Lakeport >> The date was March 23 2014. Steph Jeavons flipped up the kickstand of a CRF250L Honda motorcycle, revved the engine and rode away from her home in Wales. She was headed for the open road and one doozy of an adventure.
Over two years, her journey has spanned six continents and 50,000 miles. Once she travels through Africa, the final destination on her ride around the world, she’ll be the first Briton to have ridden all seven continents — ever.
On Saturday afternoon she pulled her red and white bike, decked out with faded stickers and boasting an obviously foreign yellow and black plate, into Frank Dollosso’s Lakeport home, where she rested for the weekend before continuing up the coast.
She estimates the remainder of the trip will take her another year. By the time she finally returns home, she’ll have been on the road, living off the back of a motorbike, for a grand total of three years. “I keep extending my trip so I guess it’s not so bad,” Jeavons said with a laugh. “I should have been home by now — the plan was two years — but I think I’ve got another 12 months left in me yet.”
Even for the most devoted of motorcyclists, it takes a special kind of tenacity and a whole new level of enthusiasm to not only embark on a ride around the globe, but to see it though. Jeavons didn’t have much in the way of a solidified plan when she took off, only the desire to hit all seven continents and a rough idea of how she might accomplish that goal. She booked no hotel rooms, scheduled no flights. She just left. A year ahead of schedule, too.
“I didn’t want to prove anything to anyone, but maybe to myself that I could do it,” she said. “I wanted to know whether I was capable of handling anything that life had to throw at me.”
Jeavons has been called a lot of things for her effort, from courageous to maybe just a little bit insane. “I’m definitely not brave. I’m not sure I’m crazy either,” she said. “I’m the happiest and the most relaxed I’ve ever been since I started this.”
Though there have been plenty of trying times — the roads of Indonesia, where she navigated thousands of stampeding people on a pilgrimage; moments of heat exhaustion when she has to resist the urge to release her handlebars and lay on the side of the road — her most harrowing experience came not on land, but at sea. Aboard a 60-foot sailing yacht, Jeavons was crossing the Drake Passage around Cape Horn, one of the roughest and most dangerous bodies of water in the world, when a blizzard hit in the early morning hours. The yacht stuck in the rocks, forcing Jeavons to climb the boom and rock the boat free. It would have been a frightening experience for anyone, but it was especially terrifying for Jeavons, who is so ill at ease in open water that she almost turned around in India when she laid eyes on the tiny sailing yacht.
“The great thing about scary moments is it’s almost like wearing a tight pair of shoes,” Jeavons said. “Once you take them off you get relief. You feel alive afterward.”
But more unnerving than treacherous waters and possible shipwrecks was the moment just before it all began. “The hardest bit was starting,” she said. “Once you get started there’s not much else to do apart from keep going.”
As she set off on her adventure, Jeavons had no idea how far she would make it. Worries buzzed around her head like flies: would she enjoy her long-planned adventure and was she even the type of person who could handle an undoubtedly extreme trip? “When you leave, the fear of failure is the biggest thing, because you realize you’ve committed fully to this,” she said. “I was terrified I’d have to turn back before I got out of Europe.”
Fortunately, Jeavons took to life on her motorbike with relative ease. While there have been undeniable low moments of doubt, fear and loneliness, she’s also found incredible joy in experiencing the wilderness, immersing herself in new and exciting cultures and forming friendships across the globe. Her highlight reel includes riding the highest road in the world in the Himalayas, reveling in the vast beauty of the Atacama Desert and visiting the exceedingly friendly faces of Iran.
“I’ve had all the emotions you can imagine to the extremes,” Jeavons said. “You can’t have the highs without the lows.”
Jeavons makes ends meet through cutting costs wherever possible. Carrying cooking gear in the back of her bike, she prepares meals herself using local ingredients, whether she’s staying in a hostel or at a campground. She signs up for speaking engagements to bring in some extra funds to get her from one place to the next.
And her house in Wales? She just sold that, too.
Despite living on the road, Jeavons isn’t wanting for a place to call home. “Home is my bike,” she said. “Everything I have is on my bike.”
When it comes to sleeping accommodations, she’s been able to rely on the good will of strangers. Many motorcycle and travel enthusiasts have been following her progress by way of an online travel blog, which Jeavons updates regularly with her photos and thoughts. She’s received countless invitations from locals eager to take her in for a night or two as she passes through. It’s especially helpful considering her funds are low — she’s ran out of money on a few ocassions — and costs in the U.S. are high. Before crossing into the country, Jeavons was worried about finances for this leg of the trip.
“I’ve ended up in some random places with lots of random people and I think it’s been the best experience,” she said. “The fact that I don’t have much money has really added to the experience … Staying with people means that I get to really experience the culture.”
As she traverses the globe not from the sky, but from the ground, Jeavons has had the unique opportunity to witness the cultures evolving. Topography, faces, clothing, architecture, they all change right before her eyes. It’s something she would miss from 3000 feet in the air. “Being on the motorbike means that I’m allowing myself to be vulnerable. That means I see everything, I smell everything, I’m putting myself out there,” she said. “I’m at the mercy of the world and the people in it and so far the world and the people in it have been extremely kind to me.”
People she meets along the way often marvel at her good health. Many express surprise that she’s still alive. But Jeavons doesn’t spare concern for her safety. It sounds that if anything is going to restore a faith in human beings, it’s traveling solo around the world, with nothing in the way of familiarity but a purring engine. Just a scroll through the photos on her blog, through pictures of children and adults from many reaches of the world, laughing and sticking out their tongues for the camera — a way in which Jeavons communicates through a language barrier — and it’s easy to see why she’s not ready for the trip to come to a close.
“I’ve had trouble with weather,” she said, “with landscapes, with terrain, with everything else apart from the people.”
Jennifer Gruenke can be reached at 900-2019.
