All posts by Walter

Sibirsky Extreme

I hate garmin

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Well another day and another set of Garmin Zumo malfunctions.  I have never been a huge user of GPS units but I thought times they are a-changin and I should change with them.  So I got me a Zumo a few months before going away.  Riding around the UK it worked just fine.  Faultlessly in fact.  So I headed off for the other side of the world, imagining I had a functional GPS from the most expensive brand of GPS units on the market.

Day 2, cross over into Europe and I found I had no detail in my maps.  It seems though my GPS came with maps of Europe, I had to manually copy them from my laptop to the unit.  So I did that in the evening and solved that part of the problem.

Day 3, and the route I had prepared and copied into the Zumo taking me from Calais to Ancona is determined by the Zumo to be too large and complicated.  It did tell me this when it first loaded  the route, but also said it would update and recalculate the route as I went through it.  But no.  The retarded unit decided the route is too large for it to handle full stop.   So all my efforts to create a route from Calais to Ancona were wasted.

Day 4, … overnight I had prepared a couple of smaller 1 day long route sections to get me between the Black Forest and Ancona … and uploaded them into my Zumo … an Jonathans Zumo 400.  Jons Zumo took them easily.  My Zumo imported the user data route 9just as Jonathan’s did) but  when i went to look for the route i just uploaded, there was nothing there.  Just a couple of old routes – and the useless route to Ancona from Calais.

If there are any Zumo wizards out there to help me understand why my Zumo is so dysfunctional, I would love to hear from you, before I throw it overboard.

Jon is doing most of the navigating at the moment, with routes that I have prepared … as I am able to tranfer them and import them into Jon’s Zumo, but despite my Zumo saying it has transfered and imported the data successfully, the route is not showing up in my routes.

Belgium, France, Sibirsky Extreme

Belgian Castles

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Well it’s only the end of Day 2, and its already been an eventful couple of days.

The departure from Touratech was a huge buzz. Getting a send off from Austin Vince was pretty special. I like to read, watch and keep abreast of all sorts of biking trips, but for me, none come close to the 2 magnum opuses of the Brothers Vince. There is one thing that sets their projects apart from almost all others, and that’s the fact that they (too) seem to value the satisfaction of being the first to do something on a motorcycle.

I guess everybody gets what they want out of adventure biking films, but for me it’s the trailblazing spirit, the desire to do something that hasn’t been done before that makes a great adventure. Mondo Enduro and Terra Circa both set out to do what hadn’t been done before. That’s why they’re great. There were no trip reports to read to help them do the bits that no-one had done before. It was virgin motorcycle territory.

I like to think my earlier trip, the Tokyo to London Project, shared the Vince philosophy in that way. If I am able to reach some (or all) of my objectives in this current project, then I hope to build on that spirit. I still believe there are plenty of interesting roads out there yet to be ridden. It’s harder and harder to do a trailblazing adventure biking trip, but there is still potential out there.

Day 2 began for both Jonathan and myself in our respective homes in Manchester and London. The plan was to meet at Folkestone Eurotunnel terminal about 10 am. As it happens, both of us were delayed (I had to search for papers in my self storage shed near Gatwick and Jon had traffic problems) and we met at about 12:00 before rolling under La Manche to Calais. The delayed start to the day meant we were squeezed in terms of schedule as soon as we rolled off the tunnel at 2:30pm local time in France. We wound our way through the Flanders Fields around Ypres and Passchendale before realising we were far too late to make a 6pm dinner date in Tongeren on the other side of Belgium with Norbert and family. Norbert was a contact through Horizons Unlimited who I had written to of number of times but had never met. There was no other option – we had to hit the dreaded motorways for over 2 hours.

I had also arranged to meet Stijn and friends, a couple of other Belgian guys planning a ride to Siberia, Mongolia and China for next year, and to meet my 8 year old son Michael – who lives in Holland – that evening. It was going to be a rushed evening and I had no idea how I would be able to link it all together. Fortune favours the brave and the answer was apparent as we arrived at Norbert’s. He lived in an old Castle! Fantastic stuff. So thanks to the fantastic hospitality of Norbert, Francoise and Thierry, all things came to pass that evening in the Castle. After an evening speaking with Stijn and his friends, Jon and I spent the evening in the guesthouse with our motorcycles, while Michael and his mum spent the evening in the Castle itself.

A stressful day, and what was probably the longest day of the trip (about 500 km for me and probably 700 km for Jonathan) ended with dinner and wine in a fantastic castle. The Brothers Vince would have loved this one!