The Bike Trac page for Steph Jeavons has to be one of the most interesting tracking pages you’ll ever see.
It shows a single orange track line squiggling its way around most of the world.
As we write this, 11 August 2015, we can see that Steph and her Honda CRF 250L are currently parked up in Colombia and that her ‘last bike movement’ was at 10:00am. It’s also the 3,614th time that her Bike Trac unit has ‘checked in’.
We can also see that her Bike Trac has recorded 34,962 miles since leaving London 18 months ago – that’s 1.4 times around the world.
When we tell her this news by email, she beams back: “Nice to know that I am already heading for my second time around! Haha! Lovely!”
While Steph is a free spirit and takes each day as it comes, she says that being able to see how far she has travelled and how far is left, is giving her peace of mind.
She tends to look at her Bike Trac tracking page once a week. “It’s great to follow and watch the line grow,” she says. “It's also good for other people to track me.”
After 18 months of continued use, mainly off road, she says her Bike Trac is working well. It turns out she hasn’t opted to receive the text message movement alert that is sent if the bike is moved. “I don’t have this on because I change my SIM card in every country,” she explains. “So if the bike did get stolen I would just look on the website directly. It really is reassuring. The Bike Trac would also help in an emergency situation if I went missing with the bike. Luckily we have not had to test that out yet!”
Steph's aim is to ride through 42 countries avoiding motorways and going off road where possible. “I'm not sure how many countries I have left,” she writes. “I think around 12 but that depends on what happens when I get to Africa. If the bike is still running and I manage to secure more sponsorship I will attempt to ride from Cape Town to Morocco and then home. But if I run out of money then I will just ride from Morocco home. If the latter is the case then I will have around another 20,000 miles to go.”
We asked her what the best moments have been in her past month of riding. “Hmmm,” she replies. “Riding some of the off road routes in Ecuador I think has to be the best during that time. The routes took me way off the beaten track and through the cloud forests. I visited villages that don't have cars and use only horses to get around. It was really cool to get up there on the bike. The tracks were a little tricky at times. Riding through mud with luggage is not always the easiest thing to do.”
And the worst moment of the past month, we ask? “Again hmmmmm,” she says. “Well I guess riding along the Pan Americana out of Peru was not much fun. I am not a big fan of that stretch of road along the coast. It is dirty and dusty and very windy. There is a particular stretch that I did in a day. It was about 600km and it was just as described all the way. The wind gets pretty annoying and tiring after a while as you are constantly fighting the bike. Drivers also run you off the road when they are overtaking from the opposite direction. They just expect you to get out of their way.”
Steph will now make her way up over the Darién Gap to Panama, through Central America, then all the way up to Alaska before riding the Trans Canadian trail coast to coast. She’ll then fly on to Africa.
She would love to become the first Brit to ride on all seven continents on a solo circumnavigation.
Why not throw her a fiver so she can get a few more miles in?
