News from Ted
My bike sits in the garage, gloomy and forlorn. I can’t ride it because it still has British plates on it, and I can’t get it insured. To get French plates I have to have a piece of paper to prove to the French authorities that the bike conforms to the European norms. Of course it does. It was made in Italy, sold and used in England. It’s as European as you can get, but the French have to have a piece of paper to prove it. The French love pieces of paper. That’s probably the worst thing I can say about them.
The paper they want costs 150 euros but there’s a business in England that said they could give it to me for half the price, and being greedy I fell for it. What they gave me was a lovely piece of paper, with all kinds of seals and signatures on it, but when I took it to the Prefecture (that’s French for police) they said it was no good. So I’ve had to fork out another 150 euros anyway, and that should teach me a lesson, but somehow I don’t think I learned it.
Anyway, on Tuesday I’m going to take this new, shiny piece of paper in its cellophane cover to the police in Beziers and hope that I don’t have to learn any more lessons. I’m an old dog. Can I learn new tricks?
Meanwhile, what is there to do except enjoy life, drink wine, and listen to music. Which is what I’ve been doing tonight. And tonight was astonishing.
A guitarist came to the café – a Spanish guitarist with violent Gypsy songs and tumultuous technique. And then Pascal, the accordion player who haunts the café, found a way to play with him, although they had never played together before, and between them they cooked up the most exciting, heart-throbbing jazzy music I have heard in ages. And it was the one night I didn’t bring my iPhone, and I curse the fact that I can’t give you a video snip of this most amazing musical triumph. Really, I know what I’m talking about. I have heard great music and great jazz in my life and this was phenomenal.
I won’t claim that this kind of thing happens every night at the Café de La Poste, and I swear that I have no interest in promoting the café other than that I badly need it to be there and succeed, but really, for a small place in a small village the record is pretty impressive. Only last night there were five people playing ukulele accompanying a wonderful chirpy singer, like a reincarnation of Edith Piaf, singing naughty, suggestive songs, with the crowd clapping and singing along.
Please come. The café needs customers. The food’s good. And I’ll sign your book.
Cheers,
Ted
Google me at
Aspiran-34800
France
I had a nightmare last night. The world was in ruins, in a rather colourful and impressionistic way, and I was in a famous photographer’s studio where he was trying to turn the ruins into an art object. I had been up and down the west coast of America, on a bike I think, getting lost in hotels and viewing the destruction, and I was trying to get the celebrity’s people to take my accounts seriously but they didn’t want to know, which was hardly surprising because I actually had nothing to offer, and that was the nightmarish part. It was the sense of my own futility that woke me up.
Of course the world around me now is not in ruins. Village life goes on as usual. People are coming to dinner. The battery of my bike has died. The church bell, which rings every half hour, is ringing as I write. The nightmare is still some way away, but I feel it coming.
One summer in the late nineties I was riding a big Triumph Tiger around the States. I was already well enough known that people invited me to drop by and stay for a night or two. One such invitation came from a man in Louisiana. He said if I turned up before he was back from work I should help myself to the whisky. It was the kind of sultry, sweaty night you associate with the south and the room I found myself in was a cavernous space full of steamy shadows. A whisky on the rocks sounded very appealing, the bottle was where he said it would be and I helped myself to ice from the freezer, not noticing that it was also full of seafood. It was the first, and I hope the last time in my life that I drank shrimp-flavoured whisky.
When my host arrived I found him very congenial. We had good conversation, great food. I slept well and in the morning again, before I left, he struck me as an intelligent, thoughtful, well-balanced man. Ten years later I wrote something in favour of Obama’s bid for the presidency and that same man sent me the most vindictive email I have ever received. He called me a disgusting, myopic fool, and tore into me for supporting “that animal.” I was truly shocked and, believe me, that hardly ever happens.
I have always thought it very important to criticise politicians. I used to think that Americans were much too kind to them, worshipful almost, especially to senior politicians like senators and White House dignitaries. I thought it would be impossible for an intelligent American to insult his revered institutions so much as to call a presidential candidate an animal. So I assumed my friend had suffered some terrible trauma in his life – Alzheimer’s perhaps. I should have known better.
On my way around the world I’ve had friendly, enjoyable relationships with people whose fundamental beliefs were abhorrent to me: An Afrikaner in apartheid Africa, a militant Muslim evangelist in Sudan, a tribal anti-semite in Tunisia, and so on. But I made the lazy assumption that we, in Europe and America, were beyond that sort of thing except when it came to fringe extremists. I couldn’t have been more wrong. My man in Louisiana was only one of millions who kept their unseemly thoughts nicely tucked away behind courtly southern manners when in the presence of “foreigners” like me. The distressing ex-mayor in West Virginia, with her careless reference to Michelle Obama as an “ape on heels”, is like a bookend around that story.
Of course it’s not just about race. It’s about poverty, neglect, misinformation and the deadly precision with which politicians manipulate underprivileged constituencies. In India, a politician could secure the votes of several thousand destitute villagers with one standpipe of drinking water. The principle’s the same. It took Nigel Farage and Donald Trump to wake me up to the existence of these unreconstructed nations within a nation. I suppose I should be grateful to them, for exposing some of the realities that we in our supposedly advanced civilisations have been trying to ignore.
My second big journey in 2001 made it pretty clear to me that all the huge disruptions in the world today are symptoms of three enormous changes that occurred since I first wandered around forty years ago: huge population growth, an information revolution, and creeping climate change. Large parts of the world are unable to sustain their populations, climate change is drying them out, and the internet is telling them where to go to get the kind of life that we are enjoying. It may sound simplistic but I think it’s incontestable.
In a smaller, more local variation of the same pattern, it’s what’s happening in England and America. A self-satisfied urban and coastal elite lost touch with the country where large numbers of under-privileged people have been nurturing their grievances and hiding their prejudices under a mask of political correctness. It was surprisingly easy for two rabble-rousers to rip the mask away, exploit their emotions, tell them a story they wanted to hear and watch them rise up in anger.
The terrible, destructive truth is what we have seen demonstrated again and again in human history. These agents of change, these provocateurs, are interested only in boosting their own egos. They have no solutions, and the upheavals they generate lead to chaos and violence from which it takes ages to recover.
I was only eight years old at the outbreak of World War Two, which has given me a life-long interest in the times that led up to it. I imagine that the sick feeling I have today must be rather similar to the way many felt in 1938. These worrying and mind-numbing events – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Ukraine – are just premonitory tremors. But its awful to think that our destinies are in the hands of people like bumptious Boris, egregious Farage and the slithy Gove on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other such ghastly creatures as Mitch O’Connell, Rudy Giuliani and the naked Emperor Trump.
Maybe from now on I really will just stick to motorcycles. The poet Alexander Pope once wrote: “When vice prevails and impious men hold sway, the post of honour is a private station.” Yes, but, is it honourable to stay silent?
I haven’t been in a locker room since I was 17 which probably accounts for the fact that all my joints seem to be working quite painlessly, but even back then in post-war London boys might be heard saying some pretty disgusting things. I don’t remember anything about pussies because we hadn’t graduated yet to reverse anthropomorphism. The C word was certainly uttered from time to time, but only as a pejorative. Anyone boasting about his ability to grab it, in the Trumpian manner, would have been considered a complete twat or worse.
If there had been such a twat, and if later he had put himself up for Prime Minister of Great Britain, and if I had been able to produce a tape of him proclaiming his vainglorious C-grabbing prowess, I doubt that it would have blighted his progress. Nor should it have. What has it got to do with running a country? My personal view is that most leaders have huge to monstrous egos, more or less well disguised, and with powerful lascivious urges to match. Neither presidents nor prime ministers should be chosen as role models. Obama seems to be a remarkable exception.
But Trump’s case (as always) is different. His so-called “banter” was really peacock-strutting boastfulness and, most importantly, it wasn’t in a locker room. He was licking his lips as he was being escorted by his well-born enabler to greet various desirable women. So it was much worse, much more revealing and I would say only barely under control. If the tape helps to defeat him I will be delighted, and yet this is hardly the best reason for keeping him out of office. A much better reason is that he clearly has no idea what he would do if he were elected other than to put Hillary in jail, cut taxes for the rich, build an impossible wall, and mess up the lives of a HUGE number of people. And then there’s the nuclear thing . . . Sweet Jesus, keep him out.
