Sibirsky Extreme 2012 - The Toughest Ride of Them All

Hi Potski

It was a 13 year old BMW F650 funduro.

Walter is the expert in these RR's but if I get chance to scribble a few notes I'll post them.
Cheers

Hi Walter, loving the ride report. Having just come back from riding the TAT (2up) I know what you mean about the limitations of the Zumo 550. I did all the TAT sections either auto routing on the known roads or with waypoints then creating routes, trying to minimise the number of way points per route. This worked OK but the other couple with us had a Zumo 660 and they are worse, only accepting about 150 waypoints so after about half of each route it would have a straight line to the end !
Did you draw all of the tracks in to create your route ? I havent tried this yet and I am thinking a Montana may be on my shopping list. What is the limit of points per route with the Montana.
Cheers Phil

I believe its 10,000 per track, 200 tracks. (You use tracks in Montana, rather than routes)

So on the morning of day 22, Terry and I went downstairs for breakfast in the cafe and noticed the stunning girl in tiny white clothes from yesterday was sitting in reception, behind the desk.

I asked the waitress in the cafe who she was ... was she the owners girlfriend?

But no, apparently she works at the hotel part time, in reception. Her name was Olga and she had been there a few months. I told Terry I would take care of checking out of the hotel after breakfast.

After breakfast, Terry went downstairs to load up his bike and I went to check out of our room and have a chat with Olga, the vision in white. Sadly, she was married to an officer in the border troops (they had a base in Pervomayskiy), was not from around here and was pretty bored in the small town. We chatted for a while before I asked her to come and pose for a picture with the bikes (straddling the bike in her miniskirt was what I had in mind). But despite my best efforts, smoothest lines and cutest puppy dog eyes, she smiled sweetly, shook her head and offered me more tea and biscuits in her office and just continued chatting.

Eventually I gave up. Guys I tried my hardest. I kept thinking the guys on ADV are going to love it if I can get a pic of this one. But it wasnt to be.

I had to break off my lovely chat with Olga. If I wasnt going to get a pic for the ADV boys, then this conversation was a waste of time. I went downstairs to load the bike up. It was right outside her window. Terry pointed out that she spend every second of the 10 minutes it took me to load the bike up and do a few checks, staring at us out the office window. I managed to get a pic thru the office window, but I am afraid it does not do her justice. She looks quite plain here, but I am sure Terry would back me up when I tell you in real life, she was stunning and she definitely knew how to make an entrance.



So for anyone who follows the Sibirsky Extreme Trail in future, I want updates on Olga at the waypointed hotel in Pervomaiyskiy !

It really does look like the camera did fog up as it 's not very clear.

Walter, i was wondering if you had any experience with the Garmin GPSmap line, 60 or 62 in particular. And if so how you feel they compare to the Montana.

The Zumo 660 has a special option for off-road tracks. You can directly load a track that someone else has logged, or if you have a route, let Basecamp convert it to a track (right click > convert to track). You can then visualise it on the Zumo and choose its color. Only down side is that you will not get spoken instructions.

Anyway, back to the RR, I'm loving it!

really late just caught up with this, but I see there are many more days riding to report...

I find that to be a positive. First thing I did with my Zumo 660 was to mute the turn by turn instructions.

Yes, on google earth there is a button labelled "add path". Using that tool you draw a line by adding points.

When finished, highlight the header for it on the left side lists of stuff, and save it somewhere as a KMZ file. Using WinGDB3 (http://www.sackman.info/) or www.gpsvisualizer.com i convert the KMZ file to a GPX track file and open in Mapsource - then its ready to load onto a Montana.

You can do the same thing (drawing your track) with a bit of free Russian software called SASplanet (http://sasgis.ru/download/ - extract it into a directory and run the exe file). SASplanet allows you to choose different satellite image sources from google, yahoo, bing, and several russian sources ... whereas google earth just allows you access to google satellite images. Also SASplanet stores all downloaded imagery in a hard-drive cache, and you can even set it to download areas or even countries at various resolutions, so you can use them offline, when you are out lost in the middle of nowhere. Its a nifty bit of software and now allows installs in English (before it was Russian only and a real handful)

If you prefer working in basecamp, then like for the Montanas, you must work with tracks and not routes. If you work with routes in basecamp, your entire effort will be wasted, as basecamp thinks its smarter than you are ignores all the hundreds of points you have drawn as your intended route from A to B ... it takes only points A and B and calculates its own way there. I still have a huge preference for garminising via Mapsource.

great info!... exactly what i've been looking for......... been looking for some way to take google w/me w/out internet connection..... very valuable!.....

Well I dont have any direct experience with them, but I do know they have very small screens with much lower resolution than the Montana. My experience when riding with guys that used 60 and 62 CSx units in the past, was that they ALWAYS had to slow down significantly or stop to read them and control them. They were too small to be readable at 60 mph off road (especially with the vibrations).

As the vidcaps show, there are a load of track splits or intersections on this track. You have to check at each and every one that you are going the right way. If you can do that without slowing down, from just a quick glance at the unit, its a huge convenience. I wish they made these things with 5 inch screens, like many of the car units, but for now 4 inch is as big as bike capable screens get - and thats the Montana.

A comparison on the link below highlights the screen size and screen resolution difference (almost 4 times re pixel resolution). Surprisingly, the weight is almost the same. 9.2 oz for the 62s vs 10.2 oz for the Montana.

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/compare.do?cID=143&compareProduct=75226&compareProduct=63801

wow that´s a nice journey indeed, just read threw the posts.

The ride began well. Weather was great, track condition was promising. The only thing we missed was Olga from Pervomayskiy.

For the next few days we were covering some of the tracks I did in the Russian Off Road Challenge in 2010 ... so where possible, I was going to take new pics from 2012 to compare the track. If there was one thing I remembered from 2010, there were some superb smooth fast sections on todays track. We should have a real ball.

(see 2010 pics of this section here http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13019040&postcount=183)

This was also the fast section when in 2010, little Andrey (PG) went head over heels in a somersault at over 80 km/h (50 mph)

See here:

http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=13085611&postcount=342

How did his soft side bags hold up?

Yes, he wanted to make drift for a video camera.

He is man of iron, 2 months ago it destroyed the motorcycle finally. Itself it is absolutely healthy.

Great info VValter! Thanks.
Have you ever use TYRE? It is more like google maps vveres Mapsource is less user-friendly, correct me if I'm vvrong.

Unfortunately, you can't work
only in SASp, you should use and GOOGLE EARTH also.
As GOOGLE doesn't allow SAS to load a picture of high resolution.
But 2 programs together lead to very good result

Here was a pic from 2010 ...


And here's Terry in 2012