[James]

Forget Big Brother, I’m a biker now

When she decided to tour Europe alone friends said she was mad, but the former reality TV contestant Elizabeth Woodcock had the time of her life

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Night is falling in Tartu. Shadowy, shifty figures are emerging from the doorways and scuttling off down the crumbling streets like rats. I am by myself in a strange place, waiting for a man I only know through contact on the internet.

This is Estonia’s second-biggest city and lies deep in the country’s interior, far from the comforts of home — or even from the country’s more cosmopolitan capital, Tallinn. My friends had warned me there would be anxious moments like this if I was really serious about travelling round Europe alone on a motorbike. And I certainly feel scared now.

In situations like this you thank your lucky stars for the bike and gear. Sitting astride my Yamaha 600 with my helmet firmly on my head, nobody can tell I am a woman, despite my small stature. I probably look as threatening to the creatures of the night as they do to me. Right now, it’s a comforting thought.

Moments later my contact, Bruno, drives up, with his companion, a blond-haired giant of a man, both dressed from head to toe in black with all the usual skulls and studs riveted into their leathers. They beckon me to follow them, and we roar off down the highway. Within minutes we have arrived at my berth for the night, the Bikers Clubhouse, a vast, barn-like building whose iron doors clang shut behind us. The walls are covered with graffiti of devils and images of naked women. Heavy rock blares out as Bruno hands me a beer. I feel a tiny frisson of fear — what if it is drugged? Later that night I fall asleep with a bottle, an iron bar and a wooden club by my side in case anything untoward happens. I am 28, a couple of thousand miles from my Edinburgh home, on a tour of the new Europe: could it get any worse than this? I needn’t have worried. When Bruno returned in the morning, he introduced himself properly, without the blaring music to compete against his voice. He proved a very respectable man, a surveyor, with a passion for old motorbikes and a double life as a Hell’s Angel.

I’d found him by putting the words “Bikers” and “Estonia” into an internet search engine — on my travels in eastern Europe I liked getting to know the locals. Gentleman that he is, Bruno had offered me a place to stay.

So it seems appearances can be deceptive. My looks are deceptive too, apparently. When I was a contestant in Big Brother in 2001 I was labelled the “motherly, sensible one” by the press — well, hardly. But you’d think I was a wilting flower from the reactions even among my close friends when I announced my intention to get hold of a motorbike and use six months off from my career as a freelance web designer to explore the new member states of the European Union.

“Why on earth would you want to do that?” was a typical reaction. Because I was curious about the “new Europe” perhaps — because I wanted to see for myself the truth behind the scare stories about those demonised foreigners whose purpose in life, supposedly, is to steal British jobs.

“Isn’t that a war zone?” was another common response. Well, no. The mechanic at my local garage was even more apocalyptic. “You’re bonkers,” he exclaimed. “You’ll be robbed or murdered or . . .” “Raped?” I finished his sentence and we shared a distressing moment.

But now, after completing my journey, all my instincts for adventure and discovery have been proved right. I’ve covered 13,000 miles through 17 countries, including every one of the EU’s new states. And on my travels I’ve met enough remarkable people to fill every after-dinner conversation for the rest of my life.

Estonia alone provided a weird and wonderful cast of characters: there was Innes, the country’s answer to Madonna, who came fourth in the 2004 Eurovision song contest and an aspiring young novelist called Caur, described as “Estonia’s Irvine Welsh” by his friends. There were the elderly Russian exiles, living in splendid isolation on an island in the middle of Lake Peipsi, not far from Tartu. They spoke perfect English, learning it as schoolgirls from the BBC and from reading international magazines such as Newsweek.

At the start of my adventures I discovered the truth of an old saying: “Shy bairns get nae toffee”. The bike came courtesy of the manufacturer, Dunlop supplied the tyres, Akito the clothing and the BBC gave me a camera to make video diaries. But none of this gratefully received assistance made up for my inexperience. At the outset of the trip I had enjoyed just 28 hours of motorbiking.

To all intents and purposes I was a novice and it took just one day for calamity to overtake me — not in deepest, darkest eastern Europe, but in small-town England. An ill-timed arrival at a mini-roundabout on a clogged-up, curving roadway, combined with my own short legs, left me lying on my back with dog mess about a foot from my helmet. I picked myself up and heaved up all 450lb of the bike, while pasty white faces peered out from the passing cars. It took another biker to stop to ask if I was all right.

But then, that’s the thing with these two-wheeled enthusiasts. They’re all members of the unofficial world bikers’ club; they share each other’s pleasures, they look after their own. This camaraderie is international and extends to waves of acknowledgment, with feet and fingers, even while travelling at breakneck speeds the length and breadth of Europe’s motorway network.

The first accident sickened me and brought the first waves of doubt as I sank to my knees by the roadside. But within days I was loving every minute, as new landscapes opened up in front of me.

There were new experiences too. Compared to the mud-spattered highways of central Poland, the M8 is positively pristine. And while you can cut a clean swathe through central Scotland, overtaking cars in Poland invariably left me covered in mud and grease. As I was smearing the detritus around my visor trying to make a peephole, an old oncoming lorry might lurch out, overtaking an old man on an equally antiquated bicycle. In turn, he always seemed to be overtaking a fat chestnut mare pulling a wooden cart.

The accommodation was different too. The floors of one mountain hostel close to the border with the Czech Republic were scattered with rat poison, and every one of its mattresses were stained and disgusting. The proprietor allowed me to use his computer, but somehow I felt uneasy when I saw he had arranged a pair of his underpants on the radiator nearby.

That was Poland, but each country blended strange experiences with its own magic. In Lithuania, after a chance meeting in a bar, I was invited to join a team of cancer researchers and spent a couple of days going from house to house collecting specimens of human faeces. In Latvia, a Siberian exile invited me to visit an ex-Soviet prison that’s now a hotel. In Slovakia, a dog bit me — but the friendly artists and children I met in that beautiful country more than compensated for the pain.

And so it went on. A castle retreat in the freezing mist of Slovenian mountains; thermal baths in Hungary to ease my tired limbs; Czech plum brandy to keep warm.

In the weeks since my journey ended I have a sense of achievement and new-found knowledge of the new Europe and its people (all those clichés about job-hungry emigrants, I’m happy to tell you, are untrue). These days I’m living and teaching English in Seville, and writing a full account of my travels, hoping to find a publisher.

It’s been strange reading about the parallel adventures by motorbike of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman. I admire everything McGregor has achieved as an international film star — by comparison I am, after all just a woman with a less than reputable television history. But heck, I really did make my journey alone! There was no best mate, no back-up land rovers or film crew travelling in my wake. Just me, a woman alone.

Watch Elizabeth Woodcock’s video diaries at http://www.bbc.co.uk/videonation/per...cock_elizabeth

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...440070,00.html