Lois Pryce, like so many people, had a boring office job. Like a fair number of people, she used a motorcycle to get there every day. But unlike most, she decided she was going to ride from Alaska to Argentina, on a motorcycle, on her own.
She’d only ridden abroad once, a week in France on a vintage BSA motorbike. “I bought the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook, which was a huge source of inspiration to me, and I had to stop reading it at night time because I used to get so excited that I couldn’t sleep. But I remember reading all these stories in it, and I’d think, ‘well, these are just normal people like me. If they can do it, I can do it’. That sense that you didn’t have to be some superhero to do these kinds of things.”
Lois seems like the last person who would desert civilisation for an arduous ride across two continents. She’s fashionably dressed with well-styled hair. Her office is almost unnaturally tidy. It’s hard to imagine her camping for longer than a music festival. She agrees, “I always like to think you can ride a motorcycle without looking like you ride a motorcycle.”
Choosing a bike was her first dilemma. Conventional wisdom pointed to a big, heavy trail bike. At 5’ 4”, Lois wanted something that would let her put both feet down, and would be light enough for her to pick up when it fell over on a deserted road in the Andes. “I’d never really ridden off road at these point. I’d barely been outside the M25 to be honest!” She laughs.
So she chose a small, nimble trail bike and started doing off road riding “which I was absolutely shite at – falling off, crashing all the time and everything. But I really enjoyed it. That was a real revelation for me, and that, now, has become my favourite sort of riding. For me the whole thing about motorcycling is about getting to places you couldn’t otherwise get to, so the logical progression then is to go dirt riding, and then you can really go anywhere.
I wanted to see a little track going off up a mountain, or a little trail going down to a beach, and think , ‘ooh, I wonder what’s down there?’ So when I got my bike over to Alaska I was all up for the dirt.”
A few years after riding from Alaska to the foot of South America – the adventure described in “Lois on the Loose” – she rode from London to cape Town, again on her own. Though she admits to travelling with companions for the Sahara crossing. Which she calls “the best motorcycling experience of my entire life”. You can read that trip in “Red Tape and White Knuckles”.
So where next? “I’d like to go eastwards into Asia because I’ve never been there. So to India… the route’s a bit tricky. Or maybe to Mongolia and through all the ‘stans… but definitely eastwards.”
Getting the bug yet? Lois has made a DVD about adventure riding, aimed at women, with handy tips on essentials like maintenance. “Although I always like to encourage people to go anyway, even if they don’t know anything,” she laughs uproariously. “It’s a fine line between preparation and obviously not being completely stupid, but also not over-preparing so you get yourself in a tizz about everything. Because at one point you do have to set a date and leave, and you’re never going to be the expert rider, expert mechanic...
“Those trips are all about using your initiative really. So if you can’t fix your bike, you just find someone who’ll put your bike in a truck, and then they’ll find someone who’ll fix it, and you just end up having a great time because you meet these people and they take you in. It happened to me in Argentina, some bloke rescued me and then I was at his mate’s garage and they were feeding me cakes and fixing my bike for nothing. Those are the best bits, really.”
You can win one of Lois’s books. The best question posted in our Start a Conversation section each week will win a copy of Lois on the Loose or Red tape and White Knuckles (check the terms and conditions here).
And if she’s inspired you to learn to start riding a motorcycle, you can still book an hour’s free trial ride on us. Don’t forget to tell us about your adventures on your Get On blog!