Man on a Mission

PRoFiLe Man on a

Mission

AUSTiN ViNCe HAS STRoNG VieWS oN WHAT MAKeS A MoToRCyCLe ADVeNTURe. BUT WHAT MAKeS HiM TiCK?

iNTeRVieWeD By: PeTeR HeNSHAW

You can't ignore Austin Vince. He's usually seen at overland events, the hyperactive chap sporting striped overalls (orange, white, red or blue), and talking animatedly about any subject under the sun. Ex-British Army (officer training at Sandhurst), he rejected a military life in favour of teaching maths, working as a TV presenter and of course becoming one of Britain's best-known motorcycle overland travellers.

First to cross Siberia by bike, film maker, co-organiser of the Adventure Travel Film Festival and off-road orienteering events in the Pyrenees, the list goes on. To cap it all, he's married to Lois Pryce, who of course has written about her own motorcycle travels through Iran, Africa and the Americas.

When we spoke on Zoom, Austin was taking a break from watching candidate travel films for 2022's Adventure Travel Film Festival. He and Lois live on a boat on the Thames, and that's where he was when I interviewed him.

z How did you get into bikes?

My brother had a bike and I thought it was cool, so my first was an MZ TS125...I blame my brother, who should have guided me better! It took me three attempts to pass my bike test because all the old boys had said it was really just riding round the block. So I didn't take any lessons and didn't know anything about road positioning – thought it was just about not crashing!

exploring the great outdoors (preferably in natty overalls) is all part of Austin’s modus operandi

z you joined the Army?

Yes, did a short course at Sandhurst and was sponsored by the Army through University. I was sold it as a windfall for any young man, but it turned out to be a bad deal because you had to spend your holidays in uniform. I remember the day of Live Aid in 1986 – I was up on Salisbury Plain, digging a trench all day, and thought of my friends who were at Wembley Stadium watching the bands... So I started to fall out of love with the Army.

This became more serious in 1987 when I saw the film Gandhi – it was also the 20th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination, so there was lots of stuff about the civil rights struggle, which I'd known nothing about until then. Now I'd grown up with war films, being taught that the British are the good guys. I'd also been taught that racism was in South Africa, but I began to understand that segregation was a white European construction, and that the USA, our glorious ally in two world wars, was actually a deeply racist society. I began thinking a lot about the morality of

Main picture: Austin and Lois hard at work recceing a Pyrenean route Small pictures: Mondo enduro was a learning curve, and follow-up Terra Circa reaped the benefit. Both underlined the importance of team work.

violence, and this whole division into good vs bad guys.

This obviously doesn't work with the Army, but I had to go back to Sandhurst, because I owed them money. There were some good people in the Army, though some racist misogynists as well. So I went to see my commanding officer, explained that I was a pacifist and wanted to leave. 'The first thing you need to do,' he said, 'is have a psychiatric examination.' I think that says a lot about the Army.

Austin managed to escape the military and became a teacher, which apart from various breaks he still is four days a week.

z What was your first big trip?

That was Mondo Enduro, and my longest trip before that was three weeks around Eastern Europe just after the Berlin Wall came down. I had a Triumph 650 then, which blew up before we left, so I went on the back of my brother's Yamaha FJ1200. It was mind blowing, because we had no idea that Eastern Europe was going to be so materially backward.

That made us start thinking about riding a country we knew nothing about, the Soviet Union – could we ride all the way across to Vladivostok and get a boat to Japan? Nobody had ever done it so we didn't even know if it was possible. We did it, finishing up at Magadan, but we were forced to put the bikes on a train to get through the Zilov Gap. We shipped to Los Angeles, rode down to Santiago, flew the bikes to Johannesburg and rode home through Africa. After Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia we rode to Eritrea where we got the boat to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and arranged a boat up to Suez. When we arrived in Jeddah we discovered that it was a closed port and we weren't allowed out. Our boat was the next day, but we noticed that no one was actually guarding the entrance to this closed port, so I got on my bike and rode out to the British Embassy. Having discovered that was possible, we decided to

start riding up to Jordan, then Suez and see what happened. There were lots of police checkpoints as we rode north, but one by one they allowed us through. One of the bikes had broken down so we were towing it, and we ended up towing it 720 miles to Oman. We got to Jordan, then through Syria, Turkey and home – it was May when we got back to London.

We started out as seven, but three dropped out in Siberia and my brother left in Canada. Then we picked up an old school friend of mine in Johannesburg and the four of us rode all the way home. That was really the best part of the trip, because it was the best line up of people – travelling is all about the people, not the kit.

Mondo Enduro really opened my eyes and turned me into an extreme internationalist, thanks to my experience of the Soviet Union. Here was a country that we had spent 50 years squaring up to, having been told it was the enemy who wanted to destroy us. But when we rode through it and met the people, we found it wasn't at all like that.

I don't hold any Russian civilian responsible for the actions of the Russian military. Just as I hope, Russian civilians don't hold ME responsible for the actions of the British military.

Orienteering by motorcycle events have proved hugely popular

z What about the bike?

