News from Ted
Last Sunday I joined a small group of bike riders on Zoom to talk about depression, not everyone’s favourite subject but a difficult one to ignore. I met with Eva Strehler, who is translating my latest book into German, and Claudio Gnypek, who was recording the meeting for a podcast, but the main man was Dieter Schneider. Dieter is in his youthful sixties but he had a son who suffered from depression and committed suicide, an unimaginable tragedy no less awful for being one of many thousands.
He found he couldn’t simply accept it. He felt he had to do something, and after long journeys looking for a solution he appealed to his friends to join him in a ride, to focus attention on the problem. He discovered, of course, that he was far from alone, and his ride is now a regular thing with hundreds of bikers taking part. He thinks of it as a fellowship and calls it the Fellows Ride. There is even a film going the rounds in Germany.
I have never been depressive and like most people, however deep in the dumps I might be, I can generally find pleasure in just being alive. But in my early life there were aspects of my personality that I did find depressing. I was self-conscious to a fault, convinced that I was always being judged and found wanting. I went to unnecessary lengths to please, and I was timid in the face of authority. I rehearsed all my important meetings ahead of time and never really learned to think on my feet. I was quite aware of all this and it sickened me, but I couldn’t overcome it. I relied almost entirely on my intelligence to make progress in life.
My big journey, the one that crystalised out as Jupiter’s Travels, changed all that, even though the change was totally unexpected. It never crossed my mind that the journey would have any effect on me. I was driven by curiosity, not self-improvement, and yet the effect it did have on me was life-changing. I have spent a good deal of time since trying to extract from the experience the elements that brought this about and released me from my earlier inhibitions.
First of all, I was alone, with nobody to judge me or help me or take over. I was on a machine that I had only recently learned to manage, and only in quite easy circumstances. I knew that, as a novice, I was in danger and that the danger would increase as I moved into ever more unfamiliar surroundings. Inevitably there was always a degree of fear to overcome, and I found a way to work with it and learn from it.
Then there was the machine itself. I had only basic mechanical knowledge, a few tools and a workshop manual. I had to keep it going, meaning I had to learn about it, be aware of it all the time, check it out every night looking for problems. It was all I had for the next 50,000 miles.
The travelling itself was demanding; finding shelter and food, managing currencies and borders, learning the rudiments of languages, learning how to avoid accidents, and of course keeping notes of everything. And to balance against all this drudgery was the sheer excitement of it all and, at first, the wonder that I was actually able to make it all work, that it was really me here in the desert where I once as a child read about Rommel’s Afrika Korps battling with Montgomery.
There was no time or reason to think about I how looked; I was unique, a traveller on a motorcycle, a phenomenon and I set the standard. Who would care how I was dressed, whether I was clean or dirty, shaven or bearded. So I soon forgot about myself and found that I could see others much more clearly. And all those hours alone with myself inside my helmet? They were busy with thoughts about what I had seen and what lay ahead, people I had met, the scene I was passing by and how I would describe it.
What I am trying to demonstrate is that I was so physically and mentally stretched by the enterprise that there was no room for negative thoughts about the meaning of life. I am convinced that by being voluntarily exposed to great physical and mental effort I defeated my old mindset.
I am afraid this may all sound naïve and boastful. Would it be impossible for someone suffering from clinical depression to launch themselves into such a project? I don’t know. But I have had letters (via email) from people thanking me, profusely, for helping them fight off depression simply through reading my book.
Is there a way . . .?
I’ve been asked for more raw notes from my notebooks. Here are my last days in Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was still called, 47 years ago.
Puttalam: On shore of a lagoon. Junction town. Single row of huts. Some thatched, some tiled. Small veg market has chilis, kohl rabi, cabbage, carrot, tomato, limes, eggplant, potatoes, yams, etc. In short, an excellent variety. Fish market, a small, raised cement platform, thatched, had good fish too. Some puppies stood around it. One was so thin and failing it was scarcely more than a head. Watched some crows on a roof – one had a fruit in its beak but could hardly eat it, since as soon as it put the thing down to grip it with a claw another bird, unencumbered, would threaten possession. It had a younger companion also which simply screeched with open beak , and got a couple of morsels for its pains.
By the shore was a thin strand of sand littered with all kinds of rubbish. Again the crows attracted my attention, and one – obviously physically inferior – was hanging about behind the others.
At one point it raised a claw and put it pleadingly on another bird’s back – twice. The other bird flew away – the mangy crow was left alone. Then I noticed a dog – a bitch with distended udders – licking something between its front paws. It was a puppy stretched out on the rubbish, head back and oozing blood. The mother looked up so mournfully. These small examples of life and death on the rubbish heap moved me and depressed me profoundly. Since Colombo I’d been viewing the world through discomfort and fever, with a deliberately jaundiced view. I saw the profusion and luxuriance of the tropics as just a terrible mess, buildings as mildewed wrecks, human effort as futile. The people seemed tedious to me – an endless procession of Marks & Spencer shirt tails hanging over sheets – with facile smiles signifying nothing if not envy and ingratiation. Only the older women impressed me, in spite of myself, with the fineness of their features and slim handsome carriage. The road was murderously bumpy, the traffic foolish. Several times in Ceylon I’ve saved my life by noticing another driver when it was his obligation to notice me. People stop quite suddenly in the road for no apparent reason and without indication. I think there is a powerful amount to be said against “tropical paradise” and should be grateful for these fevers perhaps. The yearning for temperate home must have been overpowering in early adventurers when they fell sick.
