Aaah Russia, the most mysterious and exciting of places! It is this country, 18 million square kilometres in size and 11 percent of the entire world’s land mass, it cast its spell over me when I was growing up in South Africa, where Russians were the “Reds under every bed”, feared, and demonized.

But I wanted to experience it for myself. Meet the Russians in person who occupied this vast country made up mostly of trackless taiga forest, men and women who had squared up to the Americans, beaten them in the Space Race and then collapsed, losing half their empire. So, despite holding still the childhood fear of all things Russian, I set off on my disastrous first attempt in 2006, riding solo on an old BMW 50/5 which broke down every day from the UK to Kaliningrad. Despite this, wanting more, I replaced the unreliable BMW with a KLE500 and, two years later, tried again, reaching Murmansk via Norway–still just dabbing a toe into the vast sea that is Russia.

My third journey I made the following year with my son, Gareth (who had ridden trans-Africa with me when he was just 17). This time, we reached Archangel, having many adventures along the way. We were arrested for straying into a restricted zone and spending time with a Russian motorcycle gang, the Black Bears–experiences which left us with many indelible memories.

This book recounts these first journeys into Russia–each one a learning experience, a whetting of the appetite for more. Ten years later, I felt sufficiently confident to embark on a major solo journey, including a double crossing of the notorious Road of Bones–from Kyrgyzstan to Magadan in the Russian Far East and back to the UK. This adventure is recounted in a later book: Two Fingers on the Jugular.