Best route from Australia to Singapore.
 

Hey guys,

So I've pretty much scoped out the rough route I want to take on my journey around the world. My only real question mark is over the route into SEA.

Just as a quick overview. The plan is to ship my bike from the UK to the US east coast, riding across to the west coast, down through Central America, and into South America. Then planning to ship my bike across from Chile to Australia, ride around Australia, across to Malayasia, up and across SEA, into India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and back through Europe to home.

So as said, my only question mark is over the best route across Indonesia. But while I don't want to come off as dismissive, as someone who's half ginger, I'm quite aware of how tough it's going to be in the heat of SEA, and if there's a chance, a boat or something that would take a chunk of the journey out of it, it would probably help save some of my strength for the countries I want to really enjoy (Vietnam and Thailand). Not sure if there are boats from Darwin up to Singapore, or even Vietnam? Or if anyone has any advice in general for that region, it would all be greatly received.

Many thanks,

Luke

The shipping route Darwin-Dili-Singapore is afaik the only option down there. The ship sails like this: Darwin-Dili-Singapore-Darwin. So that means you can have your bike shipped directly from Darwin to Singapore (the ship will stop in Dili - East Timor for some loading and unloading) This is if the ships route is like it has been for years. You better double check this of course to get more up to date info.

There is a couple of things you should know though - getting a foreign bike into Singapore seem to be a bit of a PITA, expensive and quite buraucratic. So check out that too for more up to date info.

By shipping Darwin to Singapore you will miss out the country of Indonesia. I finished a 5 year/250 k kms RTW trip last year and for me Indonesia was THE highlight of my trip. I spent 3,5 months there and in hindsight I could easily have spent 2-3 times as much more time there. Riding wise the «Andes countries» of south-America was more a spectacular experience, but the whole cultural and folklore experience was way cooler in Indonesia. My 5 cents though....

Riding through Indonesia: If you choose to ship Darwin to Dili on East Timor you have two main route options:
Landing in Dili you will have to ride over to West Timor and the city of Kupang. From there there are a couple of ferry options over to the island of Flores. And from Flores there you can continue the «main route» through Indo, Flores-Sumbawa-Lombok-Bali-Java-Sumatra and then ship over to Malaysia.
Or the more adventorous route - Flores and ferry from Labuanbajo on the west side of Flores to the south of Sulawesi at Bira. Then you can ride the island of Sulwesi and take another ferry to Borneo (called Kalimantan by the indonesians) then ride across the Kalimantan/Borneo island and over to the malaysian side of Borneo and ship your bike over to mainland Malaysia.

Thanks for the amazing reply friend. I'll definitely take a deeper look at Indonesia, ill admit that I had kind of seen it as just a place to get through on the way to Vietnam/ Thailand, so fool me really.

Thank you also for the details of the shipping route. Seems i have much more investigation/ planning to do!

Climatewise advise:

Darwin and northern Australia can get wet and miserable from November to March (roads can get flooded and thus closed etc) and most of Indonesia also have a rainy season from roughly October to March. Further north the west side of Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar has a rainy season that starts in May-June, August and September are usually the wettest months and it calms down in October. So if possible - try to adjust your travels to avoid those wettest periods.