No, But Make It Bigger

Declan McEvoy was 45 when a colleague at work never made it in one morning: 50 years old, dead getting ready for the day. McEvoy, an electro-mechanical engineer and motorcycling instructor from the small village of Quin, County Clare, hadn't ridden a motorcycle in over 20 years. "We always plan for things way into the future," he says, "but it was on this day that I realised that your life is now, today." Three weeks later he bought a bike in the UK and rode it home to Ireland at roughly 30 kilometres an hour on the hard shoulder, too rusty to go any faster. A friend told him what he'd just done. "You've just opened the doors to so many new friendships," the friend said. McEvoy dismissed the comment at the time. Nineteen years, 92,500 kilometres, one Guinness World Record and a planned attempt on Antarctica later, he doesn't.

McEvoy is 64 now, an age he describes with a line borrowed from a neighbour across the road: "You're not over the hill, but you've a pretty good view of the valley." What separates him from the many people who have the same realisation and let it pass isn't the realisation itself. It's a pattern that shows up three separate times across his adult life: something tells him no, and he answers by going bigger, not smaller.

A friend says no, so he goes alone

The first no came early. Riding again after 20 years off a bike, McEvoy started small: the length of Ireland in a day, then the 32 counties, a ride he failed on the first attempt and finished on the second, four months later. "I love the idea of failure," he says, "because it allows you to say, okay, what went wrong there, how can I make modifications to make the next time a success." From Ireland the rides extended to the UK, then France, then further into Europe, family trips folded in with five children who eventually would travel the world themselves. He and a friend worked out a system for longer runs: one rides out, the other flies in and rides the bike home, so both get a one-way journey out of a single set of expenses.

By his mid-40s, restless for more, McEvoy wanted to push into Central Asia. He asked the same friend to fly out and ride his bike home again, this time from somewhere past Europe entirely. The friend said no: too many borders, too much hassle, too far outside his comfort zone. "That set me back a day or two," McEvoy says, "but there's always a way around these things." He bought a motorcycle in Poland for a thousand euro, spent another thousand fixing it up, and rode it toward Central Asia with a plan for what would happen if it never came home: "If I return a year later and the motorcycle's stolen, what about it." He used his job's unpaid-leave policy, ten weeks at a time, and pointed the wheel east from Cherbourg with no fixed idea of where ten weeks would take him. It took him through Istanbul, Georgia, Armenia, Iran and Turkmenistan to Kyrgyzstan, where he stopped, flew home, and returned about ten months later to keep going.

He never set out to ride around the world. "I didn't actually set out to ride around the world," he says. "I just wanted to travel further beyond Europe to Central Asia." Kyrgyzstan led east to Magadan in far-eastern Russia in 2017, then across to Alaska, south through the Yukon, the continental US, Mexico and Central America to Ushuaia, then a separate leg across West and Central Africa. The final count: 92,500 kilometres, 59 countries, five continents, on a KLR 650 that was already 20 years old.

His own definition of "around the world" is a mechanical engineer's definition: two antipodal points, opposite each other through the centre of the earth, plotted with mapping software to within ten metres of exact and worked into the route. His pair were a town in Siberia and Rio Gallegos, in the far south of Argentina. "My definition," he says, "would be whereby you start from your home, go through antipode one, find your way to antipode two, and land back home again to where you started, with the smallest possible number of sea crossings."

The bike gave him trouble late in the ride. A rider he crossed paths with in Africa had a brand-new CRF 300 that started every morning without complaint; McEvoy's said a few prayers first. "If I was doing it again," he says, "I would do it on something more reliable, just to keep my mind at ease." He also never carried a Carnet de Passage, the customs document most overlanders treat as non-negotiable in West Africa, relying instead on temporary import permits, a fair amount of talking, and, at times, cash.

Crossing the Congo River from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, widely regarded as one of the world's toughest and most corrupt border crossings, is the moment he names as his proudest of the whole ride. He got through it with help from a stranger: the president of the Kinshasa Motor Club, a contact passed to him by a friend he'd met on a mountaintop in Tajikistan, who arranged accommodation and safe passage across with four days left on McEvoy's visa. "He was a superman with a cape," McEvoy says. Further along the coast, a border official in Ghana named Mathilda spent days chasing down a laissez-passer for him by phone, a kindness he traces back to nothing more than staying polite at her counter while another traveller lost his temper in the same room and paid for it in a two-week delay. "It's really politeness and respect," McEvoy says. "You have to do it."

