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“Poles Apart” – WorldbyBike 2008 gets down for "Antarctica Antics" and up for "Northern Lights"

This year’s motorcycling programme comprises two trips – to Antarctica and to the Arctic. The serious theme will be “Climate Change – Calamity or Con, Preventable or Preordained”? The poles are the most sensitive areas of the globe to changes in climatic conditions which makes this year’s trip an ideal opportunity to bring together all the climate change anecdotes from our previous worldbybike trips, and combine them with our observations from the polar caps, and with a literature search of the research by climatologists, geologists, anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeontologists to get an informed layman’s view of what it all means.

Then once we’ve had an opportunity to thaw out from Antarctic Antics over the last of New Zealand summer, we head back to the northern hemisphere to complete the second leg of “Poles Apart” – our long-planned, Northern Lights roadtrip.

A civilised start to this trip at least commencing with a ride up England and Scotland to Scrabster where we grab a ferry to the most economically developed but volcanically active country on earth. No doubt Gareth will be mesmerised by and envious of Iceland's 22.5% flat rate of income tax. Then back on the boat to Scandinavia where we ride up to and across Lapland to Murmansk, home of the Russian fleet during WW II. Turning south to St Petersburg and across Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus we then swing east again to Moscow before turning south down the Volga to Astrakhan – where the Volga spills into the Caspian and Jo goes hunting for the famed sheep wool coats. Our circular route turns for home via Eastern Europe taking in the Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and into Poland before heading west again to Amsterdam and back to the UK to ship the bikes back to NZ.

Northern Lights will have us riding from late June to mid September.