Jupiter's Travels

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Listen to our other motorcycle podcasts: ARR RAW - Monthly roundtable talks about motorcycle travel. I watched her still, exploring the shape of her body. I would have expected a dancer's body to be harder, to show more muscle.” I had no idea how long it would take, or what sort of an experience it would be. I felt I knew nothing about the world, and the trip was a way for me to see what was going on. In the end, I was gone for four years, and passed through 50 countries. The voyage became the basis of my book, Jupiter’s Travels. Gone were the interesting anecdotes and interesting people, in its place we get introspection and self analysis and almost self pity. Interesting it was not.

In 2001, I decided to retrace my route from Jupiter’s Travels. I’d been told I would be mad to do it at 70, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Memories of people and places were floating through my mind, and I wanted to see how things had changed. The story of that second journey became the basis of my sixth book, Dreaming of Jupiter.

Try as I would to imagine a rosier future, I could see only ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible concrete and plastic ugliness, only to look and learn and retreat in penitent dismay before the next wave of 'developing' citizens. And there seemed to be nothing that I or any individual could do that would make it a jot of difference to the outcome." p.214 For three days and two nights I drift up the Nile along Lake Nasser. The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky. The stars are close enough to grasp. Lying on the roof of the ferry at night, I begin at last to know the constellations, and start a personal relationship with that particular little cluster of jewels called the Pleiades, which nestles in the sky not far from Orion's belt and sword. Really, those stars, when they come that close, you have to take them seriously.” Jupiter's Travels in Camera: The photographic record of Ted Simon's celebrated round-the-world motorcycle journey Reviewed as part of my ongoing saga to write a review for every book I've read and logged on GR. (Written March 2019) And so I have reduced my rating to 4 stars and removed it from my favourites shelf. I do feel very guilty, but I'm sorry but it wasn't as good as I remembered. The first 2/3rds of the book were great, descriptions of people and places, tales of his travel and how the bike was doing or not as the case may be, and then at probably only a third of the way around the world we leave all of those descriptions behind, whole countries are not mentioned or receive only a paragraph, we get hardly anything of Northern India and Nepal. The last 5,00 or so miles through Asia and up to Turkey and then into Europe don't even get a map.

Everything in this picture I took with me, except the tires. They were sent on. And the umbrella? That was the photographer's, but eventually I did get one of my own, and it was remarkably useful. I strapped it alongside, under the saddle and over a box on my right. On the left side I carried a sword, but that's another story...” The writing was better than I anticipated - some beautiful metaphors along the meaningful philosophical thoughts transformed parts of it into quality literature.His mention of currencies has no meaning whatsoever, especially 40 years later. You should always describe something in the form of value. I learned this from Issac Asimov who wrote that a robot cost two weeks of pay. That will always have meaning. Instant information is instantly obsolete. Only the most banal ideas can successfully cross great distances at the speed of light. And anything that travels very far very fast is scarcely worth transporting, especially the tourist.” The Truth obviously does not reveal itself unaided to humans. It has to be uncovered by effort of consciousness. Or, more likely, it exists only in human consciousness. Without man around to recognize it, there is no Truth, no God." p. 407

In Kenya, the isolation and constant battering his ageing body is taking start to bite and it's clear that the cherished memories of a quarter of a century ago are being slowly, irrevocably, violated. Exhausted and in the middle of a vast plain, he hits a patch of mud and his bike topples over. 'For the first time in my life, I hear the loud snap of a bone breaking,' he writes. 'I put my right foot down, only to see it flop over uselessly.' Simon was a journalist prior to becoming a self-styled hero, and we are grateful - his writing is adequate, and often even lucid and beautiful. The Journey is strangely bodiless, for the most part. Simon writes like a pair of traveling eyes with an ego attached; rarely do we get saddle sores, headaches, heat rash, or dysentery on this 4-year odyssey. Perhaps he is a remarkably hardy specimen; perhaps he didn't think it necessary to put us through more than the occasional swarm of mosquitoes. Nonetheless, there is a closely observed richness to his writing, and an immediacy that shows he took good notes, and was able to revisit his experiences in sequence as well as through a greater common narrative.I have a copy of his book Dreaming of Jupiter in which he retraces his route thirty years later, and I will inevitably read that too, just not straight away. The journey had little to do with motorcycles, which was really just a conduit for the narrative – a unique way of getting around that hadn’t, to my knowledge, been done before. As a method of travelling, motorcycles are very physically demanding; you’re completely exposed to the elements. Over the years, motorcycle travel has become something of a trademark of mine, and I’ve written several books about my two-wheeled journeys. Yet many signs indicated that the time might not be too far away, when Australians would agree on a better reason for living than to eat a pound of beef a day. When that day came, I thought this would become one of the world’s best places to be. I rode forever on an astounding web of freeways, four or eight lanes wide, laid out like a never-ending concrete waffle over thousands of square miles, looking for somewhere to go, but found nothing.