The bike is big, but with the low down weight, it's very comfy all round. I headed south last September via Turkey and the Middle East and then rode to East Africa, arriving in Cape Town in March. The drive into Istanbul was absolutely mad. There, everything - buses, cars, bikes, carts, scooters, animals, beggars, pedestrians etc. Istanbul is a city of 15 million people and all are on the move all the time.
Indecision spells disaster.
After six days, I escaped its clutches. The World War One battlefields, cemeteries and memorials of Galipoli were sobering indeed. What a senseless, pointless massacre it must have been. After a rather unpleasant dose of food poisoning in Cappadocia, Turkey, I headed toward Syria. From Allepo, I rode east through a dust storm and then south to the most mystical of abandoned desert cities, Rushafeh.