2007 Gao Bound

Redboots

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John Roberts, of this parish, suggested I put this trip up on the forum, so here goes.

Rather than rewrite everything, I will put a link at the end of this post that starts on day one of the trip and ends with the "Last Post".
Fourteen years ago we headed off from my place in France on May 29th 2007, a Saturday, the same as this year.

The vast majority of it was written by my mate Mick so it's mostly from his point of view and written as we travelled on a PDA (remember them?), and also updated with pictures & text when we found internet cafes that were useable.

The GPS was a Garmin GPSMap 276C. A great bit of kit. Back in 2007 there were very few maps available for routing east of Germany, so I used the Global map that came with the unit, plus some OSM type mapping of India from "Bob the Smelly Biker". I just plotted the route using the larger towns marked on maps and we could always see that were were headed in the general direction we wanted, or not. I kept all the track-logs on the route to look at or replay later. Not having a specific route was great - flexibility. The only downside to the whole trip was that we had a deadline to be in Goa, which meant we had to press on at times and/or not take the intended route.

We both bought R100GS's with the thinking that one set of spares and tools would do and they are fairly clockwork. They also had the fuel range would need. We bought both bikes in Germany and registered them in our countries of residence nearly a year before the trip so that we could "fettle" them. Even so, we both suffered from the failing Valeo starters. Micks early on in Germany and mine in India. Having read of others having problems, we had our driveshafts modified to greaseable units with new UJ's. I put the HE disc and caliper on the front. Micks already had a Spiegler 4-pot caliper on it. Micks bike already had an Ohlins rear shock and I fitted a Wilbers to mine.

There were a thousand things to do regarding paperwork - CDP's, insurance- bike and travel, (mostly we bought bike insurance at borders), China and Visa's. All sorts of stuff, including Mick getting a Certificate of Motor Vehicle from the AA which I disassembled it and made 2 copies of using card as close as I could get to the original colour. It's a multilingual document of your vehicle registration and it's details and the idea was that it might simplify things with officialdom in various countries. I produced extra pages in Russian and Chinese. It worked a treat! Johnny foreigner loves an official looking document. The fact that my French registered bike had an English document mattered not a jot because they could understand it :thumb2

Here it is then: http://www.shales.com/txp/article/38/ (you may get security warnings because its not https (its an old site), but there is nothing malicious on there. Promise :D

There is a link to the "Trip Gallery" with more photos at the bottom right of each page.

This was the planned route. We used a different one in many places for lots of reasons :) and we sent the bikes back to the UK from Bombay on a boat. We flew.
 

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India

I enjoyed that read. Seemed like a real adventure.
Sorry to hear of Micks accident after you came back.
Bf.
 


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