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Richard & Jude’s post
With Lobo and Linda back in the UK along with Dave and Leah and Jude and I here in Sydney the WhatsApp group chat was going at a real pace. Everybody putting forward suggestions, questions and answering some of the many questions we all have but there are still so many to answer. The route is starting to get a little more achievable although some countries are still closed to visitors like China, Azerbaijan and the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. We have been chatting with Jah (named after the Rastafarian God which tickled Colin) from Ride China in relation to our chaperoned tour through China and Tibet and now have a fun packed 20 days itinerary albeit we cannot get into the country yet. Lawrence has been looking into whether it’s best to buy a bike in Australia or to ship his out from the UK. Dave and Leah are seeing if they can start with us in Sydney or if they have to join us in Thailand due to their adventure tour business commitments to take a group ride in Vietnam. We are all trying to come up with a name for the adventure. something around the trip being done with pillion passengers as this seems unusual. Colin, who won’t be able to join us for all of the journey, but is hoping to meet us in Turkey in his lovely camper van and finish the journey, is putting together a couple of possibilities for good causes we are looking to raise money for along the way. He has lots of experience in this area and we are all hopeful something good can come out of this trip for others less fortunate than ourselves. We have all been discussing what gear and equipment we need to take. What spares for the bike and any modifications are required. What type of panniers are best: Soft or Hard? What do we do about tyre changes and servicing the bikes along the way. Do we need any training courses? The route out of Australia still seems to be a problem. I have spoken to shipping companies, airlines, logistics companies about the route from Darwin to East Timor but it looks like the shipping schedule is very unreliable with potential delays running into many weeks. Not only that but traveling through the islands of Indonesia on the ferries adds more uncertainty again with potential delays of weeks for some of the ferries if we miss one or it’s full. Lawrence and Linda have set up an operations room in their dining room complete with world map and multi time zone clock. We have all been bingeing on YouTube videos of other adventure bike riders and soaking up all the information from them that we can. Jude, who already speaks 4 languages including Russian which should be useful in the Stans, has started to learn Indonesian. “The Thing” is moving but there are still many things to do Richard and Jude
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Lobo & Linda’s post
On reaching 58, Linda and I resolved to say yes to everything ‘adventure wise’ that came our way. We worked on the idea that we should have a good 10 years ahead of us and that now was our time, so saying yes to Richards vision was easy. As our good friend Colin often says: “You’ll never be as young as you are now, you’ll probably never be as healthy again as you are now - so if not now, when?” We are just back from Tasmania and our heads are buzzing with ideas and questions! We starting watching James & Jay in North and Left a Bit while we were there and have continued since we got home – they are really entertaining and have been a great source of ideas and information for our trip. Our circumstances differ from Richard & Jude as we run a couple of businesses here in Wales including several holiday cottages, so who would run everything while we were away? We also have 2 dogs, 8 chickens and a cat, who would look after them? With so many commitments, how could we make this work? Other questions were: who do we invite to join us and what would the ideal number be? If you think about your friends, how many could ‘drop what they’re doing’ and travel halfway around the world with you! What bike would we use, our current GS Adventure or something lighter like a DRZ650? Do we ship a bike over or buy one in Sydney? How would we fit all our gear, personal and shared (spare parts, tools etc) into our luggage and what luggage to take, hard or soft? Do we avoid any off-roading and stick to the relative safety of the roads as we are all riding 2up? We even went to the ‘dark side’ and thought about disaster planning: were all our affairs in order, did we have life insurance in place, were our wills up to date and so on….. We mused about various names for the adventure, I liked ‘Kangaroos to Dragons’ but 2up From Downunder was a clear winner. The ‘top and bottom’ of all the above is that there will always be a good reason why you can’t do something, but there isn’t much that can’t be overcome if you want something badly enough. Life will always get in the way if you let it. Richard & Jude’s post
So. Here we are on our boat with Lawrence and Linda in Hobart Tasmania. After a few glasses of wine the decision has been made that we are all actually going to embark on this mad adventure so it was time to start trying to work out exactly what we need to all do to make it a reality. The more we discussed it the more questions we had unanswered. We looked at Google maps to try and work out the possible routes and initially thought this route looked viable. Sydney to Darwin then ship the bikes by sea to Indonesia then ride through Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, China, India, Nepal, back to China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece then through the rest of Europe to the UK. Easy right? Getting the bikes out of Australia seems to be harder than before Covid due to more irregular and longer shipping times being reported to East Timor. Months could be lost waiting for the bikes to turn up. Finding out that you need a full time guide with their own vehicle for the two China legs is very costly and the China border was still closed and not sure when it would open again. What are the alternatives? Skipping China would mean Airfreighting the bikes to Nepal from Bangkok and then going through Pakistan, which is not recommended. After much research and emailing various to all sorts of people we decided that we would have to skip India and Nepal and go North of the Himalayas through China and Tibet. The route through China was still closed due to Covid restrictions but was expected to open in a few months time. We researched for a suitable mandatory guide through China and found one that seemed to tick all the boxes. Emails were sent backwards and forwards with lots of questions. We have mutual friends from our childhood that we keep in touch with regularly and we invited them to be part of this adventure. They are still deciding. Lawrence and Linda have been on organized adventure rides in Africa and Vietnam and have become friends with the organizers, David and Leah from RAMS Adventures. We agreed to see if they wanted to join us. We all started watching YouTube videos of other people who had embarked on similar adventures on motorcycles. We learnt more and had yet more questions still to be answered. It was time for Lawrence and Linda to head back to the UK. We are all full of excitement and eager to continue the planning. David and Leah came back to Lawrence and confirmed that they would like to join us. Great! We set up a WhatsApp group and a shared document to collate all of the information and would remotely work towards a departure date sometime in mid 2024. As Lawrence said: It’s now “A Thing |