Lois Pryce, Solo Adventure Motorcyclist

Guest Bio:

Lois Pryce

Smitten with life, UK adventuress Lois Pryce has always been on the move. At 13 years of age, an unchaperoned, week-long trip on bicycles through Cornwall’s back roads with friends introduced her to the possibilities of travel by design. And also to the idea of minimalist travel, taking shelter where you can find it, and bringing little more than bare essentials.

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Transcript

Scott Brady: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Overland Journal Podcast. I’m your host, Scott Brady, and today we will be featuring our notes from the field, where either my co-host Matt Scott or I interview a fellow adventurer while we’re out around the globe. And for today’s guest, I spent time with Lois Price. She’s one of the most exceptional travelers and human beings that I know.

Uh, in fact, I would absolutely say that, uh, she is my hero and, uh, has in- inspired so many people to travel solo a- around the world by motorcycle or by four-wheel drive for that matter. Lois is a British adventure motorcyclist and author and the founder curator of the Adventure Travel Film Festival. Her books are truly an inspiration and include titles like Lois on the Loose, where she rides from Alaska all the way down to Tierra del Fuego.

It also includes Red Tape and White Knuckles, where she [00:01:00] takes another 250 or 300cc motorcycle and rides it the length of Africa all by herself. And then one of her most recent titles is Revolutionary Ride, where she spends time in Iran, again solo, exploring around, uh, that incredible country. Lois is a regular contributor to the Overland Journal, and I was lucky to catch up with her in London, sitting next to her 100-year-old Dutch barge.

This is a little bit shorter interview than we normally feature in the podcast. That’s because Lois needed to get out and practice her banjo with her band that evening. But I think it’ll be a fun one for everyone to listen to Hello, I’m Scott Brady. I’m here with Lois Price, famed adventure traveler, and I’m standing next to their 1901 barge from the Netherlands.

I’m gonna ask her a couple questions about adventure travel But I know that so many people wanna know how do you go from leaving a desk job at the BBC to traveling [00:02:00] around the world?

Lois Pryce: Yeah, that’s a good question ’cause that really did transform my whole life. Um, I was working at the BBC in a regular nine to five.

I’d been on a, a holiday on my motorbike just, just for a few days, and I think everyone knows that feeling of coming home, uh, from the holiday or from the bike trip and thinking, “Oh, God,” you know, “back to work.” And, and I think that, that was the moment that I just thought, “I simply can’t do this anymore.” I was in my late 20s.

I don’t know if that’s a classic time for some kind of a crisis. Um, so I was just like, okay, I, the, it’s the old cliche, there must be more to life than this.

Scott Brady: What made you decide to do travel by motorcycle?

Lois Pryce: For me, the motorcycle is a, a wonderful way to see the world because it engages you with your environment, so you literally, the weather is all in your face.

You feel the hot, the cold, the butterflies, the, you know, you smell everything. And it also, it’s a great icebreaker ’cause people always wanna come up and talk to you, especially if you’re a woman alone, so you make a lot of friends, uh, on a motorcycle. So I think it’s kind of the best of both worlds, and it means you can cover distance, and you’ve [00:03:00] got that kind of excitement of, of, you know, going off-road or the kind of speed thrills of, of being on a motorcycle which maybe you don’t get so much from, say, walking or cycling.

So for me, it was the motorcycle that actually inspired my journeys almost. I’d learnt to ride just for fun, riding around London, but I’d only really ridden in London. But it was that combination of sort of this boring office job and then this motorcycle license that I’d just acquired suddenly sent me off on this kind of light bulb moment of like, aha, that’s the way to see the world.

I’d always had itchy feet. I kind of wanted to travel. I didn’t quite know how to do it, and I knew I didn’t wanna go backpacking. Uh, I knew I wanted my own wheels in some way, and so I learnt to ride a bike and then that was like the answer, and then it all went from there. Yeah,

Scott Brady: a motorcycle can be such, such a beautiful way to travel because it really simplifies things.

Lois Pryce: I suppose the main takeaway from all of those years of travel that I’ve done is just take less and less stuff every time. So if you see the pictures of my bike from the first trip and then the next one that, you know, you look at the last [00:04:00] one, and it’s so pared down. Uh, so I always wear an open-faced helmet, which I know a lot of people think is maybe not particularly safe.

But for me, a lot of the, a lot of the pleasure of motorcycle travel is engaging with people fa- face-to-face, and I think you can really, uh, make a big difference if you can smile at somebody in- instantly. Mm-hmm. And certainly in difficult situations like border crossings or police checkpoints, if you can just smile and say hello in their language, that can diffuse so much, rather than turning up with a kinda big, black visor.

