Archive | Silkriders – Venice to Beijing

Silk Riders

Motorcycle ride In the footsteps of Marco Polo

Riders: Gareth Morgan, Jo Morgan, Brendan Keogh, Bryan Wyness, Dave Wallace, Selywn Blinkhorne
Motorcycles: BMW F650 GS Dakar
Distance: 15,214km
Countries: Germany, Italy, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Krygzistan, China

Trip description: An epic motorcycle adventure on the famous Silk Road. That theme is “In the footsteps of Marco Polo” and sets a colorful historic backdrop to this traverse of Eurasia. Though the journey took Marco 24, we will attempt to cover the same ground in just 3 months.


Blogs from the trip


A Lobby for the Bikes

We arrived in Luochuan after an easy but wet ride from Xian. Easy in the sense that it was only a little over 200ks however there were still the challenges of avoiding trucks passing on blind corners ,cars cutting in when they find that there is oncoming traffic and the wonderful slow farming machinery that […]

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Xian Warriors and Wangbaas.

Xian (she-an) a modern city with much of the vibrancy based on the 10 million tourists attracted by the “terracotta warriors” was once the capital of China until Kublai Khan moved it to Beijing. We went to see the excavated areas and were all gob-smacked by the sight of the rank and file soldiers with […]

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Great Walls of China

One of the sights we had been anticipating on our adventure has been the Great Walls of China. I say walls plural, because there have been about a dozen “great walls” built, the first around 500BC. We started to see the first evidence of one of the walls as we crossed the Taklamakan Desert and […]

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Dog Day afternoon

  I’m lying face down, the bike is running still and I’m waiting for the big black dog to sink her teeth in me. Shouts from the road workers have sent the bitch running, but my leg is at a strange angle with the bike on top of it. Dave is muttering about the leg […]

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Tackling the Taklamakan

Since we crossed the Torugat pass and moved out onto the Taklamakan Desert we have seen the “Desert Twisters” that the Taklamakan is famous for. There is probably a local name for it but let me describe (we have also posted a photo in the latest upload to the website). The wind blows almost all […]

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Hard long days

Sitting in a depressing Taklamakan desert town (Mangmai) in an internet cafe that is like a bomb shelter with 200 people in it. We are the first foreigners to come here. Had a really hard (but good) day with 300 km on gravel, sand and rocks and then the last 80 on some wonderful tar-seal. […]

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A Volga Return

  You may remember Gareth had been having starting troubles, due to a failure of the push button start system Dave and I had rigged a substitude solenoid from a Russian Volga Salon. We had ordered a replacement which arrived in Tashkent about a week after it was ordered Dave and Selwyn brought the part […]

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