World Tour - Europe, Asia, North and South America - Entries for: Turkmenistan

The next morning we were awoken by the heat. Since there was not much to see in the Karakum desert except for a quite well maintained highway we were getting some good miles on the clock. We had lunch at 44°C!! The streets sometimes switched sides because one of the roads was being serviced on or rebuilt. Since it was annoying to ride on a straight line the whole day Fabi and Denis decided to ride a bit over the gravel on the construction site. Basti wanted to save his tire and decided to switch to the other side and took some great pictures of them with the Sena.
Suddenly Fabi started to kick up lots of sand and dust, up to the point where it was difficult to see him. Denis started to break and slow down as soon as he saw the big dust cloud in front of him. Fabi was already in big trouble, the gravel road had suddenly turned into deep sand with some rocks and his front tire slid from left to right. He did not try to break otherwise he would have crashed instantly. So he hoped that the sand would stop and he would regain control of the bike. After some 30 or so meters his luck ran out and he went down in a big cloud of dust and sand. When the dust settled Denis and Basti had already arrived at the crash site. They helped Fabi up, luckily he was ok except for some pain in his left ankle.
The BMW on the other hand looked badly damaged at first. Some broken parts lay about 15 meters away what suggested that the bike slid for quite some time until it came to a full stop. He had a broken turn signal, mud guard, rear view mirror adapter. What looked to be the worst problem was the fact that his front tire was not in line with the handlebar anymore. We straightened the steering by opening the fork screws and adjusting it to the right position. This way we quickly looked for the next tree where Fabi could calm down a bit and recover from the hard hit. Luckily the next tree was not as far away as it could have been.
At the end of the day we decided to take some pictures in the dunes. Even though Fabis left ankle hurt, he still decided to try twice to ride up the small dune. The sand was just to deep with all the luggage so he had to give up in the end.

The next day we started early and rode as quickly to the border as possible. About 30 kilometers before the border at Turkmenabat we had to pay additional money. We had spent all of our Manats at the gas station before so we had some trouble paying the right amount. Luckily some lorry driver helped us out in the end and we were on our way. Because of the fuss we arrived at the border right in time for lunch break. So we waited, luckily in the shade of a tree, for one and a half hours until we could finally continue.