Half Way Round
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Posted by Simon Buckley
So here we are in Germany, and it has been a real effort to make it. From Japan we took the ferry to Russia. Despite all of the advice about having (and paying for) an agent to get our bikes sorted, we went it alone. With the help of the Russian customs team we were on the road in a day. Again the positive attitude and Australian smiles got us through!
In Eastern Russia we saw mud, rivers, rocks, sand, pot holes, corregations, ditches, flat tires, broken chains, good friends, vodka and dust. We had a small drink, met Russian Mafia, Italian RTW Bikers, ate goulash, changes tubes, fixed bikes with gaffa tape and fencing wire and made it to Mongolia.
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Heading back into Russia through the snow I was lucky enough to get a flat tire – lucky because I don’t know many people who get the opportunity to change a motorbike tube in the snow in Mongolia, unlucky because I had the opportunity to change a motorbike tube in the snow in Mongolia.
Russia is the most surprising place visited en route thus far. You go into Russia with the expectation that it is going to be lawless and difficult, and that the people are going to be cold and difficult – that couldn’t be further from the truth. From the customs officials to police, other ‘road’ users, the people we met along the way were amazing - friendly, warm, inviting and generally interested in the project. The hardest part of Russia was having to say no to people inviting us to stay and ride with them due to the time restraints we had on ourselves.
In Moscow I had to get an electrical problem fixed on my bike, and after some enquiries Misha and Svetlana drove from the other side of town to pick me up. I followed them for an hour back to the workshop where the guys worked on my bike for a few hours, and instead of charging me they invited Todd and I to a family BBQ to partake in a Russian Tradition. This is Russia!
Heading out of Russia we were stopped at the border between Belarus and Poland due to a visa issue – we didn’t have them. Sat in the immigration office for 5 hours to receive our fines of $26 USD and sent back to town to get a visa the next day.
We split up in Poland, Todd went to visit friends in Warsaw and I continued through to Germany to see my family and meet my niece Emily. We will meet in Munich and continue south from there.
Next Steps
It is starting to cool down now, and all the planning has to reflect the season in Nth America, as we are not too keen on riding and camping in the snow with hungry bears. One of the hardest parts of the project is moving on, but we got to keep moving on.
~Munich to Lyon in France
~Lyon to Barcelona
~From Barcelona we catch a ferry to Tanger in Morocco.
~Short tour of Morocco
~Back to Spain at Algeciras and nth to San Sebastian
~San Sebastian to Amsterdam
~Amsterdam to the UK and Ireland
~Ship the bikes to Canada
We will have our Movember Team set up shortly for you to donate and join, and grow where appropriate.
Russia
Close, but no ferry....
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
posted by Simon Buckley @ 04:12:17 PM
Things had to work like clockwork for us to get to Wakkani on the 13th with a stopover in Sapporo to pick up tires. I skipped seeing my cousin living in Japan and anyone else to make it up in two days. 20 000Y in tolls and a 9000y ferry ride later, we rolled into town at 2.30am. Just in time, but in time! The ferry left the next day at 3:30pm so we headed to a hotel to sleep as we were both exhausted. There were actually a few overland bikes parked out the front.
At 12pm we arrived at the terminal to check in for the 3.30pm ferry. The desk was abandoned which seemed a little strange seeing as an international ferry was leaving in a few hours, but I guess the Japanese are quite well organized so they don’t need too much time to sort things out. We hit the buzzer to make sure that we had everything squared away and that there were no suprises that would stop us making the ferry that afternoon. The attendant who came out to serve us looked a little confused at the booking slip. As it turns out, although we thought we booked a ferry at 3:30pm, there is only one at 10am, when we were asleep in a hotel about 400m from where the boat left without us. You can imagine how frustrating it was, all that work and a little misunderstanding with times and we get to spend 5 days in the nth tip of Japan on a national holiday weekend when everything is closed!
The next couple of hours were one of those times that you see on reality TV shows. I mean it was reality after all. Very emotional and definitely a letdown after all of the planning and effort to get there in time. It was only an extra five days, but it was an opportunity to catch up on a few days of the schedule and it also represented the time I had to spend with my family and my baby niece in Germany. We looked at other options, but the expense and practicality of other options meant five days in Wakkanai.
It is actually almost cold up here, I broke out the jumper for the first time in months. We ran into an English couple, Simon and Michelle, at the ferry terminal (they were looking into a ferry to one of the National Parks at the nth of Japan) when it was all pretty down and out about missing the ferry. They helped out by just being around. They lived in Nagoya and have been teaching in japan for around 15 years. We spent the afternoon with them, michelle cooked curry for us which was awesome and we had a we gathered a few of the campers around the campsite together. It was handy that Simon and Michelle were able to hold the conversation together in two languages. They were a real godsend at a time when I needed some positive input.
