Hi folks,
Just finished a book about a 34,000 mile motorcycle trip I did in 2008. Some of you might have seen parts of it before which I included in the ride report Ruta 40.
I'm going to put it here chapter by chapter for the next ten days or you can download the ebook here for free.
http://thatimaydieroaming.blogspot.com/
That I may die roaming...
Prologue
My name is Oisin and I’m from Dublin, Ireland.
In July 2008, I undertook riding a motorbike 34,000 miles through North, Central and South America. The route that I intended to take would see me leaving Toronto, driving initially east to Nova Scotia, and then riding thousands of miles across Canada until I got to Anchorage in Alaska.
Once there, I would continue my journey north to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the most northerly town there is a road to in North America. From there I would ride south for months, back down through Alaska, Canada, mainland USA, Mexico, Central America and South America until I got to Ushuaia, near Cape Horn, the most southern tip of South America.
The final leg of the journey would be riding back north to Buenos Aires in Argentina, where I’d fly both myself and my bike back home; all going well in time for Christmas 2008.
In total, I planned to go through 14 countries, namely Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. I hadn’t made my mind up about Colombia yet.
I had an adventure filled with thrills, spills and some unbelievable situations. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined all the stuff that would happen to me. This book is my account of the journey.
I went on this trip to put some excitement in my life. Every kid I knew growing up, wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. In my head, going on this trip represented my chance to blow up the death star and snog Princess Leia.
When I started I knew the outcome was uncertain but that the days ahead would be filled with adventure and fingers crossed, sex would be around every corner
Most people would love to do something like this; I’m just one of the people who did. Hopefully, after reading this book maybe you’ll think about setting your sail and having an adventure of your own.
Thanks for reading, and May the Force be with you.
Oisin
Chapter 1
On a cold and wet Friday in September 2005, while out shopping I was enticed over to a DVD stand in HMV. The banner said, “Buy 3 DVD’s for 30 Euro”; I picked up two movies I really liked and because I couldn’t see another movie that caught my fancy, I grabbed a DVD called the Long way Round. It was a documentary series with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman detailing their trip around the world on two BMW motorcycles from London to New York, heading east. I had seen ads for the series but never watched it and to be honest wasn’t even remotely interested in motorbikes or in the two lads heading off to foreign shores. That said, it was as appealing as anything else on the stand so I picked it up and went home.
The relentlessly crappy Irish weather continued for the entire weekend and with Liverpool losing on the Saturday the weekend was turning into a complete washout. I picked up the Long way round DVD and stared at the black and white cover photo of Ewan and Charlie with their motorbikes and said “fuck it, nothing else to do” so I threw on the DVD. To my complete surprise I watched it straight through, episode after episode, finishing up the following morning at around 2am. I was hooked. I wanted to do something like this; No I simply had to! There were however a couple of minor obstacles to overcome, like I didn’t own a motorcycle, nor was I able to ride one.
At the time I was married. Things weren’t going well primarily down to the fact that I was a bad husband, about as emotionally available as a tin of processed peas and I was spending far too much time in work. As the winter wore on, my enthusiasm to do a trip started to wane, what with ongoing marital problems and being up to my tonsils in work, I put it to the back of my mind.
Around November 2005 one of my best mates, Dave, asked me along to the annual motorcycle show in the RDS arena in Dublin. As I was walking around the displays looking at all the bikes I came across a stand for Globebusters, a husband and wife motorcycle tour company in England who run overland trips. After exchanging a couple of pleasantries, I walked away with one of their brochures.
I looked at the back page and there it was, the Pan-American motorcycle trip stretching from Prudhoe Bay, the most northerly town in Alaska the whole way down to Ushuaia in Terra del Fuego near Cape Horn in South America. I thought to myself, “this looks absolutely amazing”, I took the brochure and plonked it on my office desk to remind me on the bad days, that there was an alternative to what I was doing now.
That Christmas my marriage came to an end and after about eight weeks of wallowing in self-pity, I made a decision to fuck off to Australia for a month on a road trip. I only thought up the idea on the Tuesday and flew out on the Thursday of the same week; I’m nothing if not impulsive. I packed like a lunatic and headed off to the airport and next thing I knew I was in Australia. I hired a Nissan X-trail and kept driving and driving to try to work the post-marital breakup blues out of my head.
On the journey, I learned a couple of things about myself. Firstly, that I was ok with being by myself for long stretches, and secondly that I really liked long journeys where you didn’t really have a place to get to. It was ok to just drive until you got bored and then, pull over, find a place to stay, go out and get some grub, have a pint and at the end of the day, hit the scratcher.
I also started to get a little peeved about having your holiday decided for you. You know how it goes, you tell someone that you’re going somewhere and right away they're off telling you that you have to go here, then there and how if you don’t go to “this place” well then “you simply haven’t been”. So I made up my mind that I was only going to go to places that I wanted to go to and not submit to any peer pressure about what I “simply must do” when travelling.
In Australia, I set myself the goal of never driving over the same piece of tarmac twice. This way the road would always change for me and every day would be an adventure because I didn’t have to retrace my steps on my way home. I carved a loop out in Australia and knocked out about 14,000km in only a couple of weeks.
When I came back to Ireland, I made up my mind that I was going to have to buy a bike if I was ever going to consider taking on the Pan-American Highway. My thinking was that I might start with a small trip; I needed to figure out if motorcycling was something I’d like, if I just upped and went I could end up hating the whole thing. I had my doubts, motorcycling is dangerous, certainly more dangerous than a car. When you combine that with the fact that you’re out in the elements and in Ireland all it ever seems to do is piss rain, I had enough reason to believe that the whole thing could turn out to be pure misery.
I went to see my friend Jason who has always been a keen biker. He had a couple of copies of motorcycle news that had heaps of bikes for sale in the back pages. No sooner had I opened the first classified page and there it was; a bumblebee 1150gs adventurer for sale, the same model bike that Ewan and Charlie had used for the long way round. It came with panniers, crash bars, heated handgrips and some other goodies and the whole lot was on sale for 11,500 euro.
