Feb 20 2017

Two steps forward…

In January 2016, the US congress introduced a new law, effectively immediately, requiring anyone who had visited either Syria, Sudan, Iraq or Iran since 2011 to apply for a special visa to enter the US. The Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) was no longer relevant, whether you had obtained it prior to this new law or not and we could no longer enter the US under the visa waiver program. As we had travelled through Iran in 2014, this applied to us. Having first responded to their 9 page questionnaire, with 156 fields to complete including whether we were terrorists or going to the US for the purposes of prostitution, we booked an appointment at the US Consulate in Sydney and had our interview last week. The security check, requiring us to leave everything behind except our wallet took the longest amount time, especially as I had a tiny pen in my wallet. The security lady was not happy with me, especially when I couldn’t think what metal object I hadn’t taken out! Anyway, the whole process including the actual interview took 40′. A breeze. The interview itself entailed just 2 questions and we learned about the guy’s father’s passion for restoring old Triumph motorcycles!!

Anyway, the interview took place at 8am Wednesday and exactly 2 days later, our passports with new US visas were hand delivered to us at home. We opted for a 5 year visa, valid 90 days per entry. Fantastic.

The other win we had since our last blog was getting our 2nd Australian passports, valid for the maximum 3 years allowed for 2nd passports. That will make getting our visas a little easier.

So how’s the visa spagetti going? This is what it looks like:

Untangling visa spagetti

Untangling visa spagetti

Uzbekistan, which had announced abolishing visas as of 1st April 2017, decided to defer this until 2021, so we now need a visa again.

The rules about obtaining a Carnet de Passage (CDP) from the UK have also changed: The RAC in the UK had stopped providing the service, so we started liaising with ADAC in Germany, and looking into another one, TCS, in Switzerland, but I found out last week that a new organisation in the UK is providing CDPs so we can no longer use ADAC. This time, we only need a CDP for Iran and the prices involved in obtaining a CDP are quite steep. With the cost of the LOI, the visa, the trips to the consulate and the CDP, is it reasonable we wondered, for such a brief visit? Our time frame, to make it to Vladivostok before the cold weather comes, means that we can only spend a few days in Tehran to visit several friends – no time for too much sightseeing like last time. So I started liaising with someone well known and recommended by motorcyclist travellers in Iran, Hossein who can provide a CDP at the border for you at a cheaper rate. But the duration of the CDP and cost depend on which border you enter Iran from… We had planned on entering from Turkey, but the CDP through Hossein is only valid one week – way too short to cross the entire country and spend time visiting friends. So via Armenia it will be.

In the meantime, I started the process of getting a Letter of Introduction (LOI) for Iran – the first step in getting a visa for that part of the world. This is a piece of paper provided by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to a tour agency working on your behalf, for a fee of course. The problem I encountered this week was Australian government regulations preventing financial institutions sending money to Iran or for matters relating to Iran… Another thing to work around…

So have we got our route worked out? No more than we had a month ago as all still depends on Turkmenistan and whether they’ll grant us a transit visa. Before we can apply for that, we must have the visas for Iran and Uzbekistan ones. But if we don’t get, it will mean we can’t go to Iran, so that visa will be a waste. See what I mean about this spagetti?!

Route options with closed borders

Route options with closed borders


And just to add a bit of excitement, my service provider in the US has migrated my business site and emails to another server and I have been tearing my hair out with that for weeks now. ‘Nugh said on that.

Some excitement of a different kind. I know we will faced with many opportunities of eating mare’s products such as mare’s cheese, mare’s yogurt and milk in Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia. Mongolia’s traditional beverage is airag, fermented mare’s milk. How will I survive with my bad lactose intolerance. Time for some research. I found out that the reason I can eat plain yogurt is because the enzymes in yogurt break down the lactose for me. Maybe I’ll be ok with airag then I wonder, if am ok with yogurt?!?! I decide to try over-the-counter lactase. If it works, I can take that while in Mongolia especially. So I gave it a try at home. I start with a lovely creamy chocolate mousse, taking 2 lactase tablets just before eating my desert as per the instructions. I was totally fine, up to 10.5 hours later – normally I react 8 hours later. Then it was touch and go, but I did manage to keep it down. I am very happy and keen to try the next test. I give my body a week to recover. A week later, time for something usually lethal for me. Something with cream and lemon. I decide to take the tablets 10’ before the ‘test’. I lasted 7 hours before being horribly sick. It took me 36 hours to recover. That was a complete failure. Rats… Another reason to perfect my Russian and Mongolian. I have prepared 2 A4 pages of various words and expressions in Turkish, Georgian, Armenian, Russian and Mongolian to help me out.

