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General Blog

November 2, 2007 at 7:33 pm | Trip | No comment

I’ve decided to change this to a general blog, as spiritual realisations only come to me every so often.

Anyway, I’d better introduce myself briefly, I’m a 21 year old IT professional, I’ve been working with the same company for four years and I’m sick to death of it.
That’s why 8 months ago I took the decision to pack up from the UK and move lock stock to Italy and live without working.

My house sale completed today, I’m now the proud owner of £32,000 with which I shall change my life.

A few weeks ago I decided that my original plan for simply back packing around Italy would be too frustrating, I wanted my own transport.

I could take my car, but it’s big, guzzles fuel like nobodies business, and though reasonably reliable is still comparitively expensive to maintain.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a motorbike!

This may not seem like a huge decision, but I’ve grown up in a family where bikes are evil, they must be avoided at all costs and sitting on one is tantamount to slitting your wrists while sitting in the bath.

Like I always do when I decide something, I’ve started to read up on the subject, a lot.
As it turns out there’s an absolutely massive following of people who take holidays or years out or even like I am sell up and just head out, all on bikes!

I started off by reading ADVRider.com, and went on to read “The Long Way Round” featuring Ewan Mcgregor, which lead me further to “Jupiter’s Travels” and “The Adventure Motorcycling Handbook”, neither of which I’ve really got my teeth in to yet.

Needless to say, due to my upbringing I don’t currently have a bike license, but no matter, I have until March 2008 to bring my plans to fruition (my official leaving date at work is February the 29th, rather fitting since I’ve been working there just over 4 years!).
My test is booked for the 4th of December, and coincidentally, my (one and only) biker mate’s car test is on the 6th of December, as you might imagine if either of us fails we’ll be taken the piss out of mercilessly (god forbid we both fail!).

Telling my friends over the past few months about my plans to leave has generated significantly less incredulity that I would have imagined, perhaps they don’t believe that I’m actually going to go through with it.

It’s fairly easy for me, to just up and leave, having a mortgage is only a mental barrier and a matter of a few months paperwork.
I’ve been moving around my whole life, by the time I was sixteen I’d lived in 16 different houses and 3 or 4 different countries, so I don’t have what you’d call a rooted past to tear myself from.

Though this time will be more difficult than previously, as I have to leave my girlfriend behind.
Doubly hard is that I can’t talk to her about my trip at all, at the mere mention of “Italy” or “March” her responses become curt and angry.
I told her from the very beginning of our relationship that I was going, we only met in June (a few months after I’d made the decision to leave) and I knew I had to be upfront with it, lest it be seen as a betrayal later on.

It’s amazing, I’ve gone as far as booking a bike test, selling my house and officially quitting my job (signing the piece of paper detailing my ’sorrowful resignation’ this morning made it seem much more real), but still I’ve made no real plans as to what I’m going to do.

I know I’m going to ride down there, probably take the ferry to the arse end of France otherwise known as Calais, after getting out of there as quickly as possible I may briefly flit into Germany to have a swing round the Nürburgring; I’ve always wanted to go there.

I also have an ex-girlfriend who now resides in… somewhere or other, I forget where exactly… But I’ll probably find out and visit her as I’m sure it’s roughly on the way to Italy…

Obsession

November 10, 2007 at 8:15 pm | Bike, Trip | 1 comment

It consumes my every waking hour, trivialising what’s in front of me and turning tortuous the daily monotony of work.

I read every scrap of travel writing I can find, Striking Viking’s ADVRider.com Thread, Jupiter’s Travels.
Amazingly enough Ewan Mcgregor’s “Long Way Down” started a few weeks after I’d made my decision to do this trip by bike, so I’ve been keeping an eye on that as well; and although it’s quite far removed from the unsupported adventures of less famous riders, it’s quite interesting nonetheless.

Vital for entertaining me at work in a job that started boring me more than two years ago to the extent that I actually found another job!
Though I was inticed back with a significant salary increase.

I’ve been stressing about two major pieces of equipment for my journey, my bike and my camera.
I don’t think it really matters which bike I get out of the choices I’ve narrowed it down to.
Namely a Honda Transalp (current frontrunner as some-one at work’s selling a cheap low-mileage example), a Honda Africa Twin or a BMW GS650.
All of these bikes will do what I require, I simply have to find one that’s in good condition.

I want to find one soon, but I have to sell my car first to raise the cash, as although I have plenty of money in the bank, I want to preserve the sancitity of it as long as possible, as through previous experience I’ve learned that “I’ll just borrow this little bit of money from my savings for the time being” quickly turns into “Fuck! I haven’t got any savings!”.

This will dissapoint my girlfriend somewhat, as since she doesn’t drive we’ll have to either walk, taxi or pushbike everywhere once I sell my car (that and she doesn’t want me to get a bike anyway as she reckons I’ll kill myself).
But unfortunately from here on in my girlfriends wants have to start to take a little bit of a back seat.

It makes me feel cruel, as she’s kind enough to late me stay with her until the day I leave for Italy.
I am helping her though, she’s under-educated to the extent that she’s not strictly independant and this has lead her to depend on a string of abusive boyfriends.
Trying to resolve this requires a… certain amount of patience, but is rewarding nonetheless.
She does hamper my planning and personal activities somewhat, as if I’m not paying attention to her she sulks with the traditional “What’s wrong?” “Nothing!” but with the most transparent body language you’ve ever seen.
However the poor girl hasn’t had much go right in her life and is the sweetest thing you’ve ever met.

I went to see a BMW F650GS today, 3 hour drive to and from and the blasted thing didn’t start first time, so I have grave reservations about it, plus the 5% the salesman was prepared to knock off the asking price didn’t impress me much.
Inspecting it was a brief glimpse into how far I am out of my depth, I know almost nothing about bikes, and being outside of my zone of knowledge trying to blag it ended up with me rushing the inspection, I don’t think I really learned anything about the condition of it bar my baseless opinion that the sprockets seemed a little rounded and the identification of a rather dodgy looking wire outside the fairing.

Complicated!

November 18, 2007 at 6:27 pm | Trip | No comment

Good lord…
There’s so much to consider in planning this trip, training, packing, paperwork, money, route, equipment, each of which sounds do-able until you split them down into their components at which point they proliferate into about half a million different considerations!
I had damned well better be able to get carnet “Insurance” rather than have to put a deposit down, as at 500% of the bike cost (for Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Iran) that’s £10,000!
Maybe I can tell them that it’s actually completely knackered and really only worth £250?

Even so, I’ve been looking at what I need to do with regards to upgrading my bike…
So far I’ve got
Airhawk Seat Cushion
Touratech Pegs
Bash Plate?
Rear Shock?
Crash Guards
Panniers + Rack
Centre Stand
Upgraded Side stand (length + footprint)
Rims?

The ones with ‘?’ are ones I’m not convinced need doing…
These are based on
http://long-way-home.blogspot.com/2007/01/bmw-f650gs-bikes-tips-and-our.html
http://www.dhpmoto.com/Trips/Baja%20Dec%202000/2001bmw/2001_bmw_f650_dakar.htm
and
http://faq.f650.com/GSFAQs/

Panniers are looking to be riiiiddiiculously expensive, the UK vendor of choice for aluminium panniers seems to be Metal Mule who give you a very reasonable price of £224 for the panniers and somewhere around £200 for the rack.
That is until you realise the £224 is PER PANNIER (who the FUCK buys one pannier?).
Ok, fair enough, that’s kinda what I’d expected… But then it’s an extra £23 per pannier for anodising and another £8 for fucking handles which beggars belief (not that £8 is a huge amount it’s just.. who the fuck buys luggage without handles?).

Touratech are the manufacturer of choice when it comes to touring gear, but their stuff sure as hell aint cheap.
I wish I had some more resourceful mechanist contacts who could make up some of this ad-hoc…
All in all, my budget is starting to look rather piffling, but I’m determined to do this and I’m convinced that I can live for practically nothing by camping every night (so what if I can’t find a camp site, screw it, I’ll set up in some-one’s front garden!).

I’ve booked myself on a couple of ST John’s Ambulance courses, pretty cheap on the whole.
I also plan to do some basic combat training (not particularly with the intent of using it, more to increase my confidence in hostile situations), though I’m going to see if the TA have anything the general public can attend.
As I’m not really convinced by the real world application of Martial Arts after a story my dad told me about a couple of his mates (Black belts in Karate or Judo or somesuch) who were living in Hong Kong at the time, going out to the docks looking for a fight and basically getting their arses handed to them by a couple of street fighters.

Still, not telling my dad about this whole bike thing is getting interesting, as I’m going to have to go and see him and other family over the christmas period.
When I go to visit him I think I’ll park up at the train station and give him a ring to come and collect me.
When I go to visit the rest of the family… Well, the question remains as to whether or not they can be trusted to keep it from him, my feeling on the whole is that they can’t, so I’ll probably pull a similar trick.

Training

November 29, 2007 at 8:48 am | Bike, Trip | No comment

I’ve been without the internet for a few days now, changing from one provider to another.

Doesn’t make much difference to life in general, but it has meant I’ve not been updating the blog so regularly.
It shouldn’t have made any difference to that though, as I’ll be without the internet on the road for days at a time, so I should really get into the habit of offline blogging (using Word at the moment *gasp*).

I’ve been on a couple of days more training for the bike, had a new instructor called Martin who I didn’t get on with, who was insistent on late braking and following him closely (he didn’t actually let me lead at all!) and considering that the biggest issue of mine he identified was running a bit wide at junctions, his blat through the countryside was not very instructive.
The next session however was with Chaz again, who I get on with much better, he restored my confidence and gave me useful information on how to get round my junction issues and took me somewhere we could practise them.

I bought Kim a helmet and took her out for a very brief ride last night.
She absolutely loved it. She’d told me that she’d been on her mum’s boyfriend’s bike before, but never expressed any particular enthusiasm for it (in fact, initially she said she wasn’t going to get on it at all!).
However once we’d done a quick circuit of the housing estate and the briefest possible dual carriageway section, she was grinning from ear to ear.
Having a pillion passenger was much easier than I’d expected, I was quite apprehensive about the effect on my balance at low speeds, but she did very well and it wasn’t an issue at all.

I had a bit of a scare a few days ago with my panniers, as Kiwibob (the German redistribute of Jesse panniers) hadn’t replied to my emails for three days , and when I tried to go to the website I got a 404 page not found error!
Still, after the weekend I pinged him another email and he responded saying that he’d shipped them that day (as it had taken the full 5 days for the bank transfer to go through, why the hell do they bother saying 3-5 days anyway? We all know it’s always 5!).

On Wednesday I got home to find that the WP rear shock had been delivered, but the panniers had been bounced back to the depot as no-one was home.
This posed a bit of difficulty as I had no way of transporting them home having sold my car.
My mate was kind enough to offer me a lift to go and get them, however I was a bit dubious about his car’s ability to pick them up as his boot is significantly full of subwoofer!
As a result I decided to pull a sickie the next day at work, saying that my back’s playing up and wait in for UPS instead.

I’d decided to have a quick look at my shock absorber, not that I’d be able to discern anything from it, merely because I was curious.
However I discovered that they’d sent me a shock specced for the F650 GS as opposed to the GS Dakar!
This basically means that the amount of travel the spring has is significantly reduced, which would make it less capable off-road (the whole point of buying the Dakar being it’s improved off-road vs the standard model!).
To their credit, the company (Full Travel Suspension) acknowledged their mistake and arranged for TNT to pick it up today and promised to sort it out as soon as it arrived and send it back for Saturday delivery!

So all good then! I’ve got two mates coming round on Saturday (potentially, at least one of them should make it!) to help me fit the shock and panniers.

Things are progressing nicely!

I need to start sending off for Visas, but I just can’t seem to get round to it, oh well, at least I’ve managed to get my dad to send off my mum’s birth certificate so that I can apply for my second passport.

I’m pondering explaining my plans to my dad when I see him at Christmas, but I still don’t know what his reaction will be. It could be that it was my mum that was completely anti-bike, it’s quite possible as my dad was always far less over-protective than my mum…

I’ve started worrying again about how Kim is going to cope once I’ve gone.
I’ve been trying to get her to make stronger friends with the people she works with, which was going quite well as last month I cajoled her into organising a night out with everyone, and despite a few hiccups with her getting upset about everyone else changing the venue without her approval it went quite well.

Last weekend we had another night out with her mates from work.
It wasn’t going well, even before the night itself she blew up at work when her friends kept teasing her that she and I were joined at the hip at the last outing.
On the night itself I thought it was going much better, I tried to encourage her to hang around me a little less and get into the group a bit more (which was helped by me going to the bar and having to wait half an hour to get served!).
However at about midnight I just got back to the group with pint in hand to find the guys had gone to the other side of the room to play pool, leaving me with Kim and the girls (fair enough really, I didn’t know or establish a rapport with any of them), then when the girls went to join them, me and Kim were left standing on our own somehow.
She then reached into my inside pocket and pull out her wallet, phone and keys (which I was keeping for her as she had no pockets or handbag) and walked out of the bar!
Abandoning my pint (which I was enjoying inordinately and only had two sips of) I trotted after her asking where she was going.
“Home, you go back to the bar with your friends”
This puzzled me somewhat as I knew nothing about those people and would never have even hung around with them had they not been friends of Kim.
As it transpired Kim felt that they’d been ignoring her and blocking her out (which, may have been the case to a small extent, but I being the social butterfly that I am was used to that sort of thing).
For some reason this caused her to vent her frustrations on me (the first time she’s done that, hopefully the last too).
She walked straight past the taxi rank declaring she was going to walk home.
I trotted along her angry striding gait cheerily chiming in that I’d come with her.
She kept ranting about how they were ignoring her and that she should just give up on people and commit suicide (she says this in moments of frustration, though even at the time she admits to having no real intent on doing any such thing).
I was getting a bit pissed off at this point, as interwoven in her insults at her friends were insults and insinuations against me when I’d done nothing wrong in the slightest, so for one of the first times ever I raised my voice to her and demanded to know why she was taking it out on me.
I sat down at the side of the road and she squatted in front of me, looking me hard in the eyes.
“Shall I pack your things when I get home?”
“Why?”
“Because this is the end, isn’t it?”
I said nothing, I wasn’t worried, I knew she didn’t mean it and my momentary anger had passed.
After a few minutes of silence she seemed to realise what she’d said and started to calm down.
I stood up and hugged her, and after a few more minutes she conceded that maybe it would be best to get a taxi (a wise move considering we live some 3 miles away and it was midnight Saturday!)

Alex is in!

December 2, 2007 at 8:50 am | Trip | No comment

Well, that’s a turn up for the books.

I went out for a drink with my oldest mate Alex, and as usual was waffling on about my trip, my route, my plans and my tribulation, and jokingly said to him “You should come too! C’mon, it’d be fun!” “Ok!”.
For the past few years he’s been working in Ambulance dispatch in preparation for becoming a Paramedic when he turned 21, however, shortly before he did turn 21 the government started moving the goalposts, with nobody knowing what was going on and interviews for the various courses that would supposedly get you into the paramedics, his goal started slipping away.
In the end he applied for the position once the government had got the application process sorted out, but failed on some piffling technicality.

To add insult to injury the centre he operates from dispatching ambulances is being moved to another location prohibitively far away to commute to.
So as a result he’s taking on a new role with doctors on call, though ultimately this is continuing in a vein that he’s not especially interested in.

Due to a quirk of personality and the currently common standard of living with ones parents (due largely to ridiculous cost of living), he has over the past 4 years or so saved up a significant amount of money.
He, like me, has very few ties to this country, and felt that he has no good reason not to go on this trip.

He happens to be the very same mate of mine that I went on a two week road trip around France with earlier this year (a tiny precursor of the big trip you might call it!)
I know I get on with him very well and honestly couldn’t think of anyone that I’d rather do this trip with.

I had been waxing lyrical about this trip to him, outlining the adventure and the romance to him, gently interspersed with slight annoyances and tribulations in the planning.
And on Thursday, over a pint in “Ye Olde Swan” in Woughton on the Green, he decided he wanted in.
I immediately started filling him on the technicalities and his immediate tasks, as there are a mere 3 months until our departure date, and that is the bare minimum amount of time for say… Vaccines to be administered.
Not to mention the fact that in that time he has to learn how to ride and pass his direct access, apply for an international driving license, get a second passport, acquire a multitude of visas, not to mention buying a bike and doing all the appropriate upgrades and gear purchases.

It’s a tall order, but certainly possible.
After a couple of beers we headed off to a late night coffee shop and drank two Mochas, which only heightened our excitement for the trip, and once kicked out of the shop we drove to a nearby pitch wood and discussed the amazing adventure we were shortly going to embark upon.

The next day Alex told his mother about his plan, her response was “No”, which struck me as rather amusing considering that “No” was not a word within her power to enforce.

On that same Friday I had my latest bike training session, which turned out to be with Steve, who I’d seen shouting at some people he was training while I was on my CBT over a month ago.
I was not looking forward to it, as I don’t respond well to being shouted at, especially when I’m trying to learn and am paying the better part of £500 for the privilege.
However, as it turns out, he was one of the best trainers they have on staff, and I thoroughly enjoyed the half-day session and corrected many of the issues I was having problems with.
I have one more session to go before my training, starting tomorrow it’s with Martin, who on my last session was a truly abysmal teacher (although some-one you could quite happily get along with in other circumstances).

I’m alternating between blissful calm and heart tightening apprehension with regards to my bike test. It’s quite tiring and also quite pointless as I know I’m quite capable of doing it, I just need to avoid making any silly mistakes (the chances of making which are significantly increased by being apprehensive and stressy!
The thing I always use to calm myself down is the fact that it’s only just over half an hour long.
I can deal with half an hour!

I passed!

December 4, 2007 at 8:51 am | Bike, Trip | No comment

My nerves were wracked all weekend, I felt as though tiny worms were wriggling slowly underneath my fingers.

It made me short with Kim, and it made me make stupid little mistakes on my Monday lesson.
They were compounded somewhat by Martin’s style of teaching, which is blunt and to an exceptionally high standard, and at times seems to try and exonerate him of responsibility.

One of the biggest things he kept picking me up on was my U-turn.
To me, I was executing the u-turn quite nicely, a little wobble occasionally, but nothing to worry about.
For Martin on the other hand this would not do, I would rev high, slip the clutch massively and use the back brake for controlling the speed.
Which is a great method for doing a u-turn don’t get me wrong, but if I deviated the controls even slightly while doing the u-turn (speeding up or slowing down while cornering isn’t the greatest idea I’ll admit) he would repeat the reasons I was going wrong (which went back and forth between a number of issues, I would concentrate on getting one right and the last problem would crop up again).
Eventually he realised that I was doing my turns too tightly, and subconsciously this was causing me to do all manner of things which were bad for a controlled turn.
I set myself up and aimed for the opposite kerb.
Hurrah! Beautiful, controlled, perfect every time!

I was still making silly mistakes like leaving my indicator on after turning (which if done for too long will fail you for making false signals!), but Martin’s style of teaching was quite effective for making me completely paranoid about leaving the signal on!

Tuesday morning came, and once I was on the bike, the world seemed to relax, everything was going to be fine, I was going to pass no problem!
In the hour or so warm up before the test Martin berated me slightly for my U-turn which I tidied up quickly, and gave me a little more coaching on the emergency stop.

We rode into the test centre and parked up, getting there a bit early I had to wait for 15 minutes which did little to settle my nerves.
Eventually the examiner came out and took my documents and fitted me up with a radio (which oddly enough went around my waist and sounded much clearer than the ones we’d been using to train with.
He took me outside, to do the tellme/showme for which I’d memorised a long list of procedures and bullshit answers.
In the end, all he asked was for me to demonstrate the front brake, and where would I find the correct tyre pressure rating?
Piss easy! So we got on with the test.
Everything was going very well, I would even have gone so far as to say I was enjoying myself, until he told me to go right at a roundabout and I bizarrely went all the way around (I think I was in another world thinking about how well I was doing!).
Unfortunately the examiner saw this too late and took the exit I was meant to take, which resulted in me losing him quite significantly.
Before he went out of range he told me to pull up on the left and wait for him, which was easier than it sounded on a 60 mph road with no pavement.
There was a bus stop, but I was almost certain that I would fail for pulling up in an inappropriate place, so I chose a side road.
Which he went past before he saw me in it.
I was getting a bit flustered by this point and didn’t know whether to wait for him or to go after him.
I waited for a little while and then went after him, which was of course the worst of both worlds as by this time he’d turned round at the next roundabout and was going in the opposite direction to come back on me!

He went past and repeated his instruction to find somewhere on the left to pull up and stop.
It was the same situation, nowhere to pull up and stop. So I did a u-turn at the next roundabout and pulled in to another side road.
Of course this resulted in him going past me again in the opposite direction and tutting very loudly remarking that I was like a bloody goldfish.

I was screaming on the inside, “Fucking hell I’ve failed, what a stupid thing to fail for”.
But still, I’d been told by every instructor I’d had that it was rarely as bad as you thought and either way worrying about it on test would only make you make more mistakes.
We went on with the lesson and I did reasonably well I felt, no major fuck ups as it were.

In the exam room, I heard those beautiful words, “I’m pleased to say you’ve passed.”
Thank Christ for that, I couldn’t stand having to do that build-up again!
Plus I can re-assure Alex that the test is not that hard, and that they seem to want to pass you!
Even so… 8 Minors…

Telling My Dad

December 10, 2007 at 8:52 am | Personal, Trip | No comment

Christ, I was bricking myself.

My dad, has never been a fan of bikes, and is the only person I can think of that has my respect, the intelligence and a reason to talk me out of this trip.

Having delayed it this long, I wanted to try not to rub it in my dad’s face, so I concoct a story about the boss lending me her company car for the evening so I can go and visit him (as he’s 150 miles away!).

I make the trip down, which coincidentally happens to be the first time I’ve ridden my bike outside Milton Keynes!

A long journey in the dark isn’t my idea of fun, and with only one heated grip working and my £12.99 Tesco Value gloves, my fingers are about to fall off.

Nevertheless I arrive, parking up some way away from my Father’s house so that I can undress (which feels very weird on the side of the road, despite me having my normal work clothes underneath my gear!) and make a relatively normal entrance (bar a rather suspicious looking backpack stuffed with all my clothes).

I go into my dad’s house nochalantly and wait for him to bring up my trip.

“Yeah, James, that’s actually why I’ve come down here… I’ve changed my travel plans a little…”
“Oh?”
“I’m not going to stay in Italy, I’m going to drive to Australia”
“What!?”
“The thing is… I’m not going to do it in a car”
“What are you going to do it in?”
“… A bike…”
“Ah…”
He looked at me meaningfully for a few moments, obviously deciding how to react.

“Sounds interesting!”
Phew! He later explains that he would have exploded and forbidden me to do it, bar the fact that he didn’t think I’d take a blind bit of notice!
Interestingly enough, his concern about the bike was not as focused as his concern about me travelling through Iran, or the fact that I was doing the journey on my own.

I related my tales of planning and revealed that I had my license and not only had I already bought a bike, I’d ridden it to his house.

While shock value was what I was trying to decrease when telling my dad, it was still rather entertaining to see his incredulity to each new revealation.

In the end, my dad gave me his blessing, and I’m sure will prove to be a powerful ally with regards to contacts, paperwork and general travelling know-how.

A great success!

Stolen!

February 24, 2008 at 8:56 am | Bike, Trip | No comment

Yesterday, at about 11pm, I look out the front window and notice something strangely missing on the driveway.
“Kim… Where the fuck’s my bike?”
“What?”
“My bike! My fucking bike’s been stolen!”.
So I run outside and look up the road, hoping in vain to see some-one trundling it away, alas no such luck.
After effing and blinding for a while and wildly gesticulating at the moon, stars and whatever deities happen to be listening, I call the police, who take my details and predictably are never heard from again.

I get on a variety of internet forums and post about my bike being stolen, a few people from them happen to be local and promise to keep an eye out for it.

The next day me and my mate Alex go drive up and down every single road in a place called “Netherfield”, which is the biggest rat-hole in Milton Keynes, and despite seeing a number of cars that we could quite happily believe were stolen, we don’t see my bike.

How? How could they steal my bike a WEEK before I leave Milton Keynes? Bastards!
Of course my insurance doesn’t cover it, I felt as I was only going to be in the UK for another 4 months at most and it was £150 extra to cover for theft, that it wasn’t worth it considering I was going to go through some of the most dangerous countries on the planet with no theft insurance.

I still feel that was the right choice… However perhaps the wrong choice was leaving my disc lock at my dads…

Oh well… Shit happens…

They’ve found it!

March 7, 2008 at 11:35 am | Bike, Trip | No comment

I can’t believe it, it’s a miracle! My prayers have been answered! Thank you jeezus!
This morning I got up at the crack of wossname (well, 7:30 anyway) and grabbed a taxi to go and see a regular old road-style F650GS.
Half an hour, £35 and lots of backseat navigation later I’m inspecting the bike.
A fine specimen indeed, no leaky fork seals, engine starts first time, no scuffs scrapes or bumps but I have an underlying feeling of disappointment, and despite dressing up in bike gear and bringing my helmet along (not to mention a wodge of cash), I decide to pass on the bike.
On the taxi ride home I mull over my decision, which had surprised me as I just felt the need to get some wheels under me and was expecting to just take a cursory glance of the bike, give the guy his cash and jump on it.
But for some reason I didn’t and I couldn’t work out why I’d just spent another £35 on a taxi when I could have a bike right now. Don’t get me wrong I didn’t regret my decision but I didn’t know the reasoning behind it.

But my decision was retrospectively justified when I got home and found my phone had a voicemail on it.
“Good morning Mr Martin, Thames Valley Police. Just calling to say we have some news on your stolen vehicle”.
I think to myself “Nah… they can’t have found it.. even if they have it’s been torched I’m sure”.
I return the call, trying not to get my hopes up (and failing miserably), I quote the reference number and the lovely lady on the other end of the phone elated informs me that they’ve found my bike!
She doesn’t know what condition it’s in though, so I have to ring the recovery company (and pay them a fee!).
I finally get through to some-one at CMG and YES, it’s in one piece!
Unable to contain my excitement I eagerly ask what the damage is.
“Mmm, snapped gear lever, busted ignition, broken front brake lever, fucked right handlebar, punctured front tyre, broken fuel cap and some scuffs and scrapes”
I chuckle to myself recognising some of the things he’s listed as damage that was already on the bike, thank him profusely and put the phone down to find some-one to pick up and fix the bike so I can ride it down to Newbury.

What a result, it’s made such a difference to how I feel, where previously I was feeling low and fatalistic, I’m now determined and rejoicing!

Angry Farmers

March 10, 2008 at 11:36 am | Trip | No comment

“What about this one?” Alex asks.
I inspect the side road; it’s hard to tell in the dark. “Worth a look.”
We roll up the road and find lovely grassy fields fenced off on either side.
“Perfect” I declare, leaping out of the car and throwing stuff out of the boot.
After parking up Alex joins me at what is starting to look like a reasonable camp site, Rip the Jack Russell cross looks on with interest.
With setting up camp out of the way we turn our attention to the food and the newly acquired petrol stove.
Filling it up is a bit of a messy affair, with not inconsiderable amount of petrol getting spilt on the grass.
“Careful Alex, that’s one flammable bit of field”
We get the stove going eventually and set about trying to fry bacon in a saucepan.
“It’s not frying” Alex tells me disconcertedly.
“What?”
“It’s not frying, it’s boiling”
Sure enough, the cheap petrol-station meat has had so much water injected into it the damn thing’s actually boiling in the saucepan instead of frying.

But despite our setbacks we have a rather good meal of couscous, chopped tomatoes and boiled bacon.
I start cracking open a bottle of wine when suddenly “WHOOMPH” and a large portion of the field sets ablaze.
“Holy shit!”
Fearing an explosion that would level our little campsite I fling the petrol can as far away as possible, then start stamping wildly at the water bottles that have ironically caught fire.
“I didn’t think it would do that…” Alex admits rather sheepishly.
We both burst out laughing, and having averted disaster (and second degree burns) we sit back down to our meal.
Three bottles of wine and a solid few hours of sleep later I’m rudely awoken by
“Oi, what d’ya think you’re doing?”
I wriggle out of my sleeping bag through the haze of a hangover and wrestle with the zipped tent door for a good three minutes.
“Morning!” I reply.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re peaceably setting up a tent!” I slur.
“Well you can peaceably piss off, and take your shit with your, else it’s coppers!”
“Fair ‘nuff”
We hurriedly pack up our shit and get out of there, but not before noticing in the brisk light of day that the field we’d chosen to camp in was just off the main road to the farm house!
Oops.. Not quite the out-of-the-way spot we’d thought it was in the dark!

Water pump

April 18, 2008 at 9:59 pm | Bike, Trip | No comment

I think the water pump is what’s squealing.
I’ve been having a worrying squealing sound coming from the bike ever since I got it back on the road and my theory is that the water pump got screwed when I had too little coolant in the bike.

Fortunately I have a full water-pump repair kit already so I’ll get that rebuilt tomorrow.
Ordered a new alternator which should arrive on Monday, get that fitted and hopefully it’ll all be hunky dorey!

James (my dad) asked me to do him a favour yesterday which turned out to be to let him pay for somebody to inspect my bike thoroughly for any potential issues and to have them repaired.
He was quite adamant about this, but appealing as it sounded I had to turn him down.
It’s hard to explain why I turned him down, I imagine some people will understand immediately while others will be perplexed by my decision.
Pride is the first reason I think, I don’t like taking handouts and in some insecure portion of my mind it feels as if accepting his offer would take something away from the acheivement of my goal (if and when!).
Secondly I want to do the repairs myself, I could look over some-ones shoulder to watch what they’re doing but it’s not the same.
I wonder whether it’s the right decision, I would sorely like to be in a position where my bike inspires confidence in its reliability, but somehow I can’t bring myself to…

Me and Alex went camping last night (at an actual campsite no less!)
It was a good chance to try out my tent before having to erect it in anger, and a damn good thing too!
It was a completely bemusing process putting it up, as you have to put up the poles, then attach the flysheet and then clip the actual tent to the inside of the flysheet.
However it does look very robust, for those that are interested it’s a Vaude De Hogan 2006 model that I got £60 off as it’s a display model.The construction process is quite simple once you know what you’re doing and hopefully it’ll stand up to the wind, unlike the tent I went camping in in the south of France last year which had one of its poles snap (in admittedly VERY strong winds).

Cam Chain Tensioner?

April 19, 2008 at 10:25 pm | Bike, Trip | No comment

Far too many posts have been named after bits of my bike lately.
So I’ve removed my left hand engine cover (which I might add is a complete BITCH due to the oil return cable being A) positioned precisely in the way and B) inflexible) to repair the water pump, and I notice that the plastic guide for the internal chain (thought it was a drive chain at the time) is a bit chewed up, but thought nothing much of it at the time.
I took the waterpump bits into the house to clean up and replace and although the impeller-shaft is a bit scarred, I doubt that it’s that causing the squealing.

However since having a look on the internet, that chain turns out to be the timing chain (or cam chain) and having chewed up guides is symptomatic of either a very slack chain (virtually unheard of) or a failed chain tensioner.
Which… I can only assume is a pretty major job, as from my (admittedly limited) experience with timing chains/belts is that anything associated with them is usually a complete pita.

I’ve posted on The Chaingang and am awaiting their expert assessment of the situation.
Hopefully it’s something I can do myself, and hopefully it’s the cause of the squealing and not yet another problem with the bike.

Either way though, it doesn’t look likely that I’m going to be able to keep my ferry booking which is a week tomorrow.

Taking up my dad on his offer to get the bike overhauled is very tempting right now…

Parteo-Parteo, where for art thou Parteo?

April 26, 2008 at 10:08 pm | Bike, Philosophy, Trip | No comment

No prizes for guessing that my part hasn’t turned up.
The tool did however and I’ve been able to get my clutch basket off (incidentally, 140nm is a LOT when the nut has nothing to stop it turning other than a tool on your knee) and inspect the bearings.

They look fine to me…

This made me somewhat upset (to the tune of a gin and tonic or three), however I was heartened by Midge’s post as that “release bearing” is one of the parts I have on order!

After chasing Motorworks and asking them the eta on my new bearings (middle of next week) I nipped down to my local bearings shop (who’d have thought there was a shop that just sold bearings?) and they measured the perpetrators with a micrometre and ordered some new ones in to arrive on Monday (seeing as it was Friday!).

Time since then has been spent reassembling my alternator, rewiring the cable of said alternator, new sealent-grommet as to get the grommet that’s made for my alternator cover would cost £350 (as it only comes with a new alternator from BMW!) and trying to figure out why I wake up angry each morning (very counterproductive, takes me until 2pm before I can do any work without throwing the first object that annoys me across the room!)

I also got a reply from BMW’s marketing department regarding my request for sponsorship, which was… declined.
Primarily based upon the content of this site I believe…
I don’t blame them in the slightest, with this blog I don’t exactly cut a very presentable front, certainly not the sort that I dare say BMW would be keen to back.

As stupid as it sounds I only applied to BMW in a fit of desperation as I don’t really want sponsors.
Sponsors feel far too much like a commitment, cutting into my feeling of “ultimate freedom” which is what this trip is all about.
A blog post I saw a few months back (alas I forget the link) summed it up for me in a way.
It went on about how nobody was alllowed to have an adventure anymore if it wasn’t for charity.
You’re not allowed to be a brash young man in another country after stories to tell the grandkids, you have to be politely tiptoeing through they various PC minefields, manitaining a good standing for your country and most importantly doing it for lukemia research.

I don’t want to do that, half the point of this trip is to find out who I am, and I’m not going to start that off by constraining myself with a load of guidelines set out by my sponsors.

It may seem like I’m being a bit of a dickhead to some people, but maybe that’s the point as well, this idea we as a society seem to have at the moment that we absolutely must go through our lives without offending anyone else in the slightest at all costs… It’s mad, and I don’t buy into it.
My view of chavs (or various other ne’er-do-wellers) remains unchanged and while these seemingly opposing views may seem unreconcileable to some people, I point to my recurring theme (in thought if not necessarily in this blog) of Balance.

It seems a popular misconception that you have to be for or against virtually every concept or principle in the universe, whereas I’m generally of the opinion that just about every concept and principle in the universe has its place in all its extremes, whether or not it affects you negatively.

.. But maybe this is a thought for another time…

The revelation

April 29, 2008 at 10:14 am | Trip | No comment

“This Sunday. I HAVE DECIDED.” I screamed into my helmet as I whisked my way up the A34 from visiting Dom.

Much rejoicing followed the re-assembly of my bike, it WORKED, I managed to take it apart quite seriously and it WORKED when I put it back together, I was overjoyed!
But still the whistling/squealing/rubbing/rotating/irritating sound remained.
I came to realise though that many of my diagnostic assumptions were wrong.
The general consensus based on my previous claim that the noise went away with the clutch pulled in and having it only occur in 3rd/4th/5th was that if it wasn’t clutch bearings it was the gearbox.
I was wrong, it happens in all gears, and it doesn’t go away when you pull the clutch in, it’s just that the engine revs higher so I can’t hear it so well.

I think it’s something to do with the air intake, and really, I think it’s a normal sound.
My subconscious made me notice the noise, and presented it to me as an excuse not to go.

Time to ignore the voices of doubt.
Time to embrace the unknown.
It’s time, time to go.

Packed and ready

May 4, 2008 at 3:31 pm | Bike, Trip | 3 comments

A thing of beauty to be sure!
I’m heading off in half an hour, going to meet up with Dom before I leave as he lives near Portsmouth and I have his cargo net still…
I don’t know when I’ll get the chance to blog next, I’ll have to use a pen and paper to scrivere my thoughts upon… Translating that into text at a later date though may prove difficult due to my apalling handwriting!

I’m oddly calm about this whole thing… I think I still don’t really comprehend that it’s happening, and probably won’t until I realise everyone around me is speaking another language I know no more than a couple of words in.

The bike is running sweet as a nut now, I reckon it was all in my head.
I was amazed how easily everything fitted on the bike, even had room to spare for a crapload of books in the panniers which I’d never have believed!

I don’t know what to say now.. I’m off!

‘n Roads to Marseille

May 9, 2008 at 1:36 pm | Trip | 1 comment

“God fucking damnit!” I exclaimed as my back spasmed and my bike fell back to the earth for the fourth or fifth time.
I’d been changing my fork oil as just before I got on my ferry to France Dom noticed that my newly installed seals were leaking.
“Bonjour, ca’va?”
I turn round to see some kind soul has pulled into the lay by behind me.
“Non… Err.. could you help me lift the bike?”
He laughs out loud at my pleading expression and frantic miming of lifting the bike.
“Don’t worry mate, I’m English too!”
“Really? Fantastic! Could you give me a hand?”
With his help it’s no problem at all, though I get the feeling it’s going to be a recurring theme on the trip.
“Well.. If you need anything else mate, a place to stay or anything, we’re just up the road”
“Really? Well… That would be great actually? Could I put up my tent in your garden or something?”
“You can have the spare room!”

I waved goodbye clutching the map Nick had drawn out for me and followed on after them once I’d repacked the bike which I’d strewn across the ground in attempt to pick it up.

I saw nick waving in the distance and rocked up behind an absolutely massive house complete with dogs and chickens (chickens not shown)

Nick and Trudy turned out to be two of the nicest people you could possibly hoped to meet and after the biggest and most delicious omlette I’d ever seen we retired to their living room to discuss (amongst other things) Nick’s work as a forensic psychologist.

It was by far the most pleasent evening I’d spent on the trip, admittedly only the second, and the first had been spent here…

I’m becoming an expert in French lay-bys and only yesterday I spent the night in a ditch, which is not as bad as it sounds surprisingly.

The past five days I’ve spent getting lost primarily. But this is only a good thing as we all know the most fantastic places are found when you get lost!
I was desperately trying to detour a toll-road yesterday and suddenly come up against a complete road closure of the only road for miles.
But I notice another biker heading down a road that’s unmarked on my map and looks set to dead end in about 100 yards and decide to follow him.
He takes me up a series of hairpin bends and we come out on top of a hill overlooking the town below… I truly wish I’d taken a photo, but I was scared I’d get lost if I didn’t follow the bike in front.
The valley stretched out as far as the eye could see in the crystal clear air below with the roofs painting a terracotta pool in the centre of green forests and fields.

I remember Marseille now, last time I came through here I swore I’d never return as the maze of roads and rush hour traffic caused me endless frustration even with GPS guidance.
Still, I’ve just looked and according to Google the BMW garage I’ve got to get my seals from is a mere mile away and looks relatively easy to find!

Clearly, fortune favours the bold!

Road-side fork oil change!

View from another lay-by campsite!

Sardegna, Corsica and.. Germany?

May 17, 2008 at 9:28 pm | Trip | 5 comments

I hastily put down my, by now, sodden map of Corsica to wave at a group of eight German overlanders who were passing by just as I realised I’d spent the last 6 hours going in a circle trying to get to where I already was.
After realising where I was actually trying to get to, I quickly packed up and jumped on the bike in hot pursuit of the overlanders.
Despite the rain I caught them quickly on one of Corsicas few pieces of dual-carriageway and did the french foot-wave I’d seen so many bikers use as they passed me throughout France.

After parting ways (and nearly falling over on a slippery roundabout taken too fast.

I found myself in Propriano on the west coast of Corsica.
The weather throughout my two day stay in Corsica had been universally wet, so I decided finally it was time to pay for some accomodation in the form of a camp site.
€10, which I didn’t end up paying as the reception didn’t open early enough for me to check out and catch my ferry in the morning, bye bye copy no.1 of my driving licence.

Depressingly enough in Sardegna the weather was much the same and after milling around in the miserable town of Porto Torres (which however boasted “il menu turistica” at a restaurant comprising of a 3 course meal of veal and three glasses of wine for €11 in its favour) I forked over for my second campsite.
May I stress that even after (less than really) a week sleeping rough, it feels so good to be able to sleep without fear of being mugged/moved on by the police and to have a hot shower in the morning.

My reason for being in Sardinia was ultimately to go and see the rally, but in my personal tradition of organising very little and adopting an “I’ll sort it out when I get there” attitude I had no idea where the hell it was other than some vague notion it was in the north east.
A quick trip to an internet cafe in Sassari revealed that the opening ceremony was in Porto Cervo, so I set off across the island, and as the weather improved started to feel a bit more optimistic about the whole affair.
And got to appreciate some excellent scenery to boot

Once I got to Porto Cervo however I found nothing other than a mini-St-Tropez and hide nor hair of anything rally related.
Being as it was getting late, the best thing I decided was to simply find somewhere to camp and to try and find out more in the morning.
The time-honoured process of driving randomly and hoping for a sign worked out well and I came to a rather nice sounding campsite “Acapluco”, at an astounding ,€8 a night and with a very plush bar on-site to boot!

