On a long (1 year+) trip, how many hours a day do you spend riding?

How many days of the week do you spend riding?

How many side trips do you take? Is it about getting from point A to point B, seeing as many countries as possible, or do you only ride every few days, and get a bit lost, never knowing where you're going?

Interested to hear thoughts...

Well it allways depends...if i find a nice place or get to know friendly people i stay for some some days even weeks but if some visa are running out or places are too rainy to stay there are also days were i ride more then 12 hours or more. For me the reason for traveling is not the number of countrys visited but to get to know the places were i am...

http://www.adventure-travel-experien...en_suedamerika

agreed.

I was kinda wondering how to plan to get from point A to point B. Say two waypoints are 1000km apart, and separated by so-so roads and sights to see, how quickly do people arrive at one "destination" form the next?

Also, how far can you push is a 12 hr day in the developing world on a motorcycle?

I cannot put a figure on how many hours but tend to stop when I reach somewhere suitable to stay or worth visiting which could be after 12 hour or just 3. I have found travelling for more than about 5 consecutive days get tiring and plan to have at least 1 or 2 days off a week.
Long term travel should be about getting away from routine and a set schedule so if you feel like doing something like staying somewhere you had not planned to or heading off down that side road just do it.

From my experience it will depends of the terrain and weather :
in North America , Australia ...5 to 6 hours a days is not much of distance , in Europe in 3 hours yo ucan cover enough miles to have someting new to see. if I have time I like to ride 4 days a week and take my time to visit the place where I am .

in Africa or countries where you have rough riding condition , the distance will be more difficult and you may endup riding for 8 hours a days ( early moring to before sunset ) In Argentina or similar places you may sometime drive all day just because you want to arrive to specific cities..

Having a location for a week and do side trip is great and doing bad road with bike without luggages is a plus.

Now the question is : do you want to a RTW and see it from your bike/ road point of view , or do you want to visit each country on your road a bit more in depth . Both are good , just a bit different.

I am not always precise in which road I will use but I do have a general idea of what I want to see in each country I go to . Be ready yo make change in your schedule and road , be also ready to change your pace when the weather get bad ..

Have fun

in my experiance , you will have this great plan laid out before your eye,s. "Right i will be here on that day do a 12hr ride and be there the next".
When you get on the road it all changes , you can come across things that you never expected and decide to hang around for a day or two, you can meet people and hang around, or you could think at a planned stop that it just isn,t worth bothering with , or it could just give you an uneasy feeling so you move on .
When on a trip i tend to ride real slow around 50 60 mph and just see whats on the horizon, you just never know whats over that horizon or around that corner .
I have done the 1000mile rides and very very long days in the saddle and in other places spent 8 hrs just covering 50-60 miles (Albania, Permit to Berat a marked road but so beat up never got out of 1st gear). Siberia , i was expecting terrible roads but the road is good, long, straight and in places boring as hell and it's good to stop. If you set points in stone to get to, you start to get tired and with the fatigue it would be easy to have a tumble .
So after all that mumbling my advice is set a plan of 5 days riding and 2 rest days and be prepared to change it day by day and enjoy the journey

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