Horizons Unlimited - The HUBB - Sweden-Vladivostok at two Chopper Trikes

:mchappy:Sweden-Finland-St Petersburg to Vladivostok at two
Harley powered Chopper Trikes!

Russia is a country at a reasonable short distance from Sweden, but it always felt like a very far away country.
In 2010 when I rode my Sportster powered adventure bike on my own to Nordkapp, I took the chance to ride to Murmansk in the same trip.
Murmansk gave me a very positive taste of Russia and the Russian people.

So I asked my wife of her opinion of a motorcycle vacation in Russia. And if possible all the way to Vladivostok this summer 2011 on my adventure bike?
She liked the idea but I know she isn’t very happy of being passenger on a motorcycle…
The idea popped up in my head… Why not make the trip on our Harley Powered Chopper Trikes? My wife didn’t have to ride behind me and it could be interesting to see the reaction of the Russians when came riding on these strange kind of bikes, with no space for luggage but tools, some spare parts, rain gear, a couple socks, underwear, shirts and of course the cameras and paperwork.
My wife did however, sneak in some extra clothes in her bag (who had to be very light weight due to the simple and temporary luggage rack attached directly to the seat bottom on her trike) without my knowledge… This extra weight (of course) caused broken front seat bottom bracket later on.

My Trike is a low mileage Harley Davidson Softail Springer 1991 which I modified to be a trike with my own made rear axle.
My wife´s Trike is a special construction with a frame and rear axle which I also built of my own. The engine comes from a crashed Texas 1994 1200 Sportster.

The 15th of July early in the morning, we took off from our small home village (100 km east of Gothenburg) to have plenty of time for the 500 km ride to the ferry Stockholm - Helsinki.
Halfway to Stockholm the voltage regulator burnt up at my wife´s bike! I quickly changed to the spare one, who also burnt up after a while… No time for searching the reason why, we had to act quickly to get in time for the ferry! So we swapped battery a few times between our bikes and managed to get just in time to the ferry.

Next day in Helsinki, we had just enough of power to ride to a Harley shop and buy a couple of voltage regulators and one extra stator just in case it also had been damaged. And off to a tool shop to by some more tools we might need.

We could relax a little and start to investigate the problem with the ohm meter… The stator was undamaged but the stator bracket did not have 100% contact to the frame/engine, causing the problem. So I had to scrape some of the expensive paint off from the frame to get perfect ground contact for the regulator. We found out that the ignition module had taken damage from over charge before the regulators burnt up (due to the poor ground problem). So I took the electronic ignition system off and replaced it with a aftermarket breaker point system.
The bike run perfect just until we crossed the Russian border, where the aftermarket condenser gave up, so we put a towing rope between the trikes and towed my wife´s trike to a motel outside of Vyborg.

At this motel we became friends with a group of Russians and we stayed to party with them for a couple of days. These friends also helped us to find a car condenser, which worked well until we could buy an original one in Moscow.

Finally we took off from Vyborg past St. Petersburg on to the heavy traffic highway M10 for Moscow. We went past many small villages with beautiful, very old timber houses.
We found a hotel in V. Novgorod. A town I liked a lot for some reason I cannot explain… It just felt good.

The Highway M10 was in a very bad condition surprisingly to me, as it is important road between two major cities. We both run into a big nasty bump on this road.
My luggage rack bent down a little bit and I recall seeing in my mirror how the rear wheels of my wife’s trike, lifted several centimetres of the ground running in to the same bump!

I was a bit worried about my luggage rack “We are only in the beginning of this adventure and...”
So we stopped at a roadside workshop and the mechanics made two simple support brackets. It worked but we had a lot of more bad, to extremely bad, roads coming…..

In Moscow we parked the bikes outside of the hotel and transformed into normal tourists.
We took a taxi to the Harley shop to by the spare parts we needed. And of course, a couple of T-shirts with “Harley Davidson Moscow Russia” at the back!
We took the subway to Kremlin and I admit I don’t understand much of these big city public transportations! Fortunately my wife, who grew up and lived in Mexico City until we found each other, understands how to get by.
We did not spend much time in Moscow as the main attraction at this adventure, was to se Siberia and Far East Russia. We can always go back to Moscow as it is not very far from Sweden.

When we finally found the way out from Moscow to the Highway M7 to Ufa, we still had heavy traffic with cars that did desperately over takings of us and the trucks.
Still a lot of beautiful Nordic nature and still a lot of very friendly and curious Russians with their cameras and cell phone cameras taking pictures every time we stopped for petrol, food or hotel etc . They even took photos from their cars or trucks at over takings, beeping the horn, waving, giving us thumbs up!! Fantastic!!

