Vehicles

Europe & Scandinavia

I’ll be riding a Yamaha WR250R from 2008. I’ve added some Wolfman luggage racks / bags and this time around I have a GPS to play with. Other than that, pretty much a stock bike, nothing fancy. Should get the job done.

New Zealand

For New Zealand I had a 1990 Ford Laser 1.5. It’s a manual car that got me wherever I wanted to go.

I was the second owner of the car and it was kept in perfect condition by the previous owner. The heater of the car didn’t work very well, but other than that it was great. It was fairly small car, I couldn’t really use it to sleep in the back (I tried it once and didn’t get much sleep, but granted, there were earthquakes during the night, suspension was fine). Never had issues with it. Only thing that I needed to replace was a seatbelt because the lady at the vehicle inspection station thought it didn’t work well enough.
I sold the car to two german girls and I’m pretty confident it is still driving around somewhere (at least I hope).

Canada

The bike I rode was 2005 kawasaki klr 650. This is a single cylinder dual purpose bike. It’s very popular in the americas since it is cheap and reliable. Spare parts can easily be found. This model is not available in Europe since it doesn’t pass the emission restrictions that are imposed over there.

I found the bike through craigslist. The owner of the bike passed away and his friend sold the bike so that the recent widow could recuperate some of the funeral costs. I tend to believe that I had a pretty good deal on the bike. Compared to other KLR’s that were on sale at the time, mine was definitely priced the lowest and even had a lower mileage than many of the other bikes. But hey, you never know.

I did some minor modification… installed a new spark plug, new front brake pads, cleaned the air filter, installed a new rear tire. Had a bigger front brake rotor installed.

When I bought it there were 21800 km on the odometer. When I finished I had about 55000km on the odometer.
So I drove 33000km in 4 months time… not bad… not bad at all.

 

2005 Kawasaki KLR 650