The End of the Road

Our last day in India was spent in a taxi, traveling from Puna to Bombay airport. An interesting ride and not only for the scenery…

On arrival in Bombay we had some time to kill so we had a couple of hours slumming it in the Leela Hotel close to the airport. Very upmarket but the prices of beer and samosa seemed OK to us.

The flight was uneventful and quite good seats for cattle class. We can recommend Jet Airways.
However the Heathrow baggage handling system is pathetic. It took nearly 2 hours to get our case so I missed the bus to Stanstead. Two of them in fact. So, I ended up at Stanstead just as my flight was taking off. Great. Bought another ticket to get me to Poitiers on the same day and called Jayne to let her know the change of airport.
M's Bike
The bikes were due to arrive in Felixstow on the 29th of September. They actually arrived on the morning of the 1st of October. The Carnet de Passage and bill of lading also on the 2nd so Mick started the procedures and paperwork to get them cleared.
HM Customs don’t make life easy. Continual passing of the buck makes life so frustrating, the agent did the customs clearance… for a fee of course…

Now, If you ship something to a place and pay for it, you expect that, that’s that. Oh no. Rip-off Britain strikes again and it cost us £265 just to get the things unloaded! That’s half what it cost to send them from Bombay!!
Then there was added charges like customs clearance and crate disposal(!!??). We also had to un-crate them ourselves with the aid of a borrowed hammer and crow-bar.

The Bikes did look a mess.
Tyres were a bit flat with Mick’s front being completely flat, but we had the means to inflate them. Mikes bike needed petrol as only one cylinder would fire. Other than that they fired up PDQ.

Mick set off for home at the same time as me. I crossed the channel via the tunnel. On the web, a one way ticket was £80. Seemed a bit steep and a deeper search of the website revealed a day return priced at £13 outward and £11 return. Bargain.

The ride home was uncomfortable but a stop every 90 minutes helped.
after the finish
Before the start
The bikes are now in their respective garages awaiting washes and a decision on their fates… restore to sell, restore to keep… who knows. Johns needs work doing to repair the bent bits as well as a gearbox overhaul. If I keep it, other stuff will get done as well.

We still have unfinished business in that we didn’t do Iran and points westward. Will we finish it? Who knows. Maybe.

We hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoyed riding it… well, most of it

So that’s it.

The End.

Below you can download a .gpx file of the route taken. I seem to be missing the first section that ran from Abjat-sur-Bandiat to Passau. There is also a section of Pakistan missing when the GPS antenna got snapped off in my crash.


File: BigTripRoute.gpx [849.20 kB]
Category:
Download: 234


Post Script

Posted on 15. October 2007 by John Shales

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