Day 16 – 15th August – Osh (0km)

This was my third day in Osh and I was starting to get bored. There was no way I was going to spend the whole day resting, so I got on the bike and went to Muztoo’s workshop.

Two days earlier I had met a French guy there who was taking apart his GS. Apparently, there was a seal somewhere deep at the heart of the bike that had gone and it was leaking oil. You would have thought that maybe it was possible to just keep adding oil, but it would spill onto the dry clutchplate, rendering it useless, so he had to take the bike apart to access that seal and replace it. And I mean literaly take the bike apart. When I was there on Monday he was already halfway through disassembling it, and today (Thursday) he had already received the part he needed, a guy who was flying in from Moscow had taken it with him as a favour, and had fitted it. He now had to put the bike back together, which at this point was split in two halves.

I had nothing better to do, so I helped him. It was not easy, as he was quite stressed out when he took it apart and there were bolts, nuts, clips, parts of the wiring harness and other bits and pieces lying everywhere around the workshop, all unlabelled, and we’re talking about a top-of-the-range BMW 1200 GS Adventure with electronic Touratech suspension front and back.

When we were going to bolt the whole back of the bike – subframe, swingarm, etc. – to the front part, we realised that the shaft had dislodged in the final drive, so we had to remove everything and disassemble that part to fix it.

When we opened it I could not believe what I saw. It was completely full of water and thick mud!

He had told me that he had got stuck in a river crossing going into Tajikistan, about 30 kilometres south of the border. He was wading through with a guy from New Zealand he had just met, and it was already late in the afternoon/evening, so the water level was much higher than in the morning. He went in and the pebbles that the river was washing stuck to his wheels. The other guy helped him get off and hold the bike from one side, but it was too stuck to get it to the other shore, and the river kept washing more rocks against one side of the bike and washing them away from under his feet on the other, so soon he was holding the bike with the water up to his waist. The New Zealand guy told him to let the bike go and save himself, but he refused to do it and told him to ride back to the border crossing and get help. He was there for hours, at 4100 metres, deep in freezing water, holding the bike, until help arrived.

We took the whole swingarm assembly apart and washed it thoroughly. As we were putting it back together, I took a look at the rubber seals and realised they really did nothing more than act as dust seals. I hoped the bearings in the final drive would be better sealed, but I understood that no matter how much marketing bullshit BMW rams down people’s throats, these bikes are NOT made for adventure riding. Literally everyone we met in the workshop going long distance were on Africa Twins, DR650s, Ténérés, XT600s, Transalps and other similar easy-to-fix bikes.

By seven o’clock in the evening the bike was in one piece again, but there was a lot to do before he could find out whether it would run or not. I promised to go back the following day to see what happened.

While I was there I also took the chance to straighten my handlebars and check that all the bolts I needed to undo to change my wheels were not too tight, a leasson I learned the hard way from Marc’s bike.