And a BIG THANKS to everybody we met on our journey so far!!!
35°C, blue sky, sheep, kangaroos, the ocean and a little Christmas tree on the table ;-)
Looking back to an amazing year we are enjoying our farm life for the time being. We experienced so much, we have seen so many places, countries, cultures, and we met incredible lovely people all over – we really appreciate this break here to recap and going back in our memories…
Even though we are already travelling much slower than the most other bike travelers sometimes we wish we would have stayed longer in certain locations or we would have spent more time with the people we met. We did not experience anything really bad on our whole journey so far – touch wood!!! The opposite: We received so much help from so many people all over which gave us strength and hope – even in tough situations. Indeed we do not regret any second!
What is really amazing too is that we spend nearly 24 hours a day together the last 14 month and we are still happy together!!! Of course there were as well moments where we would like to slaughter each other… but these were only moments ;-) Truly we even feel strange when we are separated for more than an hour meanwhile. “True love!” ;-)
As well it is nice to realize how little you actually need… Still we are on the road with our first equipment more or less. OK some items are nearly falling apart meanwhile but most of it we could repair. And here we have the advantage to get proper tools to do so. A sewing machine provided by Gil gave Kerstin the chance to patch almost everything. All kind of tools are available here for us so we could manage to do some maintenance at our motorcycle as well. Sascha did well! He changed the steering bearing by himself. The biggest challenge here was probably that we run out of power caused by a thunder storm after everything was taken apart. Parts were spread around in the middle of the shed in-between all the olive barrels. And Sascha needed to grind before we could continue… In the end we could use Eric’s generator which just produced enough power to run the grinder. But now it was dark already and we had to put the bike together with head torches as the only of source of light. Happy we finished in the middle of the night; we left the shed just to see the power came back some time ago ;-) Also Sascha took the chance to give him a welding lesson. And after some practice he welded our panniers holder! This rack has been welded about 18 times. In Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia (a BIG thank you to Sunny Cycle in KL once again!!!) and finally in Down Under. I hope this was the last time now!
Kerstin became a Christmas Elf helping to prepare hampers full of olive products and Sascha had time to maintenance the bike. If the weather is right we go fishing and spend the night at the beach, we do some sightseeing in the nearer surrounding or just meeting up with friends for some beers.
What is coming next? No detailed plan yet. We will probably leave our “farm life” behind beginning of next year and as we are really keen to see Tasmania – we will head direction south. It is just 4500-5000 km from here to catch the ferry… Around the corner ;-) Anyhow you will read from us soon.
WE WISH YOU ALL A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR. As well we want to take the opportunity to THANK everybody we met and we hope to see you all again – when and wherever!