The bike had less than 10,000km on the clock so was practically new. The chap who was selling it was based about four miles from Jason’s house so off we went in the car to have a gawk at the beast. I’d never make a poker player, as soon as I saw the bike I just said, “I’ll take it!” and wrote him a cheque for the full amount he was looking for. My penalty for such impulsiveness was I had to listen to Jason for about the next six months giving me the “can’t believe you didn’t even try to haggle!” routine. I didn’t care, I had my bike and I don’t think my pulse dropped below a hundred the whole way home.
My first big problem was that I couldn’t drive the bike. I asked Jason to drive it home for me and when we got to my place, I had my first impromptu bike lesson. I was terrified when I jumped up on it, bear in mind that the BMW 1150 weighs over 250kg. If it starts to go to the left or right and gets past about twenty degrees from vertical you’ll never be able to hold it up and the whole thing will just crash to the ground. Picking that weight up off the ground would be like shiteing a pineapple.
Every time I tried to move forward on the bike the engine would cut out as I tried to master the clutch. Every jump forward resulted in my shins getting clubbed by the crash bars, a sore bastard I don’t mind telling you. I knew that I tended to jump into things, more often than not, it doesn’t work out as expected; the niggling feeling that this was going to be another in a long line of bad ideas was starting to grow in my mind.
In keeping with a Hughes family tradition, i.e. full duck or no dinner, I signed up for three full days of intensive rider training with a private motorcycle school. The course was run in March and the weather was absolutely woeful. At various times it was snowing, pissing rain, sleeting, or howling wind and just to throw some salt and vinegar into the mix; the traffic was mental. There was however a positive aspect; I’ve always maintained that because I learned to ride in the rain I’m a much better rider in bad weather than most. Most people start the other way, they learn in the good weather and only tend to go out on their bikes when the weather is good, I never knew any different so having started the hard way I never looked back.
I was struggling to get the hang of the clutch; the instructor had a great analogy to help me get the hang of it.
“Listen horse, you need to think of the clutch as if it’s your birds left tit.... would you be grabbing it in and out like that? Eh? Would ya? No... I don’t fuckin think so, she wouldn’t be long about punching your lights out.... nice and smooth... got it?”
As for the accelerator he said to treat it like a “budgies neck”. I think it was the bird’s knockers that did it for me; never being one to snatch and grab at a boob, at least not since I was in the cot.
When I told him that I was considering heading off to ride the entire Pan-American Highway on the motorcycle, he simply replied “Me hole”.
So now I had the bike and I could drive it; it was time to plan a road trip. I talked to my mate Dave about heading down to the Rock of Gibraltar in Spain; I said I’d chance the run even though I didn’t have a full license. So we started planning in earnest.
After a couple of weeks and with the excitement starting to build, Dave phoned me. His opening line was “You’ll never guess what”, to which I replied, having read the tone in his voice “Sheila’s up the duff”.
Dave’s girlfriend was pregnant. I was delighted for him but knew it meant that the trip to the Rock of Gibraltar was over unless I wanted to go on my own, with so little experience; it was just too risky.
Some months after, when Dave and I were out for a couple of pints, I asked him
“So how come Sheila got pregnant? Did the Jonnie split?”
(A pertinent question, Dave has a hammer on him like an oak tree, sort of thing you would normally expect to see hanging out of an elephants face), Dave replied, “Nah sure I can never get one to fit”, which all credit to him, he said with true humility.
Then I asked, “So was Sheila not on the pill?”Dave replied, “Nope”. Realising that he’d been bare backing and risking our trip if Sheila got pregnant, I said, “So you were just pulling out! Ya fucker ya! Your some bollix, it’s not like the tadpoles would have far to swim, you were practically delivering them to the front door with that baseball bat of a Mickey, You bollix!”
So that was it, there was no other opportunity to go on a medium length trip to see if travelling on a motorcycle for six months was something I would enjoy or even be capable of doing. I was left with the dilemma, if I’m going to go on this trip “Who in the name of fuck was I going to go with”.
The summer of 2008 was the time I was targeting to leave, it would allow me to follow the summer south through the America’s. There were no organised tours running that year with Globebusters for the Pan American, and none of my friends could go with me. I kept asking myself, was I capable of going by myself, I doubted it.
The sort of things that went through my head cantered around that I needed to try to go with someone who’s good at fixing stuff. I’m the sort of guy who, if the house was falling down around me, I’d probably buy a tent for the back garden, I’m just not that good with my hands. Now that’s not to say that I don’t rub a good boob, I do, but with machinery, I may as well be staring up a bull’s hole.
So onto the web I went in search of kindred spirits, I was convinced there must be a couple of heads out there with the same sort of thing in mind, I still had a year to plan it so it was plenty of time to meet some guys who might be into same thing. I got a serious amount of ribbing from the lads about the gay connotations of searching for bikers on the web.
I found a website called Horizons unlimited and just pumped in the words, “Pan-American July 2008, anyone interested?” A lad living near Felixstowe in England replied and said that he was up for it. We talked on the phone and seemed to have quite a bit in common. We both said that if we were serious about this we’d have to meet and talk to hammer out what we both wanted to get out of the trip. A couple of weekends later, I flew to England and John picked me up at the airport.
On the phone John sounded a bit of a cockney but was gentle spoken, however when I met him, I nearly fainted. He was about 5 foot 5, a serious looking skinhead with tattoos the whole way down his arms. “Oh my fuck” I thought to myself.
As it turned out he was an ex British soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Again, I thought to myself “Oh my fuck! Either this guy has gone online to reel in some “ass” or he’s logged onto the equivalent of “dial a sucker to murder and leave in your fridge for six months while you take out his torso to have sex with while watching coronation street reruns.com”.
We got to his house and headed off down the pub for some pints and grub. On the way we walked down a pitch black lane, for a good while I was certain he was going to knife me. As it turned out I needn’t have worried, John was a sound skin and we got on like a house on fire. He worked on the docks and drove the exact same type of bike as me and was interested in doing the trip, if he could get his house sold on time as well as get leave of absence from his job.
While all this was going on Ewan and Charlie decided to do the Long way down, which was a motorcycle trip from John of Groats in northern Scotland to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. All of this just helped to intensify my feelings of needing to go on the trip. I decided that whatever route I was going to take it had to add up to more miles than the long way round, and the long way down combined. Why? Just, that’s the why! Not a good enough answer? Well it’s a guy thing, if you did ten press-ups I’d have to try to do eleven.
