Leaving home, and leaving Europe

May 2009

The last week or two before departure was one of the most stressful moments of my life. I'd left everything to the last minute and even had to reassemble the topend of my engine only three days before I left. The pressure to leave 'on schedule' was set by my would-be travelling partner, Leon Pang. When I decided to do this trip I knew I wanted to travel with one or more other riders for some group camaraderie and saftey when in some of the most remote areas of the world. However I'd ended up with only one possible riding partner who I'd got in touch with through the internet. Once all the gear was loaded on the bikes I could finally relax a little knowing that from then on, anything that fate threw in my path would have to be dealt with as best I could from the road.

All loaded up and ready to go.

Riding down to Dover knowing that the epic journey had now began was a fantastic feeling, though it still felt hard to believe the reality of what I was planning to do. We spent the night camped outside a pub near Dover for an early start across the channel the next morning, and I slept soundly after a good half a dozen or more ales consumed.

Things started to go wrong as soon as the ferry had arrived in France. Leon's bike showed minimal signs of electrical activity and had to be pushed off the boat. With all the luggage piled on the bike bump starting it was going to be difficult, so we decided towing behind my bike would be the easiest way to get it started. This turned into a comical charade in the port loading area, as not only would his bike refuse to fire up but Leon clearly was struggling with the basic aspects of bike-to-bike towing. Stopping to do a u-turn even saw Leon coast past me before acting surprised when his moving bike yanked mine onto its side as I desperately shouted to try and stop him. In the end his problem was traced to a loose electrical connection and we hit the motorway heading East.

A short while later I had to distmantle my carburetor at the side of the motorway after the slide had come disconnected from the throttle shaft. Leon had ridden past me oblivious to my spluttering bike coming to a halt on the hard shoulder, and I was starting to get an idea that the travelling partnership was not going to work.

Then a random fuel stop signalled distaster when checking the oil level on my bike found I'd somehow lost over a litre and half from a tank of only 2 litres. One of the rocker cover bolts had come loose due to a weak thread, and the oil gallery it passed through must have emptied the whole tank of oil on to the exhaust to be burnt in to thin air whilst I was riding down the motorway. Leon had been riding behind me the whole time so I did question to myself how so much oil could have been lost in a short space of time without him seeing the smoke. The damaged thread needed helicoiling so we hatched a plan to head back 20 kilometers to the Belgian city of Mons and seek out a workshop to get the bike fixed. I feared the bike may have suffered engine damage from riding it (unknown) with almost no oil, but I would have to wait and see.

We towed my bike back to the city, with the towing roles now reversed from the morning. I started to further question Leon's riding competance on this half an hour evening bimble, and I was suprised when he chose to ride right into the center of the city before coming to halt. It was getting late and we were going to need somewhere to sleep for the night, but since we were now in the center I went off to find an internet cafe to find out if there was a Suzuki motorcycle dealer in the city which we could try and get the bike to whilst the roads were quiet. A long walk found an internet center, but from some quick web searching there appeared to be a total lack of bike shops in Mons.

I returned to the bikes to find Leon looking particularly stressed and rattled, he'd apparently been given some grief by passing police and drunks and I could tell his temper was near breaking point. I wasn't sure what the best course of action now was, but he wanted to ride back out the city and sleep next to a car garage we'd seen on the way in. In the absense of a better plan I agreed and set the bikes up for another towing stint. Leon set off with a lot of throttle without having tensioned the tow rope, so I wasn't surprised when it instantly snapped. What I did find strange was that Leon carried on apparently unaware that he wasn't towing my bike behind him.

Leon eventually figured out that he was riding solo and came back to collect me, this time he set off at a more sensible pace only to veer wildly across the narrow road coming very close to hitting parked cars. A thought crept into my mind that this was a very unsafe situation, and in the event of Leon crashing I would probably take equal blame. We carried on and I was glad to clear the immediate center, and the narrow roads and parked cars that it contained. We came to a T-junction with the main road out of town, and to my horror Leon rode straight round the corner without stopping. He'd either forgotten he was towing my bike, or was somehow unaware that I would have to follow his bike in a straight line, cutting the corner. Unfortunately the pavement was raised very high with a foot of kerb to get over. When my front wheel hit the kerb the jolt was enough to almost stop Leon's bike dead and he fell off, landing on the pavement.

