Round the World - in Stages

Hi & welcome to our first Blog on Horizons Unlimited,

After so many years of reading every corner of the site its hard to believe we are doing our own trip and Blog story.Hi & welcome to our first Blog on Horizons Unlimited,

After so many years of reading every corner of the site its hard to believe we are doing our own trip and Blog story.

This is a recent shakedown trip with gear and bike mods as we will take to the UK..

Being new to this blog thing and being the Queen of Verbose I (Alanna aka Lan) am going to give this my best shot as John (aka Skill) has handed over the writing to me. He is in charge of bike stuff and technology, although he will edit and add to the Blog as required.

The Bike Story so far..............
Friday 25th February We deliver the bike to the shipping agent in Brisbane.

Tuesday 7th March the boat leaves Sydney

Wednesday 12th April Rang the shipping agent (London), yes the ship is due in tomorrow afternoon and it appears to be on time. Ring us back after Easter - maybe Tuesday afternoonTo keep ourselves occupied in the meantime

Well I shouldn't have gloated about our navigational prowess. After picking up the bike and making it back to London with ease, we had a lay day sorting out gear on Saturday and on Sunday we decided we would head off to Oxford for the day, to get our bike legs after so long. Skill planned our route, onto the bike and away (it was grey, raining and totally miserable) Well to cut a long story short it took us nearly and hour to get out of Kentish Town, basically every street we went down we had to back track through. Ahhhhh! It was just one of those days.

I must say that we have had a great time with our friends Donald, Lou, Mairi and Harry near Aderdeen, although they were all incredibly busy, with work, business commitments and wedding preparations etc etc. Skill was laid up in bed most of the week with the flu. With Skill being so sick we didn't get out much, Mairi was marvellous giving him the sympathy and attention his mean wife seemed unable to supply.

Skill bought our tickets for the ferry and came back to the bike fuming. "They are a mob of thieving B*****" They had quoted him a price for bike, rider and passenger, but when buying the ticket the price went up because suddenly I was not considered a pillion passenger on the bike but a walk on passenger and charged accordingly. There was a cheaper price for a passenger in a car, but a bike passenger was a walk-on at a higher price. Then they didn’t even give us a separate ticket so I couldn't walk on anyway!! Skill always feels these injustices towards bikers very personally.

Well we have adjusted to French life very well, even the bike has taken on a decidedly French flavour and quite likes being ridden on the right hand side of the road.

We arrived in Germany via the motorway from France and of course being the naïve travellers we are, got our passports ready for them to stamp at the border, but not even a cursory glance at the bike and certainly no passports, I don't think the bike even slowed down to 50km per hour.

We leave Holland via the Autobahn and head back into Germany, once again we are left standing by the traffic in the left hand lane. Scary stuff but the Germans seem to be very good drivers. We end the days ride at a village called Melsungen, we never seem to have a destination we just follow the camping signs.
A good pick, a camping ground on a river with a central lake. The owner was a gregarious German who now lives half his life in Spain and the other half running the caravan park, but previously was into freight forwarding and travelled all over the world.

Heading to Greece we couldn't decide which Ferry Line and agonised over whether to get a cabin or not, in the end economy won out. Skill checked out all the brochures, and all the ferry lines seemed much of a muchness, so we decided to just get a deck passage, 95 Euro as opposed to 300 Euro. We took the ferry that departed first.

At the border it is quite hilarious, we pass through Greek immigration who want to know where our Greece stamp is, we don't have one we arrived at 4.30 in the morning and couldn't find anyone to stamp our passports. "OK" and stamp stamp stamp, off we go, past the Greek and Turkish guards dressed in traditional dress.

Next day it is goodbye to Patrick and Belinda and we head to Ankara as we know that we have to be there by Thursday as the Embassy is shut on Friday and we don't fancy spending three days in the capital. This was our biggest days ride by far. We leave at 10.00am and reach Ankara at 8.30pm with only fuel stops and a quick lunchstop. The last 40 kms before the freeway from Polati to Ankara is roadworks, a loosely gravelled surface in the dark. Finally make it to Ankara.To quote the Lonely Planet, if you have your own vehicle, "do yourself a favour and use public transport instead.

Up and at em early as we know it will be a long day. Breakfast, packed up and gone by 8.30am we ride past the plains beneath the twin peaks of Great Ararat and Little Ararat on our way to the border. (Gurbulak)

After doing all the paperwork and taking two hours to leave Iran, we ride out of Iran into Pakistan following a dusty trail only to realise we have missed the immigration point, which I actually mistook for a chook shed. (Chicken Coop) We turn around and join the 100 locals who are queuing, the money changers are trying to boss us around and tell us we must join the line outside and stay there, obviously so they have more time to badger you to change money.

For those of you not familiar with the KKH (Karakoram Highway) here's a little bit of background.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistan and China jointly constructed a road across the mountains following a branch of the Silk Road from Kashgar to Islamabad via the 4730m Khunjerab Pass. It was only in 1986 the Khunjerab Pass was opened to travellers. This engineering feat was completed by approximately 15000 Pakistanis and 20000 Chinese. Conditions were hard and deaths on both sides were extremely high.

Disaster has struck, the letters z, x, a, s and e have died on the collapsible keyboard so you will have to be patient and forgive typos and worse than usual spelling in this blog as it will be a tedious process until we get a new keyboard, anyway here goes.

Finally we are back in action with a new iPAQ keyboard to write the blogs and we have a little catching up to do. Thanks so much to our friends Kath and Sean for scouring Australia to find it for us, then flying to Melbourne to pick it up and post it, hope you enjoyed yourselves. The lengths some people will go to so we do our blog homework. So now where were we last blog.....

Life in Goa is quite blissful and we spend three days at Palolem, just swimming, eating, and generally relaxing.

We leave Gorakpur as soon as the curfew is lifted at 8.30 am and make the 100km ride to the border at Sonauli, a dusty Indian town complete with traffic jams caused by the trucks crossing the border, we later find that it is more congested than usual because of the Terai blockades.

Indian formalities completed, we enter Nepal and head to get our visas which take no time at all.

After a perfect landing in Santiago Chile we find ourselves lined up to pay the reciprocity tax that Aussies are required to pay in reply to our own government's visa requirements for Chileans. This is all OK until we realise that there are about 300 people queued (2 other planes have landed before us) and only 2 people on the processing counter. After standing in a line for nearly three hours we have our visas, are stamped into the country and have collected our bags.