I pitch my tent next to a group of German motorbikes that looks suspiciously familiar…
It would appear that through some incredible fluke, through the entirity of Corsica and the entirity of Sardinia, the group of German overlanders I encountered in Corsica are camped in the very same campsite!
They prove very friendly and I believe this is their website, though I don’t have my notebook to hand so I may be wrong.

My incredible luck in meeting people extends to a rally journalist (who has expressed an interest in writing an article on my travels) with previous experience as a motorcycle test-pilot (as it were) and not only tested the F650 but also the very R1200s that Ewan Mcgregory and Charley Boorman did their RTW travels on, apparently revealing major issues with the first two bikes initially assigned to them!

The next day I rebuilt my forks (replacing previously mentioned leaky fork seals).
However the drain-bolts on both forks are stripped (my fault!) and my attempts to seal them with instant-gasket have so far proved unsuccessful (but I feel I may just being using it wrong!)

As that didn’t take all day and I needed to recover after successfully sunburning myself quite badly during the fork rebuild I proceeded to laze the entire day away on the beach and in the bar drinking the local beer.

Which is far too nice.

Today?
Today I went to see the RALLY!

Citta di Roma

June 2, 2008 at 2:30 pm | Trip | 2 comments

“Err.. Mi… Viagarre… Australia, Via Pakistan, India, Indonesia…” I haltingly explained to the crowd that had gathered to inspect my (somewhat conspicuous) bike.
This drew a rumble of impressed Italian from them, and brought forward a highly tanned biker with a knowledge of English from their midst to translate from me.

We were all stuck there while they attempted to bring down the landing ramp on the ferry from Olbia to Civitavecchia, and while they did so I chatted in what small Italian I could muster and posed for photos.
It was a very strange feeling, something like being a minor celebrity I should imagine; men shook my hand, congratulated me, told me that it’s what they wished they’d done.
I don’t deserve this… All I did was make a decision and follow it through!
Still… The boost to my morale was spectacular…

Eventually somebody arrived with welding gear and after welding.. something we were allowed on, with the assembled bikers at the front of the queue waiting patiently for me to embark first.

It was the slow ferry to Civitavecchia (Rome’s port), though the seven hours of it were interspersed with a myriad of free beers and chocolate from various corners (which was highly appreciated as my budget was, as always, minimal).

As a result of our delay we arrived at 9pm, meaning I had to break my promise to myself not to ride at night.
I rode the SS1 towards Rome, desperately straining in the diminishing light signs of a campsite.
A large sign labelled “Roma” flew by and suddenly I was plunged into suburbs.
“Shit, I’m never going to find a campsite in the middle of Rome”
Another well-lit sign loomed in the distance “Camping Village”.
I pulled up to the reception and after briefly explaining my story to a wide eyed receptionist and walked away with my place booked and the promise of a free beer at the bar as soon as his shift was finished.

The place was unlike any campsite I’ve stayed at before, the bar rivalled anything you’d see in Milton Keynes and was packed full of people.
As I waited I wondered briefly who would come all the way to Rome and then spend the night in the campsite but realised I was there myself so I should shut up.

Free beer! Woo! After more than two weeks of relatively solitary living in Sardegna the busy bar was overwhelming.
My new best friend leaned over and pointed out a beautiful girl over the other side of the bar and confided that he was going over to talk to her.
I shook his hand, “Buona Fortuna!”.
The night went on, and after a few beers I found myself talking to the very girl that he’d pointed out.
I’m embarassed to say I’d rather effectively cock blocked him.
Still, she turned out to be a very friendly American, I think I must have asked her about 6 times where she came from in the US, but me introducing her to Flaming Sambuca rather effectively erased the answer (though I do have a rather detailed map she drew in my notebook!)

The next day after drinking copious amounts of water and eating an entire six pack of croissants secured from the on-site supermarket (this place has everything!) I headed off into Rome to get a photo of me in front of the colosseum!

Good god… Rome is a frightening place to drive around, that is until you get caught up in it.
I blasted through red lights, cut people up, filtered through moving traffic at 30mph and made great use of my extra-loud airhorn.
Nobody batted an eyelid! It was expected, moreover it was what everyone else was doing!
I did tone it down a little after I passed the scene of an (presumably fatal) accident between a car an a scooter however…

After parking next to the colosseum I wandered through Rome, sampling the pizza (which was far nicer than in Sardegna), the ice cream and the beer.
Although full of tourists, it’s a beautiful place, wandering down tiny streets in an attempt to escape the crush resulted almost always in stumbling across a gigantic piece of masonry or marble that had been structurally incorporated into modern buildings…

I’m ashamed to say I’ve taken relatively few photos, somehow the throngs of touristica spoiled the artistic merit…

Still, plenty of time to take photos; all I have to do for today is to book myself into a hostel (as that campsite was fuckin’ expensive) and after that I can wander at will!

Until next time…

From Rome to Venice (but not back again)

June 7, 2008 at 11:07 am | Trip | 1 comment

“Buonasera” a depressed looking receptionist greeted me.
“Buonasera, duo notte per favore?”
“€38 please”
‘What?’ I thought to myself, it was supposed to be €16 a night according to the website.
Being completely knackered and having spent around 5 hours trying to find this hostel (which included giving up and going back to the internet cafe for another look at google maps at least once), I decided not to argue and forked over the cash, reasoning it was only €3 more than my camp site and included breakfast and a roof.
He handed me my sheets and directed me to my room; trapsing down the ill-lit corridor I passed several zombie like figures which I could only assume were guests beaten down by the atmosphere of a soviet prison that pervaded the place.
Eventually I got to my bed, which was clean enough, set down my gear and thought “Christ, at least I won’t be tempted to stay here instead of exploring Rome!”.
I got out of there as quick as I could and headed down into Rome to try and find the nightlife.

As it turns out, there’s plenty of it to be had for free in Rome. The Piaza del Populo was one of my favourites, free music from the locals (many not even busking, just playing for the hell of it), and a constant stream of people going by to be persecuted by the rose-sellers (who were quite audacious!) which was entertainment in itself to see how far they could go before they got told to ‘Fuck off!’ in whatever language was appropriate.

Slightly more sociable was one of the walls over-looking the colosseum (which, incidentally was my personal favourite of all the sights in Rome,) where tourists would gather to chat.
It’s strange how nice it is to simply be able to converse in English with some-one, rather than having to search for common words or the equivilent Italian.
I whiled away the evening talking to random Canadians, Americans and Australians (surprisingly few brits have I seen!) and eventually wandered back to my hostel so as not to be caught out by curfew.

My route followed the river that bisects the city, the sickly sweet smell of fermenting fruit wafting over the warm night air from where it had fallen unpicked in rotting piles, the smell seemed somehow appropriate for such a seedy street…
I paced the spacing between each hooker, exactly 100 yards, remarkable, perhaps it’s the secret army of the Roman underworld undertaking maneuvours, rather than a pathetic display of capitalistic hedonism.

The next day I awoke to such a cacophony as I expect tortures cruel music-teachers on the 8th level of hell. Eventually I established it was one of my room mates whistling, and once he’d seen that I was awake, he smiled widely and threw a croissant in my face.
I scoffed my trophy while he explained he was from the Sahara, which I wasn’t aware was a country, that he was in Rome for a couple of days, but spoke far more Italian than English, which cut the conversation somewhat brief.

I had enough cash to do only one thing that day, see the Sistine chapel.
The outside of St Pietros was astounding, hundreds of vast marble columns circling the plaza.

Having paid the extortionate €14 entry fee I walked briskly through the vast winding museum, attempting to be interested in the panoply of busts and artifacts, though in reality the only thing that held my attention was the vast hall of maps.
It’s hard to describe how I felt when I saw the Sistine chapel for the first time… Dissapointed I think fits best. Somehow the bustling display of theology stuffed into every available space on wall and ceiling struck me with a very strange impression.
That of graffiti…
I can see why Michelangelo was reluctant to take on the painting comission from the Pope, I think he would be rather unhappy that the Sistine chapel ended up being his most famous work.
It doesn’t feel fair to think such things of such a masterpiece, but it’s only an opinion!

I spent the rest of the day exploring the streets of Rome, which is far more fun on foot than the hair tearingly, gut wrenchingly, nose bleedingly, eye gougingly excrutiating experience of trying to navigate it while obeying traffic laws.
The evening I spent the same way as the previous night, gazing adoringly at the night-lit colosseum, which I simply could not get enough of.

Unfortunately all the photos I took of it at night I took in RAW format, so I’m unable to show them until I can get them processed.

 #I gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing I ever dooooo!#
I screamed racously at the top of my lungs as I searched the streets of Rome for the SS1 Aurelia heading north bound.
Ahah! And I was off, bound for Pisa!
They’re not wrong about Roman roads, they are quite… straight…
I really wish my bike had cruise control, leaning back chopper-style on the F650 I was keeping the throttle on by my fingertips with my left hand resting in my lap, pretty comfortable until IronButt kicks in, forcing me to take a stand on the pegs for relief.

I didn’t make it to Pisa in one go, I stopped short and found myself a free campsite in the form of a dead end made by recent extensions to the S1 by the looks of it.
Throughout the evening the locals kept tabs on me by driving part way up the dead end, apparently the rich (judging by the Mercedes), don’t like company!

Still, they left me alone and the next  morning I was on my way once more.
Pisa didn’t hold my attention for long, the leaning tower and the adjacent church were very beautiful, and required a few photos once I’d finished my treat of a sigaro, but again, photos taken in RAW format, so not uploadable at the moment.

Afterwards I whisked my way along towards Florence to get to the start of the SS67 which would take me to Venice.
I didn’t intend to go in to Florence, but I realised I had when the beautiful triple and quadruple story houses towered above me and I found myself waddling the bike through swathes of tourists under a sign “Strada pedona”, Ooops…
Eventually I escaped without getting arrested and/or mobbed by tourists and headed through the SS67 and over the spine of Italy.

Wow, what a road, I really wish I could have taken some photos but none of the lay-bys or stopping places could have done it justice.
The twisties were such that I scraped my panniers along the road in several places! Great fun!

I camped rough again and after a near-vertical nights sleep headed off on more of the same beautiful road.

Next stop Venice!

 

Venizia, Dolomiti, non-starto.

June 9, 2008 at 6:02 pm | Trip | No comment

*Bang, bang, bash, bang, twock*
“Muuch better”, I admire my work; my pannier was decidedly trapezoid after a failed U-turn until I took it off and bashed it on the ground a couple of times, god I love these Jesses.
Feeling very pleased with myself I motored on for the remaining five miles to Venice.

“How much!?”
“18 euros per night”
Fuckin’ ell, I paid not much more than that for a hostel, let alone a bloody camp site!
Ah well, considering the parking next door costs €10 a day, and I was going to get the ferry to the city anyway, it works out relatively cheap.
Still, €90 budget for one day in Venice (including two nights camping) is a bit of a departure from my regular budgetary constraints.

Beautiful place Venice.

I found it very difficult to take photos in Venice, the whole place is so beautiful, you end up either taking photos of everything in sight, or taking photos of nothing because you can’t decide what to photograph!
And while it was in fact very beautiful, I found myself feeling it would be a much more pleasent experience if I A) had quadruple my budget and B) was bring a girlfriend, as it is a very romantic city.

I did my usual thing of trudging round getting lost because I was too cheap to buy a map, and too lost to find the tourist information office and decided to go home early before I spent even more than I’d originally bargained (which was, by my standards, quite capacious enough already).
Getting back to my ferry port however proved to be something of a difficulty, I eventually found my landmark, which in my head was “that gigantic pillared church on the waterfront”, but unfortunately it turned out not to be the right one…
After much effing and blinding I managed to find the correct stunning piece of architecture and sat down on the steps with a sigh to await my ferry.

“So you chilling out for a few weeks before you head off to Sandhurst?”
I whipped round at this suddent burst of impeccable queens English to see a three ‘lads’ (proper lads, rugby players at a guess) sat further up the steps.
Cheekily I evesdropped on a good ‘ole fashioned lads conversation with associated lewdness, attempting to stifle my own laughter at several points so as not to give away the fact that I was listening in proved difficult.
Turns out one of them had just done his entry exams for the army.
“… and 44 press ups”
“What? But 44 press ups is so easy!”
Inwardly I balked at this statement and wondered where my phenotype had let me down.
I never butted in to their conversation but contented myself with laughing silently.

The next day I was off, off to the Dolomites!

There seems to be quite a lot of bikers on this road… I wonder why…

1700m high, not much really, but still very beautiful (and kinda cold, hence the muffs)
I wandered up hill and down dale in an attempt to find a free camp site, but the whole place was so splendid that everyone else had the same idea, hence a million and one “NO CAMPING” signs everywhere, and nowhere was hidden enough for me to ignore these signs.Eventually I find myself a legitimate campsite at a shocking €16.50 (same as Rome!) and bedded down for the night.

On the morrow I dumped my panniers and headed up the nearest mountain I could find, passing hundreds of masochists, sorry, cyclists on the way up, when all of a sudden, CLATTER, CLATTER, CFUT pffft.
I rolled to a halt, self imposed by the brake, didn’t fancy rolling backwards for 5 miles and desperately pushed the starter button.
Much clattering ensued and then finally, only clicks.
Bugger… Oh well, nowhere better for a bump start!
I turned the bike around, freewheeled for a bit and dumped it into second.
*SCREEECH* The engine locked up, hmm… neutral freewheeling for me I guess!

I rolled my way back down the mountain-side and into a garage, and after desperately kicking my starter motor, parked up and hitched a lift back to my campsite for my tools with a passing biker, +1 for the universal clan!
After picking up my tools I managed to catch the worlds most convoluted bus back to my bike, it took an hour to go from point A to point B, which were seperated by 5km of alpine road.
Eventually getting to my destination, I pulled apart my starter…

Erm… I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think it’s supposed to look like that…

A shot of the outer casing.

Quite how the fuck that happened I haven’t the foggiest, oh well… quick call to BMW tomorrow for a new starter motor I guess!
Looks like I’ll be stuck in the awful awful Alps for a few days… Oh no!
*cracks open a beer*
Ciao!

Starter.

June 18, 2008 at 2:26 pm | Bike, Trip | 1 comment

Aaah, a beautiful day at last, sunny after many days of rain and dark skies, a good omen!
I do my daily excercises and waddle down to the local internet cafe to check the online tracking my starter motor.
Status: Out for Delivery
Fuck yeah! About time, it should have arrived days ago, but yours truly typed a 5 instead of a 6 in the postcode of the campsite he’s staying at while ordering the new starter motor, and this delayed matters somewhat.
I buy my measely €4 worth of groceries and try to force myself not to run back to the camp site, instead maintaining an easy saunter.

“Hi.. Any post?”
“Ah! Yes!”
Woohoo! I run over to my bike and tear off my old starter motor and oh-so-carefully fit the new one.
Right, moment of truth… Key in, turned…
*Pushes start button*
*click*
AAAGH.. Bugger… Oh well, it’s probably just a flat battery.
So I wheel the bike over to the start of the hill that leads conveniently into the campsite and push the blasted thing up it.
Sweating profusely I get to the top, wheel it round, leap on and whoosh, starts first time!
I sit it by the side of my tent and give it a bit of time to charge up the battery.

Flicking through the Oddyssey I decide it’s probably best if the revs are above idle, and grab my mole wrench to jury-rig the throttle open.
I pull back the throttle *PHUT WHIRR BANG*, a huge black cloud of smoke issues forth from the exhaust and the bike stalls.
“Hmm.. that’s not cool”
I tentatively try the start button again, still clicking.
“45 minutes was enough to charge it anyway I’d have thought… must be the relay..”

Where was that relay again?
In the process of wrecking the bike I discover that the airbox had a certain amount of oil in it, a gobbet of which probably got sucked in and caused the earlier stall, apparently this can be due to overfilling the oil (which I may well have done).
I eventually pull out what I assume to be the relay, as it’s situated between the battery positive and the starter.
Proudly I present my trophy to the local mechanic who sets about it with a battery and a multimeter.
“Si, working”
Eh? So wtf is wrong?
I retire to the internet cafe and learn a number of things.
1) I just tested the solenoid
2) The location of the relay
3) 45 minutes at idle probably isn’t enough to recharge the battery.

So once I leave this internet Cafe I need to get back to the bike, reassemble it, bump start it again and leave it running for a few hours.
Fingers crossed eh?

Happy Birthday to me!

June 20, 2008 at 4:51 pm | Bike, Trip | 2 comments

Yup, highly egocentric this post, for today I am 22, the first “uncool” birthday! Next stop 30!
My attempts to repair my bike myself have been utterly thwarted.
A full charge and even a jump start were insufficient to get it moving, though a bump start worked no problem.

A few days ago I had an amazing stroke of luck.
Quite out of the blue a chap called Guido messaged me on CouchSurfing.com and offered me a place to stay if I was in the area, and where should his area be but 15 miles down the road!
I jumped at the chance, and despite my crippled bike, I pushed it painfully slowly up a hill and bump started it down, hastily packed my gear onto it and set off for Salo, praying it wouldn’t stall.

Stall? No, it belched black smoke and died.
I was left to walk the 8km on foot in 30 degree sun and full leathers to the nearest bus station to complete my journey.

Given time to mull my situation over, I decided I’d had enough.
My bike has been held together with bootlaces, luck and duct tape for too long, it’s time to get my issues sorted once and for all.
So I’m getting BMW to sort out everything, fork seals, black smoke, all the little niggles that have been bugging me and then some.

Unfortunately after ringing up the nearest BMW Motorrad (which was pleasingly close by) it turns out that all my local BMWs are booked up years in advance.
So where shall I take it?
Germany!
I’ve pre booked a rental van and I’m taking it to Munich on Tuesday.
In return I’m getting a courtesy bike which I’m going to ride around with great pleasure (it’ll be nice not to have to worry about my bike falling apart for a change!)

The above solution represents a days work, head bashing, bad translation and frustration that I won’t bore you with, so back to last night!

Once I’d arrived at the bus station I discovered the next bus wasn’t until 2 hours after I’d agreed to meet my host for the evening.
A quick email to warn him and hope he didn’t mind and I sat down to wait.

After the picturesque bus ride down the west side of the lake I turned up in Salo and headed for Guido’s house.
Amazingly it was pretty easy to find, I’d been geared up for wandering the streets of Salo for hours and forlornly ringing him at 10pm asking how to find him!
I rang on the door, waited… Rang a second time… No answer.
Err.. fuck…
As I hung about the gate not really knowing what to do a lady and her son approached the gate.
“Ciao”
“Ciao!”
“You… are waiting for Guido?” (not goddo)
“Si!… Err.. Dove?”
“I don’t know, but would you like to wait in my house?”
“That would be great, thank you so much!”

I didn’t stay long in her house, just enough time for a shower in fact (which I was in very obvious need of and was offered as soon as I stepped over the threshold), before Guido turned up with his other guests.
“Sam! Hello! We have been waiting for you at the bus stop!”
“Really? I’m so sorry, I must have missed you!”
“No matter, let’s go to mine and eat!”

Some time, some carbonora and some red wine later we went strolling along the sea front under the light of a full yellow moon and an artfully lit boardwalk over the crystal clear waters of the lake, beneath which you could see salmon flitting in shoals of untold magnitude.
Guido gave me and the couple staying with him the historical background of Salo and treated us to ice cream from the much touted local gelato joint.

And the next day? Well, although it’s been my birthday, not much of note has happened, so… Though I should like to leave you with some photos, I decided not to lug my DSLR from my bike, so I shall have to merely bid you Arrivederci for the moment!

I caught a break!

June 28, 2008 at 2:44 pm | Trip | 7 comments

Steering wheel, check; brake, clutch, accelerator, check; gearstick… on the wrong side but, check!
Pre-flight checks done I started the engine and cautiously eased the rental van that was to transport my bike to BMW Munich for repair out of the forecourt.
*CRUNCH*
Shit… Within 30 seconds of renting it I’d twatted the van into the post in full view of the guy who I was renting it from
To the sound of screeching metal and paint I reversed the van off the post and sheepishly drove off.
A few miles down the road I parked the van in front of my stricken bike and set about loading it.
Yes, well… Loading a 200kg bike single handed into a van 3 feet off the ground is somewhat difficult, and after abandoning a rather lame attempt at a pulley system I hailed I passing German holidayer who was more than glad to give me a hand.

Bike secured I headed for Munich.
During the 4 hour journey I discovered two things..
1) Driving a van for the first time through three different countries with the steering wheel on the wrong side after you’ve not driven anything with four wheels for half a year is SCARY.
2) Borders in Europe are amazingly fluid, the only way I knew I was in Austria was from the signs demanding I buy an “Obligatory toll sticker”.

