About the author

My name’s Ed and since my first motorbike trip abroad, travel and adventure have been synonymous with storytelling, photography and writing.

This site pretty much does as it says on the tin – here you’ll find the best of my pictures from home and abroad, mixed in with some writing that I’ve done along the way.

From the humidity of the Peruvian Amazon to the minus 20 degrees of the Sino-Pakistan border, since my first trip in 2010 I’ve been fortunate enough to ride motorbikes in 47 countries on 6 continents. The biggest of these trips was from London to Sydney in 2015 and 2016 but has included other, more focussed trips such as five months in Georgia and Armenia in the summer of 2022. In late 2023, I spent three months exploring Algeria’s deep Saharan south off-road, unguided and unassisted, becoming one the first non-Algerians to successfully do so in over twenty years.

About this site

In the Pictures section, you’ll find photos from five continents, covering a variety of different locations and subjects – many of which have nothing to do with motorbikes or adventure travel.

In the Routes section, I’ve written up some of my favourite routes, with accompanying GPXs, to be of use to others considering overland travel or trail riding both home and abroad.

In the Stories section of this site, you’ll find photo essays of some of the most memorable of those trips, including solo rides from London to Sydney and from Buenos Aires to Lima, as well as five months in Georgia and Armenia.

In the Words section, you’ll find various blogs and musings setting out some of the practical and more philosophical lessons I’ve learnt over the years, since I began to travel.

And Barney?

…or rather who was Barney?

Barney weighed about 200kgs, had two wheels, 790cc of engine and kicked out something like 60 horsepower.

That’s right, Barney was a motorbike. A black 2004 Triumph Bonneville to be exact – the modern version of the same bike that Steve McQueen rode at the end of The Great Escape.

Barney was a slugger, a bit of a lump – who was also nicknamed ‘The Black Bomber’. But he wasn’t some overweight heifer. And he looked and sounded cool. As in ‘people at traffic lights always telling you your bike looks cool’ kind of way, with aftermarket cafe racer handlebars and unbaffled exhausts.

Bought from an Oxfordshire Triumph dealer in July 2010, the bike inherited the name I wanted to give a then-recent ex-girlfriend’s black Labrador puppy.

This was the bike that really kickstarted my passion for adventure motorbiking, sometime in June 2012 on the dusty back roads of central Europe as I thrashed my way all the way to Belgrade and back from London, taking in every twist, turn and mountain pass that I could en route.