As part of my malaria planning, i needed to come up with a route for my trip. This would be a?vision? which would be adapted as i go along. After reading Chris Scott?s?Adventure Motorcycling Handbook?and Robert Wicks?The World?s Great Adventure Motorcycle Routes?for inspiration, i drew the following route as a starting point. There are some ?epic? routes i?d like to include:
- Asia:?Baikal-Amur Mainline?(BAM) (Russia)
- Asia:?Karakoram Highway (KKH)
- Asia:?Kolyma Highway?(Road of Bones)
- Asia:?Silk Road
- North America:?James W. Dalton Highway?(Alaska)
- North America:?Tail of the Dragon?? Thanks Jon
- North America:?Trans-America Trail?(TAT)
- South and North America:?Pan-American Highway
- South America:?Yungas Road?(Bolivia)
There are many forums which include details of other travellers journeys and also places to ask questions on travelling, location information and equipment, such as the?Horizons Unlimited Bulletin Board?(HUBB) and the?UKGSer.com forums?for BMW GS?. I took a map of the world i found on the internet, printed it out and drew a line through the places i wanted to visit and came up with the map below.
With this map, i was also able to identify the places i’d be visiting where i’d need to take precautions with Malaria, as shown with a line intersecting the route at right-angles and an arrow pointing to the Malaria zone. [2014-02 Revision 1.] Starting to plan the East Africa/South Asia part of my route, i came across 2 things which have caused me to change the route plan:
- 7 guards die while escorting a Spanish cyclist through western Pakistan (BBC News, Javier Colorado’s video of the event)
- Iran require British and Canadian citizens to have a guide from March 2014.
I explored shipping my motorcycle from Africa to India, but the costs became prohibitive, so my plan B is to ship from South Africa to Australia and skip the southern Asia part – possibly until the return route from North America.