Belgium - Australia on an BMW R1100 GS motorcycle, solo.
GPS logs and pictures
The route
I left with a Garmin GPS 45XL, for which I had a special holder made. That GPS, with its rotatable antenna on the side, looks a bit like a phone. In 1998, portable phones were rarer than they are now and my GPS was constantly drawing 'wrong kind of interest'. During the first interruption I bought a Garmin GPS III, which was a lot more inconspicuous. This GPS has served for a long time (about 200,000 kilometers or 125,000 miles). Reading the track log was done through a conventional serial RS232 port, and the files were transferred by e-mail, compressed by a program written by JC. Unfortunately, much of the GPS track log has been lost (due to operating errors, mostly). But here's a (partially reconstructed) GPS log:
A new window, which opens after clicking the box at the top right of the blue band at the top of the map, will give you a bigger surface (if your screen is large enough) to check out the details of the route.
Reports
The episodes on this section of the site are the emails I sent - exactly as I wrote them, but translated by Nike Jongerius. There's whining about the failing motorcycle and there are irrelevant details. But there are also some very nice anecdotes.
I am forever indebted to Niek for the countless hours he spent translating my scribblings. He wrote:
The original reports are in Dutch. For those of you who cannot grasp the complexity and intricacies of this arcane language the texts are translated by me (Niek Jongerius, that is).
My native language is not English, so there might be some strange sentences embedded in the translations. Sorry for that.
Since this is Adriaan's journal, I've tried to stay as close to the original text as possible. However, as most of you probably know, his style in writing will be a bit of a challenge for the translator. Sometimes he will refer to situations with expressions which are perfectly understandable for us Dutch people, but which will be unclear to the not-initiated. In these cases I will try to explain what he tries to tell us, or I will insert an equivalent of the used expression. My annotations will be surrounded by constructions like <-- this is what he meant -->
I just think he was too modest about his English (back in 1999 - Niek and his wife now live in Canada)...
- #1 With Klaas
- #2 - To Sarajevo
- #3 - Leaving Croatia
- #4 - Back briefly - and on the road again
- #5 - Across Italy
- #6 - Through Greece to Turkey
- #7 - Turkey
- #8 - Syria, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan
- #9 - Egypt, Jordan, Syria
- #10 - Turkey, California, Turkey
- #11 - Turkey, Iran
- #12 - Iran, Pakistan
- #13 - Pakistan
- #14 - India (part 1)
- #15 - India (part 2)
- #16 - India, Nepal, Thailand
- #17a - Thailand
- #17b - Thailand
- #18 - Malaysia and Singapore
- #20 - Australia
- #21 - Australia
- #22 - Australia
- #23 - Australia and back to Belgium
Pictures
A slideshow hasn't been made for this trip.