At the Puttalam Rest House I got hot tea and an extra sheet [for the bed] and tried to sweat it out. There was plenty of sweat and in the morning I thought I’d won.
I rode the 46 miles to Anaradhapura (after photographing a cobra) – and sat among the ruins for a while. A young man came, and by the brilliant tactic of NOT asking me for anything led me to offer him my address. I walked barefoot to the big Dagoba (or whatever). The dome is solid and covered with cement – has little to say to me. There’s a crack where it was once struck by lightning, and a new lightning conductor runs down the side. There’s also a maze of granite pillars sticking out of the ground. The lad says this is the ground floor of seven story building in which a hundred monks prayed on each floor, all in their solitary cells. If true it’s an amazing notion – what a hum must have gone out from that box. Enjoyed the moonstone outside the temple. Elephant, horse, lion, buffalo. From A on the road to Mannar, and at the main junction was already feeling the fever again. Had a drink and some Disprin. Disprin is becoming part of my diet. Rest of journey went well. No more rain. In the morning I rode through a maximum downpour for maybe 15 mins – and the [new Belstaff] jacket is a success.
Got the same room at the [Puttalam] rest house. Went straight out to fish off bridge, thinking how nice to be alone, but a great company of betel chewers l;ined up alongside me. I managed to live with it however, and got the great excitement of a catch. The fish felt very strong, and for a while I couldn’t move it at all – after its first run – then slowly I inched it in. It was a stingray. Very exciting to see it come out of the water. Not really so big – maybe 4 lbs – with beautiful mottled brown back, a rather human mouth, and two eyes on top. One of the men cut off the tail and showed me the spike which lies alongside it close to the root (not as I imagined it at all). Took it back proudly to the Rest House. The cook said he would fry it for me, but as a fish, he said “it is not famous.”
Two men passing on the bridge started talking to me. It annoyed me at the time, and I must have showed it.
“Your native land, please?”
“Are you a university graduate?”
“How much does this – or that cost?”
They came afterwards to the Rest House and I had to sit and take tea with them. One was the Medical Officer for the area – the other. Mr. Ratnavale, is a clerk of some sort. They have so little to say, and understand so little of what I say, that it’s largely a ritual. Whatever I said, Mr. R’s face would express perfect wonder and enlightenment and say “I see” as though everything was now clear. But the MO did describe symptoms of typhoid [nausea, among others] which gave me a bit of a scare next day.
Rest House manager told me of a series of superstitions. If a monk crosses your path when you aet out – forget it. If the gekko chatters as you step out of the house – also forget it. If you run over a cat you’ll have an accident. Woodpecker’s noise is a bad omen.
He also says Tamils smell different. If they use a towel, you won’t be able to. Sinhalese and Europeans are much closer [he says].
14 October
Rain is really pounding down in the night. The garden has become a lake. The varnish on all the chairs is sticky. Pools of water on the floor. Write home and walk to the post office. Get back, to feel feverish again. Decide to take tetracycline [which I carried with me]. Soon afterwards, vomit {having drunk Coca-Cola). Think I might have typhoid. Get scared and get driven to hospital as emergency. Doctor greets me with great amusement.
“What do you want – he asks – medicine or to be admitted?”
“I want to know what’s wrong.”
He can’t stop grinning. “Cough,” he says.
I essay a couple of coughs.
“There you are you see. You’ve got a cough.”
I deny it, but he just laughs. “You’ve got a fever.”
“Why,” I ask? It’s so ridiculous I have to smile too.
“The climate,” he answers. “Take a Disprin and it will go.
“That’s what I’ve been doing for three days.”
He still thinks it’s a huge joke. He asks several questions but doesn’t listen to the answers. But he’s convinced there’s nothing wrong with me, so I begin to believe that at least it’s nothing very much. Back to the Rest House, much embarrassed. Soon afterwards astonish them by going fishing in the rain. A fish takes away the hook. Later it comes down in a torrent and I slosh back to change. Through afternoon, two more Disprins, begin to feel better.
Mr. Ratnavale calls on me. My heart sinks, but he’s better today – not so overawed by his weighty companion. Eventually he walks off into the rain and comes back, unsolicited, with a packet of five Capstan cigarettes. Very sweet. Has wife and three kids in Jaffna. Means to travel overland to Europe.
Now great wind blows up outside. Will tomorrow be stormy? Walked around the Portuguese fort. 17th century. Impressive size.
Busy night. Great storm blowing, with sounds like gunshots, among others. Between nine and midnight I must have sweated a lake. Both sheets wringing wet, and mattress too. Had to change the mattress and put on trousers and vest. Both damp in the morning. The tetracycline must have helped me to chase the fever out so I’ll go on with it for 4 days. It occurred to me that the ferry would hardly have been able to dock last night and this morning, at the bus depot someone confirms that it was anchored a mile off shore. Maybe in the afternoon, maybe in the morning. I imagine I’ll be here another night yet.
Go to pier. Sea very rough. One fishing boat breaks anchor line – tossing about on the other line, spewing out broken fittings which poor owners are combing off beach. Ferry is in, discharging passengers, but customs is very slow. Capt. puts to sea empty, afraid that sea may cause ship to break the pier. No ferry today.
Forty-eight years ago this week, I was about to leave La Paz, the capital of Bolivia. Travelling with me but separately were Bruno and Antoine, two Frenchmen in a small white four-horse Renault van whom I’d met coming into Bolivia a week earlier. These are my notes.
