Motorcycle travel books normally tell the tales of 20-40 somethings travelling to far flung places, rarely are they the tales of 60 or 70 year olds.

Kiwis Des Molloy and Dick Huurdemman just changed all that.

Not only are they old blokes on bikes but old blokes on old bikes – ‘Penelope’ a 1965 650 Panther and ‘Dutch Courage’ a 1954 Norton 600.
These old blokes on old bikes travelled more than 20,000 km to have their ‘Last Hurrah’ – their long dreamed of trip from Beijing to Arnhem along the Silk Road.

Along for the ride was Des’ son Steve who was the pillion, cameraman as well as sometime rider in times of need.

If you only watch the DVD then you will be missing a massive amount of behind the scenes colour that only the book can give you. Once I’d read the book I found the DVD rather disappointing, but only because it covers so little of their adventure.

To say that their trip is inspiring is rather understating it. The road conditions alone would be enough to test those of us who are much younger, on much younger bikes, but thankfully mishaps were minor and relatively few.

The countries travelled through and the peoples that they met are brought to life in the writing and to some extent in the accompanying DVD.
Des draws the conclusion that many before have come to, that people the world over are very similar, living their day to day lives the best they can in the situations they find themselves in. There are countries where this day to day existence is extremely hard, such as Mongolia, but still they encountered people willing to give them what they had in a spirit of human kindness that often seems to be lacking in Western countries.

The fears we have of unknown countries and people and more the fear of what those people may do to harm us are largely unfounded and as with anywhere there are always the bad people, but no more so in far off countries than in Europe which is evidenced on their travels.

Dick and Des coped admirably and with a sense of humour with what were sometimes extremely testing situations especially when it came to their health,which at one point threatened the continuance of the trip.

The end of the trip was Dick’s sister’s 70th birthday party in Arnhem, which obviously had a fixed date and this meant that unavoidable delays at borders, due to breakdowns and health challenges necessitated change to their schedule which in turn meant that places they intended to visit had to be missed. Des does reflect that as a younger man he did much motorcycle travelling and how it is much better not to have a fixed itinery so as to allow for mishaps, in whatever form, not to mention the freedom it gives but accepts that this is luxury few of us these days have.

The end of the trip is rather sad because the ‘last hurrah’ their last hurrah is over and it is unlikely that they will be able to do such a trip ever again.

But it has to be said that they did it, they did the trip of a lifetime that many of us never manage.

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