About Me

The Old Bonus in Vietnam

A bit about myself. I am an American English teacher and I've been living and working outside of the US for almost five years now. I fell in love with motorcycles in Myanmar (Burma) last year when I rented a scooter through a hotel in a dusty city at the center of the country called Pye and drove through the massive archaeological ruins there. I got my first real motorcycle, called a SYM Bonus 125cc in Vietnam. The Bonus was a great starter bike; reliable enough to get around and practice the basic skills on and mechanically simple and unsound enough to encourage me to learn some basic mechanics.

My plan came to me while in Myanmar and everything I’ve done since then has been with this goal in mind. After having the time of my life getting lost on the sandy back roads of pye a friend of mine at my school recommended watching “The Long Way Around” and reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I wanted to return to Turkey in the near future and the simple idea of riding back along the silk road came to mind. He told me it was impossible to do cheaply and so I took it as a challenge. This became my passion and I began devoting large amounts of my energy and time to research but soon I realized that he was right, it can’t be done cheaply. By that time I had moved to Vietnam and thought about illegal options or alternate routes but soon realized that the only way to actually do this reverse trans-Asian trip was to move to China and work for a year. So I did.

In Pye, Myanmar

Anyway, this is the plan. On the 11^st of July, I am going to take my Chinese made Zongshen RX3 registered in my name through China, from my home near Hangzhou across the north of China and The Tibetan Plateau by way of Xi'an and Gansu provinces, into the Taklimakan Desert and on to either Kashgar or Urumqi. Then I’ll pass through the stans; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and back to Aktau, Kazakhstan where I’ll catch the ferry to Azerbaijan. From there on to Georgia and down to the southern coast of Turkey. Following the Mediterranean and along the Aegean coasts I'll past Adana, Antalya, Fethiye, Izmir and Bursa finally arriving at my old home of Istanbul around the beginning of September.