Waypoints

The overland travellers are a generous bunch. Quick to share experience and resources to strangers at a moments notice. We are bowled over by the staggering level of goodwill from a particular couple -
Amanda & Jon from ‘threeinatruck’. They have been so generous with a wealth of information and experience. They shared with us a network of contacts and waypoints that will give us some piece of mind on our upcoming adventure. All these little yellow marks are everything from service centres, hotels, fuel stops, points of interest even down to coffee shops. Amanda and Jon have put our mind at ease by answering our questions like procedures for fuelling, using ATM’s, how much cash to carry etc. …they have put my mind at ease completely.

Here’s one video of their videos from the ‘road of bones’ which we’ll be travelling alone ;-)

threeinatruck’s Kolyma Highway adventure

I’m glad we packed waders to check some of these holes and river crossings before risking our car. This however all looks pretty good and on most occasions, there seems be trees to winch to. Mongolia might be a bit more difficult in this regard as I suspect there are about 4 trees in total…. and the likelihood of those being conveniently located either side of a marshy valley is very low. But then again, there will probably be a lot more ‘earth tracks’ we can take if one looks suspicious.

You may be able to use this link to see where our Maresk Dryden ship is: http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/default.aspx?mmsi=636091083&centerx=151.8612&centery=-33.35001&zoom=10&type_color=7 It left Sydney at 18:21 tonight hopefully with our car on board.
An excited feeling has come over me which is cut short by a ‘no turning back’ kick to the guts sensation.
The thought of our car riding the high seas into the dark is a foreign idea, and our stuffed toy Quorn snake is hopefully keeping troopy nice and calm. It feels childish to imagine such nonsense, but it seems a prevalent human trait to attach personalities to inanimate objects. Either way, It’s certainly an emotional rollercoaster. These last few days I’ve felt very bored and stir-crazy now that there's not much more to do regarding the trip. There isn’t many new projects I can take on that don’t cost money, and won’t take more than three weeks to complete.

To subdue my boredom I might edit together the videos from my last trip for you guys. It won’t be very exciting, but it may give some of you some motion to an otherwise static story. On Friday I visit the Mongolian embassy to submit our visa’s… but otherwise, that’s about all I have to report.

Sorry, my last few posts have been boring, but I did just want to again express my thanks to Amanda & Jon and all the others who have contributed before us.

We're good to go...

"We're good to go" - those wonderful words in an email from our freight forwarder yesterday. Ahhh the relief!

After all the shamozzle of Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning with the "hazardous goods", it's now been decided that we can keep the fire extinguisher and brake fluid in the car afterall. That's a good outcome.

"Our ship" was docked at Melbourne yesterday and this morning, and according to the Port of Melbourne website is not listed as currently being docked there - the list is updated hourly. So I suppose this means it's on track to arrive in Port Botany soon. Fingers crossed it leaves relatively on time next week with our car aboard!

There's a website we can go on to track the whereabouts of the ship via GPS and it's been really cool following it these past couple of days. That's how we knew it was in Melbourne.

We also have a seal number for our container, so I assume that means the car has been packed! Safe and sound all tucked away, not to see daylight for about 4-6 weeks by the time customs is done over there. I guess this is why the lead time on goods from overseas is often 6-8 weeks.

This has been an exhausting and at times, frustrating, process but I've learned so much from going through this, and there's still more to come when we go through customs in Vladivostok. And also not to forget we've got to do all of this in reverse to get the car home! I'll certainly be better equipped with knowledge for the journey back. I also think for the return journey we'll try and find a company that has a more holistic approach that will do more of the coordination for us.

Now we just sit back and wait for the invoice...yikes!

More dramas...

OMG since when is a fire extinguisher a hazardous good? OK, it's got a gas propellant in it but come on, it's not flammable! Also, apparently a small container of brake fluid is a hazardous good. But hang on, Graeme's dad made an excellent point, the car has brake fluid in the brake lines already, but that's ok according to the laws of shipping hazardous goods. Ooookaaayyy.

The reason for my ranting and raving is because our shipping agent advised us at 5.30pm tonight that there's a problem with our hazardous goods form because it doesn't list the fire extinguisher and the brake fluid. This is why I wanted the inspection done on Monday while we were there. But oh no, the way all the "professionals" wanted to do it was do the inspection after the form was completed. Seriously! Where on earth is the logic? And surprise surprise, there was an issue with the form. We don't know what's classified as a hazardous good and I thought that's what the inspection was meant to sort out prior to the form being submitted to the shipping line.

