This is a journey that is supposed to take me from my current home in Australia across part of the continent and through Asia and Middle East all the way to my second home in Europe – The Czech Republic. I will be riding a Kawasaki KLR 650 dual purpose motorbike – the first motorbike I ever owned in my life, which I bought one month before the start date of this journey.
The route is supposed to take me on almost 80 000km long journey on and off road through on of the remotest parts of the world and give me a chance to se most of the highest ranking tourist attractions and world wonders. We will start together with my partner Tanja, who would travel by my side on her own motorbike (first ever for her too – actually, Tanja doesn’t even have a motorbike drivers licence yet) across half of Australia to Darwin, when she will turn back and return home. We will first cross the Simpson desert straight across from Sunshine Coast to Alice Springs in the heart of Australia, do a 1000km long loop south to the famous red monolith of Uluru (or Ayers Rock as it was known before it took back its original Aboriginal name) and back to Alice. Then we will lock on the highway that will take us all the way north to a couple of thousand kilometre distant city of Darwin. I will fly to Malaysia from there and my bike will arrive a few days later on a ship. Tanja will return back home.
Once in Asia I will travel through Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia, from where I will attempt to cross into Vietnam. I have read many accounts of people who were not allowed to enter Vietnam on their own motorbikes so this might be a problem. Nevertheless I will have to find some way since the only way for me to get to Europe overland is through China, where I can only get through Vietnam or maybe Laos, but this country I had to sadly exclude from my plan if I don’t want to zig-zag madly as both countries are very long and mostly narrow, lying side-by-side with each other. Getting into China on a motorbike sounds like even bigger problem than it sounds to get into Vietnam, since no motorbike travellers were legally allowed to enter the country in the past ten years or so. That is from what I read during my research for the journey… Myanmar is completely closed to foreign vehicles so I will have to get into and through China somehow.
After Vietnam and China it should be bit easier going as far as actually getting into a country is concerned. I want to do a big loop through Mongolia, visiting all the interesting spots in the Gobi desert and in the cities, reaching the huge lake of XXXXXXXX in the north and then returning back to China to try to cross another forbidden place – Tibet. From there it will be Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, possibly Israel, which is problematic if I then still want to travel through Muslim countries (as they don’t like to see evidence of visiting Israel before their own country). Nevertheless my sister lives in Israel now and it would be nice to see her.
From Israel (or Jordan) my original plan was to ride straight into Africa. However, since by then I would be on my way for already a year and since I have a very valuable relationship going on I might just ride back through Syria and Turkey straight to the Czech Republic and return home to Australia from there. I would continue on my African part of the journey at some later time.