Elspeth Beard's Solo Motorcycle Journey Around the World

Preparing for a journey around the world

In the early 1980s, long before satellite navigation, mobile phones, or the internet made solo travel routine, a young Englishwoman completed a motorcycle journey around the world that would earn her a place in the history of women's exploration. Elspeth Beard, born on 28 April 1959, spent roughly two years on the road, covering approximately 35,000 miles on a secondhand BMW motorcycle. Her ride took her from the United States through New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent before she returned to England. She is widely credited as the first Englishwoman to circle the globe by motorcycle.

Beard grew up in England and attended Roedean School, an independent girls' school in East Sussex. After leaving Roedean, she returned to London for sixth-form studies and acquired her first motorcycle at the age of 17. She went on to study architecture, but her interest in long-distance riding grew alongside her academic work. Her early solo trips included rides around Scotland, Ireland, and mainland Europe. In the summer of 1981, she flew to Los Angeles to meet a friend and ride in the American West, an experience that helped crystallize her ambition to attempt a full circumnavigation. By the time she committed to the journey, she had accumulated several years of touring experience on two wheels.

The motorcycle she chose was a 1974 BMW R60/6, a mid-range air-cooled boxer twin known for its reliability and torque. She had the bike shipped to the United States and flew to New York three weeks later to begin the ride in October 1982, at the age of 23. She was still enrolled as an architecture student and had only a loose plan: cross the United States, then ship the motorcycle to New Zealand and continue through Australia and Asia. She carried limited funds and had no support vehicle, no electronic navigation aids, and no means of communication beyond what she could find along the way. The journey was, from the outset, a deliberately self-reliant undertaking.

The route and its setbacks

Her route across the United States took her from New York westward, though specific details of the American leg are less extensively documented than later stages. After crossing the Pacific, she rode through New Zealand before shipping the BMW to Australia. The Australian crossing proved to be the most physically demanding section of the trip. She rode through vast stretches of outback terrain, where distances between fuel stops and settlements could be enormous and where mechanical failure or a crash could leave a solo traveler stranded far from help.

It was in Australia that Beard suffered the most serious of her accidents. According to her own account, a dog ran beneath her wheels from behind a truck, causing the motorcycle to leave the road and strike a tree. She was battered and bruised but did not sustain broken bones. She spent approximately two weeks recovering in a hospital in the Townsville area of Queensland. The crash damaged the BMW, and she had to repair it before continuing. The incident underscored the vulnerability of a solo rider in remote areas, where even a relatively minor collision could have become fatal without access to medical care.

After recovering and rebuilding the motorcycle, Beard continued northward through Indonesia and on to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. She then crossed into India, where she navigated a different set of challenges, including bureaucratic obstacles around permits and documentation. From India, she made her way westward and eventually back to England, arriving home in November 1984. The full journey had taken just over two years and covered approximately 35,000 miles, or roughly 56,000 kilometers, across more than twenty countries. She had traveled through regions where solo motorcycling was uncommon for anyone, let alone for a young woman riding alone.

Recognition and life after the journey

Beard's achievement placed her within a small but distinguished lineage of women who had pushed the boundaries of motorcycle travel. In the 1930s, Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron had ridden from London to Cape Town, and Wallach had gone on to become a military dispatch rider and a Brooklands Gold Star recipient. Other women had completed long-distance rides in the intervening decades. Beard's distinction, as recognized by institutions including Brighton Museums, which named her among its 100 Pioneering Women of Sussex, was the completion of a full solo circumnavigation. Wikipedia describes her more cautiously as one of the first Englishwomen to ride a motorcycle around the world, reflecting the difficulty of establishing absolute priority in a field where definitions of circumnavigation vary.

After returning to England, Beard resumed her architecture studies and built a career that earned her recognition as an award-winning architect. For many years, her motorcycle journey was known mainly within motorcycling circles. That changed in 2017 with the publication of her memoir, Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World. The book brought her story to a wider audience and was followed by a companion volume of photographs from the journey. The BBC profiled her in 2019, and she has since been the subject of interviews and features in motorcycle publications internationally. She continues to ride and to practice architecture.