I was peeved the very first time I found out about this new hazardous goods law mumbo jumbo and this is just the sour cherry on top.

Perhaps I should explain events further. We were presented with two options: 1) Have the form redone to include the fire extinguisher and brake fluid. This would result in the form needing to be resubmitted to the shipping line and could risk them denying to carry the goods or delaying the acceptance of the goods to the point where it would delay our shipping date. 2) Remove the two items from the car and leave the form as is.

Of course we went with option 2. The fact that they have typed the car's weight as 2092kgs instead of 2920kgs, I'm keeping under my hat. At this stage, I don't give two hoots about their mistakes when they have emails and forms from me with the correct information on it. As far as I can tell, this hazardous goods form should only affect the shipping line's acceptance of taking our container. It shouldn't affect anything else down the line, and I doubt they're going to rely on this form to calculate the weight of the container.

Well, we now have something to do during our two weeks in Vladivostok before taking delivery of the car...buy another fire extinguisher and bottle of brake fluid!

Should be ok...

Wow, so to add to what Graeme was saying in his last post, delivering the car yesterday pretty much went off without a hitch until I got an email from our shipping agent at 4.42pm saying the shipping line wanted the hazardous goods form by 10am the next day! Yikes, I didn't see this email until about 8 or 9pm and was freaking out a little bit because there's nothing I could do about it. I really wish all these people involved would deal with this themselves. I'm very tired of being the piggy in the middle, relaying messages and chasing people up. Anyway, we ended up emailing the guy who was doing that form to ask if he was able to have it done by then. I was then stressing out and ranting for a little while until Graeme calmed me down and helped me realise that there's nothing I could do about it anyway. I couldn't hurry them up, I can't fill out the form myself so it was completely out of my hands.

I guess I was worried because, as I feared, no-one at the depot was expecting us yesterday when we dropped the car off, we weren't given a receipt or anything to sign to say that the depot now has our car. We were just kind of directed to drive the car into one of the sheds as you would’ve seen in one of the pictures in Graeme’s blog post. We then had a chat with the larrikin (I mean that in a nice way – he was a hoot!) who obviously looks after the packing of exports. He wasn't concerned about anything. He asked us what does he need to know about the car, so we said well, here's the key for the roof rack, there's about a quarter of a tank of diesel in it so an AMSA250 form will be accompanying it, and then we introduced our "pet snake" and travelling companion, Quorn. (You would've seen pictures of Quorn from Graeme's last trip - if not, scroll through previous blog posts from April 2012).

So that was that. We then drove down the road from the depot and I sent off an email to all parties involved that the car had been delivered. Done. Or so I thought until I got home and read the aforementioned email from our shipping agent.

Anyway, crisis averted because I checked my email this morning and there was a copy of that wonderful form the shipping line was after. For the second time since working there, I literally said a “WOO HOO!!”, threw my arms in the air and nearly hugged my workmate as she was coming towards me to ask me a work-related question! Made a total goose of myself as per usual. Anyway, everyone was super excited for us once I explained what was going on. And the form we needed was done before 9am – well ahead of time! Phew. Hopefully that means that the export from Australia is going to be all sorted without our involvement from now on. The shipping day is next Tuesday and after that we'll get the dreaded invoice to pay and the Bill of Lading that will enable us to get the car out at the other end, and that's that. The second phase of shipping can't commence until us and the car get to Vladivostok. The plan is that by the time we get to Vladivostok the car will already be there on the docks, just waiting for us to start the customs process over there. Hmmm, fun times.

Our ship has changed from the Maersk Garonne to the Maersk Dryden. Here's a picture of the Dryden...

Maersk Dryden

Yesterday was such a long day having to drive to Sydney, sort out the depot and drive back. We were both absolutely kaput by the time we got home. We both woke up feeling exhausted this morning. Driving on our holiday will be different. And because we've already trekked halfway around Australia doing the same sort of trip, we know this for certain. It's a different type of tired you feel at the end of a day of driving when you're on a trip, as opposed to driving somewhere for utilitarian purposes.