We talked a lot about the route. Flying a bike into the states since 9-11 was a nightmare so we decided to fly into Toronto, Canada. This also happened to be where my brother lived, so would be a lot easier to get lifts out to the airport to collect the bike. From there the plan was to head west to Nova Scotia to Cape Breton, and then track back west the whole way across Canada to Anchorage in Alaska.
Once in Anchorage we would ride north to Prudhoe Bay, the most northerly town in Alaska and then south for many months, the whole way to Ushuaia in Argentina and finally back up to Buenos Aires, a trip I “back of the enveloped” at over 30,000miles. The route had some big advantages, namely you didn’t need a carnet de passage in any of the countries, and you would only need two languages, English and Spanish.
The if’s and the buts were driving me crazy so I made up my mind that I was going to leave on the 12th of July 2008, and in order to remove one of the variables I went ahead and booked my flight. I also made up my mind that if John wasn’t able to come along and I couldn’t get someone to go with me, I would go alone. Although I desperately hoped that I would find a riding partner.
John had two kids who were in their twenties and unbelievably, no sooner had he decided to go on the trip than they popped round to his house to tell him that they were getting married that year. John was torn and he said he was going to come over to Dublin to talk about some things. I knew he was coming over to tell me that he wasn’t going to be able to go, and he was too nice a guy to tell me over the phone. He knew it was our dream and wanted to tell me face to face that he was letting me down.
A welsh guy popped on the horizons website around this time by the name of Geoff and said he was up for it also, I told him John was on his way over so why not plan to come over the same weekend. Geoff was in his mid to late fifties and his wife had passed away less than a year previous. It was obvious that he was on the run from his grief but he was a nice person and very friendly; if he wanted to come along “why not?” I said.
As expected, John pulled out, and I hadn’t heard anything from Geoff for over two months so I resigned myself to going alone. The piece I was unbelievably nervous about was Central America, “How in the name of Jesus am I going to get through those borders on my own!”, the icing on the cake being that I had about as much Spanish as is used in the average Speedy Gonzalez cartoon.
About a month before I was due to leave, I got a phone call from Geoff saying he was going. I was actually a bit disappointed because I had rather gotten used to the idea that I would be a solo traveller. However, when I thought about things like the Dalton highway in Alaska and all the dangerous countries that I’d be going through, it would be better to not have to do it alone.
As the day approached, the comments from people in work all revolved around “It’ll be a life changing experience” or “You must be fucking crazy!” My nerves were at fever pitch. The date was set, and the only thing left to do was ship the bike to Toronto. This part, while expensive was easy. I dropped the bike off at my local BMW dealer and they arranged with James Cargo the shipper, to pick it up about ten days before I was due to fly out. I dropped the bike off with the panniers stuffed with camping gear and every manner of gadget that I could fit into the limited storage you have on a motorcycle.
I had the rough timelines for the trip worked out, mainly dictated by insurance limitations and I wrote in my diary:
“Plan is to take fifty nine days to complete the USA and Canada... Fourteen days through Mexico, another fourteen through Central America and the rest in South America finishing hopefully in time for Christmas!”
I structured the journey this way because in my head I reckoned I could do North America again when was fifty-five if I wanted to; its easy going relatively speaking. The real challenge would be Central and South America so it’s better to allocate the majority of time there.
I nicknamed the bike “Molly”, which I later changed to Sam Gamgee, I was Frodo. What happened to Luke Skywalker? What happened to Han Solo? Well, I decided that I was going to be a mixture of Frodo, Conan, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Jason Bourne, James Bond and finally Frodo, and no I don’t think that’s too many heroes to combine into one persona.
The week before I left, I completed the last mandatory task before undertaking any adventure; I went out on the rip. After about fifteen pints and lots of “You’re gonna get raped by FARC rebels....You know that don’t ya!” type statements the last task before travelling was complete.
With my flight merely hours away I sat on the couch in my sitting room looking out the window. I asked myself “Am I ready?”
I kept replaying a quote I’d read in my head, “The only way you’ll ever be 100% prepared for a trip like this is to have done it before”.
I had completed less than four thousand miles on the bike since I’d bought it and I had zero off-road training. With the Dalton highway in Alaska a five hundred and fifteen mile gravel fest ahead of me I told myself that I would have nearly ten thousand miles done by that stage so I’d be a lot more experienced and it would be ok.
I’d almost no Spanish, but reckoned that I could either hook up with some dudes who did when I would have to cross the borders or I’d get some Spanish lessons loaded up onto my I-pod, again I figured I’d be grand. I was ok for money and had heaps of travel equipment, space on the bike was the only concern and picking the bike up would be a massive problem if it ever fell over.
I had only met Geoff once and that was a worry, what if we did not get on? I couldn’t fix a thing on the bike if it broke down; I never even had to fix a puncture so if it happened I’d just have to deal with it at the time. I spent hours and hours worrying, and all I had to console myself with was the fact that there was no going back now.
My brother and his girlfriend dropped me and my cuddly toy rabbit Mr. Fluffykins to the airport in Dublin and as I boarded the plane, I couldn’t help notice the lack of fanfare. When Ewan and Charlie had headed off on their adventure there were support crews, a cake and big bunch of well-wishers and it felt a bit weird for just my bag and me to be heading off.
I flew out on Saturday the 12th of July exactly as planned nearly nine months previous, despite the best attempts of an air traffic controllers strike to halt my progress. As we taxied down the runway I just couldn’t believe it was about to start.
The flight to Toronto was wedged with people and I got stuck in a middle seat spending the next seven hours battling for elbow room with two fairly substantial lassies, although I doubt they talked in glowing terms about the hefty dude stuck in between them on the flight either.
It was quite a bit of hassle to clear customs, note to self: when filling in the customs form, always check "no" when asked “Are you shipping any goods to Canada, which are not on your person”. Invariably you’ll find things go a lot smoother. About ninety minutes after arriving and post a surprisingly gentle rubber glove routine from Gail in Canadian customs, I was out in the arrivals hall being picked up by my brother Ernan and his father-in-law, Jack.
