of a dish with loads of vegetables and no meat in sight, but that often just gets a plate of meaty vegetables. And sometimes, inexplicably, results in a steaming bowl of meat. Chinglish. Funny translations of English phrases are constant entertainment. Yesterday I bought a bag of “numb and spicy” flavored chips and Jamie got some peanuts that were “smelling in cream”. In one hotel shower there was a small sign that read ‘Before falling, please step carefully”, and the information sheet informed us that we would be “charged 60 Yuan for each additional bumhole”. I didn’t even know it was that kind of hotel. We rode into one city with the coolest two-wheeled transit system ever. Below the elevated roads for the cars was a network of narrow lanes for the scooters. It was amazingly liberating, zipping around the city without having to contend with truck and bus drivers. We flowed along the lanes like a fish in our school, unable to determine who was leading the way, being driven as much as driving ourselves. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-o...2/P1010697.jpg When we arrived at a hotel, the receptionist immediately called the police without any explanation and told us to stay put. Apparently we’d landed in a town with a military base that was restricted to foreigners. Oopsie. The plice agent arrived and told us that we couldn’t stay in the town. Not this again! It was already dark and fortunately rear tire on the bike had just gone flat, so we weren’t going anywhere. I showed him the tire and after a half hour of questioning via Google Translate he seemed satisfied that we weren’t spies. We were allowed to stay in the town but he made it very clear that under no condition were we to leave the hotel. We had packet noodles to eat and so were perfectly happy under house arrest. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7...2/P1010702.JPG Our experience has been that almost no one China speaks even a little tiny bit of English. It seems odd since it seems to be studied in schools universally and there are signs in English all over the place. You can go to the most flash looking hotel with the word ‘International’ in the title, but it doesn’t matter – not a word. This is pretty understandable, really, with two billion people speaking Chinese, and very few foreigners about, why would anyone speak English. We’re completely dependent on Jamie’s basic Chinese skills to find somewhere to eat and sleep. My vocabulary now includes four words that I use up pretty quickly upon entering a restaurant. Without preface, I generally walk in and say “hello….beer…cold.” Seems pretty rude sounding, really. If I learn the word for ‘now’, then I can make my staple phrase unmistakably rude, “hello…beer…cold….….now.” https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m...2/P1010727.JPG We rode for days through the Nan Mountains of southern China enjoying the scenery immensely. The landscape was dotted with these pointy little hills everywhere. Our road had us bouncing from one hill to another amongst the rice fields as we made our way south. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1010708.JPG We finally reached the edge of the mainland and took a ferry across the across the Qiongzhou channel in search of a wave to ride on a big Island. I knew that there was swell in the water, so as the sun sank we raced to get to the beach (racing for us is 50 km/hr (31 mph.) We reached the south coast of the island a couple hours before dark and found the local surf club, which had loads of boards available to use. The last place I’d been surfing was two continents away on the west coast of Norway, so when I saw a ruler edged left hander reeling along the reef I was frothing to get in the water. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...2/P1010874.JPG I traded waves into the darkness with just one other surfer – a guy from Cuba who was in China on a business trip. I had imagined riding this wave while slogging through countless Chinese cites and now I was trimming along one after another in the fading light. It had been too long out the water and I was stoked to be sliding waves again. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m...2/P1010793.JPG This wave really has no business being here at all. A cursory look at the map would tell you that the South China Sea is not the place to go looking for waves. Generally, we’re after an expansive body of water where a storm can get cooking over a large area, sending swell energy towards the coastline without the storm being right on top of the coastline. The biggest and most consistent swells happen in oceans, not moderately sized seas. Both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean outsize the South China Sea by a fair margin area-wise. Nonetheless, some magical combination of geography, atmospheric dynamics, and ocean conditions have created a wonder of a wave here. On the right swell, the reef churns out multiple pitching tube sections. My Cuban friend and I weren’t exactly hooting at each other in stand-up backside barrels, but it was still pretty fun. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-W...2/P1010821.JPG The waves were biggest on the first night and slowly tapered off during the coming days. They ended up perfect size for Jamie to come out and surf and we had a super fun couple of days riding waves together. The swell finally just about died completely and I grabbed the paddle board to slide some micro waves and try to do something about one of the major hazards of adventure moto-scootering: the most ridiculous farmer tan you’ve ever seen. Three days before we arrived it had gotten too hot to wear my insulated jacket while riding, which quickly turned me into a two-toned moto-hobo. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-A...2/P1010881.JPG We’ve ridden more than six and a half thousand kilometers across China during the last 6 weeks with barely any time off of the bike. It felt like pure luxury to just not be headed somewhere new every morning. The beach was gorgeous and I couldn’t complain about the company. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...2/P1010928.JPG After 5 days of surfing we made ready for the journey south into Vietnam. We had the choice to head for a border crossing via Dong Dang or Dong Hung. On the way to Dong Hung we’d pass through Wang Dong. I promise I’m not making these names up. It’s pretty much impossible to map out a route through Southern China without giggling like a 6th grader. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-w...2/P1010948.JPG Riding along the north coast of Vietnam sounds like it would be absolutely epic, but the problem is that we have no idea whether we’ll have a bike to ride. Given the information available, we most likely that won’t be able to cross the border with the bike. Like China, Vietnam restricts the entry of foreign bikes. We’ve been unable to find any account of a traveler successfully making this crossing with a bike and several accounts of failed attempts. Our only hope is that the absurdity of such a journey on this little bike makes them laugh enough to give us a pass. Fingers crossed. |
Well done not many people can ride/drive across China it takes a certain mindset to achieve pig headed stubbornness is one of them.China is the fourth largest land area country in the world. 6 weeks emm 6 weeks doing Xinjiang is to short.You can catch a wave in Hangzhou at certain times if your real keen.
