Ed Bach had made a fine living in the real estate business.He was married and had a beautiful home in Orange Park Acres.

Then he was hit with a one-two punch.The real estate bubble burst and he got divorced.“I had no job and no wife,” said Bach, 51. “But, I got a lot of something in return. I got a lot of time, so I figured I might as well do something with my time.”

For Bach, doing something with his time equated to a 159,000-mile journey on a motorcycle through 104 countries over five years.

He put the dreamhouse on the market and on June 22, 2012, Bach handed off the keys to the new owners and hopped on his BMW R1200GS.

“I literally got on my bike and took off,” said Bach, who’s been riding motorcycles since age 14. “I went from living the fancy life to sleeping alongside the road or abandoned buildings for the next five years.”

He packed a one-man tent, laptop and a few changes of clothes in saddlebags on the BMX, and without any schedule or itinerary, or cell phone, pointed his bike north and rode … and rode … and rode until reaching the northern tip of Alaska.

He took a dip in the Arctic Ocean, turned the bike around and traveled south.

Bach trekked through Mexico, Central America and South America.

He ran out of land at Argentina, put the bike on a plane and jetted to Madrid, Spain.

From Spain, he rode through pretty much every country in Europe.

Then he went south to Africa, crossing the Sahara Desert, passing through Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Gambia and Ghana.

Bach turned around and headed back north, crossed the Sarah a second time, circled around the Black Sea and traveled through Russia.

Next came Southeast Asia and the Philippines before returning to the U.S. through Florida in October, zigzagging up and down the country until reaching Fullerton.

Along the way, Bach had a few girlfriends and was hospitalized three times with various ailments.

He slept on beaches, alongside rivers and on mountains.

“On my trip, people would ask me what I was going to do tomorrow,” Bach said. “I would say, I don’t know. I never really planned anything. I would just kind of figure it out as I went along, and I liked it that way.”

To say he had amazing experiences would be a colossal understatement.

Not all were positive.

There was the time in Ecuador sleeping in his tent when he was rudely woken up by three bandits armed with knives and a gun. They stole his cell phone and ran off. He said he chased after them in his underwear and got his phone back.

While traveling through India, a rebel leader from Kashmir had been killed and the Kashmiri people were revolting in the streets.

Bach came across 15 angry men blocking the road, waving sticks and throwing rocks. They tried to pull him off his bike.

He said he was able to break free and speed away.

“I really believe that if they would have gotten me off my bike, they weren’t going to have a talk with me or rob me,” he said. “They were going to kill me.”

Still, the overwhelming majority of people he met were kind hearted, he said.

“I feel that after traveling the world that the world is a safer place than the media portrays it to be.”

During a two-month period in India, Bach said he had no way to access money from his bank account and was penniless.

“I literally had to go to little villages … the bamboo hut kind of places and just go knocking on doors and saying I need food,” he said. “The people took care of me.”

Bach’s original plan was to spend about two years on his world tour, but he said he found that wasn’t nearly enough time.

At one point, he returned to the United States, he said, making money working on a fishing boat in Alaska for two months and then resumed the journey.

“The hardest thing I ever did,” he recalls.

Throughout the excursion, Bach maintained two blogs and picked up followers, who, in a sense, kept him company throughout the journey.

“The difference between my trip and most people’s trips, is my trip wasn’t a motorcycle trip per say,” Bach said. “My trip was about exploring the world and seeing the world from my perspective, and the motorcycle was the means of taking me to these places.”

Since returning home, Bach has been crashing at his dad’s house in Fullerton.

He said he plans is to earn some money before heading back out into the world.

There are sections of South America, Africa, Indonesia and Japan he said he wants to explore.

“It’s his nature,” Ed Bach, Sr., said of his son’s inherent drive to explore. “He is called the Energizer Bunny by all his friends. He is constantly on the move. He could never be settled. He maneuvers pretty well in the world. All he can think of is where he is going to go next.”

From his journey, Bach said he came to believe people are basically the same, regardless of their culture or living situations.

“People want the same things in life,” he said. “They want friends. They want family. They want food. They want to have some good times. They want to be happy.”

Credit:ocregister

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