Eastern Dirt 14

After returning from Arctic Dirt 13 I started toying with the idea of doing a longer ride the next summer. I had of course read all of Walter Colebatch’s adventures and watched Oisin Hughes’ fantastic video series among other things, which both added fuel to the fire. The BAM road seemed to me the crown jewel of adventure riding at the time, so that was the logical heading to go to. I was pretty sure that the BAM road was not the only bad section of road in Russia and started mapping out other smaller roads and tracks too. I wanted to ride from Helsinki to Baikal, around it and back. Since I was there I thought I’d have a look at Altai and Mongolia too, not forgetting the Ural mountains.

A vague route started to form and I figured I could do it in two months and twenty thousand kilometers. I planned to do normal bike maintenance and service every five thousand kilometers. I split the ride into four sections with service breaks in Omsk, Ulan Ude and Novosibirsk. I originally planned the second service break into Ulan Bataar, but changed it to Ulan Ude so that I wouldn’t have to ship tyres to Mongolia.

I’m used to riding solo but for this trip I thought I’d try to hook up with another rider if possible. If it didn’t work out, I’d ride solo but would have to opt for a safer route. On some of the local rides I had gotten to know a guy with a BMW 650 XChallenge. He had already been on a ride to western Russia and was big on finding new routes. I pitched the idea to him and after some soul searching he was in.

During the Moroccan Black Hole Turkey Tour 13 in November 2013, I mentioned my plans to the other riders in the group. In the last day Juha aka. The Walrus asked a lot of questions concerning the ride. I had met him previously through work and we had ridden in the same enduro camp in Estonia earlier in 2013. I couldn’t say that I knew him well, but what I did know was that he was a very good rider, a good mechanic and generally a relaxed and nice guy to be around. So I was very happy when he asked whether there would be any chance to join the team. Come December he was the owner of a brand new KTM 690 Enduro R K13. In my not so humble opinion the best year, but that’s another story entirely.

Our team of three was not to be as my friend on the XChallenge pulled out in January 2014 due to injury. So Juha and I would be a two man team. Both KTM 690 Enduro R K13’s, which somewhat simplified things. We spent the best part of winter planning and building the bikes, sorting out logistics of spare parts and planning travel gear. The bikes were more or less finished by May so we went on a four day test run to Northern Finland. The legendary Mongolian Cosmonaut, Mishutka, had organized all tyres and oil to the three service break cities. On June 28th we were ready to ride.