Strange, unknown rider, who are you?

There are still mysteries in this world. A rider from work posted this a little while ago to the riders DL:

I met this gal in Baja out in the middle of nowhere. She was from Japan had been travelling the world for 5 years. This was her second bike, she wore out her first bike which I believe she said was a DR200. I have a DR200 and would definitely pick the xt225 over the DR for adventure riding. The DR is a 5speed and the 6th gear on the Yamaha would definitely make things a little less buzzy at 60. She picked this Yamaha up in Russia. She was just coming out of the salt flats on the west side of Baja which has some sanding spots. She was able to make that bike go where she needed and the bike appeared stock.

We didn’t have much time to chat so I have no idea what type of highway speeds she would cruised at.

There were 3 of us on a 2 week trip and we all had luggage related issues/failures. I am sure if we were out for a 5 year run our luggage would have evolved to what she was running.

She was running bent rims in the front and back and her helmet was a little scrapped up. I got the sense she would run with bent rims until she was done with the dirt section of her current trip and could find an inexpensive country to get new rims.

She was a bit lost when we met her and was getting low on fuel. We gave her some fuel and helped her with directions. Later that night we talked about “what if she didn’t meet up with us?” Would she have been stuck? We quickly came to conclusion that she was probably a very resourceful rider and had probably dealt with being lost/off track before. We also thought this probably wasn’t the last time she was low on fuel in the middle of nowhere.

We were humbled by this small woman on her little Yamaha.

The email we copied down from her didn’t seem to work so we never were able to make contact.

A few months later, a picture of her showed up in a slideshow done by MotoQuest Tours about their tour in Peru which I attended in December. At least, I think it was her. There might be lots of Japanese women riding small dirt bikes down there. :)

This is her (I love her navigational system):

I was curious and dug a little on the internet and found this on page 13 of American Motorcylist:

I dashed off an email to Skip Mascorro to find out if it’s the same woman and if he knows anything else about her and he wrote back saying – “I know nothing of her background other than she humbled our group of macho riders. I believe I was wrapped up “working” at the time ofthat enounter so I didn’t have a lot of time to visit.”

And thanks to Bluepoof, I found a couple of entries on Horizons Unlimited about a woman named “Miki” who answers to the description:
http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/newsletter/2007-03.shtml
http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/newsletter/2007-01.shtml

Outside of that, she remains a mystery. If anyone knows anything more about her, do let me know, would you? :)

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