Part one – Inception and Deception - Mondo Sahara the prequel
Austin Vince's account of his deeds of derring-do in the Sahara - with motorcycle parts from Wemoto :0)
Austin Vince and his merry band completed an exciting and eventful trip to the Sahara desert this year, sponsored by Wemoto who supplied many of his motorcycle parts for the adventure from our UK warehouses in Southwick.
Some of Austin's motorcycle parts being picked for him
Austin has made a film of the trip which is called
Mondo Sahara and is going to be launched at the end of the year - it is
not to be missed so look out for it then. Austin filmed the whole story from start to finish and it is great to see the adventure unfolding from the very beginning - he even filmed his trip to Wemoto to collect his parts - Austin is a man of many parts!
Austin and his brother Gerald filming at Wemoto
Here, in Austin's own words, is how it all started - more to follow in the coming weeks about how the adventure went.
Mondo Sahara poised for the off
The internet today is awash with motorcycle ‘adventures’. Some are aggrandised yet lame, others barely spoken of, yet stupefyingly impressive. Yes indeed, it’s all out there nowadays, the whole spectrum, so why did I feel there was anything more to say?
Spaghetti Junction
Well, it’s generally considered that after 'The Man with No Name' westerns with Clint Eastwood and then 1969’s 'Once Upon A Time in The West', Sergio Leone only came of age with 'Giu La Testa!' his 1971 western known in the UK as 'Duck You Sucker' and in the USA as 'A Fistful of Dynamite'. They say it was his first ‘political’ movie and although not a genius like Leone, I had arrived at the same conclusion.
Austin and laden bike
Ain't no mountain high enough
My first films were shot entirely on super 8 back in the early nineties. The school mountain leadership expeditions (in Spain) that I organised were my first film ‘subjects’. I had kids jumping off crags into lakes, abseiling down cliffs and doing silly dances 24/7 in my bid to shoot my own Sierra Nevada version of The Monkees. My first feature length documentary was Mondo Enduro, which despite being made by a bunch of talentless goons, was a world first – nobody had seen adventure motorcycling on TV before. Hurrah for the Discovery channel!
Ain't no river wide enough
Back in the USSR
In 2001 we were back in Siberia and tackling the 400 mile roadless Zilov Gap. That resulted in a 6 x 30min series for
Men and Motors called
Terra Circa. It wasn’t bad going for a mish mash of school teachers and couriers; On Mondo we were the first Europeans ever, to ride the so-called Road Of Bones to Magadan and on Terra we were the first people to ride all the way across Russia without using the train. It was of course, a little weird, when three years later, the phone rang and a voice uttered the unexpected words:
“Hello, I work for Ewan MacGregor. We’ve seen your films and would like to talk to you about helping him motorcycle across Siberia…”.
School's out for summer
In 1998 I got picked up by Discovery (leaving maths teaching for two years) and was allowed to make my own shows in the new genre of ‘history travel’. We had almost zero budget but by being so miserly, the channel surrendered almost all editorial control and had to accept that they had let me loose on such subjects as: The Settle to Carlisle Railway, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall and even A history of the Isle of Man TT Circuit!
Yaaay
Lois on the Loose
In the noughties I made a load of other short motorcycle films and was lucky enough to be invited to shoot/direct a two hour ‘how to’ guide designed to get women into adventure motorcycling called
‘Ladies On The Loose’. It was written and presented by my wife, Lois Pryce, so production meetings were always interrupted by cuddling.
The 'Empty Quarter'
In 2009 I was invited to film an attempt by a group of British bikers who were trying to get to the abandoned medieval salt mines of Taoudenni in northern Mali, some 600 miles north of Timbuktu. This was to be a world first and had been masterminded by Adventure Spec and Richard Kemplay at logistics legends, Beast of Burden. The trip involved some 2000 miles of pretty extreme desert motorcycling and was an eye opener to what is known as the ‘Empty Quarter’ of the Sahara.
Mondo Enduro Ethiopian piggy back
Meanwhile, 9/11 had happened and just when it looked like the Cold War was over and we could all learn to live together, a new cultural conflict broke out. In the period 2004 to 2012 I found myself increasingly being booked to do presentations in North America. So whilst the British and Americans oversaw the almost complete destruction of Iraq and the chaotic hornets nest they’d stirred up in Afghanistan, I was standing on stages across the USA telling everyone that the world was safe and that Johnny Foreigner wouldn’t kidnap you when you broke down, he was more likely to put you on his moped and actually escort you to a 6204 bearing personally!
The birth of Mondo Sahara
Which takes us back to the Leone thing; I wanted to make a political film. I wanted to challenge the bigotries and pre-conceptions that seemed, rather than to be melting away, were hardening. And I’ll say it; the anti-Muslim and anti-Arab paranoia that was sweeping the Christian West in a bush fire of suspicion. I realised I had to take a load of Brits and Yanks to an Arab nation that was on the Foreign Office Al-Qaeda watchlist. CNN seems to suggest that the only way our two great nations get to meet ordinary Arabs is for us to put on a flak-jacket, join a counter-insurgency task force and ask them for their papers. However, aside from the noble cause of world understanding, I also wanted to answer the question: “What’s the most fun you can have in just four weeks assuming that you ride your first miles out of London?” So I came up with Mondo Sahara.
Team Mondo Sahara
The aim was, starting in London, to ride off-road, across Spain, Morocco and Western Sahara. With this behind us, we would meet up with Richard Kemplay of Beast of Burden. Whilst we were riding out, he would have been burying food, fuel and water across the deserts of Mauritania. Once we rendezvoused at the Mauritanian border post he would hand us a GPS plot of the supply dumps and off we’d lunge into the Empty Quarter of the Sahara. Englishmen and Americans, following a Garmin speck across the wilderness for 1200 miles. Each night locating and digging up the supplies for the next day. Nobody had done anything like this before. It was only going to be four weeks but would still be a class-A adventure! Where would we go to kit out our second-hand Honda XR400s?
Why,
Wemoto of course!
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