Appeared in DIVER October 2012

Continuing his motorcycle tour, JOHN KEAN hits an obstacle in the form of Russian bureaucracy, causes consternation in a filling station, dives a virgin lake found on Google Earth and experiences the Black Sea’s own Thistlegorm

I arrived in Dnipropetrovsk with nearly 3,000km showing since leaving Sharm el Sheikh. It is a large city but with a population of one million not as big as Kiev. I met up with old friends Max, Philip and Julia. We had done many diving trips together in the Red Sea, usually filming and tech diving for a media company. The next day, a friend of theirs, Alex, was heading out of town to a new dive site that had been discovered just three years earlier by Sergey Ivchenko. Sergey and his friends were checking out Google maps and researching the possibility that certain patches of water located out of town may be deep and clear enough for decent scuba diving. Pyatikhatky was just such a site and is now popular for divers who travel 130km from the city to this amazing quarry dive.

John gave two presentations about the epic diving and biking journey around Egypt and the Black Sea. It was also a chance to meet again and thank some of the sponsors of the trip such as O’Three, Apeks and Diver magazine who covered the Coloured Seas Trip over three issues from August to October.

Crossing Borders with Motorcycles

This is a separate article for motorcyclists who are interested in the procedures I experienced when crossing multiple borders by motorcycle through Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine.
 
Firstly, a Brit riding an Austrian bike that is registered in Egypt was an obscure occurrence at any of the borders I crossed …and it raised many eyebrows. But that was about it! Staff who man these entry and exit posts are generally only concerned with two things: You and your motorcycle.

You might know that John and his webdesigner Martin also manage the most authoritative website about the Thistlegorm. That leads to many online articles that mention the wreck to link to our site. Once in a while that includes a giant news site like the Huffington Post or CNN.