Earlier this year my wife (Kim) and I (Seb) went on an adventure ride from Belgium to Mongolia and further to Central Asia for 110 days of offroad mayhem. We were both riding DRZ's 400E and still grateful to Walter Colebatch for some of his Sibirsky Extreme tracks for Kazakhstan and Russia. No, this is not a copy/paste or a hoax of Walter's and Terry's last ride, but an adventure of it's own since our final destination had nothing to do with Magadan and in the end we did only parts of Walter's tracks. We didn't prepare too much in advance, only all our visa and some off road tracks and off we went, direction East for almost 4 months. My wife Kim: My ugly face (on the left): As video says more than a 1000 words, a quick 5 minutes impression of the trip: <iframe width="640" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/UNxR3ObbnHI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Still not convinced to stay for more? Here are some pictures:
;-) That one is actually a good story, but it's near the end, so you'll have to endure all the trip before knowing that story!
I was wondering when you would start posting your trip. Was good to meet you guys in UB. Cheers! Noah
Yeah, likewise! We're only back for two weeks in Belgium now, and in the process of selling the house and all our stuff to start a RTW next year, so prioritizing! :eek1 Anyway, now we're good to go!
Preparations: About this, Kim's bike got a few Wolfman bags (that we still had from the previous 2 trips) and I decided to go for the Magadans from Adventure Spec. But they need some frame and I don't have one obviously. Problem with this was that my rear subframe couldn't accomodate any side frames for bags, so I needed to change the rear subframe for one of a more common DRZ 'S' model. They are longer as they can accommodate a passenger. So after finding a rear subframe in the Netherlands and a side frame in the USA and the bags in the UK this was settled. I also put a rear rack on and attached a Pelicase to it, put some 12v sockets in the front to recharge electronics etc. I did put a stiffer rear shock on mine and a 28l Safari tank, on kim's a 17l Safari tank and we had brand new sets of tires (Mefo Explorer) but that's all about major mods. I have a rather strong (maybe naive?) believe that one should spent money on the trip and not on the bike. The first days: We wanted to go to the HUBB meeting in the UK before setting off for our trip and since the timing was not exactly great of trying to combine these two, we decided to cheat a little bit. I have a van and we can put the two DRZ's in it, so we went from Belgium to France, unloaded the bikes, took the train and arrived at the HUBB meeting the same day, after (how is it possible?) a rainy 4 hours drive in the UK. I can only recommend this event to everyone as it's just plain fun and also nice to see and talk in person with fellow travellers or wannabe travelers. So after a few days there we got a 'big send off' and we went back in the direction of the van (who was just parked in France on a public parking...). (pic:courtesy of Thomas) We were acting as celebrities and didn't even do anything (yet) so kind of a weird feeling, but a nice one nevertheless. So nice that we'll do it again next year when we leave for a RTW... We got back to the van, drove home and slept at my parents' place as in the meantime we rented out our apartment for 3 months to a german expat. Next day we did a long day driving all the way to Wroclaw in Poland with the van. A friend of mine was coming with the plane to pick up the van and drive it back, so we could skip almost all Europe and do it in one day... ;-) Next day our adventure really started and one of the first towns we crossed made us feel at ease: We crossed into Ukraine, which was a bit more familiarly territory as we've been there the year before (when returning from a Nordkapp trip) and enjoyed the country a lot. This time we would even have better memories of Ukraine but not the first days, as it was pouring rain every day, all day long. But it was the beginning of the trip so we thought 'what the heck' and started on Walters' tracks... Did I mention it was wet and rainy all the time? And then Kim went down for the first time this trip. Since I was riding 100m before her I didn't notice at first that she was missing in my mirror, but knowing that the sandy part had been tricky for me, I turned around when I could'nt see her anymore just to find her like this: She looked really pissed at me and I thought the trip would be over. But Kim is tough so after a 10 minute break we started again. We arrived in a village just to find out that there was no traffic whatsoever (we had not seen anybody anyway for the last hours) except the cows. But i think they're more scary then drivers. Well I am more scared of cows than any drunken driver I would meet. We passed some typical buildings that looked just the same as in the old WW2 movies from when the germans invaded Ukraine, so we really started to get the feeling "we're not at home anymore". And some abandoned church:
