Austin Vince live in Windsor Castle, England - 2025/26 ADV Cannonball News

Recorded live in-studio near Windsor Castle, England, this episode features Austin Vince, a legendary traveler, storyteller, filmmaker, rally master, film festival organizer, musician, math teacher, and an all-around great guy. We discuss topics such as Mondo Enduro, Tera Circa, Mondo Sahara, Mega Mondo, the Road of Bones, the Zilov Gap, the Old Summer Road, the VINCE rally, and the art of teaching IT effectively, aka fake it till you make it.

Austin Vince HOME PAGE

After the interview, Taylor and Aaron chat about the upcoming changes in the 2026 ADV Cannonball Rally over a few beers.

Transcript

Welcome to the ADV cannonball podcast where we discuss all things on two wheels, the adventure bike cannonball, and other motorcycle related nonsense. Welcome to season three episode four adventure cannonball podcast. My name is Taylor Lawson, and I am your host. And today, I am joined, can you guess, by Aaron Pufal. Wow.

The please hold your applause, everyone. Hold your applause. Hold it down. Hold it down, people. What country are you in today, world traveler?

I'm back in at the headquarters in Seattle, Washington. And how about you? I am in sunny Sweden. Sunny, but, damn, if it isn't windy here. Man, it's like blowing a hooly out there.

Blowing a hooly? Okay. Well, listen. Keep it PG, buddy. Keep it PG.

We don't wanna get a we don't wanna get demonetized. Actually, when I was in The Caribbean, there was a guy named Ken Gill, and he played at the Loose Mongoose in, I think it was was it Virgin Gorda, top end of no. It wasn't Virgin Gorda. Marina Key in the British Virgin Islands. And he and his wife ran this place.

There was a a resort. And, and they they named their baby. She was wild, and she was, like, four years old then. And she used to run around this resort. We take our our charter guests and her the baby, they named her a hooley, which basically is a Spanish for at least it's Cuban for when the wind just comes ripping through.

So anyway. Oh my god. That's a terrible name. She's gonna be a firecracker when she's older. She was she was a firecracker for I bet which I mean that was twenty years ago she's probably on fire right now she's a foregone conclusion and that foregone conclusion I'm faced with crazy women this is what I like to do oh yeah this is this is a yellow dog high five hazy IPA.

Cheers. Very nice. Alright. Well, I've I'm I'm I'm sort of with the, the standby here. I'm with the Deepa, double IPA.

The money double I p a from city. Explosively, you gotta fit you can fit the last word in here for me. Explosively aromatic, fresh, and And a little fruity. Fruity. You got it.

Yes. Hey, Aaron. We got a lot to cover, man. You got a hour and fifteen minute interview with Austin, Vince. Do you think we should stop just rattle and get right to it?

Yes. Or you wanna you wanna you wanna you wanna throw it you wanna preload it to bed here? Yeah. I just wanna put us important things. So, you know, this guy really is a legend, and he is nice.

Well done. And he is, like, the original. So when the wall came down or the iron curtain came down, and he was the first who did the Zelov gap and the Road Of Bones and the Old Summer Road, all that stuff out the mega den. And, you know, no one had ever done before. There were no maps.

There were no roads. As a matter of fact, when when he was doing the the Zelophe Gap in places like that, they were literally cutting trees down to put a road in. So everyone else that had done this this route literally did it, you know, when there were roads. And, you know, we're not gonna name names, but some people put their motorcycles on trains, and some people put their motorcycles on giant six by sixes and, you know, things like that. So I just wanna give him his credit, where it is due.

And he consulted on long way round, and helped them with, their planning, and, he never really got his credit there. So I just wanted to give him his credit here for all the work that he did, with that project. You know, you make a good point is that, one of the things that's a common thread in all of these interviews that you've been knocking back seemingly every hour, every every few hours as you did this European tour, is that people, they collaborate with each other, and there's a lot of, people who are willing to work with each other and want to work with each other and support each other. And, there's also a common theme of wanting to give back, that'll tie into the, the episode, the next one. But, anyway, I just wanted to make that point.

Yeah. And everyone should have watched, if you have not watched already, Mondo Endura and, Terra Circa are, you know, basically what every single moto adventure film that exists today has done in the spirit and in the the wheel tracks of, of those two films. And a great modern one is, Mondo Sahara that is on our, motorcycle film club on our main website. So those three films are mandatory viewing for everyone. So, basically, if you show up at the cannonball, even if you are, like, the first one across the line, and if you haven't watched, that'd be, like, the first question.

Have you watched these? And if you're like, but I'm first. You go, I'm sorry. You haven't watched these. You don't get the trophy.

Yeah. Instant demerit points. And with that, roll the interview. Registration is now open to the public for the next ADV cannonball rally. All riders on any motorcycle are welcome to join the adventure.

Whether you're looking for an exciting and highly organized coast to coast ride with a group of like minded riders or a friendly competition for cannonball glory, it doesn't matter. Everyone can participate. Head over to advcannonball.com to secure your rally starting position today. Now back to the podcast. Austin Vince, welcome to the podcast.

Rock on. We are in a fancy studio here in, Windsor, England. This is a great place to live. Oh, wow. Well, that's good enough for Kings.

It's good enough for me. Have you lived here your whole life? No. No. No.

I'm from I'm from Harrow in Northwest London, suburbs. The blandness of the suburbs, but also the excitement of the space that suburban life gives you, half countryside, half city, and you can sort of have a a foot in each. So I love the fact that when I when I was a kid, on my bus journey to school, I used to go past the railway hotel where The Who had their first residency as they were as they were kind of getting better and better. And, and I and somehow I knew about that, when I was in 1975. I knew that in 1964, The Who used to play there every Tuesday.

And so if anybody ever slags off suburbia as, like, a place where nothing cool happens, I always I always think of that. You know, I've been here for five or six days on a podcasting tour, and every block seems to have some sort of history, whether it's music or motorcycles. And I was trying to do some research on you to be prepared. I try to be prepared. And did you know that when you Google Austin Vince stone cold Steve Austin comes up quite a bit?

I I did know that because of course the bane of your existence? Once the Internet was invented, like everyone else, I I Googled myself and and had, like, 500 entries about Steve Austin. Well, I encourage everyone to, YouTube, Austin Vince. And, you know, he's in a around the world motorcycle traveler. He's a filmmaker, author, musician.

He's a rally master. He's a a film festival organizer. Organizer. He's a math teacher, but you call yourself a member of the public. I that's a fact.

That's a good day. You have done your research. I'm absolutely a member of the public. Yeah. And you grew up in London, as you say.

And what was your introduction into motorcycle? Just the normal thing. My older brother, Gerald, he's nine years older than me, and in the mid seventies when I was, like, eight, nine, 10, 11, he was 20, 20 one, 20 two. Him and his Nedwell friends had access to a shed, a shack on the side of our house, and they seem to be on the industry in there with motorbikes, which in those days were all BSAs and Nortons. They couldn't afford Japanese machines, which were, you know, a bit fancier.

They're always tinkering, they're always breaking down. And these other guy my brother my brother was was, was quite cool, but his friends were even cooler and handsome. One of them had a yellow Norton Commando. His name was Ron, and, he was handsome. He looked like Stuart Sutcliffe, the fifth Beatle, so to speak, not Mary, the k.

And and Ron Ron looked like Ron looked like Stuart Sutcliffe and was as cool. And when I was a kid, pivotal in the film of my life oh, yeah. So Ron's got this yellow Norton Commando. So ironically, when Keanu Reeves' My Own Private Idaho came out, I was like, yeah. That's my life, you know, I'm looking at there.

But Ron took me to school every now and then, and, you do that thing in Uncle Buck where his niece demands that she drops him off a block away from school so that she's not seen getting out of his crappy car. So I would insist that so Ron Ron would get to school, and I'm sitting on 10 sitting on the back of this Normando, but I wouldn't get off it and walk in the school gates until somebody I knew came around the corner so I could be seen getting off this motorbike. So that was that eve even even as a 10 year old, I understood I didn't understand cool, obviously, but I knew that this Norton Commando was cooler than a normal British car. Yeah. And that's kind of a smaller bike in you know, compared to today's standards.

And we'll we'll get to your your two major movies in a second. But in those movies, in all your motorcycling, you're, still following that ethos of using a smaller motorcycle. Have you always stayed with the the smaller motorcycles? The first motorcycle that I owned were once I passed my test was a 1969 TR six R Triumph Trophy, which is essentially a single carb Bonneville at US spec, reimported, weirdly, from California, and it looked incredible. It was old, and seemed and was suddenly the most powerful thing in the world, as far as I could tell.

And and that was my that was my motorbike. So I was kind of, like, out of step with the kind of jack bike, sports bike thing, my elder brother Gerald by that stage. So we're talking about 1990, really, yeah. Something like that. 1919, 1990, my brother had a Yamaha f j 1,200, which looking back on it was a huge deal, because it was the fastest production out of a crate available in the high street motorbike in the world, and a member of the public with no training could could could get on this thing and drive literally at a 70 miles an hour, assuming they could find somewhere to do that, that didn't kill them or get them in put them in prison.

