On the evening of our arrival in Beijing on Friday 8th July the New Zealand Ambassador to China, Tony Browne hosted a reception for us at the NZ Embassy in Beijing. Present were members of the local BMW owners club, together with other invited guests from the local and expatriate community. There was also a […]
Author Archive | bryan wyness
A Mongolian Motorway to Nowhere
On this trip we have experienced a wide variety of riding surfaces .Everything from sandy tracks, gravel tracks , gravel roads , “sealed roads” where the pot holes took more of the road than the seal , roads under repair and nice new sealed roads . The longest stretch of road under repair was a […]
Those Magnificient Men and Their Three Wheeled Machines
By far the most common configuration for commercial vehicles in China is three wheels, one steering wheel at the front and two driving wheels at the rear. It would be fair to say that most Kiwis would not have seen a three wheeled vehicle unless of course they were fans of Rowan Atkinson’s wonderful TV […]
I put Salt on Mine!
The food on our ride has been varied in quality and taste ,but there has been one vegetable that has been consistently outstanding and that has been the tomato .We have all agreed that the flavour of the tomato’s, particulary those we have sampled through Central Asia and China reminds us of the wonderful but […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Volga Update (it is not about the river)
Gareths bike out of the blue developed a starting problem in Samarkhand and an earlier blog refers, so now an update. The fix involved Dave and I scouring the Samarkhand auto bazzar for a suitable part we found the perfect solution an ignition switch from a Volga salon which also incorporated a very substantial solenoid. […]
For Those Interested In Geology
Turkey and Iran have got the most fascinating landscapes . I am now digging back 40 plus years to remenber some of the local geology ( Iam sure my friend Bruce will comment if I am too wrong ) The thing that struck me was the extent of Glaciation all the classic tell tale signs […]
