Nick Sanders World Ride - Moments #15

You’re nobody if haven’t been around the world on a motorbike these days but the grandfather of all the two-wheeled explorers, Nick Sanders MBE, is at it again. The 61-year old is currently on his eighth tour of the globe – and for this 100,000km expedition, he’s riding the new Yamaha Ténéré 700.

In previous circumnavigations the super adventurer has been all about speed, most notably in 2005 when he smashed the Guinness World record for the fastest lap of earth on a bike; 19 days and four hours to be exact. And this feat was made even more astonishing because he achieved it on a Yamaha YZF-R1.

This time though, Sanders is not so bothered about speed and instead looks to raise awareness for the Two Wheels for Life charity and take in the “interesting points of view about the world and its people as I ride on by,” so says the man himself.

Starting off by transporting the Ténéré 700 across the pond to New York, Sanders joins his steed in the Big Apple and heads west. We pick up his journey by sharing photos, comment and stories taken from his own blog as well as those which he shares with us on the occasions he’s got phone service.

The great thing about slowing down the ride is that for the first time in my life I have the opportunity to take small back roads wherever I am. These are usually off-road pistes which the bike handles easily but where they go often proves really to be a path not often trod.

Puerta Lomas is a small one hotel resort which I would never normally have found. The route to it was cute and charming and led to a hideaway part of southern Peru. It’s “Moments” like this when unusual thoughts come to mind.

Parkinson’s Law

Cyril Parkinson, a British historian, first observed the trend during his time with the British Civil Service. He noted that as bureaucracies expanded, they became more inefficient. He then applied this observation to a variety of other circumstances, realising that as the size of something increased, its efficiency dropped. He found that even a series of simple tasks increased in complexity to fill up the time allotted to it. Therefore, as the length of time allocated to a task became shorter, the task became simpler and easier to solve. As I ride for longer with more time, I fill it with more things to do and inversely have less time per film project. With more time there could be a tendency to achieve less – slow down, look around, become less efficient. So I turned it around and found that by filming more, travelling harder, almost as hard as if I were on a mission, compressing the time – which ironically is something I do, that instead of filling the time with less I seem to be motivated to produce more thereby decreasing the time for what I have to do.

Behind the Scenes

The route along the coastline of southern Peru is the best coastline I have ever ridden on. By comparison, a noted coastline along Big Sur in California is domestic by comparison and short. This coastline south of Nazca to Moquegua took me two days and I’d return in a heartbeat.