And and that's that's what we did. We we we would the fastest I've ever been on a motorbike was actually when I was only about 23 on my brother's FJ 1,200. So I was no stranger to these this, you know, this enormous amount of power and speed, and then when I left the army, I was a motorcycle courier in London, and I went to work for a car, I didn't have a motorbike at the time, I went to a company that, provided you with a a motorbike. It was a BMW r 80, an 800 cc bike, and they were, like, what we'd now call naked. And, I remember thinking that was a really nippy, great little around town bike.

Now I would consider it quite quite heavy compared to what you'd call a dual sport bike, what we call a trail bike. But so I was always, I was never really far away from from, bigger bikes, but I was sort of never interested in power and speed. And the and the Triumph, which looked and because I was obsessed with 1966 in particular, the the Triumph just looked like the kind of motorbike I wanted to be seen on. And, and I didn't crave whereas my brother wanted to be seen on the motorbike that was so obviously the latest thing. And then, you know, and then they were styled in the such eighties style.

They were styled to be crotch rockets as per the the vernacular. And so it was that was that was, never ever did I have any interest in a smaller bike, and also I had no history of off road motorcycling. So I didn't I wasn't one of these people who grew up on a farm where there was always a motorbike around. I didn't have the privilege of being a child motocross person whose dad, you know, inevitably a failed motocross star, would then try and shepherd their their child through the, through the, the the regime and turn their child into the motocross star that they'd never become. I I I never had any of that privilege of so I didn't know anything about knobbly tires or that they existed.

I didn't understand at all that there were thrills to be had on motorbikes over and above on the streets where you lived, sort of thing. Didn't really understand the idea of long distance travel on a motorbike being a thing that was very different to long distance travel by any other means. So all of that was yet to come in my life. And although, obviously, in my mid twenties, I thought I knew everything, it was only this once we'd had this idea of this Mondo Enduro trip and we were thinking about what motorbikes to take, it seemed obvious that what the industry said you should take would be, in those days, in the early nineties, an Africa Twin or maybe a Transalp, that kind of thing. And then my brother saw this article in, a British motorbike magazine, or the British motorbike magazine called Bike, and this bloke had bought this brand new thing, which we called the TrailBike, which you call a dual sport, and it was this Suzuki DR three fifty, and this was this idea of the street legal dirt bike, which didn't exist as an idea.

And, you know, America Japanese brands often are mocked by all knowing journalists for answering questions that no one asked. You know, you mentioned a a few paragraphs ago about the classic bike scene in London and two episodes ago in podcast time, but two days ago in human time, I went to the fifty nine club, and, I I spoke with some members there. In a couple days, I'm going to the Ace Cafe. And I'm just so interested in this, you know, British bike culture, and it is so vibrant. But I find it interesting that you identified on your own and rather quickly that the smaller bike is important.

And you touched on mondo endura, mondo enduro. Sorry. And, you know, this is a crazy idea. This was groundbreaking. And this is, for the listeners who don't know, this is the original trip, you know, around the world.

All other, you know, Hollywood productions and trips around the world are modeled after this. Can you maybe tell us how you came up with this crazy idea and maybe take us through the journey a bit? And and I'm assuming that was on one of these three fifties. Aaron, I don't know if you wanna do that again, but I would never want somebody to say that our metasome trip around the world was in any way a first. What was the first was getting across the Soviet Union to Magadan.

Nobody nobody had even attempted that before we attempted it, and nobody else had no had tried, not even the television industry. No one else no one else had ever tried to make a television program about motorcycling around the world. That was that was what we thought of that no one else had ever done. Okay. But I will I will put the asterisk on that Okay.

To go around the world in that fashion, in that route with these motorcycles. And to be honest, we the largest growing sector in the motorcycle, community is the ADV world. So, you know, we are the ADV Cannonball podcast. So, you know, into our super niche y world of motorcycling, it was the groundbreaking trip around the world, and so many people have copied that literally almost mile for mile. But can you maybe tell us about the trip and, you know, how you came up with this idea and the routing more importantly because no one had done that routing?

It's, it's it's difficult to answer it, but my my elder brother, Gerald, led the way in that in my early twenties, I was I I was at the I was at university, then I was in the army, so I was kinda like trapped. You know, I was not a master of my own time, so to speak. That's when he got his FJ, '12 hundred, and he started and at the same time as that, he started, he rekindled a relationship with, a Canadian friend of his called Neil James, whose father owned a chain of wrecking yards in BC called Ralphs. Now the I hope, they had a big premises in Surrey on the outskirts of Vancouver, but some some listeners will definitely know about Ralphs. So, Neil James was at boarding school with my brother in England, and my brother went to Canada, borrowed a motorbike from Neil James, and he had he had three weeks of holidays.

That was the most he could take from his job on the railways. And he rode, Iron Man style from, Vancouver, BC to, like, San Diego and back via Death Valley, doing something insane, like, you know, 700 miles a day. And the and and I remember hearing about this. He didn't really you know, it was before the Internet. There was no Facebook posts or anything.

Like, he just disappeared. Then he came out and said, oh, and he said I was in America. That was it. That's the end of the conversation. But he showed me on a map what he'd done.

I couldn't quite understand it, but he was telling me about the kind of distances he was doing. It sounded awful. And I thought, well, you know, but he but he established this template of using every second of your free time to to travel as far as you could on the motorbike. And then he also did because he worked on the railways, he had this other thing where him and his railway friends had free railway travel in Europe. So they would get on a train in London where they lived and get to the furthest place that they possibly could on a train, and then come back on another route.

So they would they would it was a normal thing for me growing up in my early twenties to hear that my brother had just gone to Istanbul and back on the train for no reason, just just for the fun of of going, you know, and also, of course, those days, wasn't such a big deal to get a train through Eastern Europe, where where yeah. So that was all exciting, and so he was always you can see how where this is going. My brother would kinda, like, lead the way, totally. So he's doing these huge motorcycle holidays on his own. I mean, he is a lone wolf, really.

And, then he and if he wasn't doing that, he was doing these huge motorcycle journeys, huge these huge railway journeys for the sake of it, for the sake of travel, and that's the bit that I kind of understood. And then he I'll never forget, on the day I finished military academy at Sandhurst, we all went all of us, officer cadets, we just got our commission, so now we were left tenants, and we went home like normal people to our moms and dads, we were too young to have apartments or anything. We all went home to our moms and dads, and and I don't remember agreeing to this, but my brother just said, right, let's go. We're going to Morocco. And he had never been.

I had actually on a bicycle trip, but we got on his boat ride, drove I didn't even know where we were going, but we drove to drove to a South Coast port, got the boat to Spain, drove across Spain really fast, two up on this f j 1,200, and then we drove around around Morocco. And, and it was, of course, incredibly exciting. And this is and this is only, like, thirty four years ago, so it's not like we were the first people to go to Morocco. But what I now look back on it was the spontaneity of it. No guidebooks involved of any kind.

The only reservation was the initial ferry ticket to get us to Spain, and then everything else was improvised, which, of course, would have been considered normal in those days. And, when we were in Morocco, we were we only had enough time. We only had two weeks. So we had enough time to do a what you might call a small incursion into Northern Morocco. We certainly didn't didn't have enough time to drive all the way down the Atlantic Coast to Mauritania, which then actually was a war zone anyway, so you wouldn't have been able to get into Mauritania.

So we're we're in Northern Morocco, and there's a route, coming up from, from what you might call the Sahara, loosely speaking. And we would and we would see on this certain road, that we were on, invariably Germans going past us on what I now know we would call big dual sport bikes, like Cogiva Elephants, Africa Twins, HODA Dominators, I think, XLR six fifties. If they exist if they didn't exist then, I'm sorry whoever's listening. But bikes that look like that, big single cylinder air cooled trail bikes. And we'd see them going past us, and they were wearing what in those days would have been eighties kind of rally clothes, often open face helmets, goggles.

Their luggage seemed to be kind of improvised. We had early Jivi panniers, clip on touring panniers, but their their luggage was often rucksacks or or kind of weird army surplus stuff that seemed to be lashed together with string and how obviously, homemade fabricated luggage, and and they were covered in dust and all the fins of the of the motorcycle cooling, on the on the cylinder, the cooling fins were all encaked with invariably some massive oil leak, which was then itself encrusted with dust. And and encrusted with dust. And and and you'd see these people come to orders, you'd have, like, a second, maybe three seconds to focus on what they were. Then you've got, like, maybe half a second as they passed you, and then they were gone.

You'd I'd look over my shoulder if I was the passenger, and they'd be gone. You could that's when you'd see the German number plates. Always Germans. And and, you know, I didn't I was, what, 24? I didn't know anything about anything, but I knew that was fucking cool.