I arrived in Munich at 5:00, somewhat later than I’d hoped despite ragging it down the autobahns, all that I had to do was find a petrol station and buy a map.
This proved somewhat more troublesome than I’d envisaged, and half an hour later I was wading my way through rush hour traffic when finally I spotted one.
Grabbing hold of the first map I could find I handed my prize to the cashier who asked in admirable English “Do you need directions?”.
Having been given the worlds best directions (concise and accurate, holy shit!) I arrived at BMW… HQ…
A towering office block with BMW in 20 foot high writing was an impressive site, but nary a mechanic to be found, I’d been sent to the wrong place!
Tearing the map in my haste to open it I traced my finger over my route and was off again.
5:45, only fifteen minutes to get there!
Even though Munich was a breeze to navigate in comparison to the likes of Rome it was still 6:15 by the time I got to the 3 storey mega-garage that was BMW Motorrad Munchen.
They were still open! “Yes sir, we close at 6:30″ I was informed to my delight by the receptionist.
I managed to locate Fred, the friendly service guy with whom I’d arranged this rendezvous in impeccable English only a few days before; and half an hour later I had given him a full list of all the problems my bike had and he’d given me a brand spanking new G650X with 150km on the clock!

An uneventful ride back to Italy and an uncomfortable nights sleep in the van later, I shamefacedly returned the van to the autonoleggio.
The proprietor of the establishment walked carefully round the van inspecting for damage and stopped at the dent he’d witnessed yesterday.
“This. I say nothing”
“Sorry?”
“About this dent, I say nothing, is no problem.”
Phew! Am I lucky or what?
He even helped me unload the new bike from the van!

New bike loaded up I headed off for Switzerland!
Oh, my, GOD the Alps are beautiful!

One particular pass was especially amazing, and something of a biker meeting point!
I took the opportunity to throw some snowballs and fill my water bottles up from the cascading waterfalls of ice cold snowmelt that dotted the landscape.




The roads through the alps were as a slalom, I was grinning from ear to ear with glee as I leant from one side to the other flying round bends and overtaking with impunity, ridding the bike of what slim chickenstrips it had accrued in its short life.

Entering Switzerland I came upon a checkpoint, but was swiftly waved through without even a second glance, big difference not being in the EU makes so far!
Switzerland was more of the same beautiful roads, and by this point I’d got tired of taking photos and was simply bombing along having the time of my life chasing Porsches and Hayabusas.
Little did I know my timing enjoying these tarmac masterpieces of flowing artistry was shortly numbered.

I entered the umpteenth hairpin I’d encountered that day with confidence, “Hey, I’m getting pretty good at this!” I thought to myself, smirking at the prospect of another dose of an adrenaline, g-force sandwich.
“Hmm, overcooked this a little”, my hand went for the front brake.
*CRACK*
“Fuck, Fuck, Fuck” I thought to myself as I lay in the middle of the road, my foot trapped underneath my still running motorcyle.
I struggled desperately to free myself, visions of artics bearing down on me racing through my mind, adrenaline blinding me to the pain I was causing.
After what seemed like an eternity I wrenched myself free and saw a line of cars had stopped and people were rushing to my aid.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes! I’m fine!”
I tried to stand up.
I decided lying in the road for a little while seemed like a nice idea.

After I’d struggled to my feet and the passers by had moved my bike out of the way, I sat down on the grass verge to recover.
“Are you sure you’re ok?”
“Yes, my foot’s a bit bruised, but I’ll be fine in half an hour or so.”
“You’re sure you don’t want me to take you to a hospital?”
“Nah, I’m fine, thank you very much for your help!”
I sat in the sun nursing my foot for an hour before trying to put weight on it again.
Yeah.. not going to be riding my bike today.
I flagged down a passing troupe of bikers who were a mix of American and Swiss and after explaining what happened, asked if they knew of a cheap place to stay nearby.
“Dude, go to the fucking hospital, I’ve had a few accidents myself, you need to get it checked out”
Secretly grateful despite my protests I agreed, as despite the lack of pain I feared my toes were broken.
By this point a pick up had stopped to see what the fuss was about and I gratefully accepted their offer of a lift to the hospital, as I had not been looking forward to riding pillion with my foot!

In a matter of minutes I was being taken care of by the best healthcare in the world.
The doctor informed me that I’d broken the small bone in my heel that ran up the back of my leg and I would need surgery straight away.
Within an hour I was transferred to a bigger hospital and was sitting on a gurney having a local anaesthetic injected into my back.
“You’re making us all miss the Germany Vs Turkey game you know!” My anaesthetist cheerily rebuked me.
“Don’t worry,” she continued, “This op is very common amongst skiiers as well, we do it all the time, it will be very quick!”
And she was right, though that’s not to say that the sensation of someone drilling woodscrews into your leg with a black and decker isn’t somewhat disconcerting…

I spent the night in a private ward and in the morning was cheered to be transferred to a communal ward that was 75% bikers!

During the first day I had time to mull my situation over.
I realised my most pressing concern was securing BMWs bike, as I’d left it by the side of the road for any tom, dick or harry to bundle into a passing van and make off with.
At this point, Misha and Mattias rode in like knights in shining armour wading into the thick of a melee to turn the tide of a losing battle.

Words cannot express how grateful I am to these two doctors who went so far above and beyond the call of duty.
The drove to where I’d had my accident (a good 45 minutes away), bump started the bike and drove it back to the hospital so it would be safe.
I still can’t believe the generosity and good will they’ve shown me, some-one they’ve only just met, nor the amount of problems they’ve saved me from!
Since then they’ve visited me repeatedly to cheer me up, laughing and joking and promising to return on Sunday night with cocktails, some relative of the Mohito that they’re horrified I’ve never heard of!
Guys, if you’re reading this, thank you again, and if there is ever any way I can repay you, don’t hesitate to ask.

So there you have it!
I’m being discharged on Tuesday with any luck, the view is great,

The food is awesome.

And I have a cool scar and a super sexy boot to show for it!

Phew, I’ve had to write this post twice as for some reason wordpress decided to delete the first draft, so for now, I shall bid you Aufweidersehen!

Next time on TK-TV, why my F650 repairs cost €2,500 and what I’m going to do next+

In Amsterdam.

July 3, 2008 at 4:23 pm | Trip | 5 comments

Well, I’ve answered one half of the cliff hanger from the previous post already!
Tuesday morning I was discharged from the hospital and said a fond farewell to the doctors and nursing staff that’d helped me so much, they even went so far as to drive me to the train station, which was a mere 15 minutes hobble away!

I caught a train to Chur, which happened to be a measely half hour train ride away and disembarked with difficulty looking like a pack mule, as my 15l rucksack was woefully inadequate for the amount of stuff I had to carry and I’d resorted to strapping stuff to the outside of it with my cargo net!

After sitting down at the station’s café I dumped my bag-cum-fishing-net on the floor and had an unsettling feeling that something was missing
“Shit! My camera!”
I’d left my camera on the train!
Of course by the time I’d hobbled back up to the platform the train had dissapeared.
Sweating profusely from the summer heat and unaccustomed three-legged parambulation I stumbled into the lost and found office to find a rather self satisfied attendent who informed me with a less than well concealed smugness that he did not have my camera.
Oh well… Last I’ll see of that, time to buy a cheapo compact I guess… Money go THATAWAY!

So yes, I apologise for the lack of photographic evidence of my journey, I’d intended to get some spectacular photos as we rattled quietly through the alpine scenery in the sunshine but… T’was not meant to be!

Many hours later I arrived in Amsterdam at 11pm and hobbled into a taxi and tried in vain to explain the difference between “Hostel” and “Hotel” to somebody who really only spoke Farsi.
He dropped me off at my hotel.
“Sorry sir, we have no vacancies”
Ok, this was starting to look bad, budget splitting as my situation had been a few moments ago it looked as if I’d have to call another taxi, and another, and another until I eventually found a hotel with a room.
“Vacancies” A neon sign flickered gently across the street.
“Yeeeah! Thank god!”
I flopped thankfully into the first room I’ve had to myself for months and fell asleep watching a Dutch subbed version of “Mars attacks”, has anyone watched this film all the way through? I’ve seen the beginning about 5 times now!

The next day I was tasked with acquiring a fresh supply of Fragin, which is a class A drug new to the market tha… No seriously, it’s a blood thinner to prevent DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) in bedridden cripples like myself!

I hauled my recalcitrant body the 200 exhausting yards to the Apotheke.
“Ah yes, you’ll need a prescription for this”
I hadn’t been given a prescription? Had or? I searched through my “Pockets of holding”and after inspecting enough scribbles of paper to rival the library of babylon I resigned myself to a wearisome trapse to the tourist doctor to get myself a prescription.

2 hours and a full mile and a half round trip later I’d given up and gone back to the hostel, that was 10 yards round the corner from my hotel of the previous night, with a box of asprin and some calesthenics in mind.

I spent the rest of the day in a cafe across the street smoking a box of 25 cigars I’d bought for 10 euros and trying the Rosé beer they had, that even the waiter screwed up his nose in disgust over when I ordered it.
It was… alright… More like bacardi breezer than beer but, better than a 69cent carton of wine for example.

The evening I whiled away in the common room of the hostel talking to a lovely canadian couple who shared their purchases with me, which as previously elicited little obvious affect to myself… I must be doing something wrong…

Upon the morrow I sat in the common room steeling myself for another attempt to find the tourist doctor when
“You check out today yes?”
“No, I was thinking of staying a few more days”
“No room!”
Grr, I really did not want to pack up all my stuff into that ever shifting, clattering mess I’d assembled it into previously.
Still, to their credit they arranged another hostel for me, at an admittedly pricey 30 euros a night and I wandered off via tram to find my bed for the night.
No problems, found the tram, found the hostel, yay for things going smoothly!

My stuff dumped I still had to find my Fragmin, and after half an hour of arguing with the girl behind the counter over my swiss prescription I had an order placed and was told to pick it up tomorrow.
Right… One last thing, a book!
Amsterdam’s not short on English bookshops and I found one no distance at all from the chemists.
“One man and his mission to fight his evil half brother to rescue his love/dog/budgie”
“Miss Pennywhether couldn’t decide which suitor to entertain at this evenings ball and was in a terrible muddle”
Hmm, I seem to have found a bookshop specialising in literary diarrhoea.
I eventually settled on a Sharpe novel and retreated back to the hostel.

And there we are! Not much of note really, but tomorrow my mate Alex arrives and the fun begins!

Rotterdam

July 31, 2008 at 10:55 am | Trip | 5 comments

Moons pass, seasons change, governments rise and fall, yet still the blog remains un-updated.
Ok some hyperbole involved perhaps but it has been a while.
I’ve been trying to write this post for the past few weeks but never get past the blank page on wordpress.

It feels as if my head is a saucepan which will overflow if I put the metaphorical ladel in to extract some info…But anyway, to the point… Last weekend my father and his girlfriend (which honestly sounds like a rather disrespectful term for someone of the previous generation) came to visit…
‘”I’m quite interested to try some”
“Well, then, shall we visit a coffee shop?”
“No need, I have a gram right here”
I hand the bag of grass, rizlas, filters and lighter to my dad, who expertly rolls a bi-generational spliff.
A few tokes all round, Jenny’s feeling a little light headed (not unusual if you’ve not smoked it before), James is feeling chilled out, whereas I can barely stand up and eating my pancake is a task akin to simultaneously solving a rubix cube while writing a thesis on the hidden nature of quarks and trying to play chess with Deep Blue.
I’d love to give a coy, in depth analysis of my father stoned, as it would probably prove amusing to those that know him, however I forgot (ahah!) to mention to the crowd that the name of this particular weed was “Amnezia”, which I thought was a cute nickname, rather than a bold statement of fact.

The simple chilled out effect was fun to see in my dad though, as when he was refused a glass of tap water by the waitress who’d just served us around 20 euros in food in drink I was expecting him to go ballistic…
You see, James is the last stalwart defender of common sense and decency, and sees it as his divinely appointed duty to stand up for these values where others would not.
So when he relaxedly replied “Oh, ok” I bust into a fit of laughter.
I remember him telling me of a time many years ago when he’d been refused a glass of water by a cafe owner, his reaction at this point was to reach behind the counter, grab a large carving knife and insist that he was given a glass of water.
To those of you that don’t know my father this may paint a rather agressive picture of him, but to appreciate the irony of these tales you have to consider my father is the principle of an EFL school, and is one of the most well spoken and highly educated people you could care to meet, so I find such tales from his past endlessly amusing.

The next day they had to fly back to blighty and I had to catch a train back to Rotterdam.
I’d been staying in a hostel called De Mafkees for the past two weeks and had been told that two weeks was the maximum anyone was allowed to stay. 
So imagine my surprise when I checked my emails and found a email from Hedi, a member of staff at the hostel (a kinder more intelligent girl you couldn’t hope to meet), telling me that everyone (apart from Lizbeth, who told me I couldn’t stay) had piped up for me with the “big boss” and said that I should be allowed to stay as long as I like!
Over the past couple of weeks I’d got to know the staff at the hostel really well, such friendly and interesting people made such a change from the heartless staff at the hostels in Amsterdam that sent a poor cripple laden with motorcycle gear trapsing from hostel to hostel for a week!

Before I left for Amsterdam to meet my dad, when I thought I was going to be kicked out, the night shift guy Niels even said I could stay at his place for a while, and seeing as even though 10 euros a night for a hostel was cheap, paying in beers/stew for a place to stay was even cheaper, I decided to take him up on his offer anyway!

And that’s how I ended up in a squat at 9am drinking beer.
Seeing as Niels worked the night shift I had decided to stay up through the night and tag along back to his place at the end of his shift.
11:45pm - 7:45am in a hostel is a weird time.
Old men in their boxers, Iranian ladies teaching you the Farsi word for marmalade, and anorexic Swedish girls that wake up at 5am, down three Rosé Weickes beers and then ask if you can roll.
On the way to Niels’ we stopped at one of his old squats.
It was exactly as you’d stereotype a squat, broken glass on the floor, A for Anarchy scrawled on the walls, suspicious looking pools of dried liquid, still, looked like it must have been a cool place when people were living there.
When we got to his current place it was a whole other story, clean, tidy, a helluvalot nicer than my house was in fact!

In a way it’s a shame that I’m not staying longer, I’ve got a bus booked to Munich on Friday evening!
Oh and in an amazing stroke of news, they’ve found my camera! Nearly a month after I left it on the train it gets handed in to the lost and found.
That’s right up there with Elvis-tap-dancing-on-the-loch-ness-monster’s-head in terms of likelihood.
Still.. all’s well that ends well right guys?
Once again, Adeui!

I could be a TV!

August 3, 2008 at 12:34 pm | Trip | 3 comments

“I could be a TV man, fuck that man I could be a TV, I could be a book, I could be a table, I could be a TV man, fuck that, I could be a TV!”
Richard’s funny when he’s drunk.
A week or two ago I spent the day in Den Haag with Richard (an English guy foolish enough to want to go into IT) and Catherine (an American doing a 2 year(?) RTW trip).
The day itself wasn’t very eventful apart from being lucky enough to try a beer called BarBar, which is a honey beer, which sounded disgusting if intriguing, but tasted absolutely delicious.

They also had a rather impressive sandcastle opposite, quite how it survived the torrential downpours I’ll never know.

After our 3rd bar-beer we were all feeling rather cheap and ended up drinking a six pack of Heineken in the park, rather surreptitiously as apparently such things are illegal round there, and headed back to the hostel.

Whereupon Catherine whipped out a pack of uno cards and taught me and Richard how to play.
We were shortly joined by a Turkish girl called Melahaat who spoke far better English than anyone would have expected and we whiled away the night playing “Drunk Rules” which got us through 2 x 24 packs.
One of the best rules was the first, that Catherine came up with, which was that whenever anyone said anything, they had to say the name of the person they were talking to, which is why I actually remembered peoples names for once!

You can find Catherine’s blog here, which mentions some of the same incidents, though is censored on behalf of her parents, so no naughty drinking!

Man, how wasted do I look in that photo, lol!

On the road again!

August 7, 2008 at 3:03 pm | Trip | 2 comments

#I’m on the road again, don’t where I’m going or when, my wings were clipped but now I fly, way up into the blue sky#
Inside my helmet is the only place I can adlib both lyrics and tune without getting eggs thrown at me, aah I missed it.
Having thrown off my crutches and caught a bus to Munich I picked up my bike with glee and looked the other way while I pressed “Ja” on the card machine for a transaction of €3,700.

I spent a couple of days in Munich just because it was cheap and I couldn’t be arsed to figure out what I was going to do next.
Since my camera was in Switzerland I figured it best to head down to Chur (where I lost it) and take it from there, while sending off an email to my friends from Hospital Thusis to see if they wanted a calpirin.. calpyrhin.. cocktail of some description while I was in the neighbourhood.

So there I was, merrily singing away to myself having set off only moments before from my hostel in Munich when I get pulled over by a policeman.
“Oh, a routine check I guess”
“You were doing 64kmh”
“Yes?” I said, thoughtfully looking at the dual carriageway I was on, trying to convert 64kmh to mph.. Not a lot I concluded.
“The limit is 50kmh”
“Oh shit… I didn’t realise!”
“€25 please”
Well, that’s not so bad, better than 60 quid and 3 points eh?

Still in high spirits I buggered off to Chur, not far from Munich, but still 3 countries to be traversed.
Beautiful weather followed me all the way and all was right with the world, soon the alps loomed in to view, looking like an oil painting with their precisely varied distances to produce long distance perspective!

I arrived in Chur, bent down to take off my motorcross boots as they’re as about as suitable for walking in as a chastity belt is for the reverse cowgirl.
And while I was bent down next to my bike, what did I see?
“Oh goody… an oil leak..”
The same oil leak no less that my bike had when I gave it to BMW Munich.

Apparently 3000 pounds isn’t enough to spend to get a BMW fixed…

Ah well, c’est la vie!

Leaky Leaky Catchy BMW

August 12, 2008 at 4:33 pm | Trip | 1 comment

Well, I must say BMW Chur did an outstanding job of fixing the leak.
Not only did it start leaking again before I even got back to Munich, the sump plug is now leaking as well! Yay!
I’ve given the bike back to BMW Zentrum Munchen now so… Hopefully Fred will sort me out! Go Fred! He’s our man, if he can’t fix it… Well.. I’m kinda fucked really!

In the meantime I’m back at “The Tent” in Munich.
It’s a nice place, dead cheap (€7 a night!) and the beer is plentiful and pretty bloody cheap as well!
Though on that count I think I’m going to take some time out for a while, as I’ve been drinking every night since I broke my leg.
Perfectly normal behaviour for a holiday!
However with a “holiday” as long as mine it starts to tax ones liver, paunch ones belly and add up on the beancounters.

Must… Not… OOOH BEER!

I’ll be good!

Deadlines are like buses.

August 18, 2008 at 10:54 am | Trip | 2 comments

Except you don’t wait for them, they wait for you, or not as the case may be.

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs for weeks in Munich, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, etc waiting for something to do.
Finally I get my bike back (today, hopefully it will make it more than 2 miles without pissing oil all over the place!) and I’ve got four deadlines to meet and can only make 2 of them!

Tomorrow morning I’m meeting a chap from ADVrider.
Midweek I was supposed to be meeting a Canadian chap I met in Rotterdam in Prague to catch up.
Thursday I was supposed to be meeting the son of one of my aneasthetists (from when I broke my leg, I’m not addicted to Morphine, honest…) in Berlin.
Saturday I’ve got a tour of Chernobyl first thing in the morning.
Now, this should in theory all be possible, if I trade my BMW in for a MiG…

As it stands I’m going to have to drive from Prague straight to Kiev, do not pass Berlin, do not collect local beers or contacts.
Only appointments I’m gonna meet are seeing Martin tomorrow morning and the Chernobyl tour…

Sorry guys!
I hope the photos of Chernobyl make up for it!

The road to Praha

August 20, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Trip | No comment

“His name is Sam, hes 22, hes from Oxford and he needs a girlfriend!!
“Shut up” I snapped irritably.
Id had enough of this kid, he started following me out of nowhere and me not being very interested in kids but still good humoured, answered his questions with a subtext of “Leave me alone”.
Clearly this kid didnt get subtlety so I grabbed him by the arm and told him to shut up and go away.
He grinned stupidly and conceded to at least be quiet.
This made me realise that when you grow up, although it seems like you get better at dealing with people, its simply that adults are less fucking irritating than kids.
I remember why I was so bleeding antisocial as a child now…



Still, “The Tent” in Munich was a pretty cool place, quite literally it felt like a fridge, and exceptionally cheap.
Especially as when I went to check in for the second time, after driving my bike back from Switzerland, they said “Oh, our computers busy at the moment, go and have a beer and come back later”.
… I did the first part, but somehow ended up forgetting to check in and spent about a week there for free!

