The night Hayley Bell threw a leg over her KTM motorcycle and pointed the front tire toward Scotland, it was pitch black and sleeting — exactly the sort of miserable weather most bikers would avoid. But she isn’t like most bikers. Ms. Bell, a 28-year-old from Northern England, was on a mission.
It was Feb. 26, 2019, and she was wheeling through the dark for eight hours straight, hauling a few weeks’ worth of clothes and a wooden baton that has become a kind of talisman for the yearlong event she pioneered to bring attention to female motorcyclists: the Women Riders World Relay.
It’s exactly as it sounds.
More than 3,500 women from 79 countries have spent a year circumnavigating the globe on two wheels, logging some 63,000 miles. Some of them rode a few hours, others spent days or months, and a lot of them didn’t even speak the same language. But together, they broke new ground and forged personal connections as the baton was passed from rider to rider on a journey that spanned six continents.
The women were most recently in Dubai as the event was wrapping up, and a final celebration is set for Saturday in London.
“There was no ‘Shall we do a little trip ’round the U.K.?’” said Ms. Bell, who was inspired by an affliction common to adventurous women with office jobs: boredom. Forget that, they said, “let’s just do a world relay.”
“I was at work one day, and I just wanted to travel with women who enjoyed motor-biking and not shopping,” she added. “I wanted that adrenaline excursion with females.”
Ms. Bell has been riding for five years, but she struggled to find other women as passionate about motorcycling as she is. So she posted her bold idea on Facebook.
“I sort of got dragged into this thing,” Liza Miller said. “It’s one of these things that you don’t really realize how much time you’re committing, but once you’re in, you’re glad to be there.”
Ms. Miller, a native of Santa Cruz, Calif., offered to help organize the United States leg when the relay was just a tantalizing question mark thrown into the vast expanse of the web four days earlier.
“There was no structure. There was no plan,” Ms. Miller said. But the audacity of the idea drew her in.
“Also, that women riders are overlooked, but not just that,” she said. “Women riders don’t have the same confidence that male riders do. I thought this would really inspire and encourage women to show themselves and each other what they are capable of.”
Ms. Miller, who said she “lives, eats, sleeps and breathes motorcycles,” runs the Re-Cycle Garage in Santa Cruz and hosts the “Motorcycles and Misfits” podcast. But for the last 18 months, she has been using Google Translate to communicate with other female riders from all over the world, and Google Street View to help plot the routes, from Albania to Indonesia to Zimbabwe.
“The big secret is that we’re still building the world right ahead of everybody as they’re riding around the world,” she said. “We are staying one step ahead of them.”
Ms. Miller, 53, has been riding motorcycles since she was 12 and considers herself proficient from the littlest dirt bikes up to sport bikes and heavyweight cruisers.
To prove her point, for the 18-day United States leg in October, she rode one of the biggest bikes on the market: an Indian Motorcycle Roadmaster, which tips the scales at 930 pounds.
It wasn’t hers. Recognizing the growing importance of women to the American motorsports industry, Indian Motorcycle sponsored the United States portion of the relay, providing bikes to the lead riders and meals at dealerships.
“A global relay ride is a huge undertaking for anyone, and the fact that it’s a group of female riders just makes it all the more exciting for us,” said Indian Motorcycle’s customer growth manager, Joey Lindahl.
Indian has a long history with female motorcyclists. In 1916, the Van Buren sisters made history as the first women to ride motorcycles across the United States. Both rode Indian bikes.
Back then, a woman riding a motorcycle was a novelty. Today, one in five bikers is a woman, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Its 2018 Motorcycle Owner Survey found that women ride for a lot of the same reasons as men: because it’s fun, gives them a sense of freedom, helps them relax and makes it possible to enjoy nature.
But it’s also about connecting with like-minded women.
“Anytime you can meet another woman who rides and share a lot of common experiences, it grows from there,” said Andria Yu, communications director for the Motorcycle Industry Council. “You see someone else do it, and if they’re kind of like you, then you think you can do it, too.”
Increasingly, the women are meeting through Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites, Ms. Yu said.
Facebook was how Guliafshan Tariq, from Lahore, Pakistan, got involved in the Women Riders World Relay, or “Wer Wer,” as its participants call it.
“When I heard about WRWR, it excited me, because people across the globe don’t know that Pakistan is now becoming better and it has a lot to offer,” said Ms. Tariq, 27, who has been riding motorcycles for six years.
She is the rare female motorcyclist in her country, she said. “I wanted to show the world the soft image of my country and wanted to depict the strong face of Muslim Pakistani female bikers on an international platform.”
Ms. Tariq’s is one of the better documented legs on the relay’s website. Photos and professionally shot video show her and a small group of women wheeling their bikes past ancient monuments, most of them wearing helmets while riding and some donning head scarves when they aren’t.
Her trip wasn’t without incident, however. Ms. Tariq was originally supposed to take the baton from a rider in Iran, until the relay’s organizers learned that Islamic clerics in the country had issued legal rulings, or fatwas, against women riding motorcycles in front of men.
So the previous rider in Turkey had to ship the baton with a delivery service. But because the baton is outfitted with a GPS tracker, customs agents confiscated it as a possible terrorist device.
It took so many days for the baton to be released that it threw off Ms. Tariq’s schedule for the Pakistani leg of the relay. And then, because of political troubles between Pakistan and India, she wasn’t able to get a visa to ride across the border to pass the baton to the next rider. She had to give it to a Dutch woman to cross into India and hand it off.
Still, Ms. Tariq said participating had been worth the trouble. At least the weather cooperated.
In Laos, the relay’s sole rider, Nilamon Binthavone, braved a monsoon. Other riders have crashed, stalled, skidded and fixed their bikes on the fly. They’ve cried, they’ve laughed. They’ve had an adventure, and they’ve proved their point. Yes, women do ride.
Source : Nytimes