… and obviously I’m not the only one
Overland is one of those words used for promoting everything from socks to Santa, so you could be forgiven if you’ve missed Paddy Tyson’s Overland Magazine, for and about motorcycle travellers. But you won’t be forgiven if you don’t at least look for it now. Paddy, who also has a quite difficult day job, gives birth to this glossy marvel every three months, and it usually sells out.
So, when HorizonsUnlimited were unable to hold their usual annual meeting in the UK last year Paddy thought he’d have a go, and it was a delight. Everybody asked him to do it again, and this year it was even better despite having my picture plastered all over it. Obviously I had to go.
I flew to the UK from Montpellier because my plan was to come back with that scooter I used to roll around the British Isles in 2010 – you know, the one with two wheels in the front. I thought it would be great for nipping around the villages here in the south of France with a baguette across the handlebars, and a box of wine under the saddle.
I just assumed it would be good for a thousand miles to the south of France. I’m always saying you can go round the world on anything, but I confess I was a little nervous. Not about the bike, about myself. Some time, not too soon I hope, I will have to stop riding bikes. I have no idea how I will know when that is. I suppose one day I’ll sit on a bike and it will just feel wrong. Last year I didn’t ride at all. The V-strom needed work, and I didn’t have time to deal with it, so now I couldn’t help wondering . . .
Anyway, I got on the scooter in Godalming where Stephen had sent it to be serviced, and it felt all right. After six years I couldn’t at first remember how it worked, but mercifully it came back to me and I got it to Paddy’s do where he put it on show with my other bigger bikes from 1973 and 2001.
I was never particularly sentimental about my bikes, not even the Triumph. Here and there in the world, women – it was always women -– would want to give it a name: The Bug, or The Trumpet, or even The Green Chainsaw, but I refused to indulge them. To me it was always XRW964M.
But I must admit, that weekend, seeing the Triumph standing there spotlit, I felt a tremendous affection for it. With light glancing off the leather tank bags and the green panniers it looked not just smaller but somehow quite remote from all those other larger beasts. It looked so much simpler and cleaner, before the age of decals. And so accessible. Yet it had done everything those latter day behemoths had done. And it is still the most comfortable bike I have ever ridden.
The meeting was wonderful. Everybody said so, and one big reason was the site. It was at Hill End, just outside Oxford, a piece of ground that has seen children enjoy the pleasures of the outdoor world for many decades. It used to belong to a generous benefactor who bought it in the Twenties and it gradually evolved from an occasional camp to a fully fledged centre for kids to experience nature.
It has often crossed my mind that many children of my generation would never have known the countryside at all had it not been for evacuation in the second world war, and those who found their way here were very fortunate. The manager I met, Selby Dickinson, was extremely glad to have us there, recognising that our enthusiasm for the world at large resonated happily with the fascination for nature that he and his helpers try it impart to children. Some of the older kids were there too, in green uniform jerseys, helping out, making very good coffee, and very obviously engaged in making it all work.
All in all it felt like the beginning of an institution, and I hope Paddy finds it possible to keep it going for many more years.
I had a wonderful break in the middle of m journey down through France. some American friends met me in Beaune, and through their connections with the wine trade, they got me in to meet one of the more elevated wine makers of Burgundy, and taste his ethereal product, but I’m back in Aspiran now continuing my efforts to integrate myself with the French bureaucracy. Well, it’s not so bad, and I shall be very happy to part of such a fine social welfare system.
Angel. Teresa and I are just back from a much smaller but very enjoyable meeting in the west of France, where John Whyman organised a HorizonsUnlimted meeting. It was to introduce a new French translation of Jupiter’s Travels. I’ll write more about it soon.
On the night before Quatorze Juillet hundreds of us, in the village of Aspiran, sat down to dinner together under the plane trees with bottles of wine, to eat melon, ham, grilled sausage and lamb chops, cheese and ice cream. It’s a tradition in many French villages and a wonderful way for people to enjoy their sense of belonging to the community.
People who ride motorcycles have (or certainly should have) a much more conscious concern about the risks they are taking than the average motorist, who scarcely thinks about it at all. So the question of risk has fascinated me for decades, and particularly the way in which risk is manipulated for commercial and political profit. Of course the mundane business of insurance benefits from it enormously, but this year especially, on both sides of the Atlantic, fear-mongering has had some spectacular political successes, and the “jihadist menace” throws even more fuel on the fire.