We did manage to get down to the seaside at Port Botany to watch, from a distance, the shipping docks in action yesterday. We saw loads of containers stacked up on shore, the massive fixed cranes they use to get containers from ship to shore, and forklifts they use to manoeuvre the containers around. Incredible. We were also lucky enough to see a fully loaded ship coming into the docks! Weirdly, because the ship was moving so slowly and was laden with containers, it ended up becoming camouflaged! We seriously couldn't see it unless we stared at the same spot for a little bit and eventually saw the ship moving slowly.

Here's a little statistic, I've sent and received well over 180 emails over the past year regarding shipping, visas, flights etc. Holy moly. No wonder I get a little bit overwhelmed with information at times!

I still can't believe that all this is happening and that we’ll be off on our adventure in a few short weeks. Graeme said in his last post that I was feeling sad yesterday, and that I was concerned about not seeing the car again. I’m really not worried anymore. I’m going to allow myself the next few weeks to not worry about the car at all. There’ll be enough work to do to get the car back at the other end, and even then, it’s just a process that we have to go through. Not understanding that process and the role of the seemingly bazillion people involved is what makes it hard – thankfully I think pretty much most of the Russian people we’ll need to deal with speak enough English to help.

To quote an iconic Aussie phrase: “She’ll be right mate!”.

Delivery Day

Cool loading thing we saw on the way in. That thing’s jaws reach the ends of a 40ft container… huge!

The car where he/she sits alone in the depot. Alone perhaps not the word as it was well and truly surrounded by a heap of other shipments. The depot manager seemed capable and wasn’t fazed by removing and packing the roof rack. I drove the last ~50KM in 4th gear trying to chew through fuel as it’s only permitted to have 25% max. One tank was empty, but one tank had maybe 30% in it, so I hope they do the maths across both tanks, not individually.

Cassie has been quite sad most of today… not crying, but wouldn’t be far from it… almost like she doesn’t think we’ll see it again. It’s only a car, and thankfully I have not been struck by the same sensation. I could be a bit slower emotionally and it may sink in over a few days.

I have some video to add, but it’s side-tracked by new developments below.

Update: Cassie’s just received an email from the shipping broker requesting the ‘dangerous goods’ inspection form by 10am tomorrow. The car was due for inspection tomorrow, but just some time.
Lets get the worrying out of the way:
-Inspector doesn’t deliver form by new unrealistic deadline posed by shipping company
-We miss this sailing, forfeit potentially ~$700 in accommodation as we’ll be a week late.
-Unknown costs associated with rebooking air tickets
-Untold inconvenience with visa timings

Now that all that worry is out of the way, we can only hope that we’ve sweet talked the inspector and he gets all the paperwork done on time and our sailing date stays intact. Cassie will no doubt go into this in more detail, but there is around 5 people/companies we depend on to facilitate this project…. none of which will talk to one another, they all just go through Cassie who has enough on her plate.
 
I’m trying to think of an alternate example – lets try this one:
You’re buying a new European car. You pay the dealer, then a separate cheque to the manufacturer. Oh, you’ll need to register it yourself, plus CTP, and organise customs clearance. You’ll also need to coordinate a sailing schedule with the truck that brings it down from Sydney. You meet the truck in a dusty warehouse and pull all the plastic off it yourself.
In NO WAY would that be an appropriate level of interaction in the process of buying the car.
Perhaps I have oversimplified it, but we went to one vendor to get our car to it’s destination… yet we’re the ones doing all the running around with now 5 stakeholders. It should not be this hard.

Anyway, my rant is done. What was an awesome and exciting day could turn into a real cockfight tomorrow.

Hotel Azimut

We followed a blog of a gentleman Oisin about a year ago, and I just looked back through it to see if there were any useful photos to put on here… well here’s one:

It’s the Hotel Azimut – our first hotel in Russia. How about that!. It also was the hotel of ‘threeinatruck’.
I have this odd desire to recreate photos that I’ve seen online, in print, or in movies. It could just be the tourist in me, but I get immense satisfaction with the idea of holding up a picture to reality, at a different time.

