The traveller
Geoff Keys, 69 Left home to go touring seven years ago and hasn’t really come back
On April 23, 2014 Geoff Keys set off to ride to Australia. At 62 he’d just retired from the AA and having read Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon a few years before decided it was time to see the world from the saddle of a motorcycle. He originally planned to be away for a couple of years. He’s now been on the road for nearly eight, riding through Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Japan, Australia, Laos, Vietnam, New Zealand and most of the countries in between.
‘I had to wait for the kids to grow up but then I went,’ he says. ‘The thing about being retired is you have no timescale. I can travel as slowly as I want to, doing as few miles a day as I choose to. Sometimes I have long distances that need to be done, so I do them, and other times I’m stopping a lot to look at things. A typical day’s ride would be 200-250 miles, but I’ve done as much as 875 and as little as 90.’
After exploring Europe, Geoff rode through Russia and Kazakhstan until he hit Mongolia. ‘I had a whale of a time there – it’s my favourite place. When I went I had no maps because you couldn’t download them to a Garmin at the time. What I discovered was that you can just follow your compass, so if the track goes left and the compass says you need to go straight on, that’s what you do. You just ride to wherever you need to get to.
‘There are no fences, it’s huge and it’s fascinating. I even saw the Gobi desert. And no matter where I camped, even out of sight in the middle of nowhere, usually someone comes to visit – some guy will ride up on his Chinese motorcycle to say hello.’
For the trip to Australia Geoff followed the advice of famed adventurer Austin Vince and bought a light bike, a 1999 Suzuki DR350. ‘Once I’d chosen that everything else slotted into place. People worry about planning the journey but I just had a general direction and some places I wanted to see – I wanted to go to Poland and Kazakhstan and Mongolia so the route was sorted. Some people plan where they’ll be every night but that means there’s no flexibility. I almost never booked accommodation.’
Of course, Geoff did get into a few scrapes. ‘Until I got to Kazakhstan I didn’t fall off at all, but after that it happened every now and again – you expect that though. And I got a bit lost in Australia for a couple of days.’ This is something of an understatement. Geoff swam down a creek then decided to take a shortcut back to his camp by walking and lost his bearings. He was rescued by helicopter after two days in the bush having scrawled ‘help’ on a sandbar.
‘I also had to escape from Kazakhstan,’ he says. ‘You’re meant to register your presence with immigration within seven days and I missed that by one day’ The officials said he would be fined $200, pay another $200 for an interpreter then get thrown out. ‘So I just left. It was one of those days where you just keep going – I left at 9am, rode all day and all night and got to the border at 3am. When I got through, I then rode some more into Russia and had a snooze in a bus stop. I reached Omsk about 10am. I’d done over 900 miles. That was a long day.’
After wearing out the DR350, Geoff then wore out a CCM GP450 and now has an Enfield Himalayan to get round Indian rules which make it tricky to stay more than six months if you’re on a non-indian machine. ‘After riding in India I’ll go to Pakistan, then I’d like to get to Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and all the other Stans, then into the Middle East, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia and back to the UK,’ says Geoff. And will that be it? Not exactly. ‘Once I’m back I’ll buy another bike and set off to do Africa and after that there’s south and north America. I’ll be gone a while – it’s got to be ten years for that lot.’
‘… rescued by helicopter after two days in the bush having scrawled “help” on a sandbar’