Qaiku, the conversational microblogging service that launched a year ago had a refresh that launched today. While it hasn't yet convinced the twittering masses, it has already proven itself as a lot more thoughtful platform for the Finnish online community, and as a valuable workstreaming tool. The new version looks quite nice and fresh. Notice the privacy information on the...
Like many years before, it is again time to head out on a motorcycle trip. This time we're traveling together with Suski on my old Triumph Legend, the bike that has taken me around Europe and the Black Sea, and has been out of commission for last three years. But now it runs again. Tonight we're taking the ferry to...
Yesterday in GCDS there was a session about personal passions. First Jono Bacon gave a talk about the Burnout Cycle, and then various community members talked about what they do outside the sphere of hacking: running, cooking, building experimental airplanes and so forth. I gave a quick talk about adventure motorcycling, speaking about my 2004 trip around the Black Sea,...
Yanko Design's You-SB concept: Jerry's real prosthetic USB finger storage: The story behind this is that Jerry had a motorcycle accident last May and lost a finger. When the doctor working on the artificial finger heard he is a hacker, the immediate suggestion was to embed a USB "finger drive" to the design. Now he carries a Billix Linux distribution...
Geohashing, as introduced by the awesome web comic xkcd, is an spontaneous adventure generator. The geohashing algorithm uses the current date and the day's Dow Jones Industrial Average to generate a new location for each region in the world. Geohashers then use various means to reach that location in search for fun and adventure. As out there was beautiful autumn...
Volkswagen has released some information about their 1 liter per 100km car that will supposedly debut in 2010, and I have to say it looks cool: It provides the combination of compactness and fuel economy that usually only motorcycles reach, and at the same time protects from the elements. As I've always loved the old Messerschmitt mini-cars it resembles I...
My good friend Skoll recently wrote of the motorcycling life:
My holiday motorcycle trip of this summer was an interesting one, in the Chinese sense. The plan was to first ride to Switzerland to attend the first Haidong Gumdo European Championships, and then continue from there together with Juha to Montenegro. As it happens, Juha never got his motorcycle working, and my trip was filled with various adventures and misfortune,...
My Triumph Legend TT, which has been a trusty companion on various adventures, had an engine failure last summer. As a result, I’ve been without a working motorcycle for almost a year.
I’ve again gotten quite backlogged with publishing photos from various adventures. Today I fortunately had time to push tree sets on Flickr:
While I was riding with the Monkeys, my Triumph Legend TT left a friend on the road with a broken engine. As the number of motorcycles in Finland has grown drastically in last few years, but the number of repair shops hasn’t, the bike has since been waiting for diagnosis.
Summer holiday is now over, and as Tigert put it, we made it to Gibraltar.
…you have to follow. Next updates from me will happen sometime in late July.
I’ve been totally swamped by the number of photos taken during the last eight months of travel, and am lagging badly behind on publishing the photos. To help sort things out, I’ve now registered a Flickr account.
Montenegro (Crna Gora in the slavic languages) voted for independence yesterday. Hopefully the split from Serbia happens peacefully.
Last night I got SMS spam from Moto-Seinäjoki, a motorcycle dealer in the bothnia region of Finland, quite far from here. The message was advertising the possibility of test driving some of their new Honda range.
A couple days ago the world was full of snow, but now the weather has cleared and we can ride again!
Arttu from Protie is analyzing his car habit. Up comes the environmental aspect:
In what is becoming a regular spring ritual, the Triumph Legend is again having electric problems, this time with the starter engine.
After the starter engine of my Triumph Legend signed off the contract last week, I’ve been stranded without a working motorcycle. As most of the days it has been snowing heavily, this hasn’t been much of a problem. However, I thought it would be time to do something. As the bike dealership didn’t seem much concerned about the problem, I...
First part of the movie tells a very appealing and realistic tale of a motorcycle road trip in the third world. Many of the scenes and situations feel very familiar with my own road trips.After the sad demise of their '39 Norton the movie gets more serious, and describes the Che's Siddhartha-like enlightment through views into the poverty and plight...
The 11,000km trip was amazing, including diverse places like St. Petersburg, Crimea, Georgia, Istanbul and Kosovo.
