Available for a limited time. Watch the Silk Riders documentary with Jo and Gareth Morgan as they travel Marco Polo’s Silk road on motorbike
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 Big Thanks
In order for it to happen an expedition like this gets assistance from a lot of people along the way. We have been very fortunate in getting our party through on time and without any significant mishaps to people or machines. For us that provides a tremendous sense of satisfaction and confidence to proceed with […]
Finally to Beijing
Beijing, or as Kublai Khan named it, Cambaluc, is our final destination and there are a few significant sites for us to cover off before packing and shipping the bikes and winging our way home. Firstly there is of course the ‘great’ part of the Great Wall – that part which has been fully restored, […]
Rebecca
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 […]
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 […]
Show stopper
Today we moved into the Mongolian area. Great open spaces and a far more traditional feel with people walking their cows and sheep for grazing alongside the road. We passed through a little town with a market day on in the main through road, driving between the stalls and causing chaos. We stopped at the […]
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 […]
The Weakest Link
Expedition motorcycling is different to any other form – whether it be cappuchino canters on the road, adventure rides, trail riding or touring. The requisite motorcycling skill is necessary of course but beyond a certain competency that factor becomes irrelevant. In self-organised expeditions like the one we’ve nearly completed everybody has to bring something to […]
Out of Xian
Today we again experienced the inflexibility of the Chinese toll-gate manager. We are farm machinery and as such can’t use the motorway. We were therfore relegated to the lanes and muddy tracks that wind under this wonderful construction and travelled 25 km in two hours. we wouldn’t have had a show of getting out of […]
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 […]
