In June 2005 schoolteacher Laurence McLaughlin prepared his motorcycle for a journey of a lifetime. Patricia Weston reports
He finished his day's schooling, packed a few belongings into the panniers of his Honda Pan European ST1100 and headed for the ferry at Roscoff to make his 50-day, 15,000km journey across the world.
"I wanted to ride off in a straight line and see how far I could get, so I decided I'd take my motorcycle from Ireland across continental Europe and Asia via Russia and Siberia, through an area known as the Zilov Gap, to Vladivostok," he says.
Laurence chose a cumbersome and heavy machine to ride his way across the world. He wanted to test the bike he used everyday in Ireland rather than kit out a machine especially for the trip.
Before he set off he garnered some biking tips from his local mechanics, Embassy Motorcycles in Wexford, and made some very minor modifications.
"The bike was made more comfortable with GPS, a few electric sockets and a real nice pair of elkskin gloves attached. I also rigged up a platypus style drinking tube to the bike, bought a flip lid helmet and that was it," he says.
For his gear, Laurence swopped biker leathers for cowboy-style draggin' jeans lined with Kevlar and army-style boots with steel toecaps. He had fantasised about this trip for a long time and it finally came about by virtual reality. Sitting at his computer surfing the web one day he encountered his travelling companion Jimmy and his Yamaha XT600E along an ethereal route of the information superhighway.
Logging onto the Horizons Unlimited website, which, "was set up by a biking couple and provided a valuable portal site for bikers to log their travels on", he says. He continued to use the web as a source of contact throughout his expedition and stopped at internet cafes along the way to keep a web diary for his net surfing biker friends.
It was here he told of the kindness of a stranger. "The Russian road on the other side of the Ukraine border was really crappy. Poor tar had lifted off in sheets and there were lots of potholes. Since that night I've had to learn to stand up on the foot pegs and lean forward in order to do about 50 miles per hour without being bounced all over the seat so the bike could kind of rattle along underneath me.
"After it got dark it started to teem with rain and we were miles from the nearest town on a road full of heavy trucks. After an awful couple of hours we had almost given up. We took shelter under the canopy of a petrol station, both of us wringing wet.
"Just then, a black Porsche with blacked-out windows pulled up between us. I thought it was the Mafia but as it happened it was a Russian biker who wanted to help."
But the most difficult part of his trip was yet to come as they made their way to the Zilof Gap; a 2,000km route near Lake Baikal. It consists of compacted dirt and gravel and only has tarmac in places. This swampy abyss is considered treacherous in Russia with stories of highway robbery, giant mosquitoes and other creatures.
"Like something out of the Wild West, so we were definitely taking a risk in trying to pass it. It was only opened by Vladimir Putin last year, but it's far from finished," he said.
Once he had dexterously negotiated the Gap he headed back to Ireland and sent his trusty machine off to LA to the care of a friend. " I plan to pick it up next June and travel around the States. It'll be perfect for the US roads."