My brother was the bike expert and he recommended the Suzuki DR350. He had ridden one from London to Nairobi in about 1992, when everyone said he should be on a bigger bike, and found that it was great, with fantastic suspension. We were all novices and couldn't afford big bikes anyway, so we all bought DR350s.

They turned out to be perfect and if I was doing that trip again on the bikes available then, I'd still take one of those. I have a Honda CRF250 now, which is more reliable, but I wouldn't say it's a better bike. The only thing I would change is the luggage – we were carrying far too much, about 70kg each, and could have coped with one-third as much. We had trouble with frames cracking because we had simply overloaded. Lots of other mistakes as well, like not changing consumables, all novice mistakes. Apart from my brother, none of us had owned a bike long enough for things to wear out.

Back home, Austin went back to teaching, but looking for new horizons, he made a film out of the footage taken on Mondo Enduro which went out on Discovery TV. It was a new thing back then, well before Long Way Round, and did well. As a result he was offered a TV presenting job, which he did for about three years.

z And you got into trail riding?

By then, the late 1990s, I had started riding off-road here because I'd ridden around the world but had never ridden trails in the UK. It was amazing – I'd done a few days on motocross circuits, but this was far better, because you were actually going somewhere as well as having the fun of riding off-road. And being in a group, there was always some collaboration, helping each other. I found places in England and Wales that I didn't know existed. It destroyed street biking for me as a hobby – this was far more fun. Then some of us decided to have another go at crossing Siberia. On Mondo Enduro we had to put the bikes on the train to cross the Zilov Gap, because there was no road, like the Darien Gap. Some of my ex-pupils, who rode bikes, said why don't we go back to the Zilov Gap and

complete the ride? Since then of course, a road has been built. That was how Terra Circa came about in 2000.

Terra Circa, a rerun of Mondo Enduro, went mostly as planned, riding to Vladivostok, shipping the bikes to Japan, then the USA, and riding across USA before shipping home. The resulting film was shown on Men & Motors. Incidental music by Austin and his band.

z How did the Pyrenees events start?

A group of us used to go out to Almeria in Spain, but then I read an article about trail riding in the Pyrenees – I'd never seen anything like it and had no idea that the mountains were full of trails, really an off-road playground. We went to Stanfords in Covent Garden, bought the OS-equivalent maps of the Pyrenees, managed to plot some routes, went down there in a van and set off on the bikes with just the maps and a compass – it was exciting, an empty place.

I was hooked, and when we got back I decided to organise an event where people could map read their way through the Pyrenees on their trail bikes – orienteering in other words. It was about that time that I met Lois, and we spent the first week of our honeymoon in the Pyrenees on our trail bikes (she had a Serow), setting up routes for this new event.

That was in 2005 and we've run one every year since, adding the Twin Shock Trailfinder for older trail bikes, and a guided trail ride, which covers about 100 miles a day over five days. Most of the people who come on our trips are experienced trail riders and of those who aren't, some turn out to be brilliant off-road, some have to leave on the first day. So now we spend a lot of time briefing the riders so that they know what they're getting into.

z The Adventure Travel Film Festival...

This was really Lois's idea. Over the years, people had sent us some really good travel films, made independently, but no one knew about them. Then Long Way Round happened, which obviously was very successful, so we thought there must be a way to share these fantastic films. It was Lois's idea to make it a weekend so people could camp and watch a whole series of them outdoors. We held the first one in 2009 at an activity centre in Devon, with a dozen films, and about 250 people turned up.

Once that had happened, and we had a website to promote the next Adventure Travel Film Festival, we were inundated with people's travel films which they had made independently to good standards, but which hadn't been seen by the public. It felt as if we had unearthed a whole genre that hadn't existed before. The ATFF has been run every year since.

z Trivia question – why do you wear overalls?

That was from Terra Circa. When we were in Japan we saw a guy in beautifully-tailored white overalls, so I bought a couple of pairs, then as we crossed the States, I had some blue and red stripes embroidered onto them. For the first time in my life, people came up and asked, 'where did you get those?'

z Current bike?

The CRF250L, which I love because it's a brilliant trail bike which is also a joy to ride on tarmac. I've been smashing mine to pieces for five years, or trying to, and after 25,000 miles it refuses to break down or not start. Reliable is not the right word – it's indestructible.

z What's the difference between Adventure and Challenge?

When we started the Adventure Travel Film Festival, we began to receive lots of films which were described as adventures, but really they were just about a personal physical challenge – it might have been mountain climbing, or canoeing or motorcycling, but mostly it was about 'I got wet and tired, but I made it.'

For me that's not an adventure at all, because everyday life is like that for lots of people. The real challenge is surviving in a completely foreign culture – how you react when surrounded by foreign policemen, for example. A minority of films we are sent are about that, what I would call the cultural adventure. I think the typical western motorcyclist is actually quite unadventurous, which I find baffling. People who have walked across Europe from Syria, with a baby in a pram, then risked their lives in the Channel to get to Britain – that's the real adventure.