Category: General (Page 6 of 6)

Picked this up over at motorcycleramblings.com – it’s advice from a book by Tim Cahill – which you should go buy immediately.

The following is an excerpt from Tim Cahill´s book Hold the Enlightenment. I would like to reproduce a good portion of it hear, assuming that he will not mind as long as I make a shameless plug for his books.


Tim Cahill’s Travel 101

Have a quest. You really want to meet indigenous folks, understand their concerns, find out how things work, make friends. You don’t do this in the company of English-speakers. So have a quest, some bit of business that will shove you into the cultural maelstrom… Perhaps you are interested in trains, or motorcycle clubs, or ecological issues. Find locals who share your passion. You’ll make friends.

You will be bored. Bring a big book.

Stop whining, no one wants to hear it.

Read guidebooks and books by local authors and expect them to be wrong or out of date.

It ain’t about the money. There are places where you are expected to bargain and sharpies who want to take advantage of you. Unfortunately, too many people who think of themselves as “world travelers” become obsessed with money. Too often money, and the process of saving money, becomes the entire point of traveling. If the nature of your quest is financial, stay home and get into arbitrage.

Thinking of your hosts as “natives” who can be “spoiled” dehumanizes people and creates the kind of abyss that is impossible to bridge with friendship.

Try the local foods. Eat what is put in front of you.

Learn the rudiments of the local language.

You are the foreigner, dickweed.

The “natives” have their pride.

Schedule a rest day every now and then. Contrary to what you read, insights seldom happen at the summit of a mountain, at the moment a whale is sighted, or in the face of some overwhelming bit of landscape.

The worse the experience, the better the story.

There are no bad experiences.

I first got into Tim Cahill’s books when I overheard someone at a Horizons Unlimited meeting talk about his book Road Fever which recounts a world record run in a car from Argentina to Alaska. Hilarious!

The lists are made, we’ve agreed who’s carrying what, and we’ve looked at the weather forecast. We’re ready for the weekend. We’ve deliberatly chosen to do this long run on a weekend when we have to finish work on the Friday, leave for the weekend and then go back to work on the Monday – this way we hope to copy the stresses – or at least some of the stresses that will appear on the journey.

We talked last night about food, tents, and security; we’ve talked so much about so many of these things that now I think we ‘just need to get on with it’.

I’ll be posting to the blog during the trip, as well as uploading photos and tracking – it’s a perfect opportunity to test our tech. I’m expecting a lot of it not to work, but we’ve got quite a long time to get this kind of thing sorted.

I’ve been playing with a few methods of tracking our route and displaying it on the site whilst we’re on our trip.

Couple of reasons for doing this, but mainly it’s there to show our progress, and if anything goes wrong, where we were at the last upload.

I’m working on a way of pulling out the GPS data from the Tom Tom Rider, converting it to a sensible XML format, then creating a KML file for download (which will contain a GPS position every 60 seconds), and a google maps file (which will contain a GPS point every 4 hours).

I’ve got the KML uploads sussed, now I just need to find some way of stripping out all of the data (except one every 4 hours) and converting it to a google maps format… then I can start working on the upload function… ideas / thoughts… help!? email me

Click image to see larger version

It’s coming up fast – our first training run. We’re heading down to Dartmoor to try our hand at ‘long distance‘ riding with rough camping.

The aim this time is to see what the dynamic between the three of us is like. We’ve ridden with each other before but not actually all three of us together, so that will certainly be interesting.

I think the best thing about this training run is to see how grumpy we get after a wonderfully long hard ride from London, when we’re not fit, not used to the distance, and not used to our bikes being fully loaded.

We’ll also be trailing the technology that will allow you to track us on the big one, not to mention a little podcast and video – if we’ve not killed each other 🙂

When we first started talking about doing this journey we always knew that we wanted to do something – however small – to highlight a charity very close to our hearts – that charity is Everyman.

Everyman fund research to help cross out male cancer, they also spend a lot of time educating people about the early tell tale signs that can mean the difference between life and death.

We’ll be working as hard as we can to raise the profile of this fantastic charity, and with any luck raise some money towards their research.

If you would like to dontate to Everyman, you can use our Just Giving page here

http://www.justgiving.com/journeytorussia 

So now we’ve managed to complete our basic route, we need your help. Do you live on or near our stops?

Do you have the latest information on our border crossings? Do you have any practical advise on how we can keep our bikes running perfectly over 5000 miles?

We’d love to hear from you, and about your experiences about riding long distances over unfamiliar ground – contact us now – there’s at least one pint in it, maybe more!

With the New Year comes new determination from the Journey To Russia team – the final route has been finalised and the ferries are being booked.

You can see the final route here.

Journey To Russia is explained simply; 3 Blokes, 3 Bikes, 3 Weeks. The journey starts in September 2007, when Matt, Patrick and Stace leave the weekly londonbikers.com meet for the far flung cities of St Petersburg and Moscow.

The journey will cover several thousand miles in a very short period, crossing the familar western Europe and venturing into eastern Europe before entering the former USSR. The chaps will visit:

Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, and France.

Russia still holds a mystery, for so many years behind the iron curtain Moscow was a city of secrets, and intrige. It’s still not the easiest place on earth to visit, especially on two wheels!

Read more…