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China certainly tested our resolve at times. It has been a fantastic place, but we were ready to be moving on....
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Good Morning Vietnam
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We were delayed heading south from China by rain that came down in sheets as we hopped from one covered spot to the next.http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...0782077e591b09 We were anxious to get to the border and find out whether or not we’d be able to continue the ride. By all accounts we’d found, we wouldn’t be able to bring the bike through the border due to Vietnam's restriction on foreign bikes. The Beilun River forms the border between Vietnam and China at Mong Cai, with a border post situated on opposite banks. We rolled up to the Chinese side and were turned away immediately by the guard. I thought that we’d at least make it out of China! He told us in no uncertain terms that no motorbikes were allowed to cross that bridge, “It is not possible to ride motorbike.” We could go, but the bike had to stay. Someone came over to help translate, and we went back and forth for about 20 minutes with me trying every avenue of persuasion I could to at least help us identify an alternative. But it was to no avail. We rolled down from the gate in defeat. We could take heart in the fact that we’d already accomplished what we’d originally set out to do: we’d ridden across China under our own power, on our own schedule, without a guide shuttling us about. With nearly 7 thousand kilometers on the clock of our little machine, we’ve gotten our money’s worth and then some. The police didn’t nab us and a truck didn’t cream us, so I was calling it a win for team moto hobo. Dogged persistence had paid off in the past, so I decided to give it one more try. I walked into the immigration hall as though leaving China and found a customs agent that could speak some English. I showed him the map of our journey, a picture of the bike, and told him where we were headed. I could tell he was stoked on it, and now on my side. He made a call, then went off to talk to someone and told me to stay put. After a half hour, another guy came over, asked a couple of questions, and then simply said, ‘OK’. OK? OK what? I can ride the bike across the bridge that no motorbike can cross? Awesome! But that wasn’t quite right. He shook his head and indicated that I should bring the bike up the stairs into the immigration hall. Really? Bring it in here? Whatever you say boss! I motored the bike up the stairs and then rolled it straight through the immigration counter where they stamped our passports as though it was a piece of wheeled luggage that just happened to have an engine attached to it. They even turned off the metal detector so that I could roll it through. And just like that, something that wasn’t possible an instant ago became so. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s...2/P1010951.JPG That was supposed to be the easy part, but now the task was to get into Vietnam on the other side of the bridge. If we couldn’t make it through, someone on that bridge was going to win a free scooter. I pushed the bike through the immigration counter as though I did it every day. Mind the oil drips folks! Everything seemed cool, but then we saw trouble in our path: stomach pouting heavily over the belt, thin mustache, overtly lounging posture, and relishing in the kowtowing of underlings. We had a class 5 proud-belly big-boss on our hands, and he looked darn grumpy. He halted our progression through the hall gave us a ‘slow down there partner’ sign, all without even interrupting the rocked-back attitude of his chair. I flashed my biggest silly tourist grin. We waited while his officers made some calls. We had no plate, no license, and no documents for our petrol burning luggage rack being wheeled through this hallway. I didn’t even have a sales receipt. I exhaled too soon, this isn’t going to work at all. After a tense 10 minutes of waiting, I’d yet again resigned us to failure, but to my disbelief, he gave us the go ahead. Thirty steps later were free of the hall then out the gate. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it would at least cost us a bit of cash. We get to ride the coast of Vietnam, Yahooo! https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O...2/P1010964.JPG The first stop was to check out the geological marvels of Bai Tu Long and Ha Long Bay on the north coast of Vietnam. On the north coast of Vietnam, we rode through one fishing village after another, trying to get a view of the coastline that we’d heard so much about. We finally found our way out to a bustling little port at Bai Tu Long where fishermen hauled supplies from shore, jockeyed boats for a space at the dock, and women paddled from one colorful boat to another. I’ve never seen a coastline like it – the bay was dotted with thousands little domed islands with bright white limestone cliff faces. We’d hoped to find a boat to take us for a cruise around the islands, but it was pretty clear that we were in the wrong place unless we wanted to go fishing. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...2/P1010960.JPG We motored on to Ha Long Bay and it felt as though we had landed on planet backpacker. The place was utterly overrun with hordes of twenty-somethings toting enormous packs on and off of tour boats. We’d been off of the tourist track for a long time and it was strange to land in the middle of a place where everyone speaking English, trying to get us to sign up for a tour, and come to the bar for jello shots. Backpacker madness aside, the majesty of that bay was undeniable. It was a truly fantastical scene as we motored our way through narrow channels between the islands and alongside their towering walls. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-C...2/P1020024.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g...2/P1020008.JPG Riding south, we escaped the swell shadow of China’s Hainan Island, I was amped to get our first view of the coast exposed to swell. We saw a number of little beachbreaks that looked well worth having a surf, but I still had to find a board to ride. All I could do was stand there watching, wondering if anyone had ever surfed them. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1020053.JPG Headed for Da Nang, we tried to wait out a storm in Dong Ha, but the next morning it just kept up, so we had nothing to do but get riding and get wet. We rode pretty slowly and stopped at little shops for Vietnamese coffees when the worst of the downpours came. We got caught in a real torrent coming over Lang Co pass towards Da Nang. The pass marks the divide between the former North and South Vietnam and below the road are situated disused French and American army bunkers. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1090146.JPG It’s been strange to think of the fact that we’re here to tour around and have a good time, while the Americans here during our parents generation came to fight. My dad joined up when he was just 17 and was part of operation Starlight, one of the first major offensives, launched not far south of where we now rode. On the American side, the war was part of a larger containment policy, to stop the spread of communism, but to the North Vietnamese, it was a fight to expel foreign colonial forces, first the French and then the Americans. The human toll of the fighting was huge, felt much harder on the Vietnamese side, with casualties estimated in the millions. Soldiers like my dad didn’t get to decide whether or not the war was a good idea, they just had to go fight, and the people in the villages caught up in the middle of it all did what they could to survive. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...2/P1020092.JPG We visited a town that spent the entire war underground. They had an elaborate system of tunnels dug into a hill and for years rarely came above ground during the day unless absolutely necessary. I was pretty happy to get out of those tunnels after 20 minutes, so I can’t imagine what was going on above ground to keep people down there for years. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6...2/P1020084.JPG We met a woman named Tam who had a small café and lots of stories about life during the war. Her café is plastered with images from that time. She was just 14 when she learned English and became an interpreter for the Americans. Her family had nothing to eat and working for the Americans made life a lot better. When Saigon fell in 1975, she and her family found themselves on the losing side - collaborators with the enemy. The North Vietnamese took everything from them, her brother was imprisoned for 7 years, and the rest of the family was soon forced out of Da Nang and into the nearby mountains to try to survive. Decades later, things are much better, Tam has her little café and her brother has lived in the U.S. for the last 30 years, but hard feelings still persist. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-c...2/P1090264.JPG Communism won the war, but since then, Vietnam has adopted a largely open, free market economy. Lifting of the U.S. trade embargo in 1994 and the continued interest of international investors has driven Vietnam to be one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Da Nang is a bustling city filled with nice cafes, restaurants and hotels, and lots of foreigners that call it home. Everyone has a scooter to ride, and the city is a swarm with them. Young people weren’t alive during the war and seem to look mostly to the future and the opportunities now at hand. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1090266.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2...2/P1090262.JPG We left the rain behind in the mountains on the way down to the beach in Da Nang. The sun was shining, we found some little waves breaking, and a surf shack owned by a Portuguese expat called Goncalo. Stoked. I spun donuts on the beach in celebration. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2%252520PM.png Jamie and I grabbed some boards from Goncalo and rode the beachbreak for a few days, hanging 5 on China Beach. Jamie is still new to surfing, so the waves were perfect size for her and surfing with her makes micro-waves fun for me too. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Q...2/P1090245.JPG We hung around Da Nang for 5 days waiting for a swell to arrive that I’d hoped would bring a nearby point to life. Goncalo surfed it all the time and assured me that it was worth the wait. He nearly always surfs it alone and was happy to have some company in the water. To my great disappointment, the forecast swell never materialized and I had to be content with longboard cruising on the beachbreak. We’ve now run out of time to wait for swell, with our Vietnamese visa expiring in 2 days it was time to head for the Laos border. Of course the morning we’re to leave, the bike wouldn’t start. Luckily it turned out to be just a bad spark plug. When I popped in a new one, she roared back to life - as much of a roar that a 48cc can muster anyway. We left Da Nang and ascended back into the mountains and crossed the Ho Chi Min Trail with impossibly fluffy clouds accumulating along the ridge tops. We were headed for Laos and feeling pretty content to still be moving forward on two wheels. |
The madness continues. I have no idea how you have got away with what you have got away with but I am expecting great things now from you at every border crossing. And I am now more certain than ever that 50cc is too small for my elderly self. Nevertheless beggars can't be choosers and what you have done beggars belief.