A border says no, so he crosses a frozen lake by bicycle instead

The second no arrived at a Russian border post in February 2019. McEvoy had spent months preparing a motorcycle to ride the length of frozen Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, a lake shaped like a banana on the map, 780 kilometres north to south and only 80 kilometres across at its widest. He'd first seen it in summer 2017, on the round-the-world ride, and been told that locals drove cars across it once it froze. He'd applied to Guinness World Records for the longest motorcycle ride on ice, off-road, and modified a bike for the attempt. At the border, his own visa cleared without issue. The motorcycle did not. No real reason was given, "secret protocol" was the phrase used, and he was sent home.

He didn't cancel the trip. He rode a bicycle across the frozen lake instead, 80 kilometres, solo. "That only happened because the motorcycle entry was denied," he says. A year later he went back with an actual motorcycle, and with company: Gary O'Keeffe, a friend and fellow adventurer from Ireland who had heard about the failed attempt and proposed assembling an international team to try it properly, with a film crew along. Six riders and one support van, on KTM 450s and 550s, covered more than 700 kilometres of the frozen lake in under two weeks, in temperatures of minus 22 degrees Celsius by day and minus 32 at night, wind chill reaching roughly minus 70 at speed. Five of the six finished.

Guinness required the record to be registered to a single individual rather than the group, so it went in McEvoy's name, but he later gave up the rights to one of the other finishers, now credited in a book about the crossing. His reasoning echoes back to the same instinct that sent him solo the first time. "It's a bit like climbing Mount Everest and saying I climbed Mount Everest," he says, "but did you, when the Sherpa carried all your gear and laid out the ropes and ladders?" It wasn't, in his own accounting, entirely his to claim. He still says he'd like to go back and cross the lake solo by motorcycle, the thing the 2019 border guard stopped him from doing in the first place; for now, the war in Ukraine has closed off Russia for extreme cold-weather trips, a door that's kept him out for four years and counting.

A storm says no, so he goes back to prove a stranger can do it too

The third no was quieter, and slower to answer. McEvoy's first solo winter attempt on Nordkapp, the northernmost point of mainland Norway, stalled about 30 kilometres from the finish for four or five days: roads closed, weather too bad to move. He camped it out in a hunting swag and waited. On the morning conditions finally looked possible, he rode the last stretch not knowing if he'd be turned back again. He wasn't. He reached the globe monument at the top of Norway and recorded himself arriving, a video, he says, "with so many expletives in it," the sound of two weeks of pent-up effort finally letting go.

A year later, someone commented on his social media that what he was doing was "off the scale." McEvoy didn't agree, and decided to prove it. He put out a call for a motorcyclist who could ride but had never attempted anything like an expedition, someone ordinary, to come with him on a second winter run to Nordkapp. An Irish rider volunteered. McEvoy told him what it would take: time, money, logistics, preparation. "Whatever you tell me, I will do," the man said. Last January, the two of them stood together at the top of Nordkapp holding the Irish tricolour. "It really does prove that anybody can do these things," McEvoy says, "if they're maybe stubbornly determined."

The next no, not yet answered

That same Nordkapp companion is the one who proposed what comes next: riding a motorcycle across Antarctica, from Hercules Inlet toward the South Pole. McEvoy had looked into it years earlier and judged it close to impossible, mostly on the logistics and permissions. The pair have since been in contact with Antarctic Logistics and Expeditions, the company that runs access to the continent, who told them, in effect, that their cold-weather experience isn't yet close to what the environment demands. "If I'm camping in Finland at minus 25," McEvoy says, "20 kilometres down the road there's a Circle K, you go in, warm up, get a coffee. On Antarctica there aren't too many Circle Ks en route to the South Pole." The plan for early 2027 is four or five days of extreme cold-weather training with a professional, followed by a winter test ride from Whitehorse, in Canada's Yukon, to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic coast, roughly 1,300 kilometres at temperatures as low as minus 40, a route McEvoy has ridden once before in summer. Antarctica itself would follow, contingent on how that goes, and on money: McEvoy puts the cost of a properly modified motorcycle and support at somewhere between six and seven hundred thousand euro, not yet raised. To his knowledge, no one has successfully ridden a motorcycle from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole; a Royal Enfield-backed attempt tried in recent years and didn't make it.

Asked what advice he'd give someone who has the same realisation he had at 45 and never acts on it, McEvoy doesn't offer a formula. "There's a thousand reasons why you shouldn't do something," he says, "and only one reason why you should, and that's the one we're chasing." He describes fear less as something to overcome than as an argument with a second version of himself: the voice that says don't, and the one that says he's going to anyway. "It's nearly a matter of which person are you going to listen to," he says. Asked to sum up adventure in three words, he doesn't quite manage three: "Being outside your comfort zone." For him, travel has always come down to a shorter list than that. "There are three things I love," he says. "Motorcycling, geography and people."