Yesterday morning as part of my “hectic” schedule I was due to meet Martin from ADVRider.com.

Me and Martin headed off to… A palace of King Ludwigs that I forget the name of, situated on an island in the middle of a lake.

As you can tell Im the one doing all the hard work!

Some of the statues in the fountains were rather odd.. As Martin rather poignantly commented “He was quite mad you know!”

Extravagant? Naaaaah!

Personally I think I look quite dashing with the rolled up bike trousers and the flip flops… Most people seem to disagree however, but will generally agree that I do, if nothing else look very English.

You can just about see Martins bike hiding behind my overloaded behemoth.

We headed back to Martins place afterwards where I traded him my UBER torque wrench, which was taking up half a bleeding pannier, for a slighter model.
Martins also took some photos of me stuffing my face with his food, but I look so much like a hamster Im going to neglect to post those, though if youre that interested theyre on my smugmug page anyway.

My brief soirre with Martin was a good laugh! Hes a great guy, especially as he paid for everything including breakfast lol!
Thanks for the day out mate, but I rather wish Id gone my original route to Prague.
I ended up getting to the hostel at 11PM last night! I set off at about 3:30.
Entirely my fault of course, I should have had a larger scale map, but hey, I found some nice roads near the border!

Prague, is, BEAUTIFUL.
I dont know why when queried all anyone ever says about the place is “Oh Prague, yeah its REALLY cheap”.
Sure, its cheap, but I wasnt expecting it to be the better of Paris for looks!

Not entirely convinced by the food however!

I think the waitress would rather I just buggered off in this photo.

And although Ive always seen posters on the street, Ive never actually seen the elusive beasts that put them there, so… I felt this was worthy of a shot!

Im going to get some photos of the centre this evening as they really know how to do uplighting round these parts.

The next two days are going to be fun fun fun as Ive got to cover 800 miles to get to Kiev before the 23rd for my tour of the irradiated land.
Still, the bikes holding up ok, touch wood, so in theory it shouldnt be an issue!

Oh and I apologise for the distinct lack of apostrophes in this post, seems they didnt think them worthwhile on Czech keyboards!

Update

August 20, 2008 at 4:54 pm | Trip | No comment

Well.. Shit…

Clamps, Clubs and Clocks

August 23, 2008 at 11:24 am | Trip | No comment

“No parking here”
“Yes, sorry, I realise that now”
But why? I’ve parked on the pavement everywhere in Europe, even in front of the Colosseum of Rome for God’s sake and nobody batted an eyelid!
Still, they did show up within 15 minutes of me calling them to unlock it and it was fairly reasonable at 40 quid or so…
However, when I came to unlock the bike and pack it up to move it…
*CRACK*
(I seem to be using that particular bit of onomatopaeia a lot in this blog)
And my bike falls flat…
“Shit… the side stand’s snapped”
Being six o’clock, everywhere that could conceivably repair it was shut, and as I was supposed to be driving to Kiev the next morning I was in something of a pickle.

I decided the best course of action was to put off my Chernobyl trip yet again and get the side stand fixed, as the idea of refuelling my overloaded monstrosity without a side stand didn’t bear thinking about.

The next morning I spoke to the guys behind the hostel bar, who busted their arses and found me a guy that would not only fix it, but would come to the hostel so that the bar guy could translate for me, but also escort me back to their garage and fix it then and there!
Damage? Twenty quid including tip!

Still, I had a while to kill as I’d put my tour off until next weekend, so I decided to stay in Kiev and got to keep my appointment to meet Ashley Chivers after all!

Me, him and a group of German lads went out to a club they knew of from their previous trip.

Waiting for the metro…

The club itself

Modern equivalent of a disco ball…

The DJ was very impressive, mixing three tracks at once of Reggae, Pop and Trance..

The German lads!

Prolst!

Leaving the club the gang was a little drunk…

According to Ash the chap sitting down is a little old lady… I can see the resemblance actually!

“We’re not lost, my friend has great intuition” “… Yeah.. And a map…”

We did get back in the end, and what wonders we saw on the way!
We even saw a man who lived in a cupboard with a coat hanger and lots of cigarette smoke.
He tried to get us to join him, but we decided to run away instead…

It was a good night!

As I had a few days to spare my dad’s coming over to visit! Woo!
He couldn’t get a flight to Prague though so I said…
“Hey, try Warsaw, it’s on the way to Kiev for me!”
So he booked a flight to Warsaw!
I had to drive straight to Warsaw the next day to get there on time, but when I looked at my map..
“Oh fuck, I meant Krakow, not Warsaw!”
Little difference of an extra 250 miles to do that day.
Ten hours on the bike was fun…

Still, I’m here now and my dad lands in about 3 hours and I still don’t know where his hotel is.
So… Goodbye in Polish!

And I would walk a thousand miles.

August 28, 2008 at 9:53 pm | Trip | No comment

Well, drive at any rate.
I’m so glad I didn’t drive from Prague to Kiev in two days, that would have been murder.

Warsaw was ok, didn’t really see very much of it, the old town seemed quite nice, as did the hotel bar (which we managed to wrack up a HEINOUS bill in).

But all too soon it was time to move on, To KIEV!

My first border crossing was smooth if lengthy, and soon enough I was driving down the ridiculously wide and well paved road from the border post.

Which… abruptly ended in road works and dumped me onto something a bit more traditional.

Mile after mile after mile of endless straight roads!

Kiev was signposted right from the off so I thought “ooh, this should be easy!”
Except that eventually even the undulating, patchworkof a road that I’d been converted to, also abruptly ended in roadworks.
No matter, I simply turned onto the nearest road, which was a washboarded unpaved road.
“This can’t be right” I thought to myself as my spine tried to escape throught the seat of my trousers.

Eventually the road went through a tiny little village, and upon noticing a group of teenagers huddled round a hay/fire I pulled over and pointed down the road.
“Kiev?”
Turns out Kiev is prounounced more like Kia than anything, so at first they didn’t understand what the hell I was on about.
Despite not sharing a language they invited me to warm myself by the fire, and as we got to talking they invited me to stay the night!

Being as Kiev was some 300 miles away and it was utterly dark I was more than glad to take them up on their offer.

One of the kids had his own motorbike, so he was very excited to give mine a try.
Thinking that he was just going to tootle round in a circle I let him jump on and start it off.
15 minutes later I was starting to wonder where the hell he’d got to.
Though seeing as he’d left me with what was presumably his girflfriend I felt there was a certain amount of mutual trust involved and stayed by the fire.

Eventually he came back and showed off a very impressive gash on his leg where he’d binned the bike -See! It’s not just me!-.

Him and his group of mates showed me back to a house, which seemed to belong to an extremely randy old man who was desperately insisting I have sex with one of the girls… Though as the teenage lad was saying the same I suppose I shouldn’t blame the old guy too much…

We spent the evening pantomiming questions to each other, they were very impressed by the cost of my shoes, which struck me as rather odd as they all had the latest mobile phones.
Admittedly the standard of living seemed to be pretty low, 4 beds to a room, and it looked like they ate what they grew for the most part.

I was somewhat non plussed when he asked for ten euros for the nights stay, but didn’t begrudge him his money, price of a hostel anyway!
Another five euros for breakfast next morning struck me as a little ridiculous however.
The breakfast was in itself a feast.
It consisted of an omelette that tasted NOTHING like any omelette I’ve had before (including the one I made with duck eggs!), which had the worlds saltiest bacon in it. Alongside this was a plate of fat strips, and for the main component we had a giant bowl of mashed potato each.
It was actually pretty nice, just… really not what I wanted first thing in the morning!

One of the kids was going to Kiev that morning, so I volunteered to give him a lift.
He didn’t have a helmet, despite owning a bike, so we scoured the village looking for (presumably) the one guy that had a helmet.
But.. Since he was, from what I gathered, unavailable, we made a trip to the nearest bus stop some six miles away.

The roads in between were pretty epic.
The earth road was fun, the gravel road was hair-raising but the weirdest of all was where they’d taken an old, undulating, potholed road and put COBBLES on it without flattening it.

At one point we were quite happily bombing along a delightfully flat unpaved section at some 40mph, when suddenly we came upon a 3 foot wide, 3 foot deep TRENCH spanning the entire road.
If I’d braked we’d have locked up the wheels and still hit it, so I just went for it.
Down went the front wheel, UP went the front wheel; me and my pillion hanging suspended at the peak of our parabola quite seperately from bike.
THUMP the bike landed straight and as we kept whizzing on, awestruck by our good fortune I turned and looked at my new friend and we both laughed the nervous laugh of two people who for a split second thought they were in deep deep shit.

Eventually we got to town and it was decided that since he couldn’t describe how to get to Kiev I would just follow the bus.
This was all well and good until about 5 miles down the road my fuel light flicked on.
“Oh well” I thought to myself, “I’ve got about another 70 miles before it actually conks out, I’m sure we’ll be on the main road by then”.
Little did I know that this bus took the worlds most winding route to service all the tiny little villages in the surround area.
Sixty miles on I found a petrol station.
“No cards” Shit, I had no local currency.
I soldiered on, even though by this point I’d lost the bus and consequently had no idea where I was going.
Praise the lord I found a town, even rarer a town with a CASH POINT! WOOHOO!

Fuelled up and feeling pleased I stopped in front of a sign to consult my map.
Head buried in my “Cart” I heard over the top of it “Do you need some help?”
“Holy crap! Somebody that speaks English!”
He grins at my amazement.
It turns out I ran across one of three guys who own a metal working company locally.
The odd thing? Just a couple of months ago they hosted a pair of Danish bikers doing a long haul bike tour!
He invited me back to the office to meet his friends, I went along delighted at my good fortune.

Over lunch we all got to know each other a little better and they agreed to have a look at improving my side stand.

Good god what a job them and their guys did.
My side stand is now about two yards long and has a foot on it the size of my hand!

It’s amazing how much difference such a seemingly small thing can make, but it’s improved my confidence in the bike astoundingly, and they didn’t even charge me!
This is the Ukrainian hospitality I’d been hoping for!

We also discovered on further inspection that in my friends late night escapade he’d managed to bend my pannier rack, moreover one pannier had popped half out of the rack and was held in only one place!
How it held on when we were flying through the air on those roads I have no idea, but I thoroughly reccomend Jesse panniers!

After straightening it out it was dinner time and my new best mates took me to a local restaurant.
I would love to regale you with the stories we shared and the exciting things I learned about Ukrainian culture.
However I don’t remember much after we polished off the first bottle of vodka.

Waking up in the morning it was reassuring to find a big bowl and a bottle of water lying next to me.
“Aah” I thought to myself “At least I’m not the first person to get really drunk round here”

That day was spent mostly recovering from the hangover to an extent where I was able to drive the rest of the way to Kiev.
But eventually I did recover and fare-thee-wells said I strode off, mounted my newly strengthened bike and headed for Kiev.

Where I eventually found a Hostel run by a loquacious Norweigan.

And tomorrow? Tomorrow I go to Chernobyl!

Chernobyl

August 30, 2008 at 12:37 pm | Trip | 4 comments

After a 2 hour bus ride from Kiev, we arrived at the 30km exclusion zone checkpoint.

“Please will everyone get out and bring your passports”
The guard has a clipboard with our names and passport numbers on, I hand mine over.
He runs his fingers down the list of names, looks puzzled, runs his finger down the list of numbers to check and is even more confused, he consults the driver in Russian.
“The numbers don’t match” translates a Belgian guy also on the tour.
Shit, I gave them the number of my other passport (I have two UK passports), visions of being left outside the checkpoint while the group saunters on cross my mind.

Eventually after much incomprehensible discussion the guard shrugs his shoulders and lets us through.

We stop in a nearby village and pick up our tour guide, who is also a leading government official concerned with public relations in regards to Chernobyl.

As you can see his approach is somewhat.. relaxed to the whole affair.

This monument was built and maintained by local firefighters with no outside assistance in order to commemorate their comrades who died.

Reactor number five was under construction at the time of the disaster; the cranes used for its construction remain a skeletal monument to the confidence and visions of expansion at the time.
As our tour guide explained, the party line on nuclear disaster before 1986 was “It can never happen” and afterwards the party line was “It can never happen even more“.

A quick demonstration of the geiger counter reveals that in the air the count is around 45 miliroentgen per hour.

On the ground it’s over 200!

The biggest surprise for me was seeing people walking around!
Apparently around 10,000 people work on a shift rota of something like 14 days on, 50 days off to minimise the build of up radiation in their bodies, and at any one time around 3,000 people are working in the exclusion zone.

The information centre had an amazingly detailed model of the current state of reactor #4.
Apparently the thing in the middle of the photo that looks like a scrubbing brush weighing 30 metric tonnes leapt 10 metres in the air at the time of the explosion and landed on its side… Gives you some idea of the scale…

We got very close to reactor #4 (by my standards anyway) and this was in fact the area in which we saw the most people.
They didn’t say what the radiation level was where we were standing and nobody asked.

Town sign for Pripyat.

The long road to Pripyat.

The infamous bridge from which the Pripyat villagers watched the technicolour fireworks display that was the burning reactor #4, fifteen minutes here at the time was a lethal dose.

Pripyat main street, you can’t even see all the buildings; it feels not so much like a city with trees in it as a forest with buildings in it.

Entrance to Pripyat hotel.

What remains of the lobby.

“In case of nuclear disaster, please do not use the elevator”
So we took the stairs!

I think I’ll stick with my Hostel…

The views however are quite spectacular.

This was my favourite place of the whole trip, I have absolutely no idea what this tree is growing in six storeys above ground level, but I’m very glad that it is.

Outside the hotel again there’s evidence still of the group of graffiti artists posing as photographers who paid Pripyat a visit some years ago. Though caught they were not prosecuted as the entire town is classified as nuclear waste, and there isn’t a law against graffitiing nuclear waste!

More graffiti, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it, I think if anything it adds a chilling air to a place that, given the style of the locals, is more exciting than reverential.

The stairs leading up to the local gym.

The climbing rope hangs forlornly, the last remnant of what must have been a well furnished gym at the time (Pripyat was a model town for the communist ideal)

An amazingly photogenic place, you could spend weeks here with an army of creative photographers without realising anything like its full potential.

From the inside of the gym you can see our next stop, the amusement park that was due to be opened a few weeks after the disaster.

Bumper cars sit gently rusting, never having heard the playful whoops of children in their midst.

Somehow I don’t think this would pass Health and Safety…

The ferris wheel was one of the few rides that was used briefly even though the park was never officially opened, its belts long rotted the engine turns no more.

“Anyone want to take a dive?” jokes our guide.

Maybe not…
The olympic sized swimming pool was apparently quite a popular social ground at the time.

Entrance to the local school.

And entire room, filled 3 foot deep with strewn books, a pity you can’t take souvenirs…

Rusting cash machine.

This abacus looks rather folorn sitting forgotten in a corner, its wires bent, its beads spent.

The school was the end of the tour, we nearly ended up not visiting it until one of the tourists shouted out on the way back to Kiev “We must visit the school”

I’m glad we did.

Sam sick, Bike sick.

September 4, 2008 at 6:40 pm | Trip | No comment

Maybe we’re symbiotic, or maybe my bike’s just a one upper but no sooner had I decided to soldier on to Odessa with my hacking cough and running nose (which, in a motorcycle helmet is a lot less fun than it sounds) than my bike decided to first become impotent by falling sideways after the side stand turned limp and subsequently incontinent by leaking shitloads of oil.

I’m not actually sure this two incidents are related as it seems to be leaking oil from the opposite side to the side it landed on (and the opposite side to the one that was leaking before).

If I’m honest I’m about ready to break this bike for parts and buy some cheap ukrainian POS that at least will be cheap to fix.

I of course had arrived in Odessa before I discovered my leak, which is leaving me to chase after a non-english speaking local who’s been trying to help me get to a phone/internet etc, though for cash of course, not out of the kindness of his own heart.

We shall see what tomorrow brings…

Taxi!

Hot Talk

September 6, 2008 at 1:25 pm | Trip | No comment

‘Many a word said in haste’ and all that…
After running the engine for half an hour yesterday I was unable to replicate the oil leak.
From the location of pooled oil and trails thereof I think it was leaking from the oil pressure switch, which would make sense as the oil pressure light has been flickering on occasion.
So I gave it a quick tighten, hopefully that’ll sort things out
I really should have researched my crossing into Romania more thoroughly when coming to Odessa, as it turns out although there’s a shared border, there’s no crossing, meaning I’m going to have to go into Moldova, yay!

And according to recent reports, crossing into Moldova is a rather hellish experience…
Bribery ahoy!

Kiev Hostel Politics

September 6, 2008 at 5:54 pm | Trip | 4 comments

Hostels in Kiev are a weird weird thing…
I stayed in (reportedly) the best Hostel in Kiev (Kiev Backpackers).
Which, had a decent enough location, was clean enough and no lock out.

However the Norweigan guy running it was one of the most abrasive people I’ve ever met.
If you asked him a question, it would immediately be thrown back at you as stupid, and too much effort to answer properly.
He was vocally racist against Russians and Ukrainians (right in front of them in the restaurant, hope to god they didn’t speak English).
Not to mention the fact I’m almost certain he charged me 360 grivnah for the first night (about 50 euros!), though I evened the score by getting a free night without him realising).

However if you look at the alternatives on hostelworld.com you’ll see similar stories (and worse) at the other hostels in Kiev.

In fact he was telling me of an English guy who set up a hostel in Kiev with a very similar name to his, which created an ongoing debacle whose highlights include the English guy leaving a dead cat slit from top to tail in front of the Norweigan guy’s hostel,  operating on a tourist visa and without a hostel licence and threatening the Norweigan’s wife and 7 month old son, or so we’re told.

All in all I think there’s a niche in Kiev for a reasonably priced and more importantly sane hostel owner…

Still he did have a couple of pretty young things working for him who were always insisting on a joyride, so it wasn’t all bad!

Moldova, Romania

September 9, 2008 at 8:30 am | Trip | 2 comments

“Any LSD or guns?”
I think the border guard was a little offended when I burst out laughing.
Getting out of Ukraine was easy, so far the worst the Moldovan guards had done was insist that I had to detour around Transnistria (around 250km) and say.
“Maybe a little present!”
I played dumb “Oh, what’s a present?”.
They looked at me in disgust and handed me a form to fill out.
I filled it out and made my way into the queue for customs where I was asked whether I was drugsmuggling, and no sooner had they started inspecting my panniers than a yellow Suzuki rocked up behind me and I heard.
“You’re from England?”
I turned, smiled and replied that I was, whereupon a beamish smile broke out on the guys face and he pumped my hand vigorously.
“Where are you going?”
“Chisinau”
“I live in Chisinau! We should go together!”
“Sounds good!”
How little I knew at this point what a blessing it would be.
The customs official had been observing this exchange in silence, and upon its completion, gave me a sickly smile and waved me through.
“Huh..” I thought to myself “that was easy…”

I waited on the other side of the border for my new compadre, who followed in very short order and asked:
“How fast you want to go?”
“Oh, hundred, hundred and twenty is fine by me” (kmh lads, kmh!)
“Excellent, I am Moldovan criminal police, we have no problem with speeding!”
As the country we were in at the time was Transinistra (a breakaway country from Moldova consisting of some 600,000 odd people) we still had to cross another border to get into Moldova proper.
We stopped at the next border post, showed our passports, Constanin (my guardian angel) exchanged a few jokes in Russian and we were whisked straight through.
I can’t help but think that would have cost me an hour and a small sum of dollars to get through on my own.

Once through into Moldova I realised what a blessing my guide was.
As you see, if there’s one thing Moldova lacks (apart from EU membership, and a first world infrastructure) is fucking ROAD SIGNS, I swear there’s only one of the fuckers in the entire country.
We went whisking down unmarked roads that I would have had no chance to navigate on my own, and when we arrived at Chisinau, Constantin even rang my hostel for me, found out where it was and took me there!

What a guy! It’s people like this that make travelling what it is.

I didn’t do much that evening, as even though I’d set off in the morning, it had taken me hours to find the right road out of Odessa and by the time I arrived I was ready for some food and some sleep.

And what food!
I had, of all things in the universe, Caviar and Sturgeon Pizza!
That, a beer and an orange juice came to just under 7 quid (horrifically expensive by Moldovan standards, but a cheap price to pay to be able to say I’ve had Caviar Pizza!
It was incidentally, like a very posh anchovie pizza, and since I love anchovies, that was just great!

