Carnet and repairs

I knew from the start that my tires, chain and sprokets were quite worn, but I didn’t want to fix it in Denmark because it is quite expensive. I had originally planned on getting it fixed in Croatia, since I assumed it would be fairly cheap. However, on the way to Munich I spottet cracks in my tire and figure I’d rather have it fixed sooner rather than later - it would suck to have a broken tire somewhere in the alp. Since the cracks were on the side of the tire, if it broke it couldn’t be repair easily, despite me having a tire-kit with me, it can only fix punctures on the tread, not the sides.

So upon arriving in Munich I drop of my things and headed to the mechanic, after a little chat in half English half German, we agreed on what needed to get fixed. Unfortunately he didn’t have the tires on hand and would have to order them, which wasn’t much of a problem, since I already had to wait on getting my Carnet de Passage. So I went back to the hotel and extended my stay and I was just glad to finally have some time to relax, as I had already drivin over 1000km in just 5 days. This may not sound like a lot, but driving from hotel to hotel everyday, doesn’t allow for much downtime to sightseeing. Besides 150km through the mountains feels like a lot, since I mostly avoided highways.

Before I arrived in Munich, I stayed a night in Erfurt and met another traveler. He was driving from Germany to Japan, similar to my trip, although he was doing it by bicycle and taking a more direct route, crazy guy. I would not want to cycle that far, but to each their own. Erfurt was his home town and we met on the day before the start of his trip, so we had dinner and chatted about our crazy travel plans and found out me might cross paths along the way. He also told me that it was still impossible to cross over from Armenia to Azerbaijan, as he had called the Embassy just a few days ago. That’s why he was flying from Armenia to China to avoid having to go around. But just hoping on a plane is a little harder for me, so I’ll have to change my route a bit and go into Armenia first, then Georgia and then Azerbaijan, which should be fine, as long as I don’t enter the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The day had finally come and my Munich speedrun was over. I went to the ADAC offices to pick up the Carnet de Passage import document. It only took a few minutes of checking over the papers and signing a few things before I had the document in hand. It was a great feeling as that meant I could now slow down and spend some more time sightseeing and wouldn’t have to worry about more documents for now. The ADAC Carnet team was very helpful and told me to take photos and time I imported my bike, just in case I lost the document. We also agreed that I would get my deposit back once I had imported the bike into Japan, since I’ll be registering it there. Normally you still need the Carnet in Japan, but since I’ll be registering the vehicle it’s a separate process. Yay! More paperwork.

The morning after I dropped the motorcycle off at the mechanic and went to a bakery for some breakfast. There I met a very nice lady whom also loved traveling and we got to talking about our different trips. She suggested I should go to the BMW Welt and Museum while I waited for my bike to get fixed, since it was in Munich and I would probably find it interesting. So I did just that, I headed off to BMW welt and spend the early afternoon there. I had a fun time there checkout out all the vehicles and sitting in/on some of them. I was quite different sitting on the bigger 1200cc motorcycles, compared to my 500cc. The museum was also quite interesting and it was nice seeing the history of the engines and how they were developed an evolved over time. They also had some of the motorcycles from the Dakar race, which I thought was really cool! I would love to do something crazy like enter the Dakar.

Next stop, Italy!