Follow Kevin Turner, also known as ‘The Hapless Biker’, on his recent motorcycle trip from London to Moscow on an 11-year-old Ninja 636.
Turner gave himself three weeks to squeeze in the 6000-mile trip – through Norway and across Finland – a journey that should rightly have taken three months. His story appears in his new book: From Crystal Palace to Red Square – A Hapless Biker’s Road to Russia.
“Over those 21 days I experienced some of the most wonderful moments of my motorcycling life, and also some of the worst. I rode along the extraordinary Trollstigen pass in Norway and felt my heart skip a beat as I looked down on the majestic Geirangerfjord; I experienced first-hand the beauty of St Petersburg and felt the presence of so much history in the Russian capital. And I also came very close to a horrible, mangled death beneath the wheels of 1000 enormous trucks as I bounced across the loose rock and rubble which constitute so many of Russia’s roads,” Turner writes.
“The journey represented the culmination of ten years of riding: it was a challenge set for no good reason; a mountain to climb simply because it was there. Throughout, my only companion was my bike, an 11-year-old Ninja 636; stock, except for the after-market exhaust, a tinted screen and a few too many stickers.
“If the ride was tough for me, it was ten times worse for my bike. The Ninja is a sports-tourer, but it is not an adventure bike. It was not designed to ride across hundreds of miles of rubble, lugging two heavy panniers, a tent and a hapless biker way out of his depth. I lost count of the times I felt sure the poor machine was about to grind to a halt, its chain and sprockets thick with congealing mud and its suspension hammered beyond belief. But it just kept going.”
From Crystal Palace to Red Square – A Hapless Biker’s Road to Russia, published by Veloce Publishing and available from Amazon and all good bookshops. More information on Kevin’s books can be found at www.haplessbiker.com