There is something special about taking a ferry trip to Italy. All the Croatian ship staff insisted on speaking Italian to me, even though I would've understood Croatian much better. On the deck the ones afraid of traveling were praying with their rosaries.
The Bulgarian border was much better than its reputation. Leaving Turkey actually took more time. No road tax for motorcycles.
(2004-08-02 14:38 - Bergie)
Now in Turkey. The border was quiet but wonderfully inefficient. No carnet problems but issues with not having ten dollars for customs forms.
(2004-07-28 13:03 - Bergie)
Senaki, headed on M1 to Tbilisi. Nice weather and good road.
(2004-07-21 12:45 - Bergie)
Started the trip to Crimea. First gasoline break on the outskirts of Odessa, and then on the road. Sun is shining.
(2004-07-16 10:50 - Bergie)
Ukraine. The border was surprisingly fast and the nice border guards even warned me of a police radar trap ahead.
(2004-07-12 13:52 - Bergie)
Last morning in St. Petersburg. We're packing and wondering how Kerttu will get all her stuff carried without the motorcycle.
(2004-07-10 10:38 - Bergie)
Heavy rain in Helsinki so we put on our teletubby suits. Odometer says 56084km
(2004-07-03 11:53 - Bergie)
This trip will be headed to the Black Sea, and possibly to the Caucasus region. Research for the Caucasus part of the trip has been going on for quite a while, but now it looks like the area might be a bit too restless for travel.
The planned travel route is:
RussiaUkraineRussiaGeorgiaArmeniaTurkey
Now I'm reading Nicholas Griffin's "Caucasus - Mountain Men and Holy Wars".Other books I've been thinking about include:Panttipataljoona (Jokipii, 1968) - Finnish volunteers fighting for German SS in CaucasusHadji Murad (Tolstoy, 1904) - Story of a Chechen warlord fighting with and against the legendary Imam ShamilLet me know if you have any thoughts. As usual, I prefer historical accounts over...
"Motorcycling is a great hobby of mine. I ride all my life and I owned different bikes and I ended with big kawasaki ninja. This motorbike has matured 147 horse powers, some serious bark, it is that fast like a bullet and comfortable for a long trips. I travel a lot and my favorite destination lead through so called Chernobyl...
On thursday morning I started calling different motorcycle rental places to find a bike. Most of the rentals were out of bikes but finally I was able to find a reasonably priced BMW F650GS from Sama Tours in Hatfield, Pretoria (Darryl Berman, Tel +27825516132, Web www.samatours.co.za). Unfortunately the bike's battery needed to be changed so I could start my trip...
As my mobile phone had been offline during the hike, I had received a quite constant stream of text messages during the night. Again, the internationality of the whole trip amazed me. Our group included two Finns, one American, one South African and one Argentinian, and we were chatting in mixed German and English with two older couples from Hamburg....
The evening around the fire was amazing. The fire circle is located on a good vantage point on the hill, with view opening across the small nature preservation area to the west and Pretorian suburb to the south.
While waiting for the roast to be ready we visited Hogan's Irish bar quite near Wapandrand. The bar had Guinness on tap, but apparently it was African made and tasted quite different from the normal stout. We tried to fish out the beer's origins from the waitress but she didn't know it. Rumor has it they have a Guinness factory...
I left Helsinki in middle of a blizzard. It had snowed almost 30 cm during the morning and whole traffic was in chaos. Taxi call center had crashed, and it took almost half an hour to get a taxi to appear.
We started the next morning with another refreshing swim in the river, and continued to the centre of Pärnu for beers and some shopping. The day was very hot so we had to stop to a beer terrace every couple hundred meters.
Tuesday morning in Pskov and not a single cloud on the sky - the first summer day during our vacation. Wearing only t-shirts we aimed for the Estonian border. We were there at about 1 pm. There was no queue, but then again there didn’t seem to be any officials either. While we waited some Latvian cars came behind us...
Monday morning in Velike Luki was the first one to greet us with sunshine. Dark clouds still covered most of the sky but that didn’t bother us. During the last few days I had noticed odd cruching sound coming from my Ural’s engine. The previous day I had topped up the oil but that didn’t help. This morning, after a...
