The trip

This is my first attempt at a blog so bear with me a while until i get the hang of things. My plan is to set off from Australia in September 2009 and ride this bike back to the UK. My idea is to ride it through the Simpson desert and down to Uluru, then up to Darwin. From there it will get crated up and shipped to Chennai in India. From Chennai i will ride through India, up to Nepal, possibly through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy etc.

These are some photos of the bike when i first bought/won it off ebay. I suppose it looks pretty nice, maybe thats why i bid on it?

The bike is a 1998 xt600 with 68,000 km on the clock. Like anything you bid for on ebay, it was a fairly big gamble. The bike was located 850 miles away in Brisbane so having a quick kick of the tyres before i bid was out of the question. Anyway, the bike was won so i had to get a plane to pick it up and ride it back to Townsville, i won it for $2650 (about 1300 quid). This seems to be a reasonable price, bearing in mind bikes in Australia are in general a bit more expensive than in the UK. A like for like bike in the UK would probably go for about 1000 quid, at a guess. When i first picked up the bike it blew quite a bit of blue smoke out of the exhaust, however, it has never done the same since, strange.



Although it looked nice, further investigation showed that a few quid needed to be spent on it. The costs of the items i replaced and added are shown below;

Cush drive = $94
Sprocket carrier bearing = $10
Dunlop 605 front and rear tyres = $200
Standard roller chain = $65
Spare clutch cable = $34
Spare front brake pads = $14
Spare throttle cable = $10
12V cigarette lighter socket = $6
Chain rollers = $40
GPS wire = $34
Slime for inner tubes = $12
Old battered GPS 12 = $50
2 person tent = $100
Plane ticket to pick bike up = $240
Petrol to get bike back to Townsville = $70
Overnight stay in Rockhampton on the way back up from Brisbane = $70 + a few pints


As well as the items i replaced, there was the matter of getting a few other things sorted;
Carnet = $950
Medical insurance = $520
Third party insurance = 375 euros
International driving permit = $25
Membership of breakdown club in order to obtain carnet (breakdown cover limited to certain parts of Australia only) = $125
Shipping to India = $1000