The first question out of their mouths was nothing to do with the trip but was "What’s the story with Ireland and the European Union and the whole Lisbon treaty thing?" Ireland had just rejected the Lisbon treaty and it was getting massive airplay, so much for being treated like a superstar biker setting out on a terrifying expedition.
I was starting to notice a trend, as much as I would like to think that what I was doing was the equivalent of Luke Skywalker attacking the death star, I had to be content with the fact, that I was the only one who thought so.
On the way back to house the three of us stopped for some nosebag and after a pound of wings and three frosty bottles of Coors light it was time to go and meet up with the rest of my extended family. After a lovely evening catching up it was time to unpack and hit the scratcher.
The plan was to collect the bike from customs on Monday morning, which would be the point at which the journey would really start. I’d arranged to collect Geoff on the way to the airport cargo hanger; the plan was that hopefully we’d collect the bikes and be on our way by Monday evening. I kept thinking about the scene in Die Hard 3, where Samuel L Jackson tells Jeremy Irons to “stick your well laid plans up your well laid ass”, and wondered whether or not we were just being wildly optimistic to think that we would clear customs in an afternoon.
Monday came and it was time to meet Geoff. We collected him at the hotel and Shannon asked me do you know where this place is? I said “don’t worry, I have a GPS!” Off we went out to the Cargo warehouse or at least to its address, whereupon I discovered the first of many limitations of the average GPS unit. Always remember when in the states to enter the address in East or West terms, you will find that 2500 XYZ street West is a completely different place to 2500 XYZ street East! After being lost for about forty five minutes, we copped onto the problem and made our way to the correct location where we stood in line to clear the bikes.
When we went up with our paperwork, it was obvious that the gents behind the counter had never done anything like temporary importing of motorcycles before. After a lot of head scratching they told us to come back tomorrow as they needed to take some soil samples from the bike to make sure we weren’t bringing in any fungi in the mud on the tires. A complete load of cobblers but there was nothing to do but turn away and come back the next day. They gave us a number to ring to check to see if the bikes were ready, and told us not to come back out unless we’d checked with the number first. They gave us the impression that it might take a couple of days, which really put a downer on things.
In our eagerness to get going we’d gone out to the airport in enduro motorcycle gear hoping to just jump on the bikes and drive off into the wild blue yonder. With the heat and the fact that the cargo terminal was a solid walk away from the customs area and having to walk back and forward between the buildings, we were literally cooking in our own juices. Geoff and I got a taxi to a hotel together, and shared a double room.
This was the first of many weird moments of the trip for me. There I was in a hotel room in Toronto with a guy maybe twenty years older than me, who I barely knew waiting to go and collect our bikes to start a trip where, who knows what would be ahead of us. It was surreal. Sharing a hotel room with a friend is easy; it’s a little harder when you barely know the person. As we were nodding off to sleep, Geoff started to snore like a whore’s bastard. I lay there staring at the ceiling wondering just what the fuck I had gotten myself into.
Early the next morning we rang the number customs gave us and we got the news that the bikes were good to go, so off we set to uncrate the bikes and go through the customs formalities, it wasn't long before we were shooting east in the direction of Nova Scotia. Leaving Toronto gradually five lane highways became four then three and finally two as you get further and further away from the urban sprawl. Gradually we made our way through the traffic towards the town of Cornwall on the St Laurence River.
The stifling heat combined with wearing too much gear and the slow moving traffic made the early going almost unbearable. I was sitting on the bike driving along thinking to myself “Is this it? Is this how I’m supposed to feel? This is the trip of lifetime right?” It probably sounds unbelievably selfish to say it but I was having a horrible time, after a year of planning I was driving along roasting hot and miserable; when you stopped moving it was easy to imagine what it must be like to be a rotisserie chicken.
It’s only when you start travelling in Canada that the sheer scale of the country starts to dawn on you. We drove two hundred and seventy seven miles in the first day, or rather afternoon but if you were to look at a map of Canada on an A4 sheet, you would barely be able to perceive the distance at all. In Canada you have to stop saying things like its “two hundred miles away” or “its 400 kilometres away” and revert back to saying things like such and such a place is “a three day ride” or such and such a place is “18 hours away”. Talking in terms of kilometres or miles would drive you crazy. To put some numbers on it; Canada is over one hundred times the size of Ireland, and more than thirty six times the size of the United Kingdom, so there!
In Ireland and the UK it’s pretty common for motorcyclists to filter between traffic, that means making a second or third lane where there’s none marked, it drives the rest of the driving fraternity crazy but makes us bikers feel like kings. It turns out Canadian driver’s don’t like you filtering on your bike, in fact, seems like they hate it enough to physically roar out the window "hey a-hole... get in fucking line". By the end of the first day I’d already had a couple of these greetings. Thankfully, due to the lack of availability of handguns in Canada I felt I was able to return the greeting with an extended index finger, not the sort of reply I would consider giving in Texas!
The Canadian highways are full of bikers; mostly driving big Honda Goldwing’s made to cover the sort of distances one encounters in Canada. Every time we stopped for Gas or a cup of coffee, which was about every hour we met loads of people. My first impressions were that the Canadians were a friendly, if a little guarded, bunch. Based on the first couple of conversations we had with the people we met along the road, most didn’t have a bull’s notion where Argentina was geographically, although most had heard of it.
After a shower that evening, I headed out to try to find a computer to send an email to my family to say that I’d survived the first day. I looked up Cornwall in my Canada rough guide, it didn’t mention it. Hmmm, let me try Google I thought to myself, where I found out that its biggest claim to fame is that its home to one of the biggest distribution centres in Canada, Yawn!
It was the first time that the realisation dawned on me that while there are lots of really great places in the world; in between them are a lot of really average or just altogether boring places. I guess there wouldn’t be such a thing as great places if it wasn’t for towns like Cornwall, so I saluted its boring mediocrity while draining a beer.
I lay in the bed that night staring at the ceiling wondering “Is this how I’m supposed to feel? Shouldn’t I be feeling better? Shouldn’t I be happier? Why am I still thinking about work? I’m on the trip of a lifetime, why doesn’t it feel like it, and how the fuck does Geoff snore that loud without waking himself up?”
__________________
Ride on!
30000mileson2wheels.blogspot.com
BacktoBroke.blogspot.com
Just finished a book about a 34,000 mile motorcycle trip I did in 2008. Some of you might have seen parts of it before which I included in the ride report Ruta 40.