Like many people of my generation, I imagine, I can’t stop comparing the situation in Europe today with my memories of wartime London. For a year, in 1944 and ’45, England was under attack by flying bombs and rockets. There were more than 22,000 casualties from the flying bomb alone, and a high proportion of those was in London where I was living at the time. So through most of my 14th year I was accustomed to the sound of these things flying in overhead, usually at night, and landing somewhere with a big “crump” – usually far away but sometimes frighteningly close.
I never thought that one of them would hit me – although I was once chased down the road, as it seemed to me, by one that came gliding in very low. I was also quite sure that we would win the war and that before long they would stop coming. I suppose I would guess now my chances of being hit were around one in a thousand – I had no way of knowing then what they were. I considered them negligible. I don’t think they affected my behavour much and, for a boy, they added a certain spice to everyday life.
The probability of my being targeted by a jihadist in Europe today must be around one in a million. I am four times more likely to be killed by a crashing airplane, and ten thousand times more likely to be killed on the road. So, much as I felt 70 years ago, I have no fear of being one of the victims of the current “wave of terror” and I also expect that it will be over some time soon unless, by over-reacting, we make it a lot worse.
At the same time as being horrified by the violence and deeply sympathetic to the victims, it is terribly important not to think of this as the end of life as we know it. In 1944 there were concerts in the Royal Albert Hall and all over England. Nobody thought, OMG what if a bomb were to fall on it.
Instead of fearing, uselessly, for our skins we could put a lot more energy into wondering why so many men and women are willing to throw away their lives in a violent gesture, or risk their families in desperate ventures at sea, and what part we in the pampered West have played in all this.
From the tragedy at Nice I rescued one bit of morbid humour.
It was the day the algorithms went horribly wrong. As I read a long account on my Mac of this ghastly rented truck mowing down crowds of holiday-makers the text was interspersed with a series of ads ––– from a car rental company.
Read about the Fire Sale, and then if you want that $10 CD and you’re in the USA, send me $12 (includes $2 for shipping) by Paypal to tsimon@mcn.org. If you’re not in the US send me an email, please.
Not quite, perhaps. More of a moving sale, but fire sure sounds more urgent. I did have a fire here once, in 1991, when my redwood barn burned down, and wasn’t that dramatic. All gone in six minutes. Now that I’m leaving those memories come flooding back.
So, as I search around for things to leave, things to take, I find something I haven’t looked at for a long time – it’s the living record of my second journey around the world, and looking at it again I am amazed at how rich it is, in stories and pictures, almost all of them unique to this medium. For three years I ran a live web site of my journey and it’s an example of what I have been imploring other travellers to do – look at what’s going on around you, think about it, write about it, photograph it, tell the truth.
There are 253 pages of text with 706 pictures from Europe, Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and India. It’s easy to navigate – there are calendars to take you anywhere you want to go instantly, and quite a lot about the choices I had to make before I started.
A lot happened on that journey – nine-eleven for one. Even now it reads like history, and it’s quite different fro the book I wrote afterwards, Dreaming of Jupiter.
I have been asking $25 for this CD, but I want more people to see it, so right now if you’re in the USA you can have it for $10, plus $2 postage. If you are anywhere else, just email me and we’ll work something out. I really believe it’s a bargain. If you don’t agree I’ll give you your money back. Can’t say fairer than that.
It has taken me 85 years to discover Verona, but I’m one of those people who like to save the best for last.
What got me there – apart from my new/old Citroen C2 – was an email from Luigi Licci who owns a travel book shop.
Anyone with a book shop will get my attention. Book shop owners are among the bravest, and most endangered people alive, and one should go any distance to find them. YOU will find him on the Via Stella in the heart of the city and the shop is named after Gulliver, who was my inspiration too.
Luigi invited me to enjoy stardom at one of those amorphous public events that I never really got the hang of, but which I liked tremendously. A PR girl in harlequin tights and a denim burqa tried to explain it to me in vain, but I had my shoes shined by an elegant gentleman in top hat and tails, so who needs explanations.
