The community of women bikers who relayed around the world in a year-long mission to inspire others

With 3,500 female participants across six continents, Susan Carpenter takes a trip along the Women Riders World Relay through deserts, monsoons, with a community that transcends languages and stereotypes

The relay spanned the globe – here riders can be seen in Argentina (Images Women Riders World Relay)

The night Hayley Bell threw a leg over her KTM motorcycle and pointed the front tire toward Scotland, it was pitch black and sleeting – exactly the sort of miserable weather most bikers would avoid. But she isn’t like most bikers. Bell, a 28-year-old from northern England, was on a mission.

It was 26 February 2019 and she was wheeling through the dark for eight hours straight, hauling a few weeks worth of clothes and a wooden baton that has become a kind of talisman for the yearlong event she pioneered to bring attention to female motorcyclists: the Women Riders World Relay.

It’s exactly as it sounds.

More than 3,500 women from 79 countries have spent a year circumnavigating the globe on two wheels, logging some 63,000 miles. Some of them rode a few hours, others spent days or months, and a lot of them didn’t even speak the same language. But together, they broke new ground and forged personal connections as the baton was passed from rider to rider on a journey that spanned six continents.

The women were most recently in Dubai as the event was wrapping up. A final celebration took place last Saturday in London.​

“There was no: ‘Shall we do a little trip ’round the UK?’” says Bell, who was inspired by an affliction common to adventurous women with office jobs: boredom. Forget that, they said. “Let’s just do a world relay.”

The relay’s London party, with Bell seen in the top right (Women Riders World Relay)

“I was at work one day, and I just wanted to travel with women who enjoyed motorbiking and not shopping,” she adds. “I wanted that adrenaline excursion with females. Bell had been riding for five years, but she struggled to find other women as passionate about motorcycling as she is. So she posted her bold idea on Facebook.

“I sort of got dragged into this thing,” Liza Miller said. “It’s one of these things that you don’t really realize how much time you’re committing, but once you’re in, you’re glad to be there.”

The relay’s founder Hayley Bell (Women Riders World Relay)

Miller, who’s from Santa Cruz, in California, offered to help organise the US leg when the relay was just a tantalising question mark thrown into the vast expanse of the web four days earlier. “There was no structure. There was no plan,” Miller says. But the audacity of the idea drew her in.

I thought this would really inspire and encourage women to show themselves and each other what they are capable of.”

Liza Miller, US leg organizer

“Also, that women riders are overlooked, but not just that,” she says. “Women riders don’t have the same confidence that male riders do. I thought this would really inspire and encourage women to show themselves and each other what they are capable of.”

Miller, who says she “lives, eats, sleeps and breathes motorcycles,” runs the Re-Cycle garage in Santa Cruz and hosts the “Motorcycles and Misfits” podcast. But for the past 18 months, she has been using Google Translate to communicate with other female riders all over the world, and Google Street View to help plot the routes, from Albania to Indonesia to Zimbabwe.

“The big secret is that we’re still building the world right ahead of everybody as they’re riding around the world,” she says. “We are staying one step ahead of them.”

Miller, 53, has been riding motorcycles since she was 12 and considers herself proficient from the littlest dirt bikes up to sportbikes and heavyweight cruisers.

To prove her point, for the 18-day US leg in October, she rode one of the biggest bikes on the market: an Indian Motorcycle Roadmaster, which tips the scales at 930lb.

Some of the relay’s British gang can be seen at Land’s End (Women Riders World Relay)

It wasn’t hers. Recognising the growing importance of women to the American motorsports industry, Indian Motorcycle sponsored the US portion of the relay, providing bikes to the lead riders and meals at dealerships.

“A global relay ride is a huge undertaking for anyone, and the fact that it’s a group of female riders just makes it all the more exciting for us,” says Indian Motorcycle’s customer growth manager, Joey Lindahl.

Indian Motorcycle has a long history with female motorcyclists. In 1916, the Van Buren sisters were one of the first all-women teams to ride motorcycles across the US. Both rode Indian bikes. Back then, a woman riding a motorcycle was a novelty. Today, one in five bikers is a woman, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Its 2018 owner survey found that women ride for a lot of the same reasons as men: because it’s fun, gives them a sense of freedom, helps them relax and makes it possible to enjoy nature.

But it’s also about connecting with like-minded women.

The group has connected women from all over the world, who use Google Translate to interact with anyone with whom they don’t share a common language (Women Riders World Relay)

“Any time you can meet another woman who rides and share a lot of common experiences, it grows from there,” says Andria Yu, communications director for the Motorcycle Industry Council. “You see someone else do it, and if they’re kind of like you, then you think you can do it, too.”

Increasingly, the women are meeting through Instagram, Facebook and other social media sites, Yu says.

Facebook is how Guliafshan Tariq, from Lahore, Pakistan, got involved with the Women Riders World Relay, or “Wer Wer”, as its participants call it.

“When I heard about WRWR, it excited me, because people across the globe don’t know that Pakistan is now becoming better and it has a lot to offer,” says Tariq, 27, who has been riding motorcycles for six years.

I wanted to show the world the soft image of Pakistan, my country, and wanted to depict the strong face of Muslim Pakistani female bikers on an international platform

Guliafshan Tariq, Lahore, Pakistan

She is the rare female motorcyclist in her country, she says. “I wanted to show the world the soft image of my country and wanted to depict the strong face of Muslim Pakistani female bikers on an international platform.”

Tariq’s is one of the better-documented legs on the relay’s website. Photos and professionally shot videos show her and a small group of women wheeling their bikes past ancient monuments, most of them wearing helmets while riding and some donning headscarves when they aren’t.

Paraguay riders can be seen taking a quick pitstop (Women Riders World Relay)

Her trip wasn’t without incident, however. Tariq was supposed to take the baton from a rider in Iran until the relay’s organisers learned that Islamic clerics in the country had issued legal rulings, or fatwas, against women riding motorcycles in front of men.

So the previous rider in Turkey had to ship the baton with a delivery service. But because the baton is outfitted with a GPS tracker, customs agents confiscated it as a possible terrorist device.

It took so many days for the baton to be released that it threw off Tariq’s schedule for the Pakistani leg of the relay. And then, because of political troubles between Pakistan and India, she wasn’t able to get a visa to ride across the border to pass the baton to the next rider. She had to give it to a Dutch woman to cross into India and hand it off.

Still, Tariq says participating had been worth the trouble. At least the weather cooperated.

In Laos, the relay’s sole rider, Nilamon Binthavone, braved a monsoon. Other riders have crashed, stalled, skidded and fixed their bikes on the fly. They’ve cried, they’ve laughed. They’ve had an adventure, and they’ve proved their point. Yes, women do ride.

© New York Times