I met Mark Hammond on the phone just before he took off on a trip he’s blogging under Ride Far, a Chronicle of a Motorbike Ride thru Central & South America.
Mark was leaving for his trip and was helping his company find a replacement – he writes for a company that works a lot with Sun Microsystems, as I do. While he was researching motorcycle travel he found my site, which also indicates I work for Sun. I was too busy to take the job but recommended a colleague and we talked a long time about motorcycle travel. I recommended the TypePad blog tool, as it is browser-based and easy to design and of course, selfishly, I wanted to hear about his trip. We didn’t get to meet, though we only live about 3 miles apart in San Francisco, because he was only a couple of days away from departure. I got an email from him today, in summary:
Greetings from the southernmost city in the world. I made it — five months, 15,589 miles on a motorcycle, a heavily fortified Kawasaki KLR 650, thru 12 countries, to arrive here, at the cold and windswept tip of Tierra del Fuego, the end of the road, 700 miles from Antarctica, met by a large crowd of cheering penguins.
I hadn’t seen his blog, and was pleased to find that he writes beautifully about travel and motorcycles and takes nice photos, too. I put him in touch with Dr. Gregory Frazier, who I thought was in the area, who replied immediately from Buenos Aires:
Our run thru South America has ended here in Buenos Aires where we are dumping the bike (or maybe storing it so I can return and run up through Brazil solo next winter). From here we jump over to Africa and down to the bottom there – Cape Agulhaus. We should tag the North Cape a couple of months later, than a sprint across Asia and back to USA. I am a Featured Speaker doing my multi-media show at AMERICADE June 4, in conjunction with the release of my new book, so that is target date.
I also pinged Daniel Todd, who last I heard was in the area on a continuous stream of adventures, as in the day reported below that started like this:
…when a German overlander pulled up to my hotel as I was packing to leave. We explored the outskirts of Tupiza, the last frontier of Bolivia and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid´s last hangout, doing photo shoots of all the stange rock formations in brilliant red. It was decided that we should then ride at least part of these desolate dirt roads together. We had them all to ourselves, just wide open space, in the high desert Country. I singled to him to stay beside me so that we didnt have to eat each others dust, then suddenly we looked at each other and started twisting the throttles wide open and racing across the mountains. What a rush!
Knowing Daniel, I won’t hear from him for a while, but when I do he’ll have plenty to report! Stay tuned.
