About

In 1999 I bought my first Honda Pan European, also known as the ST1100 with a view to spending lots of time touring Europe on two wheels.

With this in mind I started to research on the internet for information regarding motorcycle touring, also hiring and renting because it would, I thought be cheaper to rent a motorbike in the USA rather than shipping my own across the Pond!

Now I didn’t want to keep all this research to myself, I wanted to share it and find some way of letting fellow motorcycle travellers access it easily and without any charge. So after much thought I decided to build a web site for this purpose, ridetheworld.com was born!

In the beginning I found about 300 motorbike rental and hire companies of which many also offered organised motor tours. I e-mailed all of these to invite them to come on board and get their details listed on ridetheworld.com, the response was fantastic and I was kept extremely busy hand coding their individual pages and enquiry forms.

After a few years I felt doing this manually was becoming too time consuming and searched out a better way of maintaining the web site, this was around 2004/2005 and I settled on a script called HotLinks SQL which has served the site well ever since.

We now have 1000 plus motorbike tour and motorcycle rental and hire operators listed from all corners of the globe and more are joining as they discover the site. We don’t charge people to get listed on the site, although there are some advertising opportunities becoming available in the near future.

So how much touring did I end up doing, well not a lot really, personal and work circumstances and the fact that I had two teenage daughters who I was bringing up on my own effectively put paid to my aspirations of becoming a motorcycle nomad!

However, ridetheworld.com did bring me one nice surprise back in 2000, I met Shalini who at that time lived in Delhi, India. She was a partner in a touring company providing tours all over India. Shalini came over to Madrid for work for a few months in 2000 so I took the opportunity to fly over and meet her, we married within a month of that first meeting so we have a lot to thanks ridetheworld.com for.

Our honeymoon was on two wheels, from Delhi to Leh and back, right across the Himalayas on the trusty Enfield Bullet. If I describe it as an awesome three weeks then I think you will get an idea of what I mean. Thanks to Raaj and Kamal of Indian Shepherds, Camps and Adventures (now Shepherds Realms I believe) for this wonderful experience. We now have many operators servicing the needs of the motorcycle traveller in India, all of whom can be found on the India motorcycle hire, rental and tours pages of ridetheworld.com

But there you a go, a quick potted history of ridtheworld.com, possible one of the oldest motorcycle hire, rental and touring resources on the internet today.

Ride safe

Dave