I'm going to put it here chapter by chapter for the next ten days or you can download the ebook here for free.
http://thatimaydieroaming.blogspot.com/
That I may die roaming...
Prologue
My name is Oisin and I’m from Dublin, Ireland.
In July 2008, I undertook riding a motorbike 34,000 miles through North, Central and South America. The route that I intended to take would see me leaving Toronto, driving initially east to Nova Scotia, and then riding thousands of miles across Canada until I got to Anchorage in Alaska.
Once there, I would continue my journey north to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska, the most northerly town there is a road to in North America. From there I would ride south for months, back down through Alaska, Canada, mainland USA, Mexico, Central America and South America until I got to Ushuaia, near Cape Horn, the most southern tip of South America.
The final leg of the journey would be riding back north to Buenos Aires in Argentina, where I’d fly both myself and my bike back home; all going well in time for Christmas 2008.
In total, I planned to go through 14 countries, namely Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. I hadn’t made my mind up about Colombia yet.
I had an adventure filled with thrills, spills and some unbelievable situations. In my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined all the stuff that would happen to me. This book is my account of the journey.
I went on this trip to put some excitement in my life. Every kid I knew growing up, wanted to be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. In my head, going on this trip represented my chance to blow up the death star and snog Princess Leia.
When I started I knew the outcome was uncertain but that the days ahead would be filled with adventure and fingers crossed, sex would be around every corner
Most people would love to do something like this; I’m just one of the people who did. Hopefully, after reading this book maybe you’ll think about setting your sail and having an adventure of your own.
Thanks for reading, and May the Force be with you.
Oisin
Chapter 1
On a cold and wet Friday in September 2005, while out shopping I was enticed over to a DVD stand in HMV. The banner said, “Buy 3 DVD’s for 30 Euro”; I picked up two movies I really liked and because I couldn’t see another movie that caught my fancy, I grabbed a DVD called the Long way Round. It was a documentary series with Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman detailing their trip around the world on two BMW motorcycles from London to New York, heading east. I had seen ads for the series but never watched it and to be honest wasn’t even remotely interested in motorbikes or in the two lads heading off to foreign shores. That said, it was as appealing as anything else on the stand so I picked it up and went home.
The relentlessly crappy Irish weather continued for the entire weekend and with Liverpool losing on the Saturday the weekend was turning into a complete washout. I picked up the Long way round DVD and stared at the black and white cover photo of Ewan and Charlie with their motorbikes and said “fuck it, nothing else to do” so I threw on the DVD. To my complete surprise I watched it straight through, episode after episode, finishing up the following morning at around 2am. I was hooked. I wanted to do something like this; No I simply had to! There were however a couple of minor obstacles to overcome, like I didn’t own a motorcycle, nor was I able to ride one.
At the time I was married. Things weren’t going well primarily down to the fact that I was a bad husband, about as emotionally available as a tin of processed peas and I was spending far too much time in work. As the winter wore on, my enthusiasm to do a trip started to wane, what with ongoing marital problems and being up to my tonsils in work, I put it to the back of my mind.
Around November 2005 one of my best mates, Dave, asked me along to the annual motorcycle show in the RDS arena in Dublin. As I was walking around the displays looking at all the bikes I came across a stand for Globebusters, a husband and wife motorcycle tour company in England who run overland trips. After exchanging a couple of pleasantries, I walked away with one of their brochures.
I looked at the back page and there it was, the Pan-American motorcycle trip stretching from Prudhoe Bay, the most northerly town in Alaska the whole way down to Ushuaia in Terra del Fuego near Cape Horn in South America. I thought to myself, “this looks absolutely amazing”, I took the brochure and plonked it on my office desk to remind me on the bad days, that there was an alternative to what I was doing now.
That Christmas my marriage came to an end and after about eight weeks of wallowing in self-pity, I made a decision to fuck off to Australia for a month on a road trip. I only thought up the idea on the Tuesday and flew out on the Thursday of the same week; I’m nothing if not impulsive. I packed like a lunatic and headed off to the airport and next thing I knew I was in Australia. I hired a Nissan X-trail and kept driving and driving to try to work the post-marital breakup blues out of my head.
On the journey, I learned a couple of things about myself. Firstly, that I was ok with being by myself for long stretches, and secondly that I really liked long journeys where you didn’t really have a place to get to. It was ok to just drive until you got bored and then, pull over, find a place to stay, go out and get some grub, have a pint and at the end of the day, hit the scratcher.
I also started to get a little peeved about having your holiday decided for you. You know how it goes, you tell someone that you’re going somewhere and right away they're off telling you that you have to go here, then there and how if you don’t go to “this place” well then “you simply haven’t been”. So I made up my mind that I was only going to go to places that I wanted to go to and not submit to any peer pressure about what I “simply must do” when travelling.
In Australia, I set myself the goal of never driving over the same piece of tarmac twice. This way the road would always change for me and every day would be an adventure because I didn’t have to retrace my steps on my way home. I carved a loop out in Australia and knocked out about 14,000km in only a couple of weeks.
When I came back to Ireland, I made up my mind that I was going to have to buy a bike if I was ever going to consider taking on the Pan-American Highway. My thinking was that I might start with a small trip; I needed to figure out if motorcycling was something I’d like, if I just upped and went I could end up hating the whole thing. I had my doubts, motorcycling is dangerous, certainly more dangerous than a car. When you combine that with the fact that you’re out in the elements and in Ireland all it ever seems to do is piss rain, I had enough reason to believe that the whole thing could turn out to be pure misery.
I went to see my friend Jason who has always been a keen biker. He had a couple of copies of motorcycle news that had heaps of bikes for sale in the back pages. No sooner had I opened the first classified page and there it was; a bumblebee 1150gs adventurer for sale, the same model bike that Ewan and Charlie had used for the long way round. It came with panniers, crash bars, heated handgrips and some other goodies and the whole lot was on sale for 11,500 euro.