I think it was all about books and travel and motorcycles and Verona, but there were also people selling retro clothes and jewelry. The food was very nicely presented from cleverly converted trailers along the side of a sort of mews that was once attached to the city arsenal. As well as pasta and seafood there was beef from Argentina, which is a very big deal in Italy. I had some (too much actually) and it was pretty scrumptious. Everybody seemed to be doing well except for Giorgo, a short man with a huge tummy, who sat back on the saddle of his ice-cream tricycle. It wasn’t very hot and nobody wanted ice-cream. I felt sorry for him but he seemed happy enough not to have to bother.
As you can see a lot of people came to listen to me stumbling through a long interview and they seemed to be genuinely interested although it obviously helped that it was the only place where they could comfortably sit. I was interviewed by a notable Italian rider/writer called Roberto Parodi, who also translated for them since I don’t speak Italian (not to mention several hundred other languages).
What people generally want to ask me is how they too can have a journey like mine, and of course that’s impossible for all kinds of reasons. But I understand what lies behind the question and try to do my best. Anyway they all applauded enthusiastically, and I felt very much among friends.
Luigi – he’s the one in the green shirt – looked after me like a son (well, actually more like a grandfather) and invited me into his home to meet his family and friends. Of course I already knew that he must have another source of income because nobody makes money selling books off the shelf, and he was a successful broker in “real life”. So now he lives in the country in a villa with a view that Visconti would have envied. It’s heart-warming to see money put to such a good purpose.
Guiglio Fanton, who writes for Mototurismo, took me on a marvelous sight-seeing tour of the city. Of course all the stuff about Romeo and Juliet is a bit hoky, but there’s masses to see. He showed me piazza after piazza, each one more beautiful than the last, and Verona also has a Roman Arena, only a bit smaller than the colosseum in Rome. That’s Guiglio standing in front of it. (Happy Birthday Guiglio).
The city sits around a lovely green river that snakes through it. You can see someone fishing in the picture and I watched him make a catch, so the water’s clean, which is not too common in big cities. That huge castle is made, incredibly, from brick. Someone told me that brick absorbs the impact of canon balls better than stone – remember, you heard it here first.
The history, of course, goes back beyond the Romans and is pretty bloody. One member of the ruling family is credited with having slaughtered 11,000 men from Padua at one sitting, but the good old days are over and it’s pretty safe now. Can’t wait to get back.
When you move house all sorts of things float to the surface. Here’s one of them – a piece I wrote for the Sunday Times in 1977, just after getting back. I think it’s interesting to read now, and some of it is not a little prophetic.
It’s easy to look back and think of those days as relatively peaceful and innocent, but that’s not at all how they seemed then.
The twin track of molten tyre rubber began halfway round the bend, a steeply descending right-hander on a Turkish mountain. I kept to the right side near the rock face, and watched the tracks veer away to the left and across the far edge of the road where they disappeared. Beyond the edge there were several hundred feet of nothing. Some policemen in rough khaki with red insignia stood nonchalantly looking down. I stopped the bike and joined them. Far below, the rear end of a lorry was visible. I rode on contemplating those fresh black tracks, imagining myself in the lorry driver’s seat as he was launched into space. It made me shudder.
I thought of the various ways it could have happened. One lorry overtaking another on the way up? Steering failure? Terminal fatigue? Some drivers on this Eastern run use opium to keep going. I went on to imagine how I would react if a lorry like that came hurtling round a corner towards me, and paid homage to the dead man by using his example to stay alive. It was one of the methods I employed to survive a 65,000 mile journey on a motorcycle.
On the road from India to England there were endless chances to learn from other men’s’ tragedies. At times one could imagine there was a war on. Seven thousand miles strewn with wrecks. A TIR juggernaut sliced in two, the cab here by the roadside, the container in a river 200 feet away. How could that happen? A new white Peugeot rammed down to chest height under the rear axle of a trailer. Tankers ripped open. Innumerable vehicles upside down. All the way through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey the carnage mounts up as the traffic concentrates. On the Iran-Turkey border ( a wonderful old-style frontier where you have to pass through a stone gateway) the biggest TIR trucks queue up, two abreast, in a two-mile-long line.
At the Pakistani end I was, in a sense, lucky. Newly proclaimed curfews and martial law had reduced the traffic to a trickle. I was privileged to see a great city, Lahore, apparently deserted by all life except for the cows moving majestically in herds along the broad thoroughfares, quite independent of man.