I felt like I was wittnessing Leon's mental state breaking down, piece by piece. He got up off the floor in a rage, before declaring that he couldn't travel with me any further and was sorry he had to leave me there. I untied the tow rope and waved him goodbye, feeling like a serious liability was driving off down the road. I did feel a little bit worried that he might get himself into further trouble being in a large city late at night with nowhere to stay, but that was no longer my problem. Half an hours walk revealed a camping site on the edge of the city, so I returned to the bike ready to push it there. Just as I set off I was dismayed to see Leon return - He'd decided he couldn't leave me stranded in the city and was going to tow me out. I countered that he wasn't safe to tow anything anywhere, I'd whilst he'd been having a tantram I'd gone off and found somewhere to stay the night. He didn't believe there was a camping site, and even after I gave him simple directions he came back saying that it didn't exist. I didn't feel like conversing with Leon after seeing how quickly he'd been reduced to an irrattional confused mess, but I had no choice but to tell him to follow me to the campsite. Even when we arrived he started complaining and pannicking that it was closed, apparrently oblivious to the fact it was now gone midnight. I merely opened the pedestrian gate and pushed my bike through, trying to imagine how this guy might ever make it across Europe let alone Russia and Mongolia.

My 'Ray Mears' camping setup. I suspect I was the object of much interest and amusement to the Belgian locals.

I'd stripped the top end of my engine the same night I'd arrived with only the haze of a streetlamp to see by, as I'd worried the owners might object to me engaging in some campsite engine surjeory had I waited till the next day. Running without oil and caused the camfollowers to wear heavily, and camshaft bearings were also totally eaten. There was only one way to fix the bike, and it meant obtaining a new cylinder head.

Damaged rocker arms and cam journal - The bearings in the head were worse than this one.

The ride to Belgium had also highlitghted that the rear suspension was a bit on the soft side for the weight I was carrying. Since I was going to be stuck in Mons for at least a week I decided to order a new heavyweight spring to pre-empt any problems. Second hand cylinder heads for DR350s are pretty hard to come by as they are the most common failing point on the bike, but my close friend Nathan back in Nottingham (yes, the same name as me) generously agreed to take the head off his DR350 and send it over. A new head would have cost over a thousand pounds and took weeks to arrive from Japan.

Leon's mental state seemed to be unable to recover from the previous day's events. For some reason he decided he couldn't carry on with the ride down to Turkey without making a drastic change to his plans, and he went through a range of ludicrous decissions changing his mind every 20 minutes, until eventually deciding to ride back to England and hand his bike over to UK overlanding expert David Lambeth to work some kind of voodoo magic fixing all the bike's problems (no-one has ever been sure what these supposed problems were besides a soft shock spring). I'd already decided that Leon was a serious liability and I would not ride with him again, though my soft nature prevented me from directly telling him this and it took him a while to realise we couldn't continue on together.

Whilst I waited for my parts to arrive I killed the time by getting ludicrously drunk every night. This was going fine until one night whilst walking back to the campsite someone managed to remove my wallet from my pocket without me noticing. I hadn't had much cash on me, but my debit and credit card were in there along with my driving license. I had emergency cash stashed on the bike, but no extra cards. Getting the cards sent out would mean staying put somewhere, and with my bike parts about to arrive I was eager to get back on the road as soon as possible and get the trip properly underway. My first planned stop would be in Istanbul, so I now had a fixed budget to get me there, and no driving license in the event of trouble with the police. I was off on my way a couple of days later.

