This weekend things have started to move on the Andes Moto Extreme website development. Walter Colebatch got in touch about his latest project and through mutual support of each others projects I am now following on from my work on Sibirsky Extreme to now focus my efforts on the new website.

Sherri Jo Wilkins has also joined the team and will be the base camp manager, photographer and videographer. Other members of the team include:

Walter Colebatch – Team Captain
Lukas Matzinger – Technical Director
Barton Churchill – The Mountain Man

The plan is to take a troika of Husaberg FE 570s to South America and make a world motorcycle altitude record attempt of 20,500′ 6,250m!

You can follow the prep here (www.andesmotoextreme.com) ready for a kick off in March 2012.

Sibirsky Extreme Project DVD

Join prolific adventure motorcyclist and Siberia aficionado Walter Colebatch and his friends on a ride of discovery into Central Asia and the darkest depths of Siberia.

Sibirsky Extreme was the journey that pioneered new routes across Siberia, including the legendary BAM Road.

This journey also features the Tuva Track, Vilyuisky Trakt and the Road of Bones.

Full of interactions with locals, as well as stunning scenery. If you ever dreamt of exploring Siberia on two wheels, this is the DVD for you!

Enjoy the main feature and then feast on the fantastic extras that really give you a feel for life on the road (and off it) in some of the most remote parts of the World

Main Feature: 31min

Walter’s Extras (people, places, lots of river crossings, the ups, the downs and the girls!): 73min

NTSC Version For North American customers & PAL for Europe & the rest of the world

Click here to Buy PAL version or click here to but the NTSC version

The relentless procession of doom laden news is never ending. Whether it is the suppression of peoples rights, stock market crashes, job losses or natural disasters it really is enough to give anyone a permanent case of the blues. If you have your health though and can appreciate the birds singing as I can whilst I write here at 4am then it ain’t all bad.

I am currently self unemployed shall we say at the moment but as Charlie Sheen said last week “you can’t fire a man with plans” and I have plans. In true Gemini fashion I think I have too many plans all going off at once. You all know about the DRZ plan. I had an idea about that or should I say an evolution on the initial idea. It’s my 40th Birthday next year and according to some 2012 is also the end of the world. Some would say hitting 40 is the end of the world but we shall see. So I got to thinking that maybe I should ride my bike “to” the end of the world as in Tiego Del Fuego. The thing is these days I am struggling to identify the reasons for doing such a thing. It has been done many times before and has been well documented in print and film. Am I doing it for ego or to escape the rat race? Is the pull stronger than the push? I still haven’t found the answer or the motivation yet.

What I have done though is committed to a second bike. Or perhaps it is the first bike as the DRZ is not in my possession yet? Anyway I have been selling bits and bobs on ebay in order to raise some cash for a road trip across Europe in just over a week. I had a projector screen I wanted to get rid of. It was surplus to requirements and in the end it was just annoying me due to the space it was taking up. So I sold it to a guy who ran an Air Cadet Squadron. “Great”, I thought, I used to be a cadet so I felt I was giving something back. I met the guy and did the deal and we had a coffee and a chat. As we parted he said you could do worse than have an R1100GS or perhaps an R850GS if you can find one.

I didn’t think much of it until later when I did a quick search on Google. I find a thread on a blog that is advertising the rarer 850. Not only that but it belongs to a friend and he’s been trying to sell it since October last year! NO WAY! So I make a few enquiries, pull a few strings and before I know it I have laid claim to another GS. I can tell you now I don’t have the money for it yet and I won’t borrow the money. Thankfully my friend is not in a hurry and all being well the hand over will be at the Horizons Unlimited event in May.

It’s funny how things work out. All I need to do now is work like a madman, somewhere, anywhere, anyhow.

This has been in the pipeline for a while but 2011 is the year it all kicks off. I am very much looking forward to this.

I have not posted for a long time because there were a number of false starts and idea changes. My circumstances have changed quite a bit and after much thought I stopped compromising on the kind of bike I needed. I was considering a bike that would be a halfway house between going two up and adventure overlanding. Well to be frank that just ain’t going to work.

So for now the requirement has shifted to a significantly lighter 400cc bike that is cheap to run, easy to service and with parts easily available anywhere in the world. That bike is the Suzuki DRZ400SM. yes you read that right, the SM as in Super Moto. I need a bike I can use on the street once in a while and the SM is good for that… check the video below…

As you can see it fly’s pretty well too and I like flying! There will be many detractors on my choice. Some will say it is an old design, others will say it is too heavy (at 295 pounds / 133kg) even though I will be losing 100kg in comparison to my old BMW and some others will say it is too slow. yet more will say that compared to a 600 or 800cc bike the service intervals will be too frequent.

I have checked all the pro’s and cons and for my purposes this is THE perfect bike. It can be easily changed into a dirt bike, it is easy to work on, with limited electronics. Fuel range can be increased quite substantially and my luggage requirements these days are in the realm’s of Dave Lomax etherealness.

Will I be trudging the painfully boring expanses of Europe’s autoroutes, motorways and autobahn’s? No I won’t. I’ve done that, been there and to be honest it is a waste of time and effort. The real fun starts when you get to the perimeters of this continent of ours.

The bike you see below belongs to a friend of mine in Holland and he has very kindly offered to cast a fairing from the same design he has used on this bike.

