This weekend

Hello. We've just come back from our weekend in Sydney where we climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I've climbed it twice before, but I must say, I struggled much more this time.
Perhaps I didn't have the same self-preservation as before, perhaps I was fearfull of Cassie been upset, either way I wasn't overly impressed with myself.
I did however appreciate the exercise, it made my back feel much better today.
It's Anzac long weekend, and I'm kinda bored - I wish I had my SPOT messenger to play with, but that should be arriving on Tuesday. I was keen to get a weatherproof little HD handheld camcorder for $100 off all classifieds, which would be excellent for video diary, and 4wding, but these things happen for a reason. I think financially we're getting further behind our target. Although a fair bit of Twomagadan savings is tied up in shares, it still feels like we're a long way off. Little purchases like this will proove costly in the long run.

The tour gide told us a story of Lennie Gwyther, a nine-year-old farmer's son, rode his pony, Ginger Mick, 600 miles from Leongatha in the Gippsland region of Victoria to Sydney to witness for himself the celebratory opening of the Harbour Bridge on Saturday 19th March 1932.

In case you missed that - the kid was 9! I'm 25 and I would still struggle with such an expidition. What an amazing feat. It makes me realise how soft we are these days - and perhaps how with media influence, we think the world is a bad place - obviously, and sadly it wasn't always like this. I long to find the comfort and freedom to leave doors unlocked but I don't think i'll see this in my travells or in my lifetme.

Do I have the maturity?

This weeks concern is that I may not have the maturity to go through with this. I'm not sure if you call it homesick, but I just get tired of not having some things in my day being easy. I need to drive to Dubbo tomorrow (another 1000km round trip). I would have driven today, but my camera is still in for repair, so taking a day, taking it slow isn't so appealling without it. Plus I have to stay somewhere.
It's this thinking that makes me doubt I have the maturity for a 3 month trip. I'd be inclined to take my swag but I have nowhere to shower (and it is important because I'm seeing clients).
I watched an amazing documentary on Stress made by NatGeo. It highlighted that two comparable studies with monkeys in Africa and the UK public service both experienced different health issues based on their position in the pecking order. Well, the top dogs didn't have any health issues, but the bottom ones were continually plauged by it. Needless to say, it's imperative for my health that I get to, and stay at the top.

I guess that the next two years will 'provide' the maturity for such an adventure, but really, I need to do something about it. I'd imagine I could build this maturity by taking on adventures on my own, such as a few weeks away from Cassie, home, family to really find myself. Then I imagine I would return wise, quiet and well developed. I'm continually pulled to do such a thing, to make sure twomagadan isn't the test, it's just an activity that I will do with skills that I already have - not learn along the way.

Four day weekend

I've typed this blog in Microsoft word this time so that I don't have to use the shift key so much - my little fingers are really getting sore. We have a lovely four day weekend and we are going to drive to Stockton beach, just out from Newcastle to go for a tiny dry run - it's the furthest we've driven in the Pajero - which sounds crazy compared to Two-Magadan. 1000km compared to 20,000km.
It's only Friday and I've already fixed the biggest annoyance on my car so far. At precisely 3000rpm this awful rattling noise happens. It sounds like it comes from the tail shaft BUT it happens when the car is moving, or standing still, with the clutch engaged or disengaged. This perplexed me for a long time. It's the not knowing that is a bad feeling, is it a dropped valve, timing belt backlash, something clanging around in the gearbox or transfer case. Turns out it was this:

This is a unique doo-dad that is meant to reduce vibration... ironic isn't it. See the crack on the right hand side. At precisely the right rpm this vibrates and makes an awful noise. I'll try get some better pictures tomorrow.
It's now been removed and the vibration is a little better - so I might put it back on and weld it and the 80kph-90kph vibration may disappear?
Oh well. That's enough for tonight.
How about these chairs?

Magadan Two?

OK - An interesting suggestion has come up - why not go the other way?
Well it's a pro's verses con's scenario here.

Con:
Less confident the car will arrive / Difficult to get from docks due to language barrier.

Pro:
We'll be doing the trip the other way round - we'll get the harder bits done first, and leave the touristy bits to the end (Europe)

Pro: Any excess time can be more easily spent in the UK or Europe - Magadan would get boring after two days.

Con: We'll have to change the name.


One of my personal motivations was to see the 'Mask of Sorrow' which is in Magadan. It seems selfish, but that was one of the non-negotiable destinations. That and 'Buwler' Street in London where the journey commenced.

Shipping can be arranged between Vladivostock & Magadan, but again its more complication and room for errors. The more I look at the scenario - maybe shipping and flying too and from is going to be too difficult.
I'm yet to find a road route between Vladivostock and Magadan but we'll see. I don't really want to extend the trip by two weeks, only to double back. Oh the humanity.

