The 42-Year Voyage

In 1979 a 21-year-old Chris Donaldson pointed a café-racing Moto Guzzi out of Belfast — a city of checkpoints and bomb scares, where his family’s furniture shop got blown up on the regular — and aimed it at Australia. He never got there. The Iranian revolution closed his road east, and what was meant to be a four-month, 10,000-mile ride became a year and a half and more than 50,000 miles the “wrong” way: across the Sahara on a road bike never built for it, down through Africa to Cape Town, a hitched ride on a yacht race back to Europe, then Canada all the way down to Buenos Aires.

Forty-two years later, Chris is climbing back onto the very same bike to finally finish the ride — this time with Parkinson’s, an old friend named Liam, and a phrase he lives by: “adventure before dementia.” He and Jeanne talk about the Aboriginal walkabout that shaped him, why an unmapped, pre-GPS world made for richer adventure, and the strangers across four decades who fed him, fixed his bike, and once filled his petrol tank for free in Iran and waved off the money.

They close with Two Truths & A Lie — the Sahara, a scooter to Antarctica, and crossing Iran with a cancelled visa — and with Chris’s quiet reframe of a lifetime of detours: “It wasn’t the wrong way at all.”