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Hey you guys are on a roll, obviously the cosmos is gunning for you right now. Lovely RR and you're gonna love Laos (no surfing there though, I'm pretty sure!), the scenery there looks like ha long bay but with an ocean of bright green paddy fields, instead of the blue of the ocean. Enjoy!!
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Awesome!!!
How cool is that? Riding through China not only without guide, but two-up on a 49cc moped and then even crossing into Vietnam with it.
Great photography, great story, sweet little China moto and you are a fortunate guy having such a wonderful woman sharing your adventure. :thumbup1::thumbup1::thumbup1: |
Inspiring guys , not sure i'd have your patience, first class effort :thumbup1::thumbup1:
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thanks guys! we've definitely had more than our share of luck. it all just feels like gravy at this stage anyway.
She is quite a lady. I swear that I'm still amazed that nothing ever seems to rattle her... |
Out of Step on the Vagabond Trail
Out of Step on the Vagabond Trail
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...2/P1020199.JPG Everything changed in Laos. Gone were the perfect tarmac roads, regularly spaced villages, and petrol stations.http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...830f991ba87fe6 We ascended 1500 meters as we approached the border from Vietnam and were greeted by a lofty, impenetrable wall of jungle. We slowly climbed steep escarpments and coasted down ravines. Houses stood 8 feet in the air on posts in small clearings, barely free of the dense vegetation surrounding them. Intermittently we moved through sections of trees with an incredibly loud, steady, high-pitched whine. Surely it was a symphony of some insects, but I’d never heard anything quite like it before. Suddenly this felt like an adventure again. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-l...2/P1020103.JPG After all the difficulty getting through the Vietnam border, we hoped that Laos would be easier. We parked the bike near the immigration office where all the local bikes were parked, walked in wearing our backpacks, got our passports stamped, got back on the bike and rode away. Just like we did it every day. We didn’t mention anything about a bike and neither did they, so I figured no one cared very much, and just like that, we were off into jungle. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1...2/P1020147.JPG The beaches and little cafés of Da Nang were fantastic, but it was a great feeling to be cruising along in a wild place once again. Both beams on the bike headlight had died and we were very happy to arrive at a small town just in time to escape the deep dark of the jungle that was quickly engulfing us. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-n...2/P1020122.JPG After another day of riding, we arrived at the ancient Khmer Hindu temple called Wat Phu, with structures dating from the 11th to the 13 centuries A.D. We wandered the ruins and sweated our way up the ancient stone staircases in the sweltering heat to the impressive shrine at the top, dedicated to the Hindu diety Shiva. The site later became a center of Theravada Buddhist worship as it remains today, with Buddhist shrines newly refreshed and folks quietly meditating here and there. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--...2/P1020165.JPG We continued west, winding our way along the Mekong River. The most direct route west unfortunately ran straight into the river, but it turned out not to be much of a problem with the help of a local boatman and his resourceful craft. We wheeled the bike out onto a set of planks that he had nailed to the rails of two canoes, joining them together to make his barge that was powered by an outboard motor with a tiny little propeller. We slowly putted to the opposite bank, nursed the bike up the bank through the sand and continued on our way along the river towards the Cambodian border. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-2...2/P1020172.JPG There’s something soul crushing about backtracking. When we’re moving forward, no matter how slow the pace or difficult the conditions, it lightens the heart to know that progress is being made. After hours at the Cambodian border, it was pretty clear that they had no intention of letting us ride our undocumented bike in, no matter how diminutive she appeared. We turned around in defeat and did a full day’s ride the wrong direction. Our best option left was a massive detour around Cambodia through Thailand and try to enter Cambodia from the other side. At least people drive much better in Thailand than in China. They actually look to see what’s coming before launching into a stream of traffic. It’s very relaxing. Jamie reckons I’ve been traumatized by China as I’m constantly honking the horn as we approach any intersection. In China, everyone did it and I got the impression that if you weren’t manically tapping your horn, you would be held responsible for anyone who decided to T-bone you from a side street. It will take awhile to get a handle on my PCSD, but I’m working on it. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-E...P1020216_3.JPG We got to the Thai border and did the same routine as Laos – parked the bike with the others and strolled into the immigration office with our packs. No worries. Out the door and wheeling the bike towards the gate while the customs guys was busy talking with someone else. We were halfway there. Ten more seconds more and we would be out the gate and free to roam across Thailand. A shout came from the customs booth. I ignored it. Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us. A second shout came. I turned around pointing to my chest, eyebrows raised with most innocuous look I could muster. He waves us over. Damn, so close! We went into the office and explained that the bike is from China, and that bikes this size aren’t registered there, and it's really little more than a bicycle, and we’ve ridden so far on it already through mountains and rainstorms, and if they could just allow us to continue the journey they would truly have our eternal gratitude. I was talking about accomplishing some world record for riding a tiny bike and all kinds of other bullshit. We were starting to sound pretty intrepid and heroic by my telling of it. We were provided some initial hope with an attempt to issue us a temporary import permit, but all that I had was the service manual for the bike, which was all in Chinese. They studied the booklet carefully, but it turns out, a Chinese service manual is not sufficient documentation to bring a vehicle across international borders. Go figure. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R...2/P1020207.JPG We were ushered into the big boss office, who turned out to be a wonderfully kind big boss. More dudes with all kinds of official looking pins and stripes on their uniforms piled in. There was a lot of conversation happening, but I didn’t quite understand what it could have been about because they just keep telling us the same thing in no uncertain terms – we must return to Laos with the bike. I kept replying the same thing – that if we can’t take the bike we’re just going to walk away from to border to catch a bus and one of you lucky dudes gets to ride it home. After two hours of back and forth I was running out of avenues to press and we became resigned to just leaving the bike. But something was wrong here…they were still talking to us. Why were they still talking to us? As it turned out, they really wanted to just let us go, but were worried if they might be called to account when the police stopped us for not having a license plate, which they were quite positive would happen. I wasn’t worried about it. I promised that if they helped us, we wouldn’t rat them out for all the tea in Thailand. Finally the biggest big boss just made a waving motion with his hand and the guy who spoke English said, “We never saw you”. We were off again. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...2/P1020236.JPG Given all the effort getting into Thailand, we decided to just hop on the bus to Cambodia to visit the ancient city of Angkor. It was an awesome day riding in a tuk-tuk around Angkor exploring the ruins. We’d never seen anything like it. The styling of the architecture is unique in all the world. Stone pillars rise to the sky from mountainous temples served by grandiose causeways. High walls along with wide moats protect the city. It is an epic feeling place to explore and you can still find corners that are still nearly completely sheathed by the surrounding jungle. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-a...2/P1020281.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-V...2/P1020333.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...2/P1020305.JPG Angkor was the capital of the Khmer people for 600 years starting around 800 A.D. and was the political center and home to a slew of god-kings during that period. It is an exceptionally grandiose example of Hindu dedication to their gods. The main temple, Angkor Wat, is arguably the largest religious building of any kind in the world. Subsequent Khmer kings upped the scale of the display with bigger and bigger temples and on occasion mixed in Buddhist figures and symbols to the temples according to their own beliefs. What we see now is just the spiritual skeleton of the Angkor that was. Most of the city was built of wood and has long since succumbed to the armies of neighboring peoples, and was ultimately reclaimed by the jungle. European ‘re-discovery’ of Angkor in the 1860’s by Portuguese and French explorers was a much celebrated event and the site has grown in popularity ever since. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-9...2/P1020292.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...2/P1020286.jpg https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...c42/Anchor.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-H...2/P1020324.jpg From Angkor, we returned to Thailand and rode to Bangkok for a few days off the bike while we waited for our Indonesian visa to be processed. Indonesia was the next destination where there was a good chance to find some really good surf and I was getting pretty amped to get there. We weren’t looking forward to clawing our way into another big city, and Bangkok didn’t disappoint as we hit some solid gridlock as we approached the center of town. Jamie visited the Grand Palace and I didn’t do much besides drink coffee, enjoy air conditioning, and be glad I was walking around the city rather than trying to ride through it. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0...2/P1090318.JPG Getting out of the city was a dosage of pure madness. With a top speed of about 53 km an hour we were way out of our league on the little bike. Even the little 110cc and 125cc bikes smoked us as we cowered on the side of the road, trying to stay out of the way of everyone. The bike is a bit worse for all the wear after 10,000 km. Her seat broke off completely and I used some quick-set epoxy to re-attach it to the bracket. The right turn signal broke off again and went skittering down the road behind us, and the chain has some stiff links in it causing it to have a varying tension during rotation. But, she’s remarkably still moving forward. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-G...2/P1090355.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-e...2/P1020369.JPG Finally free of the city, we were off to find the prettiest beach we could to swing in a hammock. By the time we hit the Andaman coast of Thailand, we were deep into the well-worn SE Asia vagabond trail. The islands offshore of here were a wandering bohemian’s dream in decades past, with abundant gorgeous beaches and cheap living. Nowadays, most places seemed pretty overrun with Russian package vacationers, Scandinavian expats, European backpackers, and busloads of Chinese sightseers. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-g...2/P1020361.JPG Luxury hotels and resorts lined the beaches and a souvenir shop, a tour agency, or a band of tuk-tuk drivers occupies every corner. A lot of the adventure seems long sucked out by the lucrative commercial appeal of this place. While I'm sure that there are still uncrowded places to find, we just didn't make much of an effort to find them. We were roundly uninspired. There’s great food and the coastline really is spectacular, but in the end it just wasn’t our scene. It's a great thing about being on the road – when somewhere doesn’t suit, it’s a simple thing to just ride on to the next place. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-I...2/P1020351.JPG |
i love checking back in on your travels, what a great adventure and I'm glad that luck shines on you:scooter:
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Long Way for a Wave
Can't believe you've put 10,000k on that thing two-up with luggage! I rented a similar thing in Hampi, India years ago, there's a lot to be said about cruising along on a nifty fifty :)
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totally dig the tiny bike thing now. I think that Asia is particularly suited to rolling small...
