Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
GOBBLING UP A LONG AND WINDING ROAD
TOP OF THE WORLD Geoff in
As I bounced down the road in Colombia on my head, I couldn’t help thinking things were not quite going according to plan.
That was the plan which had begun two years earlier when I picked up a copy of The Adventure Motorcycling Handbook by Chris Scott. It accidentally opened at the section on the Pan-american Highway, at 16,500 miles the world’s longest road, from Quellón in Chile to Fairbanks in Alaska. It sounded brilliant.
A year later, I had found sponsorship, two motorbikes and a fellow lunatic in the shape of Clifford Patterson, a former Isle of Man TT racer who’d read my previous bike adventure books and phoned to see if he could come on my next jaunt.
As a result, two men in search of an adventure found themselves standing in Quellón with a Triumph Tiger 955i and an Aprilia Pegaso 650, christened, naturally, Tony and April.
Within days we were at the border with Colombia, a country that everyone had told us not to visit, or we would be kidnapped and shot.
Late that afternoon, after riding hard all day without a break, I went into a bend too fast, braked too late, and the next thing I knew I had adopted the rarely used horizontal motorcycling position.
I got groggily to my feet with my left shoulder in agony, and most of the skin stripped off my left elbow. A few yards back, Tony lay in the ditch with oil pouring from the engine, forks twisted and fairing shattered.
We got the bike onto a passing truck, got it repaired in Cali, limped on through Central America, and finally crossed the border into the United States, with Tony still leaking oil and April held together with gaffer tape.
After much-needed repairs and a service for both, we set out with renewed heart for Alaska, where Clifford had to leave for home. I reached Fairbanks, but I was determined to press on another 132 miles to Gobblers Knob, for no other reason than the name.
Having arrived, I turned and rode south for the first time in a long time. It was my 50th birthday.
■ If you’ve got 20 weeks to spare, Globebusters’ Alaska to Patagonia expedition is 22,000 miles using your own bike, from £33,995 per person sharing, or Alaska to Chile from £29,995. You can do individual segments from £2,300 for 17 days. See globebusters.com. If you’re going it alone, horizonsunlimited.com and Chris Scott’s Adventure Motorcycling Handbook, £15.61 from amazon.co.uk, are great sources of information. ■ The Road to Gobblers Knob, Geoff Hill’s best-selling book on riding from Chile to Alaska, is £3.79 on
Kindle.
If you’ve money to burn and like a bit of off-road excitement then Land
Rover will sell you one of these Defender
Works V8 Trophys.
JLR has taken a batch of its Defender
Works V8s (built by
Land Rover Classic) and upgraded them with uprated suspension, steering and brakes.
Powered by a
405bhp, 5.0-litre V8, the 25 cars being built will be divided up between short and long wheelbase (90 and 110 respectively) versions.
The 90 costs a ridiculous £195,000.
For that buyers do get to partake in a three-day off-road event at Land Rover’s Eastnor Castle test facility, but even so...