That it was cool. And I just thought I'm more I don't know who these guys are, what they're doing, but it's better than what we're doing. That's for sure. And they were probably struggling with those bikes, because they were probably a little bit big, especially coming off the the empty quarter there. That's just nothing but sand.

And I've said sand, so everyone's butts have, you know, puckered up for sure. But taking that experience and saying, right, I'm gonna go do this is is a bit of a leap for sure. Well, the next day so that was a that was a fun trip. Obviously, I was a passenger. We took turns turns riding the bike.

I bet it was a tarmac trip. And, interestingly, we didn't we had camping gear, but we never rough camped. We were extremely conservative, looking back on it, and very unadventurous, and and I lament that. But I think neither neither of it didn't it just didn't occur to us, also because we didn't have a bike that was well suited to to exploring off road. Maybe that's why we didn't, rough camp.

But we did we never even wanted to. We never we never had a craving to do that. And then in about then I went to teach training college, and at the end of my, year of teacher training, we had the summer holidays. So I had about seven weeks off or something like that before I started my first teaching job. And we had an idea.

Oh, yeah. So it was 1990 by then. And, the Berlin Wall had just come down, and my brother phoned me up one day and he said, did you know that overnight every single Eastern European country that has kinda like basically just had all of the Soviet troops withdraw have declared that you don't need a visa to visit them in advance anymore. And you and you did do in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and eighties. And not only that, you don't have to prebook accommodation in advance.

So in the these totalitarian states, you know, when I was a kid, if you met somebody who'd been to Bulgaria, you would, like, have them around to dinner, and they'd tell you what it was like. You know, my sister went to Czechoslovakia when she was about 18, and that was a huge thing. People were talking about it at school, in the playground. Austin, has your sister gone to Czechoslovakia? Because it's it was unheard of for someone to get into these countries.

And not only that, you had to prebook every single night in a state owned hotel, which was run by the national, hotel tourism infrastructure agency that was called Intourist, and they would charge you five star Western Hotel prices for staying in pretty forgettable, humdrum, Soviet style guest houses. So it was incredibly expensive, incredibly bureaucratic. You couldn't organize this on your own. You'd have to work through the state tourist agency, and there were coach trips and things like that that could be done. But there was literally no such thing as independent travel by a Westerner in, in the in the Warsaw Pact countries.

You know, I've never put it together. I never understood like, I understand history, of course, but I've never understood that that was the impetus to go into that region of the world. And people don't realize, especially most of our listeners are in North America, but it is close. Like, it is only a few days ride, and you and you are there. And to have that literally, the wall come down and have that that place, accessible must have been really exciting.

So you you grabbed your 3 fifties and strapped on some of the bags. We didn't have the little bikes then. We there was so four of us went. My Triumph obviously broke down just beforehand, so I couldn't take that. So me and my brother went, two up on the trusty, Yamaha, 1,200, and then two other friends came on some other Japanese bikes, one Honda, one Kawasaki.

And we got the ferry to Hamburg, and, because the East German border was quite close from Hamburg. You get off the ferry in Hamburg, and that afternoon, you are entering East Germany, which, you know, I mean, remember, East Germany was was the North Korea of the post war era. It was the most repressive regime in the world, more so than, you know, this lethal combination of hard left communism fused with a police force, every member of whom had been in the Gestapo. I mean, just can you imagine growing up in in that what what that society was like. I mean, just a one simple East German fact, in the nineteen eighties, every single private phone call made from someone's apartment was recorded on a quarter inch reel to reel, machine in a like a and there's and there's photographs of, like, these gymnasiums with you know what the gymnasium looks like at exam time when there's, like, 200 desks in there?

On every one is a separate recorder with a technician patrolling them, and they're autumn and they automatically start recording every single private, you know, phone call. So that's that another simple fact. I've just read a book about the Stasi, you see. So I'm I'm kind of full of this. But but, they say that at its height, the Stasi had actively, on its payroll of informants, about one and a half million citizens, which is something like one in 20 citizens, was actively informing on their neighbors to the central authorities.

Now we yeah. We just in the West, we cannot imagine what that level of of surveillance is like. And what and what and and if you're unhappy about your society, now, you know, for all of its faults, we can go to the Internet and we can write anything we want about King Charles or the or the or Donald Trump or anything. We, you know, we we could record now a a list of jokes, humiliating political leaders with no fear that we would be arrested tonight, you know. So so getting into Eastern Europe was, of course, not so scary.

We didn't but definitely, definitely, none of us knew what we were gonna find. And my brother had the vision to realize that going to a country that nobody in the West had ever been to before, that was gonna be exciting. And this, of course, was the great the great development, the great click forward, almost like a in a like in a scientific context. We suddenly realized that the motorbike wasn't cool because it looked cool, or girls liked it, or you or you went really fast, or you're an outsider, or you got some cache from owning it. Suddenly, the motorcycle became the thing that allowed us to get into these places quickly and easily, and to go all over the place in a in a fun way.

We would never we would never have considered this trip if the thought was, let's all get in a car and drive around East East Germany in a car. That would never have occurred to us. Whereas it did occur to us, we wanted somewhere excited to go on our motorbikes, and Eastern Europe Eastern Europe was gonna be it. And we created a route just literally on the kitchen table with a map of the whole of Eastern Europe. We created a felt tip line on a map that went from Hamburg to the Black Sea, to a place called Constanta in Romania, and then back to, France through, and it went through every single European country.

Then most of the capitals. The only one that retained its repressive visa, requirements was Albania. So we cold called Albania, couldn't get in, so that was the only one that we couldn't tick off the list. But we went through every single other one. It was funny it was a funny little wiggly line that did all this.

And, of course, that was only three weeks. We were on the move a lot. It was to be in Bucharest in 1990, I never met any I'd never met anybody. I'd never heard of anybody who'd been to Bucharest, Sofia, Bratislava, who'd who'd swam in the Danube. You know, all the all the, who we went who'd been to Warsaw, Kharkov.

Now it's all just it's nothing. EasyJet. You know? You'd go to a stag weekend in Prague. When we were in Prague, it was like, fuck.

This is Prague. You know? And it felt and it looked like it was the year 1750. Add to that the communist atrophication post war. It was just utter time travel.

That's where the seeds of Mondo Aduro were born. That's really fascinating. You know, especially North America, we don't we don't think about these things. Right? And then you were, you know, you're you're very modest and, you know, you're gonna hit me telling this, but you were the first to get to Magadan.

Can you maybe tell us about that route planning and maybe something about that trip? It must have been exciting to to go on the road of bones and what we now know as the old summer road. And for you, it was just the road. But, that must have been fairly exciting. How do you come up with this concept?

Well, my odds to that is is will vaguely disappoint. So following on from this three week trip around Eastern Europe, which was, like so many like so many pivotal experiences in one's life, it's not till you got back that you that we were like, oh my god. That was that was mad. And, you know, all we had was a couple of rolls of still photographs. And we wrote a diary every day, which my brother had instigated.

Initially, he wanted it to to just record where we started, where we finished, and what the mileage was, but it turned into a proper diary of of all the unusual things that we were experiencing. So we we had that to look back on. And and it, within a few weeks, there was there was talk about doing another trip, something like that. But then I was at an age where the the other two guys on that trip were at university with me. They're in my generation.

They just started their jobs. It was a time for knuckling down. The fun and games of university were behind us. We had to start becoming grown ups now, not planning enormous motorcycle holidays. But, it the the seed had been planted.

And then about about two years later, in 1992, we were kind of just and this is obviously all done by letter. We're constantly writing letters to people, and photocopying them and send I sent out a a circular to my friend saying, let's let's let's meet up and do something. We'd like to do another big trip. But the more we think about it, the more likely it is that we're we're gonna have to take some time off work. And we'd only been in our jobs a couple of years.

A lot of us were teachers, so we had some summer holidays, but we knew that wasn't gonna be enough. We're gonna have to take it, you know, with a leave of absence, get an entire semester of school to give us four months to do something. And, of course, in those days, the only thing that anybody talked about really was driving from London to Cape Town. That was the that was the set piece. That was the, like, like, the you know, the first meal your mom teaches you to make when you leave home is a spaghetti bolognese, let's say, as opposed to a bowl of cereal in Jerry Seinfeld's case.

And, so the it was the standard thing. If you're gonna if you if you said, I'm gonna do a long motorcycle trip, it's gonna take four months, people would just say, oh, what's Cape Town? It was a given in those days. And, of course, the first, you know, 20% of Ted Simons' Jupiter's travels is exactly that. And so, of course, we all read that, and that and it was exciting.

I found Jupyter's Travels quite hard work, but the first twenty percent of it, I thought was the most exciting thing I'd ever read, you know, and, and we loved it. So we talked about going to Cape Town and and, what bike should we take, when should we do this, how we're gonna do this, who's gonna and none of us none of us wanted to take time off work. Everybody said, well, we've all just started our jobs, it looked really bad, and and but anyway, we we talked about it, and but then three of us in the room sorry. Four of us in the room, there were there were, eight of us in the room, eight guys there, eight friends, but four of us had been on that Eastern European trip. And some somebody, and I don't I don't know if it was me, but somebody said, why don't we see if we could ride across Russia?