The next morning I set off for the Romanian border, which should have been easy to find once I got on the M1.
However, the “M1″ at one point randomly curved off to the right and I went straight on (with, of course in grand Moldovan style, no signs indicating which way the main road was).
So I was left going down roads like this.

Which left me very glad I upgraded my suspension!
Gravel is fun, you have no say in where you’re headed, you’re just along for the ride!
At one point I hit such a vicious pothole that my tent/misc bag came off (amazing, considering it’s strapped down with two ratchet straps) and I didn’t even notice until about 10 miles later.
Fortunately it was still with me as it was locked on to the bike, I was just lucky it wasn’t hanging next to the exhaust!

Crossed over into Romania eventually with no problems, total cost of Moldovan borders?
$0!

Romania as I saw it was much prettier than either Moldova or Ukraine before it.
It’s almost as if some-one did the south downs, then some-one else responded “Pfft, I can do better than that!” then did Romania.

I wasn’t quite sure where I was spending the night, so I popped into a couple of Motels along the way.
“40 euros please!”
… Yeah, no thanks.
Seeing as the roads were blissful in comparison to Moldova (average speed, 100kmh!) I decided to press on to Bucharest and find a Hostel.

And what a hostel!
I parked up next to this.

Turns out staying at the hostel is a German chap doing almost the same trip as me!
With almost the same time frame!
He’s entering Turkey a little later than I am (25th rather than the 11th), and he’s going to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam rather than Philippines/Indonesia, but other than that, identical!

Oh, also…

The Hostel has a resident Pile-’o-Kittens (TM)!
So, what the hell, I figure I can stay another night!

Not Constantinople

September 15, 2008 at 10:35 am | Trip | 2 comments

Bucharest is not far at all from the Bulgarian border, took me no time at all to cross and despite being told you had to pay a toll to get over the river that marks the border, the guard at the toll booth lifted the barrier and waved me through without so much as a Moldovan Lei in exchange.

The roads in Bulgaria were much akin to Romanian roads (ie; 1,000,000,000,000,000 times better than the average Moldovan/Ukrainian road) and I was bombing down the weird style of wide single lane roads that characterises this part of the world.

Oddly enough when I leapt onto the first motorway on my route I was slowed to a crawl by a rolling traffic jam going at 20-30mph.
Being a slim fit vehicle (if somewhat more rotund than the average motorcycle) I flitted my way daintily through the traffic, sliding determinedly between cars like a skinny guy in a mosh pit full of dykes.
I eventually got to the front of the queue and found three police cars driving across all lanes of the motorway with their lights flashing, and beyond them in the distance I could see the Bulgarian equivilent of the Tour De France.
Urgh… 2 hours at 30mph in the blazing sun, could have done that stretch of road at 90, c’est la vie, I was stopping in Bulgaria for the night anyway.

I eventually found a campsite near Bulgas and settled down for the night.
In the morning I found the German owner of the site (known to the world as German Willie) who turned out to be walking to Japan (through Kazahkstan and China) on his own.
Though.. Being as he was 70 and had spent the last 6 years in Bulgaria apparently I do wonder slightly whether he’ll get to the end of his trip.
Still, it’s not about getting there is it?

Though judging by some of the tales he was telling me, he’s a very experienced traveller to say the least!

We said our goodbyes (he gave me some insanely thin towel I’ve yet to try out) and I motored off into the distance.
The road to the Turkish border was very very small, and I more than a few times I questioned whether it was in fact the right road.

Still, the roads were beautiful so I kept going.
My accident prone nature was bound to catch up with me again however and not long after I took the above photograph, I took a corner relatively quickly (though perfectly manageably), leaned over and heard a grinding metallic sound and suddenly I was on the tarmac.
Turned out the side stand had got trapped below the centre stand and when I leant over to take the corner it had scaped the tarmac and sent me tumbling.
Thank god for ‘All the gear, all the time’, I just stood up, dusted myself off, picked up the bike and carried on unharmed.

Close to the Turkish border there are some quite spectacular hills, and if the roads were a bit better surfaced they’d be good fun!

Woo! I made it to the Turkish border! And my last sign in Cyrillic!
The border was pretty easy, took a fair amoung of time to get all the paperwork as I had to go through umpteen different offices, but the motor insurance was a piffling $10 and the visa only $20.

Once I got through the border, oh my god, a whole new world of tarmac.
I think the Turks dream of paving the entire world, on the Bulgarian side I was riding single lane roads which hadn’t seen a construction crew this side of the millenium and on the Turkish side…

Good god, thank you Jesus, I can keep to my schedule and get to Istanbul today without a worry!

I bombed along the E80, a 3 lane super motorway, at 90mph and got to Istanbul in no time at all, though the 90mph wind speed did result in 3 days of excruciating muscular pain… Maybe I’ll keep the speed down next time…

“Istanbul 20km”
And then the houses started.
Istanbul is home to more than 13,000,000 people and good god it is huge.
A quick consultation with my map and I arrived in the area of my benefactor.
Taksim being a complete maze I did the traditional thing of giving the address to a taxi driver and following him through the death defying driving of Istanbul.

I was greeted by Sharron, a friend of my father, who’s staying in Istanbul teaching English and graciously agreed to put up with my smelly self and provide me with a place to sleep (and subsequently some rather delicious meals!).

I’ve been in Istanbul a few days now, so there is much to relate.
But, that will have to wait for another blog post!
In the meantime, here are some samples

Bir, Iki, Uc, Dort!

September 21, 2008 at 8:22 pm | Trip | 1 comment

I always find it hard to write an entire post about a city, even one as amazing as Istanbul; it requires having an opinion on things, and I find they’re treacherous things at the best of times!

I’ve been having a fantastic time in Istanbul, not least because I’ve spent the time being shown round by a lovely Turkish girl by the name of Melahat!

This lovely girl spent endless hours giving me the low down on the best places in Istanbul, all the drinks and meals, not to mention the local slang and some interesting insights into Turkish life!

We did just about everything there is to do in Istanbul (yeah right that’d take a lifetime!).

There’s me in the middle of the Bosphorous, with the main bridge in the background.

This is the Turkish speciality of erm.. something-er-other, it’s quite nice but I’m told the batch we had wasn’t up to its usual spice level!

Kumpir, basically a baked potato (except uhh.. boiled) stuffed to bursting point with everything from gherkins to yoghurt to olives to beetroot (and anything else they can lay their hands on!)

Post haircut a way up Golden Horn.

Istanbul is Purdy!

A street performer on Istiklal.
I swear this guy is the most talented motherfucker I even met; he was singing, playing really fast flamenco guitar and riding a unicycle.
In four months not a single street performer has got a penny from me, this guy got all my change (about 80p).

A film set I ran across near Istiklal, seemed to be doing a protest scene (note the poor guy clinging to the railing on the top right!)

The spice bazaar was absolutely incredible, scents from hundreds of spices (and a number of the more pungent shoppers!) mingled to create a heady mix that verged on overpowering.
Me and Melahat performed an experiment whereby she would go up to the stall and ask the price of something, then I would try a couple of minutes later.
Surprisingly the shop-keepers proved quite honest (or observant) and the prices were pretty much the same.
Unlike my first taxi, which cost me 20YTL when it should have been around 5…

Oh well, I can count up to 50 in Turkish now and ask “Nekidar?” which means “‘ow much is it?” which seemed to do the trick when getting my hair cut (initial price 12 YTL, final price 5! :D)

My cynicism has taken a step up lately, as everyone around is trying to rip me off it seems.
I was walking down a road near the Iranian embassy last Monday after handing in my passport, when a guy walking in front of me (who buffed shoes for a living) dropped his brush.
I found it rather odd that he didn’t notice the loud *clack* that the wooden brush made when it hit the pavement, but nonetheless tapped him on the shoulder and pointed out the fallen brush.
“Thank you very much sir, where are you going?”
“Uh, just to the internet cafe…”
“Oh, that internet cafe is for tourists, come with me! My friend run internet cafe half price!”
Hmm, how convenient, still I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment and follow along.
We stopped in front of a shop:
“We drink chai or Turkish coffee here! 10 minutes only!”
“Erm.. Thanks but I really have to get to the internet cafe right now!”
“Please! Don’t insult me!”
“Byeeeee!” I yelled over my shoulder as I walked determinedly in the opposite direction.

I thought nothing more of it until two days later I went to pick up my passport (with said Iranian visa) and walked down the same street.
*clonk*
This time I simply stepped over the brush and kept walking.
About half an hour later I was walking down the same street again in the opposite direction.
*clonk*
“Jeez, do these guys never give up?”
I don’t know what the rest of the rouse was but from what I’ve heard they’ll either charge you exorbitant amounts for the supposedly free chai, try and sell you a carpet, or simply spike the tea and strip you of everything you own.

I leave Istanbul on Wednesday, many experiences and one Iranian visa richer, woo!

When I get to Australia

September 23, 2008 at 6:20 pm | Trip | No comment

Strange to be thinking about something so far away, when I have such wonders in front of my nose.
But I suppose it’s my equivilent of whistfully thinking about home, as I don’t particularly have a ‘home’ anymore (beyond ‘where my bike is parked’).

As my financial situation stands, having been taken roughly in the barn by BMW, I will have to work solidly in Australia to support myself; although I am sure with excursions at weekends and holidays!

I am really looking forward to a manual job.
It may not be a long term job, but I would love to know the feeling of coming home from work every day, physically exhausted rather than mentally.
When I got home from my desk job, I was mentally exhausted, that horrible kind of exhaustion where your muscles scream ‘hey, yeah, let’s go, we’ve got work to do!’ and your brain screams ‘Murr, let’s sleep’.
Even worse when you try and sleep, you can’t, you don’t have the simple pleasure of wearied muscles sinking deeply into the mattress and end up fidgeting endlessly.
My solution? At the time I drank to get to sleep most nights, worked quite well for me, although I eventually came to a point where I associated boredom with a very strong desire to drink, at which point I decided to lay off the booze for a while.

My attitude towards personal posessions has changed immensely in the past few months.
Having everything you own in the world in the panniers of your motorcycle can do that to you I guess…
I said to some-one the other day “I have a real hankering to build a bed” which naturally surprised them somewhat.
When I get my own place in Aus I intend to furnish it, electronics and all, for under £100.
If the second hand markets in Australia are anything like they are in the UK, simply putting an ad in the paper saying “Will collect furniture” should get my phone ringing off the hook with people glad not to have to hire a van to take it to the dump.
As for electronics? Provided I go a few generations back I should be able to get everything for nothing.
“CRT TV? Windows 2000 PC? Sure mate, free!”

It all sounds very hippyish but, I get the feeling I’m going to want to save as much money as I possible can to continue my trip.
As it’s always been my plan to go beyond Australia, hell, those of you paying attention in the photos will notice my panniers say “Travelling the world” rather than “UK to Australia!”.
If I can scrape together the money I’ll ship the bike to South America, I’ve heard tales of people spending 9 months in Latin America on a motorbike on around $1500 (including petrol, food, accomodation etc).

My other idea is to go to University after a year in Australia working.
Really these ideas are simply putting off working full time again for as long as possible, but there are still many things that appeal to me about university.
Mainly the congregation of people with some degree of interest in something in a single place.
The thing that irritates me about most people is they’re not interested in anything.
Oh they may have their hobbies, their topics of conversation, but for the most part they’re simply inane.
Really this is a very sweeping generalisation, and it obviously depends who you talk to and what circles you move in as to whether or not you can relate this to ‘most people’, but honestly I feel you can sum up a helluva lot of people in the world like this.

That’s one of the things that makes travelling appeal I guess, what other people from different countries and cultures talk about inanely is often of the greatest interest to a traveller!

Cappodocia

September 28, 2008 at 2:10 pm | Trip | No comment

I left Istanbul, striding (well, rolling technically) proudly into Anatolia.

To say the landscape changed was an understatement.
If you’ve ever taken a photo of a faraway landscape, you know how much less impressive the photo looks than the reality…
So imagine what this looked like to me as I stood next to my gently cooling bike, awestruck at its magnificance.

I had a long way to cover to Neveshehir, and I set off late.
I’ve discovered many months ago that once it gets dark and I have nowhere to stay, I start to get bloody stressed.
Add to this the lack of hotels (and my lack of knoweldge that ‘Pension’ means ‘really cheap place to stay’ in Turkish) and I was starting to get a bit worried.

Eventually I found a petrol station that had a field conveniently empty next to it, a short offroad stop later and I was camped for the night.

Not the most inspiring campsite in the world but being free counts for a lot in my book!

Massive salt lake I passed on the way, would have loved to drive out on to it, alas it was… a lake rather than a ‘flat’.

Cappodocia is a cool place man…

I managed to find the campsite marked on my map, and what a view…
‘Bir Nekidar?’
‘On Besh’
Fifteen Lira a night, about 7, seemed expensive but… compared to a hotel…
Camp setup I headed to find an internet cafe and along the way saw a BMW R1200 GS going in the opposite direction, which waved and pulled over.
I swung round the approaching roundabout and pulled up alongside what I could now see was a swiss bike.
‘Hey! I’m just going to ___ valley to meet a Belgian guy, wanna join us?’
‘Sounds good!’
I rode with him and we met up with his associate on a brand spanking new F800.
Turned out that the Swiss chap was heading south, but the Belgian was heading east.
We decided to team up for the journey, which was to be continued after three days in cappodocia.

We three agreed to meet at Jean’s hotel the next day and parted ways.
I went off and did a little offroading…

The next day…
‘I was thinking of going down to Ihlara valley today’ Stefan proposed.
‘I’ve already been’ Jean responded ‘But you two can go!’
‘Cool’

Quite an impressive place!

We strayed from the beaten path for this photo.

Offroading is fun!

Stefan made the most of the photo opportunity!

Farm tracks are good fun on road tyres!

The road goes on forever!

Tomorrow we head off to Nemrut, a short post, but I wanted to get those photos out there

Tamam

October 7, 2008 at 6:43 pm | Trip | 3 comments

‘Terrorist! Big Problem!’
‘Hiyur problem, tamam, tamam’
‘Tell him we only want to stay for one night’
‘Uhh… Bir… Night… Tamam?’
‘Hiyur! Big Problem! Terrorists!’
Camping near Chatac in SE Turkey was proving difficult.
‘It’d be a shame to move, such a beautiful spot’

Unfortunately we were unable to persuade the military personnel that they were really making a big fuss over nothing and were convinced to pack up our tents and follow them to ‘Teacher House’.
Chatac was not a pretty town, though in a pretty setting, the concept of keeping streets tidy hasn’t quite caught on in Eastern Turkey, which makes the towns appear somewhat downtrodden, despite the beautiful surroundings.
We rolled up to the teacher house and once checked in (no cost, except our passport details!) were escorted to the Jandarma (Police Station) to park our bikes.

‘Chai?’
‘Never say no to chai!’ replied Chris.
‘Passports please’
‘Interpol?’ Wez joked.
‘Interpol’ The police officer nodded gravely.
We sat down outside the police station and chatted to one of the local traffic officers, who knew a fair amount of English from living in Istanbul previously.
‘So what are you doing out here?’
“Well, it’s the way it goes sometimes, they needed police officers out in the east so they sent me’
It struck me that all the professionals, Police Officers, Teachers, Military etc all seemed to be migrated Turkish whereas all the locals, shopkeepers, farmers etc, all seemed to be Kurdish.

We discovered later that the military were understandably twitchy as 15 members of the Turkish army had been killed that day in a pitched gun battle with the PKK (Kurdish ‘Freedom Fighters’) about 150km or so away from where we were.


Local kids were friendly! (as usual)

This way? Yes, this way…

Fruit sellers in town.

Highstreet, not pictured: mounds of rubbish.

The previous day we were driving through the moutains (lot of mountains in the east of Turkey!) and stopped for the night in a local town.
Three Europeans on heavy bikes always attract attention round here and soon we were surrounded by the usual gathering of kids (the record so far being 30, who subsequently threw stones at us!)




Fortunately we were shortly rescued by their teacher, who spoke excellent English.
‘You need a place to stay?’
‘Do we ever!’
‘You can stay at the teacher house’ (see a pattern?) ‘It’s only 12 lira a night’
‘Excellent!’
Our new best friend proudly showed us round his school, which continued the Kurdish construction technique of making one step a foot high, the next 3 and the next half an inch.
‘This is my classroom, the First Class!’ he beamed proudly.
‘Holy crap, it’s got a projector in it!’
‘Yes, only First Class has projector’
All in all the school was pretty damn impressive for a village of only a few thousand people in the middle of nowhere with roads leading up to it that you could have used to grate cheese.
Wez showed me, our Turkish Teacher Friend (TTF) and Stephan Australian football, by the magic of the web; it looked a helluva lot more interesting that regular football, but more like a riot than any sport I’d ever seen!

The next day we set off again, with the eventual goal of getting to Van Gülü.

Who needs the alps?

Admiring the view…

Down in the valley

Surprisingly difficult to take photos of Stephan on his F800!
Riding along in the sunshine, admiring the scenery, trying not to succumb to death-by-target-fixation due to a lack of barriers between us and perilously high drops combined with unpredictable patches of loose gravel, it was easy to forget that we were a mere few hundred kilometres from the Iraqi border.
That was set to change however, when we hit our first checkpoint!
‘Passports’ This was set to become a common sound over the next few days.
We handed over our passports and were promptly given them back.
‘Register’ He said, pointing up the road?
‘Where?’ Chris queried.
‘Jandarma’
Seeing we still weren’t quite convinced one of the army men jumped on the back of Chris’ bike and off Chris wobbled, ancient sub-machinegun knocking his knee as the bike bounced over the lumpy road.
Me, Wez and Stephan were left to chat to the remainder of the squad at the checkpoint.
‘Chai?’
‘Evet, Teshekur!’
Two rounds of tea and some Turkish desert (not to mention innumerable photos of me taken with the bike and various Turkish Privates (steady, watch the capitalisation) Chris returned with our passports.
We weren’t yet on our way however as a car rolled up and we were hailed in English.
‘Hello! Where have you come from?’
“Australia, England, Belgique’
‘No no, I mean in Turkey’
‘Aaah, Nemrut’

Aaah, Nemrut, one of the more popular tourist attractions in Turkey (outside Istanbul and the coast obviously) is a mountain, not the highest in Turkey by any stretch of the imagination, but the interesting part is the fact that it has a false summit created artificially hundreds of years ago to cover the burial chamber of the current king.
Adorning the site are a number of carvings of the heads of Persian gods
 
(on a related note I learned the Turkish word for sun is Ganesh), but although these were quite spectactular, once the cloud had cleared the sight that capture my attention was the view was the view from the top.



Althought Nemrut is not that high, the contrast between it and the surrounding land is incredible.
I still have the image burned into my mind from sitting on the steps of the ceremonial platform, chin resting on upturned palms, staring rapt at the view for nearly half an hour: In the foreground the undulating terrain surrounding the summit, descending sharply into a hidden valley to rise again 10km later in a sharp range of jagged mountains encircling the area, to the glittering lakes in the far distance, arable land dotted in between the winding network of roads that picked its way through the lakes and streams.

Not far away there was a fantastic Roman bridge that we road over (I’ll have to get the video off Chris).

Anyway, you’re probably all wondering who Wez and Chris are!
Out on a day trip with Stefan we had stopped fro some chai and saw a bike ride past with two guys, alu panniers and a GB sticker, I waved but they didn’t see me.
We rode on, thought no more of it until in a village not far up the road we saw the bike parked by the side of the rode, owners nowhere in sight.
*scribble* ‘Hi guys, fellow English overlanding, staying in Goreme, send me an email if you want to grab a beer’

The next day I was walking around Goreme hunting the wild durum (aka the cheap durum in tourist area) and lo and behold saw the bike and finally its seat-fodder.
Turns out Wez and Chris are actually two Australian guys doing the UK-Aus trip on a Honda CB500.
We were going in the same direction (namely Nemrut) and decided to ride there the next day.
I showed them the Pension I was staying in, seven lira a night, not to mention Jimi Hendrix stayed in the room (or so the plaque on the door proudly boasts) and as it was Ramadam, when they broke fast they served us all with beans, rice, meat and some whiteish nutty dessert I adore but can’t find again!

