Motorcycle Adventure Around the World - friends of MAD TV

Motorcycle Adventure Dirt Bike TV is proudly supported by Adventure Spec in England, Rally Raid Products, Giant Loop in the United States and Adventure Moto in Australia. Over the past couple of years MADtv has taken you on movie-length motorcycle adventures all over the world. Our goal is simple, to motivate you off that couch and find your own adventure. For a whole host of reasons we didn't manage any big adventures of our own for 2018 and so we turn to you guys, the subscribers and friends of MADtv to show us what you've been up to during this past year. Some of the achievements have been awesome. Jörg and Manuel from Germany took on the tough BAM Road of Bones and their filming of their adventure is excellent. Well-known Australian motorcycle adventurer Amy Harburg discusses her recent 25 000 kilometre Mongolia to London adventure via The Stans on her Rally Raid BMW 310 GS. Greg Villalobos from Adventure Spec takes us for a tour of his backyard in Northern England and my old riding pal Nosh Mystery returns to India and takes his father high into the Himalayas for his 70th birthday. Subscriber Scott Purcell from California gives us a sneak peek of the Baja Trails and we catch up with Steve and Amelia as they travel from Sydney to New York by bike and boat with an interesting marriage twist and we finish off with some great Aussie Outback footage from YouTube channel Big Bike Adventures. Our first story is to tag along with Jörg and Manuel on their six-week 16 000 kilometre Road of Bones adventure. Jörg has a long time association with MADtv, in fact he is one of the reluctant stars of this channel and features in a number of popular adventures. A movie by Walter Colbeck called Sberski Extreme inspired Jörg to take on the BAM and Road of Bones in Siberia Russia. He knew it would be tough and he teamed up with Manuel, an experienced adventurer in his own right. Following a year's worth of planning Jörg and Manuel shipped their bikes to Ulaanbaatar in Northern Mongolia and then quickly moved into Siberia Russia to take on the BAM and Road of Bones. Jörg had ridden extensively on KTM 690s in Australia clocking up over 30 000 kms. Due to their agility power and low weight 690s were chosen for this challenging ride but were heavily modified to prepare for this adventure. One of the highlights of the trip was crossing the Wittem River Bridge. Walter Colbeck told Jörg they'd been one of the first bikes to cross the bridge after a major bearer collapsed in February 2018. Jörg said one of the toughest days on the BAM was between Kuanda and Yuktali where they covered just 150 kilometers in 16 hours with tough riding through deep rivers, massive washouts and over 20 railway bridges. That night they rested in a railway maintenance shanty to ensure they didn't become a meal for bears. When you realize that only a handful of motorcycle adventurers throughout the world successfully complete the BAM and Road of Bones each year it's time to celebrate. Now before we move to the next story I've got to reach into the video vault and show you some video of Jörg's first ride with me. One I will never forget. For those long-term subscribers you'll remember that infamous ride with Alex where a guy on a KTM freeride recommended a track for us on our big bikes. That was my first outing with Jörg who was riding a BMW 800 at the time and this ride ended up in carnage. But out of that adversity forged a great friendship. Jörg rode with us in Australia for about eight years before he recently returned to Germany. And a big tree on the right. I want to know the strategy here. I'll call my mum first. Well Jörg, well done on getting through the Road of Bones. At the moment we're right here at that special place where it all started, where all the carnage happened. Oh hang on a minute Oh what bike is that? I'll be blown. In May 2018 Scott Purcell of California took his riding buddies on their annual seven-day pilgrimage on the Baja. Scott rode his BMW 1200 GSA whilst his friends turned to the lighter Agile 450s for the trip. On this day Greg Villa-Lobos of Adventure Spec and John Mitchinson of Rally Raid Products were in Northumberland in northern England comparing the Rally Raid Honda CBX500 and the BMW G310GS. But it was also a great opportunity to use the footage of that shoot and speak with Greg about his backyard and the types of riding he does close to home. But first a little background on John Mitchinson. John was one of my first sponsors on my 2012 London to Sydney ride and adventurised our KTM 690s and made them capable of round-the-world trips. John is a creative engineer with a wicked sense of humour, obsessed with adventurising existing models. He's also successfully led the anti-establishment of adventure bike ethos, small is better. He puts his money where his mouth is at being the first rider in the world to cross the Simpson Desert on a Honda CBX500. Yeah okay so we're what you call the H which is kind of one of the more challenging lanes that we got off here. I'm Greg Villa-Lobos, I'm based in the UK. It's a bit of a rites of passage really. It's totally doable on the 450, on the EXC and on enduro bikes but it's going to be a bit of a challenge on the bigger bikes but we'll give it a go. So the H is quite a classic lane up here for us. It's in Weardale and it's called the H because you've got a track on either side and then a track in the middle that connects it and you go down one side and you've got a nice little river crossing in the middle. It's quite small but then you go all the way up the other side and the route up the other side has been eroded by water. The farmer's kind of left his drainage to just kind of cut a channel down through that. Technically it's a road. Over the years it's got more and more eroded which makes it a really interesting kind of route, an interesting challenge to get up it. It's almost like a trials route. You kind of try and get up it without dabbing if you can and it gets worse and worse and worse but there's an easy way and a harder way. To be honest the easy way is to not go in the channel and it's easier up the top but the threat is, or the danger is, if you do fall you fall into the channel so it's kind of easy with a high risk fail option and actually the harder route if you want to stop you just stop and you can literally leave the bike on the side. He's up on his pegs. Is he going to take the easy line or the hard line? Ah he's gone the easy way. You made that bit look easy John. I still do a bit of trials to keep my hand in. You can have a big adventure in a day and for me that's really why I started trail riding. That's why I really enjoy it still. I've got a young family. I'm not, at this stage of my life, I'm not able to get away for three months to go traveling around big parts of Europe or the world. Definitely not a 12-month adventure. It's like how much