The bike had less than 10,000km on the clock so was practically new. The chap who was selling it was based about four miles from Jason’s house so off we went in the car to have a gawk at the beast. I’d never make a poker player, as soon as I saw the bike I just said, “I’ll take it!” and wrote him a cheque for the full amount he was looking for. My penalty for such impulsiveness was I had to listen to Jason for about the next six months giving me the “can’t believe you didn’t even try to haggle!” routine. I didn’t care, I had my bike and I don’t think my pulse dropped below a hundred the whole way home.
My first big problem was that I couldn’t drive the bike. I asked Jason to drive it home for me and when we got to my place, I had my first impromptu bike lesson. I was terrified when I jumped up on it, bear in mind that the BMW 1150 weighs over 250kg. If it starts to go to the left or right and gets past about twenty degrees from vertical you’ll never be able to hold it up and the whole thing will just crash to the ground. Picking that weight up off the ground would be like shiteing a pineapple.
Every time I tried to move forward on the bike the engine would cut out as I tried to master the clutch. Every jump forward resulted in my shins getting clubbed by the crash bars, a sore bastard I don’t mind telling you. I knew that I tended to jump into things, more often than not, it doesn’t work out as expected; the niggling feeling that this was going to be another in a long line of bad ideas was starting to grow in my mind.
In keeping with a Hughes family tradition, i.e. full duck or no dinner, I signed up for three full days of intensive rider training with a private motorcycle school. The course was run in March and the weather was absolutely woeful. At various times it was snowing, pissing rain, sleeting, or howling wind and just to throw some salt and vinegar into the mix; the traffic was mental. There was however a positive aspect; I’ve always maintained that because I learned to ride in the rain I’m a much better rider in bad weather than most. Most people start the other way, they learn in the good weather and only tend to go out on their bikes when the weather is good, I never knew any different so having started the hard way I never looked back.
I was struggling to get the hang of the clutch; the instructor had a great analogy to help me get the hang of it.
“Listen horse, you need to think of the clutch as if it’s your birds left tit.... would you be grabbing it in and out like that? Eh? Would ya? No... I don’t fuckin think so, she wouldn’t be long about punching your lights out.... nice and smooth... got it?”
As for the accelerator he said to treat it like a “budgies neck”. I think it was the bird’s knockers that did it for me; never being one to snatch and grab at a boob, at least not since I was in the cot.
When I told him that I was considering heading off to ride the entire Pan-American Highway on the motorcycle, he simply replied “Me hole”.
So now I had the bike and I could drive it; it was time to plan a road trip. I talked to my mate Dave about heading down to the Rock of Gibraltar in Spain; I said I’d chance the run even though I didn’t have a full license. So we started planning in earnest.
After a couple of weeks and with the excitement starting to build, Dave phoned me. His opening line was “You’ll never guess what”, to which I replied, having read the tone in his voice “Sheila’s up the duff”.
Dave’s girlfriend was pregnant. I was delighted for him but knew it meant that the trip to the Rock of Gibraltar was over unless I wanted to go on my own, with so little experience; it was just too risky.
Some months after, when Dave and I were out for a couple of pints, I asked him
“So how come Sheila got pregnant? Did the Jonnie split?”
(A pertinent question, Dave has a hammer on him like an oak tree, sort of thing you would normally expect to see hanging out of an elephants face), Dave replied, “Nah sure I can never get one to fit”, which all credit to him, he said with true humility.
Then I asked, “So was Sheila not on the pill?”Dave replied, “Nope”. Realising that he’d been bare backing and risking our trip if Sheila got pregnant, I said, “So you were just pulling out! Ya fucker ya! Your some bollix, it’s not like the tadpoles would have far to swim, you were practically delivering them to the front door with that baseball bat of a Mickey, You bollix!”
So that was it, there was no other opportunity to go on a medium length trip to see if travelling on a motorcycle for six months was something I would enjoy or even be capable of doing. I was left with the dilemma, if I’m going to go on this trip “Who in the name of fuck was I going to go with”.
The summer of 2008 was the time I was targeting to leave, it would allow me to follow the summer south through the America’s. There were no organised tours running that year with Globebusters for the Pan American, and none of my friends could go with me. I kept asking myself, was I capable of going by myself, I doubted it.
The sort of things that went through my head cantered around that I needed to try to go with someone who’s good at fixing stuff. I’m the sort of guy who, if the house was falling down around me, I’d probably buy a tent for the back garden, I’m just not that good with my hands. Now that’s not to say that I don’t rub a good boob, I do, but with machinery, I may as well be staring up a bull’s hole.
So onto the web I went in search of kindred spirits, I was convinced there must be a couple of heads out there with the same sort of thing in mind, I still had a year to plan it so it was plenty of time to meet some guys who might be into same thing. I got a serious amount of ribbing from the lads about the gay connotations of searching for bikers on the web.
I found a website called Horizons unlimited and just pumped in the words, “Pan-American July 2008, anyone interested?” A lad living near Felixstowe in England replied and said that he was up for it. We talked on the phone and seemed to have quite a bit in common. We both said that if we were serious about this we’d have to meet and talk to hammer out what we both wanted to get out of the trip. A couple of weekends later, I flew to England and John picked me up at the airport.
On the phone John sounded a bit of a cockney but was gentle spoken, however when I met him, I nearly fainted. He was about 5 foot 5, a serious looking skinhead with tattoos the whole way down his arms. “Oh my fuck” I thought to myself.
As it turned out he was an ex British soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Again, I thought to myself “Oh my fuck! Either this guy has gone online to reel in some “ass” or he’s logged onto the equivalent of “dial a sucker to murder and leave in your fridge for six months while you take out his torso to have sex with while watching coronation street reruns.com”.
We got to his house and headed off down the pub for some pints and grub. On the way we walked down a pitch black lane, for a good while I was certain he was going to knife me. As it turned out I needn’t have worried, John was a sound skin and we got on like a house on fire. He worked on the docks and drove the exact same type of bike as me and was interested in doing the trip, if he could get his house sold on time as well as get leave of absence from his job.
While all this was going on Ewan and Charlie decided to do the Long way down, which was a motorcycle trip from John of Groats in northern Scotland to the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. All of this just helped to intensify my feelings of needing to go on the trip. I decided that whatever route I was going to take it had to add up to more miles than the long way round, and the long way down combined. Why? Just, that’s the why! Not a good enough answer? Well it’s a guy thing, if you did ten press-ups I’d have to try to do eleven.