Worst of all was the notorious Yugoslav Autoput from Skopje to Zagreb. Juggernauts and impatient German tourists bound for Greece pack these 800 miles of two lane monotony as tightly as the meat in a sausage skin. The skin of course bursts in frequent and bloody accidents.
Nowhere on the 7000 miles from Delhi to London is it a difficult ride, unless one chooses to cross the high passes in winter. (In Africa and along the South American Cordillera I had a much tougher time with rocks, sand, mud, flood, and corrugation). After four years of traveling I was glad to have this relatively easy – and often tarred – surface rolled out for me all the way home but, thank heaven, I had also acquired the road sense to survive on it.
Many people who took an interest in my journey consider that my greatest accomplishment was to come back alive. With my mind full of more positive benefits this seems like the least important achievement, though it was done with great effort. But at least it proves that the odds, however bad they may seem statistically, can be defeated. The only serious injury I suffered –to an eye – was due to a fishing accident.
I found the best aid to survival was the old truckie’s motto “drive the next mile”. to which I would add my own corollary for motorcyclists “and don’t let the other fellow get you.” Most people believe that situations can arise on the road which make them helpless victims of chance. I think you stand a much better chance if you believe that everything that happens to you on the road is your own fault. Everything.
The truly astonishing volume of traffic that now surges up and down the Great Orient Expressway has rather overshadowed what used to be called the Hippy Trail. but the Hippies still flourish. The “freak buses” still plough between Munich and Goa, Amsterdam and Khatmandu, advertising stereo sound, free tea and fully collapsible seats. In little rooms in Kandahar, Europeans wearing odd combinations of ethnic dress, from Turkish Depression gear to Gujarati mirror clothes, still fondle polished slabs of compressed hashish and dream about the price on the streets of Paris and Hamburg. And dope-hunting Iranian police still make tourists turn their camper vans inside out at the Afghan border where cornflake packets and supplies of Tampax blow away in the high wind. So it is all the more bizarre to find oneself riding in central Turkey among bountiful acres of white and purple opium poppies, their fat pods ripening for another harvest of morphine base.
The anti-Hippy crusades pursued with gusto by some Asian authorities may have been justified, but seem designed mainly to clear the way for the big spenders of tourism.
What is a Hippy?
“If you are found dressed in shabby, dirty, or indecent clothing, or living in temporary or makeshift shelters you will be deemed to be a Hippy. Your visit pass will be cancelled and you will be ordered to leave Malaysia within 24 hours . . . . Furthermore you will not be permitted to enter Malaysia again”
Signed: Mohd. Khalil bin Hj. Hussein
Dir Gen of Immigration
The above definition would have included me with my tent and jeans as well as a high proportion of the native population.
In Nepal “every guest who is in Immigration for their problames (sic) should be polite and noble behaved, any misbehaved activities and discussion by the guest shall be proved a crime”.
Difficult advice to follow in view of the impolite and ignoble behaviour of the officials there.
However Mother India remains mercifully benign to all comers. A few more people in shabby clothes and makeshift shelters are not going to make much of a dent on several hundred millions in the same state. As long as India is India the Trail will live on.
These have been four crucial and violent years to travel in the world. Of the 45 countries I visited, 18 have been through war or revolution. Many of the rest have faced economic depression or internal violence. Yet my own experience has been overwhelmingly peaceful, marked by kindness and hospitality everywhere.
I have returned to find prices double, the European pecking order changed, and the political complexion of Europe much pinker than it was. Britain seems a bit chastened but otherwise unchanged. People are as oblivious as ever of their relatively great material wealth. I suppose they are right to be, since what we have here is not really important to the quality of life; indeed most of it, to my mind, is a burden. My mother’s garden, about half an acre of lawn, flowers and fruit trees, could accommodate an Indian slum of a thousand inhabitants (not that I suggest it should). I watch her move about in it alone, pruning and trimming, and I imagine she wishes there were less to do.
I used the word slum, but for me that denotes people who have abandoned hope in their squalor. The Indian slums that I saw were not like that.They were scrupulously maintained in the village tradition. Given just a few amenities (a source of clean water within reach, drainage, a supply of roof tiles, they would reach an acceptable minimum standard. Direct comparisons between European and Indian lifestyles are as fraudulent as ever.
