June 2005 Archives

Many of us have dreamed of some day racing in the Dakar Rally, but few of us can afford the price of a vehicle plus the hefty entrance fee (€11,700). The Plymouth-Banjul Challenge is aimed at those of us who might not be able to afford the Dakar but still want to do something similar, with every bit as much adventure. The Challenge lays down few rules, and two of them are there to limit the amount of money spent on the race. Vehicles must not be worth more than £100, and racers must not spend more than £15 in preperation. All of the vehicles are auctioned off in Gambia at the end of the race to raise money for Gambian charities. If you have the time and are lacking in the adventure department then you may want to look into the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge.

In Dakar news, a broad overview of the route has been released and you can now view the 2006 Dakar route map online. 2006 will be the first year a Mauritanian motorcyclist will participate in the Dakar and the rally will cross a new country by starting in Portugal in the capitol city of Lisbon. The motorcycle category has been filled, with 320 total entrants outnumbering the 230 possible spots. This year also marks the adoption of a 150km/h (93mph) speed limit for motorcycles and trucks, with organizers currently researching a speed limit for cars. Interested parties can view Dakar registration information but are warned that it may lead to excessive dreaming.

While researching our upcoming multi-fuel portable stoves roundup I came across Mark Jurey's Penny Alcohol Stove. Many claim it to be the best DIY alcohol stove they've used. I had not researched alcohol as a fuel source extensively until reading about this stove but it looks like a very viable option--finding burnable alcohol on your trip will be almost as easy as finding petrol. The price is right, at roughly three Heineken cans, and it's claimed that the stove can be made in the field with only a sharp knife available. Most travelers I know can spare that, and many will jump at the chance to make this stove if it calls for them to drink a few beers first.

For more information you can check out Zen Stoves (which isn't limited to information on alcohol stoves) and Art Simon's review of lightweight alcohol stoves for backpacking.

Google Sightseeing--whose motto is "Why bother seeing the world for real?"--allows those of us without the wherewithal or ability to take time off work to see the world. It's a frequently updated blog that highlights interesting satellite imagery using Google Maps satellite data. The site is very well designed and browsable by location, category, and through a map interface.

I believe most of the Google Maps satellite data comes from Google's acquisition of Keyhole last year. Now Google is almost ready to unveil the updated version of Keyhole, called Google Earth. The screenshot makes me very excited, as it looks capable of overlaying driving directions and has many other enhancements over the original Keyhole software. No word yet on whether it will be free or join the stable of Google's few pay offerings.

[Sergey] Brin demonstrated how in the new release, he could "fly"--in a virtual sense--through the Grand Canyon, a landmark he's never visited in person, and view the canyon's peaks and valleys.

"Now I don't have to go," he said.

There's currently a beta version of Google Earth available that you can play around with as well as the official Google Earth website.

If you'd like a completely free alternative there's NASA's World Wind software, the opensource equivalent to Keyhole and Google Earth. World Wind is setup to access some of NASA's scientific data, and users have been udpating it to show data of interest to many. World Wind is also useful for checking out global news in a novel new way--it allows the user to view alerts on the globe. Forest fires, flooding, and earthquakes can all be seen soon after they happen. The connected traveler could use this data to make updates to their route in realtime, avoiding delays or rushing in to document or help out in a disaster.

Finally, for a pictorial travelogue from a place that few travelers will ever go, see Elena's Kid of Speed website. She takes her Kawasaki Ninja through the ghost town of Chernobyl in the irradiated zone, Geiger counter and camera in hand. It is an amazing and sobering look at the aftereffects of a nuclear disaster:

I have ridden all my life and over the years I have owned several different motorbikes. I ended my search for a perfect bike with a big kawasaki ninja, that boasts a mature 147 horse power, some serious bark, is fast as a bullet and comfortable for a long trips.

I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130km from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads.

The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes.

In places where roads have not been travelled by trucks or army vehicles, they are in the same condition they were 20 years ago--except for an occasional blade of grass that discovered a crack to spring through. Time does not ruin roads, so they may stay this way until they can be opened to normal traffic again... a few centuries from now.

The Pak-Lite is a very simple concept that has a definite appeal for hikers and other travelers with an eye on keeping their carry weight down. It's basically a battery cap that also happens to contain a three-way switch and two ultra-bright LEDs, and which happens to have survived the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail, three months in a freezer, 45 days frozen in a block of ice, and a drop from an airplane traveling at 100mph. It's a flashlight stripped down to the bare essentials, where the battery itself is the grip. The next time you need a light that doesn't weigh much more than a 9-volt battery I suggest you give it a try. It also comes in an infrared version--which would come in handy for both night-vision users and those interested in infrared photography--and a flashing version for those that need an emergency signal.

