Too Much Sand in My Data: How Inadequate Motorcycles and Complete Participation Reveal Authentic Adventure

In medias res
That is me, sat there on the sand on day two of a seven-day journey across Morocco, in the small settlement of Sidi Alli. Having just crossed the desert along the Algerian border from Ramlia, riding through sandstorms and overcoming breakdowns. Here we are discussing the plan for the following day; I am trying to resolve conflicts between my identities of researcher and adventure traveller, navigating between involvement and immersion, rapport and over-rapport, familiarity, and loss of self (Coffey, 1999). Both the physical and research journey had truly begun; the threshold to the unknown crossed (Campbell, 2012), and the journey of transformation was under way.

Central to this study is the concept of the ethnographic self; “in researching, constructing and writing the lives of others we are engaged in negotiating and writing ourselves” (Coffey, 1999, p. 47). This autoethnographic study is necessarily filtered through a particular embodied subjectivity: that of a white European male researcher in his forties, positioned within a cultural context of privilege that shapes both how adventure is culturally coded and how physical hardship is interpreted. My autobiographical history, including military training, engagement with adventure sports, and participation in expeditions, has provided a specific lens through which embodied difficulty, vulnerability, and authentic experience are understood. While Coffey notes that such “selves” and bodies can be theoretically bracketed or made distant in ethnographic work, this paper deliberately refuses that distance. Instead, it acknowledges that my interpretation of “authentic” adventure is inseparable from this masculine, European positioning. As Zweig (1974) argues in The Adventurer, physical achievements, and the confidence they generate shape our psychological and intellectual understanding of the world. Yet this principle itself carries gendered and class-specific assumptions rooted in particular cultural contexts. The findings presented here do not claim universality across all adventurers or cultures, but rather represent one embodied, socially positioned account of how vulnerability and physical friction produce meaningful experience. This positionality is not a weakness to be minimised but a constitutive feature of phenomenological autoethnography that demands visibility.

In February 2019, I had embarked on a seven-day motorcycle journey across Morocco, from Merzouga to Marrakech. This expedition was part of my research into the lived experience of adventure travel by motorcycle, yet it became something more complex than a straightforward data collection exercise. The motorcycles themselves challenged assumptions about adventure riding: we rode 50cc minibikes in the style of monkey bikes, machines that bore no resemblance to the gleaming, high-tech adventure motorcycles marketed in glossy magazines and manufacturer adverts. On day two, in the small settlement of Sidi Alli, surrounded by an unexpected sandstorm and mechanical failure, I found myself literally and metaphorically stuck, simultaneously researcher and participant, observer and observed, with sand infiltrating not only my underpowered motorcycles engine but also the neat boundaries I had drawn around my research.
The following short comic documents that moment and the tensions it revealed. My intention had been to observe others creating narratives of their motorcycle adventures, to uphold what Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) describe as an observer as participant position, maintaining appropriate scholarly distance whilst part of a group of riders across the Sahara.

Instead, I discovered that the motorcycle journey itself refused such easy categorisation, demanding reflection upon my identity in the field and a fundamental shift in my researcher position. The embodied, sensory, often uncomfortable reality of adventure travel demanded a different kind of attention, one that engaged not just the observing mind but the experiencing body.

This paper explores what the shift towards what Hammersley & Atkinson (2007) term as a complete participant offers for phenomenological research into embodied experience. Specifically, it examines how adopting a fully immersed autoethnographic position reveals dimensions of motorcycle travel that remain obscured through detached observation, challenging authenticity of motorcycle travel.

The Morocco journey marks a fundamental methodological shift in my research journey. What had begun as an attempt to maintain distance collapsed under the weight of lived experience. The sandstorm, the mechanical failures, my role within the group, all conspired to make the position of observer as participant untenable. This was not a failure of research design but rather an invitation to embrace what the journey itself was teaching me: that understanding the embodied experience of motorcycle travel requires full immersion in that experience. This realisation necessitated a methodological reorientation towards what I term the 3A approach: the integration of autoethnography, autobiography, and autophenomenography.

This triadic framework, whilst building upon Ellis and Bochner’s (2000) foundational work in autoethnography, extends their emphasis on the research process (graphy), culture (ethno), and self (auto) by explicitly foregrounding the phenomenological dimensions of lived experience. Autoethnography serves as the cultural framework, connecting personal experience to broader social contexts. As Ellis and Bochner (2000) argue, autoethnography bridges the gap between the personal and the cultural, situating the self within social narratives. In the context of motorcycle travel, this approach enabled me to examine how my experiences were shaped by, and contributed to, the culture of adventure motorcycling. The choice of 50cc monkey bikes, for instance, was not merely a logistical decision but a deliberate challenge to the cultural narrative perpetuated by motorcycle manufacturers: that adventure requires expensive, technologically sophisticated machinery. By riding machines utterly unsuited to desert crossings, we inadvertently interrogated the commercial mythology of adventure motorcycling, revealing how cultural assumptions about authenticity are constructed and maintained.

Autobiography turns the analytical gaze inward, exploring how personal narrative shapes, and is shaped by, experience. Following Bruner (1991), I understand personal narratives not simply as records of experience but as constitutive of identity itself. The autobiographical thread traces my evolving sense of self through the journey: from confident expedition leader to humbled participant, from researcher maintaining boundaries to complete participant embedded in the group’s experience. This component captures what Ricoeur (1992) describes as narrative identity, the ongoing process through which individuals construct and reconstruct their sense of self through storytelling. Autophenomenography, as defined by Allen-Collinson (2011), focuses explicitly on the lived, embodied experience of phenomena from the researcher’s perspective. The physical sensation of sand infiltrating clothing and machinery, the visceral experience of navigating blindly through a sandstorm, the exhaustion of wrestling an underpowered motorcycle across hostile terrain, these embodied realities constitute the essence of adventure travel, yet they often remain absent from academic accounts that privilege detached observation. Autophenomenography grounds abstract concepts in tangible, sensory experience, attending to what Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes as the body’s primal relationship with the world.

The integration of these three approaches attempts to address a limitation of traditional phenomenological research: the challenge of accessing lived experience without becoming part of that experience. Husserl (2012) argued that comprehending the lifeworld requires direct engagement with phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness. Yet how can a researcher access the lifeworld of motorcycle adventure travel whilst maintaining observational distance? The Morocco journey demonstrated that such distance may not only be unnecessary but can be counterproductive to phenomenological inquiry.

During the journey, data was collected through a range of modalities, field notes, photographs, video recordings, and more reflective journal entries composed in the evenings. These artefacts formed an archive of experience; the challenge was then how to analyse and present this material in a way that complemented both its embodied nature and its analytical potential. Traditional academic writing, with its emphasis on prose and linear argument, seemed inadequate to capture the simultaneity of sensation, emotion, and cognition that characterised the lived experience of motorcycle travel. It was here that the medium of comics emerged as both an analytical tool and a mode of presentation.

The turn to comics grew from a recognition that visual storytelling offers unique affordances for autoethnographic research. As McCloud (1993) demonstrates, comics possess a remarkable ability to convey complex ideas and experiences through the interplay of images and words, creating what he describes as the invisible art of meaning-making that occurs between panels. The sequential nature of comics allows for the representation of temporal aspects of experience crucial to autoethnographic research (Kuttner et al., 2017), whilst visual metaphors and symbolism can effectively convey emotional and sensory dimensions that might be lost in textual accounts (Weaver-Hightower, 2017).

The comic panels presented throughout this paper are not illustrative afterthoughts, but visual representations grounded in fieldwork data. Following Geertz’s (1973) concept of “thick description”, the comics function as a form of dense, layered interpretation of embodied experience during the journey. Each frame is constructed from field notes, photographs, video recordings, and phenomenological reflection, ensuring that the visual choices, including framing, composition, gesture, and expression, emerge from the data itself rather than from aesthetic invention. In this way, the comics operate as a data-led methodology, transforming raw fieldwork materials into a coherent visual narrative that captures both the sensory dimensions of adventure and the lived complexity of the research encounter. The apparent simplicity of the cartoon form belies the analytical rigor beneath: every panel is a deliberate act of interpretation, selection and emphasising those embodied details that illuminate the research questions.

When creating this comic, monkeying about, the process began with a period of reflexivity during which I returned to the field data, photographs, notes, voice recordings, and began to craft a narrative from these fragments. This initial narrative was then converted into a script, following guidance from Abel and Maddens (2008) Drawing Words and Writing Pictures, which provided a framework for translating experiential data into visual-verbal form. I worked in collaboration with an artist (Innovative Pixels Art), rather than attempting to create the comic independently, introducing an additional layer of analytical rigour to the process. The artist functioned as a critical friend, challenging my assumptions and forcing me to articulate experiences more precisely. When I attempted to describe the sensation of riding through the sandstorm, for instance, the artist pushed me to specify: What could I actually see? How did my body position change? This collaborative interrogation of experience constituted a form of analysis itself, requiring me to move beyond vague impressions to concrete, embodied details. The artist’s visual interpretations often revealed assumptions or biases I had not consciously recognised, prompting deeper engagement with the data and offering new perspectives on familiar experiences.

The creation of comics thus became an integral part of my research process, not merely as a final product but as a continuous method of reflection and analysis. Translating lived experiences into visual narratives required decisions about what to include, what to emphasise, and how to visually represent complex emotions and moments. Each stage: storyboarding, sketching and finalising demanded engagement with the material at various levels of abstraction, forcing reconsideration not just of what happened but how it felt, what it meant, and how it connected to broader cultural contexts. As Sousanis (2015) argues, this process of working spatially and visual-verbally facilitates creative discoveries otherwise obscured when limited to linear text.

The visual and narrative qualities of comics make complex academic ideas more accessible and engaging (Kuttner et al., 2018), potentially reaching readers who might be less inclined to engage with academic prose. The comics requirement for reader participation, what McCloud (1993) calls closure, the act of mentally connecting one panel to the next, creates an active engagement with the material rather than passive consumption. This participatory quality aligns with autoethnographic research, which seeks not merely to describe experiences but to evoke them in readers, fostering empathy and self-reflection (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). The comic form thus bridges the gap between researcher and audience, making research feel more personal and accessible whilst maintaining analytical depth.

I have long been enthralled by tales of great journeys: Shackleton, Scott, Mallory, those romantic-era quests that shaped how we understand adventure itself. This fascination evolved through my own work in adventure travel and expedition leadership. I have been fortunate to travel widely and to ride motorcycles since adolescence. When the opportunity arose to undertake doctoral research, the focus was immediately clear: I would explore the intersection of these two passions, adventure travel by motorcycle.

I began my doctoral research, by immersing myself in published accounts of motorcycle adventurers. Early pioneers like Carl Stearns Clancy’s, 1913 circumnavigation (Clancy in Frazier, 2010), C.K. Shepherd’s 1919 crossing of America (Shepherd, 1922), and Max Reisch’s 1933 Vienna to Mumbai overland journey (Reisch, 2010) had established the genre. Yet this genealogy has historically centred male narratives; Theresa Wallach’s 1934 trans-African journey (Wallach, 1935) and Peggy Iris Thomas’s 1951 North American expedition (Thomas, 1953) demonstrate that motorcycle adventure has always involved women’s embodied experiences and voices, even if persistently underrepresented in contemporary discourse. More contemporary voices like Sam Manicom (2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2010) continued the genre of motorcycle travel literature, but it was Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels (1979) that proved most influential. Simon’s four-year odyssey spanning 78,000 miles and forty-five countries offered a raw, unfiltered account that set a high standard for personal expression in adventure travel narratives. Yet more significantly the Long Way Round and Long Way Down television series featuring Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman (2004, 2008), had brought motorcycle adventure travel to a global audience, popularising not just the concept but also the machinery: the BMW GS.

This was how I found myself standing in a BMW showroom, surrounded by gleaming adventure motorcycles. The salesman’s enthusiasm was palpable as he guided me around the latest GS model, explaining its technological sophistication, its reliability, it is almost mythical ability to manage any terrain without failure. “It never breaks down”, he assured me, his hand resting proudly on the motorcycles fuel tank. The bike stood before me as a monument to engineering excellence, its presence reinforced by years of marketing. Here was the machine that had carried many across continents, the bike that appeared repeatedly in Manicom’s accounts. This was not merely a motorcycle; it was the materialisation of adventure itself, or so the cultural narrative suggested.

Yet as I stood there, surrounded by technological perfection, a profound unease settled over me. The salesmen’s words echoed Ted Simon’s observation from Jupiter’s Travels: that the breakdowns, the wrong turns, the moments when everything goes awry, these are not obstacles to adventure but constitute its very essence. Simon had recognised that adventure emerges not from seamless progress but from friction, from the unexpected encounters and forced dependencies that arise when machines fail, and plans unravel. If the BMW truly never broke down, if it smoothed every challenge into manageable comfort, what remained of the adventure? Ingold’s (2000) distinction between, wayfaring, and transport, suddenly felt relevant. Wayfaring, he argues, involves embodied, improvisational movement through landscapes, a mode of travel characterised by attentiveness, vulnerability, and ongoing negotiation with the environment. Transport, by contrast, structures mobility around efficiency and insulation, separating the traveller from the world through which they move. Did the BMW GS, for all its adventure marketing, facilitate transport rather than wayfaring?

The question of authenticity loomed. The glossy magazines and manufacturer advertisements depicted riders on BMWs conquering dramatic landscapes, images that promised adventure but perhaps delivered something closer to tourism, that commodified and pre-packaged experience critiqued by Coles, Hall, and Duval (2005). True travel, as Franklin and Crang (2001) suggest, manifests as a more intimate and transformative venture, distinguished by spontaneity and individual agency rather than predetermined itineraries and technological mediation.

MacCannell’s (1976) concept of staged authenticity is particularly relevant here. MacCannell argues that tourists seek authentic experiences but often encounter carefully curated environments designed to meet those expectations, a performance of authenticity rather than authenticity itself. The BMW showroom, with its pristine machines and salesman’s assurances, represented precisely this kind of staging: an immaculate presentation of adventure that erased the very elements, breakdown, vulnerability, uncertainty, that constitute authentic adventurous experience. Wang’s (1999) tripartite typology of authenticity offers a useful framework for understanding this tension. He distinguishes between objective authenticity (verifiable, authentic objects or settings), constructive authenticity (experiences symbolically authentic within their cultural context), and existential authenticity (personal, transformative experiences of self-fulfilment). The BMW GS, whilst possessing objective authenticity as a genuine adventure motorcycle with verifiable capabilities, offered questionable existential authenticity. If the machine truly never broke down, if it smoothed every challenge into manageable comfort, could it facilitate the kind of transformative, self-defining experience that Wang identifies as existentially authentic?

This tension between commercial adventure and authentic experience extends beyond philosophical musing. Mortlock (2000) argues that true authenticity emerges from immersion in experience, where risks and challenges catalyse personal growth. Similarly, Zweig (1974) contends that genuine adventure surpasses physical exploration to encompass an internal journey, challenging individuals both physically and psychologically through confrontation with uncertainty and risk. The BMW GS, designed to eliminate risk and uncertainty through technological sophistication, appeared to work against these very principles. Nietzsche’s (2003) concept of authenticity, achieved through honest acknowledgement of one’s desires and courageous embrace of life’s challenges, suggests that adventure becomes not simply an external pursuit but a deeply personal endeavour requiring confrontation and overcoming of obstacles. Yet here stood a machine explicitly marketed to remove obstacles, to ensure that adventure proceeded smoothly according to plan.

The broader cultural context compounds this paradox. McGregor and Boorman’s televised journeys, also contributed to what Urry and Larsen (2011) term the tourist gaze, a socially constructed way of seeing influenced by media representations that create preconceived notions of destinations and experiences. The BMW GS had become emblematic of a particular vision of adventure motorcycling, one that emphasised technological capability over vulnerability, comfort over discomfort, and controlled experiences over genuine uncertainty. Standing in that showroom, I recognised that pursuing this cultural ideal might paradoxically prevent access to the very experiences I sought to research.

After some further research into motorcycle adventure travel, I was troubled to find that the modern vocabulary of adventure had been hijacked by commercial entities and reduced to a mere commodity, a product to be packaged and sold. Loynes (1998) warns that outdoor adventure is evolving into recreational capitalism, risking the abandonment of values that originally defined the field. The marketplace, he argues, threatens to dissociate people from their experiences of community and place.

These concerns were not just theoretical. Buckley (2006, 2010) emphasises the need for sustainability and environmental responsibility in adventure tourism, contending that true adventure experiences should promote environmental stewardship and cultural respect. Swarbrooke et al. (2003) explore the tension between commercial imperatives and philosophical ideals, noting that packaging adventure experiences for mass consumption can dilute their authenticity. Hudson (2003) points out that commercialisation often prioritises profitability over genuine engagement with nature and culture.

My research had led me to The Adventurists, an organisation promoting what they termed “real adventures.” Their website proclaimed a philosophy that resonated with my emerging questions: if the BMW GS represented the best motorcycle for adventure travel, then surely the worst would reveal something essential about authenticity. Quick searching brought me to the Monkey Run, what they described as a farcical battle between humankind, cheap engineering, and humour. A seven-day journey across Morocco on cheap Chinese 50cc motorcycles fit for clowns, quite possibly the worst bike for rugged adventure travel through some of the most unsuitable terrain. The cultural contrast could not have been starker: where McGregor and Boorman had ridden gleaming BMWs with support crews and camera teams, The Adventurists offered undersized, underpowered machines with minimal support and maximum absurdity.

Yet my reservations persisted. This was still an organised event, still a commercial product, still a form of package holiday despite its anti-establishment branding. Was The Adventurists simply marketing a different flavour of the same commodified adventure, substituting absurdist humour for technological sophistication but ultimately offering the same structured, pre-packaged experience? I had rejected the technological perfection of the GS precisely because it eliminated the friction that generates authentic adventure. Yet here I was, considering joining an organised event, a structured, commercialised experience with predetermined routes, set dates, and paying participants. Was this not simply another form of staged authenticity?

Then the waiver arrived. Page after page of risks; mechanical failure in remote locations, extreme heat, sandstorms, lack of medical facilities, potential for severe injury, acknowledgement that participants would be entirely responsible for their own navigation, repairs, and safety. The legal document’s unflinching catalogue of dangers shifted my perspective. This was not risk manufactured for tourist consumption, not the carefully controlled adventure of Disneyland (Coupland, in Holyfield et al., 2005). The waiver’s blunt honesty suggested genuine uncertainty, real vulnerability, authentic risk. The Monkey Run, I realised, precisely offered this opportunity: a chance to practice ethnographic fieldwork in the field, to develop my research methodology whilst simultaneously participating in an event that, despite its commercial structure, promised genuine adventure through its embrace of inadequate equipment and hostile terrain.

I approached the organisation cautiously, explaining my doctoral research into adventure motorcycle travel. They graciously offered me a place, running from Merzouga to Marrakech. My plan was methodologically clear, informed by Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007) framework of ethnographic positions. I would enter the field as an “observer as participant”, present within the group, riding alongside others, but maintaining appropriate scholarly distance to observe how participants created narratives of their motorcycle adventures. This position, I believed, would allow me to gather rich data whilst preserving the analytical perspective necessary for rigorous research. I would observe, document, and analyse without becoming so embedded that I lost critical distance.

Arrival in Merzouga confronted me immediately with the material reality of my research decision. The motorcycle assigned to me stood in stark contrast to every adventure bike I had ever encountered. It was so small it could be lifted and carried in a backpack, with tiny wheels, minimal suspension, and an engine designed for urban commuting rather than desert crossings. Its diminutive stature was almost comical. This machine radiated absurdity and vulnerability. Its very presence challenged every assumption about adventure motorcycling perpetuated by manufacturers, travel writers, and television programmes.

The cultural weight of this machine, or rather, its complete absence of cultural prestige, proved immediately significant. The motorcycle became a physical manifestation of the authenticity question I had been wrestling with conceptually. Wang’s (1999) tripartite typology offers a useful lens here: the monkey bike possessed no objective authenticity (it was not a “real” adventure motorcycle by any established criteria), questionable constructive authenticity (it existed outside recognised adventure motorcycling culture), but potentially rich existential authenticity through the vulnerability and uncertainty it demanded. Standing in the desert heat, surrounded by approximately forty other participants, all equally incredulous at these ridiculous machines, I gained an even deeper appreciation of how the deliberate inadequacy of the equipment might generate precisely the kind of authentic adventure experience that technological perfection prevented.

The buzz of anticipation was unmistakable. Participants had travelled from afar, including from Australia, USA, Switzerland, and beyond, to gather in Merzouga’s vast, undulating sands, bonded by the shared madness of attempting to cross Morocco on underpowered, comically small motorcycles. I found myself joining a group of six other riders formed of three pairs, each with varying levels of biking experience. Some were adept at road biking, others had backgrounds in off-road riding, and one individual had never ridden a motorcycle until that day. This diversity had the potential to be strategically valuable for ethnographic observation, I could observe how distinct levels of experience shaped narrative construction and meaning making around adventure. My own decades of riding experience, combined with military training in remote environments and expedition leadership, positioned me as the most relevantly experienced member of our group. This expertise, I believed, would allow me to maintain observational distance even whilst participating, to lead without becoming lost in the experience, to observe even whilst acting.

I could not have been more wrong. The methodological assumptions underlying my planned “observer as participant” position would collapse within hours, undone not by a lack of theoretical rigor, but by sand, wind, and the relentless material demands of keeping an inadequate machine moving through difficult terrain.

As the flag dropped and approximately forty riders kicked up clouds of sand charging across the expansive open desert towards the road a few kilometres away, I experienced something unfamiliar: I was riding as part of a group. Throughout my decades of motorcycle travel, I had overwhelmingly ridden solo. Solo travel had shaped my identity as a rider, the freedom to make spontaneous decisions, to alter routes on whim, to move at my own pace without negotiation or compromise. Franklin and Crang (2001) characterise travel as distinguished by spontaneity and individual agency, qualities I had always prized. Yet here I found myself embedded within a collective, my movements coordinated with others, decisions no longer entirely my own. This shift from solitary wayfaring to group dynamics represented not merely a logistical change but a fundamental alteration in how I would experience and understand the journey.

Once we reached the road, this collective identity immediately manifested in a crucial decision. The other forty or so participants turned north, following the well-constructed tarmac road that countless Monkey Run riders had taken before them. Our group, however, made a different choice. In conversations leading up to the start, we had agreed upon a pact: to seek paths that would set us apart from others, to embrace the thrill of discovery rather than following established routes. When we reached that junction, we turned south, steering our diminutive motorcycles directly into the heart of the Sahara, along the Moroccan Algerian border. This was uncharted territory for the Monkey Run; no previous group had ventured this direction. The decision had emerged from collective desire rather than individual impulse, a manifestation of what Turner (1969) terms communitas, that spontaneous sense of egalitarian community that arises amongst individuals sharing liminal experiences.

The landscape we entered bore the weight of cultural mythology. This was the Sahara, not the sanitised, tourist-friendly edges but the vast, unforgiving interior that had featured in countless adventure narratives. Notably, the Paris-Dakar Rally, particularly during its African years from 1979 to 2007, had established the Sahara as the ultimate proving ground for adventure motorcycling and for me personally, this terrain resonated with childhood dreams. At thirteen, racing down a dirt road on my Mountain bike, I had imagined myself as Edi Orioli racing through African deserts on his iconic Lucky Strike Cagiva Elefant in the Dakar Rally’s prime. Orioli’s victories in 1994 and 1996 had represented the pinnacle of desert racing, a fusion of technological capability, physical endurance, and intimate knowledge of hostile terrain. Yet here we were, decades later, riding through that same landscape on machines that represented the antithesis of Dakar engineering.

This juxtaposition proved analytically valuable. Where Orioli’s Cagiva boasted sophisticated suspension, powerful engines, and innovative desert racing technology, our 50cc monkey bikes offered minimal ground clearance, undersized wheels, and engines designed for urban commuting. Where modern adventure bikes might diminish the desert through technological mediation, its long-travel suspension smoothing terrain, its powerful engine reducing distances, its advanced electronics providing reassuring control, the monkey bikes amplified everything. Every undulation became a challenge, every stretch of soft sand a potential trap, every kilometre a hard-won achievement. Paradoxically, the bikes made us feel bigger, more capable, more adventurous, more alive to the experience, whilst simultaneously making the landscape feel more immense, more hostile, more utterly indifferent to our presence. We became more present, more engaged, more embodied in our relationship with the environment precisely because our machines offered so little protection or assistance.

The sand itself emerged as the primary antagonist. Fesh-fesh, that fine, powdery sand that characterises much of the Sahara, proved treacherous for our undersized wheels and minimal weight. Where more capable machines might plough through or float across the surface, our monkey bikes small front tyres constantly sought to dig in, to find purchase in sand that offered none. The physical demands were relentless: constant micro-adjustments to body position, delicate modulation of the throttle to maintain momentum without overwhelming traction, continuous attention to balance as the sand shifted beneath us. This was embodied phenomenology in its most visceral form, Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) “body-subject” fully engaged with a world that demanded total attention. Riding in formation added another dimension to this embodied experience. I positioned myself at the rear, my experience in desert environments making this the natural choice as from this vantage point I could observe the group’s collective progress, offer assistance if needed, and maintain situational awareness of our overall situation, fulfilling my intended role as observer-participant.

Figure 4  I could barely see in front of me. All I could think was: how am I supposed to observe others when I’m focused on trying to ride?

Then the sandstorm descended with little warning, and everything changed. One moment we rode through clear desert air, the next we were engulfed and visibility collapsed to mere metres. Sand, stirred into a frenetic dance by invisible forces, infiltrated every gap in my riding gear, through the cracks and crevices of my helmet, into my mouth and nose with gritty persistence. The group ahead vanished from sight, swallowed by the vast churning darkness. I strained to hear the faint hum of my engine amidst the cacophony of wind, struggling to keep the wheels true in the treacherous fesh-fesh, every instant bringing forth challenges that demanded unwavering attention as the sand continually reshaped the landscape beneath me.

In that moment, the methodological foundations of my planned research position collapsed as completely as my visibility. I could no longer see the group I had come to observe, they had vanished into the maelstrom. As someone who had positioned himself to observe the group’s experience, to maintain scholarly distance whilst documenting their narrative construction, I found observation had become impossible. There was no opportunity for detached notetaking, no space for analytical reflection, no possibility of maintaining the researcher-participant boundary I had so carefully constructed. The sandstorm cared nothing for research methodologies. It demanded instead total, visceral engagement with the immediate material reality of keeping an inadequate motorcycle moving through hostile conditions.

The physical demands were absolute. Beneath me, the motorcycle’ s tyres grappled desperately for traction, battling to secure purchase on an ever-shifting foundation. My grasp on the throttle sought constancy, a delicate modulation that translated power into progress, yet the modest engine strained against the oppressive sand, a resilient heart beating within a constricting grip. Body weight shifted constantly to maintain balance, arms absorbed the jarring impacts as the small front wheel bucked and wandered, legs gripped the tank to maintain connection with a machine that threatened at every moment to slip from beneath me. This was Merleau-Ponty’ s (2012) body-subject in extremis, no separation between consciousness and embodied action, no space for reflection, only the immediate, pre-reflective engagement of a body moving through a world that demanded everything.

Gradually, shapes emerged from the abyss, their semblances teasing my vision until the haze dissipated enough to reveal my compatriots, silhouetted against the dramatic backdrop of the tempest. Our mutual thumbs-up exchanged, a silent testament to survival, to camaraderie, to shared experience, we surged ahead together. Yet something had shifted irrevocably. I was no longer observing their adventure; I was utterly embedded within it, my identity as researcher subsumed by the immediate demands of participation. Sand had infiltrated not only my motorcycle’s engine but also the neat methodological boundaries I had drawn around my research.

Figure 5  Completely lost myself. Is research supposed to be this much fun?

Later that same day, after the sandstorm had finally abated and we had navigated through to clearer terrain, we found ourselves riding along a section of the old Paris-Dakar route. The tyre tracks from previous rallies were still visible in places, deep ruts carved by proper rally machines, the ghosts of those legendary races still inscribed in the landscape. The physical exhaustion from battling the sandstorm remained, but something else emerged as I followed those wheel tracks on my absurd 50cc monkey bike: I was riding in the literal traces of my childhood heroes, Orioli, Rahier, Auriol, all those who had raced through this terrain on machines representing the pinnacle of desert racing technology.

What happened next defied my careful research planning entirely. The experience triggered what Csikszentmihalyi (2008) describes as “flow”, that state of complete absorption where self-consciousness dissolves and action become effortless. Time seemed to collapse; the analytical mind quieted; awareness narrowed to the immediate experience of movement through landscape. I was no longer a researcher documenting others’ experiences, no longer an observer maintaining scholarly distance, no longer even fully conscious of performing the act of riding. Instead, I simply became the act itself, the flow of motion, the rhythm of gear changes, the dance of balance and throttle control. The inadequacy of the motorcycle somehow amplified rather than diminished this experience. Where a powerful adventure bike might have made the terrain feel conquerable, manageable, the monkey bike demanded such total attention that there was no space left for self-reflection or analysis.

This was my thirteen-year-old self, no longer on his mountain bike imagining being Orioli but actually undertaking the act of desert riding, wholly present in the moment. The challenge perfectly matched my skills: difficult enough to demand total engagement, possible enough to avoid overwhelming anxiety. Goals were immediate and clear, maintain momentum, choose the best line, keep the bike upright. Feedback was instantaneous and unambiguous: the bike either moved forward or bogged down, balance held or collapsed.

Even as I lost myself in this flow state, a deeper realisation was forming beneath conscious thought. The distinction that once stood between observation and involvement had grown not just tenuous but meaningless. The sand in my helmet, the exhaustion in my muscles, the tracks of Dakar legends beneath my wheels, the flow of riding, all of it had conspired to teach me something my research design had failed to anticipate: perhaps understanding embodied adventure experience requires this kind of total immersion, this surrender of detached observation in favour of lived participation.

By the time we reached the small settlement of Sidi Alli on day two, the accumulated effects of the sandstorm, the mechanical failures, and the relentless physical demands of desert riding had fundamentally altered the group’s dynamics, and my position within them. The conversation that unfolded in this moment, captured in the comic panel, reveals the extent of that transformation. “Are we going to stay in the desert or head up to the mountains?” someone asked. “Depends on how much more they get dropped,” another replied, referencing the frequent spills and mechanical issues. A third voice interjected: “How much more sand can the bike handle?” These were not abstract questions about adventure narratives or theoretical discussions about motorcycle culture. These were immediate, practical concerns about survival, capability, and collective decision-making, and the group was looking to me for answers. I had crossed Hammersley and Atkinson’s (2007) continuum entirely, becoming what they term a “complete participant,” someone whose presence fundamentally shapes the experience being studied.

Coffey (1999) warns of the dangers inherent in this crossing: the challenges of navigating between involvement and immersion, the risks of developing such strong rapport that critical distance evaporates, the possibility of becoming so familiar with the field that one loses the capacity for analytical insight, the very real danger of “going native” and losing oneself entirely in the researched community. These concerns proved well-founded. Sitting there on the sand in Sidi Alli, I grappled with competing identities, researcher and adventurer, observer and leader, analyst, and participant. The internal conflict spurred profound reflection on my own identity and positionality, unearthing questions about the delicate interplay between familiarity and loss of self in ethnographic fieldwork.

Yet it was precisely in this moment of methodological crisis that the deeper insight emerged. The question of what the shift towards “complete participant” could offer for phenomenological research into embodied experience could now be answered not theoretically but experientially, not abstractly but through lived understanding. Husserl (2012) argued that comprehending the lifeworld requires direct engagement with phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness. How, I had wondered standing in that BMW showroom months earlier, can a researcher access the lifeworld of motorcycle adventure travel whilst maintaining observational distance? The Morocco journey demonstrated conclusively that such distance is not merely unnecessary but actively counterproductive to phenomenological inquiry into embodied experience.

The shift to complete participant offered something that detached observation never could: access to what Merleau-Ponty (2012) describes as pre-reflective bodily knowledge. The sensation of sand infiltrating my helmet during the storm, the exhaustion of wrestling an inadequate machine through hostile terrain, the flow state triggered by riding Dakar routes, these experiences existed at a level beneath conscious articulation, accessible only through total immersion. When I attempted to maintain analytical distance during the sandstorm, observation simply failed, I could see nothing, document nothing, analyse nothing. But when I surrendered to complete participation, when I stopped trying to observe and simply rode, the embodied knowledge that emerged proved far richer than any detached observation could have captured. This was not knowledge about adventure travel but knowledge of it, phenomenological understanding arising from the lived body’s engagement with the world.

The inadequacy of the monkey bikes proved crucial to this insight. The BMW GS, with its technological sophistication and carefully engineered capabilities, would have mediated the experience, smoothing the rough edges that generated authentic phenomenological data. The monkey bikes, by offering no such mediation, forced total embodied engagement. Every challenge became amplified, every sensation heightened, every moment demanding complete presence. Wang’s (1999) concept of existential authenticity, personal, transformative experiences of self-fulfilment, manifested not through technological capability but through technological inadequacy. The worse the bike, paradoxically, the more authentic the adventure, precisely because inadequacy demands embodied engagement in ways that competence does not.

This realisation carries implications beyond motorcycle travel specifically to adventure tourism research more broadly. The commercialisation critiqued by Loynes (1998) and Buckley (2006), the packaging of adventure into consumable products that prioritise comfort and eliminate risk, may inadvertently prevent access to the very experiences such adventures purport to offer. MacCannell’s (1976) staged authenticity becomes not merely a cynical marketing strategy but an epistemological barrier. If authentic adventure emerges through friction, vulnerability, and uncertainty, as Ted Simon insisted, then research methodologies that maintain detached observation may miss precisely what makes adventure experientially meaningful. The researcher who remains safely positioned as observer-participant may document about adventure without ever understanding adventure itself.

The 3A approach, Autoethnography, Autobiography, and Autophenomenography, proved essential to capturing these layered dimensions of experience. Autoethnography situated the journey within broader cultural contexts, revealing how the BMW mythology and Dakar narratives shaped both my expectations and the group’s choices. Autobiography traced how personal history, from childhood dreams of desert racing to military training to expedition leadership, influenced not just how I understood the experience but how I performed within it, how my identity shaped and was shaped by the journey. Autophenomenography addressed the immediate, lived, embodied moments that constitute the phenomenological heart of adventure: sand in the helmet, flow on the Dakar route, exhaustion at Sidi Alli. These three lenses worked together to create what Ellis (2004) describes as a “showcase” of concrete action, dialogue, emotion, and embodiment, not despite the methodological shift to complete participant but because of it.

The comics proved invaluable for representing this embodied knowledge. Traditional academic prose promotes abstract analysis over concrete sensation, cognitive understanding over pre-reflective bodily knowledge. The visual-verbal form of comics, as McCloud (1993) demonstrates, can convey simultaneity, such as the sandstorm’s visual chaos alongside the physical struggle, the group’s collective exhaustion visible in body postures and facial expressions, the absurdity of tiny bikes against vast desert landscapes. The comics captured what written description struggles to express: the embodied, sensory, often contradictory nature of lived experience. Collaborating with the artist functioned as an additional layer of analysis, forcing articulation of tacit bodily knowledge through visual representation, demanding clarity about what could be seen, felt, experienced rather than merely conceptualised.

What, then, does the shift to complete participant offer phenomenological research? It offers access to the lifeworld as it is lived rather than as it is observed. It provides entry to pre-reflective bodily knowledge that exists beneath conscious articulation. It reveals how authenticity emerges not from technological capability or careful staging but from vulnerability, inadequacy, and total embodied engagement with hostile environments. It demonstrates that understanding embodied adventure experience requires becoming vulnerable to that experience, surrendering analytical distance in favour of lived participation. This is not a compromise of research rigour but a necessary epistemological stance for certain kinds of phenomenological inquiry.

The sand that infiltrated my motorcycle’s engine also infiltrated the neat boundaries I had drawn around my research, and in doing so, revealed something essential: that the embodied experience of adventure travel cannot be fully understood from outside, cannot be adequately captured through detached observation, and demands instead the researcher’s total participation in the very vulnerability, uncertainty, and physical challenge that constitute adventure itself. Standing in that BMW showroom, I had asked what would constitute the worst motorcycle for adventure travel. Sitting on the sand at Sidi Alli, exhausted and transformed, I understood that the worst bike had paradoxically enabled the most authentic adventure, and the most authentic research.

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Biography

Jason Wragg, PhD (FRGS, FHEA) is the Programme Lead for the BA (Hons) Leadership through Outdoor Adventure degree at the University of Central Lancashire. He holds a PhD that explores solo motorcycle travel through an autoethnographic methodology, incorporating comic book creation as a mode of data analysis and representation. With extensive experience in leading and participating in expeditions, Jason’s research foregrounds fieldwork and narrative techniques to examine the lived experience of journeying. His academic interests centre on adventure and solo travel, and the ways in which meaning is made through stories of movement and place.