Budapest Travel Blog

This amazing story began in 2004 when some experienced motorcycle bikers decided driving to the Olympic Games in Athens with the inten-
tion of supporting their friends in the judo competitions. The sportsmen did not win anything but the motor biker team was full of confidence.

The idea suddenly came up: let’s drive to the next Olympic Games again. The distance will not be the same however: the destination will be Beijing.

In 2006 two of them drove through the Ural Mountains in Russia with their T5 Pannonia sidecar bikes made in 1967 to see how they can cope with such a distance. This 9.000 km route has been a unique achievement; no Hungarian had ever driven a vintage motorcycle for such a long distance. They experienced a lot of adventures on their trip, acquired a lot of new friends and the motorcycle was ready for the challenge, only minor technical problems occurred.

The road plan

Paks–Kiev–Voronezh–Penza–Samara–Ufa–Chelyabinsk–Omsk–Novosibirsk

–Saihan Tal–Beijing

Beijing is approximately 12.000 km far from here. The road to there drives through Ukraine, the enormous Russia and the wild romantic Siberia to the Lake Baikal then turns to the south, crosses the nomad Mongolia and the Gobi desert as it finally reaches Beijing.

The vehicle will be the good old sidecar Pannonia again; the enthusiastic young ones will take spare parts and a spare motor block with them.

The movie

A cast of two people will accompany the motorcycle bikers during their journey and they record everything on tape so it will be possible to produce a series of six movies with each episode being 35-40 minutes long.

The movie will be made in a road diary style: it will not have any narrators, the events will be recorded by video diary and the story will be told by the motorcycle bikers themselves in the form of interviews. There will be interviews with people in the visited countries and with people related to the story. The movie will have a mission: it introduces the locations related to
Hungary. The guys will visit the monument of the Hungarian soldiers who died at the Don-curve in the Second World War and the movie will provide a little historical background. They – being nuclear experts – will visit the villages near to the Majak nuclear complex next to Chelyabinsk where perhaps the most radioactivity-infected areas in the world can be found. In Novo-sibirsk they will visit the Gulag where many Hungarians were held as war or political prisoners.

The road diary will not only be popular among the lovers of romantic adventures, beautiful landscapes and other cultures but the motorcycle and technique lovers will find it interesting too. Technical problems can arise with a vintage bike like this so repairing them will be a major challenge. The technical expertise of the young engineers helps to quickly overcome the problems. The motorbike itself is the technique of the ’50s; it was manufactured in the Budapest Csepel Motorcycle Factory from 1954 to 1975 in a virtually unaltered form.

The bigger cities, local specialties, traditions and accommodations will be presented by the boys themselves in the form of road diary. They will sleep in casual hotels and tents which may involve danger for the lack of help in these locations.

The movie will contain another storyline too: Six young men will drive the same road with an old Robur bus. Their progress will also be followed but just marginally. This journey that crosses the largest and most populated continent is about friendship, togetherness, endurance and willpower.


The motor bikers’ adventures truly represent the Olympic spirit where sportsmen fight to qualify for the Olympic Games. Their performance is not only physical but a spiritual effort; they face a lot of not foreseeable problems many thousand kilometers away from their homes. The movie shows this effort.