1980,
Elspeth Beard was a 24 years old architect student when she bought an
used BMW -1974 R60/6 to be precise- and decided to ride the world. She
shipped the bike to NY and started the trip, riding up North to Canada,
then down to Mexico before she reached LA. From there, she shipped the
Beemer to Sydney.As an architecture student, she did not have enough funding for the complete trip so she had to work while in Australia for 7 month to build up the funding. She wrecked her bike riding Australia and spend 2 weeks in hospital before she finished the trip there.
Her bike was then shipped to Singapore to explore the South-East Asia, where her valuables got stolen. Took 6weeks to replace all the important documents, such as passport, visa for the country she was planning to visit. She wrecked her bike again hitting a tree, destroying a garden of a Thai family, who kindly nursed her for 2 weeks. Her bike was damaged, "I took the cylinder off, straightened the bent studs as best I could and packed the cylinder base with gaskets and goo to get enough compression back".
She rode the India and fell victim to both hepatitis and dysentery. While there, assassination of Mrs. Gandhi (PM of India at the time ) happened, which made her nearly impossible to get out of the country. She got fed up and forged the necessary document to get out. She rode Pakistan then Iran with a fellow BMW rider from Holland but gotten seriously sick from the hepatitis; She had to take some time off at Turkey. After that, she finished the trip through Greece to Europe and finally UK, which was a lot easier ride.
The trip took her 3 years, 48,000 miles and 53 lb of weight loss.
She became the first British woman to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle.
She still rides and helps fellow bike adventurers and has well-established architecture business. Here is Her architecture site
And for more detailed her bike adventure, you can read this an article from Motorcyclist
