I’m Robin. Hello.
I ride a Royal Enfield Himalayan 450 out of Pahi, on the Kaipara Harbour. I’m in the slow process of leaving — first New Zealand, then the world. This site is the long version of where I’m going and what I’m learning along the way.
I started this site because I wanted somewhere to think out loud about why I do this. Not the bike — the bike is, in the end, just a bike — but the slowness, the solitude, the long argument I’ve been having with myself about what counts as a life well used. The bike is called Hunter. He’s a 2025 Himalayan 450, dirt-shod, loaded heavier than he ought to be, and he listens better than most people I know.
I worked, for a long time, in a job that prized urgency. I was good at it. I am not, on balance, sorry I did it. But somewhere along the way I noticed that I had stopped having the kind of thoughts that take a long time to have, and I noticed it the way you notice a tooth — only because something started to hurt.
I had stopped having the kind of thoughts that take a long time to have.
The bike was an accident. The riding wasn’t. The writing about the riding was a third thing that happened on top, and is the part I’m least sure about and most committed to.
What’s on the site
Journeys are long-form trip reports — usually four to eight thousand words, with the bones of a route and the meat of what I learned. Field notes are shorter pieces, five to twelve minutes, written from the road or shortly after. Watch is the visual companion: a small YouTube channel of slow, mostly-quiet rides. The Bike is the long ledger of what I’m running, what I’ve changed, and what’s broken.
Things I am not
I’m not a professional traveller. I don’t sell a course. I don’t have a Patreon tier called Inner Circle. The bike, the trips, and the writing have been paid for by me to date — and the best way to follow along is to join the dispatch. It’s free. Brands whose products genuinely belong on the bike are welcome to get in touch via partnerships.
Where I am, right now
Late April 2026, I’m back in Pahi after a few weeks across the Tasman — Sydney to Geelong, ferry to Tasmania, the long loop around. The fast went the distance. Hunter went the distance. The next leg is local: a couple of NZ runs through winter, the South Island in spring, and after that the notebook says Indonesia, but the notebook has been wrong before.
What I’m trying to do here is write the slow, internal version of an adventure-bike blog. The kind of thinking that takes a long time to have: about why you ride alone, about what comfort costs you, about the small wins like a fire on the second strike of the ferro rod. Less performance, more notebook. Mostly happy when nobody’s watching.
Colophon
Fraunces for display, Source Serif 4 for body, JetBrains Mono for the small things. All open-source.
Next.js, hand-written CSS. No third-party trackers beyond a single privacy-respecting analytics ping (full disclosure on /privacy). No newsletter that needs an account.
Mostly Robin, on a Fujifilm X-T4 that lives in the tank bag. Sometimes a phone.