We’ve been riding together ever since and it’s been great fun, I’ve only spent 8 pound ninety a day since I’ve been with them, including accomodation and food but excluding petrol.
Except today, today was a bit different.
For the past few days my batterys negative terminal has been in a bad way; when I fitted all my electrical add-ons (cigarette adaptor, heated gloves, horn, etc) I added a longer but smaller bolt, and in subsequent tightening and retightening the nut ate into the flesh of the negative terminal and eventually snapped the top of it off.
I was able to keep going by swapping it for a larger bolt I had in my spares bag but with the shaking the bike was receiving it was not a permanent solution and finally in Dogubayasit (Doggy Biscuit as it’s fondly nicknamed)….
‘Holy shit my bike’s smoking!’
The bike stalls and I leap off and dive into my tool kit and remove the bodywork.
‘Christ, the terminal’s melted’ I exclaimed, holding up a blob of metal like a rather unappetizing sweet.
‘Good job there’s a bike shop up the road’ Wez pointed out.
Batteries they had, but of insufficient amperage, however the owner made urgent motions, telling me to follow him and bring the battery and for someone else to follow on a bike.
I got into the shop owners car, Chris following along behind wondering where our destination might be.
‘Oto Elektrik’ The sign proclaimed.
An hour later my battery was topped up with electrolyte, recharged and had a cable with a suitable connector soldered onto it to so I could hook it back up to the bike.
I hopped on the back of the CB500 and rode pillion back to where I’d broken down.
*rrrnnn rnnnn PHUT PHUT WHUMUMUMUMUMUMUM*
‘Wooohooo!’
All for 10 Lira, job’s a good’un!

Bad roads, nice terrorists.

October 19, 2008 at 6:18 pm | Trip | 4 comments

Where to begin.
On reflection I should have made a blog post before I left Turkey.
‘Oh, I’ll do one when I cross the border’
Little did I know the Iranian internet infrastructure was slightly lacking capacity.
I’m writing from the first internet cafe that has speeds above 56k per computer, which means I can get on to wordpress, yay!
Downside is I didn’t expect this, so the only photos available are those that I uploaded before I left Turkey.

Aaanyway.
After leaving DoggyBiscuit Stefan had to go back down south so we bade him faretheewell and as 2 bikes and three men headed north for Ani.

We stopped briefly at Diyadin for their famous hot spring baths, in the process locating a hotel for 5 lira a night each (approximately 2 pound fifty).
‘Twenty Lira’
‘But we were told 1 lira!’
‘Twenty Lira private bath!’
‘Well lads, let’s be sociable!’
We stripped to the undies (undies and swimming trunks in my case as I’d taken to wearing swimming trunks rather than trousers under my leathers in the hotter weather) and climbed in with everyone else.
‘Aaah, this is the life’ I said to no-one in particular as I stretched my arms along the edge of the pool, sitting comfortably on the wide shelf just under the water.
First bath (as opposed to shower) I’ve had since leaving England. Beautiful!

We woke the next morning properly refreshed and headed once more in the direction of Ani.
‘Get there tonight, stay somewhere close by, visit the site in the morning’ I suggested.
‘Sounds good’ Chris agreed.
Little did we know three nights would pass before we would actually make it to Ani…

We took a right off the main road onto an ‘important link road’ (as classified by the map) that cut around 250kms off the main road’s path, and based on previous experience, roads of this classification were generally 100km an hour roads.

The road was OK to start off with, lumpy tarmac, but reasonably well maintained.
Soon though the road started to become pitted with potholes, then degenerated to massive roadworks which left only a narrow path for the bikes, a car would have had to turn around.
But we soldiered on, even when the road turned to mud and the poor CB’s road tyres clogged with mud and took Wez and Chris for a tumble.

Eventually the road came to a little village, where the surface finally turned into the same consistency of mud as potters use as ’slip’.

And slip we did, Wez and Chris landed right next to a locals car, who immediately came out and pointed angrily at the rust patches and paint cracks on it, as if somehow caused by us…
As the bike had landed on Chris’ foot, this was the last thing on his mind and he rightly ignored the opportunistic local and stood the bike up and gingerly rode out of the mud.

Immediately after the village the road forked, and the direction marked on the map went uphill and showed no signs of improving, whereas the unmarked road started off paved and went on the flat.
According to a local…

… A rather eccentric local, the paved road would take us out onto the main road in fairly short order.
Meanwhile Wez and Chris stop to take off the mudguard on the CB, which is acting as a perfect ‘mud distributer’ and liberally caking the wheel with fresh mud each time they clean it.

Pretty cool vista I must say…

We soldiered along the road, and after coming over the top of some spectacular mountains, picked our way carefully down a seemingly endless series of alpine style hairpins covered in gravel.
After getting to the valley floor we rode through a small forest, me leading and I very nearly binned the bike into the hedge when suddenly a massive Armoured Personell Carrier came charging round the corner, gun barrel pointed directly at us and rumbled on past oblivious.
Eventually we came to a small village, modest, though large enough for a chai shop, where we gratefully stopped after our ordeal.
‘Oh great, here come the Jandarma’
Usual rigmarole, follow me, passports please.
Except this time it took longer than usual, and they were rather more pleased to see us.
Wez made noises about being hungry and we were promptly sat in front of an omlette and a can of coca cola each.
‘Cor, so this is where our tax money goes!’

Muuch better! We headed off again to stop at Digor, a tiny town which when we rolled up and asked for directions to ‘otel…
‘No otel’
‘No otel?!?’
‘No otel..’
‘Balls..’
*psst*
We whipped round and saw a mustachioed gentleman who made signs that said we could sleep in his house.
His ‘house’ as it turned out was in fact the middle-floor of a bakery, and after getting settled in he queried.
‘Efes?’
Efes being the Turkish Beer of choice we nodded vigorously and were shown the ‘back’ of a local chai shop.
*Some time/beer later..*
#Onsi fan dari don… Neden#
‘Neden!’ The three of us chorused, being unable to remember the rest of the oft-repeated lyric fragment.
Our mustachioed amigo sat up in his chair, pulled out his mobile phone, played with the buttons for a while and passed it to me.
In front of me was a picture of him holding a submachine gun in full camoflague gear.
I handed it to Wez and Chris slightly concerned.
He pointed to himself, and then to his two friends who were drinking with us.
‘Peh Keh Keh, Peh Keh Keh, Peh Keh Keh’
‘I think they’re part of the PKK…’
The tone was still jovial, and we spent the rest of the night drinking, learned what the Kurdistani flag looked like, and went to sleep in the bakery.

A few hours later I was woken by the sharp squeak of a walkie talkie end-call tone.
I half opened an eye to see an armed figure standing in the middle of the three beds, Chris and Wez were standing up.
Somehow my sleep-addled brain thought this unworthy of waking up for, and I immediately put my head back down and went back to sleep.

Chris related in the morning that at about midnight the Polis burst in in an armed squad of 20 and demanded to see passports.
Fortunately there only being two bikes outside, they didn’t notice me and I was left undisturbed!

We spent that day visiting a nearby Armenian church, which, while locationally impressive (why you’d bother to build a church on such an inaccessible outcrop of rock I’ll never know) was not especially beautiful, and personally I was thinking only of Ani.

After another night spent at the PKK bakery we set off in the morning for Ani.
According to our map (a familiar phrase!) the road to Ani was half way between Kars and Digor.
Well, there was only one road in the right direction even approximately halfway between Kars and Digor, so we took it.

Beautiful bit of road, all the better for not being sealed.

Striking countryside, though the road has now turned into a tractor trail that’s mostly invisible.

At the bottom of this valley is a river crossing, which both bikes deal with with panache.
http://toukakoukan.smugmug.com/photos/392991849_2kpdv-M.jpg
Having got to the other side, we now have to climb up the hill.

Oh come on lads, this is ridiculous!

Getting the bike from the bottom left hand side of the picture to the top right was far more difficult than it might appear.

Having crested the hill I was simply happy not to end up like the guy in the foreground.

We found the gravelly broken road to Ani and set off.
By the time we arrived the place was about to close (it was getting dark) so we attacked the local grocers shop (which had only 4 eggs) and were promptly invited to stay the night with a family of Turkish farmers, which we whiled away teaching each other card games (with varied degrees of success)

The next morning we stormed Ani.

Being an ex-UT geek I found ‘The Church of The Redeemer’ hilarious and a place of worship simultaneously.

From the inside.

The inside of another church, nearer the canyon that is the natural border between Turkey and Armenia.

The ceiling of the same.

Broken steps.

Another little Chapel.

Perilously close to the edge!

Quite an effective natural border I’d say!

Some of the patterns feel almost Celtic.

The minaret of the oldest-mosque-in-the-area-now-known-as-Turkey (named for factual accuracy) which me and Chris climbed to the top of before noticing the ‘Do not climb minaret’ sign round the side…

What’s the best thing to do with graffiti on your ancient Armenianchurch?
Why whitewash it of course! Historical conservation, Turkish style!

This blog post has taken a surprising amount of effort to write, I’d hoped to be able to write about Iran while I have a reasonably fast internet connection but I’ve run out of time.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to update next so apologies if it’s a long time!
If you really get desperate for an update I’ve got an Iranian mobile now, the number of which is…
+98 937 093 6325

Guli Guli! (or the farsi equivilent!)

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

October 27, 2008 at 12:23 pm | Bike, Trip | 3 comments

‘I think… I think… It was a cat’ I replied, tenatively prodding the gelatinous lump on my plate that seemed to be staring at me eyelessly.
‘Don’t think about it, just eat it’ Ben said firmly.
I’d met Ben and his brother Sascha almost immediately after crossing the border into Iran, as they were simply passing through the town I’d holed up in when they saw my bike and came to investigate.

The first meal we all had in Iran wasn’t exactly appetising, none of us spoke any farsi so we simply communicated ‘Whatever you have’ to the restauranteer and sat down at our table.
We really wished we hadn’t…
Unless of course anybody is able to enlighten me as to a domesticated (and edible) animal with vertebrae approximately 3/4 inch in length…

Ben and Sascha were driving from Germany to the UAE where Ben was working, and wow what a schedule!
They’d got from Germany to Iran in 11 days and were due to get to Bandar-e-Bas (south of Iran) to catch a boat a week after I met them next to Turkey.

The next day the three of us took the roundabout route to Tabriz, going via the Azerbaijani border.

By and large the scenery so far in Iran was much similar to Turkey, so I didn’t bother taking many photos.

Many dusty and warm (in comparison to Turkey anyway!) hours later we stopped for our first petrol fill-up with our new Iranian petrol cards.
We zipped to the front of the queue (being the arrogant tourists we were!), which was surprisingly long for a country that extracts and refines its own oil, and I was selected to try and figure out the pump.

Simple enough, put the card in, wait, start pumping.
Wait.. 14 litres.. surely no—
*SPLASH*
“Holy shit!”
Err yeah, lesson one, not all Iranian fuel pumps have auto-shut-off switches…
Drenched in fuel I sheepishly pushed my bike to one side and let Ben and Sascha fill up, with somewhat less embarassing results.

Tabriz is a big place, and despite more road-signs in English than we’d expected, we still fail to find the centre of town.
At one point we tried to do a u-turn (which involved slowing down in the fast lane) which nearly got Ben killed as the car behind him screeched in a cloud of tyre smoke to a halt mere inches from his rear wheel.

Eventually we stopped by the side of the road and Ben wandered off to ask about a hotel and came back with a friendly Iranian chap to give us directions.
At about this point a lady came up to us and asked in English.
‘Are you looking for a hotel?’
‘Yes, do you know of one?’
‘No no no, you should come and stay with my family!’
After the traditional three-time-mock-denial we followed her at a walking pace back to her home.
It must have made quite a sight, three heavily-laden bikes, larger than anything allowed in Iran, following a lady at a walking pace down the highstreet.

As it turned out the entire family, of which our saviour was the mother, spoke wonderful English, and their hospitality surpassed anything we could have expected.
In researching my trip, I’d read many times that people are always surprised by how incredibly friendly and generous people in Iran are, and good god I have not been dissapointed.
I honestly think you would have to rugby tackle an Iranian to stop him from paying for a meal at a restaurant, I always offer three times (at least!) but they always refuse and almost seem insulted! Pushing my wallet back into my pocket and frowning at me.

As I’d was suffering a recurrance of a dodgy stomached I’d contracted from unpasturised milk in the last few days before I left Turkey, I was more than glad to accept their hospitality and slept for most of the next two days.

In between my mammoth sleeps I said goodbye to Ben and Sascha, who had to continue pell-mell south through Iran, and spoke at length about England and Iran with my hosts.

As it turns out Iran is a much more ‘liberal’ country than I’d expected.
Having lived in Saudi, the women dressed in black Abyahs (not sure what the Farsi word is for the shawl) and headscarves came as no surprise, but what was shocking was the beauty the women could convey through their faces alone.
I don’t know whether Iranian women are unnaturally blessed with beautiful eyes or whether their dress simply focuses the mind, but call me crazy I could almost start to think dressing in this manner a good idea!

Western music is technically banned in Iran, but you’ll hear it played openly in taxis, and blaring out the windows of ‘the kids’ cars, and if you turn on PersiaTV, an Iranian Music channel, you will see scantily clad ladies (comparable to music videos in the west) singing the latest Iranian pop music, which sounds indistinguishable from western pop music barring being in Farsi.

At the same time of course, there’s a lot of opression going on, for example I’ve been told that a woman riding a bicycle down the street in Tabriz would likely be stopped and warned by the police for ‘Abnormal Behaviour’.

Having spent two days with my faultless hosts in Tabriz, I journeyed on by their reccomendation to Orumiyeh, a city next to the second saltiest lake in the world.
A bridge is currently under construction over this lake, but as it’s only about 20% completed I opted to take the ferry.
On this ferry I met Professor Mohammadi, a lecturer and researcher of Animal Genetics at the university of Ahvaz, who invited me to stay at his home for a few days.
‘Sounds excellent! I’ll see you in three days time!’ I said, thinking to myself
‘How far can the south coast be?’
1,300KM that’s how far!

Orumiyeh didn’t fulfill my expectations of a lakeside town, and I embarassingly spent my entire time there without actually going down to visit the lake.

I had to continue my journey south through the mountains.


A water trough in the middle of the mountains trickled softly as I stopped and ate my bounty of fresh dates (which since discovering I’ve been eating by the kilo)

It’s not all mountains round there!

A local bus thunders past, unfortunately I haven’t got any photos of the beautiful bright-blue pickups that are so common around these parts.

A photo of my home made radiator guard made from 25cm of free chicken-wire!

I’ll post the rest tomorrow or soon after I think! My heart’s not in blogging today
Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Iran, it’s not how you think.

November 4, 2008 at 9:55 am | Trip | 2 comments

‘How much?’
‘16 Toman’
About sixteen US Dollars, hmm, I hadn’t stayed in a hotel in Iran that was more than 10 toman a night.
‘Hi, can I help?’
‘Oh yes, I’m just trying to explain that this is too expensive, do you know of a cheaper hotel?
*Some Farsi is exchange*
‘12 Toman he says’
‘I’m sorry but I can’t afford more than 8′
*some more Farsi, the hotel owner looks slighted and glowers at me*
‘He says ok, 8 toman; I’m an English teacher at a school down the road, will you come and see my class?’
‘Of course! Anything’

A few moments later I’m sitting in front of a class of 15 or so 18-22 year old Iranian girls, somewhat apprehensively.
‘Tell us about England Mr Sam’
‘Ah, well I’m probably not the best person to talk about England as I’m not really a fan of it!’
Despite my personal viewpoint I launch into a diatribe attempting to compare the differences between the UK and Iran diplomatically.
‘Does anyone have any questions for Mr Sam?’
The girls break into hushed discussion and burst out laughing and start nudging one of the group who shakes her head and looks at the teacher.
‘She wants to know if she can have your email address’
‘Of course, no problem, you can write it up on the board if you like’

The questions start flying, ‘Where are you going?’, ‘What do you do when you need to calm down?’, ‘What countries have you been to?’, ‘What do you think about Iran?’.
Time’s up, one last question from the prettiest girl in the class.
‘Would you like for me and my friends to show you the city?’
I’m not about to turn down an invitation like that!

That’s how I found myself in a Peugeot 206 with 3 beautiful Iranian girls driving round seeing the sights.
I quizzed them about what they thought of the laws that the west perceived as ‘oppressive’.
‘We feel the same, I hate the Hedjab, I wish I didn’t have to wear it’
At that moment one of the girls phones rang.
‘It’s her boyfriend’ Nelly told me, giggling.
‘How does that work?’ I enquired, as as far as I knew Iran was a segregated society and I knew that at the very least sex before marriage is illegal.
‘Her parents don’t know, they’re always talking by SMS and mobile’
As it turned out we were going to the park to meet this boyfriend, so they could surreptitiously hold hands and exchange a few words in person.

I don’t seem to be very loquacious at the moment, but I figured I’d better post this otherwise it’ll end up on the ever-growing pile of drafts that never get posted!

Friendly too friendly

November 4, 2008 at 2:44 pm | Trip | 4 comments

I followed the cross-eyed man to his hotel room even though I was dog-tired.
‘Don’t refuse Iranian hospitality!’ I reminded myself.
When he pulled out a bottle of scotch I was glad I had, a stressful day’s driving called for a bottle of highly illegal scotch (carrying a sentence of 6 months for the first offence, 2 years for the second, though admittedly largely inapplicable to foreigners).

He gestured for me to put my feet up and make myself comfortable, as I did so he stripped to his boxers in the same vein.
Unperturbed by this I went on drinking.
Only when he started massaging his thighs did I start to get a little worried.
As soon as I finished off my glass he grabbed my hand and thrust it upon his thigh.
‘Whoa! Ok.. Yeah… Thanks for the drink but… that’s enough for me!’
I fled to my own room, locked the door and didn’t come out ’til the morning.

The cave near Hamedan was quite impressive, absolutely massive and more stalactices than you’ve ever seen.
I apologise for the quality of the photos incidentally, it’s hard to get a good photo in near total darkness while you’re pedalling a pedalo!

A country behind

November 10, 2008 at 5:42 pm | Trip | 2 comments

Warning: andy area ahead
‘Andy area?’ I thought to myself , ‘What the fuck is an Andy– Holy shit!‘
I leaned hard on the right hand handlebar and narrowly missed the massive sand dune that flared up in my headlight only metres away.
‘Ah.. that would be a sandy area…’

As if driving on the left after 6 months of driving on the right wasn’t enough to contend with!
Getting from Zahedan (the closest large city on the Iranian side of the border) to the border itself took me 4 hours due to a highly inefficient relay of escorts that seemed more geared towards preventing me from leaving the beaten path than actually protecting me.

On the way to Zahedan I overtook a tourist bus rocketing along at some 70mph behind a pick-up with a belt-feed fully-automatic machine gun mounted on the back, comforting!
But… Other than that the crossing itself was hassle free and relatively quick.

On the Pakistan side….
‘Wow… Pakistan is a 3rd world country man…’
Whereas on the Iranian side it had all been neat offices with airconditioning and tarmaced roads connection them, when I traipsed into the Pakistani Immigration Office I nearly slipped over on the shifting mini-dunes that skittered across the cracked tile floor.
The customs office was little better, hidden behind a power-substation it took me a while to find, but when I did, I met a fellow overlander; a chap from Germany with ‘Everest 2003′ emblazoned on the side of his transit-van, apparently he’d been travelling for some time!
‘The road from here to Quetta is in very bad shape, the engineers who planned it were stupid people who didn’t put drainage in, so the first wet season came and it all washed away’

This assessment was to prove unfortunately correct.
Although it had been many years since the road was originally built, since then its re-designs and re-builds haven’t improved matters much, and I was faced with Moldova-syndrome, where the road would periodically plunge into unsealed gravel roads with rocks the size of my face dancing gaily under my wheels.

Still, after a few near misses with sand dunes, unlit cyclists and even the occasional camel I descended upon a road-side truckers ‘hotel’ after the smell of hot curry drew me inexorably towards its source.
‘Cor… First curry in 6 months’
I had been starving myself all day for this… 3 full plates of curry and rice, 3 pots of tea and an unknown quantity of Naan later I drove my bike into my room…
Yes.. Literally, was a bit of a squeeze but it fit eventually!
… And I settled down for the night.

*Knock knock*
‘Salaam Alaekum’
‘Alaekum Salaam’ I replied sleepily.
One after another the entire village walked curiously into my room, careful to remove their shoes first, even though my muddy, sandy, oily bike had already made a complete mess of the floor.
Fortunately one of them spoke English and he proceeded to introduce every, whose names I immediately forgot, and their roles in the village, the only ones I remember being ‘Barber’ and ‘Militant’.
‘Militant? For whom?’
‘Baluchistan National Party’
‘Aaah, the BNP’ I quipped, a joke mystifying to my friends.