And of course it wasn't the Soviet Union by then, by 1992, it was Russia, and somebody said, oh, yeah, I have read a thing about how there is a boat that goes from the port near Vladivostok, which is called Nokodka, I think. So Vladivostok was a was a military port. It was a closed city, but Nokodka was the, was the civilian port. Or maybe I got it wrong, maybe it's all the way around. Anyway, you have two ports right next to each other, one's military only and one's civilian, and somebody said, oh yes, there's definitely a civilian service that allows a citizen, a private citizen, to get from Russia to Japan.

So So we thought, wow. So, you know, getting into Russia didn't sound that difficult. We only boarded Poland. We'd just been to Poland. So the next country along was Russia.

Well, of course, it was Ukraine, but in our minds, that was still Russia, but that's another podcast to discuss that. And so so we thought, well, getting into it can't be that hard, you know, because they'd and and somebody did some research or made a phone call, and there were travel agents then, of course, Russia was opening up, and they were they dropped the visa requirements. And so we discovered that it was not actually that difficult to get into Russia, same as Eastern Europe. They'd gone the same way. So we had somebody we had this brainwave.

What if we rode motorbikes across Russia? Let's buy Japanese motorbikes. Let's get all the same motorbike. Let's and let's ride them across Russia, then get this boat, this notional ferry to Japan, and then ride them to the factory of wherever it is, Honda, who who made them, ride them to that factory, and and they'll have all the workers will come out and they'll cheer us for coming from England. We'll be the first people that have ever ridden those motorbikes from England all the way across this huge landmass, you know.

And even then, we knew that, you know, the Soviet Union represented a sixth of the Earth's Earth's surface. You know, it covers 11 time zones. It's it's literally two and a half times bigger than America and Canada, and people think of them as, like, enormous. But nobody talks about how enormous Russia is. And, of course, notion because no Westerner has ever traveled all the way across Russia over land except on a train.

And then half the time, they're asleep, and it's moving, so they don't realize and all that jazz. So we thought this was this was genius. We thought, great. We'll get sponsored. We'll be get get give them free motorbikes.

And our imaginations just went mad, this idea of getting to Japan and taking these motorbikes back to the place where they'd been made. We thought we'd be on we'd be on TV and everything, and and we have these these fantastic delusions of grandeur. Anyway, so that was in December 1992. We said, well, look, this is gonna take a lot of planning, and nobody's done anything like this before. We don't know we don't know.

I think somebody said we don't know what we don't know. And so it sounded exciting, but we knew that we were distinctly unqualified to do this. We had no role model. There was nobody saying, oh, yeah, I've done this, it'll be fine, or this bit will be difficult, but all the rest of it will be fine. We didn't even have that, and and we we wasted loads of time pursuing kind of trying to fight.

It was like it was like being a prospector or something like that, just going up into the mountains and not knowing where to look for the gold. And we kinda had an idea it was up there somewhere, but we needed an old Canadian guy with a long beard who would who would say, oh, yeah, check try that creek there. That's yeah. We needed that, and we didn't have it. And, of course, that ironically is what made it exciting in the end.

We didn't we didn't what we wanted was to have the trip prepared in advance for us so we had no drama and no pain. We thought that would make it a great trip. Of course, now I know the drama and the pain was the were the only bits that counted, really, And the easy bits, you could do you could have easy living at home. There's no point having easy living on the road, you know, on too much of it. And, so we're going along and we're heading for Vladivostok and have left out, obviously, two and a half years of planning, but we you know, of those eight people, seven of us left together.

That in itself, somebody should make a documentary about that, that eight friends have a conversation in a pub, and set and two and a half years later, seven of them are going around the world together. And so going along, and when we crossed the Caspian Sea from Baku in in, Azerbaijan to Krasnodarsk, as it was called then in Turkmenistan, We were, this ferry was insane. It was, like, so clapped out and smelly and awful toilets, terrible food and beverage, really, not really any at all, and a mad load of people. Like, one guy had an old larder filled to the brim with bulbs of garlic in the main body of the car, and he built essentially like a like a a a a booth of plywood that surrounded his driver's seat and where the gear stick was in there and, went up to the roof. And that stopped the garlic inundating where he was sitting.

But the rest of the car was filled to the brim with garlic, bulbs of garlic, not even in bags, individual bulbs. They'd all been loaded in with a shovel or something. And the boot, obviously, was full of garlic. And then we had bags of garlic on the roof. So I'll never forget the guy you know, they're like, all these, like, crazy things like the garlic car.

And he was, of course, an early an early businessman. He was taking he'd got this garlic from as a bajan. He was taking it back to Terminus to start to sell it. Anyway, so on that ferry, and then we saw this Western we saw a guy who was obviously not from a Soviet country, a former Soviet country. Turned out he was Australian.

He was some kind of journalist. He was probably about 60 or 65. We got chatting, and, and he said, where are you going? We said we're driving to Vladivostok, and he was like and we thought that was pretty cool. And he goes, oh, yeah.

That's a long way. It's gonna take you a long time. He goes, why don't you go to Magadan? And we said, what's that? What's that?

He said, well, that's the that's the other port on Russia's Eastern Seaboard. It's like an old prison town, but it's further north. And and now also, as I talk to you, I've never understood how he knew this. Maybe he worked for the government or something like that. But he was like, so so, we said, well, we it's all about this ferry.

It's all about getting the ferry to Japan. He goes, ah, but Alaska Airways has just started this special circular route, Seattle, Anchorage, Magadan, Khabarovsk, and back. And so if you get to Magadan, if Alaska Airways will let you put the motorbikes on the in the hold of the plane, you'll be able to leave Magadan. So we're like, wow, that sounds exciting. He goes, yeah, and you'll just be able to fly to Anchorage, because we thought once we got to Japan, we would, the best we could hope for is getting a boat to Long Beach in in Los Angeles.

That would be the best escape we could imagine. So the idea that we'd, like, get flown to to Anchorage in Alaska, that was, like, super convenient, that would be great. It would be like the top of America, then we could drive all the way to the bottom, and it would all fit perfectly. Anyway, so, we parted company with him, and the seed was planted, and we spent the next I mean, it was I could make a film about this, but we spent the next, like, three four months from then to get to the Far East Of Russia, Months and months. And then the Zilov gap was in the way and and everything like that.

And, but the more we attempted to find out in 1995 Russia about something else, further down the road, the more we realized this it was utterly impossible. So the language barrier was immense. No one spoke English. We our Russian was was almost zero, and it was there was just no way you could find out what was happening at Mackadac Airport. We then rang my mom and dad back in England and said, look, can you find out this is obviously all before the Internet.

Could you try and find out if there's a phone number? Oh, yeah. Another bad thing. I had this brainwave about Alaska before we left, and we were trying to get some shipping information. And in those days, it was possible to write to the yellow pages in wherever the headquarters was, Minneapolis or whatever, Tucson.

You could write the yellow pages, send them, like, an international post post order, which I did, and I got sent back the yellow pages for Anchorage. And I and I had this in my it was like one of the few resources we had, so I and I'd left it with my parents, and I said, well, phone see if you can phone some travel agents in Anchorage, or phone Anchorage Airport, find out if anybody can confirm this thing about this flight, or if, more importantly, how we had no idea how was it once a month? Was it every day? And, so then we had this we had this delightful plum dropped into our lap of if you get to this place, Magadan, you could fly out of it, and then the frustration of having no idea if that was, a, even true, or, b, how would that work? Having you know, if you if we were foot passengers, we'd have been fine.

We'd have just chanced it, but so we got the maps out and we and, like the there's this thing, you know, the Trans Siberian Railway going across, the Soviet Union, across Russia, across the Far East of Russia, and it just it goes pretty much East West. But Vladivostok is much further south than people realize. And to get and, you're 1,500 miles from Vladivostok when you make the decision to turn north up towards the big town of Yakutsk, which is like the big top, northern Siberian city, and then from Yakutsk trying to get to Magadan, and, as far as we could tell there there wasn't a road. We had a but we had a a Russian road atlas. This was the other amazing coup, is there was a thing in London, in Central London, in Charing Cross Road called the International Bookshop.

No. It was the International Motoring Bookshop, or is or it was the headquarters of the International Society of Motoring, some mad analog seventies kind of thing. We and we went down there, met some funny old bloke, and he said, I can get you a Russian, the Russian version of the Rand McNally. I can get you a a road atlas, one book road atlas of the entire Soviet Union. And we remember thinking, wait a minute.

The Soviet Union is, like, immense. Surely that's a 10 volume set. Yeah. But but the nature of it, there were so few roads, so few tarmac roads in the Soviet Union that you could condense them all down to just one book that was like an inch and a half thick. So we had this.

