Done: Shipping from Southeast Asia to Europe

[klausalz]

Hi folks,

well well, back from 20 months of travelling - so I am now trying to catch up with all the documentation stuff. Shame on me, just did not really find the time to do it on the road...

Anyway, my mate Hannes and me shipped our two Honda XR650RTWs and gear out of KL just before Christmas and this is how it went:

We were riding SEA and had to find a way back to Europe for bikes and gear. Air freight was necessary, as my bike is my only means of transport so having it sit on a ship for several months was not an option. We checked around for shipping from Bangkok, but it all seemed pretty sketchy. I have a friend who shipped to and from Bangkok a couple of months ago and he was all but happy. Might have been due to his agent, but given that I could not manage to ship our bikes into Thailand a year before - as they just would not allow me to temporary import my mates bike without him being present, even though I had all the papers and letters of attorney - I was not really looking forward to having to deal with Bangkok custom ever again.

We decided to ship from KL when we were in Cambodia or Laos, that was about two or three weeks before shipping date. I met Bernd two months prior to that at Sunny Cycle in Kuala Lumpur. He is a German expat, living in KL now with his Malaysian wife and family. While I was working on the bike he came by Sunny's on his Dorsoduro and spotted my German number plate. He invited me for a (which ended up at the ShangriLa Hotel lunch buffet at got my mate and me more than food pregnant), we stayed in contact, were later invited to his home and went riding together.

When we talked about our further plans the shipping thing came up. He remarked that he worked in freight shipping so we asked him if he could check out options for us. As this point of time we still planned to ship from Bangkok, so this was more a backup plan, given the chance meeting and him being in the business.

Well, as things turned out we decided to ship with him, send him a message and he sent us a quote and some possible shipping dates. We mainly communicated via whatsapp, only documents were sent via e-mail. He made a reservation for the flight for us while we were still in Laos, so we had an exact date for shipment and could plan accordingly. That was great for us, as we could spend some more time in the jungle.







Three days prior to packing date we rushed over to Bangkok and chucked the bikes on a southbound train. The train went from KL to Hat Yai (it does go further to Butterworth but as only two cars went that way, it was already fully booked). Great way to get over some miles you've already ridden before, the train goes overnight and the bunks are really nice and comfy, food is cheap. If it had not been for a huge Chinese tour group, we would have slept like babies... the photo is from 2013, same train though.





We arrived in KL the night before packing date and stayed yet again in the PODs backpackers right at the central train station. It's cheap, has parking on the street which you can see from the dorms and it's quite clean - we can recommend it for a cheap and central overnight. The next morning we headed out to meet Bernd and his wife at their packer's. As usual, Murphy's law hit us hard and my mobile GPS decided to die on us, so we spent ages trying to find the place without routing. When we finally managed, they had spent an hour waiting for us and we had about three hours to get the bikes apart and packed before the place closed. The two still seemed to like us though, for which I was (and still am) very very grateful.

Hanes and me started pulling the bikes apart in order to downsize as much as we could. I have a time laps video of this, will be uploaded later today or tomorrow.

Once we had the bikes down to what we thought to be a nice smallish size, the packers started making a box for us from scratch, making sure it was as small as it could be. Basically we put them on a pallet, played Tetris with the luggage and stuff (which was a lot, as we ended up with mountain of gear, tyres and parts stored at a mate's in Bangkok for months), fixed it all with plastic straps and then cling-wrapped the whole thing. The cling wrapped pallet was then encased in wood.





The measurements of our box were 1900 x 1100 x 1050 mm, our bikes weight in at 155kg each and with all the gear, tyres and wooden box we totaled at just over 500kg. As we managed to get the box size down we were charged by weight. We handed out carnets over to Bernd, who made sure they were stamped correctly at customs and a couple of days later I picked the whole thing up at the tiny FMO airport near Müster/Osnabrück in Germany.

There was no price difference due to shipping to a specific German airport, as we shipped with a freight-only airline and they flew from KL to Luxembourg. From there the bikes were sent by truck to our airport of choice, where I declared customs. Pretty easy and good for me, as nobody ever flies anything to the closest airport here...






All in all we ended up paying roughly USD 1400 each, which I find quite reasonable. I have added this to the shipping database, so you can look up the address and contact details if you need someone to help shipping your bike.

Well, I'll go and finish that time lapse video now...



EDIT: Here it comes...

[farqhuar]

That was a very good deal. Might see if I can contact these same people for shipping to/from Australia

[klausalz]

Originally Posted by farqhuar

That was a very good deal. Might see if I can contact these same people for shipping to/from Australia

Just realized I forgot to provide the link for the shipping database - you'll find the whole thing with addresses here:


http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/shi...-december-2014


Nice guy, maybe if you ask him he'll go riding with you in the KL-area, too...

[RTWbyBIKE.com]

Super, I like the timelapse, you did it with LRTimelapse?
(which Cammera, which intervall? etc... )

[klausalz]

I'm using a Canon DSLR with MagicLantern firmware, pretty neat hack, you'll find it on google.

Gives you the ability to manually override the framerate, so the camera records 3fps or whatever you like and you end up with a finished time lapse on you cam. Very neat and clean way of doing it. I used an EOS 60D for this one. =)

Originally Posted by RTWbyBIKE.com

Super, I like the timelapse, you did it with LRTimelapse?
(which Cammera, which intervall? etc... )

[RTWbyBIKE.com]

I use the ML nighly build (developers version to identify bugs) on my 5DMKII; and to get them together a good tool is LRTimelapse 3 as plugin for Lightroom (makes Things easier)...

[klausalz]

Thanks, I'll have a look into that. Haven't been shooting stills for the timelapses though, I quite like the ease of setting it all up in cam and just recording direclty to video for simple stuff like this.
LRTimelapse seems to have some nice grading options though, definately on the list to check out.