January 14
Bruno, Antoine and I agree to meet at 7am to leave. I wake at five. It’s pouring. The sound of the rain drumming down on the tin roof depresses me. In my dozing state I even slip and lose my footing – in bed. I walk over to their flat [we were in separate houses] at seven. 12 Frenchmen in it. It’s got a terrible rancid smell. Filthy mess. They agree it’s better to leave later. At 10am the rain stops and there’s some sun. But the Renault won’t start. When at last, after changing the oil, cleaning the carburetor and plugs, it does start, it begins to rain again. There’s bread to buy, money to change. Then up to the big bus and lorry concourse on the altiplano, 800 meters up. There’s fog and rain and mud everywhere. The [government] controls are even harder to endure.
The road is semi-ripio [gravel] but plenty of mud. I begin to get the hang of it, but it’s hard work. All combinations of surface present themselves, Then cloud thins and eventually, as we approach lake Titicaca and the hills, the sky clears a bit. Beautiful light as we follow the lake shore. Reeds in the water, many rich-looking plots of irrigated land, sailing boats. Come down at last to the ferry. Long boats with Johnson outboards. Some trouble maneouvering off the boat backwards. Costs me ten pesos, then another 45. More riding through mountains and along the lake. The water is a glorious blue. The contours are very appealing, The grandest lake and mountain combination yet – though Bariloche was more hospitable, having trees. No trees here, just surfaces interacting.
Round one corner an extraordinary sight: A man bending over flinging stones off the road, arms like windmills, cloak flying. Three handfuls, then he stands up, takes his hat off and holds it out to me with the most sly and ingratiating grin. But he was too slow to start his pantomime. I was just in time to see him stoop He was not young, but vigorous. The Frenchmen, after me, got the same performance but this time he stood in their path, with menacing gestures, and they felt obliged to give him bread.
Indian women, still with bowler hats (why?) and shawls, rather than ponchos, fully pleated skirts in blue and crimson to below the knee with many petticoats also coloured, thick woolen stockings, leather sandals, usually a coloured blanket flung over their backs with some kind of burden, or baby, in it. And often spinning yarn as they go, from a handful of raw yarn onto a spindle in the other hand.
After following the shore we cut across a promontory to come down to Copacabana, a small town between two hills on the lake shore – oddly similar to the one at Rio at a distance. Nice looking town, but all the hotels are dreadful. The most luxurious-looking hotel is like a barracks inside – 25 pesos. We cooked a huge dinner in the room, regardless of regulations. Next day the promised hot water never materialised. The manager, a strangely shambling Indian, wanted us to pay for the garage. With some bad feeling we parted.
January 15th
The road from Copacabana went straight up a steep hill. The Renault couldn’t make it – even with a mighty run-up, even in reverse – so they took a long diversion, got stuck in a bog, and eventually reappeared round the hill 45 minutes later. After a short way we met a police control. He told us we were not allowed to leave without a stamp from the police at Copacabana. Engagingly he produced the stamp we should have. Alas, he said, if we didn’t want to go back to Copacabana (Heaven forbid) we would have to pay 10 pesos. We had no pesos. A dollar would do. A very neat trap, but not very expensive.
Eventually we got to Peru and waited endlessly for immigration. Here is where we first met the raft of Germans who were to hound us all the way to Puno and beyond, filling the hotels, eating all the food, and covering me with mud from their taxis as they passed. There were two rivers to ford. The second, by far the fastest and deepest so far (about two feet) was too much for me. I stopped halfway across but managed to stand the bike upright. Then some police drove past me, sending tidal waves. I waded to the shore with camera and bags, and back. Then a driver threw me a piece of cord. I tied another one to it. Two Peruvians and a German helped to haul me out. As the Frenchmen arrived I was wringing out my socks and emptying my boots. They got across the river but couldn’t get out. So I had to get back in the water and pull.
We drove the last 20K in the dark, but fortunately here it was dry. In Puno great difficulty finding hotel rooms – the Germans had them all. Someone did find us a hotel. The courtyard was an extraordinary labyrinth of makeshift constructions, rickety steps and drums of water. There was one room and three beds. The bike was outside in the passage. We felt like having a grand meal to offset the horrible hotel, but the Germans had eaten all the food. We found a chicken take-away and ate like savages – but with two bottles of good wine.
The hotel manager had a nightwatchman who slept just inside the door. He came into the room when we were fast asleep, switched on the light and said the bike had to be moved. I told him to move it then and went back to sleep. At six he came back, switched on the light to say he was “revisando” everything. We cursed and tried to sleep again.
January 16th
From Puno next day was fine most of the way, then a hailstorm. I left B&A behind me with a punctured tyre.
65 km to Sicuani. First 35 km were fast and dry – the last 30 km were the worst ever. Deep red mud, mostly in the dark, with corrugations. Reminded me of World War I battlefield. Craters everywhere with just a lacework of road showing. In one village it looked impassable. I tried riding on rough ground but fell and couldn’t pick it up because ground just slipped away under my feet. With help got going again.
