I forgot to mention we also have a lot of cold salt mixed in with the cold ice and cold slush. The bike will be filthy and rusting from all the salt unless you constantly wash it after every ride. In Ontario if the road is not white with snow it often is white from all the salt they put down.After the water evaporates you should see the salt dust fly!We don't need to go to South America to ride across the Salar de Uyuni, we have it at the end of our driveway.
.And cold scenery... the country is just drab cold grey trees and bush if not covered in snow and dirty potholed frozen out city streets.
Some of the travel stories I see on TV are silly in the way they show people from tropical areas going north to experience true cold north , and then they stand around outside bareheaded and sweating and not a breath shows on the wind....meaning that they are not in cold at all.Another source of misunderstanding is the movies where people seem totally unaffected by cold. I forget the name of the pic, but it had Richard Burton in some WW II character snuck into Germany behind the lines to sabotage some installation in the middle of winter.In that movie he gets on a sidecar equiped bike with NO helmet and NO mitts and proceeds to race along snow coated roads for many kilometers ....and he manages not to freeze his digits and he can after the ride still use his hands and think and walk and fight ... absolute total rubbish. In the real world he would have been numb and stiff within minutes. That is the reality of riding in Canada in winter
Riding is no fun because you cannot hold any speed through corners because you can never know if there will be a patch of ice .If you hit that you will go down and under the wheels of a big truck or you wind up in the snowbanks.If you are alone good luck on digging yourself or the bike out. Anytime you fall down you have a good chance of personal injury and breaking bits on the bike- or totally wrecking one or both bike and rider.Bridge surfaces will be fozen slick even if the road is dry, beneath highway overpasses there are often patches of ice from the drips that fell and froze again into humps below in the shade.Down you go.
You are wise in your change of plan to do Canada before the GP...like at least 2 months before ,.No reason to "push the envelope, test your limits,prove your mettle ... " then after the races head south

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http://advrider.com/index.php?thread....207964/page-5 then scroll down to post #93

Well, if you read my posts, then you surely must´ve noticed, that I wasn´t recommending the OP to do that, if he has practically no previous winter-riding experience.

My comments were aimed at the claim, that it is totally impossible, which in the end, it is probably not. Not saying I could do it, though – and in any case I don´t think I´d enjoy it, and I´m certain enough not to even try. And for someone, who hasn´t ridden in proper winter conditions, this sure as hell would not be the place to start!

But hey, it wasn´t so long ago, when somebody, I think coming from tropical Australia, asked about doing the Trans-Siberia highway, on a bike, in January......