BrianandTanja

It would seem that there are many of you, family and friends, who are under the impression we are on some sort of glorified extended holiday. We are NOT on a holiday! Riding a bike from London to Sydney is more like unpaid work, really. Expensive unpaid work at that. For example, we are very busy every day with planning routes, finding food and accommodation in strange countries, crossing borders, arranging visas, arranging bike shipping, writing blogs even! Well, ok, perhaps not so busy writing blogs as this one is somewhat overdue. Hmmm, so where were we when I last wrote something? Lombok for my birthday… two months ago.Yes, definitely not so busy writing blogs. Turning… older (the nice thing about being old is you can forget how old you are) I would like t... read more

Boxes Boxes is what you pack bikes in before you put them on a plane. If the box is not big, packing a bike in a box is a b*tch! Our boxes were not big. Mr Suraj, our shifty shipping agent, had made our boxes almost too small to squeeze our bikes in. Handlebars - off, front wheels - off, clutch cables - off, screen - off, instruments - off, brake callipers - off, mudguards - off. Although, if packing was not much fun, unpacking and putting the bikes back together was decidedly un-fun. A situation made significantly worse by my ‘sensible’ decision that since the front wheel was off already, it would also be a good time to change my front tyre. It was not a good time to change my front tyre. Firstly, I ... read more

India A lot has been written about India by previous motorcyclists. Most of it was negative; and probably all of it justified. While India has its good points, very few of them can be happily observed, or for that matter reached, on the back of a motorcycle.Riding in India is chaos… life threatening chaos! Welcome to India Our border crossing at Wagah-Amritsar went surprisingly smoothly, apart from a small disagreement when Tanja decided to take on ‘Indian bureaucracy’. I gather there was a short argument with a painful chap in a Turban about whether I could wait outside and watch the bikes while he processed our passports. I couldn’t. By the time I... read more

How low? Out of 1.9 litres of oil I got down to about half a litre… low enough to cause catastrophic engine failure! So pretty low :-( But before I go into the embarrassing explanation of how that happened, perhaps first some lighter news. The Iranian Highway Code Having now spent about five weeks in Iran I think I have grasped the road rules here. They are unusual, and not like those in Europe and Australia, but fortunately they are short. So, in rough order of importance: 1. Speed: the appropriate speed is determined by estimating the minimum safe stopping distance. You should always travel at greater than this speed to maintain priority (right of way) - see Rule 2. This is a minimum speed, not a maximum speed. 2. Turning: turning traffic, traffic crossing your ... read more

My Iranian Haircut So, I'd been putting off getting a haircut in Iran because I was bit worried about how it might turn out, what with the language barrier and all. I'd settled on Esfahan as a promising place, supposed to be quite an upbeat and diverse city.... what could possibly go wrong? Perhaps I'll let the photos speak for themselves, because sometimes a picture can be worth quite a bit more than 1,000 words... in extortion money! (Which makes me wonder why I'm putting these on our blog; but hey if nude snorkeling went up there)... read more