JUPITER'S TRAVELS

This is the best known of my books. It tells about my four-year journey around the world on a Triumph motorcycle.
The first half of the journey took me the length of Africa, from Tunis to Capetown, then around South America from the tip of Brazil to the Argentine Pampas and from Chile north through Panama to California.
Then I rode around Australia, and from Singapore overland to Europe through India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey.

Jupiter's Travels was a bestseller in the eighties.
The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the London Times among many others, all praised it.
Motorcycle Sport called it "...the best motorcycle travel book ever written." Readers and reviewers agree it is much more than a travel book.
It is a book that changes lives, and there are many readers' letters to prove it. In the years sinceJupiter's Travels was first published it has sold more than 400,000 copies world-wide.

Jupiter's Travels costs $24.95 in the USA. You can get it at all the usual places. For more information click on how to order.

Now, if you'd like to know more about the story behind the book, read on.

 

For a while it was hard to find in America. Penguin, unaccountably, let it go out of print. In 1996 the demand for a new American edition became irresistible, so I designed and published my own. This is a full-sized book, with 456 pages, many previously unpublished pictures, and a full range of maps.

The publishing project has been a surprising success. Not only have thousands of new readers bought the book (it's in its fourth printing) but I have now met many of them personally. In 1997 I took my books in a pick-up all across America talking and showing slides, and it has been extraordinary to discover how much this book has meant to so many people. I had no idea when I made that journey that it would inspire others to fulfill their dreams. Now I have the evidence that it really has changed many lives, and I know this book will not die.

Soon after I wrote Jupiter's Travels I also wrote a companion volume, Riding Home .
So much had happened to me during those four years that did not find a place in the first book, but there were other matters too I wanted to discuss. For one thing, hard as it may be to travel for so long through unknown territory, I found it even harder to stop and rejoin "normal society".
Compared with Jupiter's Travels that second book found few readers in the UK. The timing was bad, and it was never published in the US, but I have been so encouraged by recent events that I have published that myself too. It is now called Riding High, and people are responding to it very well. I'm surprised at how many identify with my feelings. You can find out about it in these pages.

There are other books too.
My latest travel book, The Gypsy in Me, has been published in the US, the UK and in Holland. If you have trouble finding it, you can get it from me. Read about it by clicking here.

Then there is The River Stops Here, a story about California, water, and a brilliant crusade to save the beautiful valley I live in from becoming another trophy reservoir for the dam builders. That book also came from Random House, and has now been republished in paperback by the University of California Press .

Before all these, I wrote a book about a year of Formula One motor racing ­ the incredible, and tragic year of 1970, when so many great drivers died. That was called The Chequered Year in the UK, and Grand Prix Year in the US. It's out of print now, but the libraries have copies.

Please help yourself to the rest of these web pages. You can read what reviewers have written about Jupiter's Travels. Or, if you want to taste the book for yourself, you can see what it has to say

about small worlds
about snakebite insurance
about the bike
about meetings in the desert
about growing into the saddle.
about five o'clock follies

You can turn to the page about Riding High by clicking here
And then find out how to order a copy for yourself.

Or you can go back to the Home Page

Recently I gave a talk to college students in Kansas, and I've put the text up here too. I tried to tell them what I thought it meant "to make a difference." If you'd like to read it, click on speech

To get in touch with me, an email to tsimon@mcn.org would probably be best.