I have spent a lot of time wondering how “they” could arrive at some sort of parity with “us”. During these four years “they” have acquired much more power to press their demands. I see no alternative: we shall have to sacrifice some of our abnormal privileges. If we did it gracefully and imaginatively we could benefit a great deal from the sacrifice, but I expect it will be a bitter and bloody business in the end. Around the world I have been asked to defend Britain in her “decline” and have tried to conjure up some notion of a British “genius” at work. Under the stresses of these last years I thought maybe new directions would be found, new social forms experimented with. I see now that this was foolish. We still carry so much fat. There is no sense of change, just an occasional whiff of decay.
But things will change. Having been among the two billions who will demand it I know they are not just images on a screen or on posters for Oxfam. They are real. We will have to accommodate them.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“How will you ever be able to settle down?” people ask. “Will you want to do it again?” I used to laugh. The prospect of stopping in one place, of doing some real work and living among familiar faces was all I could dream of. The book I have to write has been on my mind too long, but now I realise that until the book is written the journey will still not be over. And already I know what makes the tramp go back on the road. There’s a tingling vista of freedom that is as elusive as it is intoxicating , and it is peculiar I think to those who travel widely alone. There is a wild pleasure in being able to vary one’s behaviour at will, with nobody around to remind you of what you said or did yesterday.
For example, I used to take it for granted that I preferred to sleep on a bed. In these four years I have slept on all kinds of surfaces, wet or dry, hot or cold, in a prison and in a Maharaja’s palace, still or moving, in pin-drop silence or in railway platform bedlam. I now find that I would choose, whenever possible, to sleep on a rug on the ground in the open air.
Why does it matter? To me, enormously. The habits of sleeping, eating, drinking, washing, dressing that I learned in youth had great influence on my state of mind and body. But they are not habits I would have chosen and in these four years they have all changed. In many ways I find that the old ways of dong things were unnecessarily complicated and expensive. Today what I do is much closer to what I am.
It does not take much imagination to see that the same process applies to less tangible but even more potent habits of behaviour. I think I used to make great efforts when meeting people for the first time to impress them. This kind of thing obviously demands a lot of energy and creates a good deal of anxiety as well. If I had tried to sustain it through four years during which I met, practically every day, new people from whom I wanted help, often with no common language to fall back on, it would have made me a quivering wreck. Relax or crack were the only possible alternatives. I managed to relax by abandoning expectations.
“Whatever it is you want” I told myself, “you don’t need.” Whether it was a visa or a pound of rice, or permission to sleep on somebody’s land, I prepared myself in advance to be content with refusal. The result was a revolutionary illumination. I was almost always given what I wanted and at the same time I found I wanted much less.
These personal discoveries once begun, became the foundation for a philosophy which, while in no way startling, is intensely real to me, having arisen out of my own personal experiments.
Towards the end of the journey the power I had built up in this way began to fail. There is obviously a limit to a learning process like this; in my case about three years. After many months in India I began to wish I was home. I knew the wish was dangerous and debilitating. To hurry now would invite the accident I had avoided for almost 60,000 miles
In Delhi I became absurdly frustrated by a delay of two weeks in getting some spare parts. When I finally climbed out of Old India through the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan I experienced a psychological dizziness that astonished me, and kept me in Kabul days longer than I intended. It had a lot to do with the way I had adapted to the pressure of Indian life, the permanent exposure to people, their curiosity, hunger and clamour. Coming out of that was perhaps like decompression for a diver, but earlier in the journey I would have taken the transition in my stride.
On the long route home I made mistakes attributable only to apathy. For the first time I looked for companions to ride with, and used them to support my faltering spirits. And finally, in Istanbul, I lost all restraint and I rode for home almost non-stop, getting to Munich in three days although I dared not take the bike over 50mph.
Somewhere along the way I wrenched my back and so, having spent four years in almost perfect health I managed to arrive home a physical wreck. And my imagination having worked overtime for so long went into a coma. For many days I could hardly recall, with any conviction anything that had happened to me “out there.”
For a while I felt as though those four years had never happened at all.
I’m only two weeks away from moving to France, and there will be much more about that soon. I hope to be riding my little MP3, the one I used to roll around the isles. I’ll be able to go to all those great European meetings, and especially Paddy Tyson’s wonderful event in August near Oxford. But first I need to unburden myself and seek guidance from those who understand my perplexity.