Anyone who has any interest in professional sports, rock climbing, running or any other outdoor activity has almost surely heard of Under Armour. It's been around for a couple of years now and continues to innovate with newer products and continued advancements in the technology surrounding their patented fabric. My goal is to test a variety of their products and offer my recommendations for their use.

The focus of this review will be to evaluate a few of the more general items to meet our readers' trekking and adventuring needs. I will focus less on numbers and more on my perception of performance. How I feel and what I feel like while wearing and using the various products is what is being evaluated. I intend to evaluate the following Under Armour products in some varied environments:

Heat Gear: Tight compression fabric designed for high performance heat removal
Loose Gear: Loose fitting version of the same fabric, cut like a standard t-shirt
Cold Gear: Two-fold compression fabric designed to remove excess moisture while trapping heat
Underwear: Heat removal, comfort and moisture transport
Socks: Heat removal, impact dampening, and moisture transport

Read on after the jump for my detailed impressions.

You can now listen to Erden on the Entreprenuer Hour's final show (in Windows Media Audio). The show is titled Making your Dream a Reality and Erden "will share how far he has traveled, how far he has to go, and the challenges and rewards of living a dream."

There's a new Ask Slashdot up asking for advice about DV cameras that are up to the task of on-the-road use. If you're in the market too it's worth a read; I suggest changing the comment sort mode to "highest scores first" for a quick read of the comments deemed most helpful.

Tom Sheppard's book, the Vehicle-dependent Expedition Guide, is well-known because it is well-written and researched with an aim for "dead accurate detail."

Even though it is in a 2nd edition it is becoming hard to find. You can check this Amazon page for the softcover edition to see if any copies become available there.

From earthroamer.com (which may also be worth a look around):

This book started as a commission from Land Rover to 'do a little booklet on expeditions'. We had the idea of basing it around the Royal Geographical Society notes Tom Sheppard had done earlier - these in turn drawing on his extensive expedition experience and in particular the first west-east crossing of the Sahara for which he gained the Royal Geographical Society's prestigious Ness Award.

For those that don't know, the Ness Award is "for travellers, particularly those who have successfully popularised Geography and the wider understanding of our world and its environments." A list of other Ness Award winners is available, as well as a list of other Royal Geographic Society awards.

[Via Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools.]

You know the feeling: You've made the final ascent of K2 only to find your camera's batteries are dead, leaving you with no way to prove to the guys back home that you were actually there. We want to make sure this doesn't happen to you, so we've detailed our favorite picks for mobile power.

Soldius has the smallest solution I've seen, which also happens to be the most powerful gram for gram. The Solidus1 is a compact cell phone charger designed to provide enough power to completely charge a phone in 2-3 hours of direct sunlight. Amazingly it weighs only 85 grams and will fit in your pocket! This is also the only model I've seen which does not require an attached battery pack. It's compatible with Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Siemens, and Sony phones. A model to charge PDAs and other accessories is in the works now. Here's more information on the Soldius1.

The Solio is another solution, it weighs quite a bit more due to its integrated 1600mAh rechargeable batteries. It uses by far the most unique looking panel setup, called Solar Blade. It has sleek lines and folds up to about a third of its size when not in use. Capable of charging PDAs, cell phones, the Gameboy SP & Gameboy Advance, and iPods--at the same power and rate as if they were using their own power blocks--this is my pick for portable power. $99.99 from Solio.

I run my equipment quite hard, and if you're like me then ICP's PowerFlex is the only solution that you should consider. It is constructed of lightweight, ultra-flexible CIGS solar cells and designed to take a beating. ICP produces 5, 10, 20 and 40 watt versions of the PowerFlex, all of which are capable of being daisy-chained together via plug & play side connectors. These would be great for draping over the rear of your backpack, providing you on-the-go charging of all your electronics or batteries. View the specifications and choose the model that's right for you.

Trekking on a budget? Check out all-battery.com. They're selling the Solar E-Power on sale for $49.99 right now. Compatible with a whole host of cell phones and smaller electronics, this panel is capable of 1.38 watts in direct sunlight and comes with a series of adapters to meet your needs. Here's more information on the Solar E-Power.

If you need to cross Europe or get from point to point in a hurry this may be an essential resource for you. It's a GPS-based early warning system for speed traps and speed camera locations in Europe. The system features a downloadable database fixed radar installations, as well as areas known for mobile radar operation. The system is capable of holding up to 10,000 possible trapping points in memory.

As you approach an area covered by a speed-trap the early warning system will set off a series of beeps and flashing lights to warn you to slow down. A version for cars has been available for sometime but now there is a version avaiable for motorcycles.

