18 days in London

No visas yet. But a whole lot more equipment piling up in my parents' flat in Munich. On April 2 I will fly home for a week and take my motorbike into pieces, change some parts, get the tools and spare parts we might need on the trip, go to the dentist, get the last vaccination and hopefully finish and survive the marathon in Freiburg.

Satellite Phone

I forgot to mention one thing - we got our satellite phone yesterday!
With the help of Christian's colleague Laura and her sister Carolyn (THANK YOU!) we got a Thuraya satellite phone from the States, where it is about 50% cheaper than in Germany. Not that we want to constantly hang on the phone, but unlike most people think, calling from the satellite phone isn't expensive at all... and yes, I love the idea of annoying people that have to stay at home and work from some beautiful remote place somewhere along the way.
And anyone wanting to contact us while we're on the trip can send free texts to the satellite phone from http://services.thuraya.com/sms.html

Preparations - only 5 more weeks in London

5 weeks before we leave London... and still a gazillion of things have to be done before we can start our motorbike trip. We're planning to leave on May 1 and return some time in October. Starting point will be Poland and from there we're planning to go to: Slovakia - Hungaria - Romania - Ukraine - Russia - Kazachstan - Uzbekistan - Tadjikistan - Kyrgyzstan - Kazachstan - Russia - Mongolia - Russia - Estonia - Latvia - Lithunia - Poland - Germany. Looks like a nice little round trip on the world map - about 25.000km :)

From what I have heard so far the roads in Kazachstan, the other Stans and Mongolia are rather dirt tracks than roads. So it'll be an interesting experiment with Marcin not having ridden a motorbike for the last ten years and me having no offroad experience.

Two years ago I was thinking about which motorbike to buy for such a trip, and in the end I decided to get a BMW F650GS Dakar. But since going on just one motorbike is no option we're going on the BMW Eurasian Twins - two Dakars. Which has the advantage of reducing the amount of tools and spare parts we need to take. After several phone calls to Touratech and BMW and endless talk to people who know something about motorbikes and many who think they know something about motorbikes we decided not to change much on the bikes. We'll leave the catalyzers where they are and will simply destroy them with leaded petrol in Mongolia. And worry about it afterwards, if we fail to get the bikes through the next emissions check. A foldable gearshift, extended sidestand, a cigar lighter plug thing for charging batteries and a few minor modifications should do.

Our largest worry for now are the visas. With the help of an agency we hopefully get them in time, but we haven't heard back from them yet.

Other main things that remain to be done are getting some vaccinations and medical insurance, deciding which tools and spare parts to take and which tyres to use and getting some more equipment including motorbike clothing and doing those few little changes on the bikes.

So that's it for now - in the next posting I can hopefully report on some colourful visas in our passports...

Zwei Monate

In zwei Monaten geht's los! Und bis dahin sind noch ein Haufen Dinge zu erledigen. Wir brauchen 6 Visa und haben noch kein einziges, die Motorräder müssen reisefertig gemacht und Werkzeug und Ersatzteile ausgewählt werden und nebenbei arbeite ich daran, Marcin zu überzeugen, dass Impfungen eine gute Sache sind...
Mitte März trifft, wenn alles nach Plan läuft, das Thuraya Satellitentelefon in Deutschland ein, das Garmin GPSMAP 278 liegt fröhlich in der Schublade und wartet darauf, verstanden und bespielt zu werden.
Nachdem der kleine Norwegenausflug ins Eis vorbei ist, beginnen die Vorbereitungen nun ernsthaft...