We are slowly ticking items off our list of things to do. A very exciting one was to find new boots – I did not fancy going through rain or crossing rivers and having wet feet as I did on our last RTW trip. After much research and trying several different models, I settled on a pair of Sidi Adventure 2 goretex boots. So comfortable!! And with much better support than the old boots.

Sidi Adventure 2 boots

Sidi Adventure 2 boots

Our pre-trip fitness regime includes a couple of walks a day and a weekly trip to the Gold Coast’s Main Beach for some boogy boarding – a fun way of getting your arms and legs a bit of a work out.

Happy times at Main Beach

Happy times at Main Beach

Suddenly, we have just 5 weeks before we leave. Still so much to do, most importantly Anthony’s annual heart check up – it is 8 years today that he had his heart attack while riding a motorcycle in Bhutan. We will forever be grateful we rode our motorcycles around the temple 3 times to cleanse our sins – a clean sheet, so only got a small zap from upstairs… followed by a quadruple bypass that was life changing.

Anne

Jan 1 2017

2017 where next?

The New Year’s champagne has ceased to flow, the last party streamer has fluttered to the ground, and the party music has finally been silenced, now 2017’s pristine calendar waits to be filled with good intentions. While we have only been back for six weeks settling in and our good intentions to paint and redecorate our home, have drifted to the back burner as the lure of the open road once again fills our minds. Yes we are planning another motorcycle trip in 2017.

Before I reveal our plans for 2017, I thought it might be of some interest on how we went about reaching our decision. For those who just want to know the route and not our decision making process, just scroll down past the next paragraph and picture.

We had fairly quickly decided that we wanted to undertake another long distance ride after going to Spain last year. Given the milage on ‘Streak’ & ‘Storm’ we feel there is another long trip before we may need to undertake serious work on them. So out comes the A1 sized paper book we have used over the years for planning purposes and I add a small clutch of coloured markers. Let planning commence! A somewhat inaccurate map of the world is drawn and four possible routes snake our from the motorbikes home in the UK. Pros and cons of each option are discussed and the inevitable action lists are drawn up.

After much discussion we each independently rank the four options and find we both agree on the same first choice. We are drawn to this option for a number of reasons;

1: the chance to revisit some friends made in our 2014/5 RTW trip, no we are not repeating the same route;
2: the attraction of spending more time in sparsely populated regions;
3: visiting new places we have had on our list for some time;
4: returning to a region we last visited in 1985; and
5: the trip to last no more than six months.

How early planning evolves for the 2 slow speeds.

How early planning evolves for the 2 slow speeds.

As you can see, our options included Europe to Cape Town and a circumnavigation of Europe, neither of which we felt was quite what we wanted to do this year, so we have chosen to attempt a Northern Round the World (RTW) in the summer of 2017! Phew there it is out in the open, RTW again, sounds so simple when put this way as I sit on the couch typing away, but based on previous experience, there will be a lot more to do before we start. Motorcycle maintenance, route planning, visa acquisition and a host of others items that I have already forgotten from the last trip and will need to review on the blog for reminders.

Our plan is to travel, subject to getting the appropriate visas, via Turkey, Iran and the ‘Stans’ again, Russia, Mongolia and on to Vladivostok. Ferry to Korea, then plane to Alaska and then ride to east coast of America and then return to the UK. We plan to depart the UK by mid April returning towards the end of September.

This timeline, if adhered to, should allow us to complete the journey in the Northern Hemisphere summer, but it will be tight. Any untoward delays or forced detours could impact our ability to complete the trip before winter’s icy fingers start to reach out. This adds a little extra spice to the challenge we are setting ourselves.

