...un faux départ...

25th May 2014

Opening Chapters usually start in one of two ways. Its either the informative scene-setting introducing you to the characters, location chronology or its straight in there with crash, bang, wallop to get the pulse racing and make you read on. Perhaps racing pulses, unless we mean lentils with go-faster stripes are not the way to start this one...

We have been planning for a while to ride round the Globe on our motorbike - London to Sydney to New York via the Balkans, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, China, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, the USA and Canada. The plan was that we left home on the 2nd May.

A lot of people had helped us get ready for the big departure and wished us well. Little did we all know...

Unfortunately Day One did not happen as planned. Nor Day Two, Three or Four etc. You spend all that time preparing and then, well... stuff happens!

With the bike all packed and all ready to go, the electronics fail. Not those of the bike which had always been a worry, but Paul's. So with the rest of the crew riding down through Europe, Paul was stuck in a hospital bed.

We know all about change being the one constant in life and therefore one has to be able to constantly adapt, be flexible; but this just seemed like a tad too much. Paul had been feeling slightly unwell for three or four weeks which had resulted in him spending Easter Sunday in A&E. This was then followed by a visit to the GP but all the time the clock was ticking; D for Departure Day - 2nd of May. Paul managed to have an appointment with a Cardiologist on the 30th April after literally leaving work that day, only to pass out in the waiting room; such a Drama Queen!

He was strapped up with 24hr monitoring electrodes, which were sensibly hidden under his shirt when we did our going away presentation to Invicta Primary School the following morning. That evening on returning to see the Cardiologist, he was admitted to hospital with his heart splendidly misfiring and out of control at 250 beats per minute for some periods of time. He was given some drugs to calm him down a bit. No problem - he would be out in the morning and we would set off at lunchtime once everything had calmed down a bit...

Not quite so easy as he also stayed in Friday evening too: so we would leave the Saturday and catch the rest of the crew up en-route. But he didn't leave hospital on Saturday either.

Or Sunday for that matter. And the plans of catching up with everybody in Istanbul were now somewhat in doubt.

In fact he stayed in hospital eight days until the following Friday and was told to rest afterwards so that he could have a medical procedure, an ablation, on the 19th May.

Not being deterred by such things we came up with Plan F; Plans A to E having long since flown out of the window.

Whilst Paul was in hospital, Françoise unpacked the bike and on the 9th May, good friend, neighbour and fellow biker - albeit a Beemer took the Electraglide to a freight agent near Heathrow for a planned reunion in Kazakhstan at the beginning of June.

Paul's procedure went very well and today, Sunday the 25th May, we fly overnight to Tashkent in Uzbekistan via Baku so we can do see parts of the Silk Road we have otherwise missed prior to the big reunion with the bike. This also allows Paul the time to respect the four weeks of no driving requirement.

The big heroes then are the medical team who managed to put Paul right enough to travel - they also had to put up with him in hospital convincing him that despite everything he would not be leaving the hospital at midday and catching a ferry that same evening on the bike. The technology they used in the procedure was simply incredible - lets just hope the bike doesn't need the same in the next few months!

The plan is that after our sojourn in Uzbekistan - overnight sleeper train and all - we be flying to Almaty from Tashkent on the 1st June so that we can knock on the door of those friendly Kazakh Customs officials first thing on the Monday morning asking, pretty please, whether we can open that rather large crate and have our motorcycle? There are a few days reserved in the 'plan' for the necessary persuasion.

Of course having to freight the bike meant unloading it and us having to take all the gear with us on the airplane. Things like the tool kit, the puncture repair kit, the compressor, the spare number plate, the map holder let alone our helmets and riding gear. All within our 20kg allowance and there is still space for the travel hair dryer...

Next update from Uzbekistan.

And as we publish this, the bike is flying so to speak.

What could possibly go wrong now?

Paul & Françoise