The man who motorcycled round the world and then just kept on going

GEOFF Thomas was nine weeks old when adopted from the Salvation Army Mother and Baby Home in Newcastle.

“A very nice little boy,” they said of him and his birth mother “a very nice girl”, though friends and neighbours had simply been told that she was working away. It was 1962.

His adoptive parents were George Thomas, a Darlington farm worker, and his wife, Barbara. “He will have clothes to travel in and you will receive a tin of food and his routine,”

the Salvation Army letter added.

They were good Methodists and good people. Geoff believes them to have been the best parents in the world, but there’s far more to the story than that.

We wrote of him a couple of times in 2008. He was the chap who completed a 28,000 mile, round-theworld motorbike pilgrimage – the bike, like Mrs Cratchit’s turkey, was a Triumph – via which he delivered his parents’ ashes to his brother’s farmstead in California.

He called the adventure Poor Circulation, the emphasis on impoverished.

He called the ashes the Special Package, and that was very special, indeed.

A secondary aim was to raise £5,000 for St Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington, where his mother worked as a volunteer and where both his parents died.

Geoff has now written and selfpublished a 370-page book – the first of a trilogy – on what happened in the ensuing years. “I’m on course to break even by the time I’m 219,” he says.

There aren’t regrets. “Forget Prozac, cocaine and crystal meth. If you want to outrun your demons, then a fast motorcycle on a beautiful road is the surest way to do it.”

It is also, he adds, a great deal more addictive.

HIS childhood was happy, not least because his parents had a motorbike – Triumph Thunderbird, “flew like the wind” – with a particularly large sidecar. “Half the size of my bedroom and twice as exciting,” he supposes.

Never much able to get the hang of reading and writing at school, he enrolled on a catering course at Darlington College.

“Within the first few weeks they’d added the very important words ‘profoundly’ and ‘dyslexic’ to my vocabulary,” he recalls.

By the time of the Great Adventure – “at first little more than a self-indulgent jolly” – he was a twice-divorced motor bike despatch rider in London, had been round the block a few times and seen a bit of the world, too.

The job helped prepare him for the devil-and-hindmost traffic in eastern European cities. “I was a despatch rider. It was good to keep in practice,” he writes.

The journey to his brother Alan’s home in Boonville – home city of Charles Manson, population 715 – took him via Western Europe, through Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania – best speed past Albania – to Russia from coast to coast.

Everywhere was characterised by the kindness of strangers, save for those in uniform. If the Russian police opened his wallet, he says, the Russian people opened his heart.

Whatever the colour of their kit, however, it should perhaps be explained that the “little black bastards” were the ubiquitous mosquitoes.

They told him that the secondhand Triumph Tiger, piled with most of his worldly goods, would never make it. “It’s a street bike with an adventure frock,” said the experts.

It did, the only malfunction a busted headlight bulb in Vladivostok. For much of the journey he was accompanied by a travelling companion called Adam, though not always as easy riders.

“I was advised to take out some of the stories about him,”

he confesses.

Geoff ’s budget was £20 a day, the experiences and the exhilaration beyond price. With hindsight it probably wasn’t wise to get involved with those transvestites in the Elephant Bar.

All the time conscious that his parents were riding with him, all the time wondering what mum and dad would have done, he once or twice imagined a raised Cockerton Methodist eyebrow at his freewheeling.

The book has a nice line about that. “Surely rules exist only to provide gainful employment for the word ‘exception’?”

GEOFF’S back in California when we catch up via Skype, the Darlington accent jettisoned somewhere along the road.

“People think I’m Australian. I don’t take offence,” he says. “Geordie was just too difficult for people to understand.”

He’d delivered the Special Package to Boonville, arrived back in England in November 2008, had his photograph taken at St Teresa’s, learned that his rented place in Essex had burned down.

“Almost everything I owned was now on my motorcycle. I decided just to keep on travelling.”

Stripes abundantly earned, the Tiger remained in England. He now spends half his time around California, riding a Kawasaki and helping his brother, the other half based in Bangkok, helping underprivileged kids and, more sedately, riding a mass-produced Hondo Super Cub.

The downsizing was deliberate.

“The Tiger was a battering ram.

People wanted to know all about the motorcycle, but not about the rider.

People just think of Thailand as bars, beaches and brothels, but I’m discovering much more than that.

It’s what the BBC doesn’t tell you, what you don’t see as a tourist.”

Wheels within wheels, he plans to keep on travelling, living on a $300 a month budget. “It’s made me relaxed about everything. I now have no problems in my life, no stress.

Things come up and I deal with them.

“I have no assets, no pension fund, but I wouldn’t change places with anyone. I haven’t had a Monday morning for five years.”

n Ashes to Boonville, the first part of Geoff Thomas’ trilogy, is available via Amazon and as a Kindle book.

OUR own horizons are perforce a little more restricted, though little in the world may on a sunny day be more joyous than the meadow-sweet walk from Wolsingham to Frosterley.

It was the anniversary of D-Day, the sort of day on which it is not just wonderful to be alive, but when it’s possible seriously to wonder why ninetenths of waking hours seem to be spent in front of a computer screen. Some llamas, a hare, the summer’s first cuckoo, too.

For most of the three miles or so from Wolsingham station, the river’s on one side and the Weardale Railway on the other. Last year they ran no summer trains at all; last Saturday they started a limited service between Stanhope and Wolsingham, with the hope of again getting down to Bishop Auckland.

It’s run by a new subsidiary company of the Heritage Trust – non-profit making, no paid staff – using what they modestly call a bubble car. The website talks of “Wild West robbery trains”, too, though £9 return seems pretty reasonable.

The walk’s other main attraction, of course, is that the incomparably excellent Black Bull at Frosterley marks the halfway point. Bikers of both the leather and the lycra sort were congregated – the other way of telling them apart, as Geoff Thomas might confirm, is that it’s the motorbike boys who wear the earrings.

NEAR Frosterley, above the south bank of the river, a small diversion has had to be created around a locked gate.

Offering a £250 reward, a notice explains that several padlocks in the area have been superglued. It’s to be hoped that the crass culprit may himself soon become unstuck.

Thus refreshed by Weardale’s wonders, the column contemplates something a little further afield. We return in a fortnight.