How it all began
In some ways of course it was easier. For one thing I didn't have to
learn how to ride a motorcycle. But support was more difficult to come
by at first, because it is not such an unusual thing to do these days.
And that is rather ironic, since my own book is partly responsible for
the increased global traffic.
Nevertheless, slowly, the money worked itself out. Iwas being paid by
a newspaper here, and a magazine there, and sales of my books helped
too, but best of all, money came from good-hearted enthusiastic people
who wanted to see the journey happen, and wanted to read about it as
I travelled.
I asked all the people on my list if they would be willing to pay $5
a month for this. That was a lot to ask, but enough of them said Yes
to make me believe that this site could make a real difference to my
survival. So this becamea viewer-suppported site.
The pounds and dollars added up. What did I need
(what does any person need) to do this thing? Some money, and a bike.
Not to mention various intangible qualities, mostly but not entirely
good. I think I have the money. I do have the bike. As for those other,
elusive attributes, I had them once, I hope I have them still.
For months I was very uncertain about which bike
to take. In 1973 it was simple. Today there are so many possibilities,
and everybody has a different opinion. Should it be a Triumph again?
I had been riding a new Tiger for a couple of years and I liked it
a lot, but it was heavy, top heavy, not a bike you want to be picking
up too often, and when I remembered Sudan and Ethiopia I thought,
Maybe not.
Well then, the new Triumph twin? For symbolic reasons
I suppose that would have been the one. It was closer to the old tradition,
with a lot of what's best about the new bikes. And it was at least
50lbs lighter than the Tiger. But Triumph in the UK didn't want to
talk about it. Why ? I don't know. Perhaps they didn't think it was
ready for a trip like this. It certainly wasn't built for the desert.
But then, neither was the old Tiger I took in '73. Whatever their
reasons, they never bothered to tell me. Rude, but conclusive.
Meanwhile, something better came along. A beautifully
fitted out R80 GS, late model, with 1000cc pots, and barely run in.
CW Motorcycles in Dorchester, UK, put it together,
with Ohlins shocks, panniers from Bernd Tesch, and an Acerbis tank.
The tyres were by Avon, just as they were in the Seventies, but the
tyres themselves are so much more developed. These were the new Distanzia
dual-purpose tyres, and I soon experienced the difference it makes
to have all this new equipment.
When I rode out from London to go around the world
in 1973 I was fully prepared, somewhere along the way, to lose my
life. Nobody to my knowledge had made such a journey before (it turns
out I was wrong about that. A few people had) and I thought it would
be as dangerous as it was exciting.
In fact, thanks to some near misses, I got away almost
scot-free, and the years since have come as a bonus. I could have
gone on travelling. That would have been the easiest thing to do,
but I thought I had tasted the best of it, and was afraid to have
it go stale. Life took a very different turn during the following
years, as I went through the pleasures and pains of the more normal
existence that I had wished on myself, marriage, home -building, a
child, and then sadly, separation and divorce
Memories of distant places were a powerful presence.
It was unimagineable that I wouldn't see them again, but there were
so many places , far too many for me to re-visit in a casual way,
so I suffered their absence as best I could and got on with my life
as a writer and father and the other things I do more or less well.
Then motorcycles began to play a bigger part in my
life again. I rode the new Tiger around America, recovering that Centaurian
feeling of being one with the steed. With my family dispersed I began
thinking more and more of that journey I made so long ago (the seventies
do seem so far away) and the idea of repeating it came often to my
mind, but the thought of what I would have to do to raise the money
and the support hampered my enthusiasm.
I live, by choice, in an isolated community, and
have little contact with the traditional sources of sponsorship. These
days, motorcyclists travel around the world with increasing frequency,
and having to sell myself was a miserable prospect. Then, literally
out of the blue (since that is the United Nations colour) I got a
call from Geneva. Some UN volunteers wanted to ride bikes around the
world to celebrate the Year of the Volunteer. Could I assist them,
support them, bless them on the their journey.
Sure thing, I said. But even better, how about if
I come along. It seemed a perfect solution. I do the blessing, they
do the heavy lifting. For a while it went well. I was much better
at selling them than selling myself, and pretty soon I had made the
mental shift from thinking about doing it, to being actually prepared
to do it. And then, to cut a tortuous story short, the financial rug
was pulled from under them. But it was too late to save me from my
conversion. I was commited. I would go anyway. And I was very happy
to discover that a lot of other people thought I should go, and were
making concrete gestures of help.
To my great surprise I found myself, at the age of
69, still perfectly fit and apparently capable of making that journey
again. I had the privilege of being able to revisit a great number
of places and people in this world, many in remote and disputed areas,
and seeing them through the same pair of eyes across a quarter century
of extraordinary change.
How would I measure the changes? Sometimes one can
go to the same place twice in a very short period of time and have
profoundly different impressions and experiences. How would I compensate
for these purely subjective variations? Well, the best I could was
to reproduce, as exactly as possible, my mode of arrival. Being on
the bike, I thought, would impose the same perspective, and this is
important. We all know how different a place can seem when arrived
at by train, say, as opposed to by car.
How I was perceived then, as a stranger riding in
on a bike, was a big part of the story too, another reason why it
is important to return in the same way.
But for the most part the changes are too obvious
to miss, as I try to track down the people with whom I had such intense,
though short-lived relationships. I began by reading my own book,
and the notebooks I kept, with new and urgent interest. I was fizzing
with excitement at the prospect of those coming encounters.
Quite soon I found out what had become of the great
passion and grandiose projects of Signor Zanfini in Roggiano, Italy;
what El Kabaria is like today, and what became of that bubble of Edwardian
mannerisms that was Madame Mellasse's hotel in Alexandria. Would there
still be a school in the Atbara desert, and if so how would they view
the pictures I took of them 27 years ago? Had the tea house, Khor
el Fil, become a cyber cafe? Would I again be staying at the Curry
Pot Inn on the road to Mombasa, and would there be a bar girl still
alive after all the years of AIDS?
On and on it went.
Now the journey is over. You can judge for yourself
how successful it was.
Thanks again for visiting. Wander through these pages.
You'll find interesting ideas, and good things to read. If you don't
know who I am, let this web site introduce us. I look forward to knowing
you too.
Would you like to know more about my books? Visit
Jupiter's Travels or you can go back to the Home
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