We'd set off with this with this book. It was in, of course, Cyrillic, so we had to learn Cyrillic so we could understand the names of the towns on it. But in that book, from Yakut from the South Of Siberia up to Yakutsk was marked as a motorway. Actually, it was a dirt road, but by Soviet standards, it was a maintained dirt road, so it was marked as a as a freeway. Then from Yakutsk, there was a dashed line that went all the way to Magadan.

So when we met this Australian guy on the ferry, the first thing we did was open the rogue atlas, and there was this dashed line. So it wasn't like it was in space or in or on the moon. Some Soviet cartographer thought that it was possible to somehow get from Yakutsk to Magadan, so we thought, well, we've gotta try. And, and there were these small tiny towns, like about seven towns, which are now kind of quite famous, Susuman, Ushneira, Onyakon. These are the and we didn't know then, but these are all prisons.

We thought they were little villages with people, you know, cheerfully chopping down pine trees or whatever, but they're all prison towns. And Magadan is the big prison town, and people forget that on the outskirts of Magadan, there were prisons in the in the suburbs. Yeah. And and, you know, slave labor camps, prison labor camps, processing minerals, and all that sort of stuff. And, Gulags.

Yeah. Yeah. Gulags. Yeah. But we but you don't it's unless you've read An Applebaum's book about gulags called Gulag, it's not I don't I don't think it's well understood or well known, a, how the culture of exile was a completely accepted social norm in the era of the czars, And exile meant, whereas in the in the West, we would exile, for example, in the English, we exiled our prisoners to Australia, another country.

But in Russia, it was so big, you exiled people to Russia, But to the other side of it, that was that was 8,000 miles away from, so when the September Septemberist revolt happened in whatever that was, something like 1870, forgive my history nerds, forgive me for not knowing off by heart. When the when that revolt happened, everybody convicted in that revolt was exiled to Siberia, and they took their wives and children with them, and they just went they didn't live in a prison, they lived in a in a cottage in a in a town in Siberia. So we didn't understand in 1995 that that so much of Siberia was populated with the descendants of people who'd been exiled, and that when they died or when the you know, and their exile would often be, you know, thirty years. So their children would have grown up and everything, and I don't know what the rules were if children were allowed to to leave, but people would then just stay there because they because they knew it. And, of course, the other thing about Siberia is that you tended to not get any hassle.

It was so vast and empty, and unpopulated at all, that in the in the eighteen nineties and the early nineteen hundreds, it had a kind of tranquility of its own. Obviously, brutal six month winter and a brutal six month summer of heat wave plagued by killer mosquitoes, but you were far away from the heavy hand of authority if you were in Siberia. And so that combined with the extent to which the Bolsheviks were absolutely determined to use their political enemies to economically fuel the socialist utopia. And all of these prisons that are filled with people do two brilliant things. They take away your political enemies, and they give you an enormous labor source of people who will work for nothing, or be killed, or be murdered.

They'll work for nothing, and and the figure, I'm gonna get this wrong as well, but the figure was something mad. Like, in in about 1932, something like 18% of The Soviet Union's GDP was centered and based on slave labor, gulag labor. I mean, astonishingly, economists have studied it and said, actually, if you've got, whatever it was, 17,000,000 people contributing towards your GDP and that's all they produced, then they're failing. Anyway, so so when we saw this dotted sorry for the backstory. When we saw this dashed line on this road atlas, we didn't know anything, any of what I've just said.

We just thought it was, oh, maybe it's maybe it's and one of us said, oh, maybe that means it's only in the summer. We knew that it would be covered in snow in the winter. So we thought, yeah, that's it. The dotted line means it's it can be used in the summer, and in the winter you can't use it. So we the big thing that made the so called and we didn't know it was called the Rotter Bones.

We'd never heard that expression. But I'll I'll never forget, we did the Zilov Gap, which is all before you turn off going north to Yakutsk, and that almost killed us, and it was the hardest, most depressing thing I've ever done. And and the trip grounds of the halt, everything was smashed up, the sprockets were all, all the teeth came off the sprockets. They were all stuck in you know, they're all they're all had 12,000 miles on them already, bearings collapsing. Everything the bikes were falling apart because of, not hard conditions, but sheer lack of maintenance by us because we were ignorant.

We didn't realize the bearings existed. I didn't know there was a thing inside a wheel that that needed to be changed. I thought when you bought the bloody motorbike, it was ready to go. And I didn't realize all these things that were gonna fall apart unless you change them. And I was, you know, I was an ordinary person.

I thought, well, why don't they make it with something that doesn't fall apart? And so we were useless, ignorant, like children, and crashing our way across Siberia. And, I'll never forget when we turned off the what you might call the Trans Siberian Highway, and and there's a junction, a normal dirt road junction straight on for Vladivostok Fifteen Hundred miles further on north to Yakutsk, and Yakutsk was a thousand miles up this road. And then after that it was another 500 miles or whatever to Magadan, and then of course if when we got to Magadan they said you I don't know what you guys were thinking, you can't put your motorbikes in your in a plane here, we'd have had to drive 1,500 miles back to that junction, and then another thousand mile, 1,500 miles onto Vladivostok. So in terms of having a punt, in terms of it being an experiment, it was a massive call.

And by then, it was August, and we knew that we'd be looking at you know, the winter lasts, like, a week. The autumn lasts a week and so and then this this the winter comes in. We didn't have any winter clothes or anything. We we didn't have our tires were all bald and all of that. We couldn't replace anything unless the Soviet person made it for us.

So it was exciting and vaguely stressful to to turn off and head up to Yakutsk. You've hit on a bunch of important things there, the the Austin Vince ethos of DIY. Also, you've always been a proponent of people. Even if you may not know what you're doing, be a little bit prepared and, you know, just go and do it. And you've had some other groundbreaking, trips.

On our motorcycle film club, you have, Mondo Sahara. And in that, and in that film, you placed caches, and today we know as a Geocache game, but this wasn't a game. You had all your supplies and fuel and food, placed for you out in the Sahara Desert. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. And, also, what I found interesting about this, this film is you act kind of as a moto envoy.

You didn't just show up and we're brash, like some of us do, unfortunately, but you really took care to make sure you represented the people you're were with when you were off doing your life or death, geocaching game in the Sahara. Well, Monte Sahara was, the direct result of a trip that I did with Adventure Spec, with Dave Lomax at Adventure Spec, which is where I first met Linda Poske, actually. It was called Salt and Gold. I think it was something like 2012, that kind of time. And, and I was asked to film this attempt to get to somewhere in the heart of the Sahara called Tauadeni in in what is, Mali, but in the the center of the of the empty corner of of the of, the Western Part of the Sahara, and a place that could that had no you've not didn't even have dirt tracks leading to it.

You can really feasibly feasibly get to it, on camel trains. There were some salt mines there, from the medieval period, and the trip's called salt and gold. And it was a really ambitious project, and it was spawned by this incredible man called Richard Kempley who lived in Yorkshire, an Englishman. And he was essentially obsessed with the Western Part of the Sahara. What we'd what would if you look get your map out, what we'd now call Mauritania, Mali, and, well, actually and a bit of Western Sahara and Algeria.

And he had been going out to, these countries on his own, or with a buddy in a Land Rover that he'd specially converted, exploring using basically old French military maps from the nineteen fifties. In those days, in the in the late in the early naughties, a primitive GPS, but where which would tell you at least where you'd been, there was nothing on it, no features on it, but it gave you a night, it stopped me getting completely lost. And he'd been exploring routes and talking to old people and finding out where there used to be old military roads to to foreign legion fortresses in the middle of the desert and stuff like that. And he'd I don't know how he got connected with Dave Lomax. I I I don't know how that happened.

But they'd cooked up this idea of trying to get some motorcycles to this place, Towardenny, via Timbuktu, and do some other old, Parash Dakar routes in the Far East Of Mauritania, but really about as extreme off roading as could happen in terms of the remoteness, and in terms of if anything goes wrong, there is no one gonna come and get you. Obviously, there's deserts in in in North America and all sorts of countries, but this is a this is a different you know, this is true Sahara and true interior of the Sahara, where you're, where you could be easily 800 miles from, let's say, a helicopter or something like that, and and the idea and it was also the earliest days of satellite phones. So once you were going that far off grid, if something bad happened, there was a very strong chance that that that was it. It'd be there wouldn't be a rescue. There wouldn't be someone coming to get you.

You were too far away. By the time, you know, if somebody had a bad injury, by the time you got back to tell somebody in Mauritania, the fourth poorest country in the world, oh, we need somebody to travel a thousand miles and back in that direction into the desert, and it had to be by helicopter, then your casualty would be would be dead by then. It was. So in that respect, it was it was high stakes, adventure motorcycling. And so I I went on this trip, filmed it, but I was still teaching.

I filmed it in the holidays, and I didn't have time to edit it. So I handed the film over to the the brushes of the film to a third party, and they put this film together. And I and I and I didn't really like it very much. I thought they hadn't done with my footage what I thought they would do. And I was, that was fine.