The English site has not been updated as of yet, but the French version (translated via Google) has more information. It's also notable that there are no laws against this type of device, as it's not actually a radar detector.

Ronja is an interesting DIY design plan for building a set of optical 10Mbps transceivers capable of beaming information at 10Mbps up to 1.4 kilometers away. It's full duplex and costs less than $60. Ronja is small and easily transportable to remote locations for quick deployment of communication infrastructure. The technology simulates a LAN connection via LED transmission rather than using radio waves.

Transfer files between base camps, create village to village networks, or relay communications over multiple, cheap installations.

From the site:

Ronja (Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access) is a Free Technology (like Free Software) project of optical point-to-point data link. The design is released under the GNU General Public License: you get all the necessary documentation and construction guides free. The construction costs are minimal; it's probably the cheapest wireless system ever. The operation is reliable and immune to interference.

Ever needed to amplify a weak audio signal while on the road? You might try Chu Moy's portable design which can run on 9-volt or NiMH batteries:

Chu Moy designed a very popular headphone amplifier that's easy to build, and it can be built small enough to fit in a pocket, power supply and all. It's powerful enough to drive very inefficient headphones to thunderous volumes from even weak sources, and it sounds excellent considering that you can build a bare-bones CMoy amp for just US$20, and a pretty nice amp for under $50. Considering that the cheapest of the worthy commercial amps is $100 and most of them are in the $200+ range, this is a very worthwhile cost difference.

Erden Eruç will be on the Entrepreneur Hour Radio Show this Monday between noon and 1:00pm EST (11am CT, 9am PST).

The show title is Breaking Free: Making your Dream a Reality.

From Erden:

The career changing aspect of the Six Summits Project and my reasons for embarking on a new path also drew attention, and became the focal point of many media interviews. Similar interest remains in the US for this latter topic. For example, I will be interviewed live on radio on Monday, June 13th at noon EST (that is at 22:00 on Monday in Turkey).

Should be some great stuff, hopefully it inspires some of you to start saving so you can quit your day jobs and go on the road.

Over at Globeriders you can track Helge Pedersen and his group of adventurers in realtime as they ride their Silk Road tour.

Those of you planning for an RTW trip might want to look into this as a way to keep supporters, readers, and family up to date on your whereabouts.

[Update: There's also a page at the GPSS website about using Inmarsat-C to track vehicles.]

How could I forget the ukulele in my travel guitar roundup? It's already small enough to take with you wherever you're going, it has two less strings to break and to tune, and some say it's easier to learn.

Pictured at right is a Fluke ukulele in the cowboy style. You're a loner traveling the world on your trusty metal steed, right? Make sure your instrument shows it.

Documenting your high speed tour of the Autobahn but don't have a Hollywood budget for vehicle-mounted cameras?

Make a couple yourself for ~$20 in parts and keep the expensive camera at home. ErinCH has videos and a simple howto:

I was bored after my finals and decided to do something fun. I had a Logitech Quickcam Express webcam for 3 years which sucked all the time. It had a very poor video quality and didn't work well in my dimmed room. So I decided to mount it in front of my car.

Five or six of these placed on the right vehicle or motorcycle could yield some very spectacular driving scenes.

CVS has introduced a new single use DVD-quality video camera system. The innovative camera allows up to 20 minutes of DVD-quality video and sound recording, as well as playback and deletion of recorded clips via a 1.4" color screen. At $30 these little cameras could be indispensable to the average adventurer or traveler. The $30 price tag and one-time use means you don't have to feel bad about strapping it to the front of a car or motorcycle--or worry about the Vietnamese humidity ruining a nicer camera.

PRNewsWire has the story:

Built on the Pure Digital(R) Imaging platform, the revolutionary new CVS camcorder is the perfect easy-to-carry choice for capturing memories of weddings, vacation getaways, beach trips, or any time that family and friends get together. Just grab it and go -- and leave that expensive and cumbersome traditional camcorder at home. Using just three simple buttons, consumers can capture up to 20 minutes of digital quality video and sound, in as many separate segments or clips as they wish.

The video camcorder's 1.4-inch color playback screen lets consumers instantly enjoy their home videos and even delete unwanted segments with the press of a button. Once finished shooting, consumers simply return the video camera to their local CVS/pharmacy store and get a DVD to view and share the very same day.

Erden Eruç has set out to conquer the oceans, the mountains, and everything in between. Others have set out to do the same, but Erden is going to do it with only the power of his own arms and legs. He will bicycle across six continents and row the oceans in between, and he will climb the highest peak on each.