Further thoughts - If we don't bring the car back (original idea) then it doesn't matter - we get to Magadan and sell it! no shipping headaches - then just catch the next flight back homeward bound.

The other thing is, in addition to Magadan's Mask Of Sorrow, is the Kolymer Highway (Road of bones) - again, whats the point of doing this trip, and missing out on that!


We can revisit the idea of selling the car in Magadan because there is no Carnet's for Russia. We don't need it to leave. Only considerations would be possible export limitations but then again it'll be worth less than $3000 so who cares? I guess if I just don't renew the registration the car disappears? Who knows!

Russia Eh?

Ugh - this is one of those down moments.
Why is it so hard to get into Russia. Everything everyone tells me is that it's next to impossible, and that somehow we are odd for wanting to enter and exit where we wish. Why are these people so cynical and suspicious of visitors - it's absurd by our standards. I feel that this one damn country is going to ruin the whole trip.

But then a ray of hope... "The border crossing at Tashanta (Russia) and Tsagaannuur (Mongolia) opened for third country nationals in 2005."

You beauty! that's been one of the most difficult pieces of information to attain! Suddenly things are beginning to look up.

This article has made my day - http://dreamers1.com/russia/Practicalities/Russia_Mongolia_Practicalities.htm
O well - I don't feel so bad now ;-)

First video diary

Hey all
I've been trying to become confident making video diary entries on my mobile phone while driving to work or going for walks. It's going to take a while to learn how to do this comfortably. Lets see how these turn out.



That seemed OK?

Communication Ideas

Morning - It's my birthday today and the opportunity has come up to look into potential gifts. So this is an excuse to go wild and post and article about the type of technology we plan to take.

A brilliant idea that I hope to include is a SPOT Satellite Messenger. http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=102
It's a one way communication device that allows you to send the below messages with the press of a button.
The new unit has four basic messages.

911/Emergency - Sends a message to an international emergency department, which coordinates and dispatches local emergency authorities to your location. It continually does this until the batteries run flat. This also informs your contact group which may help if for some reason your 911 call goes unanswered in a certain country - allowing your contact group to coordinate a rescue.

I'm OK - Sends a message to your pre-defined contact group that you are OK and your GPS location so that your friends and family can locate you on Google maps.

Help - Sends a message to your pre-defined contact group informing them that you need non-urgent assistance. For example, I'm bogged, I'm broken down etc. Again giving your contacts your GPS location and visual indication on Google maps.

Track - A facility that allows a stream of messages at roughly 10 minute intervals to be tracked and plotted on Google maps. Probably not a bad idea if you were bushwalking and were not aware when you might become disabled or fall, or become ill - without triggering your SPOT personally. The intent is for people to track your adventure, but I see it more as an 'un-attended tracking in case something goes wrong'. I guess it would be important that your contacts were aware of this prior to you going out - so that IF you didn't come back with an 'I'm OK' after your adventure, they would assume your last location was your last tracking location.

Custom Message - This isn't an interactive SMS type service, but more of a pre-defined message you may often want to send. For example 'I'm stuck in traffic, I'm running late' could be triggered by this button and gets sent to your contact group.

As always with these posts - Click on the pictures to see a larger size one. Above I have pictures of the messenger, and the coverage maps.

OK so that's the spot messenger, but we plan to carry a Satellite phone, on the Iridium network which should give us excellent coverage 24/7 as compared to the laughable 10 minute window every hour or so that you get using the Globalstar network. Play with this tool here to see the Globalstar network shortfalls. Try keying in somewhere in Mongolia. Even keying in Canberra sees similar results. Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, but that does seem to make it a bit unreliable.

The Iridium network has this to say "According to the Frost & Sullivan report (an independent report) over 99% of calls are successfully connected and completed without being disconnected. Iridium has more satellites than any other commercial constellation, and they are constantly in view of every part of the Earth. With no service gaps, Iridium users should be able to pick up and hold a strong communications signal, allowing them to place or receive calls just about anywhere as long as there is a direct line of sight to the sky." - That's the sort of confidence we want.

You can imagine we intend to document this trip whilst we are on the road and are pretty much assuming there will be absolutely zero WiFi or 3G for 90% of the trip. We will try to use satellite data which has a whopping 2.4kbps speed. For those of you that are too young to remember dialup, that should be just less than 17KB/minute. They say that using a specific kind of data service can get you up to 9600bps or 70KB/minute In the interest of saving our patience and money we're intending to post our blog articles via raw text based email. We intend to write the articles, edit and spell check them with an email client like outlook, and email them straight to our blog using a special email address. This should save us a heap compared to writing these online. Even this post has taken more than an hour. Even best case writing the blog offline, then logging into blogger.com and posting would take us 15 minutes at this speed. Which makes for a very expensive post at roughly $3/Minute. So all going to plan, we've budgeted $5/day satellite phone/data usage. We imagine a once a week call home to keep our sanity - but look forward to text based emails from family.