The Ural Mountains are so beautiful.
But! For the first (but not the last time) we had the bad luck to have to ride in fresh asphalt tar. We got splashed all over us and our fender less trikes! Directly after that ride in fresh and dry gravel….All this small rock were smattering the bikes, helmets, sunglasses and our faces as if it was coming from a machine gun…

All the bumps in the road made my luggage rack cut the two rear bolts straight off! As with a a bolt cutter (four 3/8”bolts holding the rack)! This time I succeeded to get out the cut part from the threads in the frame.
I also found that the luggage rack had started to crack near the bolts so we found a young inexperienced welder in the next village (in the Ural) who welded the cracks and it lasted for a while..

After The Ural in Western Siberia we choose to go north to Yekaterinburg to avoid unnecessary in and out border crossing of Kazakhstan.

About 150 km before Tyumen my wife´s bike started to run very badly. So bad we decided tow it to Tyumen where we might had a better chance fixing it rather than by the roadside.
In Tyumen we let car mechanics try to fix it, they checked everything from sparkplugs, ignition system, carburettor, compression...
They found nothing wrong…
All of a sudden an elderly gentleman named Vladimir came by the workshop and he actually spoke some English. Vladimir used to compete in Ice racing, Motocross and was also a former pilot!
He insisted taking the trikes to his garage and fix the problem and for us to stay in his house. Me and Vladimir started to check everything we possibly could think of, without success.
In the afternoons we had a few beer in his garage talking about motorcycles, cars, airplanes…Vladimir was restoring an old airplane from Czechoslovakia in his garage!
In the evenings they had parties with a lot of food and drinks, all the family members came by and so did many of his friends.
One evening in Tyumen one cash dispenser took my most important Visa card! The next morning Vladimir’s son, who speak very good English, took us to the bank and kindly helped us get the card back again!

Finally we found out the engine had a leak from the head gasket and not from the exhaust pipe, as it first looked like.
So we took the rear head of and yes, a small piece of the head gasket was blown.

What to do now? There are no head gaskets for Harley to buy in Siberia!
Well, Vladimir has a lot of contacts in Tyumen and asked a company who make gaskets for diesel engines to make an exactly copy of the original and so they did!
A beautiful job in asbest/grafit with a metal ring in the middle!
Vladimir bought a torque wrench and I found out the torque of the head bolts at internet in Vladimir’s computer.
The engine was assembled and we fixed up a few other things too, while we were at it!
We said goodbye to Vladimir and his wonderful family and took off.
The engine of my wife’s trike ran perfect the rest of the trip after this job!
Vladimir’s wife told us before we left that one Orthodox priest or monk she had talked to promised to pray for us at the rest of the trip… Very touching indeed!

After a few days in Tyumen it really felt good to hit the road again and we rode to Omsk with no more stops than food, gas and sleep.

A couple of hundred kilometres before Novosibirsk we met a nice men from Omsk who spoke good English, riding one old Kawasaki Touring bike.
He was heading for a biker event in Novosibirsk and he asked us to join him to for the event.
I was a bit curious about the event but tired and we had no tent or sleeping bags.
He rode faster than us so he told us that he would wait for us near a roundabout at the entrance to Novosibirsk.
Now the rain hit us at the last distance and we was soaking wet when we finally came to Novosibirk and the nice Kawasaki man was waiting for us drinking coffee…
He had absolute everything for camping life at his bike. He offered us some coffee and when we were talking about the event, I told him that we didn’t have tent or sleeping bags with us, he almost dropped his cup of coffee….
He said (in a friendly way):
- You must be completely crazy crossing Russia without a tent!
Thereafter he started calling the organizers and yes, they had guest tents.
A quick glance at my wife told me she was not in the mood at all to enter a biker party at this moment. I told him that it might be better for us to stay at a hotel and have a good sleep…
He understood the situation and helped us to find a hotel with secure parking before he went off for the event.

Next morning we took off for two days of riding with less traffic thru beautiful Siberian open landscape Kemerovo-Krasnoyarsk-Kansk.
In Krasnoyarsk we found a very nice old man who rewelded the cracks in my luggage rack and also welded the front seat bottom bracket at my wife´s trike. He did not accept any money for the work!

After Kansk in direction for Irkutsk
We had another roadwork again! 300 km of the roughest roadwork I ever been at! Rockhard ground with potholes, bumps and full of big sharp rocks, all the way.
We rode mostly in first gear and the frames hit and scraped the ground a lot! We rode (zig zaging) until late at night when we (totally wasted) finally found a place to eat and sleep!
We meet a German couple here who rode two BMW´s who also where exhausted after been riding this road.
A short distance after the roadwork my luggage rack cut of the rear bolts again (surprised?). This time I had no chance to get the cut bolts out from the frame; they had to be drilled out.
Just when I was working at my bike, three off road enthusiasts stopped by to offer help. They were on their way back home to Novosibirsk after a ride in Mongolia.
They went out in the bush, cutting pieces from a tree and tied it to the tube which is holding my sissy bar bag in place with wet band. From the tree pole they tied two straps in a V- form to the steering head and it worked very well until we found a workshop.