We talked until midnight over tea and hashish; which I was sole partaker of worryingly, I was starting to  expect a drug-bust!
Sleep, then up a swig of tea and benzine (siphoning is harder than it looks) and an 11 journey to Quetta, where East meets, uhh.. Middle-East…

And here I am!
Next time on TKTV:
Can I find a cheap second hand camera at Quetta’s renowned market?
Will I be able to sell the 80l of petrol left on my Iranian quota card.
Is there in fact anything interesting in Quetta?

All this and more.. NEXT TIME!!!

Quick Quetta Quip

November 11, 2008 at 4:27 pm | Trip | 1 comment

First thing this morning I nipped down to the Rusi Bazaar, and amongst the broken Sony’s and battered Samsungs I found myself a reasonable enough camera that I beat the guy down from $100 to $55 for.
Only 5.2 megapixel but it works!

Pakistan really is a breath of fresh air after Iran.
It’s made me realise how oddly stale Iran felt in many ways, as although the people are absolutely lovely, that really is the only remarkable thing about the country.

Last night I met an Aussie chap in a curry house while I was fraternising with the locals (who, again tried to offer me a hash-cigarette) and we bumped into one another again the next day shortly after I’d procured my camera.

We sampled the ‘green eggs’ sold on the side of the road with a wedge of bamboo for 7 rupees (about 10cents) which were rather cool.

The rest of the day was spent wandering round looking for alcohol as we’d both come from in Iran and were in need of a stiff drink.
Not much luck was had, so we went all touristy and popped into the local ‘Arms and Munitions dealer’ and had tea and a chat about the accuracy of their rifles.

Lots of poor kids in Pakistan, pens are all their after and as they’re 50 cents a box I’ve been handing them out like sweeties.

Donkeys galore

Quettan speciality of a whole leg of lamb barbequed… Haven’t tried it yet, but god damn it looks delicious!

Gotta love the decorated tuk-tuks!

Beyond that I’ve simply been splurging cash, buying English language books of which there’s a massive selection at ridiculously cheap prices!
And I’ve bought myself a new SIM card, so if you want to give me a call the number is…
+92 (0) 31-38256935

Ciao!

Friendly not so friendly.

November 18, 2008 at 2:38 pm | Trip | 2 comments

I’ve been wrestling with whether or not to write this post, as it’s perfect cannon-fodder for those who try to generalise an entire country as ‘a bunch of terrorists’ or other such nonsense.
But I’m rather committed to my warts-and-all view of the world so here it is.

‘Hmm, must be a very bad accident’ I remarked to myself as I weaved throw the rows of cars parked sideways across the highway.
Suddenly I found myself in a crowd of people, who, as usual turned to look at me with interest and smiles.
They pushed to the fore a man who spoke English.
‘I am sorry,’ (he didn’t look sorry at all) ‘This is a strike against the government, you cannot go anywhere.’
‘I’m just trying to get to Zhob’ I pleaded.
‘You cannot go.’

At this point a  man appeared on my right carrying a bamboo stick, then another appeared, and another, they were collecting stones from the ground.
‘Shit…’ I thought to myself, adrenaline racing.
There was an energy running through the air, the kind which lets you know that the crowd you’re in is about to turn into a mob.
Suddenly two small guys burst through the crowd in front of me and bodily push the people standing in front of my wheel to the side and gesture desperately for me to move through.
I stare dumbfounded at them for a second before desperately trying to start the bike.
The gap closes up again, god I’ve missed my chance!
The men reappear and reopen the gap, this time I’m ready.
I rev the engine hard and dash forward, scattering people left and right.
As I force my way through the crowd sticks and stones bounce harmlessly off my armour-padded motorcycle gear.

I duck in and out between the trucks and buses strewn across the road, 6 months of riding with this setup serving me well as I dive through gaps inches wider than my bike.
‘Shit.’ A pick-up blocks my path, I can’t go back and I can’t go round.
Amazingly the two men who cleared my path the first time come to my rescue once more, convincing the onlookers (who appear to simply have been inconvenienced by the whole strike and were milling around outside their bus) to push the pick up out of the way.

Open road before me at last I open the throttle and run as fast as I can, adrenaline pumping and tail between my legs.

The Karakoram Highway

December 1, 2008 at 11:29 am | Trip | 5 comments

The Karakoram Highway is, amongst other feats, the worlds highest international road.
Construction was started in the 1960s and carried on all the way into the 1970s.
It’s not surprising the length of time it took to create such a road, considering they were blasting their way through the western edge of the Himalayas, along the path of the Indus (and further north the Hunza, the valley that inspired the book ‘Shangri-La’) which had previously seen nothing much bigger than a goat path.
Apparently for every mile of road laid down, at least one Pakistani life was laid down in mirror, possibl even more Chinese lives but that’s all rather hush-hush.
The area is quite different to the rest of Pakistan, I saw plenty of women not wearing head-scares, let alone veils, but it’s still dead poor, the number of child labours I saw was particularly abhorrent.
The road in Pakistan is maintained by a mix of Pakistani and Chinese works (though always in seperate groups).
It’s quite easy to tell who’s who as the Chinese are always slaving away as if the devil himself were whipping his tail playfully upon them, where as in contrast the Pakistani teams seem to consist of 8 guys having a cup of tea and one guy banging away at a rock half-heartedly.

November wasn’t really the best time to visit, as although a lot of the road is quite low in altitude (1,500 metres or less) a lot of the more interesting passes and plateaus are closed due to huge amounts of snow.
Still, as you can see the landscape is simply awe-inspiring and this place alone was worth the 14,000 mile trip so far!


A market in the northerly town of Gilgit



The ‘Dirty Glacier’ at Passu

Rockfalls on the road are quite common, but a path is always quickly cleared!

Phwoar, look at the distances on that baby!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmtNS7O76qo]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejnUlJMAXms]

Lahore

February 6, 2009 at 1:57 am | Trip | No comment

I arrived at the Regale Inn still fuming from being ripped off by the tuk tuk I paid to navigate me through the crowded and smoggy streets of Lahore and loudly enquired “Do you have any beds?”. The proprietor led me in to a clean enough dorm room and explained the cost was 190 rupees.
“Surely not? I’ve had private rooms for 200!”
“Sorry sir, this is the price”
I haggled briefly, convinced it was ‘pull one over on the tourist’ time until a French chap piped up from behind his lonely planet “That’s what he charged me as well” which didn’t convince me that it wasn’t a tourist price but at least made me feel better about paying it.

Me and the Frenchman (whose name I sadly forget) assaulted the nearest, cheapeast, cleanest resataurant, or so we told ourselves, such a combination is in reality, unlikely. Over a cup of chai and the 800th plate of Daal (or so it felt) I’d had in Pakistan we asked the same barrage of questions every traveller asks every other traveller in a hostel. Where are you from, where are you going, how long are you staying.

As it turned out this particular chap was staying only the one day which left me with no-one to talk to tomorrow and reminded me that I should email the Dutchmen I met cycling down the KKH from China and tell them the address of the hostel like I’d promised.

It’s amazing how much more interesting the internet seems when it’s slower than cold mollasses going at 99.99% of C, I must have wasted an hour on it while acheiving not much more than checking my emails and signing on to MSN briefly, which was, admittedly far more than I was generally able to do at Pakistani internet cafés…

I flopped on my bed and pulled my lonely planet out of my handy-bag(tm) in one fluid movement. Pakistan was one of only two countries I had lonely planets for and although I’d originally turned up my nose at the concept as ‘akin to package holidays’ I found it rather useful.
Looking up the listing for where I was staying I noticed that the editor placed great emphasis on the rooftop. ‘What rooftop?’ I wondered to myself, I’d seen only the pokey reception-cum-internet-café and the dorm room, so I decided to go exploring up the unlabelled staircase, which after a tale from a traveller I’d met previously about exploring top-floors and finding drug-labs held an air of forboding about it.

I leapt up the top step and leapt into the bright sunshine of my Shangri-La.

Lahore? Nope, not been there, I stayed a week in the confines of the Regale though! City sightseeing has never been a favourite of mine and with the crowd at the Regale I felt no need to leave that rooftop except for food and (shh!) booze!
When I arrived it felt like everyone there was an overlanding cyclist, there must have been 5-6 of the buggers there all talking bicycle-shop and figuratively if not literally looking down their noses at bicycles with petrol engines.

I spent the better part of 10 days at the Regale just sitting on the roof top reading trashy novels from the library while overhearing other peoples conversations and interjecting with pithy, poignant and insightful remarks.
It’s a wonderful thing (from my perspective at least) that the common language of travellers is almost invariably as English, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Korean all yammering away in my mother-tongue, bliss! 

While I was there there was a English chap of Indian-Punjab descent who was hanging around for a few months learning Urdu so he could do volunteer work in Afghanistan (as I recall); which was a testament to his will to do what he wanted as he’d already been to Uni for three masters before realising he didn’t want to be an academic. Another chap from England was driving every-which-way-but-home in a Toyota Hilux, and as a group we would draw a discussion out of the rest of the crowd on the roof top and before anyone knew it there was a debate going on as to whether you could objectively judge morals or whether travelling in a country really gave you a less biased opinion of it than reading a tabloid.

All told, even though I didn’t actually see much of Lahore, it’s one of my fondest memories of my trip due to the people I met and the time I had just… talking to people with a brain…

This is the only photo I have from Lahore for some reason, even though it was the most beautiful city I saw in Pakistan, this bookshop window struck me the most…

Kashmir

February 16, 2009 at 5:10 pm | Trip | No comment

“Don’t gossip! Let him drive!”
Wow, even the road signs are chauvanistic round here!
It was two days ride from Amritsar on the Indian side of the India/Pakistan border and the first day took me past Jammu and into the foothills of the Himalayas, where I met mountain monkeys for the first time since my trip to Sri-Lanka as a kid, bloody dirty bastards that they are!
 The next day took me through Srinigar, which is the capital of Indian Kashmir and sported roadsigns to Muzzafarabad in Pakistan-Kashmir which I’d tried to ride to on my way up the Karakoram and failed due to Pakistani beauracr… buearac.. paperwork…

Eventually I arrived at Tangmarg, at the bottom of the mountain road up to Gulmarg, my final destination. ”13Km to Gulmarg” read the signs, I mentally spat on my hands and rubbed them together and began the climb. As I as ascended the evergreens became more prevalent and the grass gradually gave way to snow. The back wheel skidded and slid and I repeatedly saved myself from near disaster until I foolishly crossed a track of snow compacted by cars and slammed unceremoniously onto the snowy tarmac.
As I was struggling to pick the bike up an army truck rolled up behind, all 18 vertical feet of it adorned with gun-toting, motorbike helmet wearing privates and well kitted out with four wheel drive and snow chains.
Out the leapt and helped me pick the bike up, giving me a push until I could find traction and followed behind as I ever so slowly crawled to the top of the mountain.

Snow!

February 19, 2009 at 2:03 pm | Trip | No comment

“May I come in sir?”
“Murr, sure”
As I  stir inside my warm bed ‘the boy’ puts fresh wood into the tin stove and pours an obscene amount of kerosene on top of it swiftly followed by a match.

• WOOMPH*

“Whoa, you were lucky to keep your eyebrows with that mate!”
He smiles back at me, we don’t understand much of what each other says but we get along ok. After he’s gone I try to decide whether it’s worth suffering the toxic smoke belching from the holes in the chimney to warm the place. “Aaah, fresh air!” I open the door onto the balcony and admire the icicles hanging from the roof but resist the temptation to pluck one.

The day before I’d traipsed round the entirety of Gulmarg, which is in fact not very far at all but has the disadvantage of being covered in snow and ice, not to mention being deceptively warm in the sun making me more likely to die of heat stroke than hypothermia. Still, my quest to find a snowboard had not been entirely without success, after discovering the  season didn’t officially start until the 25th (Christmas day! Woo!) I managed to befriend the local tailor, who surprisingly spoke by far the best English I’d encountered that day and in amongst expressing intense dislike for the ‘Indian/Pakistani occupation of Kashmir’  told me of Billah. My task for today was to get a snowboard and Billah was the man to talk to.

I hadnt taken my two layers of thermals off before going to bed and as they were the only clothes warm enough I had a horrible feeling they were going to start to smell after a week or two. Still, I pulled on my bike gear, which would double very well as ski gear being both waterproof and light, and walked very carefully to Billah’s shop to claim my board.

“600 Rupees a day for board and boots”
I smiled cheekily “That sounds very expensive my friend, I was told the other ski shops hire them out for 300 a day!”
Billah smiled back behind bloodshot eyes “Maybe so, but they are very bad, old boards! And the other ski shops are not open!”
“True, but I’m only a beginner, I can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad board, besides… There are no other boarders around, who else are you going to hire this board to? Call it 300 eh?”
“*sigh* 450″
And so it was set, board in hand I trudged the half mile to the ‘Gondola’ to be told that the second stage wasn’t open but that I was welcome to ski down the first stage. I’d driven 500 miles from Amritsar, I was damn well going to get on some snow!

Three hours later I slammed my board down on Billah’s counter.
“When does the second stage open?”
“Maybe tomorrow, why? Was the skiing bad?”"
“That’s not skiing man, that’s hiking…”
Fuck… As with anywhere in the world ‘tomorrow’ is as likely to mean ‘next week’. Depressed I stumbled into the restaurant next door and sat down with the first three westerners I’d seen since arriving. Two Aussies and a Swede (the countryman, not the vegetable).
“You guys here skiing?”
“Yeah man,  just sitting here with our thumbs up our arses waiting for the second stage to open”
“Me too, that first stage is useless… Hey… you guys know where sells booze round here?”
“Out the door, third door on the right, up the stairs”
“Cheers”
Out the door it had started snowing, looked like it was working up for a big dump, I rubbed my hands with glee to stop them freezing. Third door on the right, up the stairs, into… A guys bedroom.
“Beer?”
“How many?”
I grabbed four beers and we talked about how good our respective accomodation was and how much we were paying.
Rob complained about how crap his hotel was, even though it was cheap and enquired if my room was a double.
“”Tis actually, we should share it, 250 rupees each, bargain!” 
“I’ll bring my stuff over tomorrow”

Next morning it was snowing and snowing hard, Rob and I met at the restaurant for breakfast, French Toast for me.
“Sweet or salt?”
“Uhh… sweet?”
“Yessir”
I turned to Robert as he whipped out a mini chess set he told me later he’d bought in Nepal.
“Want a game?”
“Sure, why not?”
The snow didn’t stop that day, and neither did we except to lug Rob’s gear back to my hotel room, I lost count of the number of games we played and the near equal (if not identical) number of games I lost.

Next day it was still snowing, I finished my book and Rob introduced me to a card game called ‘Chicago’.
Next day…
“I’m GETTING CABIN FEVER“  I screamed, dropping onto the bed in the fetal position chewing my scarf. A touch melodramatic perhaps but days on end without stimulus were getting to me, there was still no end in sight to the snow….

My only friend, the end.

April 1, 2009 at 3:59 pm | Trip | 10 comments

Hacking and wheezing I sat down in the snow for the the 10th time in 3 minutes.
As I gasp for air, gulping it down in huge freezing mouthfuls I decide it’s probably best to quit smoking… at least while I’m up here.
When my breathing returns to normal and my heart-rate goes below heart-attack levels I stand up, tell my calves to stop whining and continue down the mountain.

A clear day had finally found Gulmarg, after the clouds dumped 45cm of snow in a single day some days back, me, the Aussies and Robert excitedly waited for the first stage of the gondola to open.
While we were standing there I met the first snowboarders I’d seen in the place, a group of four Russians from Moscow who spoke pretty good English but were more interested in talking amongst themselves.

Once we got up the first stage I hopped from one foot to the other in anticipation as Billah chatted with the lift operators.
Suddenly the massive machinery whirred into life and the first pod slid round the track and open its doors.
Rob, me and the two Aussies all piled in, sticking our skis/boards out the top where they would get trapped in place by the closing door.

The mountain loomed  huge ahead of us as we passed the tree level and finally got a look at the second stage up close.
Blood drained from my face.
“Oh. My. God”
The slope was far far more technical than anything I’d tackled before.
Hardly surprising as I’d only ever been on an artificial slope, at approximately a 45 degree angle, before.
This… this was more like 75 degrees…

I satat the top strapping my board on as the Russians arrived from the  pod behind us.
“Excited?” I asked them.
“I’m a little scared” replied the girl from the group.
“That’s ok, I’m fucking terrified!”
As I hauled myself to my feet, breathing heavily from that small effort, I looked down the slope and couldn’t help thinking that should I unbalance and pitch forward down the mountain I would tumble head over heels for hundreds and hundreds of metres until I arrived at the bottom of the second stage.
“Well, ya gotta die sometime!” I thought to myself and pushed myself over the lip.

The snow was amazing, the most beautiful powder you could imagine, my first time making fresh tracks I slalomed back and forth getting a feel for carving in a space wide enough to make it possible!
I only managed two runs that day, by the end my lungs were screaming blue murder asking me why I’d taken them into space and expected them to function.

The next day I arrived at the top, not having smoked since the day before.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Aaaaah, I can breathe now!”

All in all I managed around 4 days of boarding due to weather conditions, and by god was it amazing.

By the time boxing day had rolled around me and Rob were ready to leave.
“How about a lift down to Delhi?” Rob had enquired over lunch one day.
“You pay for half the petrol?”
“Sure, why not?”
And that was  how come the 27th of December 2008 we strapped Rob’s backpack on to the back of my bike and set off in the direction of Jammu.

After a full 10 hours riding we stayed the night in a bargain basement guesthouse outside Jammu and set off the next morning.

About mid-day we saw the first sign for Delhi itself, followed it, but kept going south instead of SE.
“Is this the right way?” I thought to myself
We stopped in a town to ask directions
“Delhi?” I asked a local in the monty-python style of foreign languages.
He pointed the way we’d come
“Fucks sake… Oh well, we’ll go down to Amritsar and take the GT to Delhi”
We set off again down the road to Amritsar.

Then I woke up  on a hospital bed with Rob on my right lying on his back in another.
“I’m so sorry…” I told Rob, and was hit with a wave of pain, my jaw was broken, I tried to put my hand to my face but couldn’t. I looked down and saw my arm was broken.
Using my left hand to hold my jaw in one piece I asked
“What happened?”
Rob sighed and in a tone that suggested it was not the first time he’d told me he explained that we’d overtaken a truck, which then turned right, right into us.

I blacked out again and came to in an x-ray room, which Rob explained was in another hospital.
He was next in the queue and sat on the table ready for the scan.
Worried I asked “Are you ok mate? Anything broken?”
“My back is very painful, but we’ll see”
A few minutes later I was up on the table being pulled into excruciating positions so that the ancient x-ray machine could get a proper look at my injuries.

The doctor slammed the x-rays on the whiteboard and peered at them intensely.
He turned to Rob.
“Nothing is broken, but you may have muscular pain for a while”
Turning to me he added
“Your jaw is broken in two places and your right arm is broken near the top”

“We can deal with these injuries here, but it might take some time. Would you like to go to a private hospital?”
“Yes please!”
I spent the next week at Dr Grewal’s hospital where they plated my arm, jaw and wired my jaws shut, though very well as I was still able to speak surprisingly clearly.

Rob stayed with me for a few days having helped me to Grewal’s hospital (which was a rather agonising experience in a tuk-tuk).
We waved goodbye a few days later as he had a prebooked plane to catch, but I was very grateful for his help and company (and very glad that he wasn’t in the same condition as me).

I was in a bite of a state, although I could get around quite happily, my thought processes were very slow and easily lost or distracted.
My bike was some 50 miles away in a police station and it was to be at least 3 months before I could ride again.
I spent my days lying in bed contemplating what do to next, whether I should recover in India and go on to Sri-Lanka and Australia as planned, whether I should just head back home and ship the bike, and whether a blended cheeseburger would fit through my teeth.
After a week in the hospital I had my decision.
Eating soup and being unable to do just about anything for a week had been depressing enough, spending 3 months essentially confined to a hotel would send me completely mad.

As I could barely get my head round the logistics of moving from the hospital to the hotel, and going to the cash machine seemed such a challenge it made my heart sink, I was very very grateful when my father got an emergency Indian visa and leapt on the next plane out.

We spent the next few days going from pillar to post, collecting the bike from the police, getting it shipped and for some reason going back to Wagha border to try and get the carnet stamped (I knew it wouldn’t work but the freight guys insisted!).

Finally, less than a week after my dad arrived, we stepped off the long-haul flight and into London Heathrow.

I stood outside the airport, the cool January air causing me to shiver.
“Is something wrong?” my dad asked.
“No James, it’s good to be home.”

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