We talked a lot about the route. Flying a bike into the states since 9-11 was a nightmare so we decided to fly into Toronto, Canada. This also happened to be where my brother lived, so would be a lot easier to get lifts out to the airport to collect the bike. From there the plan was to head west to Nova Scotia to Cape Breton, and then track back west the whole way across Canada to Anchorage in Alaska.
Once in Anchorage we would ride north to Prudhoe Bay, the most northerly town in Alaska and then south for many months, the whole way to Ushuaia in Argentina and finally back up to Buenos Aires, a trip I “back of the enveloped” at over 30,000miles. The route had some big advantages, namely you didn’t need a carnet de passage in any of the countries, and you would only need two languages, English and Spanish.
The if’s and the buts were driving me crazy so I made up my mind that I was going to leave on the 12th of July 2008, and in order to remove one of the variables I went ahead and booked my flight. I also made up my mind that if John wasn’t able to come along and I couldn’t get someone to go with me, I would go alone. Although I desperately hoped that I would find a riding partner.
John had two kids who were in their twenties and unbelievably, no sooner had he decided to go on the trip than they popped round to his house to tell him that they were getting married that year. John was torn and he said he was going to come over to Dublin to talk about some things. I knew he was coming over to tell me that he wasn’t going to be able to go, and he was too nice a guy to tell me over the phone. He knew it was our dream and wanted to tell me face to face that he was letting me down.
A welsh guy popped on the horizons website around this time by the name of Geoff and said he was up for it also, I told him John was on his way over so why not plan to come over the same weekend. Geoff was in his mid to late fifties and his wife had passed away less than a year previous. It was obvious that he was on the run from his grief but he was a nice person and very friendly; if he wanted to come along “why not?” I said.
As expected, John pulled out, and I hadn’t heard anything from Geoff for over two months so I resigned myself to going alone. The piece I was unbelievably nervous about was Central America, “How in the name of Jesus am I going to get through those borders on my own!”, the icing on the cake being that I had about as much Spanish as is used in the average Speedy Gonzalez cartoon.
About a month before I was due to leave, I got a phone call from Geoff saying he was going. I was actually a bit disappointed because I had rather gotten used to the idea that I would be a solo traveller. However, when I thought about things like the Dalton highway in Alaska and all the dangerous countries that I’d be going through, it would be better to not have to do it alone.
As the day approached, the comments from people in work all revolved around “It’ll be a life changing experience” or “You must be fucking crazy!” My nerves were at fever pitch. The date was set, and the only thing left to do was ship the bike to Toronto. This part, while expensive was easy. I dropped the bike off at my local BMW dealer and they arranged with James Cargo the shipper, to pick it up about ten days before I was due to fly out. I dropped the bike off with the panniers stuffed with camping gear and every manner of gadget that I could fit into the limited storage you have on a motorcycle.
I had the rough timelines for the trip worked out, mainly dictated by insurance limitations and I wrote in my diary:
“Plan is to take fifty nine days to complete the USA and Canada... Fourteen days through Mexico, another fourteen through Central America and the rest in South America finishing hopefully in time for Christmas!”
I structured the journey this way because in my head I reckoned I could do North America again when was fifty-five if I wanted to; its easy going relatively speaking. The real challenge would be Central and South America so it’s better to allocate the majority of time there.
I nicknamed the bike “Molly”, which I later changed to Sam Gamgee, I was Frodo. What happened to Luke Skywalker? What happened to Han Solo? Well, I decided that I was going to be a mixture of Frodo, Conan, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Jason Bourne, James Bond and finally Frodo, and no I don’t think that’s too many heroes to combine into one persona.
The week before I left, I completed the last mandatory task before undertaking any adventure; I went out on the rip. After about fifteen pints and lots of “You’re gonna get raped by FARC rebels....You know that don’t ya!” type statements the last task before travelling was complete.
With my flight merely hours away I sat on the couch in my sitting room looking out the window. I asked myself “Am I ready?”
I kept replaying a quote I’d read in my head, “The only way you’ll ever be 100% prepared for a trip like this is to have done it before”.
I had completed less than four thousand miles on the bike since I’d bought it and I had zero off-road training. With the Dalton highway in Alaska a five hundred and fifteen mile gravel fest ahead of me I told myself that I would have nearly ten thousand miles done by that stage so I’d be a lot more experienced and it would be ok.
I’d almost no Spanish, but reckoned that I could either hook up with some dudes who did when I would have to cross the borders or I’d get some Spanish lessons loaded up onto my I-pod, again I figured I’d be grand. I was ok for money and had heaps of travel equipment, space on the bike was the only concern and picking the bike up would be a massive problem if it ever fell over.
I had only met Geoff once and that was a worry, what if we did not get on? I couldn’t fix a thing on the bike if it broke down; I never even had to fix a puncture so if it happened I’d just have to deal with it at the time. I spent hours and hours worrying, and all I had to console myself with was the fact that there was no going back now.
My brother and his girlfriend dropped me and my cuddly toy rabbit Mr. Fluffykins to the airport in Dublin and as I boarded the plane, I couldn’t help notice the lack of fanfare. When Ewan and Charlie had headed off on their adventure there were support crews, a cake and big bunch of well-wishers and it felt a bit weird for just my bag and me to be heading off.
I flew out on Saturday the 12th of July exactly as planned nearly nine months previous, despite the best attempts of an air traffic controllers strike to halt my progress. As we taxied down the runway I just couldn’t believe it was about to start.
The flight to Toronto was wedged with people and I got stuck in a middle seat spending the next seven hours battling for elbow room with two fairly substantial lassies, although I doubt they talked in glowing terms about the hefty dude stuck in between them on the flight either.
It was quite a bit of hassle to clear customs, note to self: when filling in the customs form, always check "no" when asked “Are you shipping any goods to Canada, which are not on your person”. Invariably you’ll find things go a lot smoother. About ninety minutes after arriving and post a surprisingly gentle rubber glove routine from Gail in Canadian customs, I was out in the arrivals hall being picked up by my brother Ernan and his father-in-law, Jack.
The first question out of their mouths was nothing to do with the trip but was "What’s the story with Ireland and the European Union and the whole Lisbon treaty thing?" Ireland had just rejected the Lisbon treaty and it was getting massive airplay, so much for being treated like a superstar biker setting out on a terrifying expedition.
