Edinburgh to Vladivostok - Aug - Oct
 

Hi All

I'm riding from Edinburgh to Vladivostok (starting on Friday). Hope to get to Vlad by October.

I'm riding a Bonneville (cos its the bike I have rather than the one for the job). So if anyone is riding along a similar route - give me a wave because I don't know what I am doing!!! :D

Cheers
Ed

Hi Ed and welcome to the forum,
Have a great trip and let us know how you get on, your choice of bike is fine, the only thing I would recommend is an engine bash plate if you don't have one.

Hi Ed

Are you able to share the route? This is one for the bucket list :-)

Cheers and best of luck

Route
 

Hi, I'm sort of making it up as a I go along. Currently in Krakow but will start to head to the Baltics so I can cross at go to St Petersburg for a couple of days. Not particularly fussed on Moscow and so may go through the historic towns around it then head east.

I'll keep updated.

Also, thanks for the tip on the bash plate. It helped when I ran over a piece of metal tubing on the autobahn.

Being local to Edinburgh , and this trip being one I fancy , I'd like to see the route as well please. Hope you have a great ride.:scooter:

Cheers

Crossed today at Narva. It was looking a little tricky until they gave me the customs form in English rather than Russian. All the border people were super helpful.

My UK insurance runs out in a couple of days and they won't cover Russia. No problem I thought - I'll just get it at the border. But no.. the booth selling insurance just couldn't do it. So it left me to ride through the St Petersburg rush hour traffic with no insurance at all.

Bugger.

Weighing my options at the moment.

Quick update.

Managed to get OSAGO insurance in St Petersburg (Alfa) for the princely sum of £8.

Route was probably the usual St Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhy Novgorod, Kazan, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Ishim (should have gone north to Yekaterinburg / Tymen - plus road to Ishim was garbage), Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tayshet, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ule, Chita, wild camp, Belogorsk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok.

Weather in September was great, sunny days (20c) and no rain, but bitterly cold at night from Ulan-ule to Belogorsk - not great for camping. Roads are generally fine. (Usual watch out for pot holes, crap falling of lorries etc..)

Key lesson - beg, borrow or steal a business visa as the tourist visa means you are always on the move. (Would have loved to have spent more time in Nizhy, Omsk, Kras, Ulan et..).

Bike was rock solid. Bumped into a Japanese guy on a Honda 110 Cub - so can do this on anything.

Americas next