You The Rider

This section is aimed at the adventure rider intending to overland the more remote parts of Asia or Africa for the first time. Everything written here may be a no-brainer for the experienced but may be unnerving for the less experienced. The intent is to ensure that EYES ARE WIDE OPEN with respect to this kind of adventure endeavour. All riders need a grounded appreciation for:    

1.       Fitness for riding

2.       Weightless rider skills

3.       Different road rules and etiquette

4.       Drishti

5.       Conscious reserve and near misses

6.       Complacency

7.       Navigation

8.       Communications

9.       Murphy’s Law

10.   Looking out for each other

FITNESS FOR RIDING

The biggest favour you can do for yourself right now is to start focusing on your HEALTH & FITNESS. Fatigue is one of the biggest risks for long-range motorbike travel, especially when compounded with rough riding conditions. TIRED RIDERS MAKE MISTAKES – it’s as simple as that. Fatigue management needs to be taken seriously, particularly for the first three days post international flight. You can’t ride hard non-stop for weeks on end without sh^tty consequences. Plan for rest days and maximise time with head outta helmet to see stuff on foot.

Maybe you’re a bonza rider and get away with being unhealthy and unfit – but you still need to consider that the best way to experience the great ranges is with your own two feet and head outta helmet. This is a once in a lifetime for most of you – you don’t want to be too shagged for the walking required to reach the super special places and the walking is generally UP. The jeep track up the side of Uturuncu Volcano in the remote Bolivian Altiplano climbs to be one of the highest tracks in the world – incredible ride! But what about the last bit to the 6,000m summit?   

SW Bolivia : January 2017

You should also have a strategy for Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), which can affect anyone going to high altitude without giving the body time to adjust to the changes in air pressure and oxygen level. Altitude affects everyone differently. My wife is buggered above sea level. If you’re new to altitude then a safe rule of thumb for where to sleep is 500m per night from 2,500m. Spiti Valley offers a great entry route to the Great Himalayan Range for this very reason. The villages of Ladakh are at an altitude between 2800m and 4600m with Leh at around 3500m.        

190919 Shingo La Altitude

WEIGHTLESS RIDER SKILLS

You do not need to be a motocross superstar, enduro champion or rock hopping trials king… but you do need sound weightless rider skills. This means having the ability to stand up, weight your pegs and float above the bike so that your body weight doesn’t fight with what’s going on down below. It’s amazing what your motorbike can achieve when it’s free to move underneath you: traction is improved, suspension performs optimally and there is reduced impact on both you and the bike. Standing up also gives you better vision for potties, proudies, punchies, whoops, whoaboys and whatever else might be waiting for you in the different shades of light across the track. Finally, sitting through the rough bits is a spine jarring experience and incredibly fatiguing – I encourage you to let the bike do the work.

DIFFERENT ROAD RULES AND ETIQUETTE    

You are going to have a bad time if you ride in the developing world with the western mentality, “I’m clearly visible in my lane so I’m sweet.” For starters, it’s not your lane – you’re just borrowing it from someone bigger than you. What you must never forget is that when you’re dead – you’re dead. Whether you were technically in the right won’t matter anymore. Yes it can be chaos, but when your overlanding spidey senses kick in you’ll realise that there’s an order to that chaos. A truck or bus isn’t going to spend all day zig-zagging around every single donkey cart, bicycle and grandma on scooter – it's going to sit in the middle of the road and only shuffle to the side if another truck or bus is coming from the other way. You only need to ask yourself, “Do I fit?” and if you don’t then do something else. It really is that simple.

I was riding in Sumatra when a truck driver went right hand down the moment I was on overtake – I was deflected hard and fast diaphragm first into the dirt. Never have I had the wind knocked out of me like that before – I pathetically wheezed in the fetal position thinking I was finished for what felt like an eternity. I was lucky to not have ended up under the truck. I was angry – it was a legitimate overtake so I was in the right! The reality was that the last thing on that truck driver’s mind was some western prick on quick overtake. He was likely focused on keeping his truck alive through the broken road and probably saw a pothole at the last moment.

Always put yourself in the driver’s seat of the vehicle you’re about to interact with – and be courteous. One quick beep means I’m here! and two quick beeps means I’m about to overtake! If your horn is weak then invest in an aftermarket one. In narrow conditions recognise that it might be easier for your bike to hide somewhere than what it is for the larger vehicle.    

Waiting for the loader Kashmir

DRISHTI

I learnt this from my wife, who is a yoga enthusiast, when we rode our motorbikes from London to Kathmandu over six months. Drishti or ‘focused gaze’, is a means for seeing everything at once and developing concentrated intention, which is invaluable for recognising danger and picking optimal lines. Your average Aussie rider waiting at a set of lights will be fixated on the lights changing whereas a drishti rider will be taking in the whole scene - the lights are only a very small part of everything going on around them. A rookie rider in broken road for their first time will see the potholes one at a time whereas a drishti rider will see all the potholes at once with an optimal line through the broken road. Aggressive trucks and buses are a tough one for rookie riders - it can be difficult not to fixate on this great big mass of steel carrying life threatening momentum toward you and instead 'see all the space' around the truck.

