Motorcycle Legend Austin Vince Hits the Road Again

To any poor soul with the wanderlust, Austin Vince is a god. He is of that rare order?a modern British expeditionary.

I first came to know about Vince when a friend lent me a tape of a remarkable travel series that had run on the Discovery Channel. The show, deceptively titled The Easy Riders, was about six Brits who'd endeavored to break a Guinness World Record for traversing the world by motorcycle. They'd christened their trek the Mondo Enduro. Their goal was to ride around the globe using the longest possible land route in the shortest number of days. The journey, which was two years in the planning, took them from the Mill Hill School in northwest London (where Vince taught math), across Europe, Turkey and the Caucuses, into Central Asia, across Russia, Siberia, Magadan, over to Alaska, down the North American coast, through Mexico, Central and South America, over to South Africa, up the African continent, through Saudi Arabia, back through Turkey and Western Europe and on into London. That no member of their expedition was killed along the way is remarkable. That they did it all on comparatively tiny bikes?Suzuki DR350s?is unbelievable.

Austin Vince made a stopover in New York last weekend and I talked with him about a new trek he's planning, which has been dubbed Terra Circa.

"The idea for Terra Circa grew out of the last trip. Only this time we're going totally minimalist. It'll only be half the distance of Mondo Enduro?London to Anchorage?but twice as extreme."

How's that?

"Restrictions. Each man is allowed only one topcase big enough to fit two soccer balls. And we ride every possible bit of road. No riverboat ferries or trains when the road runs out. And absolutely no panniers or tents."

No tents?

"Well, beyond simply roughing it, the idea is that we won't be weighed down when we get into difficult road conditions."

This unbelievable minimalism of kit makes sense. On the Mondo Enduro, Vince and company found themselves mired for days in the vast turbid swamp of eastern Siberia. With all their luggage, the bikes were too heavy to move and they were reduced to portage.

Since accidents are common on a trip of this sort, I asked Vince about first-aid precautions and, specifically, painkillers. The only drugs he plans to pack are a couple vials of a liquid morphine derivative called Nubane, a drug that came in handy on the last trip when, in Ethiopia, a truck ran over one of the team members.

"Fortunately, the truck's tires were low on air. Had they been fully inflated Clive would've been killed. As it was, the lucky bloke got out of it with a mere four broken ribs. And the Nubane did the trick."

According to Vince, broken ankles, scrapes, bruises and the inevitable intestinal disagreements were also common on the Mondo Enduro, and all treatable to some degree with Nubane.

When asked what it's like to never stay, to never have the opportunity to dig into a country or its culture, Vince answered in a way that surprised me, but that captured the truth, cliched as it may be, of all great odysseys.

"If I want to see Victoria Falls or the Grand Canyon or whatever, I can hop on a plane and do it. This kind of thing is more about the journey inward. It's really about the soul of the team, the selflessness and sacrifice it takes to accomplish an extreme task. I've played on and coached sports teams all my life. Cricket, football, rugby; I've led schoolboy expeditions?that kind of teamwork is nothing compared to the grind of living with people day in and day out.

"One interesting thing that happened on the Mondo Enduro was that we were all great friends before we left, but the conditions of the road were so extreme that some of those friendships couldn't sustain that. All the admin, all the aggro. Preparing, cooking, repairing, no downtime. Always working on something. Every night in a different place. By the time we hit Africa we'd shed the dead weight [three of the original six had quit] and we had become a well-oiled, nearly telepathic unit."

Okay, so things were austere. Still, I don't imagine you went an entire year sans femmes.

"Believe it or not, we didn't get laid until we hit North America. All across the Ukraine and Russia we kept seeing these exquisite women, but we were always on the move and it was near impossible to chat up any of those Slavic birds because of the language."

Ah, the foreign tongue, the great un-equalizer.

"True, and in North America all that changed. It wasn't like we were rock stars, but for ordinary guys like us?school teachers, railworkers, no-hopers?we suddenly found that people responded to us in ways that we'd never been accustomed to in Great Britain. It was that Warholian sense of fame. You had an angle, you had a pitch. I'm breezing into town, not because I'm a loser, but because I've just been all around the world. But it cuts both ways. In other parts of the world, people saw how physically dirty we were and they thought us outlaws, rootless itinerants, drifters."

Vince resembles a very young Robert Redford crossed with an even younger Jon Voight. He has blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. But for the web of ruts by his temples, his is the look of the eternal schoolboy. He's a quasi-celebrity throughout England and Europe, well known for his public donning of white fur coats and gorilla suits. While Vince could attract considerable corporate sponsorship for this next trek, he eschews that approach.

"A lot of bollocks, that is. I know from experience. It goes from being your trip to their trip and things get all fucked off. I'd rather film it myself like I did last time, edit it when we get home and if some cable channel wants to purchase it, then fine."

At the end of our discussion, Vince said their team was in need of a scribbler to write a memoir of the trip. Terra Circa kicks off in July 2001. I'm polishing my boots.