We are now drawing up our ‘to do’ lists and from there start to build an action plan. As we do, we will keep the blog updated on our pre trip progress. Have a great 2017!

– Anthony

Dec 24 2016

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Wishing our family, friends and followers a merry Christmas and very happy and healthy new year 2017!!! Let there be peace and joy in your life and in the world, like the other evening in Brisbane (turn your device vertically if you can, to see the whole video below).

Love to you all and stay tuned for more adventures starting April 2017.

Wherever you are, stay safe out there!

Anne & Anthony

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Dec 3 2016

adventure bike tv…….?

Just when you thought the blog entries were over for another year and you could resume your slumbers, here we are again. We mentioned that we attended the Horizons Unlimited South Africa Adventure Travellers Meeting event in our Nov 6 post. What we did not mention was that adventurebiketv.com, a web based adventure motorcycle tv program was there to film the event. In addition they conducted a few interviews for their ‘under the visor’ segment, including, yes the 2slowspeeds. We were told that it could be up to six months before they used the interview, if at all.

Season 3, episode 7 is just out and features the South African event, with quite a few glimpses of us, well mostly Anne, and yes an in depth interview with your intrepid bloggers, us! So if you have a few spare minutes or the TV is only showing Christmas reruns go to adventurebiketv.com or click or tap the photo’s to see the episode on youtube.com.

The Horizons Unlimited South Africa Adventure Travellers Meeting starts in the first photo and our interview in the second.

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– Anthony

Nov 22 2016

Four and a half months

We set off from the Wild Coast heading for somewhere north of Durban, our destination is Swaziland. This quickly changes as two facts come to light. The first is that we are almost up to 10,000 km or 6,200 miles on this trip and under the terms of the rental agreement we need to have the vehicle serviced, the second is when we finally get onto a freeway with a 120km maximum speed limit after a few weeks on slow roads, our wheel balance has gone again, 105km per hour is our new top speed.

New plan, we will go to Johannesburg on a more direct route. After a short stop north of Durban, Anne finds a spot to stay in the Drakensburg en route to Johannesburg, and yes it’s another world heritage site for us. We have our last night in the 4×4 that has been our home for the last 7 weeks, and after all the sun in Namibia and Botswana we are treated to a mountain evening storm with hail, but we keep warm and dry.

Last night camping in the Drakensburg

Last night camping in the Drakensburg


The majestic Drakensburg

The majestic Drakensburg


It seems hard to imagine as we come to the end of this trip that we have been away for four and a half months. Ordinations, Christenings, Motorcycle and 4×4 trips and family and friends have filled our time from Europe to Africa. As we start to wind down and prepare to give everything a good clean to pass the eagle eyed Australian Customs inspection, we have a little time to reflect on what we have seen and done.

This is the first time in decades that we have paid more than a fleeting visit to South Africa. In reflecting on what we have seen, we note the progress in the provision of sewerage, water and power to many homes, but also the deterioration of existing infastructure. How does one balance out the respective benefits of allocating finite resources? I certainly do not know. What one can hope for, is the on-going robust democratic process (yes, it is a democratic process even if there are massive corruption problems everywhere), a strong press (we were pleasantly surprised to see how brutally open the press is in its criticism of the corruption and nepotism) and the optimism we found in young people who have grown up only knowing the ‘rainbow nation’ to tackle the challenges facing South Africa. While the corruption, level of violence and run down feel are all palpable and undeniable issues, we choose to remember and believe the optimistic young generation we met will one day manage to swing the pendulum to a more equitable balance.

We have enjoyed this varied trip, and found it interesting to compare our motorcycle and 4×4 trips. While the 4×4 provides comfort and space to carry more ‘stuff’, we have no doubt that our preferred method of travel is motorcycle. The primary reason is the connection we have with people on the motorcycle just does not exist when you are in a car/4×4. We feel a strong sense of separation from the world around us in our 4×4, so while we were able to visit places not accessible by motorbike , it is not our preferred form of travel.

So we sign off wishing our followers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, we do not know what 2017 holds, but I am sure we will be back on the road somewhere.

– Anne & Anthony