Gadgets, gadgets, gadgets ...

Technical gadgets are equally fun and painful during the preparation phase of the trip. Playing around with GPS, GPS-tracker, intercom and net-book gets us excited for finally going on the trip. And for sure they will be much fun on the trip, if they work properly. And exactly this is my problem, getting them to function properly.

But finally we're getting there. The GPS-tracker arrived in Vientiane last week after it was tested thoroughly in Switzerland. This fun device should make it possible to track our location along the route and should send our coordinates to a communication satellite. Finally I managed to also integrate the widget into this blog! Besides, it lets us send of emergency messages, just in case something really bad happens. Quite handy. The netbook is now set up and ready to use. This way we don't need to take guide books with us, but can look everything up in the computer. After several hours of troubles setting it up properly, I decided to take it to a Vietnamese run computer shop in Vientiane. The staff fixed the problem in 2 hours and charged me 20,000 KIP (= less than 4 USD). I should have gone for this option right from the start!

Finally, after many hours of fiddling around, we've got it almost everything properly set up. Boris modified the bike-electrics completely, so that we are now also able to recharge our fun devices via the motorbike battery while riding. And he found the "mute"-button on our intercom, which means he can put me on mute if I talk to much. Lets hope the Chinese will not take any of our dear gadgets away at the border crossing.

The last hurdle to go over will be loading the OSM Open Street Maps onto our GPS devices. Why does Garmin have so proprietary formats and bad documentation!!!! This drives even a most dedicated gadget-tinker insame!

Learning to ride the KTM

Although I am Boris´s flight engineer on this trip - ok, others call it pillion rider - I thought it would be pretty handy if at least I knew a little bit how to ride his KTM safely. That´s no easy undertaking, because (a) if Boris is in town, we want to go on big rides and head out together, (b) try out how it feels together on the bike and plan for bike adjustments. Finally, and most importantly (c) it is in fact quite a risky undertaking for me to grab the KTM and learn how to ride it, while at the same time we want to avoid any kind of damage to the bike with our big ride coming up and knowing the limited possibilities of getting it fixed in Vientiane.

Well, I did it all the same and together with Lisa, who was riding a Vanvan for the first time in her life, I headed out of town to Ban Pako. Very exciting, and yes, very, very nervous with regard to (c) above. But Lisa and I are probably natural talents - or maybe just riding incredibly slow? In any case, we enjoyed the outing. The bike feels great. Once I picked up some speed it was so much fun. Only stopping at red lights must be planned a bit in advance. As the bike is so high I generally have to balance it out on my toes when stopping.feels like a 10-year old kid taking dad's bicycle for a spin.

We made it to Ban Pako with me only dropping the bike twice. The KTM is very heavy compared to the scooter which I am normally riding around town. So it happened twice that I wanted to take a turn slightly too tight and too slow. As a result I could not hold the bike anymore and it just fell to the ground, while I jumped off landing on my feet. No material damage, neither to the bike, nor to my body. But a new challenge. Pick up the KTM by myself again? Impossible, too heavy! Lisa had to help me every time and only together we managed to get the bike up again. The rest of the ride was just awesome.

However I am facing in-depth psychological damages now. There is this constant small fear of dropping the bike again when taking another tight corner. Especially when I ride by myself through town. The U-turns on Tha Deua road are still a nightmare. So is the turn off from the main road into my little dirt road: Low speed, turn off to the right while of course exactly in this very second a big truck or Toyota-Hilux will block the way, and finally the vicious German Shepherd dog of my neighbors who aims to attack my calf this very moment. Perfect set-up for a little drop.

Getting Rocinante ready for the trip

Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was. - Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.

Well, it did not take me  four days to figure out a name for our horsey, which will have to carry Boris and me over all these mountain passes. It was quite obvious: A knight, somewhere from the outback, with the crazy idea of traveling through "the Stans" by motor bike; then the embassies in Bangkok, which indeed behave like the wind mills in the old story, acting like ferocious giants, hindering us to organize the visas required for our trip.

So, last week I stood in front of the mechanic´s shop, trying to get all these little, but important things fixed on theMBT, and the poor thing just looked so brassy compared to the fancy other bikes waiting to get a good drop of oil. So it was clear, Rocinante it must be named, meaning in the first place a work horse, brusque labourer, but also rough, unkempt man.

Fuark is the number one mechanics in town, and I had a list of things to be fixed/adjusted/added to the bike in order to get ready before our trip. Getting the vehicle to this point was real team work: Boris compiled the list of tasks to be done, Simon had to ride to the shop as I was too scared to ride it for the first time through the urban traffic, and finally Horst had to come in order to explain and translate into Lao what we actually wanted to be done.


Picking the bike up on Saturday I was quite disappointed. Lots of little things of course were perfectly fixed, so now Rosie is dressed in brand new tires (which we brought in from Switzerland and spent about three days of our holidays last October to find them...), has a flashy new LED headlight turning the night into bright, is filled with new oil and has a spotlessly cleaned carburetor. But the main issue, namely fitting in a new rear spring apparently did not work. "There is one part not matching" Fuark tries to explain to me, but he is missing the words, and I am missing basic understanding of the components of a spring. Well, I though it was about a spring only, but nothing on a KTM is "just a spring"...

... so tomorrow I will try to find out which part is actually missing or mismatching for the new spring. After all, we want Rocinante to really follow in the footsteps of his namesake and carry:

a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.

Boris gets his Kazakhstan visa

Another weekend in Bangkok. Time to celebrate, as finally we have been able to organize the visa for Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan for all of us. Boris was the last one having to go to the Bangkok Gems Trading Center, were the Kazak embassy is located. And surprisingly it was not a big deal for him to get the visa glued into his passport. Simply walking in, holding up the passport and walking out again did the job. Something I expected to work already two weeks ago, but which turned into a nerve game of waiting, checking, waiting again ... Maybe the consul has had a cup of the Lao coffee I gave him as present in the meantime.

While in Bangkok, we bought another electronnical gadget which we plan to take along on our trip: A mini netbook. Just to keep us busy and alow us to get on the internet on our trip from time to time. It´s lovely purple in color and has a classical thai keyboard set up.

Now Boris and I are sitting in our hotel room, getting another set of visa organized. We are filling out the forms for Kyrgizstan for all of us, as well as the forms for Aserbijan for Simon. These visa should be a bit more easy to organize, as we are going through the visa agent Stanstours. Let´s see...