I am lucky to have two great fellow bikers on Eric’s Myanmar trip. The four of us had an absolute ball.

Eric ‘Awesome’ Wasson: our guides and owner of Ride LARA based in Laos. Eric’s favourite word Dude…Eric is from the states, Texas, but living in Laos married to a very nice Lao lady, Parn, who I met when I was in Vientiane. I nicknamed Eric awesome because he was going to send me his DRZ piston, rings and valves when Dizzy died in order to get Dizzy back on the road. Sadly the logistics of getting them to Irkutsk or Almaty just would not work due to cost, time and therefore the risk was just too great. However I can now say that Eric is rightly call awesome because he runs Awesome tours. He is a real people person, a great guy to be around and thinks of everything, I genuinely cannot criticize a single thing he did and he made my tour to Myanmar one of, if not, the highlight of my trip. http://www.ride-lara.com/  http://www.myanmar-motorcycle-tours.com/

Maurice ‘Same Same but different’:  the words on Murices t-shirts, of which he had 3 or 4 the same words but different colours. One of the quietest Irishmen I have ever met. I like Maurice he is a nice guy with a good sence of humour. His nickname is butterfly became he falls in love with every pretty woman he sees and I could imagine him as a butterfly landing on a flower and in mid air spotting another one and flying after that one. The only thing that got to me about Maurice is the fact that kept on harassing (for want of a better word) every woman he met, hugging them or holding their hands uugghh drove me nuts he’s 74 and I can only image what these poor shy young Burmese ladies thought of this touchy feely foreigner.

David ‘chatterbox’ Gould: I have never met a man who can talk so much or in fact talk more than me, quite a verbal feat 😉 David and I hit it off like a house on fire and he quickly became a friend. I am a land person and have less than no interest in sailing, harbouring even a small fear of water. I am usually instantly bored to tears with anyone who tells me sailing stories, however David has a sailors way of spinning a yarn and kept me entertained for hours with all his tales of the high seas, as well as his many interesting tales of his many years as a rally driver.