It was, you know, somebody else said it's their vision of you know, they're gonna use what I gave them, but they didn't they didn't use it in a way that I thought. So I kind of had a niggling a niggling thought. Or could I you know, I wouldn't mind doing that again because it was exciting. But also there are elements of the I didn't meet the team for that trip until until we actually arrived in Paris for the flight down to Mauritania. So, they were all good eggs, but I didn't know who they were, and and I realized that making a decent especially after the experience of Modern Enduro and Terrace Circa and being on the road with the other guys who were my childhood friends and stuff for years or months at a time.

Now I'm doing a film about some guys who just met up, and also they'd all come for the extreme motorcycle thing. They hadn't come because they'd wanted to meet Mauritanian people, or they'd wanted to go to Mali and meet, you know, Malian people. And and I and then just about this time, so this is 2012, you know, the American military adventure in Iraq is now really definitely falling apart in front of, you know, to and you'd have to be an international commentator to see that the the Western involvement with the Islamic world is not working at all. The war on terror is now, to quote, Borat, the war of terror. Everything's going wrong.

And I had this idea, and, of course, as an internationalist and somebody who traveled extensively in Islamic countries, I wasn't happy with now. Now we had Islamophobia, which we didn't used to. Obviously, nine eleven, you know, plays plays into that. But just generally, across the West, these were the new bad guys to be scared of. And that went against my experience of life and my experience of of of the of motorcycling with vulnerability across Muslim countries.

So I had this idea. I said, meanwhile, I met Richard Kempley at an an event, and I said, oh, yeah. That Salt and Gold thing was it was it was exciting. It was great. And then something went wrong, and we weren't able to complete it, by the way, at the end.

So that was it was there was some unfinished business there. And and I said, yeah. It's a shame. I didn't I didn't really realize what I was getting into. I was too busy teaching.

I'd love to make that film again. And he said, oh, it's French to say that often because I'd love you to make that film again, and I've I've got another idea. And it's and it was the same kind of thing, but this time, the supplies weren't carried on the Land Rover. The Land Rover would go out in advance and bury the supplies. And, GPS had moved on in the three or five years since then, and Richard Kempey said, yeah, I could, I could go out into the Sahara, bury all this stuff, food, fuel, and water, and the occasional bottle of brandy, which was a sweet treat in the Islamic Republic Of Mauritania to dig up booze out of the ground.

And, the he said, yeah. I could do that. I and also I've got a better idea from before, and so we he and I collaborated, and we worked out what we wanted to do, and we agreed that we had the same vision for the project. Then I brought in my kind of idea that I thought adventure motorcycling was, adventure motorcycling should be a political act, not just more off road riding. That already exists as a hobby and as a fun thing, but now in the modern age with the modern communications and the Internet and knowledge and everything and the ability for people to make films and stuff, I said, car drivers, not you know, the normals the normals aren't gonna get in their Subaru or their station wagon or whatever or their Honda Civic and drive across Africa meeting people who are culturally the opposite of them, and make a documentary about it.

That's never gonna happen. Car people aren't gonna do that, but motorcyclists might. And the people who might do that are the ones that we call the adventure motorcyclists. So I said, it behooves me, because I was at the kind of front end edge of that community, it behooves me to make a show about being a Westerner in Islamic communities. Are we do we have stones thrown at us?

Do they come up to us and, like, you know, shout death to America or whatever it is, you know. Do they come up to us and shout and blow themselves up, you know, so as to kill us? Is that what it's is that because that's, of course, what in in in popular culture was being, offered is what that's what these people are like. They're all essentially mentally ill, and they're hopped up on this, you know, crazy god who wants them to kill everyone. Yeah.

I'll I'll share a funny story with you. I was a yacht captain for years and years, and I had actually worked for the royal family in The UAE, and I had a two two year contract there. And this is, you know, fifteen years ago or whatever, maybe longer. And this is while I was getting my visas for The United States, sorry, my residency. And my fiancee, my wife at the my wife now, my fiancee at the time, she was telling her family in Florida, which by the way are from Georgia.

And they literally, I tell you what, they talk like that, which is fantastic. And she says, well, I'm gonna go visit, you know, Aaron in The Middle East. You know, he works for the royal family on their big yacht, and it's gonna be awesome. And they they literally had a meltdown in that exact same vein is aren't they gonna blow you up and they're gonna they're gonna steal you and rape you and all the and all these things. And it was the greatest two years ever where it literally, you know, sipping tea on the aft deck, you know, of of this motor yacht in Dubai as they were building the Palm Islands.

So, yeah, it's a it's a common misconception, and and then I think you're gonna tell me that that was your experience as well. Oh, yeah. Totally. It was, but so the the the just to finish that kind of idea of adventure motorcycling as a political act, I thought this has got it. This is gonna be, easy to recruit some friends who wanna come and do this trip into the desert.

And, we reckoned, me and Richard Kemp believe, that he could he could create something like a three week route that would be something like about two and a half, 3,000 miles of pure desert riding, almost no tracks or trails, most of it literally just driving across the sand, like sailing. And, so that was, like, super exciting, and I thought, well, I can get some people to do that. And, but then I thought, you know what? I'd rather half the group was Americans. And in my mind, because, the British and the Americans' big Islamic incursion cooperation project at that time was Afghanistan and Iraq.

I thought, well, I can't I can't undo that. I know I'm not a statesman. I don't have the influence or the power to to correct the mistakes of the of those farcical, you know, misjudged projects. But I can take my miniature group of motorcycle friends, half of whom I decided should be American, and I could take them into the Islamic Republic Of Mauritania and then into, Mali, which is another Islamic society, and and, of course, see what happens. And I kind of was quietly confident that what would happen is that we'd have an amazing time and that we'd meet loads of lovely people.

And so I set about recruiting, some Americans that I knew already, rather than members of the public, but the working title of Banda Sahara for a long time was was called Americans Without Guns. And then the American guys said, can we not call it that, please? So I said, alright. And then somebody said, you should call it a mondo or something. I said, but it's not a mondo trip.

They said, well, it is if you're doing it, Austin. And so I said, alright. You know, and somebody said, yeah, just call it mondo's hara. Everyone will know what that is. Everyone will get that.

I said, alright then. So that was begrudge. If anybody thinks Mundus Hara is a clever name, I was against it. And everyone should go watch that. That's on your YouTube channel, and you can access that through your website.

And another film, we enjoyed very much is Mega Mondo, and that's more our world, the the cliche giant ADV bike that we force into doing things that, that we shouldn't be doing. But I think it's important that, you know, everyone's gonna love hearing all these stories, and there's so many more. Could you maybe tell us what you have going on in Spain and your events? Because everyone who listens to this podcast is probably, interested in our in our checkpoint rally event, and you hold a very special checkpoint rally event in Spain. I do.

It's called the very interesting navigation challenge event. The VINCE. Jealous of the of the name. I have no cool acronym except for badass, but Does that stand for something? No.

I just if you if you are a badass, you should be doing the ADB Canada backcountry access direct, American We're gonna have a beer and work on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna shoehorn something in there.

Exactly. It's not very difficult. I was, so, as, when I came back from Terra Circa, in 02/2001, I I met the woman who is now my wife, fell in love with her, that occupied me for a long time. I had no money. I was thousands and thousands of pounds in debt from Terra Circa.

And, I just, by chance saw an, an article in a magazine about how much trail riding or what you call dual sporting potential there was in the Pyrenees, in the Spanish Pyrenees. So my brother and I again went out there in in a in a in my old van with, a couple of bikes in a in a trailer. We managed to combine it with some light removals for a friend who'd who'd moved to the South Of France. He, and so he effectively, paid us to take his furniture out to his new house in France, and we had a trailer with the motorbike that with the trail bikes in the back. So we got to the Pyrenees, did some research, got into a right pickle, got nowhere, got lost, went back to England, bought some maps in a place called Stanford's, the best map shop in the world in, in London's Covent Garden.

And then we went back to Spain with the maps, and we've done some research. This is obviously before the Internet, before GPS, before Google Earth. So we found these trails in in the Pyrenees that that were very long, and we went out and we tried to ride them. And sure enough, on the whole, they existed. And, and that began my obsession with the Spanish Pyrenees.

And then that I thought for a lot and I thought for a decade that what was amazing about the Spanish Pyrenees motorcycle access and trail network, I thought what was amazing about it was unique to the Pyrenees. I didn't realize, because, of course, I didn't know what I didn't know. I didn't realize that the whole of Spain was like that. And so we spent I, so my wife and I had well, I had this idea. There isn't time to tell you, basically, but I'll try and make it in one sentence.

In 02/2001, I got hired to cover a teacher at Mill Hill School who had been fired for being useless, and, they taught the then fledgling subject known as IT. And, and in 02/2001, there was, like, no such thing as IT, but now schools were getting computers, and everybody had a computer. You know, when I was at school, there was one computer in the school, and it was the and they took over an entire classroom. And it, like, you know, you wrote a program and it added up the numbers from one to a hundred. You know?