Now riding on my own I picked a route south avoiding motorways, and made stady progressing heading down to Southern Italy. My bike problems were not entirely over as this replacement head also had a weak thread with one of the same bolts which had killed the first head. Previous owners having repeatedly undone and re(over)tightened these bolts had left the threads ready to strip, and this one particular bolt could not be done up tight enough to resist the oil pressure behind it (five years of working on bikes had left me with a pretty good 'feel' for these things). It was a slightly flawed design which must account for a large proportion of dead DR350s. The easy fix would be to remove the head and helicoil the thread, but after so much recent mechanical activity on this bike that was probably more than I could have took. Instead I played around with PTFE tape trying find a way to create a better seal against the high oil pressure. This made my ride through Italy a little less enjoyable than I would have liked, but after a couple of attempts the leak was eventually fixed for good.

Camping overlooking a lake in rural Italy.

Camping rough isn't always that easy in Western Europe, but with my budget now finite it was more important than ever to avoid having to pay for overnight accommodation. Fortunately I only had to spend one night in a commercial camping ground on the whole ride to Istanbul. Sleeping under a basha rather than in a tent was working out nicely, and I was really enjoying waking up in the morning and being able to see the world all around me from my sleeping bag.

I was soon in Brindisi right in the far south of Italy, ready to catch the night ferry to Greece. I'd took the same ferry three years earlier, and like on that trip was planning to disembark at Igoumenitsa in the North of the country. This time around I had a bit too much to drink in the onboard bar and slept right through the unloading at Igoumenitsa, despite sleeping out on deck where I should have heard all the trucks driving off the boat. When I woke up and found it was already daylight I knew instantly that I'd be getting off at the Southern port of Patras instead, and I used the extra time on board the ship to contemplate the nature of fate and coincidence, and how the least significant events could change the coarse of someone's entire life completely, quite possibly without them ever being aware of it. This would become a reoccurring theme for me during this trip.

Arriving in Patras.

The beautiful scenery here on this coast road put me on a real high.

Three years previously I'd found Greece to be very hot, and full of amazing landscapes. However both the heat and the scenery somehow managed to come as a surprise to me now, and I can say of this that the effect something will have on your soul and spirit is surely something that can never be predicted. I really enjoyed riding through the country, and I started to feel really excited about my surroundings for the first time on the trip. Camped for the night on a beach I encountered one of the worst thunder storms I've ever seen, and the basha was really put to the test like I'd hoped it never would be. I stayed mostly dry despite terrential rain, and in the morning I could feel more confident than ever in my sleeping arrangements.

The border crossing into Turkey was fairly painless, and marked the beggining of uncharted territory for me. I was a little anxious about riding into Istanbul as previous bike travel had repeatedly taught me that riding in big strange cities is a recipe for getting lost like a needle in a haystack, but some lucky road choices saw me navigate easily to the area where I planned to stay. I ditched the bike to find the hostel on foot, but managed to spend a lot of time wandering around lost sweating away like an idiot, and then after I'd found the hostel I got even more lost trying to find where I'd parked the bike. There was a surprise in store for me as one of the guests at the hostel was no other than Leon Pang.

I was now carrying four tyres as Leon had discarded one in Mons and I couldn't bring myself to leave it there.

Leon had set off in France the same day i'd left the Mons campsite, but had sped his way South much faster. I was not really that pleased to see him, but was surprised that he'd made it. I noted that he'd took a few suggestions off me and swapped his hefty motocross boots for lightweight army boots, and his racing leathers for jeans. I was going to be stopped in Istanbul at least a week whilst my new driving license and cards were posted to me, but thankfully Leon moved on much sooner. Whilst at the hostel I also met three other British bikers, all of whom I would later see again in Baku, Azerbaijan. I met plenty of interesting people at the hostel and spent plenty of time chatting, sight seeing, and drinking. It had been three years since I'd last stayed in a hostel and I'd forgotten how nice it was to meet and chat with people from other countries and backgrounds. Interestingly, by the end of the trip I was quite sick of meeting fellow travellers and having the same repetitive conversations.