The site very eloquently describes a feeling that many lifelong travelers and adventurers have:

There are dreams that never go away. They live inside us. We learn to live with them. We tuck them away. We try to ignore them. We have commitments in the city. We feel guilty to even consider those dreams. Sometimes we indulge, lifting our eyes off the pages of a magazine with colorful pictures, and gaze into the distance. These dreams most often define the true individual inside us that wants to come alive.

Erden's voyage is inspiring in a wholly different way from most others because he is doing everything using the power of his own body. Inspiring the youth of the world and showing them that their dreams are possible if they only try hard enough is one of his goals, and undertaking a voyage without the use of motorized transport will surely make most of us marvel at the power of our bodies when properly motivated.

For an overview of the voyage you can view a map of Erden's route.

For more information on ocean rowing please visit the Ocean Rowing Society's homepage.

It seems that Dr. Dan's Alternative Fuelwerks also sells biodiesel in Seattle (and they deliver!), so if you're in town and need some of the cleaner stuff you've got some variety.

Please also see Dr. Dan's nice list of Washington biodiesel stations.

A guitar can ease your mind when you're waiting on the side of the road and out of gas. It can also serve as a source of income on the road if you partake in busking and always serves as a great conversation starter.

Martin makes a series of Backpacker guitars that come in Steel String, Classical, and Mandolin styles. There are many reviews available for the Steel String version here and here and for the Classical version here.

You can also check out this thread on Horizons Unlimited about carrying a guitar while traveling by motorcycle.

If the Martin guitar doesn't look like your thing check out these other travel and smaller-sized guitars:

• Takamine's Takamini guitars (3 varieties, acoustic & acoustic/electric)
• Ovation's Trekker guitars (2 varieties, both acoustic/electric as far as I can tell; these look nice)
• Ibanez' Daytripper guitars (2 varieties, acoustic & acoustic/electric)
• Go Guitars' Parlour, Grande Mahogany, Grande Walnut, Walnut, and Mahogany (5 varieties, acoustic in steel string and nylon)
• Washburn's Rover RO10 and RO20 (2 varieties, acoustic in steel string and nylon, respectively)
• Fender's TG4 Travel Guitar (1 variety, acoustic)
• Traveler Guitars' Pro-Series, Speedster, Escape Steel, Escape Nylon, and Escape Bass (!) (3 varieties, electric in steel string, nylon, and bass)
• Vagabond Travel Guitar's Vagabond Standard Steel String (1 variety, acoustic steel string with option for acoustic/electric; left-handed version available)
• Taylor Guitar's Baby, Baby Mahogany, and Big Baby (3 varieties, all acoustic, 3/4 dreadnought and 15/16 dreadnought)

For even more options try looking up SoloEtte, Brunner (with removable neck!), Gibson, Larivee, Ozark, AXL, Vintage, and Crafter guitars.

There's also a nice list of travel guitars over at Guitar Notes.

What's the first result for "motorcycle travel" on Google? It's Horizons Unlimited, the world's largest motorcycle travel website and a mainstay for any motorcycle traveler who uses the internet.

Need some inspiration? The Horizons Unlimited E-Zine is just about the most travel-inspiring thing you can read every two months. The bulletin board is also especially noteworthy as it's the one place where you can ask any motorcycle travel-related question and get many informed answers.

As an added bonus, this website is also the best repository of border crossing information available currently on the web.

Seattle now has its first biodiesel refueling station, operated by Laurelhurst Oil. The station uses locally produced biodiesel and promises cleaner burning, 100% backwards compatible fuel which will run smoother and prolong periods between maintenance. A number of claims that, if true, could present a much better option for those of us with diesel vehicles. If you're traveling through the Seattle area and need some fuel for your vehicle or generator you might think about trying Laurelhurts's biodiesel.

The station is located at:

4550 Union Bay Pl NE
Seattle, WA 98105

From Laurelhurst's biodiesel page:

Biodiesel Quick Facts:

1. Biodiesel is made in the USA from renewable resources, reducing our dependence on foreign oil. We supply locally produced biodiesel when available.
2. Biodiesel will run in ANY diesel engine. Select pre-1990 vehicles require updates to older "natural" rubber hoses and gaskets. Biodiesel is a natural solvent, and will loosen diesel sludge in older vehicles; resulting in a plugged fuel filter. The solution? Fill with B50 or above, wait two weeks and replace your fuel filter.
3. Biodiesel can be used 100% (B100) or mixed at any ratio with regular diesel fuel. Common blends are 20% biodiesel/80% diesel (B20), or a 50/50 combination (B50). To blend, fill with diesel first, then top off with biodiesel. A common method is to fill up at half tank increments, alternating biodiesel and petroleum diesel.
4. Biodiesel is cleaner than petroleum diesel. Biodiesel use substantially reduces emissions of greenhouse pollutants and essentially eliminates sulfur dioxides and sulfates emissions.