I was starting to notice a trend, as much as I would like to think that what I was doing was the equivalent of Luke Skywalker attacking the death star, I had to be content with the fact, that I was the only one who thought so.
On the way back to house the three of us stopped for some nosebag and after a pound of wings and three frosty bottles of Coors light it was time to go and meet up with the rest of my extended family. After a lovely evening catching up it was time to unpack and hit the scratcher.
The plan was to collect the bike from customs on Monday morning, which would be the point at which the journey would really start. I’d arranged to collect Geoff on the way to the airport cargo hanger; the plan was that hopefully we’d collect the bikes and be on our way by Monday evening. I kept thinking about the scene in Die Hard 3, where Samuel L Jackson tells Jeremy Irons to “stick your well laid plans up your well laid ass”, and wondered whether or not we were just being wildly optimistic to think that we would clear customs in an afternoon.
Monday came and it was time to meet Geoff. We collected him at the hotel and Shannon asked me do you know where this place is? I said “don’t worry, I have a GPS!” Off we went out to the Cargo warehouse or at least to its address, whereupon I discovered the first of many limitations of the average GPS unit. Always remember when in the states to enter the address in East or West terms, you will find that 2500 XYZ street West is a completely different place to 2500 XYZ street East! After being lost for about forty five minutes, we copped onto the problem and made our way to the correct location where we stood in line to clear the bikes.
When we went up with our paperwork, it was obvious that the gents behind the counter had never done anything like temporary importing of motorcycles before. After a lot of head scratching they told us to come back tomorrow as they needed to take some soil samples from the bike to make sure we weren’t bringing in any fungi in the mud on the tires. A complete load of cobblers but there was nothing to do but turn away and come back the next day. They gave us a number to ring to check to see if the bikes were ready, and told us not to come back out unless we’d checked with the number first. They gave us the impression that it might take a couple of days, which really put a downer on things.
In our eagerness to get going we’d gone out to the airport in enduro motorcycle gear hoping to just jump on the bikes and drive off into the wild blue yonder. With the heat and the fact that the cargo terminal was a solid walk away from the customs area and having to walk back and forward between the buildings, we were literally cooking in our own juices. Geoff and I got a taxi to a hotel together, and shared a double room.
This was the first of many weird moments of the trip for me. There I was in a hotel room in Toronto with a guy maybe twenty years older than me, who I barely knew waiting to go and collect our bikes to start a trip where, who knows what would be ahead of us. It was surreal. Sharing a hotel room with a friend is easy; it’s a little harder when you barely know the person. As we were nodding off to sleep, Geoff started to snore like a whore’s bastard. I lay there staring at the ceiling wondering just what the fuck I had gotten myself into.
Early the next morning we rang the number customs gave us and we got the news that the bikes were good to go, so off we set to uncrate the bikes and go through the customs formalities, it wasn't long before we were shooting east in the direction of Nova Scotia. Leaving Toronto gradually five lane highways became four then three and finally two as you get further and further away from the urban sprawl. Gradually we made our way through the traffic towards the town of Cornwall on the St Laurence River.
The stifling heat combined with wearing too much gear and the slow moving traffic made the early going almost unbearable. I was sitting on the bike driving along thinking to myself “Is this it? Is this how I’m supposed to feel? This is the trip of lifetime right?” It probably sounds unbelievably selfish to say it but I was having a horrible time, after a year of planning I was driving along roasting hot and miserable; when you stopped moving it was easy to imagine what it must be like to be a rotisserie chicken.
It’s only when you start travelling in Canada that the sheer scale of the country starts to dawn on you. We drove two hundred and seventy seven miles in the first day, or rather afternoon but if you were to look at a map of Canada on an A4 sheet, you would barely be able to perceive the distance at all. In Canada you have to stop saying things like its “two hundred miles away” or “its 400 kilometres away” and revert back to saying things like such and such a place is “a three day ride” or such and such a place is “18 hours away”. Talking in terms of kilometres or miles would drive you crazy. To put some numbers on it; Canada is over one hundred times the size of Ireland, and more than thirty six times the size of the United Kingdom, so there!
In Ireland and the UK it’s pretty common for motorcyclists to filter between traffic, that means making a second or third lane where there’s none marked, it drives the rest of the driving fraternity crazy but makes us bikers feel like kings. It turns out Canadian driver’s don’t like you filtering on your bike, in fact, seems like they hate it enough to physically roar out the window "hey a-hole... get in fucking line". By the end of the first day I’d already had a couple of these greetings. Thankfully, due to the lack of availability of handguns in Canada I felt I was able to return the greeting with an extended index finger, not the sort of reply I would consider giving in Texas!
The Canadian highways are full of bikers; mostly driving big Honda Goldwing’s made to cover the sort of distances one encounters in Canada. Every time we stopped for Gas or a cup of coffee, which was about every hour we met loads of people. My first impressions were that the Canadians were a friendly, if a little guarded, bunch. Based on the first couple of conversations we had with the people we met along the road, most didn’t have a bull’s notion where Argentina was geographically, although most had heard of it.
After a shower that evening, I headed out to try to find a computer to send an email to my family to say that I’d survived the first day. I looked up Cornwall in my Canada rough guide, it didn’t mention it. Hmmm, let me try Google I thought to myself, where I found out that its biggest claim to fame is that its home to one of the biggest distribution centres in Canada, Yawn!
It was the first time that the realisation dawned on me that while there are lots of really great places in the world; in between them are a lot of really average or just altogether boring places. I guess there wouldn’t be such a thing as great places if it wasn’t for towns like Cornwall, so I saluted its boring mediocrity while draining a beer.
I lay in the bed that night staring at the ceiling wondering “Is this how I’m supposed to feel? Shouldn’t I be feeling better? Shouldn’t I be happier? Why am I still thinking about work? I’m on the trip of a lifetime, why doesn’t it feel like it, and how the fuck does Geoff snore that loud without waking himself up?”
__________________
Ride on!
30000mileson2wheels.blogspot.com
BacktoBroke.blogspot.com
seen the vid you posted before look forward to the next instalment 
what if you and Timoraga went on a ride together,now there is an adventure that would be worth reading