adventure and how much experience can I cram into eight hours. Business car's that size. For anybody that thinks you only need a big bike to ride the trails and anything else is a phenomenon. Here's a magnifying glass to look at your incredibly small penis when you get home. Hi I'm Notch Mystery. I love riding bikes. I love filming as well and putting the two together, what could be better? So that's in India and Dad and me went up the north around this area. We were up here for close to about seven weeks traveling on our individual bikes and at 70 we did a great job. 70 Notch, that's amazing isn't it at that altitude? It is. Ships are gonna sail. Hearts are gonna break. And everybody knows. Smoke is gonna rise. Tears are gonna fall. So don't be nervous honey. Love is touching gold. Notch has some serious international motorcycle adventures under his belt and has ridden extensively in Central and Southeast Asia and from the Himalayas back to Sydney, Australia. His bike of choice for adventure is a slightly modified Yamaha WR250R. In this ride Notch returns to far northern India to ride with his 70 year old father. Notch captures the landscape, the culture and the people and the bikes in a unique way that warms our hearts and reminds us why we love motorcycle adventure. His slow motion landscape shots enchant us with their beauty. Notch is a great riding companion and I'm looking forward to filming my next international adventure with him when we return to northeastern India in 2019. Through this video I'd like to show and share with you the people, the culture, the journey with dad and it's something that he's never done before even though he's an avid biker. I've grown up on the tank of a Norton Dominator so that tells you how much he likes bikes. But it's something he has never done before so I thought it'd be a great way to celebrate him being 70 as well. So it's just the journey and basically both of us just being mates enjoying what we both enjoy. Hi, my name's Amy Harburg, I've just ridden 25,000 kilometres on a BMW G310. So I started my journey in Far Eastern Russian, Vladivostok, rode all the way around, down into Mongolia, did a big loop around Southern Mongolia, across the top of Mongolia, back into Russia, down through Kazakhstan, into Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, across Uzbekistan, around the top of the Caspian Sea, to Georgia, across Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, into Italy, then up to Germany, the Netherlands, and then on to London. Without a doubt, the focus of my trip were the Stans. I absolutely love this place, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The people are amazing, the scenery is incredible. It's an absolute adventure rider's paradise. There's no place on earth like the Stans, the majesty of their mountains, it's just epic. They're not a particularly soft place, they're brutally hard, but that's what's so beautiful about them. In Tajikistan, I rode the Batang Valley, and I kind of didn't expect to go there and ride it, I just got the opportunity to go do it with a couple of people. And the landscapes out of there are amazing, you're so far from anywhere, and the mountains are huge. One of the best things about riding solo and being alone in those places is the people you get to meet, particularly through the Stans, and again, my favourite, Tajikistan. I met the most incredible sisters up in the Batang Valley, and they were so welcoming. The people don't have much, but what they have, they just want to give and share with you. They make you feel so at home, and amazingly, in Tajikistan, most people speak at least some English, so they're always wanting to find out about your life back home, but they just share, and they're so lovely. Everywhere you stop, they're offering you food or water, it's amazing. Taking on a solo journey like this, particularly as a female, many people think it's really dangerous or it's going to be fearful out there. My experience of it was completely opposite. We have this completely skewed take on the world through the media, the media paints a bad picture of all these countries. My experience was completely opposite, the people were welcoming, caring, and lovely. All they want to do is help, and all they want to do is see you have a good time in their country. Dear kids, the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason. Chasing the highs and embracing the lows on an adventure from Sydney to New York without a plane. Steve and Amelia left Sydney just under a year ago, with the intention of either riding their KTM 1190 Adventure R, and or boating their way to New York. There is another twist, but I'll let them tell you about that. Their adventures are recorded on YouTube channel The Extreme Life, and I caught up with them in Singapore. Hello. Hey guys, how are you? Good, can you hear us okay? Beautiful, it's good sound. Cool, cool. So, our objective is to go from Sydney to New York without an aeroplane, so the whole way by motorbike and boat. We cannot catch a plane anywhere. Even, for example, when Darwin waited for six weeks and signed up at all the sail yacht clubs to get a boat until someone would actually take us, because no one did want to take us, but one guy did. That's a challenge. And then along the way, we wanted to basically test our relationship against the world, so we got engaged before we left, and then if we survived the adventure, then we get married. So it's like the ultimate test. That's the ultimate test. That's a good test. I think by the looks of the smiles on your faces, you're doing all right so far, so everyone's passing and getting high credits at the moment, so that's great. So after we finish up in Singapore, so we're just visiting some friends around here, after we leave Singapore, we're going to head back into Malaysia, and then we're basically toying between two different directions after we ... So we're going to head through Thailand, and then we can either go east and kind of hit Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, or we're going to go west, and we're going to go North India, Myanmar, that way. West. Head west. That's my ... Head west. Our last piece of inspirational footage comes from Steve of YouTube channel Big Bike Adventures. Steve and his mates are based in Brisbane, Australia, and have ridden all over the country. Steve loves two things, the vastness of the outback, which he captures beautifully in this footage, and secondly, sending younger riders into deep river crossings first to help them develop their skills. Very generous, Steve. I'm going to walk through. He's got very wet feet, boots full of water. A huge thanks for our first worldwide collaboration between friends and subscribers of Motorcycle Adventure Dirt Bike TV. For our first attempt, this is a cracker. You can't watch these stories and not get motivated to hop on your bike and get out there and explore.