I’ve just done some quick research online because Cassie said off cuff “haven't you seen their website…?”… well no I hadn’t. I’ve heard that a visitor didn’t have hot water, so I was expecting a dirty slum… but it looks swish as! I was expecting a fat intolerant babushka but if the photos are to be believed, perhaps not. http://www.azimuthotels.ru/en/hotels/vladivostok/about_hotel/ Click through the photos at the bottom of the main photo. Free Wi-Fi was the only real requirement, but 24hour cafe makes up for the ~$1600 cost for ten days. This was seriously a shocker, I was expecting a slum.

I’ve also done some research (thank goodness for this awesome internet thing) on Seoul’s airport. Thinking we would be lost, hungry and with no English, we found this. A sparkling airport, with bi-lingual announcements – Don’t feel like you have to watch all of it:

I doubt we’ll be having McDonalds, but it’s certainly a nice backup plan ;-)

It may sound a bit soft, but I think I was most worried about language barriers… something I suspect will dissolve quickly into our adventure. Not finding our luggage or boarding gate due to our inability to read is NOT COOL. All of the above has melted away any stress I may have had. Oh, and the Taxi’s take eftpos – what more could you ask?

This might not seem a huge deal to others, but I’ve had that sticker for about 6 months. It’s huge, and if we do a similar overseas trip again, I think I’ll get a smaller one. This one was sent by the Australian Automobile Association.

Signing off - super excited Graeme. Tomorrow Sydney!

The car is packed

The car is packed… well it’s as packed as it’s going to get, because if it’s not in it, it means we’ve forgotten it.

In this picture there is:
-Double sided tape
-Line clamp
-Air compressor accessory kit
-Wiring heat shrink
-A small roll of white electrical tape
-100W H4 headlamp
-Pliers, side-cutters, long nose pliers
-about 50 fuses (~40 blade fuses for us, ~10 glass fuses for anyone else who might need them) and three special MIDI fuses.
-Screws, bolts with matching nuts and washers.
-Hose clamps, 1 radiator sized, 2 smaller
-Rubbish LED Interior light globes X2

Other stuff that is not pictured:
-Two rolls of wire (two different gauges)
-Three sizes of vice grips
-Heaps of quick crimp connectors.

Toyota coolant concentrate, breaker bar, 500mm bar socket extension, screw drivers, spanners, DOT3 brake fluid, WD40, head sealant compound, spare air compressor hose, 3X spare belts, top and bottom radiator hoses, 1M spare water hose, blue gasket creator goo.

-Four more rolls of electrical tape (ok, that does sound like overkill)
-A couple of meters of twin core wire
-Allen keys, plus other weird key adaptors
-Huge roll of 100mph cloth tape
-Tyre repair kit
-Socket set (metric and imperial)
-Bag of rags
-Paper funnels
-Reflective Vest (required in EU)
-Spare air, oil and fuel filters
-Multimeter
-Radiator/Fuel tank repair putty
-Tyre Valve kit
-Razor blades
-750A Jumper leads
-2L of 10W-40 fully synthetic oil (will get a bit more in Vladivostok)
-1.4 million cable ties of various sizes

In the recovery equipment box (not pictured)
Fire extinguisher
-6 D-Shackles
-Tow hitch pin
-Winch extension rope
-Snatch strap
-Latex gloves
-Leather gloves
-Tree trunk protector
-Overalls and Waders
-Hi-Lift base and wheel lift

In the car
-Maxxtrax
-Hi-Lift jack
-Shovel
-3X 20L water containers

I have visions of Apollo 13 ‘bodging’ with all of these parts and tools. For those that can’t remember the movie, they had to make an air filter out of socks, hoses and duct tape. I’m sure with half this stuff we could make an awesome contraption.

Pictured
-Two cleaning cloths
-USB extension cable
-Tripod ball mount (tripod not pictured)
-Remote for head unit
-JVC video camera (hey, why not have a third/4th perspective)
-GoPro skeleton case
-GoPro water proof case
-GoPro suction mount
-12V Laptop charger
-Serial cable for Satellite Phone
-Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable
-Mini-USB to USB cable
-4X AAA batteries for SPOT messenger
-Small battery for video camera

Not pictured
-DSLR Camera
-Video Camera
-12V USB Charger
-1X Quorn snake

There is a heap more stuff, and this hasn’t gone into food/toiletries but all that stuff is easily attainable. Some might suspect we have over packed… but I really don’t think we have. All of this stuff can be used to get us back on the move in a place where we can’t speak the local language.
Shortly there will be a video below which I’m sure people are sick of seeing our car, but it’s finally done.

