It’s always darkest before the dawn

Cassie is as we speak writing a post about the toils of shipping. It goes without saying that ‘this better be worth it’. There is a hint of truth to that expression in this instance. I can’t help but wonder if after the immense expense, frustration, stress, fights, sweat and tears… will it be worth it?! I can’t help but romanticise it and assume “yes, from what I’ve seen, it will be”
But every financial and bureaucratic blow makes it hard to remained focused on the goal. My only escape from it is to become involved in the technicalities of the car and equipment.

This picture is a bit of a flash-back. This is the waterproof fuse panel I installed in the beginning. Well, as you can see the stark contrast between the filth that is outside and the pristine internals means it works perfect. The reason for having this panel off is to install the GPS. I’ve set it up to be triggered by the accessories position of the ignition switch, but is actually powered by the auxiliary battery.

This was captured from a video at night, so it’s not real clear. But the just of it is, and pretty much the main purpose of it, is to provide direction when there is no obvious roads…. MONGOLIA!
You can see by the yellow and red line pointing straight up. This points to our next waypoint which in this case was 13613KM away (i just dropped something on a world map to make it work). This combined with the virtual compass, it gives us some great sense of direction. I have since customised all these screens to really make it handy. We have some beautiful maps of Russia & Mongolia which is nice to have all setup already. I need to calibrate some more maps because when I did the rest of them, we were not driving from Vladivostok. Don’t be alarmed by the reliance on this system. It’s going to be very reliable, but we have a printed Mongolian atlas on its way to us which we will update frequently with our position.

It’s amazing to think there are more than enough maps on this memory stick to travel two thirds of the circumference of the world…. or across the largest continent… which ever way you want to look at it.
We also picked up some waders which I have a picture of Cassie wearing in our lounge room which is far too embarrassing to post here. But that aside, they are cool. Not only will they facilitate safe evaluation of rivers before we cross, they will allow us to get some cool camera angles from half way across, low to the water, or from the other side. Sounds like every TV show you’ve ever seen right? but they had to get the camera man to the other side somehow to get that shot. We have since learnt that you don’t store water in clear bottles because mould forms. So we need dark, light proof ones. These ones should be lightproof and also fit our campers plumbing without modification.

I genuinely do feel a bit crazy undertaking this trip. Everyone has that blank look on their face when you talk to new people about it. Almost a ‘I wouldn’t think that is possible’ or ‘surely you’re mad, why would anyone want to do that?!’ but at the moment, I even agree with their logic.
I try and think of this like an investment (odd I know, but hear me out). It’s a huge capital outlay, it’s fraught with risks (95% of them are just financial), it takes a long time, and we don’t even know if it’ll work. We have however read all the books and researched everything possible. If it is a success, it will pay out ten fold in life experience… but hey, even if it only ‘breaks even’ we’ve still done something that maybe one in a thousand people would ever do and maybe one in ten dreamt of.
But two little inspirational punches to get me back in the spirit are:
“A lifetime of regret awaits the man with an unpursued dream” – Someone awesome.
“It’s always darkest before the dawn” is obviously an old saying, but is timely as it’s also a lyric from a great song by Florence + The Machine.

How do you ship a car to Russia?...

How do you ship a car to Russia?... With a lot of help from people who know more about this stuff than you do, and a dash of stress.

It's me, Cassie, typing up this blog post. Officially my first post for the epic TwoMagadan trip. Some might say it's about time I contributed something to this blog and the trip. I shrug in their general direction. I have been quietly doing my little bit towards this trip behind the scenes. I think my realm of capabilities are in dealing with the paperwork side of things. So, I'll be doing the paperwork and coordination of the visas and organising the shipment of the car whilst Graeme concentrates on getting the car up to spec (that's been a mammoth task), navigation system and paper maps sorted and of course the technology we'll be taking with us.

The reason for this post is to let you all know some things about shipping a car to Vladivostok, Russia. First thing you need to do is contact Bill Nicoll at SilverWind - silverwind@pacific.net.au. He's the man to know when it comes to all of this. If he doesn't have the answer he knows someone who does. SilverWind is basically THE international shipping company in Vladivostok - that we've managed to find anyway. There is also  another shipping company, FESCO, but from what we can gather from our research they're best for local Russian national shipping only.

