OverlandSphere » Gelände Straße Travels

Boss! De Bike, De Bike!

Gelände Straße Travels — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 08:59:52 +0000

Shockingly enough everything with the arrival of the bike went off without a hitch! Instead of giving you all the details, here’s some photos of the uploading. Then it was off to the jungle for riding and special meet that’s been 2.5 years in the making!…

No motorbike, No cry

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:17:20 +0000

So, with my bike safely (?) aboard a wooden vegetable boat, it was time to get me to Malaysia. In this day an age in Indonesia it involved going to the airport, walking up to the check-in counter and buying a ticket for the next flight. That’s it- no ‘you-didn’t-buy-it-on-the-internet-and-print-your-own-ticket-so-we’ll-charge-you-all-sorts-of-handling-fees’ silliness. As it turns out, my flight was delayed, so…

Okay, now it’s just creepy

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:19:34 +0000

Back on the road and heading to Medan things were normal until I hit a bit of a traffic jam where a truck was trying to pull another one out of a ditch (not a terribly rare event in Indonesia). As I was stopped, I heard some squealing and the general types of noises made by overly exited teenage girls. …

And I’m Off!

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 09:26:24 +0000

Ah, no. I’m still in greater Jakarta. So, ‘I’m off’ actually means that the 100km ride to the ferry for Sumatra doesn’t ever really leave the sprawling suburbs and takes the better part of a day! The whole experience really brought home the fact that while Indonesia ‘only’ has a population of around 240 million people, over 30 million on…

Trip Track has been updated- Finally!

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:34:42 +0000

I finally got around to it- sorry it took so long. I’d promise to be better about it, but based on past experience that probably won’t happen……

The Big Durian

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 05:10:09 +0000

Getting to Jakarta seemed like a fairly straightforward ride, and generally it was. Decent traffic, some pleasant detours, and a dash of deja-vu. Along one country road that paralleled a canal I was thinking about how Dutch the scene seemed (not surprising considering the canal was built by the Dutch while Indonesia was still a colony) when I passed a…

Java Jive

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 04:17:20 +0000

Rolling off the ferry into Java was perfect- wonderful! Whatever happened to the bike now, I only had to get a truck to Jakarta and didn’t have to deal with any kind of ferry issues or anything. I couldn’t relax, but I could certainly give my nerves a break. First order of business was to head to Yogyakarta to experience…

Bummer Dude!

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 03:07:37 +0000

Riding while worrying about your bike is just not fun. Any little noise, any strange vibration and your Spidey Sense goes on full alert and you become convinced that your bike is on the verge of self-destructing in the middle of nowhere. When riding on roads with the kind of variable surface that you get in Indonesia, it turns into…

Tourists are Bad. I Think.

Gelände Straße Travels — Wed, 23 May 2012 09:49:32 +0000

When I got to Flores I was looking forward to the mountains, volcanoes, and volcanic lakes… Unfortunately, while the rain held off, everything was carpeted with low clouds and mist. It was still something to see, but not what I was hoping for. Sigh. But, but, but! The riding was great! Decrepit roads winding through the jungle, impossibly steep corners,…

Island Hopping

Gelände Straße Travels — Sat, 12 May 2012 07:46:10 +0000

Finishing Sumba worked out perfectly- I arrived at the town where the ferry left from in the late afternoon and the ferry was scheduled for 9am the next morning. After finding a hotel, I went down to the dock to make sure I knew where to go and buy a ticket. Unfortunately, things weren’t exactly as they should be… No…

This is gooooood

Gelände Straße Travels — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:55:03 +0000

After my 32 hour odyssey on the ferry, I arrived in Sumba well after dark. A stop at a gas station where the attendant waived over a local to direct me to a hotel had me in a dreamless sleep before my bike had even started to warm up properly. The morning came early (like 4:30 am early!) when the…

What a difference a border makes…

Gelände Straße Travels — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 14:56:01 +0000

Crossing the border into the Indonesian side of Timor was a straightforward and relatively pleasant affair. I was steeped in the history of East Timors occupation and was half expecting some fortified border filled with hardened military men. Instead I got a very friendly welcome from a universally young group of army lads- I suspect chosen because they were too…

Timor-Leste

Gelände Straße Travels — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:39:51 +0000

East Timor- a country whose very name brings up thoughts of civil war and brutal occupation. And one where my knowledge of it ended there. It’s now a country struggling towards a stable democracy, with a surprisingly cordial relationship with it’s one time oppressors (Indonesia), and a growing worry over the planned UN pull out at the end of 2012. …

I’m doing it again!

