Matt Bishop and Reece Gilkes are The Sidecar Guys, holders of the Guinness World Record as the first to circumnavigate the globe in a scooter and sidecar. Five years later, they still can't get enough sidecars, and they run The Sidecar Experience in beautiful Northumberland. It's not just a fun way to get around - more a way of life.
It's great to talk to you, Matt! How did you and Reece meet, and what inspired you to travel around the world in a sidecar?
We met at school - year 9 science! - so we've been friends for a long time. By chance, we ended up working together in London as travel agents after uni, and we shared a dingy flat and spent our evenings over a few beers coming up with ideas for a really big, silly adventure. The scooter and sidecar one just stuck. While it may have appeared unwise, it was indeed attainable. Although inconvenient, the task remained feasible; no one had dared to try it before, making it especially appealing to us.
We'd never been on motorcycles before planning the trip worldwide, but we met the right people who pushed us along. We crossed paths with a guy who built us the sidecar, and we bought a Honda SH300i scooter - a standard commuter scooter - and the next thing we knew, we had a motorbike and sidecar with no idea how to drive whatsoever, but we were ready to take on the world. We obtained our licenses and started our journey at the end of 2017. Our record-breaking expedition covered 35 countries, spanned 34,000 miles, and lasted 455 days on the road. We returned home in January 2019. Interestingly, this trip also holds the world record for the longest journey undertaken by scooter and sidecar.
What were the highs and lows of the journey?
Highs and lows tend to come together, with the highs coming after the lows, right? The Trans-Siberian Highway was tough. We drove from Vladivostok home to London, and it was very, very, very chilly - minus 40 - and we had no heated kit or anything like that. It's one road that goes on forever. It stretches across 10 time zones, and you keep driving along it, but nothing changes. It's snowy and white and blizzardy and windy and freezing. After a couple of days, we're thinking, This is horrendous, and we've got six weeks of it. But then Russian Facebook found out about us, and they posted to biking groups nationwide to tell them that we were attempting this mission. And then, in every town or village, bikers would be waiting for us on the side of the road in the cold to take us in for the night and fill us up with vodka and food. We'd have mad moments of thinking we're going to die in the wilderness, and then we'd come to this tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, and there'd be two or three guys on the side of the road standing next to a sidecar waiting for us to arrive and take us back to their warm houses. The trip was full of real extremes like that.
Tell us about the Sidecar Experience
The Sidecar Experience is our ongoing mission to have fun with sidecars! We're based in Morpeth, Northumberland, and doing a load of different stuff, but it's all to do with the sidecar and adventure travel.
We are a dealership for Ural motorcycles and Watsonian Sidecars. Urals were initially built in the Soviet Union as military sidecar motorcycles to fight the Nazis, and now they've become one of the ultimate adventure boys' toys. They're fantastic in rugged terrain. The Ural is better if you want to go off-road and do fun stuff like that, which you can try out on one of our rider or passenger experiences. We also sell Royal Enfield sidecars, which you can put on any bike. They're more of the classic Harry Potter/Hagrid-type sidecar. I like the Urals, but the Enfields are fun, too.
We are on the outskirts of Northumberland National Park, and there's no traffic here, not even any tourists, and it's just beautiful.
During lockdown, we started the virtual Armchair Adventure Festival—a celebration of adventure travel—because no one could travel anywhere. It was so successful that it has morphed into a real-life festival every summer by the sea in Cornwall. We hope it inspires people to make their adventures. We are getting ready for the next one in July 2025.
What is your next project?
This year's big thing is setting up a destination cafe that we will call Wild North. The idea is to be a hub for adventure travellers in the region, offering various adventures. It doesn't have to be bikes, although there will be a focus on bikes and sidecars. Hopefully, it'll combine the silly sidecar adventures side of our work with the community stuff we get from the Armchair Adventure Festival. We want a cool space for people to come to and plan their adventures and then head off from.
To help raise the cash, we're running a crowdfunding campaign throughout 2024 with a stunning prize: a 2024 Sahara model Ural Gear Up. It's the ultimate adventure motorcycle and is worth £28,000. We run a monthly draw, but the big draw will occur on 29 December.
We've been doing some publicity around this, and you might have seen us on the news last month when we broke another world record—this time for the longest reverse in a sidecar. Just so you know, that is 107 miles, and it took 15 hours!
How did you meet the Roadskin guys, and what do you think of the gear?
We met Ian and Mark at a London motorcycle show last year and got ourselves some kit - the Taranis jeans, the Munro shirts and the waterproof overtrousers [Rainskins]. It's all just excellent. It works, looks pretty cool, is very durable, and protects us. We wear it every day, and it's still going strong. It's effortless: easy to clean, wash, and use.
It rains a lot in Northumberland, so we needed decent bike clothing. But it's the most fantastic place for our sidecar lifestyle - see us!
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Find out more about the record-breaking rides, sidecar experiences, buying a sidecar, the Armchair Adventure Festival and the cafe crowdfunder here.
Follow the adventures of the Sidecar Guys on Facebook and Instagram.
