Off Course
I had a one week wait in UB for the rotor to arrive from UK, in the meantime I visited the Christina Noble Foundation for children - bloody amazing work they do with the homeless, abandoned and disadvantaged kids of Mongolia - some of their stories are horrific.
I saw heartrending pictures of the 100 or so kids who live on the streets of UB- they go underground to survive in the winter and live in the tunnels that the pipes run through as often the temperature is -40 degrees for days on end.
Cole on a weird BMW that he has painted brown (-what a George and Mildred colour it is, naturally I couldn't help telling him what I thought of the colour) was in town for a while as well and had the very dubious pleasure of sharing my room - a dorm supposed to be for six but due to our combined messiness it looked like a full room.
From Mongolia, I was supposed to be riding home across Russia to Europe, but I thought, having got this far, I might as well go and dip my toes in the Pacific Ocean.
So I had a long, hard and freezing cold ride across Siberia to Vladivostock (a robbery of sorts, a stray Armenian cyclist sharing my tent one night and four welding sessions amongst some of the mishaps as well as the high speed blow out, men with guns outside my tent at night etc more details on the website).
Vladivostock- home of the Iron Tigers, a Russian bike club with a legendary reputation for hospitality towards bike travellers - their guestbook reads like a Who's Who in the bike travel world interspersed with a few names of people I know. They showed me around and were great- I just missed out on a major paintballing game as I got to town two hours too late - now that would have been fun - playing war games and shooting at genuine Russkies.
And once I found out there is a ferry to Japan well...as I always say, I enjoy a ferry as a method of transport because it means I can paint my toe nails whilst still managing to travel in the right direction.
and the fact that I don't have the paperwork to Japan - not a problem, I managed to find a way around it..
I just about scraped through the frustratingly convoluted and slow Russian customs procedures in time to get on the ferry to Japan. For some reason leaving Russia by ferry is a whole different ball game to leaving across a land border and customs took two days, whilst the land border procedures take 30 minutes.
So I here am in the land of the Rising Sun - possibly a bit off course from my original plan, but life's too short not to have reached the Pacific Ocean from the Asian side I reckon.
and now I am working out how to get home - I think I want to go via Nova Scotia as I've got some friends there I haven't seen for a long time.