Something else to keep in mind about shipping is that rules, regulations, costs and timetables are constantly changing. We're currently in the process of setting a shipping date in concrete, but there's always the chance of unforeseeable problems such as strikes, port congestion, problems with the ship, customs etc. Hopefully our shipping experience will be a boring one - ie: no problems!

We learnt today that recently a regulation was changed around the shipping of "hazardous materials". Well, the battery in a car is considered hazardous so that was always going to have to be disconnected. Annoying but fine, whatever. Today we learnt that fuel in a car stowed on the vehicle deck of a ship is considered fine so long as the fuel tank has a maximum of 25% in it. But...and this is the illogical, irritating, money grab by whoever is responsible...if your car is in a container, like ours will be, the fuel in that is considered a "hazardous material" so you've got two choices: completely drain the fuel tank(s) or pay the US$150 hazardous materials surcharge and notify every port between Sydney and Busan, Korea that there's fuel in the car. I have a problem with that for a number of reasons: 1) the car is a diesel which means if the tanks are emptied the car needs to be re-primed - doable but a laborious task. Also runs the risk of damage to the car when someone goes to start it. Which brings me to number 2) how the heck are the port staff/customs meant to start the car to unload it from the container for us if we drain the fuel? der!; 3) the car is also full of a crap load of oil, as all vehicles are, which is no more susceptible to spontaneous combustion than diesel is. But, the oil in the car is not a problem; 4) what about all those vehicles in cargo that aren't in a container and are exempt from this unreasonable rule - go figure; and lastly, 5) what on earth do they think the ship runs on!?!? Arrrgghh brain explosion!

That's my information rant done. On another related topic, my Russian letter of invitation is on it's way from Moscow and should arrive any day now. In a couple of weeks I shall be joining the ranks of those who have a Russian visa!

Underestimated

Hello. I’ve just finished reading a blog of a two couples who are from Brisbane.

http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog/threeinatruck/1/tpod.html

It seems I’ve underestimated the kind of road that the road of bones is. It’s doable, but it’s not just going to be a gravel road with a few rocky river crossings. I’ve borrowed all of these pictures from their blog, so consider this me referencing them.

I imagined more of this:

… and NOT so much of this.

The other good thing about this blog, is we now have some clear distances between Vladivostok and Magadan…. 5000KM, two to three weeks of driving or roughly four weeks since arriving in Vladivostok. The road to Magadan is effectively a figure-eight. Meaning there are four segments, allowing you to swap roads mid way if you have a failure or have had enough. It also has the advantage of us not retracing exactly the same steps to and from Magadan (that could get boring)

The white truck above arrived into Magadan with no brakes… relying on the handbrake. To be honest, I can’t quite get my head around all of the mechanical failures. From what I understand, they have had FOUR flat tyres. And they don’t look like the cheap all-terrain tyres that came on our truck, these look like top of the line brand name off road tyres! It does look like they are carrying more weight than us and it turns out that the brake failures were due to a damaged brake line due to some after-market air-bag suspension. We’re they running lower pressures? Should they have been driving slower? One of the cars (the bogged maroon v8 turbo land cruiser) was AVERAGING 105KM/Hr one day. Not on this road, but on some highway closer to Mongolia. Oh my god that’s still crazy.

So to summarise, I’ve underestimated:
How long shipping and customs clearance will take
How much time the travel will take
The distances involved we must travel
How many failures to expect

Good news is that they used the same shipping company. It’s so important to use a Russian company as the days of paperwork on the ground in Russia is immense and I would say impossible to translate and organise without their local knowledge.

So, enough about them. What's new with us? Well, not a great deal. Since recovering the Rodeo last weekend, my headlights, taillights, and indicators all had condensation in them to some degree. The degrees ranged from a light haze to our own portable river ecosystem.
Here they are, all washed and drying in the sun. So much for ‘semi-sealed’ globes, there is a huge gap at the bottom even with the rubber boot on all the way.

Sealed it up. The roof rack has now been emptied. I’m still yet to discover the source of the leak in one of the boxes, but I will. I’m trying to work out the logistics of how we get the car packed and unpacked from the shipping container. The roof rack needs to be taken off to fit in the container. Apparently they deliver the car to your hotel… so that alludes to them putting the roof rack on?! I’m not sure if they will eh. It seems the boxes and hi-lift will actually fit in the back of the car, but with the rack, I may have to dissemble it entirely and pack it in the car. No great big deal, but it’s probably an hour’s work to assemble it again.

