Vita & Portrait

Doris Wiedemann has been exploring the world as a solo motorcycle traveler for over 30 years. It all started very small: she spent a week exploring her Bavarian homeland on a Kawasaki Z 650 B. At the age of 23, she then spent five months on the road in the United States of America on a Honda Shadow 700. It was there that her curiosity about the people of our planet finally got the better of her.

In Germany, she bought a BMW R 100 GS/PD. The first test ride took her north, six weeks in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. A subsequent enduro training session convinced her: “We’re staying together.”

In 1996, Wiedemann equipped the BMW with a 42-liter Acerbis tank, self-built aluminium boxes and an Öhlins shock absorber for six months together around Australia. There, the speedometer was damaged in an accident. So an IMO from TOURATECH accompanied them on their next trip, seven months across Africa in the winter of 1997/98.

The next trips took her east: Doris Wiedemann traveled to Vladivostok, visited North and South Korea and Japan, and drove back home across Russia.
“I’ll take your motorcycle into China, but I won’t take it out again.” This sentence prompted the adventurer to set off on a trip through Poland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia in spring 2005. As she did not want to leave her trusty R100 GS in China, she bought a used TT 39, the Touratech conversion of the BMW F650 GS Dakar, for this trip. Together they spent a total of six months in China – without the guide prescribed by the Chinese government. And because adventures cannot be planned, everything turned out quite differently at the border, and Rotbäckchen, the BMW F650 GS/PD, also returned to Germany.

In 2009, the solo traveler added another experience to her résumé: For the first time, she traveled with a travel partner. At +25°C, they rode from the southernmost point of the continental USA, Key West Florida, to the Arctic Ocean in Alaska in the middle of winter – through ice and snow, at -52°C. Since then, Doris Wiedemann has been the first woman to ride the Dalton Highway by motorcycle in winter.To warm up, she shipped her little robin, the F650GS Dakar, to the west of Africa and spent several “warm” winters with it there. And because adventure can also be found on your doorstep, she rode Pitt’s wall of death at the Oktoberfest in Munich.

“Interpersonal relationships are humanity’s greatest adventures.” In this sense, Doris Wiedemann sees herself as an adventurer. Her curiosity about people in different cultures around the world keeps drawing her out from behind her desk.

Traveling alone has some disadvantages: There is no one to talk to and no one to share the luggage and organization, the joys and sorrows of a trip with. For Doris Wiedemann, however, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages: she immerses herself in foreign cultures and finds ways to communicate with people whose language she doesn’t know. Many hosts find it easier to invite a single person – for both social and financial reasons. As a single person, the traveler is integrated into her hosts’ household without much fuss and fits in with family life. In this way, she experiences life in other countries – completely subjectively and without conforming to statistical rules.