We realise that there has been some confusion as to what our plans are once we get to Australia at the end of this month. To make it all clear, I’ll step back in time and explain how this trip all came about.

Back in April 2013, we decided that we wanted to spend time with our families in Europe and I had a strong feeling that if we didn’t do this now, I would regret it. So we booked ourselves a one way ticket using frequent flyer points. Spending those 9 months with family was one of best things we’ve done.

Then we had to look at the return journey. To this day, neither of us can remember who came up with the idea of riding back on motorcycles…. As the saying goes, the rest is history :-).

While in Europe, we started looking into prices of motorcycles. We tried to see if we could buy motorcycles built for Australian design rules so that we could import them into Australia (knowing that the models we were interested in had not gone through the necessary certification for private importation). Neither BMW nor Triumph could help us there. Ok, we can’t bring bikes into Australia, we’ll just do a whole Round The World trip instead. The plot thickened when we found out that residents of a country are not allowed to temporarily import vehicles into their country on a Carnet de Passage (a Carnet is a customs document which allows travellers to temporarily import their vehicles without having to leave a cash deposit at the border). We were going to have UK registered bikes, on a UK Carnet de Passage which is valid for 12 months. So now, we can’t even bring the bikes into Australia, even just for a few weeks. Ok, we’ll just leave the bikes in Kuala Lumpur for 4-5 weeks while we go back to Australia and collect them again end of January 2016, when we’ll ship them and ourselves to South America.

Where exactly in South America we are not sure yet as it depends on what deals we manage to get – we’ve been working on that but haven’t firmed anything up yet. Our original thought had been to fly to Santiago and head up the west coast of South America etc but shipping the bikes there is problematic because it would entail using two airlines from KL and that means extra handling, and, yes, you guessed it, cost… The other option is to go to Sao Paulo, and find a boat to take us all down the Amazon. Looking into that too.

After South America, Central America, Mexico, and the USA, we’ll fly back to Europe from New York, sometime towards the end of July 2016.

Time to see our families again for a while, park our bikes somewhere in Europe and then we still have to work out how we’ll get home to Australia sometime… We are the 2 Slow Speeds – we’ll work it out sometime!! :-).

In the meantime, we will have had an absolutely fantastic time, learned so much, seen the world and people with new eyes, made new friends. And thanks to you all, our followers, we will have a diary of what we did, where we went, how we felt, who we met, all the details our memories couldn’t retain as we’ve experienced so much, because if it wasn’t for you and your comments and emails we received along the way, we might not have perservered with the blog.

We arrive in Sydney on 26th December and Brisbane 28th December and plan to fly back to Kuala Lumpur 28th January 2015. We will have lots to do as we will have been away for 15 months and we hope to catch with as many friends as possible during our time back home.

– Anne