So I’m a big fan of kinda humanizing the experience, so I wear very low-key clothing. I wear normal clothes, you might say. I don’t wear motorcycle clothes really. So I just wear, like- Regular old leather fry boots, jeans, uh, Belstaff old wax jacket, uh, it’s not from the ’70s and, and an Openface helmet. So- Yeah

uh, I’m pretty kind of pretty low-fi really.

Scott Brady: Yeah. And, and that’s a lot of the fun of it, is being able to engage so quickly with people.

Lois Pryce: Yeah.

Scott Brady: So you come into a village and you can talk to the kids, [00:05:00] so it means you’re interacting with the locals a lot more.

Lois Pryce: Yeah. I mean, I, I, I find that it really helps with interacting with the locals.

It also, it… I mean, there’s an incredible, as you know, camaraderie of motorcyclists around the world, and, and that was just an in- an amazing experience for me to tap into that everywhere. Another motorcyclist will, will always stop, always talk to you. Uh, and then the local motorcyclists, of course, they all wanna know you.

So you instantly tap into this kind of secret world, uh, which I, I found really, really exciting, and I’ve made so many friends all over the world through- Mm … through that. I always carry my camping gear, so I know that no matter where I get stuck, I can always pitch my tent somewhere. Uh, and like you say, you, you have to stop a lot for supplies.

You can’t carry a lot and, you know, disappear for, for weeks on end, so you do tend to be going into little villages, cafes. And for me, the human interaction is, is the essence of overland travel.

Scott Brady: For those of us that travel, we know that it changes us, oftentimes in profound ways. For you, how has travel changed you personally?

Lois Pryce: Yeah, I agree that it definitely [00:06:00] has changed me. It wasn’t a sudden thing. I didn’t come back from my first trip like, “Wow, I’m a different person.” It’s more of a gradual thing. I think the main two f- ways it has changed me, one, it’s certainly made me more, uh, tolerant of people that are different from me, uh, more interested in people that are different from me.

Certainly less judgemental, I think. Um, the other way that it’s changed me is that I don’t worry so much. I know that everything will work out in the end. While as I think before, certainly before my first trip, I used to be lying awake worrying about this, that, what would happen, what about this, what about that?

Now I just think, “Yeah, it’ll be fine.” And it is. That’s the amazing thing. It always is.

Scott Brady: So one of the things we’re getting feedback from, from more and more of our readers, is that they’re actually traveling as vegetarians or as vegans, which I think is really an interesting change that we’ve seen over the last decade.

And it, and it’s consistent. And you can oftentimes find good ways to travel as a vegetarian or a vegan. How have you found that you were able to do that?

Lois Pryce: I do depend a lot on bread, cheese, and tomatoes, uh, which you can get anywhere in the world, as I’m sure that you know. But I have had [00:07:00] difficult situations where, uh, ’cause a lot of cultures, they don’t understand being a vegetarian, and so they couldn’t really make out, so they would sort of make a big fuss about bringing me some camel or some endangered species.

In Niger they said, “Oh, we kill the gazelle,” you know, which are like endangered species, and, and bring it to you for… And so y- you kind of have to eat it out of politeness ’cause it would be so rude not to. So I have eaten some meat, sort of really quickly, and then, yeah. But most of the time I manage, because you can always find fruit, some kind of vegetable, um, bread, and some kind of cheese, even if it is Laughing Cow.

Scott Brady: So we’re bringing this interview to a close, but I know that there’s more to you than just travel. So tomorrow you’ve got what going on?

Lois Pryce: Well, tomorrow, yeah, I’m playing the banjo with my, uh, band, The JoLeens, in Central London. So shame you can’t be there, but you go home tomorrow, right?[00:08:00]

Scott Brady: And how long have you been playing the banjo?

Lois Pryce: Oh, probably about seven or eight years now.

Scott Brady: Oh, fun. Yeah. And is that something you’ve been able to bring along with you on any of your travels?

Lois Pryce: Well, it’s funny you should say that, because we did a, a Ural trip in a Ural sidecar from Richmond, Virginia to Seattle.

6,000 miles. It was absolutely brilliant. And yeah, the banjo traveled the, in the sidecar, so.

Scott Brady: Perfect. Well, thank you for being such an inspiration. Oh,

Lois Pryce: thanks

Scott Brady: for having me. It’s

Lois Pryce: great to see you. And thanks for having me as part of Overlanders.

Scott Brady: Yeah, thank you.