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Tales Untold
Tales Untold
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...2/P1090297.JPG We rode as fast as our 48cc’s could muster through the south of Thailand, with fleeting appreciation for the landscape as it passed. http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...55fb734a8aee86We were once again surrounded by karst topography, the ancient limestone hills with pale, sheer walls and rounded tops. I was zoning out a bit looking at the hills, when we were shook by a horrendous jolt from the bike that sounded like we’d run over a baby carriage. I stopped to see if there was in fact a baby wedged beneath the gearbox. The gearbox was baby free, so that was good. When the gearbox wouldn’t engage the rear wheel, I knew that our long-suffering chain had finally given up on us. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-e...2/P1090361.JPG We literally had not even gotten off the bike before a pickup truck came along, I put my thumb out and we had our ride to the next town. We hoisted the bike into the back and Jamie and I squatted next to her for 40 km or so. The truck’s suspension was long dead, the road was bumpy, and I honestly longed for the safety of our motorbike. The new DID branded chain cost $5 USD and we were off again, hardly missing a beat. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6...2/P1020370.JPG https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1090367.JPG At the hotel around the corner I saw a grizzled looking dude wearing a plaid shirt and bike shorts talking to the receptionist with his girlfriend tending a set of fully loaded bicycles. It was obvious that they’d been on a long journey and it soon occurred to me that I’d seen them before. The last time that we’d seen Paul and Jo, they were standing in the skinny shadow of a telephone pole in the Uzbekistan desert. It was the only shade around for miles, there seemed to be no-where to resupply with water, and I thought they were completely mad to be riding bicycles there. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-x...5%252520PM.png It’s been a heroic ride all the way from the U.K and will carry on to Australia and North America ( check out their FB page). Their route across Asia has been much more direct than ours, which wandered through Mongolia and Siberia, but even so, it was a shocker to have them turn up having pedaled the whole way there. We drank beers and commiserated over the unique challenges of traveling in China and the wonders of the Stans. Talking to them helped me remember why we just keep riding and how mad this whole trip has been. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...2/P1020375.JPG Back on the Thai island of Phuket, I’d been looking around for a used board, figuring out how to attach it to the bike, and working out where to catch a ferry to Sumatra. I’d just zip tied my sandal together, hoping they’d hold together awhile longer. I wondered how many more miles the back tire would run and if the wheel bearings were starting to go. But then I got some news that vaporized all of the silly little problems that have occupied our transient world for so long. My dad had just died. The journey was over, and it was time to go home. He had been doing just fine. He was sitting there talking to a doctor when his heart stopped beating and refused to start again. Suddenly it felt as though we’d just been floating along in a dream and that real life was happening on the other side of the world. We loaded up the bike the next morning and rode south, headed for Singapore, where we’d booked a flight back to North America. It would take days to get there, but it felt good to just keep doing what we knew for a while longer. There’s not much better for sorting out your thoughts than sitting on a bike all day long anyway. My dad always seemed like he was born a century or so too late. I’d say he never fully embraced the advent of the telephone. He’s always been more of a ‘see ya when I see ya’ kind of guy, and so that’s how we left it more than two years ago. I’d always expected that when I got back, we’d go sit outside somewhere with a six-pack of Budweiser and I’d get to tell him all about the trip. The sun would be burning off the coastal fog, he’d be sitting there in his U.S. Navy hat, and he’d tell me a new joke and call bullshit on one of my stories. He’d know half of the people who walked by on the sidewalk by name and tell them that I was his son just back from riding around the world and I’d know he was proud. It didn’t work out that way, and I’d give about anything to do that just now. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-8...2/P1090372.JPG Approaching the Malaysian border, we once again wondered whether or not we’d be able to cross a border with the bike. There was a bicycle race happening in honor of the king of Thailand’s birthday with a route that crossed the Malaysian border. After getting our passports stamped, we just pushed our bike through the gate along with all of the bicyclists. No one seemed to mind. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-h...2/P1020381.JPG We spent the days riding through Malaysia dodging storms. They have a real motorbike culture of sorts in Malaysia, which is reflected in the roadway design, with a big shoulder and sometimes an entirely separate lane for bikes that winds its way around tollbooths and through tunnels under the overpasses. It made for quick miles when the sky wasn’t opening up on us. Jamie made me laugh singing songs from animated Disney movies as we rode. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-U...2/P1090380.JPG By the time we reached Singapore we were soggy and exhausted. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-u...2/P1020392.JPG It was time to move on. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-1...2/P1020384.JPG We were having some trouble moving on. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1020383.JPG On the Malaysian side of the border with Singapore, I found a little hole-in-the-wall bike shop, just like one of those that had helped us countless times on the road, run by a very nice lady. Since we had nowhere left to ride I gave her our faithful little bike to take back to her village. Out of the city, someone could use it without having to worry about not having a plate. It felt like giving a little something back to the sort of people who had helped us time and again. We were glad to see our girl go to a good home after all our time on the road together. After 12 thousand kilometers or cheap as chips Chinese bike was still running perfectly. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1020401.JPG We weren’t in the most festive mood, but Singapore put on a heck of a light show to see us off anyway. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-F...2/P1020424.JPG Our final wild camp was in the Shanghai airport en route to Vancouver. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p...2/P1020428.JPG A rider named Pete who had seen our story offered to help us out in Vancouver. He had picked up the bike from the shipper when it arrived and kept it tucked away in his shop for us until we arrived. As if that weren’t enough, he showed up at the airport to meet us, towing an enclosed trailer with the bike inside. When the bike wouldn’t start or charge the battery after we got her running, he even gave us a ride straight to the bike shop. It was yet another gesture of kindness in a clutch moment from someone that we’d never met. The guys at the shop let me wheel her inside along with our entire pile of luggage and start taking things apart. The multimeter read only 4 volts on the battery, so we knew it was toast. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-_...2/P1020431.JPG While I worked on the bike, the mechanic there mentioned a gang of 7 British guys on a big trip riding DR350's, who had stopped at the shop for some custom fabrication work way back in the early 90’s. He thought they had made a movie or something about it, and had a photo of them on the wall. Of course it turned out to be a photo of Austin Vince and company on the legendary Mondo Enduro ride. It seemed that we’d come to the right place. Things don’t always go as planned on the road and changes of course along the way are part of the deal. With all of the dangers and barriers in our path, I always figured that what stopped us would be running into some bad luck of our own, rather than events back home. There wasn’t much left ahead for us other than some nasty looking storms and a bone-chilling ride home to California from Vancouver. We'd take it one mile at a time, just like always. It’s been a ride to remember and I’m so happy that we took the chance to do it, even with a heart so heavy in my chest on the journey home. I never imagined that we’d get so far in the first place. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Y...2/P1020388.JPG |
Epilogue to Adventure
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Looking at Vancouver on the map when we were in China, it seemed so close to home. The reality of riding a thousand miles in the rain at near freezing temperatures made it feel a whole lot further away. http://advrider.com/index.php?attach...3cb36028f5d559The immigration official at the Canadian border seemed confused as hell as to what we’d spent the last two years doing. He wanted me to write down every country we’d visited since last time in the U.S. on a form inside a box the size of my thumb. They weren’t all going to fit in that box. He gave me some extra paper and when I finished writing them all down, there were 85 countries on the list. The bike was riding like crap. The brake rotors were scored, front tire wonky, carb needle about to break off in the slide, and the chain had stiff links in it, but this is all to be expected after a long journey. The chain and sprockets had been rolling since Sweden! After nearly 60,000 miles zigzagging across three continents, she was ready for a break. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-S...2/P1020437.JPG We still had no idea what we were going to do when we got back and already feeling unsettled. There was Christmas music playing everywhere and everyone around us was speaking English in an accent identical to our own. It was strange. The supermarket shelves were filled with an avalanche of choices for breakfast cereals, cheese, and shampoo. It was paralyzing. The television streamed endless voyeuristic entertainment between advertisements of cures for several ailments that I’d never heard of, and sound bites of Donald Trump trying to alienate the Muslim world. Motorbikes have to drive around as if they are cars, following all the rules. We can’t even park on the sidewalk. Even the Germans allow that, and they are very fond of their rules. Jamie had returned with some food in comically gigantic proportions. The hotel bed was superbly comfortable, but as I lay in the dark, my stomach was fluttering. It’s a strange thing to have the most familiar of circumstances provoke feelings of anxiousness and bewilderment. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-b...2/P1090392.JPG I wasn’t in a particular hurry to leave home in the first place. I didn’t hate my job or have a need to make my world larger than it was. I loved my job, the people I worked with, and I couldn’t imagine a nicer place to live. I had a brand new niece born just before I’d left and a new relationship in full bloom. But I also had an idea burning a hole in my brain (fellow motosurf wanderer Matty Hannon might call it a slow burning dream). It came down to an honest assessment of whether I wasn't leaving because of what I feared to loose, even though I knew how my time could best be spent. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-L...2/P1070662.JPG We rode for days along the coastlines and through the forests of the Pacific Northwest. It was so cold and the storms so fierce that we could only manage 150-200 miles each day. Sometimes we were shivering cold and others the wind had convinced us to get of the road before we were blown off. I’d never been on the stretch of the coast and we savored the few occasions when the sun broke through the steely sky. I arrived home unceremoniously squishing in my boots as I got off the bike to go hug my mom. She said I looked taller. She always says that. A couple days later, we all said goodbye to my dad. He was an adventurer at heart too. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/--.../DadCowboy.jpg I drove a car for the first time in more than two years. I wandered all over the lane and couldn’t seem to tell how fast I was going without staring at the speedometer. In my steel cage I was isolated from the world whizzing by outside and disconnected from the machine that propelled me. It felt like I was driving around on a whale in jello. I hated it. Except that I was warm and dry. That was very nice. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...2/P1070676.JPG Our time getting wet on two wheels would have ended for me long ago if not for Jamie’s spirit which spurred us forward when my resolve had long since worn through to the steel belting. While I let the bumps in the road rattle me, and the world we ride through wind me up, she just bends to what comes, taking all the madness in stride. She still thinks that I brought her on this trip, but in the end, she’s the one who pulled me along. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-K...2/P1010433.JPG As always, the kind folks that we’ve met along the way truly made the journey and helped keep our stoke alive. You fed us dinner, helped us fix our bike, gave us place to rest, wrote some encouraging words, and rode alongside us. Our hearts spill with gratitude to you all. https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q...P1010604_2.JPG I was a mess of apprehensions setting off on this trip, but mile-by-mile, they all slowly melted away into the sands of the Sahara. It bends my brain to know that the days of wave hunting in the desert, mud puddle diving in the Congo, making friends in Sierra Leone, elephant dodging in Botswana, gorilla tracking in Uganda, gasping for breath in the stratosphere alongside Kilimanjaro, and hunting visas in Nairobi all happened on this trip. In my memory it feels somehow like it wasn’t really us, as though events that happened two continents away were just scenes from a movie we saw. We knew the moments we wanted were out there, but didn’t know what they looked like or where to find them. They all happened because we decided to just go for a ride anyway. Henry David Thoreau explained his own drive towards adventures in the wilderness simply enough: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." I like to think that with the oddly appropriate combination of motorbikes and surfboards, and a long path ahead of us, we found our own way to move deliberately. We’re back home for now, and pretty happy to be amongst friends and family once again. There’s a whole world of coastline to ride with plenty of waves to find if you’ve got the time to look around and don’t mind some dust in your teeth, grease on your hands, and bugs on your board. There’s plenty of rad stuff along the way that you’re not even looking for. I imagine we’ll go for another two-wheeled wander at some stage and we hope to see you out there. Get moving. ;-) |
Thank you for completing the report even though it must have been hard. A very worth while read with of course all commiserations for one lucky enough to be close to his father.
I wish I could see into the future and see how this journey has changed you both, and how it will change your trajectories. Now that it is complete I maintain this journey is one of the epic motorcycle travel stories, not only because of the itinerary, but because of the way it was photographed and perhaps more importantly because of the manner in which it was told. It has been a joy to follow along. Thank you. |
Thank you so much for letting us follow along! Awesome story, awesome pictures and awesome travellers!
Hope you get settled nicely. That can be no small feat after all what you got to experience. All the best to you and Jamie. Thank you! Peter |
Thanks so much for writing this all up - I've 'only' followed since end of Africa but have really enjoyed it. I often think how I'd feel after so many years of travel if I got a similar phone call. An absolutely epic ride report from people with a true spirit of adventure! Hope you settle back in all good and would love to meet you guys on the road someday!
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beercheers I've loved every mile:scooter:
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One of the best bike trips I've ever read. Perfect both in the friendly tone you narrate it to us, photos are very good. And the ride itself is perfect. I admire your adventurous spirits, your courage. Thank you very much for sharing it with us. Wish you two all the best.
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Thank you for the write up, enjoyed reading your ride report and wished we would have had more time when we met in Osh Kyrgystan in summer last year. Now I am back at home in Bolivia, my DR350 is here and I have some biker travelers (and couchsurfers) staying in my little house. All the best to you guys. mika
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Guys, you gotta be kidding? What a journey, congrats
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