Here is a new idea for securing the flyscreen mesh over the grille. It was taped in place before, and although the tape stuck to the grille, It wouldn’t stick successfully to the flyscreen (I’m a slow learner ok!).
It’s tough aluminium flyscreen, so it does bend over the back side and the clip just holds it still.

More real world testing of the GoPro

It’s in my nature to save things, I don’t know why. Even though the camera came with four adhesive mounts, I was still very hesitant to use one… well I did. I fixed one behind the mirror and it generates some brilliant, vibration free, point of view shots. Today we went on a picnic with Cassie’s parents. I ran the camera for about 30 minutes on 720p, 60fps in wide mode. The wide mode is stunning but it makes us look like we are driving very fast. Below is a shot in wide mode. You can see the fish-eye effect towards the outer edges with the bendy trees. But amazingly, you can even see the snorkel in the bottom right of the shot. Because the camera doesn’t have a preview or viewfinder, the footage is typically captures with a ‘I hope this looks ok’ attitude as it is just guesswork on these early days.

So only after getting home and reviewing the footage, I’ve decided ‘wide’ mode is too wide.
I know that the shot below is virtually unusable, you can see the difference in perspective if you use the bull bar as a relative measure. The camera is mounted at the exact same angle and position, yet the perspective is more ‘human eye’. I think the wide mode would be very useful if you wanted to capture traffic for evidence, but to capture a point of view, I think this mode may be better.

It’s taken years to slowly break the habit of ‘keeping things for special occasions’. We all do it. We have the good china we don’t use, along with the good cutlery. The good tools we save for good jobs and we leave the plastic screen protectors on things way too long. But the sad truth of it is, it all goes out of date. Either you grow out of it (heaven forbid using good clothes for having fun), it gets stolen or you don’t care about it any more.

You can’t take one lick of it with you, so stop living like

I get why we have this attitude. You only have to be poor for a day to appreciate the scarcity of things. I’m sure it comes from parents and their experiences (and those of their parents). I’m sure if you only got one meal a day, you would certainly keep the screen protector on something worth a hundred meals.

I do however think that some of the countries we will be travelling through will have a different take on it… but more on that later.

Q: What’s new?

A: Not a whole lot ;-)
I guess you could call it practice. Deliberately getting bogged to practice self recovery:

I am so thankful for the front diff lock, without it, using the Maxtrax never quite works like the advertisements. They are fine, but used on a vehicle with open differentials, you end up only able to use one at the front, and one at the back. But even then, once those wheels have traction on the Maxtrax, the drive disappears out to the wheels with less traction.

Today I changed the transfer case oil and rear diff oil and greased everything. The transfer case oil needed changing because of the below video. The right hand side is a sample from the transfer case, the left hand side is a clean sample from the gearbox.

Four wheel driving is an expensive hobby.One of the reasons I resisted buying a car before we left is so that I could avoid costly damage. Ok, the above is a minor cost, but the damage can get expensive. I have discovered that over the course of my ownership, I have inadvertently dinted both diesel tanks. No biggies, but enough to see that they are not perfectly straight. dammit! Probably lost 5L in capacity all up, but the question begs, is there any weakness developed now? To try and limit the risk associated with a tank rupture and loss of fuel, we will be switching between tanks every couple of hundred KM’s. This way we only risk loosing 'half’ our fuel if one tank fails and we don’t notice the leak. if you buy into the superstition, Murphy's law would suggest it will invariably be the full tank that fails… but I don’t really buy into that. I do believe in mitigating risks however ;-)

Oh! something that is new is this: (Obscure shot builds suspense). Don’t mind the string, I’m still learning to trust the suction mount.

It’s a low price, brilliant quality HD video camera. Key features include 1080p HD video, 11MP stills, 170 degree field of view, water proof to 60M. They are an ugly little bastard but very versatile. The versatility is demonstrated in the accessories which are very well priced. From additional ‘bolt on’ batteries, anti-fog inserts, wi-fi remote and even a red floaty to help you find it in water.
To demonstrate it’s versatility, here is another video shot entirely with these cameras:

Shot entirely with GoPro HD Hero 2’s

We’ve taken probably two hours of footage with it so far, and it has been very impressive. Not quite as awesome as the footage above, but cool none the less.

