Final rest day before heading off to Russia and the real adventure. I met the group I’ll be travelling with last night it’s smaller than I thought with just us 4 bikes (I originally thought 8) and the support vehicle. I am however quite happy that it’s a smaller group and they are a really really nice fun bunch of guys. We pick up another rider in Kazakhstan one in Mongolia so there will be 6 bikes in total later on. The 2 additional riders are from Australia, the other guys are from Malaysia, Mexico and 2 from the plus me the Safa, so we are quite an international bunch.

Going over the route I was surprisedto see just how many wild camping nights there are in each stretch. I thought, for some reason, there would be 3 at a stretch and thought no problem I can live without a shower and bathroom for 3 days, eeerm try 7 days wild camping in a stretch OUCH 🙂 ah well I have had no illusion that this would be one of the toughest things I’d ever do in my life. Although the bathroom will be the least of my worries. I am far more concered about the very long days up to 500km a day double ouch on bad roads. Time for those big girl pants and that bottle of man up.

I also still need to get us to taking the bike off road. I love the little WR250s we ride in Spain but the Suzuki 400 is a bit different. I hit a couple of relay sandy bad roads in Poland on the way and it was quite an experience. The bike is fully loaded with the panniers and the tires are pumped for tar roads, so when I hit the dirt roads it was quite tricky and I still need to adjust to that.

So here goes early tomorrow morning we leave beautiful Riga and the adventure is really starts 🙂