CONSCIOUS RESERVE AND NEAR MISSES

Riding with conscious reserve means that you are never riding on your limit, which is for racing. Riding on the racing line or with a racing mentality in these places will get you dead. Do not take NEAR MISSES for granted – they are a GIFT. Think about what contributed to the near miss and more often than not, I was riding too aggressively will be top of the list. My brother and I watched each other nearly die many times early on in our travels. The reality is we were riding too aggressively too often and not riding with the conscious reserve necessary for long-term survival. The only reason we were still alive was LUCK. It took our young dumb male brains a long time to figure that out.

COMPLACENCY

So you’re a fit and healthy rider with good weightless rider skills. Your subconscious has gelled with the different road rules and etiquette and you’re riding with conscious reserve. You got drishti. You’ve got it all figured out and even finding it a bit of a breeze. Complacency works the same for all adventure pursuits – you find your groove, get overconfident then you become blasé. Confidence is a great thing but do not let it breed complacency. I have too many examples of this mistake. One example is when I was riding in a remote valley in far north Pakistan and I didn’t horn for deadset the ONLY vehicle of the day appearing on the ONLY blind spur – I was fine but gave the wall a passionate cuddle.

Horn in Pakistan video

DRC video 7:35

NAVIGATION

If you’re riding trunk lines from one town to another then navigational skills are not so important – but it’s a very different story riding off into the middle of nowhere. Navigational errors are not only a source of frustration but can also leave you in dodgy situations. You can end up separated, riding at night, out of fuel, camping crappily or just generally compromising your safety. You need to know where you are, where you’re going and how to get there – you need to know how to navigate.

Ideally you have a GPS unit hard wired to your battery and a secondary mount for your smartphone, which provides for redundancy and convenience. Many riders are using two phones these days instead. Personally, I use my GPS unit for ADV and my phone for trips around town. If you do use your smart phone off-road then be mindful of the charge outlet connection and likelihood of failure due to damage from vibration, which renders your phone unserviceable.

Mounting your GPS is an extremely important consideration. Ideally, it’s top of your dash – so as you check for an upcoming turn it’s just a slight dart down of the eyes with vision still on the road ahead. If you find yourself fully tilting your head downward for a quick nav check then your GPS mounting is not ideal. My brother and I first started learning about OSM and Basecamp when we landed in East Timor – it was a dodgy self-learning process. We also had our GPSs mounted to our handlebars, which meant full head tilts downward with vision ahead lost as we checked nav. On the island of Flores this exact situation happened to Laws through the main town – when he looked up a second later the copper on the motorbike ahead had braked to turn (no indication given of course) and Laws flattened the young police officer with his right hand pannier. Straight to the lockup for Laws – our round the world trip looked over before it had barely even begun. Fortunately the flattened cop didn’t have any serious injuries and the police were great.           

COMMUNICATIONS

All riders should have a working SIM and two-way satellite messaging capability - Garmin inReach is the go. Sat phones let you down and SPOT trackers are no good trans-Africa, trans-Asia and return ride home. If you wipe out remote and break bones, the difference between getting treatment in the next 24 hours and the next few days can have a big impact on your injury's severity and recovery.  

Post crash USA

MURPHY’S LAW

I do not like Murphy – the adage is all about things going wrong in any given situation. A perfect example (and hot topic) is where you should mount your emergency device – there are three main options: 1) on your person; 2) on your dash / handlebars; or 3) in your tank bag. Most would probably argue that it should be on your person in case you can’t move to your bike post incident – but what Murphy does is damage your device’s antenna as you take the tumble. I’ve put two devices out of service: once on the handlebars and once on my person. I now store my device inside my tank bag sitting upwards cushioned with other stuff and that’s where it stays safe and sound – but there is no way I will recommend to another rider to do the same. If I did that, Murphy would see that rider’s bike irretrievable over a cliff. But definitely in the tank bag for countries finnicky about satcomms.

All you can do is PLAN FOR THE WORST AND HOPE FOR THE BEST. There is honestly not much else you can do about olmate Murphy – it’s only a matter of how much time it will take before you can laugh about how Murphy pummelled you in any given incident. Generally, the more you overland round the world the quicker the laughter comes – to the point of looking like a crazy person laughing during the actual pummelling. 

LOOKING OUT FOR EACH OTHER

I encourage all riders to use the buddy system just the same as any other adventure pursuit – this is a marriage like commitment. You can be in a larger group and shuffle the buddy system day-to-day but whoever you’re with on the day – marriage. You’re always looking out for someone and they’re always looking out for you – the buddy system ensures fastest possible response time in case of an incident, which could be as simple as a navigational error.

Riding with others is not always possible – just because you can get time away from work, family and other commitments doesn’t mean your mates can. Personally, I have spent a lot of time riding solo and enjoy it immensely. There may be other single riders looking for a buddy and we can line up a date night or something to kick things off – just don’t make it weird.