One of my roof boxes leak. I have no idea where or how, but after some significant rain the other night, there was about 5mm of water lining the bottom. A bit annoying considering they are meant to be weatherproof… evidently not.

The registration on the truck expires on the 10th of June. Not awesome because not only would we be on our trip by that stage, but how would we renew it's registration whilst in Russia. It'll be shipping out mid march so time is of the essence.

On a previous visit to the RTA, after swimming through the 'you can't do that' attitude, we realised that renewing the rego ahead of time would be an option. I couldn't remember the specifics about it, so we visited the RTA this morning to clarify. Even the topic blew her mind... "you mean your taking YOUR car overseas?" as if she had misheard me. However, once she thought it trough we came up with some results. The short of it is, we can renew the registration up to three months before it's expiry and a pink slip is valid for 6 weeks prior to renewal.
This is all good news. In a few weeks I'll go get the pink slip done, then renew the rego on the 10th of March. The window sticker will actually be for 15 months which is cool. I had fears of arriving in Russia but having difficulty moving it without the sticker.

I feel like my job in this trip is preparing the car. I know I go on and on about it, but its my responsibility. It'll get a full service with synthetic oil before loading it on the ship. I'm also going to change the brake pads and maybe shoes too before we go because it's something I can do. I've always had this fear of a clutch failing. It happened towards the end of our last trip. It wasn't a deal breaker and realistically, we could have driven another 30,000km in it's state. But it's almost like a single point of failure that concerns me. You can run on a few less cylinders, one tank, one tail shaft, one diff, a few brakes, no heater, no aircon, no electricity, one gear or one range, but you can't run without a clutch. The beauty is, they typically don't fail instantly. You'll feel it slipping long before you can't move the car. But as you embark on an isolated stretch of Mongolia steppe or sandy Kazakhstan with the thought in the back of your mind "gee, I think that slipped when we went up that mountain yesterday" the uncertainty will rise and I will begin to stress.

You may suggest 'why don't you just replace it ahead of time?' Well because I suspect it would cost at least $1500 and if it doesn't need doing that sounds like a waste of money.

On the Pajero, it had an inspection window on the side of the bellhousing. I don't think this one has anything like that but I assume you could measure the width of the pressure plate to determine life span?

 I've rebuilt our laptop with a fresh install of it's operating system, all new drivers, 4x the memory and upgraded the hard drive. Not only does the new hard drive offer twice the space, it offers much more speed and better battery life. That and it's oddly quieter. I'm posting this post from the laptop to make sure it all works. Weirdly, I need to seriously start thinking about the in-car navigation. I had been procrastinating on such a purchase, but I really need to act sooner rather than later. I might go down and measure it to make sure it'll fit.

The second picture is a bit of a laugh. I took this picture milliseconds before a guys head came into view (if you look close you may be able to see him behind the snorkel). I was taking the picture of our car kind of 'in context' of the street. When I walked up to the car, the old guy said "You're flirting with danger there". To which I replied, "what's that mate? no front number plate?". "No, parking front in in a reverse in spot". Maybe he was just making conversation but it's so stupid. why can't people just mind their own business?

So Cassie's Letter Of Invitation or Visa Support letter has been ordered and should arrive on the 7th of February.

 Position: 12-01-14 16:54:32 -0800
http://maps.google.com/maps?&ll=-35.37395,149.1872&q=-35.37395,149.1872&z=16

Storm blew over

Excuse my short hand, I'm writing on the phone so my post will be brief

The meeting with the client was calm and un-eventful. They seem to think we have 6 months left on our contract which works out well as i didn't think we had one. Even if the worst happens, its a heap less workload on the other gents. We will be going through a tender process with other companies.

The tyre is now mounted and balanced but I need to get it up onto the roof. It was a bit windy and wet to attempt today, but tomorrow is a different day. It's a two person job. One to lift and one to steady. In an emergency it's certainly a one person job, but you risk denting something.

My Russian visa was issued without a hitch. It's the multi-entry 12 month business visa. Jackpot!

I was fortunate enough to receive a tyre repair kit for Christmas.
 

The're not intended for sidewall damage, but I'm sure I'd give it a go in the middle of nowhere.