I like his fuel setup here which is a 17L Safari tank. That said I’m toying with a 17L on the front and a 5L on the rear similar to this configuration.

While 22litres of fuel is more than enough in most places I have a riding style that means I like to keep stops to a minimum and keep on riding. Every fuel stop usually ends up with 30 minutes of faffing about especially if other people are involved. So I am thinking of doing a 28L on the front and a 5L on the rear. The only downside to this is weight if fully fueled up and the 28L suffers from having 5L of fuel you cannot utilize because it needs a vacuum pump to drag it up from the bottom of the tank. If I can sort the pump issues and have some degree of control with regard to the distribution of the fuel front and back then I will go with the bigger tank.

As far as spares and kit goes for the bike I have drawn up a list based on Dave Lomax’s advice after his numerous trips into the deserts and lonely places around the world on a DRZ400.

Take a look at my bike kit list here

if you are interested in my pack list for myself it currently looks like this…

Mark Ronson & The Business Intl – The Bike Song
Uploaded by emipubfrance. – Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

I decided to leave Lindsay and Delilah to do their own thing today as I’m sure they wanted to plan the next leg of the route, blog a little, have some rest etc. I had a chat with my friend Greg who is currently playing doctor to his girlfriend who has just come out of hospital after a gall bladder operation.

We met at the “shed”. Not in the British sense of a wooden structure at the end of a garden but a workshop full of manly, sharp and dangerous tools . Without burdening him too much I needed some of his skills in order to bash a few things into place after yesterdays spill. He also kindly made my muffler a bit more legal after initially making it sound very illegal LOL

With some flat black paint he also restored the bike back to it’s stealthy origins. So I have a lot to thank Greg for. He’s a good guy.

After some bashing, spraying and welding we got down to the important stuff of helping Lindsay and Delilah decide on where would be a good next stop before nightfall. Naturally all this planning was done on the saddle of an original XT500.

I rode with them out of town and had intended to ride with them to the lakes but my recent ailments and the increasingly persistent rain were telling me to save it for another day and head home. So with a wave and a thumbs up I bid farewell to these intrepid adventurers as they traversed Austria en route to Italy and ultimately Africa.

Tomorrow or should I say today some friends of mine arrive from the Czech Republic. They are a 3 strong team but only two of them have set off in advance of the third who is sorting out visas back in the UK.

They are part of the 2010 London to Cape Town team. Riding two F800GS’s and one F650GS the length of Europe and Africa. When I heard they were in Berlin and in no real hurry to reach the port in Italy I thought it would be good to arrange a meeting. Berlin and Prague are almost exactly due North of my current location, so plans were made at the beginning of the week for a rendezvous.

They took this photo in Český Krumlov which is a very beautiful Bohemian town just a few clicks north of the Czech/Austrian border.

Český Krumlov is a UNESCO world heritage site and really worth a visit if you are in the area.

The last time I met Lindsay,  Delilah and Andre was back in April when I had to give my 800 back. Back then I got to see the plans for their trip which were inspiring. They are also doing the trip in aid of charity. Links to follow after the jump.

The planned route through Africa

doppelgänger’s

When in London they laid on a fantastic South African Brai (BBQ)

These are good guys.

You can follow them on:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/uk2za

Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/photos/uk2za

Blog: http://uk2za2010.blogspot.com

I’ll post some new photos tomorrow. Not sure of the plans as yet if I will join them for a ride or they will stay put. They only have an hours ride tomorrow which is not enough in anyones book.

For those that are thinking whaaaat? How come everywherevirtually has stickers on the Russian/Mongolian border sign first let me explain. I would like to say yes I put them there, but sadly no. Well not yet anyway. My friend, fellow adventurer and motorcycling doppelgänger Simon Johnston from www.awayfromhere.org fame placed them there on his recent trip to Mongolia and the Altai region of Russia.

I had originally donated them so that he could pass them onto two friends in Russia but the plans changed as did the route and he did the next best thing. Stick them on a magnificent landmark in the middle of nowhere. Should I find the time, money and wherewithal to get out there myself I shall look forward to being reunited with these stickers. I won’t say “one day” as those words are often spoken by people that have no intention of doing what they say and stare into open space and say “oneeee daaaaay”

So thats the story.

Well there has certainly been some talk for a long time here and here about Triumph releasing an adventure or dual sport bike onto the market.

Well Triumph have lifted the lid and are giving us a teaser of what to expect. It can be fair to say that they are aiming this new bike directly at the BMW F800GS market.

By all accounts One version will be the real deal  with spoked wheels and a claimed 21″ front wheel  and a second version for wanabee adventurers will be very like the BMW F650GS which as we know is a toned down 800. This is feted to have a 19″ front wheel and mag rims.

The engine will be an 800cc Triple and beyond that Triumph will be releasing further teaser videos through their new website dedicated to this bike.

www.triumphadventure.com

The screenshot above was snapped from the video that is currently airing on YouTube. The full launch will be at the Milan bike show in November.

The bike was also spotted in Greece having done a tour of Europe as part of a final run of testing before launch.
The photo below was taken allegedly by a mechanic in Greece who serviced the bike. You can’t see much but what you can see certainly hints very strongly at the F800GS/ The beak, the spoked rims, similar sized screen, handlebars, mirrors etc. Only difference being the tank which is up front.