‘I ran off with a biker at 49 – and it changed my life’

Sometimes, one split second decision can change the course of a lifetime – and that was certainly the case for Jacqui Furneaux.

At 49, nurse Jacqui found herself at a crossroads, longing for something different. Taking a leap into the unknown, she set off on a journey across the world.

It would become the adventure of a lifetime, proving it is never too late to find yourself.

Jacqui told her wild-hearted story to Dr Sian Williams on Radio 4’s Life Changing.

When Jacqui burst into the travel agency in late 90s Manchester, filled with a desire to escape, she told the agent not to let her out “until she had booked something”.

The recent end of her marriage had been a difficult one, and she was determined to “clear off” to a far-flung part of the globe.

“I had an affair with a diving instructor, and that was the end of my marriage” she said.

Her daughters were late teens, and Jacqui says it was “not a good time for them”.

“I think they knew [of the affair] a long time before I thought they knew… it was awful. I actually moved in for a while with the man who I had left my husband for – then that didn’t work out either”.

Full of “guilt, shame and unhappiness,” Jacqui decided the best thing to do was to “get out of everybody’s way”.

“I would have left myself behind if I could… I hated myself. I felt so guilty. I ruined a perfectly lovely family,” she says.

The travel agent suggested Bangkok as a starting point, and after planning an itinerary - through tears at times - Jacqui left with a ticket “to be away for a year”.

Knowing she had full support from her daughters, Jacqui packed her bags and jetted off to Thailand.

“I thought, I’m a bit old for doing this,” Jacqui says, “But I went anyway.”

Sitting in a bustling backpacker’s hostel in Bangkok, she had no real plan of what to do next, with no idea how long her travel funds would last - but revelled in her new-found freedom.

“It was glorious. I just didn’t have to do anything and I didn’t have to be anywhere to pick anyone up or take anyone to a lesson.”

Instead, she “sat there all day just talking to people” without any routine or agenda, and it was “the most marvellous experience”.

There were still pangs of sadness for Jacqui though.

“I missed them [my daughters], but I didn’t feel like I could tell them,” she says, “Because I’d made such a mess of the end of their childhood, which I still feel very keenly.”

Jacqui travelled extensively – from Thailand to Laos, through to Southeast Asia, parts of Pakistan and onto India.

It was here, in the north-western medieval city of Jaisalmer, that Jacqui’s adventure took a thrilling new direction.

“Jaisalmere is like one big sandcastle… on the edge of the Thar desert” Jacqui explains. “I thought ‘Ooh, I’d like to do a camel ride”.

Jacqui was browsing through camel tour brochures when a “big” ginger-haired man pulled up on a “funny-looking motorbike”.

Her interest was piqued – she had learned to ride a motorbike in the “hot summer of 1976”.

She followed him into a dingy restaurant, where they struck up an animated conversation about their shared passion for Royal Enfield motorbikes.

“He said, there’s room for you on the back. Why don’t we go off into the desert together?” Jacqui recalls.

“So he loaded me up on the back of his bike, with all my stuff, and off we went into the Thar desert.”

Zooming across the sandy landscape, thoughts were whizzing around Jacqui’s mind.

“What was I thinking?” she muses: “I thought… I like motorbikes, and it would be fun to go into the desert on a motorbike. I can do a camel ride any time, but how often is life going to offer me this opportunity?”

“I’d been in India for long enough to know that the bizarre is normal.”

The biker was in fact, a Dutchman called Hendrikus, 17 years Jacqui’s junior.

Sharing a tent among the sand dunes, they made a little fire and camped out under the starlit sky.

“We just talked – and he told me about how his marriage had fallen to bits, and I told him about how my marriage had fallen to bits,” she said.

“We had a lot in common, even though there were so many years between us.”

After a few days, they parted ways and exchanged their parents’ addresses.

“I never thought I’d see him again,” Jacqui says, and she returned to her old life, on home soil.

Nothing had changed at work – “my colleagues… were still making the same phone calls and saying the same things”, but inside, Jacqui was a different person.

“I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I’d changed”.

But another twist of fate came soon after, when an unexpected visitor turned up at her mother’s front door. It was the red-haired motorcyclist from her travels - Hendrikus.

“I’ve never been able to forget you,” he told Jacqui. “Why don’t you come back to India with me, buy your motorcycle – same as mine – and we’ll travel together?”

Jacqui instantly accepted his offer, and off they went.

“We explored a lot of India together, and we were pretty rough travellers,” Jacqui says. “We were really basic – there were no five-star hotels for us.

“It was 50p-a-night hotels… pretty grim, but lots of fun.”

Navigation was tricky: “There was no sat-nav then, and so it was maps, asking people the way, road signs, and going wherever we wanted to”.

Jacqui embraced a life of simplicity and spontaneity - and fell deeply in love with Hendrikus.

“I was in love with him. I was in love with the life, I was in love with India. I was just in my element,” she remembers.

For three years, they adventured from Bangkok, to Cambodia and Malaysia – but trouble in paradise was brewing.

“I could see the writing on the wall,” she says. “He was getting restless, he was getting fed up with me… and so we both came to the same conclusion at roughly the same time.”

“We said a teary farewell, but we kept in touch.”

Hendrikus left to make a life for himself in Australia, and Jacqui decided to continue her voyages alone, from New Zealand all the way to Ecuador.

But six and a half years on the road had taken a toll – and during a visit from her daughter, Jacqui became ill.

“She’d looked after me… and she said, ‘How much longer are you going to be away Mum? We need a mother.”

Jacqui was surprised: “I hadn’t forgiven myself [for the affair], I didn’t think anyone else could possibly have either - and that I would be forever in disgrace.”

It was clear to Jacqui that things had moved on; she could “go home”.

With no home to go to, Jacqui worried about putting out her loved ones.

“And then I thought, well I’ll manage somehow. I did have some money in the bank… I can always work and earn my keep again”.

Jacqui’s fears proved to be unfounded, and she has now been back for “a long time”.

“I’ve got a good relationship with both my daughters now – and my ex-husband, which is good.”

Dr Sian asks Jacqui whether she has forgiven herself. Jacqui pauses for thought, then says, “More or less”.

“I’m learning to be happy with myself,” she says. “I’m a much more healthy person to be around.”

Jacqui, now 75 and living in Bristol, has no plans to slow down anytime soon though…

“I’m planning another journey… with a friend of mine who also rides Royal Enfield Motorbikes. We’re going back to the border between India and Pakistan”.

“Do you ever think to yourself,” Dr Sian Williams asks Jacqui, “What might have happened if Hendrikus had not walked through that door?”

“I do!” Jacqui says. “I would’ve gone on a camel ride, wouldn’t I?!”

Listen to the full interview with Jacqui, and other stories like it, on Life Changing with Dr Sian Williams.