I am prone to calling myself a lemon or a plank and I am no always very posh and I get lost sometimes. Also clumsy and can say stupid things completely innocently. 🤡🌚🤔

If you’ve watched any of my videos, you’ve probably already worked out that I’m John. I’m the bloke usually sitting on a motorcycle, riding a mountain bike, wandering up a hill, looking at a map wondering where the hell I am, or standing somewhere in the middle of nowhere talking to a camera.

I’m also the person behind XploraLora, although there’s quite a bit more to me than motorcycles, mountain bikes and an apparently endless ability to find bogs in Scotland.

I’m Scottish and that’s a very important part of who I am, although I’m also a slightly unusual mixture. Half of my family background is Celtic and the other half comes from Southeast Asia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia. Perhaps that’s partly why I’ve always been fascinated by other countries, cultures, people and geography. I consider myself Scottish first, but also very much a global citizen.

I’ve never understood the idea that you have to be suspicious of somebody because they were born somewhere else, look different or live their life differently from you. The world is far too interesting for that. There are billions of people out there with different languages, landscapes, food, music, histories and ways of looking at life, and I’d rather learn about them than spend my time deciding which ones I’m supposed to dislike.

I’m naturally curious about things. I want to know how something works, why it’s there, what happened there and, perhaps most importantly for XploraLora, what’s on the other side of that hill.

A Curious and Slightly Shy Human

I’m also something of a knowledge sponge. If something catches my interest, I want to know more about it. I can start by wondering what a mountain is called and twenty minutes later find myself reading about its geology, the history of the people who lived around it, where its name came from and why there’s a strange pile of rocks halfway up it. The same thing happens with countries, cultures, technology, engineering, science, history and pretty much anything else that manages to get my attention.

I don’t think I’ll ever get bored of learning things. The more you learn about the world, the more you realise how ridiculously much there still is that you don’t know, and I rather like that. I suppose XploraLora is partly a physical version of the same thing. Instead of merely reading about somewhere or staring at it on a map, eventually I want to go and have a look for myself.

Despite putting myself on YouTube, I’m actually quite shy and can be fairly timid. I’m certainly not the naturally outgoing person you might expect to find wandering around talking to a camera. I’m much happier with a few people I know than being the centre of attention in a room full of strangers, and I’m probably more comfortable sitting quietly on the side of a mountain than I am walking into a crowded social event.

I’m also quite an emotional person and tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m not embarrassed by that and I’m certainly not going to pretend otherwise for a camera. Sometimes a place, a piece of music, a memory or simply one of those moments when you stop and realise where you are gets to me. I’ve shed a tear or two in my life and undoubtedly will again.

I don’t see anything particularly wrong with that. If you’ve climbed or ridden for hours to reach somewhere extraordinary and it makes you feel something, that’s surely part of the reason for being there in the first place.

A Slightly Nerdy Background

I’ve spent much of my working life around engineering, computers and technology. I’m well educated, technically minded and have worked in engineering as well as software, web development and design. These days much of my working life involves sitting behind a computer building websites, writing code, designing things and trying to persuade computers to do what they’re bloody well supposed to do.

I enjoy the technical stuff, but spending your working life looking at screens also gives you a fairly strong incentive to switch everything off occasionally and disappear into the real world.

I’ve always liked understanding and making things too. If something mechanical breaks, my first instinct is usually to find out why and see if I can repair it myself. That’s how the garage videos happen and also how Liza, my perfectly innocent Carrera Fury mountain bike, eventually found herself being dismantled and converted into an eMTB.

Not everything I attempt works first time. I’ve fitted things, removed them again, stared at them for a while, made tea, sworn at them and eventually worked out what I’d done wrong. I’m quite happy showing that because that’s what actually happens.

Tea, incidentally, is extremely important in this process.

Motorcycles Have Always Been Part of My Life

I love motorcycles. Not simply sports bikes or Kawasaki or going quickly, but motorcycles in general. There’s something about being on two wheels that I’ve loved for a very long time, whether I’m working on one in the garage, riding through the countryside or simply stopping somewhere and looking back at the machine that brought me there.

The bike you’ll see most often here is Lora, my 1998 Kawasaki ZX-9R C1. She’s an old-school superbike from an era when 900cc sports bikes were big, fast and rather less interested in protecting you from your own stupidity. Aye, she is a Diva sometimes.

There was a period of about four years when I didn’t ride her at all. She sat in the garage while life carried on around her, and when I finally got her back on the road I genuinely wasn’t sure how I’d feel. Our first ride was all of two miles, on brand-new slippery tyres, with me apparently having forgotten that motorcycles are capable of leaning around corners.

But it came back.

That little ride became longer rides, then journeys across Galloway, then adventures where Lora became the transport that got me somewhere before I carried on into the mountains on foot. That’s where a lot of what XploraLora is today really started to take shape.

Before XploraLora There Was Ayrshire Outdoors

XploraLora isn’t actually my first attempt at filming my adventures. Before it came Ayrshire Outdoors, where I made videos of my solo walks, hikes, hill climbs, wild camping and backpacking around southern Scotland.

The channel came from two things I’ve always enjoyed: being outdoors and making films. I’ve loved photography and video for years, and there’s something satisfying about coming home with several hours of footage and eventually turning it into something that lets somebody else experience a little of what I saw.

I never really wanted to make films that simply showed the summit and the spectacular bits. I like the journey. The walk in, the weather, getting something wrong, stopping for something to eat, finding something unexpected and sometimes discovering that the thing which looked perfectly sensible on a map is anything but sensible when you’re standing in front of it.

Ayrshire Outdoors was predominantly about exploring on foot. XploraLora has taken the same basic idea and expanded it.

Now I’ve got more ways of getting lost.

Music, Games and Other Nerdy Things

When I’m not outside, fixing something or sitting behind a computer, music is a big part of my life. I particularly love indie music and I play electric guitar, although whether anybody else should be subjected to me playing it is another matter entirely.

I’m also a gamer and spent a lot of time hardcore sim racing in things like rFactor 2 and iRacing. I enjoy RTS games too, which probably fits the same part of my brain that likes maps, planning routes and staring at landscapes wondering how I’m going to get from one side to the other.

Then there’s science fiction. I’m a complete nerd for it. I love everything from wonderfully imaginative and occasionally wonderfully terrible 1950s science fiction through to modern films and series. Give me spaceships, strange planets, aliens, robots and some questionable pseudo-science and I’m generally quite happy.

Perhaps there’s a common thread running through all of it. Science fiction explores imaginary worlds, games let you explore virtual ones, and XploraLora gets me off my backside to explore the real one.

Then There’s Liza

Liza is my Carrera Fury mountain bike, although she’s no longer quite the Carrera Fury that left the factory.

After being unwell, there was a period when I couldn’t comfortably cover the distances on foot that I once could. I have coeliac disease, and more recently I’ve also had some problems with my heart that are still being investigated. I’m not particularly interested in making XploraLora about my health, but pretending none of it happened wouldn’t be honest either because it changed what I thought I could physically do.

There was a time when I genuinely wondered whether some of the things I loved doing were behind me.

I didn’t particularly like that answer.

I missed being able to disappear miles into a forest and then carry on towards the mountains, so Liza became part of the solution. The electric conversion wasn’t about removing the exercise or going ridiculously fast. It was about extending my range and getting to the interesting bit with enough energy left to actually enjoy it.

I didn’t want some ridiculous 50 mph electric mountain bike. I wanted range, torque and something that would happily daunder along forest tracks at about 10 mph. Basically, I wanted a tractor, so I built one. (I do no really need one of those Sur-Ron style manic electric trail bikes anyway, why would you when you have a ZX-9R in the garage? honestly I think they are a tad dangerous and I have seen some idiotic riding on them and I also thing they are giving us trained, legal and professional motorcyclists a bad name)

Anyway Liza, She’s already taken me into parts of Galloway that I’d previously only looked at on maps, and that’s worth considerably more to me than outright speed.

And Sometimes I Just Walk

Long before XploraLora, I loved walking and climbing mountains. After becoming unwell there was a period when I genuinely didn’t know whether I’d ever be able to do that sort of thing again.

That bothered me more than I probably admitted at the time.

Eventually I decided there was only one way to find out what I could still do, so I started small. Then I went a little higher. Then a little further. On one trip I set off towards Black Craig simply to see how far I could get and ended up surprising myself. Not long afterwards I headed towards Corserine and reached around 800 metres before deciding that daylight, common sense and an estate curfew were probably good reasons to turn around. I later discovered the summit had only been about 400 metres away, which was useful information to learn after I’d walked all the way back down. Wonderful. 😂

But getting to the summit wasn’t really the important part. I’d answered the question I’d gone there to answer.

I could still get into the mountains.

Why Scotland?

Because I live here, mostly. 😂

But also because I genuinely think Scotland is an extraordinary place. I’m particularly fond of the quieter bits: Galloway Forest Park, the Southern Uplands, the forests, lochs and mountains where you can get away from the busy tourist locations and find places that sometimes feel completely removed from everything else.

Mountains in particular have always fascinated me. They’re enormous, beautiful, occasionally intimidating things that can look completely different from one hour to the next as the light and weather change. I can sit looking at one for ages, although my description of it will probably still amount to something highly sophisticated like, “Bloody massive.”

I’ve spent years looking at some of these mountains from roads and wondering what was behind them. Now I’ll spot a little line on a map and think, I wonder where that goes? Occasionally it goes somewhere magnificent. Occasionally it disappears into a bog. Both generally end up in the video.

I’m also quite happy exploring alone. There’s something about being somewhere remote with nobody around, no phone signal and nothing particularly urgent to do except decide which direction to wander next. After spending much of my working week surrounded by computers, emails and technology, getting somewhere that none of those things matter for a few hours is rather nice.

Why Make Videos About It?

I genuinely love making films. That’s been there since Ayrshire Outdoors and it’s still one of the biggest reasons I do any of this.

I’m not particularly interested in making perfectly curated outdoor videos where everything goes according to plan, every drone shot is magnificent and the person making the video mysteriously never gets tired, lost, annoyed or covered in mud.

Because that isn’t what actually happens.

I get lost. I fall off things. I forget things. Equipment breaks. The weather changes. Batteries go flat. Trails that look perfectly reasonable on a map turn into tussock-covered nonsense, and sometimes I spend hours trying to reach somewhere only to discover that there really isn’t a bloody way through. But that’s exploring, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

The spectacular views are obviously part of it, but so are the mistakes, the conversations with people I meet, stopping for coffee somewhere ridiculous, finding something unexpected beside a trail, or simply sitting quietly looking at a mountain. Those are usually the bits I remember.

I also don’t suddenly want to become a different person because I’ve switched a camera on. If I look across a landscape where all the trees have been cut down and my brain decides it looks “shaved”, then shaved it is. I’m not going to spend twenty minutes thinking of something more sophisticated because it might sound better in a travel documentary.

The Need to Explore

If there’s one thing connecting most of my interests, it’s probably curiosity.

I’m fascinated by geography and by the rest of the world. I’d happily spend hours looking at maps of countries I’ve never visited, reading about the people who live there and wondering what their landscapes actually look like from ground level. I don’t think being proud of being Scottish conflicts with that in the slightest. Scotland is home, but we’re one small part of a much bigger world.

I’d like to see more of that world one day too.

For now, though, there’s an astonishing amount still sitting practically outside my front door that I haven’t explored properly.

Even my car is gradually being dragged into all this. I drive a Dacia Duster, which is rather better suited to disappearing down questionable Scottish roads than most things I’ve owned, and I’m currently contemplating calling her Dusya. Apparently I can no longer own a vehicle without giving it a name.

Why XploraLora?

The name originally revolved around Lora, but XploraLora has gradually become bigger than the motorcycle. Today it covers Lora, Liza and whatever my own two feet can manage.

Two wheels and two feet.

The motorcycle lets me cover enormous distances and reach places I otherwise wouldn’t. The mountain bike gets me along forest roads and trails where Lora can’t legally or sensibly go. Then eventually even Liza has to stop, and I carry on walking.

Each one gets me a little further into the landscape.

I’m not trying to tick off every tourist attraction in Scotland or race through a list of mountains just so I can say I’ve climbed them. Half the enjoyment for me is simply wondering what’s around the next corner and going to have a look.

Life has also given me a few reminders that none of us really knows what’s coming next. That’s changed my attitude towards putting things off. If I’m capable of going somewhere I’ve always wanted to see, I’d rather make the effort and go while I can than spend another ten years thinking that one day I might.

Sometimes the resulting adventure is spectacular. Sometimes it’s a complete disaster. Quite often it’s a mixture of the two.

And that’s pretty much me.

I’m John. I like motorcycles, mountains, maps, music, guitars, computers, science fiction, games, other cultures, exploring things I don’t understand yet and an unreasonable quantity of tea. Lora is the Kawasaki, Liza is the mountain bike, and the Duster may apparently be becoming Dusya.

Scotland provides the scenery and occasionally tries to kill all of us with weather, bogs and potholes.

Keep Exploring!