B&A turned up late. To our surprise Sicuani had the beginnings of a luxury hotel. There was hot water (a little), a separate dining room, a llama, two gorgeous parrots. We did quite well, though the food was less than brilliant. Next day, to Cuzco…
PICTURES BY BRUNO BOUVERY
In December of 1975 I was in Chile. At that time the entire country was under a fierce military dictatorship. In this same week, 48 years ago, I was in the capital Santiago where a nightly curfew was strictly imposed by lethal means. I was deeply in love at the time with a Chilean journalist who belonged to Chile’s upper social stratum and lived in a prosperous part of town, but her circumstances made it impossible for me to stay with her. My hosts lived some miles away, there was gunfire in the streets every night and several times, leaving her too late, I ran the gauntlet on my bike.
Chile really was beautiful, but deadly
The dictatorship was imposed by four generals, Pinochet for the Army, Leigh Guzman for the Air Force, Merino for the Navy and Mendoza for the police. The most notorious then was Leigh Guzman, whose planes had bombed the presidential palace and caused the death of the President, Salvador Allende. My lover was passionately opposed to the dictatorship but had friends everywhere and we were invited to a party where most of the guests were upper class and favoured the regime. As always in extreme times the producers of tragicomic episodes worked overtime. I met a leather-jacketed man who supported the generals but had been arrested by mistake and imprisoned with left-wing suspects for some days. Frightened to death at the time, he nevertheless described with awe and relish the horrifying screams of tortured victims echoing through the building, relieving me of any doubt I might have had about the stories I had been told. Fortunately for him the mistake was discovered in time and he was released, but he remained convinced that ‘leftists’ all deserved what they got.
I also met a rather pretentious newspaperwoman called Perla Searle who worked for El Mercurio, Chile’s oldest newspaper whose editor, Silva Espejo, fervently supported the generals. I asked her to talk to him on my behalf, and soon after was told that the Air Force General Leigh Guzman had agreed to an interview for The Sunday Times.
So on this Sunday, 48 years ago, I went to her office to meet Perla who complained that she had had to interrupt her lunch, and that we would have to use her car because the paper wouldn’t reimburse her for a taxi. We drove through empty streets to the UNCTAD building where Silva Espejo was waiting to introduce me to the General. Apparently the generals had seized that United Nations building, a great glass barn with a heli-pad on top, for their offices. Uniformed carabinieri, with slung machine guns, unusually shiny boots, and many more leather straps than seemed necessary, were clustered around all the doorways. Because I had no other clothes, I was in my travelling jeans with a broad leather belt and leather pouch, which seemed oddly suitable, and I toyed with the idea of asking to borrow a gun.
Eventually Silva Espejo, an elderly man, formal and impassive, arrived walking very, very slowly and seeming to have trouble with his shoes. Together we advanced at a snail’s pace to the reception area, also dominated by police. A woman exchanged my passport for a piece of paper, I was asked to open my camera case, and we proceeded across a courtyard to the main building. There were some steps to go down, and twice I had to hold Espejo up as his legs gave way.
A guard travelled with us in a lift and passed us on to a reception area, and Espejo went into the general’s office first for 20 minutes before I followed. The General, a short man of undistinguished appearance, greeted me easily and sat opposite me at a table. We talked in French. He began by asking me which countries I had visited. I went through the list as quickly as possible and told him, truthfully enough, how beautiful I thought Chile to be.
“How do you find things here?” he asked.
I said I was anxious for him to know that I had not been sent to get a story. I would only write something if I thought it could be constructive. Thus my opinions would be my true opinions, not those he might want to hear. I said Chile made me nervous, that people were afraid, that if I lived here I too would be frightened of being carried off in the night.
He replied by making a general case for the measures they had taken, putting most emphasis on the “Communist Plot” to isolate Chile psychologically, economically and militarily in preparation for “a Viet Nam in South America. He walked across to his desk, fished out a printed White Paper about the build-up of arms in Peru and came back to sit next to me. It had a rather meaningless title, “Defense: Foreign Affairs,” and he read out lists of arms being supplied to Peru, which had a moderately reform minded government at the time. I remember seeing SA 5, 6, and 7 missiles and 500 T4 tanks. He said he got it from his attaché in London. He read them out as though they were self-explanatory; Peru was being primed for war with Chile. Peru he said was “on a direct line to Communism”, part of the world conspiracy, financed by Russia, through Cuba. Then more stuff about human rights in Cuba and Russia, all confirmed, he said by an exiled Cuban singer whom he’d met the night before. Meanwhile, he said, the British were strangling his air force by refusing to supply parts for his British Hawker Hunters. This was all to do with Communist Unions in the UK.
“Better watch out,” he said, “or we’ll bring all our money out, and won’t sell you any copper.”
Most startling though was his belief that Britain would soon have its own military coup, and I only found out later that there had, in fact, been a crackpot scheme, involving a general or two, to overthrow the government.
I said that my preoccupation was with the many thousands he had locked up and subjected to torture.
“I don’t think you appreciate the significance of the human rights issue in Europe,” I said. “Even those who might otherwise support Chile would not do so in face of the evidence. Surely by now you must have removed the threat to your internal security.”
“Yes, he replied, “there is no more an internal problem.”
“Then you can relax your repressive measures,” I said.
“Yes, I am going to talk to the other generals about it this month.”
“And your prisoners?” I prodded.
“We realise we must let them go.”
I left on a wave of euphoria, but before writing anything I went to discuss the matter with the British ambassador’s number two.
Far from being encouraged, he was disturbed by my news. We sat outside the embassy on a plumbed lawn where the risers, inconveniently, popped up to water the benches we were sitting on, causing him to speak sharply to his gardener. After a lengthy talk I was persuaded not to send anything to London for fear I was being used and that it might upset the ambassador’s arrangements.
I have regretted it bitterly ever since. There never was a relaxation and, so far as anyone knew, no prisoners were released. At the very least I would have exposed their hypocrisy.
I visited Gustavo Leigh Guzmann again in 1982, now retired and in business. He received me in his office in jovial fashion. Shortly afterwards men burst in with machine guns and assassinated him.
On this day, 49 years ago, I drifted along the Nile from Aswan to Wadi Halfa on a ferry consisting of two rickety boats tied together. One of them, the second class, was occupied by Nubian camel drivers. The other first-class boat carried Europeans. My ticket was second-class, but I found the snoring intolerable and smuggled myself into first class and slept out under the sky.
First Class accommodation on the roof of the ferry to Wadi Halfa
What follows is straight out of my notebook:
Bright moon. Stars becoming familiar. Cold at 3am but not too much so. Spent time talking to Australian Mike McDonald. Something about him remained alienating to the last. A conflict of styles.? His funny hat – a Muslim cap – was aggressively incongruous. The forthright manner was not quite true. – and concealed a complex and uneasy personality. Protestations of easy independence were contradicted by heavy point-scoring humour, and he lost few opportunities for self-congratulation. Yet there is a wistful, touching desire to find peace with himself (which he failed to find in his monastery).
From Wadi Halfa I had to take the train to Atbara and met a Dutch couple:
Although the Dutchman wielded an equally heavy sledgehammer he seemed to have found more peace in his 26 years. He and his wife Alice were travelling to South Africa to visit her father. It was her idea – he had wanted to holiday in Norway. Now he was finding much reward. His treatment of his wife was very masterful, and she was obviously devoted to him, even when he scolded her like a father. A big man, studying ‘marketing’, son of an old family, with a natural confidence which could make him boorish and pig-headed but for her moderating influence which he is happily able to accept. He was taken with my idea of classifying people as ‘alive or dead’ but said he would need to study it.
In Atbara I met Thomas Taban Duku and then Fabiano Munduk, both African Christians from South Sudan. With Fabiano an evening that started when he came to the hotel with his nephew Peter, a four-year-old boy in brightly striped jersey and shorts. They had come from school sports day. All day I had heard martial music of the (British) Empire drifting across. He explained they had been playing musical chairs. We drank two bottles of sherry between us in a bar, then took him by taxi to his brother’s house. Brother is in the police (a captain he said). Brother’s wife Rita speaks no English. He got her to give us a small bottle of home-distilled date liquor (like eau de vie). Dates left in water for seven days, then the container set out over a fire. Above it a lid perforated. On that a small bowl. Above it a bigger bowl serving as a lid and condenser, filled with cold water.
We took the bottle and walked across cultivated ground to look at the (Blue) Nile. Fabiano says the White Nile was a day’s walk away. He obviously didn’t know the Blue Nile only joins the White Nile at Khartoum 200 miles further south. We walked back to place where music had sounded. Fabiano was dodging about into bushes in the manner of Don Genaro looking for cars. I think he was looking for animals or snakes. We had been talking about his life in the bush – ‘bus’ – when he and his brothers were refugees from Sudan after his parents had been killed – he said – by the Moslem army at the time. He is proud of his brothers. They are twelve. Two are at Oxford, one doing economics, another librarianship. The others are mostly in the army – all of them officers. He is the youngest and least qualified.
The music came from a wedding party in a community on the edge of Atbara. Large square clearing with canvas spread over a large area, illuminated by bulbs strung out in large rectangle. Rows of chairs all round. Many children jostling for good positions, scrapping with each other but although they pushed each other around quite hard there was no bitterness in their manner and no crying. Fabiano says the children are allowed to be independent.
The band arrived in an army truck. We were given favoured seats, and then plates of food were brought specially for us, ta’ameya, bits of meat, salad, sweet pastry, bread and water. When the music started men would wander over casually, sometimes two together, snapping the fingers of one outstretched arm, to indicate their pleasure, and reach over to touch one or more of the players. Then they would retire, just walking way slowly.
I don’t know now who it was that sent me to the Golden Hotel in Cairo, but it was an inspired recommendation. Right in the centre of the city, on a busy but fashionable street, it should have been too expensive, but despite the noble façade the rooms were quite spartan and the facilities very basic. In reality it was pretty run down and although I don’t remember any cockroaches, I’m sure there were some around.
Even so the manager, Amin Simaika, worked mightily to keep it clean. I had only intended to stay a couple of days, but in fact I got stuck there for over a week, hoping in vain for permission to ride up the Nile to Aswan, and during that time Amin became a good friend. He endeared himself to me immediately by bringing the motorcycle into the hotel, relieving me of the biggest of my problems.
I spent most of my days on fruitless missions to the Government Press office in pursuit of a permit, but although they didn’t accuse me of being an Israeli spy – which had happened to me twice in one day in Alexandria – I was obviously viewed with suspicion. And in fact I have to admit, retrospectively, they may have saved me from a nasty fate because the population had been raised to a high pitch of ardour by the war. The cities along the Nile, like El Minya, Asyut and Luxor, became infamous years later for massacres perpetrated by fundamentalist Muslims and any foreigner would have been suspect.
The evenings I usually spent with Amin and Alan, a very English young man with blond hair, a slightly posh accent and a sardonic manner whom Amin was convinced was an MI6 agent. We played a lot of chess, which I discovered to my surprise I was quite good at, and learned as much as I could about what was going on.
Amin was a Copt – that is to say, a Christian – which put him and his sect somewhat at odds with the Muslim population. His uncle, who actually owned the hotel, was a very distinguished old gent called Faris Serafim whose family had founded the city of El Minya. He told of his great grandfather who was “keeper” of a village in the reign of Mohamad Ali. The villagers hatched a plot to murder him rather than pay taxes. He escaped, but they claimed he had run off with their taxes and a price was put on his head.
However, he made his way down the Nile and somehow contrived a meeting with Ali when the guards were some way off.
“Surely you know,” said Ali, “that I have put a price on your head?”
“You can have it for nothing,” was the reply, “if you don’t believe my story.”
The upshot was that he promised to double the tax returns if he was allowed to found his own village, and did so. The village became El Minya, and his family became very wealthy: Sufficiently wealthy, according to Alan, to give a visiting Cardinal a dinner for forty off gold plate. But most of the wealth was confiscated by Nasser at the revolution.
Faris was at Oxford in 1919 with Nehru and other famous men of that generation, who founded an International Club and toured England – Cardiff and Bradford were mentioned – to speak in halls and churches about their respective countries.
In my notebook I wrote:
“Cairo was the first city I’d come to in which fate as much as mortar seemed to fix the fabric.
In Tunis the poorest appeared to have some sense of social movement, could dream and hustle a bit. But here the impression was different. Cairo was intensely populated – 6 million in a relatively small space. Many of them – I don’t know how many – were newly arrived from the farms around and were as completely uneducated and unskilled as can be.
I saw them swarming into the city on foot in the morning, hundreds and thousands it seemed, in identical pale blue galabeas, crowding over a footbridge that crosses a big central highway.
Economic inequality is, of course extreme. Despite having kicked out the British, the shadow of the Raj lingers on. My small amount of money buys me luxury.
Not a hundred yards from my hotel is a cake and coffee house called Groppi’s, where a light breakfast of eggs, coffee, toast and marmalade involves the waiter in bringing eleven separate items to the table; a glass of water, a glass containing cutlery and napkins, two heavy silver jugs of coffee and milk, a cup and saucer, a plate of toast, a slab of white butter, a silver pot of marmalade, salt and pepper, and the eggs. My coffee cup comes from the kitchen full of boiling water which is poured out at the last minute.
It takes the waiter, who wears white linen and a turban, an appreciable time to unload the tray. The whole routine, I presume, was prescribed by the British, and the price is 28 pence.
Anyone living here within grasp of a Western income is clearly able to enjoy the best the city can offer, while the poor are just able to subsist on the crumbs he sprinkles in his wake – a penny for guarding the car, twopence for polishing his shoes, a penny for simply being somewhere regularly on the off chance of a service to perform, and so on.
There is little evidence of resentment on one side or contempt on the other. Once the donor has evolved his routine, and his small area of patronage becomes established, the relationships are warm and benevolent on both sides. This mutual respect is fostered by the clear duty imposed on the Moslem by his religion, to donate a distinct fraction of his income or wealth to others in need (10%, I think) The other duties are, to pray five times a day, to keep himself clean – particularly private parts – to do as he would be done by, and to visit Mecca at least once, if he can afford it.”
I finally surrendered all hope of riding the bike to Aswan, and took the train. Just before leaving, Amin asked me if I would carry his sword to Brazil. It was his father’s ceremonial sword (he had been a soldier). Amin was plotting to leave Egypt illegally and couldn’t take anything much with him. Of course I agreed. It fitted next to the umbrella, caused a bit of excitement here and there, and I delivered it a year later in Campinas, as promised.
In Campinas, Brazil in September 1974. You can see the tip of the umbrella, but I had already given the sword to Amin, on the right.
During the course of this past week I have been relieved to learn that the world is probably not flat after all, and that the flat-earthers seem to be losing their grip, so I’ll leave that subject and go on to something else.
I still have all the notebooks I filled during my first journey around the world, so I thought it would be interesting to see what I was jotting down 49 years ago today. But while I was looking this up I noticed something that I thought would interest you.
I was, as you know, a novice motorcyclist – I had only got my license three months earlier – and I was, quite plainly, scared. Just before starting the journey, on an overloaded and badly packed bike, I wrote:
Here is a list of the things I fear
Getting on rough ground and finding that the load makes it undriveable; Dropping the bike and not being able to pick it up again; That the odds on a fatal accident seem unreasonably high; That the combination of chores may become crushing, and pin me down to immobility; That if the bike is stolen I shall have nothing left but a few dollars to get me home; That my fear for the bike will force me into unbearable cost and sterile apartness; That the natives will really be hostile; That with one hand clamped down on a gushing artery, I shan’t be able to unpack and open a field dressing with the other; That wherever I go it will always seem to be too late.
Four years later I was happily able to say that my fears were exaggerated (although I never did have a gushing artery). But I am quite sure that being afraid during the first months were key to my survival.
So it turns out that on November 21st 1973 I was in Egypt, in Cairo and riding my bike to visit the pyramids, just like any tourist. But there weren’t any tourists because there was a war on. Remember? Egypt and Israel?
To my astonishment I see that in Jupiter’s Travels I wrote nothing about Cairo at all. Let me make up for some of it here. It turns out that what I wrote in my diary surprises even me. Only lightly edited, I quote:
A throng of guides, horses and camel drivers make an appreciation of the pyramids impossible. To have first stumbled upon them must have been marvelous but I can find no sense of awe for these lumps of stone. Less barbaric than Teohuacan, but still a monumental egoism. The marvels are all abstract – geometry, astronomy, etc.
I can’t resist the importunities of a guide who is clever enough to be less clamorous than the others, but he shows me very little. In a tent he gives me good tea made on a primus stove by a pretty wife dressed in pink. She boils the water and tea vigorously, decants it, boils it again, decants it again. How the sugar got in or where the tea leaves went I have no idea.
Walk into the second pyramid (Queen Sharfeen?) One tomb with hardboard partitions. Graffiti carved into the stone in the early 19th Century. G.R.Hill and Scheistenberger were here.
Back to the first (big) pyramid, Cheops. Inside is like something from the film Metropolis – all scaffolding and duckboards. What, in God’s name, does the average package tourist get out of it all?
I’m ready to leave altogether but give way to a camel driver, and now my reward, because he gives me a great ride, over an hour, into the sand dunes, on Jack Hulbert (that’s the name of the camel).
Faris, the driver, is bright, humorous, great fun. We take a roll of pictures with his mate, Mandor.
I really rode that camel, rein, switch and heel. JH lurched and swayed and hobbled along, with brief bursts of crazy trotting. I crossed my legs, Arab style, across his shoulders. My thighs ached from the unaccustomed movement. He is six and will go on probably until he’s twenty-five. There are sacks of clover at his side under heavy embroidered cloth.
I’m disturbed by my failure to respond to the pyramids and question the quality of the response in others. I know perfectly well that if I want I can whip up a storm of fancies and imaginings but I was determined to let the pyramids do the work. As props for a mind hungry for sensation they do very well, no doubt, but as objects to inspire pure awe I think they fail, even more so as they are surrounded by bric-a-brac, haggling and petty detail.
I’ve been told that it’s better to see them first at night, through ‘son et lumière’ and that it’s a very good show. I quite believe it, but that’s a different matter.
The pyramids depend, like all other earthly things, on perspective. When the perspective is altered, whether by a persistent camel driver or a new catch-penny museum built up against the side of the pyramid itself, the pyramids fail to overcome. The viewer has to supply, by an act of imagination, what has been stolen. I refuse because I feel I will become an accomplice of the despoilers.
Yesterday I recorded the final chapter of Don’t Boil The Canary. It’s a huge relief. I had no idea, when I started doing this nine months ago, just how demanding it is. For one thing my voice has been constantly on the brink of collapse, and a frog has taken up permanent residence in my throat.
When the idea of recording Jupiter’s Travels first came up I was hoping to persuade Ewan McGregor to do it, and he told me, vehemently, “I’m not the man for this job. It’s absolutely the hardest thing to do to keep it alive for days in a recording studio. I recorded five short stories once for Radio 4 and it almost ended me.”
I should have been warned then what I was in for.
Well, I didn’t have a recording studio – only the kitchen table. And I suspect that if you listen to it, as the recording proceeds you’ll hear me getting older. I am full of admiration for Rupert Degas who recorded Jupiter’s Travels with that marvellously rich, even-toned voice, with never a hint of stress or uncertainty.
My only excuse for doing it myself is authenticity, and there’s plenty of that. It’s possible, if you listen carefully, that you may hear my neighbours shouting in the street, and there was a month when the village authorities were tearing up the square.
To be honest I have no idea what will happen to the recording now. I have a friend, Iain Harper, who I hope will help to bring it to market, and I expect to make it available from this website.
So, in other news, it has taken me five years to discover that a motorcycle mechanic from New Zealand lives in the next village.
A friend of his from Los Angeles introduced us, but Peter Clark and I are now buddies, and he has carried off my 650 Funduro for a last ditch attempt to discover why it has the unfortunate habit of dying under me at completely arbitrary intervals.
You may have heard me complaining about this before. Several times I thought the problem was resolved. This will be my last attempt. You have also heard me threatening to give it up and it may come to that too, but not until I’ve ironed out this last wrinkle.
When I did my first big journey I rather took it for granted that the world was a globe, but there are some people going around now saying the earth is flat?
There was a time, many thousands of years ago, when everybody thought so and it’s easy to see why. They didn’t know if it was a disc or a rectangle, or what happened at the edges, but it didn’t bother them. They would have said that when I rode my motorcycle round the world I was just riding in a flat circle.
Today most people – pretty much everybody – knows the earth is a globe, but now, suddenly, there are people who say they got it on very big authority that the earth is actually flat, and they want us to give them money and vote for them so they can beat the scoundrels who say the world is round?
As a reward they say they will bring down gas prices, conquer inflation, and stop aliens from clambering up over the edge of the world to do bad things.
So what do you do? Do you believe them? I guess I’ll find out on Tuesday.
I suppose it’s about time I started believing what people tell me. For forty years now they have been saying that it was my book that inspired them to get on their bikes in the first place, and then out into the world. I have always been afraid of letting all that praise go to my head but now, at 91, perhaps I can let go and be proud of that achievement because I believe strongly that individuals travelling in that way can only be good for society.
And yet, at the same time, when I’m asked to talk to an audience about my experiences I have very mixed feelings. I talked to a tentful of friends at the Overland Event near Oxford (pictured above) and a few days later I talked to a room full of people at a lovely pub called The Richard Onslow in Cranleigh, Surrey.
