January 24, 2006 - English part (sev)

This website is entirely in French, and we don't have the courage to translate it. Anyway you can find plenty of other bike-world-tour-blog in English on
Horizons Unlimited web site, or simply look at our pictures in the 'Photos section'.


Here, in case it helps other travelers, I will just put a set of technical stuff.

The home made pannier

For those interested to have an interactive map of their trip, I have made a page that helps you to draw your travel itinerary on Google Maps(tm) and put links to your blog. You can see the map of this trip here. Or try it directly here . Just click on the map to add points, click on the points your created to put some text or links to a blog section of yours. Drag the map to move, or change the zoom level with the +/- buttons. You can also embed the map in an iframe on our site directly. All this is still beta version.

Going with a 250cc

The reasons where :
- we wanted to have the same bike my girlfriend and I. (she is 1.6m tall).
- we don't want to go very fast (stay under the legal limit).
- we normally have rather powerful bikes (I a hornet 600, and vero had a CBR 600), so would anyway have to loose some horsepower, even with a NX650cc, or AT.
- cheaper (so we could even loose the bikes or leave them somewhere)
- very easy to handle.
- very simple engine
- less volume for transportation

Bad points :
- we where really missing some kW when doing passes like the aconcagua with front winds. With the altitude, the engines where less powerfull than usual, and the road was straigth so the buses and even some trucks where faster than us.
- you can`t put as much things than on a bigger bike.
- we had some troubles to find some 16' tires in Argentina. They often only had bigger and smaller size.
- with front winds in south of argentina we could not go very fast.
- In New Zealand, we would have liked to have sport 600cc, but then we would have been over the speed limits. (=fines)

Big or Small ??? :

We also discoverd that this model was not imported in NZ nor Argentina, so we had problems to find a spare part when we needed it. Honda dealers can have any parts, but it may take to 2-3 weeks to come from Japan. (We never needed this anyway).