Now they have returned to Greater Manchester and written a book about their adventures.
Simon and Georgie McCarthy ate spiders, camped out with Mongolian nomads, visited jungle temples and appeared on Kyrgyzstan TV as they rode overland on the BMW to Japan and back.
The epic 18-month journey of a lifetime took the couple, of Kilvert Drive, Sale, to some of the most remote and exotic parts of the planet as they travelled across Western Europe, through Turkey and the former Soviet Union and on to Japan, then back via Cambodia, Thailand, India, Pakistan and Iran.
Half-way round, 37-year-old Georgie, a fluent Spanish and French speaker, tired of sitting on the back and bought her own bike, an Enfield, which she rode back from India to Britain.
She said: “We were in Greece in 10 days and it really started to feel like an adventure when we got to Turkey.
“From there we travelled through Georgia, up to Azerbaijan, which is a wonderful country, and on to Turkmenistan
“It’s ruled by a bizarre dictator and is a very strange place. From there we entered Kyrgyzstan, a small, high country.
“Our bag was stolen and our landlady helped by threatening to call the president when the police couldn’t find it. They believed her and all their officers, off-duty or not, were called in to look. They even organised a TV appeal.”
Bottles of vodka
A few days later the bag turned up – minus their passports, which were returned a little later for the price of a couple of bottles of vodka.
Simon, 42, and Georgie then travelled east through Russia to a place occupying a special place in their hearts – Mongolia. Georgie said: “The country is how I imagine life in Biblical times, very simple, with nomadic people sleeping in tents.
“Mongolia is the size of Western Europe but there are only 450 miles of paved roads, so you literally could ride in a straight line for hours at a time across huge landscapes and not see a soul.”
From there the couple crossed to Japan, appearing on the front cover of a national magazine, before travelling on to Thailand to begin the long journey home.
They visited the famous jungle temples at Angkor Watt in Cambodia for Georgie’s birthday. Arriving in Pakistan a few months after the end of the war in Iraq, they felt very nervous.
But the people were very friendly, and from then it was on to Iran and back home.”
To get a copy of their book or to find out more about their adventures, visit their website through the link below.
