This is the travelblog of Cyril Ducau and Niccolo Manno on their adventure from London (Cyril), Munich (Niccolo) to Hong Kong on motorbikes.
It took us short of 3 months to do 20,000km on bikes, trains and planes. We crossed the following countries together:

Austria - Italy - Slovenia - Croatia - Serbia - Bulgaria - Turkey - Georgia - Azerbaijan - Turkmenistan - Uzbekistan - Kyrgyzstan - Kazakhstan - Russia - Mongolia - China - Hong Kong

On this site you will find some info on both of us, our bikes, some of our friendly helpers in Hong Kong and London and loads of pictures on our trip. 

Latest top picture

Latest top picture
Thanks for watching our blog - Enjoy as we did it!

Our path

Our path
Click picture to download Google Earth kmz file !

Saturday, May 24, 2008

Ciao Mongolia and our Motorbikes

Our last 48-hours in UB were quite hectic and after visting the cultural highlights of the city, a day rock-climbing in the Terelji Natural Park (only a few kilometers away from UB) and a lot of time trying to sort out the shipping of the bikes we finally left beautifull Mongolia.
The shipping of the bikes proved so far to be far more complicated than expected and despite spending a lot of time running around UB and opting for the safe (and more expensive) option with DHL, we have still a lot of doubts that the bike will ever make it back home. We spent most of day last Wednesday at a timber factory dismounting the bikes in the smallest possible space and watching the crates litterally being custom-bulit around the bikes. Quite impressive indeed even if the bill turned out to be much more than expected...
We left UB onboard the Transiberian on Thursday morning for a 30-day journey to Beijing. This is exactely what one would expect from such a trip; nice landscapes and most of the time is spent reading and sleeping in a 4-people cabin. The border crossing process was fairly simple but we were quite impressed by the change of wheels on the train wagons to accomodate for the different systems between Mongolia and China. They separate the entire train, elevate each cars 2meters above the ground and change all the wheel-base.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Changing all the wheel-base is also done on freight carriages at the French/Spanish border in Port Bou.
Ciao
Onkel Giuseppe

A BIG THANK YOU TO:

Cyril:
- Maddy, the head of our "London HQ", special technical and weather advisor, and because she is simply the best and has been so supportive over the last few months
- My family and friends for their understanding and moral support
- Robert Roe (alias Bob) from Motoselect Franham for preparing the bike with such good care
- Anastasia from thevisacompany for helping me deal with so much red tape
- Claudio von Planta for sharing his valuable experience on Long-way Round and Long-way Down and answering so many of our questions
- Ronnie, Emmanuel and Benjamin for their enthusiast support and precious advise
- The Techtransalp team for their excellent website and advertising our adventure

Niccolo:
- clearly Manon as she has always been supportive of this trip even though this means 3 months without me
- My mother for not giving up on me, for receiving all the parcels at home in Austria and for not freaking out!
- Amy and Steve for pushing over several months to keep focus on the organisation
- Xavier, for trusting me to be in France in June and be his best man at his wedding
- Cyril, for posting our tracks on the blog
- Louis, for looking into getting Continental to sponsor us
- Romain, for getting us the Turkmen visas
- My friends for all telling me "DO IT"!
- Claudio von Planta, Sambor and Maciej for sharing their great experiences on their numerous motorbike trips
- Henry, Yau and Tan from BMW HK for their support with the bike, the preparation and the bike sale
- Yasser, Mark, Michael and Christoph from BMW Munich for their help with all the accessories and the last minute bike purchase
- Bertrand and Alice for your help with the tyres in Almaty