Wars, crashes and closed borders

Wars, crashes and closed borders - my quest to visit every Belfast in the world

"With all the hiccups, all the wars, people seemed intent on stopping me getting places."

Sean Drysdale thinks there are at least 26 different places across the world with the name Belfast and his quest to visit every one of them was never going to be simple.

The difficulty level only increased when he decided he wanted to complete it on a motorbike built in the 1970s.

The first leg of his journey in 2023 took him through Africa to visit Belfast, South Africa, then it was off to north America to tick off the19 Belfasts there.

Part three of the odyssey took him to New Zealand and Australia, with a return journey through conflicts zones in the Asian subcontinent and the Middle East.

His New Zealand trip began uneventfully after some much-needed repairs to his bike.

The retired doctor from Glengormley, County Antrim, rode down the east coast of the North Island before crossing over to the South and visiting the Belfast there, which is just north of Canterbury.

Then several weeks into the journey, came the first of those "hiccups".

While overtaking a truck "the bike ended up in a ditch and I ended up in the hospital".

Drysdale suffered a fractured hand and the bike was "deemed economically unrepairable".

He said on a map, sitting beside Australia, New Zealand "looks tiny, but it's not".

"If you put an overlay of New Zealand on Europe it stretches from northern Scandinavia almost all the way down to Spain, so it's a very, very long country," he said.

"The variety of the landscapes is just incredible. You're looking at mountains with the snow on, then you're looking at the sunshine sparkling on the sea."

While recuperating from his hand injury and having his bike repaired, he flew to Australia to visit another - former - Belfast, now called Port Fairy.

"There's still lots of Belfast named things there," he said.

The plan for his return journey to France, where he now lives, was to ship the bike to India, then ride to Pakistan into Iran, up into Turkey and back home through Europe.

"I arranged to meet my two sons in Islamabad for a couple of weeks in the mountains of northern Pakistan, just as a bit of detour," he said.

"All went well, I got to India and was all set to head on and then India and Pakistan started fighting with each other and closed the border."

The only place he could get the bike shipped to from India was Dubai, so he flew to Islamabad to meet his sons, where they hired three smaller motorbikes.

"We spent two weeks up there having an absolute ball on these little bikes travelling through Pakistan over all sorts of terrain," he recalled.

"A spectacular part of the world, it really is, those mountains are something else."

Another war then scuppered his plan to ship his own motorbike from Dubai to Iran, a country he had wanted to visit on the way home from Africa but had been foiled then by the weather.

"I was standing in the ferry booking office to book my ticket when Israel decided to go to war with Iran," he said.

So with all the ferries cancelled he went back to Dubai.

"I went up the other side of the Gulf and went through Saudi, Kuwait and Iraq."

While he described Iraq as "fine, no trouble at all" with people who "were very friendly, very helpful" he said the region's extreme heat was an issue.

"At ten in the morning the temperature was in the 40s, especially in Saudi and Kuwait." he said.

"I'd get up and ride early and by ten or eleven o'clock in the morning I'd have stopped. It was not just me, the bike doesn't enjoy those 40 degree temperatures."

He finally made it back to France via Turkey, Greece and Italy.

"One reflection I did have when I got back and was sitting with a glass of wine, was 'this is where I've been coming to', I think it was just a long way home basically."

He's now visited 25 current or former Belfasts around the world as part of his epic journey.

When asked which ones stick out in his mind, he said "it's usually determined by the people you met there".

"You meet people and they're just so kind and generous."

Reflecting on the overall journey he said: "I look back and think of all the hiccups, obstacles along the way and the fact that I recovered the bike from an insurance write-off twice and overcame this, that and the other - on reflection it's quite an achievement.

"It was perseverance, or stubbornness or bloody-mindedness."

He may have to draw on that perseverance again, as there's one Belfast out there that he's not visited yet.

"I have to decide now am I really going to fly to Jamaica to tick off the last one?

"I have a feeling that at some point I'll decide it has to be done, you can't leave the job 'oh so near, oh so far', so I think I'll have to do it."