08 September, 2008

On the road again........ NOT!

Thank you to all readers. I am now back home in Melbourne and today I have returned to my office and daily routine. As you can imagine, it's quite a shock to the system to be back at work and I'm slacking off to update web pages, and the like, instead.

Altogether I travelled over 29,000kms on the Burgie, 7,500kms on the Haobon and another few hundred on the Honda in Vietnam, for a total journey of 37,500kms and 17 countries over a period of 4.5 months. I will now collate all photos and flesh out this blog (which is currently really just a skeleton) such that I properly describe all my experiences. I hope it will be interesting reading for many of you and will inspire some to take your own personal journeys.

The Burgman was crated on Saturday 30th August (at great expense by a local Italian dealer) and is sailing from Genove on the 17th of September. The photo below was one of the last shots I took of the Burgie, parked in the dealers workshop awaiting crating.
It will hopefully arrive around a month later. I will then strip it down, check all mechanicals, have the subframe trued and rewelded, and probably arrange a respray for the plastic panels. Wear items such as the air filter and brake pads are now due for replacement and I was fortunate that they managed to last the complete journey.

Some of you may recall that my biggest mechanical concern was whether I would have further problems with the fuel filter after it started to leak one week prior to departure. I had the filter plastic welded but also elected to purchase a spare and have it shipped independently to Korea. Well, in a classic example of Murphy's law at work, the fuel filter was shipped back to Melbourne, still in its original packing, untouched and unused. I gurarantee that if I hadn't brought it along though, that the original would have started leaking again somewhere in the backblocks of Siberia and I would have been up the creek without a paddle.