The Saturday morning in Valdaj was once again gray. To our surprise the bikes were still there. Still, even when we were loading the bikes, we were instructed to take them to guarded parking area (stajanka). Despite of our plans, we decided to push on one more day and have a look a Tver. Before leaving I also adjusted the...
Friday greeted us with a deprssingly gray atmosphere. After a quick breakfast we loaded the bikes. My Ural was running nicely. To our surprise the can of Binding beer was gone. We were sorry we weren’t there to see the exprssion of whoever took the beer, when he first tasted it. It had, after all, been with us for almost...
[Bergie] In the morning Skoll noticed that his left cylinder wasn’t firing. We replaced the spark plug with Skoll’s only spare and that seemed to help.
Monday. When we woke, it was rainng heavily but by the time we had checked out the rain had ceased. We went to the other rock store where Veronica and Svetlana were working that day to buy an CCCP pin to go with my Ural vest. We changed a few words and started our bikes with Staraja Ladoga as our...
The sun was shining. It was (by the way, Henry is at the moment playing Bounce on his new Nokia) a beautiful Firday morning when Bergie came to fetch me from my apartment. I loaded my bike and we left for lunch in Atelje. Unforuntately it was closed so we decided to get the visas and eat something on the...
The next day was Thursday 25th. We started from the camping site towards Frankfurt where we were supposed to meet Juha, Jenni and Timo. The weather was sunny with some clouds here and there. As our goal for the day was to reach Frankfurt as soon as possible, we rode most of the way on autobahn. Lane splitting through the...
Skoll awoke briskly in the morning and started the day by calling to an Ural service station in Wehr, Germany. We heared that it’s OK to bring the bike there so our target for the day was set. Also Bergie woke eventually to a call from the Italian Midgardians. We had a small breakfast with the last Switch franks we...
The day started like just another day. The sky was somewhat cloudy, but cleared up soon. We had a breakfast at the hotel and started our trip towards Bourg-St. Maurice. I have a feeling I’m starting to repeat myself, but once again the roads were a joy to ride and the landscapes truely beautiful. And even if you are getting...
The morning came with a cloudy sky. We packed our tent and countinued to Verona. At he first bigger town (Egna - Neumarket) we stopped at a Supermercado to get some breakfast which we ate at a parking lot. The terrain slowly started to be flatter there were still nice twisty roads. After driving by a few castles we stopped...
From Prague we contiued onwards to the Austrian border. The border crossing went swiftly despite having to exchange Finnish Euro coins to the border officials. It is easy to see the power of EU, as after the border everything felt like home.
In the morning we attacked the twisty road 11 towards Prague. At places the road had splendid hairpin turns where the Ducati and Triumph really were at their best. The Ural was also doing OK, but with the Russian tyres some of the turns were quite difficult. Scenery was simply splendid with lots of rolling green hills and forests.
The star of the morning was the Ural. The previous evening we noticed that we have found the local Tattarisuo (area in Helsinki with lots of car repair etc. places), so we started looking for the velding-place there. In the first place we tried the master didn’t speak any english, but guided us to some other place. After searching the...
Crossing the borders in Baltia was surprisingly easy and fast. When we arrived at the border of Poland, the queue was longer thn any of us had seen before. In the queue we met some fellow finnish bikers who had been waiting for several hours and weren’t even near to the passport control. Once again life is easier with bikes...
We left Pärnu on monday morning and started the slow progress towards Riga. The main roads here have very low speed limits, ranging from 60 to 90 km/h. Of course, anything faster would probably have been uncomfortable on Skoll’s Ural.
We arrived to wet and dark Tallinn around 10:30pm in Friday, and started the slow and bumpy progress towards Pärnu. The effect of EU funding on the Via Baltica (E67) road we’re apparent, as road was under construction in many places. Unfortunately for us this mean removed tarmac and lots of potholes. Addition to this fun was crazy Mercedes and...
A Linda Line ship is sinking in the Baltic and our ferry was called to the rescue operation. We’re still waiting in the Tallink terminal, as we will the transferred to another ship.
The first travel day has been busy with preparations, as we had to build first version of the travel portal, and manage all practical issues for the trip. We have agreed to meet at the Tallink ferry terminal at 4pm, although Rambo already managed to forget that and tried to book that time for arriving to office. This will be...