Available in 1080p for those opti-snobs out there.

Is this really us?!

I have spent the last minute doing little ankle jumps in excitement. It’s dawned on us that we only have one more Monday left before the car is shipped! I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited in my life. Not even Christmas excited. I can only imagine a similar level excitement would await the delivery of a new sports car or something else you’ve ordered years earlier.

Cassie’s trying to convince herself that ‘people do this all the time’ and that we are not doing anything particularly awesome. Knowing deep down, we are doing something very odd, and going against the grain. We will be drowning in uncertainty and unfamiliarity the moment we step off the plane in Seoul, let alone Vladivostok. In my head, Russia feels like this impatient and unforgiving animal. Not one word of English will be spoken, and no one will give us the time of day with our weak language and currency skills. This may prove to be untrue, but it’s worth documenting.

“This isn’t something that ‘we’ do, we’re not adventurers.” This is the stuff of movies and make-believe! I truly cannot believe that this is happening. I find myself cautious of things that we undertake from here on. For example, 4wding, motorbikes and generally risky activities are ruled out from here on. I’m not even driving the car at all from here on. Regardless of it’s insured state, any fender bender would mean us missing our deadline which as far as I’m concerned, isn’t a viable option.

It must serve as inspiration for anyone that has an impossible dream, you really can achieve anything if you put one foot in front of the other. I remember reading Ted Simon’s book, Jupiter’s Travels. He said you need as much time planning as you will spend on the road. Rubbish I thought, how hard can it be? Realistically, we would have easily done 3 months of 9-5 planning and preparation if we added it all up.

It does alarm me how we’re running out of time however. I ordered some paper maps yesterday with plan to put them in the car so we don’t have to carry them in our luggage. I don’t think they are going to arrive in time.

It also alarms me how even the most basic of things is going to be immensely difficult. Even from the first steps in Russia. How are we going to pay the taxi driver in Vladivostok? How is he going to tell us how much it is? How are we going to check in to our hotel room… I think we’ll be out of our depth. I’m of two minds. I’m glad Cassie can take some of the pressure off, but in the other mind, if no one was to see me fumble, then there would be no embarrassment when I do! It’s interesting that topic of embarrassment, that will come in a future blog post I suspect. Thankfully our arrival in Vladivostok is at 2:30 in the afternoon which should give us enough daylight to get us to our hotel without being stuck somewhere overnight in a foreign land.

Note to self: buy marker pen and write on the oil filter when it was changed. The batteries will be disconnected in the container, so my odometer indicating the service interval will be wiped out.

The picture above is the eye-bolt which secures the chopping board. I was using a bolt previously, but this should be easier on the hands.

Giggidy Giggidy–so excited!

Looking over an example form of a previous customer of SilverWind shipping, they shipped the same car, to the same destination. there is something about that fact that is so exciting. I think it’s proof that we are not crazy, unrealistic or even far fetched. in fact the biggest hurdle we hit, is shipping companies pushing us back, saying “jeez, three weeks out… call us on the day” kind of attitude. This is so everyday for them it’s not funny!

Soo it’s like totally less than four weeks till the car is shipped! That’s amazing! From a distant dream more than four years ago, to less than four weeks!

We even have shipping advice: The ship is the Maresk Garonne

The only thing I’m torn about is marine insurance. It’s somewhat of a scam at $600 odd dollars for a month’s worth of insurance. I’m doing all kinds of justification for getting out of it, like:

-The car isn’t going to be insured for a further 3-4 months after it lands and will cover 20,000-25,000KM… so what’s another month?
-If we loose the car totally mid way through the trip, it is a saving of ~$7000 of return shipping, so the loss is really only $14,000. I say only, but that’s a lot of money.

If we do the maths, 10,000+ containers fall overboard each year… of the 100+ million containers shipped world wide. I’m not sure if my maths is correct, but that a one in ten thousand chance.
Sure, marine insurance does cover more stuff but I sure as hell can’t figure out what.

Got some more goodies today. This is my winch extension strap which can be used on my winch drum if mine breaks and also through a pulley block which is innovative. The 5mm eye is to secure the chopping board to the door. This is a more finger friendly solution as opposed to the 5mm bolt.