Sara Linley, who runs a motorcycle apparel shop in Guildford with her husband Chris, approached me two months ago. It was their friend, Elspeth Beard, who lives nearby in a converted water tower, a quite extraordinary building, who suggested that they ask me to talk when I was over in the UK for the biker festival at Ragley Hall. The talk was such a success that when I came back to the UK this time for Paddy Tyson’s Overland Event they asked me to do it again.
My job is still to convince people that nothing can compare with riding out alone into the world and yet, even as I’m talking, I can’t help feeling a little sad. I know that no one today could hope to experience it in the way I did.
I was lucky of course, very lucky. I set off around the world at a very good time – in 1973 – long before ordinary people like us dreamed of communicating with anything more sophisticated than the telephone. The world was divided up, more or less, into compartments. Unless it was your business to know what was happening outside your bailywick people generally had only a vague idea of what was going on in the rest of the world, or what it looked like. True, after the war “Wogs” didn’t begin at Calais anymore, but people and places beyond the edges of Europe were only dimly recognisable to most people. No Instagram, very few pictures at all, and no blogs.
The little I knew of South America was mostly coloured by my stepfather’s description of various sordid ports he visited when he worked as an engineer on merchant ships, and my ideas of Africa were shaped by the war, and novelists such as Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad.
Today we all see and know too much about the outside world, but what we know is shaped by others who decide what we should know, and what they want us to believe. How often travellers today find, when they arrive at some distant destination, that what they see and hear is nothing like what they’ve been told.
You could say I’m guilty too; that if you had travelled to, say, Zimbabwe at the same time I did, in 1974, you might have seen it quite differently, but in my defence I say Jupiter’s Travels is not reportage. It is as much about how the world affected me, as it is a picture of the world, and one of Its purposes is to persuade you, the reader to go and see for yourself. And although the world is very different today that is still my purpose and it seems, to some extent, I have succeeded. I think the people who listen to me, know that. And I’m grateful.
Marabou stalks in Tanzania’s Mikumi Nature Reserve
Forty-eight years ago, when I was riding through Tanzania on my way to Mbeya, I came across an elephant. *
“It stood a little way back from the road and facing me, arrested in the act of chewing a trunk-load of grass. The grass stuck out on either side of its mouth behind the trunk, like a cat’s whiskers, giving it an undignified and rather lugubrious look. We stared at each other for a while. Then I got the definite feeling that it was fed up with me and planning to do something about it. I kicked over the engine and rode on.”
“Farther along a small troop of zebras also stood grazing and again I stopped. All stood still as statues, heads turned to face me from whatever position they had been in. Their small, round ears strained upwards and seemed to tremble with the effort to pick up any slightest signal. Their markings were immaculate, as if freshly painted on with immense care. All wild animals gave this impression of sharpness and clarity that was new to me, and I began to remember zoo animals as having lost this edge and looking faded and grubby by comparison.”
“Nothing ever enchanted me so much as coming across wild animals. I thought often how human society had impoverished itself by driving this element out of its life. In Africa I began to see the human race, sometimes, as a cancerous growth so far out of equilibrium with its host, the earth, that it would inevitably bring about the destruction of both.”
Well, we’ve gone a lot farther down that road since then. I’m writing from one of those heat waves which are soon likely to become another word for summer. I shall leave this world long before the worst of it but how dismal to see it coming. Are any of you from West Virginia? Can’t you recall Joe Manchin? Is there anyone in Moscow? Can’t you plant a bomb under Putin? We’ve got rid of Boris, but not in a very useful way. If only my pen were really mightier than a sword. If only I were mighty enough to wield it.
So far life is still manageable. I rode my new MP3 a few hundred miles recently, just as the heat was coming on. I rode past grand vistas of green grassland and newly verdant vines, and plunged into aromatic forests of evergreens. It’s a 500cc machine and it gobbled up the miles with ease. So I still get these ideas . . .
Africa may be a bit too far for me now. Anyway, the second time I went, there were no elephants on the road. But the first time will always be an explosive experience.
I have to assume that if you are reading these words you have an interest in travel, probably by motorcycle, and that you are curious about those parts of the world you haven’t experienced. Even though the abundance of images from everywhere today can give the illusion of being there, you know that it is an illusion. You need to be there to know it and, more importantly, to know how you personally respond to it. Adventure travel, after all, just means getting out of your comfort zone and finding out what happens.
So, of course you would want the world, as it is, to survive, and you would want travel to be possible and unhindered by wars and dictators.
This is my clumsy way of establishing what it is that you and I have in common, regardless of age, nationality, politics, religion and gender: and I want to say that what we have in common is vastly more important than those other things. So, what are the biggest threats to our common interest? Well, I would say, first and foremost, climate change. Apart from making “normal” life abnormally uncomfortable, it will create dangerous, chaotic conditions in the most interesting parts of the world, like Africa and Asia – travel will become difficult and downright dangerous, but not in a very interesting way.
What is puzzling, and extremely aggravating, is that American voters, who have the power to turn the tide, are so concerned about their current discomfort that they are shutting the door on measures that must be taken now to avoid a dystopian future. Do they feel helpless? Why is the only charismatic leader around determined to make a bonfire of the environment?
I reckon I may be talking to a couple of thousand people who feel as I do. I keep coming back to it, I know, but are we helpless too?
* Jupiter’s Travels: P 153