And that was it. That was the look at the school computer. So now there's there's, you know, Windows exists, my Microsoft exists, and the Windows suite of software exists. And so I I had no money. I was a courier.

I was poor, I got offered quite a lot of money, steady income, and I got offered a small cottage on the school grounds, which is from where we launched Terra Circle actually. So I suddenly was offered like five months of decent money and accommodation, and all I had to do was stand in and teach IT. But I was a math teacher, and I didn't know I'd never turned a computer on in my life. And so I I knew who the head of IT was, and he was an old friend because I used to work in the hill as a math teacher. He said, don't worry, Austin.

You've you've only been hired because we know that you can run a classroom without it being mayhem and chaos. And that's the other guy who knew the IT. He couldn't do that, so that's why they fired him. So all you gotta do is hold the fort for a term until the real IT teacher replacement comes in. He said, don't worry.

I'll just tell you every so much for my this is what an Austin Vince one sentence description is. And, he said, look, I'll just tell you every night what you're gonna teach the next day, and we'll and we'll muddle through. And I thought, well, okay. If the boss is saying that to me, I'm not gonna get into trouble if I don't and he knew I didn't know anything. So he said, okay.

And I'll never forget on the first, the night before the term started, before the semester started, he said, right, come in come into the sit next to the computer with me. He goes, right. Okay. Now we're gonna do the thing, you're gonna open a Word document. And, and I said, what's that?

He goes, it's like it's like a piece of paper. It's like a typewriter, like a piece of I said, okay, I understand that. And he opened it up and the screen was white. And I said, oh, I see what you mean. And he goes and he typed something, you know, gibberish.

And I said and he said, oh my god. It's a typewriter. He goes, yeah. Okay. So the children are gonna open the Word document.

You click on that thing and then that thing, and he gave me the mouse. I'd never touched the mouse, and I was like, click he goes, no. You click it twice. I was like, what? You know?

And, so we opened the Word document. He goes, right now, what you do is you get the school camera. There was one school digital camera. He goes, get them to take a picture of themselves. Okay?

And then you plug you open the side of the camera, you put a wire in it. And I was like, what the? So I said, there's no film. And he goes, no. There's no film.

It's all it's all digital. There's like a chip in there, and the cat the anyway, so he was going to do all this stuff. And he he showed me that you could put into a Word document a photograph. You could scan something, for them it was they they scanned the outside of the school the school rules, and they inserted that, and then you could insert a text box, and you could write some words, then you could have some other little pictures and things, and, insert shapes, stuff like that. I was like, wait a minute, so you can just like make your own book or something.

And I had this idea for an orienteering, map reading, navigation treasure hunt in the Pyrenees, but I couldn't work out how I would be able to tell everyone where to go. And when they got there, how would they find the clue if they've just got the map, but it that would be too difficult. And, so I'm doing this job at Mill Hill, and suddenly, the penny dropped right in front of me. I said, wait a minute. I could go out to Spain, lay out a load of checkpoints, take photographs of them with the school camera, and and sure enough, like, the next the next summer holiday, this is what Lois and I did on honeymoon.

And I borrowed the camera. I'm so romantic. Yeah. I borrowed the camera. And I said I remember when Lois and I, once we were engaged and we started talking about we had a wedding date, and we started talking about our honeymoon.

I said, look, would you would you consider she was a trail rider. You know? I said, would you consider coming to the Pyrenees and helping me set up an orienteering event? She goes, yeah, that'd be fine. And then I said, after that, and to sweeten the deal, I said, after that, we'll just go on a road trip of Europe.

Let's go all around Europe. We'll have five weeks after a week spent in the Pyrenees. She goes, yeah, that'd be great for us. And we'll and we'll we'll have a go on a road trip, we'll be romantic, and we'll end up in nice hotels and everything. So I kinda, like, tricked her into the into the setting up the the navigation thing.

And, and so we did so we went out and we we got the map, found these trails, there were loads of them, rode along, took digital photographs, and I'd made all these little plates in the in the DT workshop at school, the, I don't know what you call it in North America, but the, you know, the metal working shop. And I've got those little sticks with the numbers on the end, and I smashed out these these dog tags. And we screwed these to the backs of telegraph poles and road signs and stuff like that. And then these were what people were gonna find when they when they did the event. And we we came back from honeymoon, and then we sent a letter, a paper letter to every I posted it to every single person I knew with a motorbike license.

And that me and Lois. And that came to 72 souls. And, it took ages. I printed it all out of school, bit naughty, sent out all these letters, and set and in the letter was, like, a three page document with some pictures, and it said, would you like to come and do a treasure hunt in the Spanish Pyrenees to coincide with me and Lois' first wedding anniversary, so we'll have a big piss up. Another party, it'll be a few days.

And of those 72 people, 65 of them said yes. And loads of them went and bought Julets Sport bikes who who didn't even do it. They just came. They came for the party. They came for the first anniversary party, had to make sure that my marriage lasted a year or else it wouldn't it wouldn't work.

And everyone came out and did that. It was a spectacular success. We've done a lot of preparation. It was really good. We created this lovely booklet using all the skills that I've learned in the IT lesson, and everyone got this this gorgeous booklet, and every page was a checkpoint, with a picture, a map thumbnail, description, little arrows and things, and there's an arrow pointing at the tree, and exactly at the end of the tip of the arrow, that's where the metal plate was, so that once you were there, you'd find it.

That was the whole idea. And it was a great success, and at the end, we all got drunk. And at the end of the the kind of party, we're all in the dining room, and I just got up and did a speech and said thanks for coming everyone. I'm so happy to have met Lois. I'm so in love.

It's great to to have such fun with all my motorcycle friends. I said should we should we do this again next year? Everyone cheered, and and Closet and I had it in our minds only that it would happen once. And somebody shouted out, yeah, but not here. We've already done this.

And so we realized that we'd have to set up another one. So we we took steps to do that, which meant basically canceling a week of our holiday, and we stayed back out in Spain, got another map, and set up a new one in another bit of the Pyrenees. And, and and that was in 02/2006, the first one. And so that's what? Nineteen years ago, and and it's been going strong ever since.

Yeah. And in in a world where it's GPS based, it's it's so much fun, and it's exciting to do actual orienteering with a with a map, and it's, rewarding as a group to come back at the end of the each day and everyone share notes or or perhaps guard their notes, to see, who who is in first place. But I wanted to give you something. We have a tradition here and, you're gonna laugh as a as a Brit, but this is the certified badass sticker and there's only 100 of them in the world. And I think there's only two on this island.

So here is your certified badass sticker. Wow. Thank you very much. And Well, you know what I'm gonna say there, Erin. I I'm not a badass.

I'm a You absolutely are. You're just too modest. I'm a member of the public, and, the, I I just can't imagine ever ever being be prepared to stick this sticker in a place where somebody could see it because I would be terrified that somebody would think that I thought I was a badass, and I'm not. I'm no I'm nobody. As he zips down the trail, I can't catch on for All the all the TV shows and the films and the the festivals that I've run and all the events that I run, I do I I've created a lot of things, and I have a lot of interaction with with thousands and thousands of people and have affected and the films, of course, when they're on television, affect a lot of people.

Seventy seventy million people watched Mondo Enduro on on Discovery back in the nineties, and and they remember it. And it was and if they were bikers, it was the first time they'd ever seen motorbikes traveling on on TV, and it was exciting. And every single thing I've done, I've always been at pains to to state, if this was difficult, I couldn't do it. Because I'm a I'm I'm a flesh and blood. I'm made of clay.

I'm not a tough guy. When, you know, when there's a I've never run a marathon. I can't do a wheelie, and I've never won a competition in my life. Actually, I did win a map reading competition once when I was at the army, but but, but I'm, like, so definitely not the the the top guy that, you know, the the jock, the alpha male, the I'm just nobody from Harrow. And but I have had a go, and I've discovered again and again and again that almost everything that some people said, that will be difficult.

You won't be able to do that. It turned out it wasn't that difficult, and that's what I've spent my life doing. So I want you to make me a sticker that says ADB, Cannonball, member of the public. You got a deal. Okay?

And then hand them out to people who who, let's say, are inspirational, but actually are normal. I am normal. We actually have a segment. It's called everyday rider, and that's our That's me. Can I be on that?

We will rename this episode, from celebrity guest to everyday writer. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day. I know you're so busy. And when I came to your your studio, you had maps strewn everywhere, and you were you were busy at work. And I appreciate you taking time out of your day to speak with us.

It's a pleasure. Absolute pleasure. And and, the you you won't use this, I'm sure, but, when I was teaching a couple of years ago, not that long ago, I mean, let's some about ten years ago, I was at school, and I'd been booked by a club to do a talk about one of my trips around the world that evening. And, and it meant that I got permission to leave the school premises early. You weren't allowed to leave the school till 05:30.