We set up camp in the free campsite near the port. It was on a hill and the view was awesome. We met a bunch of fantastic people over the five days, Hokkaido is a favourite holiday spot for Japanese and there were quite a few bikers riding the island. The roads are fantastic and the traffic is sparse so it is a great spot for riding.
We set about making use of the time we had now. We worked on updating the website, serviced the bikes (took a day to find oil and somewhere that would let us change it), change over the tires (this was a two day adventure, ended up doing most of it ourselves), post some things home, caught up on sleep, did washing, planned the next part of the trip and hit Russia extremely well prepared. I mean there were still a lot of loose ends that needed to be taken care of (like the things I just mentioned), so we got on top of everything and made the ferry on time.
Osaka Times
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
posted by Simon Buckley @ 04:05:03 PM
Although I was pretty keen to save to dollars on a nights accommodation and take the overnight bus from Tokyo, Todd convinced me to jump on the Shinkansen Train, commonly known as the bullet train. I have taken similar trains in Europe, but as Japan was supposed to be the Mecca for fast trains I gave in and agreed to take the train. We were separated in at Ikebukuro station and Todd ended up waiting for me on one of the Tokyo Stations. I figured that there was no hope of finding Todd in the station so I took the next train to Osaka. It turns out Todd waited an hour then jumped on a train.
The train its self was fast, but I wouldn’t say it blew my socks off or anything. Just efficient and fast. They are more impressive when you aren’t onboard, inside it is so well built and organized that you don’t feel the speed.
As Todd had made the booking for the hotel in Osaka on a Hostel booking website I wasn’t sure where it was, so I headed for in internet café near the station. I passed my first seriously drunk pedestrian on the way. He had lost a shoe stumbling along and after a couple of minutes trying to put it back on whilst standing (I was waiting at the lights), he plonked himself down on the ground and appeared to fall asleep, shoeless and on the edge of the road. I wanted to run over and give him a hand, but it is never a good first move in a new city to get involved with local problems so I let him lay.
The internet café was amazing, more of a ‘media centre’ with thousands of DVDs, and magazines, vending machines (surprise, surprise) and booths for internet. There was booths for two, three and four so you could watch Japan-imation with your friends and singles booths for poor lonely sods who don’t have any friends or anywhere to stay. As expected the details for the hotel were in my inbox, and I spent the remaining 50 minutes (you had to buy an hour of internet time at least) working out where the customs office and shipping yards were before heading to the hotel. I needed a key deposit in Yen as they wouldn’t except my card, and I spent my last cash on the train buying dinner, so I dropped my bag at the hotel and wandered around the nearby streets to find an ATM that accepted international cards. There are ATMs everywhere in Japan, but for most of the part they only accept Japanese cards and I was having no luck. I bought a deep fried mystery snack with my remaining change (turned out to be chicken) and wandered around to get my bearings.
I must have landed in the Osaka equivalent of the Bronx, there were drunk people stumbling around everywhere and people sleeping on broken down cardboard boxes. I heard that there was little to no homelessness in Japan, so I assumed that they must all hang out in ***** Osaka. It felt pretty safe though, considering, because these guys were having enough trouble walking let alone causing any trouble for me. It was good to see the rougher side of the city.
Todd turned up at the Hotel as I was returning from my little fact finding Mission and had enough cash for the key deposit so we were in! The hotel looked as though it was once a pretty flash pace. There was a fountain that looked like it hadn’t worked for 15 years, and a shoe rack at the front door so that you could remove your shoes and place on a pair of the lovely blue plastic communal sandals. Needless to say they were Japanese small and I had no hope. The place had rated well on the booking website, and was very cheap. It was the kind of place that people stayed at when they were short on cash or dodgy. Our room was in the Japanese style with mattaresses on the woven wicker mat floor, and had an unpleasant aroma akin to wet dog, but you got used to it after an hour or so and didn’t notice it anymore. The shower was outside and you had to pay for it. There was two of those coin operated internet machines in the foyer, with a sign that read “Please, You can enjoy the internet here” It was close to transport (right next to the train line) and very cheap, Todd had paid deposit on five nights there, and it was my birthday in a couple of days, I wanted out.
Customs Clearance
The proximity of transport made it pretty easy to get to the Customs office, and without too much ado we were able to get some paperwork done and were shunted onto the next office for some more paperwork. We were advised, by an agent, that it would be too difficult to undertake the import procedure without the help of an agent in Japan, who had it all “under control” for a charge the equivalent of $2600AUD. As it turns out, the agent in Bangkok forgot to mention that there was a hefty port tariff that is applied by the sqm, a point that was not mentioned at the time that we were advised to make the crates bigger to avoid having to spend time and energy pulling the bikes apart this time.