There are people who don’t like me to talk about politics, or religion, or anything else important except bikes. But I can’t go against my nature.
As I prepare to leave California I think more and more of my reasons for coming here in the first place 35 years ago.
It wasn’t really America I was coming too, it was very specifically California, and not even the star-struck beach-boy Southern California that most people envisage when they think of the West Coast, but very much the under-populated land of mountains, streams, forests and bears in the north of the state, where I had spent such happy months in 1975.
I remember clearly that one of the great attractions for me was that it was only a hop, step and jump from South America. The truth is that, but for some real, practical difficulties, I would have moved to Colombia, and I imagined riding down there every now and again.
In those days the prospect of hopping on a bike and riding a few thousand miles through several countries was no more daunting to me than a trip to the nearest Costco. Quite honestly, that is no exaggeration. I was so confident of my ability to negotiate all the little obstacles that might come my way that they didn’t figure in my calculations. It was just a question of taking the time and a bit of money.
Perhaps that’s why I never did it. It was too easy. It could wait. There were other things to do first. I was newly married, with a baby on the way, and was looking for a fresh start in life. It was less than three years since I had come back from my big journey, 18 months since I had finished writing the book, a year since I had married. The idea was that we would begin something new, far away from the problems that had shadowed our life in France.
Of course I did do that Latin journey in reverse, when I went round the world again twenty years later, coming up from Chile to Arizona, but by then a whole new lifetime seemed to have elapsed. In the meanwhile Mexico and several other countries south of the border had come to me.
My valley in California, and indeed the whole county of Mendocino, is full of Mexicans. The fact that marijuana flourishes here naturally attracts some less savoury types as well, but that’s equally true of the indigenous white population. On the whole I have to say that I really like Mexicans. Both here and in Mexico I find them to be very nice people – nicer even than white Americans, and certainly nicer than me, because their niceness is achieved without effort. Watch them in a crowd. They are happier, because they wear their empathy on their sleeves.
And they work hard.
So, as I prepare to leave this country I find myself utterly bewildered in the middle of a quite outrageous and bizarre primary election season, and one of the things that strikes me most forcibly is the farcical nature of the arguments about immigration.
Now that Marco Rubio seems to have gathered strength and looks like having a chance, my only reason for writing this is to point out the absurdity of his position.
His parents were Cuban. They left Cuba for the USA, before the the time of Castro, presumably because they wanted a better life. No doubt they immigrated legally, but there is also no doubt that Rubio would defend all those Cubans who fled Castro’s Cuba and arrived in Florida illegally, to be greeted as heroes. Given a different accident of timing, his parents would probably have been among them.
Almost all those people were economic refugees, just like the millions of Mexicans and others from south of the border who came here to support their families. Yet, according to Rubio, these people from the south are all criminals who should be given hell and sent packing. Cruz is no better, and Trump’s xenophobia is so obviously manufactured (trying to whip up up this anger I’m supposed to be feeling) that it’s beneath contempt.
Right now, Europe is struggling to welcome a few million refugees from the most bitter of wars, where civilians are routinely bombed, gassed, starved and enslaved. Absorbing them is a difficult and painful process. Generally speaking, most Europeans recognize that they have a responsibility to help, but there have been powerful reactions, and demonstrations. Obviously, among these millions, there are bad apples, and there have been some well-publicized crimes committed, which have forced several governments to put new limits on the flow. Nobody yet knows how it will be accomplished.
The United States, on the other hand, has unintentionally absorbed about eleven million people, most of them Latinos, in a relatively peaceful process – people who have adapted well and work hard. They have become a cornerstone of society. There are many who believe that if the undocumented were all magically spirited away (I imagine a sort of Trumpian Rapture) the American economy would all but collapse.
You would think that America – the USA – should be proud of it’s ability to offer these millions a safe life, an opportunity to work hard and prosper, and to contribute to the American economy. Instead we have a trio of bombastic, self-righteous, puritanical (you can pin the labels where they belong) men proposing the most preposterous and unworkable schemes, and screaming in the face of reason.
And the worst of it is that a lot of people seem to believe them. This isn’t a matter of liberal versus conservative. It’s common sense versus lunacy.