And this this talk was two hours away. So I was leaving at 04:30, and somebody saw me going to my car, a colleague, and they said, what's going on? You're leaving. I said, oh, I'm I'm a I got permission from the head from the principal to to leave school early, and this woman said, why? I've got a medical appointment.

I said, now now I'm doing a presentation, tonight. And I Carly's face all, like, scrunched up in making the what are you what are you talking about face. And, and she said, well, a presentation? Well, what about? I said, you know, like, better talking around the world.

And she said, what why are you doing that? And so my point being that I that that those are those are my credentials. I am a member of the public. To her, I was just a math math teacher who had the classroom next to hers, and that's all I was. And I and and and that's all I am.

Just I'm just an ordinary person with no special skills at all. Well, you've definitely, let the cat out of the bag here. So thanks for sharing your secrets with us today. We appreciate it. It's a huge privilege to be to be, invited.

You know that you can. Every girl and every man. And we kinda got a plan, got to get across that side. Everybody land a hand, just like brothers in a van. It's a motorcycle scene, a song about fun.

A sabassine machine Have a dream, get a team from far and wide They seem like a dream, so that'll do just fine They'll all stay together Ladies and gentlemen, could I please have your attention? I've just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. And I need all of you to stop what you're doing and listen. Cannonball. Hey, Cannonballers.

Thanks for subscribing to our podcast. We appreciate it. If you're not a cheap Canadian and want to buy us a coffee, head on over to buymeacoffee.com, or better yet, buy us a case of sweet ass craft IPA? We'll visit on patreon.com. Links are in the show notes.

Now back to the riveting podcast in progress. And we are back. Yes, sir. We're back. You know, first of all, I love some of my mother's British.

And every time she go to The UK is as when I was a kid, she come back. I could choose from Liverpool and I could never understand her. She come back and go, mom, are you in there? But I love his his broad accent. His, it was just nice to hear him chat.

Just listen to his stories. He's a great storyteller, and he can really paint the picture of what happened. A couple of things that really stood out for me. But you're gonna you're gonna comment in on the throw a comment in there, Aaron? No.

No. I'd no. I I just think he's a an awesome gregarious dude. He's super smart. Like, when he was doing his mic checks, he was doing, like, the Fibonacci sequence and things like this for the the mic check.

So he you know, he's a super smart dude as well. Yeah. And quite the artist as well as you pointed out previously. So, these are a couple of things that I that I thought were interesting. One is I love the spontaneity that he took with his brother.

His brother rocked up because guess where we're going. He's like, where? He's like, we're gonna get on this FJ 1,200, and we're going to Morocco. He's like, totally unplanned. Like, let's go.

When I was 24, I was doing I was a freight forwarder, and I ended up in, in Egypt. And I got back and I said, I've been to, I've been to Africa. And someone's like, where'd you go? And I was like, I was in Egypt. I'd be like, that's the Middle East.

That's not Africa. I was like, okay. And by the way, one of the worst places to visit, I've been there a couple of times, and each time is just a disaster. Oh, I had the best time when I was there. It was amazing.

I'll tell you about the, yeah, don't put a 24 year old with his with his buddy who works for the UN up at the Nile Hilton on the on, like, I don't know, the Fourteenth Floor or whatever the Top Floor was because we used to we used to start at the back of the apartment by the door, and we'd run to the railing and try to see if we could get this rotten fruit that they gave us across the Nile. I don't think you ever I don't even think we ever got it into the Nile. But anyway, do not I do not recommend this. You're so rock and roll. Alright.

So other thing that I really loved about this, so as you say, in 1990, when the the Berlin Wall had just come down and the Eastern the Eastern Soviet block countries no longer required visas in advance of arrival. And everything previously had been state controlled. Any to any place you went in there, you're required to go in and stay in a very expensive hotel, and that that stopped. And it was kinda cool because, like, as he's saying this, I could see this, like, unfolding, and you're like, I hadn't put that together. So neither had I.

You know, at the age of 57, I was like, yeah. You know? I I actually have a piece of the wall, so I knew it was happening, but I wasn't really clear about all that was going on then. Anyway, the one of the things I thought was really cool was the fact that being in a motorcycle, being on a motorcycle was way different than being in a car because it kinda gave you access in and out, quick access, in and out, way different than a car would have been. So that was kind of a a cool aspect of it that I thought.

Yeah. For sure. And everyone says that. Everyone who does these these, these big trips like this. Like and and more to the point, you couldn't have done the Zilov Gap and the Road Of Bones and the Summer Road with anything but a super lightweight motorcycle.

Remember, there, you know, there was no road. And, you know, he he was not putting his motorcycle on a on a train. So, yeah, without without a motorcycle, you never would have had that access. Yeah. Good point.

I also thought his comments were interesting about the footage that he had taken in Mauritania, Mali, in modern day Mali in, in Africa and in the I guess, it was, sort of in the middle of nowhere in the desert. You know? The desert seems to be you say desert, people think middle of nowhere, but you think in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere is where he was. And, the story about them burying, you know, caches of supplies, I thought that was great. But one of the things that really stood out for me was the fact that the he gave the footage of that.

He was busy. He had to go back and, you know, go back to teaching, and he gave the footage of that to an editing company, and they didn't do with it what he thought they would do with it. And it reminded me when we were putting this podcast together, you were like you know, we looked at know, what it would cost to have somebody. It wasn't terribly expensive to have somebody edit an episode. And then we're like, but the editing is really what potentially changes the how the podcast or how anything happens is like, what ends up on the cutting room floor potentially could have been the thing that really would have changed it and made it speak to what you wanted to have it speak to.

So anyway, I recognize that, and I also wanted to just take a moment and say thank you for the awesome editing job that you're doing in this podcast. Yeah. There's nothing worse than hearing your own voice. I think everyone will admit to that, that syndrome. That's, you know, that's for sure.

And, Austin mentioned something about his acronym for his rally, the Vince rally. And I have a a favor for everyone here. If anyone can come up with an acronym for badass for our rally or our podcast, that would be fantastic. Taylor has one right now. It's big adventure does America.

So sweet. But, you know, it'd be really great to find something, good that reflects the, you know, the rally and reflects the podcast, in our in our our mantra of, doing things. So, anyways, the call is going out. Please, throw us a bone. Throw us a bone.

Throw us a bone. Hey, Aaron. Yes, sir. This this this is what probably gonna be one of our longest podcast, but I just wanna ask you. Is there any Cannonball news that you wanna throw out there?

Yeah. For sure. We'll do it quickly. So twenty twenty six rally is is open. The registration is open, and we're changing the model simply because I am overwhelmed with work.

And in 2025, we booked everyone's hotels, and, we handled everything for for everyone. In 2026, we are working with Hilton, and we have a a super sweet discount code, a group booking code. And, so you pay your entry fee, and then everyone just handles their own hotels. We strongly encourage everyone to stay at the Hilton, because that's the official hotel because that's where the meetings will be, that's where the the the final checkpoint will be, and that's where the starting checkpoint will be. So please don't be an ADV weenie and go camp in the parking lot.

Please stay at the Hilton Hotel, because of because of all those reasons. Not to mention, it's a killer discount. So that's the other part. Yeah. The yeah.

There there was no point staying at the Super eight down the street with crispy cart carpets and scratchy sheets when you can stay at the Hilton for the same amount of money. Although I could say the only reason to stay down there be if there's a Krispy Kreme next door. Oh, fair enough. Listen. I will go with the van and get cases of Krispy Kreme.

So if you just stay at the Hilton so we don't have a disaster in the morning with a bunch of motorcycles showing up. Hilton, it is, sir. And since there's no, what is it? We used to get Timbits before we do the, the Alcan five hundred. Tim Hortons, baby.

Tim Hortons. There's no there's no Tim Hortons. There's there's, you gotta go to the Bucks. Yeah. One of these days, we will have a cannonball that will pierce the northern border and the southern border, but we're not quite yet there yet.

But we absolutely will. In the fine tradition of the scooter cannonball and the motorcycle cannonball, we absolutely will do that maybe in 2027. We'll see. Very nice. Very nice.

And with that, sir, in the in order to make this a two hour, episode, shall we, shall we wrap it up, or you have anything else you wanna say? Well, surely, there's no one else listening by this point. But, in case someone is, let's roll the outro. Thanks for listening to the ADV cannonball podcast. Please give us a five star review on your preferred podcast platform.

That really helps us with the algorithm gods. All hail the algorithm gods. You can buy us a coffee on buymecoffee.com/advcannonball, or directly help save this sinking ship for the price of a pint at patreon.com/advcannonball. Follow us on all the socials with the handle at a d v cannonball. If you'd like to send us a question or comment for the air, or if you are a musical artist and want your royalty free music played on our podcast, or if you'd like to contact us for advertising opportunities, email us at podcast@ADVcannonball.com.

Thanks for listening, and remember, don't be an ADV weenie. Keep your right hand cranked and your feet on the banks.