The staff in all of the offices we visited were fantastic, and we were sent away after only a few hours with a handful of paperwork and the permission to get our bikes and big smiles. We just had to pay the tariff to the shipping agent and go down to the bonded yard to pick up our machines which we were going to do when the free storage time ran out so we didn’t have to worry about finding parking in Osaka.
The place we moved to in Osaka, the Guest House Koma, was absolutely fantastic. Owned and run by travelers they have the equation absolutely right for a friendly backpackers. The facilities are not amazing, but the experience is. Small things like curtains on the bunk beds for a bit of privacy make the difference. The staff were the happiest people in Japan and extremely friendly and helpful. They even let us park the bikes in the lounge room overnight for security when we picked them up from the port. The place was only recently opened and will do really well in a market with a lot of demand and not many beds. I had an awesome experience on my birthday, the guy who runs the hostel organized a surprise party for me while I was working away on my computer. Cake and all! He had organized all of the guests to hide in the common room and at midnight he asked me to come and have a look at something. Very cool indeed.
My birthday party was awesome, starting the night before with cake and a surprise party, and heading out for a few drinks on the 5th. Marco from Finland who we met at the hostel came out to tear up the town. We met a couple of local guys at the train station and they tagged along, picking up other ramdom people as we headed around. We ran into some Coke executives on the train station and chatting to some intergalactic road workers doing their thing was a fitting end to a great night.
Russian Visas
The next big job was to get our visas organized for Russia. Again we were told it was impossible in Japan by people who hadn’t actually tried. The funny thing is that all of the negative advice comes from those who haven’t actually gone through things themselves, all Chinese whispers. Anyway, to get a Russian visa you need to get an official invitation (which you can order over the internet), which takes about 15 working days to process. To get a multiple entry business visa (which is the one we needed) you need to have the original document, which was delivered to the team at Osaka City Council (who I had connections with through the City of Melbourne). For the actual visa you need to take the invitation and an application to the consulate and have it processed. This can take up to another two weeks.
Unfortunately ordering of the invitation fell to the bottom of Todds ‘to do’ list and may have been left a little late which pushed things back a few days, but it arrived at Osaka City on the day after my birthday, and we headed in to meet the team, pick up the paperwork and head for the Russian Consulate. All sorted in a couple of hours, we even had a laugh with the staff in the consulate, or maybe they laughed at us practicing Russian, none the less there were smiles. The processing was going to take three days, unfortunately it was Thursday so we couldn’t pick it up until Monday so an opportunity to go for a ride in Japan, the bikes had to come out of the port and we had nowhere to stay, so we thought we would get the bikes out of the port and take a ride down the coast.
It happens a lot, especially when there is money to be made, but we were told that we would have a hard time getting rid of the crates that the bikes were shipped in but that for a fee the agent could take care of it. I am sure there was no communication with the actual bonded yard, because again, they were the friendliest bunch of chaps, and not only did they take the crates but they helped us unpack them. We also got invited out to Friday night drinks but weren’t able to get back to the port in time. Now that’s genuine!
We headed down to the coast, although we left pretty late, Todd was downloading updates or something, and managed to miss all of the great weather. I stopped off at a ‘Cosmo’ (service station) to ask about camping spots in the area and replace a fastener that vibrated off of my bike on the way and had another fantastic human experience. Keeping in mind that our command of Japanese is more or less inadequate for any type of interesting conversation, we spent about an hour in the office with the five guys and one lady (who gave us tea and cut up watermelon) showing them our site and, well, eating watermelon and drinking tea! We arrived at the campsite in enough time to convince the reception guy to let us stay and run up the hill and catch the dying stages of the sunset. I don’t think the guy at reception he was too keen on dealing with foreigners and told us they were full which was funny because the place was almost deserted. Anyway after a long day, and not having set the tents up for a while we did a pretty poor job of getting set up and needless to say, it rained all night. We were both up in the middle of the night , as were some nearby campers, to have a second crack at pegging out the fly in the wind and rain. Lesson learned.
Back in Osaka to pick up visas and passports from the Russian consulate, Todd was waiting on some parts to be delivered to the Council office which hadn’t arrived by Friday. The next ferry to Russia from Wakanni in the Nth of Japan was only three days away and it was going to be a real challenge to get on the ferry. After waiting around to hear about Todds parts for most of the morning I decided we had better head off, we had a big ride ahead of us. We got on the road to pick up our Russian Visas at 12.30pm (I wanted to head off at 9am), stopped in at the City Hall to find out if they had the package and it had arrived at last. Photos with the Osaka City Council team and we were off to find our passports at last. We arrived at the Russian Consulate about 2 hours after they closed the Visa section. I chatted to the police at the guard gate, pleaded the case on a little speaker on the gate and 40 mins later we were holding our visas