Hi Miquel,

We left Calgary at the beginning of July on our trip. We are currently in Helsinki and going to cross Russia, Kazahkstan, Mongolia and China. Then we plan to go to South Korea and Japan before returning to Europe following a similar route to you over the Phillipines to India.

There are some great people in the Calgary HU Community if you want to contact them I'm sure they would love to meet you.

Have a great journey!

Hello, I'm a native Calgarian and live in the Phillipines for the past 30 yrs. I must warn you that if you happen to get into a problem here with customs you may be looking at a duty of 300% of what they think your bike is worth to import / export it.. just be aware.. Long nose tax is pretty steep here and if you do get nabbed expect to spend at least 2 weeks sorting it out.. some have been lucky but most have not and the bikes are sitting in the customs warehouse in Manila for many years awaiting payment before being released along with storage charges.. beer

Thanks for the tip, I will double check our carnet if we decide to there from Japan.

Ekke, just to let you know Carnet is not recognized here.. If you manage to get your bike here you would get off easily if they just required you to put a deposit down of what they think the bike is worth. Paying that may get your bike into the country but i doubt if you would ever see the money again.. The hard part is if they decided that you were trying to smuggle the bike into the country, then you will never see it again or expect it to be impounded and the process taking a minimum or 6 months to get it back again after paying a lot.. This is a great country to live in and ride in but so much smuggling and corruption going on that the customs have got very hard to deal with lately..I have 2 friends here who took a ride to Brunei and Malaysia (Miri) by putting their bikes on a small ferry to Sandakan. When they came back after 2 weeks their bikes were seized and until now are stuck in a Customs warehouse in Zamboanga. The ride was during Christmas 2011. The riders were Philippino's and all the haggling etc didn't help.. just be carefull..People claim they have done it, but a very small majority actually got away with it.. bier

This is interesting, and worrying info. I have a potential job offer in Cebu and have been considering working it into a big trip. Hmm.