We found a littered workshop that could drill the old bolts out and also made stronger support brackets for the luggage rack out of tubes from an old car seat.
They also welded and made the front seat bottom bracket stronger at my wife´s trike. The workers worked very slowly and the result was not good looking at all. But strong and fixed these problems for the rest of the trip!
But first of all I had to accept a small symbolic drink of cognac together with the boss in his cabin-office before they started to work!

When we came to Irkutsk we were lucky to find a big modern shopping centre where we could get cash, buy some camera stuff and some other small things we needed
on “Putins road” (as some Russian call the road between Cita and Khabarovsk).

It was very easy to enter Irkutsk. But we had big problems finding the road out!
We tried to ask people but it did not help us much, as we only know a couple of dozen words and a few numbers in Russian…
After to many “levi ,pravi ,cton etcetera, we were lost with no chance of understanding…
But we had good luck again! Two nice, young men in a car, offered to drive in front of us showing the way out. They drove like car thieves and I bet they wanted to show us every street in Irkutsk. We just tried to hang on to them as good as we could in the streets of Irkutsk!

It was very beautiful to ride south of Lake Baikal at the winding roads there…
Bad luck we had rain so it was out of the question having my GoPro camera on, at this stretch which is one of the most beautiful part of Russia I have seen.
Well… The next day we had all sunshine and we went down to Lake Baikal where we took some photos and meet a nice lady and her son. The son was happy to show us the best place to take photos and when we were ready to move on, this young boy was so happy to show us the way thru lakeside village. He rode his bicycle at the highest speed he could, for at least a couple of kilometres, until we arrived the main road.
Next destination was Ulan-Udé where we got lost again, until a car with the wheel at the right hand side, came up when we were reading the map. The man asked us where we were going and we told him: Vladivostok. He offered us to show the way with his car straight away!

When we arrived in Cita we knew the next stretch to Khabarovsk was 2200 kilometres long with very little services…
My wife´s trike has a 8,5 litre gas tank and mine is 13,5 litre..
We started to get a little bit nervous, we filled up a couple of water bottles with petrol and I had my plastic tube so we could move petrol from my bike to her bike…
Should we make it without running out of gas?

“Putin’s Road” where in the best condition of all the roads we rode in Russia, so we could move on quite a long distances without consuming a lot of petrol. At one place we turned off the road to a private house and asked for petrol. The owner kindly took some petrol out from his small truck and sold it to us.
We found some simple gas stations and food places just in time before the gas tanks where empty!
I like the Siberian style of petrol stations! With three big tanks and old style pumps just in front of each tank, and a small little house where you pay thru a box in the wall. No signs at all, just three big tanks!
We entered a small isolated town, Moroya, 10 kilometres from the main road to get petrol and three young men showed us the way to the hotel..
The owner was very friendly… But the hotel was stinking mildew and the floors and walls where very warped. Probably because of the ground movement between the very cold winters and fairly warm summers.

At the last night at this road we had to ride until very late, in the dark, just to find three different places that did not want us as guests!
Yes, where very dirty. But this attitude was new for us in Russia! We believed we had to try to sleep outside in some parking lot in the cold night.
At that moment a friendly Russian showed up and talked us in to one of these places. However, I had to wash my face before I went to the front desk with him again.
We took of early next morning as we didn’t feel very welcome in that place.
When we finally came to Khabarovsk the first police we observed after 2200 kilometres with almost no police at all stopped us, and I still had my GoPro camera on. Because of the experience the night before, I felt a little bit uncomfortable. But no worries with this policeman! He was a biker himself and he had three motorcycles and he also gave us his phone number just in case we needed some help in Khabarovsk.

We were back in the civilization again and we were also back into bad roads country again, they didn’t get better until the city centre of Vladivostok…

We stopped by a cheap hotel about 200 km north of Vladivostok city limit and meet some interesting people there…
At the hotel’s backyard they had a big, angry and very much alive bear in a cage!

When we finally came to the city limit of Vladivostok we had to stop and take some photos. Surprisingly, it was a very far distance from the city limit to the actually city!
At last we found a hotel where we could stay until we flew back home. We have had 5 weeks of adventure and two weeks of bureaucracy (of the home transport of our trikes), and rode somewhere between 13000-14000 kilometres on the trikes.
We where late back home for our works but luckily, it seems like it didn´t affect our works in a negative way!

Anders and Sandra Johansson
Sweden :mchappy: