Last July, Adventure Motorcycling author Robert Wicks travelled to Iceland with BMW off-road instructor and Dakar veteran Simon Pavey, and friend and co-author Greg Baker, to meet up with local BMW tour operators Biking Viking. Their mission: to find the best places in the country to shoot pictures to illustrate a new book called Adventure Riding Techniques.

Accompanied by Iceland's leading automotive photographer - Thorvaldur Kristmundsson - and riding a selection of BMW motorcycles, including the F 650 GS, F 800 GS and the HP2 Enduro, the group enjoyed some of the best riding and terrain available in Europe, including snow, ice, rocks, sand, gravel and mud. The pictures were superb and showed, step by step, all the riding skills that adventure motorcyclists need to fully enjoy themselves out on the trail.

Adventure Riding Techniques
by Robert Wicks & Greg Baker

Robert and Greg then spent the following months painstakingly writing their book, as well as researching real adventures to include, and selecting the best images from a choice of more than 1,500 photographs to best illustrate all the topics contained in the various chapters. Finally, Adventure Riding Techniques is finished and is due for general release in early March. However, it is available for `pre-order' now, much to Robert's delight.

"It's very satisfying to see the second book finally `done and dusted'," said Robert. "We've been working hard on this since August and it's been a long time coming. That said, it's turned out exactly as I'd hoped and it was great to share the load with a co-author this time. When we went to Iceland, we had a lot of pre-planned things to cover, but there was no way we could have done everything without the team at Biking Viking, who took us exactly where we needed in order to shoot such a variety of situations on all sorts of terrain - and we got all the pictures we needed."

Adventure Riding Techniques is being described as `the definitive guide to the specialist skills needed for off-road adventure riding' and has been written to give readers the confidence to undertake a long-distance adventure ride, whatever the conditions. The book covers a variety of topics, including adventure bike basics, riding techniques, how to cross different types of terrain using the correct riding positions, and survival techniques. Many of the chapters are picture-led and include step-by-step instructions, covering all the key aspects of the techniques relevant to adventure riding.

Robert believes that the book will appeal to a wide variety of riders, from anyone who has ever contemplated doing a big trip, to off-road training schools and even tour operators offering trips to far-flung destinations. After the success of his first book, Adventure Motorcycling - which has just been translated and published in German language version - Robert is looking forward to seeing this latest book on the shelves early in March and is in fact already planning his next motorcycle publication.

"What I'd like to do is to write a third book that covers exactly what you need to do to build the ultimate adventure bike," he says. "So, the theory is that you start off with a standard motorcycle and then work out exactly what you need to add, or what you need to modify, in order to suitably equip it for wherever you want to go. Naturally, I'll be getting a helping hand with the boys from Touratech for this book, but with more people discovering the joys of adventure motorcycle travel, I believe there will be plenty of demand for a publication of this kind."

Adventure Riding Techniques is published by J H Haynes & Co Ltd and is available in 176-page hardback (ISBN-10: 1844255727). It is released on 19 March but is available for pre-order now at all the usual quality retailers such as Amazon.