The Moray Speyside region has featured in a new film project by round-the-world cyclists Jenny Graham and Markus Stitz.
Chasing Rainbows portrays their three-day journey on the new Tern Orox Adventure Cargo e-Bike. The 9-minute film, available to watch for free on YouTube, documents them cycling a 239 km (148 miles) loop starting and finishing in Jenny’s hometown of Inverness. The short documentary takes viewers on an adventurous journey through Moray and Speyside, famous for its abundance of distilleries, but also home to some of the most stunning coastal scenery Scotland has to offer.
Jenny Graham, who holds the female Guinness World Record for circumnavigating the world on a bike said, “Using the Tern Orox e-bikes for this trip, with big 4-inch tires and two batteries, was quite a change from anything else we’ve ridden so far. We chose a route where we could really put these bikes to the test. And of course, the benefit of having a cargo bike is that you can carry so much stuff with you. Markus and I are used to living out of tiny little bags on our bike, but this time we were literally thrown everything that we wanted for a really boujee picnic camping trip, through the Cairngorms first and then into Moray and Speyside. The trip was very different from what we are used to, but great fun.”
Markus Stitz, author of Bikepacking Scotland and round-the-world single-speed cyclist commented,”I think the film shows how capable the bikes were; there is a huge potential in this new type of bike for getting more people to enjoy bikepacking. We chose Moray and Speyside as it not only offers breathtaking coastal scenery and great beaches to ride on, but also superb trails like the Speyside Way. Our route had to be barrier-free – one thing that was not possible is lifting the bikes over closed gates – and contained a nice mix of off-road and on-road sections. And as people can possibly guess from the title of the film, we had to cope with a lot of rainfall on our journey. Jenny and I didn’t postpone the trip to showcase that Scotland can be enjoyed by bike in almost every weather condition. For me the rain added to the atmosphere.”
The route for the film, From Coast to Barrel, can be found at Bikepacking Scotland’s website. It is based on an itinerary included in Stitz’s ‘Bikepacking Scotland’ guidebook, published in May 2023 by Vertebrate Publishing. Moray and Speyside, which sits between Inverness and Aberdeen and extends from the Moray coastline south to the Cairngorms National Park, is home to more than half of Scotland’s whisky distilleries.
Click here to find out more about Visit Moray Speyside.