Gelände Straße Travels — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:16:59 +0000

Yup, I’m going to condense the rest of Australia into one post. Partly because I want to get to the new, fun stuff and partly because it was more of the same, where some of the cool riding was off the table because of rain and delays just dragged things out. Leaving Perth I started my ride- generally my plan…

Like the Dodo

Gelände Straße Travels — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:29:47 +0000

Well, it seems my little post is well and truly lost, so here’s a quick recap. -Bal, blah, blah, sorry for the lack and generally poor quality of posts. -Thanks for still reading and for taking this blog to over 40,000 hits with no big pushes from me. -Until I get new posts up (as you can see, they are…

Peebles, People, and Perth

Gelände Straße Travels — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:55:16 +0000

Finishing up with the Nullarbor, I got in contact with some riders in Perth that I’d met in Columbia and arranged to stay with them while my bike got dealt with- new front tyre, my wiring harness checked, and various other odds and ends that were no doubt a result of my little Finke run. Poor bike- she’s still young,…

The long road to nothing

Gelände Straße Travels — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:15:40 +0000

Riding the highway down south is an exercise in patience. It’s neither barren enough to satisfy my ‘desolation’ fix, nor diverse enough to give you something new to look at every so often. Then you get close to Coober Pedy and the scrub disappears and is replaced by piles of dirt from the (estimated) million+ opal mining shafts. The town…

A reality check

Gelände Straße Travels — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:59:37 +0000

Uluru was also where I had to make a choice. A most annoyingly difficult choice. Head down to Port Augusta or try and ride across the desert on The Great Central Road towards Perth. I REALLY wanted to do the desert ride- 1,250km of deep desert with only a couple of roadhouses, no tar, deep sand (it’s supposed to be…

A touristy tour

Gelände Straße Travels — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:42:55 +0000

After a hot, sandy, sweaty, hard day- you know- the best kind, I finished the night just outside of Kings Canyon. After the rather flat and uninteresting terrain, the rising cliffs were a most welcome change. As always in the desert, the morning came early and cool. It wasn’t going to last, so I got myself together quickly and headed…

The creeping sands

Gelände Straße Travels — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 09:59:37 +0000

The outback- the real middle of Australia outback- creeps up on you. Over hundreds of kilometers, the grassy prairies and small forests slowly become sandy stretches and small copses of stunted trees. There is no line- no instant you can say ‘I am now in the outback’. It is something you feel and changes for everyone and in every season. …

Rain, Rain Go Away!!

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:27:19 +0000

So, after a pleasant little stay in Brisbane that also included meeting up with a rider that I had just missed in Botswana, I decided to head North-West and towards the outback. Well, I’d planned to that is. I knew there had been some flooding, but knew pretty much which roads were out and thought I could avoid them without…

Not Feelin’ It

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 03:19:22 +0000

On the bike, on the road again, and… Nothing. Everything was fine, but just that- fine, nothing was really grabbing me. The people were perfectly nice, the riding perfectly pleasant, but it seemed somewhat pointless. No ‘WOW!’ moments. I think most of the blame can be laid firmly at New Zealand’s feet since it really was such a wonderful treat. …

tech specs

Gelände Straße Travels — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 13:19:58 +0000

I’ve made a point of skipping much of the boring detail of shipping a bike around the world- this blog isn’t about that sort of thing. Horizons Unlimited is where I post that info since, really- how many people care which customs shed you have to take form B to in order to get stamp 12 so you can return…

Long Story Short

Gelände Straße Travels — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:21:26 +0000

I ran this cheat in South Africa and I’m going to do it again- finish up NZ in one post and then then start Australia clean. The rest of the south island was fine, but nor terribly moving- I’d done the really fun stuff, so I took the eastern coast up back to Picton. From there I headed back to…

Still a perfect Christmas

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 05:16:47 +0000

With Christmas on its way, I picked what sounded like a perfect campsite from the D.O.C website and started to head towards it. I had a mountain pass to cross and another to partially cross, so it was another day of tight corners opening up into stunning views. The road coming down towards the coast was especially dramatic and it…

The soul of riding

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:10:23 +0000

Before I hit the flat lands properly I had some fun riding through recreated historical towns… More impressionist masterpieces… And more scenes from LOTR, this one being close to where they filmed the chase scenes through Rohan to Fangorn forest. I also met up with another rider, though he spent far too much time just staring at the views, so…

The magnificent Mount

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:34:40 +0000

It was finally time to ride up to Mount Cook/Aoraki. I honestly wasn’t expecting too much since the weather had been excellent for the last week or so and with less than 70 rain free days a year at the mount and my luck, I figured it was time for the weather to roll in. Guess not. The ride up…

It’s like they picked out all raisins…

Gelände Straße Travels — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:59:20 +0000

…And left the rest of the world with the bran flakes. Hitting the south coast it was time to do the mandatory ‘Southern Most Point’ pic at Bluff and like most of these points, it’s technically not the southern most point (that honour belongs to Slope Point), but it’s the traditional one, so it gets the pic. I then had…

Back to the classics

Gelände Straße Travels — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 07:09:31 +0000

Off to Milford Sound and another ride down a couple of different memory lanes… My luck was holding out and the normally rainy area was filled with puffy white clouds and warm sunlight. This, of course, meant plenty of tourist buses, cars, and caravans on the road. All things that tend act as fun vacuums on bike, but on this…