I bought these from what is quickly becoming my favourite supplier of motorcycle goods, Sportsbikeshop and I’ve worn them on one two hour in-the-rain trip to Suffolk.
Sizing: reviewers are advising prospective purchasers to go for their usual shoe size when buying, unlike Alpine Stars for instance where you really have to buy one size up. So, I went for Euro size 45. In the house these were certainly not sloppy. My left toe (half a size bigger than the right) was pretty snug against the toecap – but comfortable. I’d describe the fit as rather narrow or you might consider it a supportive design especially around the ankles (more on ankles later).
Buckles: there are three buckles that, once you’ve worked out which way the clasps move, and adjusted the length, are surprisingly smooth to use. Along with a small area of velcro near the top, they give a very secure feeling. I see they are replaceable but I’m not sure of the material.
Comfort: like most pairs of new shoes, I think there is a brief honeymoon where you are astonished that they do not hurt or dig in. During this time they feel super comfortable. But then, somehow, you start to notice the pressure in unpredictable places. So after nearly two hours of riding and some walking comfort, these boots suddenly became exquisitely painful mainly around my ankles where it felt like some of the protection had decided to make its presence felt. This led to some desperate leg manoeuvres on the bike as I got nearer to my increasingly longed for destination. I am hoping that this will pass. It might be that I had crammed, successfully I thought, my leather trousers into these boots.
Looks: maybe this should have come first. I think they look great. A year or so back I would never imaging wearing brown suede motorcycle boots but these have changed my mind. See this web page for some beautiful product shots of these boots.
Build quality: these are very rugged. Everything is double stitched and the protection feels strong. I can see that they are not as tank-like as my Alpine Starts old Tech 3s but they are an improvement on my disintegrating Spada cheap boots which I bought these to replace as those head into the bin. They are made in Romania which is refreshing when everything seems to have been made in China.
Waterproofness: during my 100 mile plus rides the heavens opened. I did not notice my feet being wet or cold so I presume their waterproofness, aided by a part elastic top, is pretty effective.
Overall: I will be very happy if the pain I felt after a day’s riding eases off. This kind of pain that only sets in after a couple of hours of riding is a killer. It adds to fatigue and just makes you want to stop riding. My otherwise lovely leather trousers from Hideout Leather are the same. After a while the armour on the left knee becomes really uncomfortable and distracting. I have some good quality textile trousers on my shopping list and these might solve both problems.
‘Her light-hearted account almost disguises the grit’
There are always two reactions to motorcycle travel books: one is to the journey itself – usually awe inspiring in some way – and the other is to the writing. Lois Pryce’s second book about motorcycle travel (I haven’t read the first one yet) is a nicely written, easy-to-read contribution to this genre. But it tells a tale of almost unimaginable nerve and endurance across some of the most difficult terrain and politically frightening countries you could think of.
In our patriarchal world men not only take centre-stage but manage to convince most people that the male way of being in the world is some kind of norm. For example, Ted Simon’s accounts of riding around the world seem, mostly, to be the story of a person’s adventures rather than specifically of a man’s. But Lois Pryce’s books remind us that riding a motorbike, like everything in life, is gendered: in Muslim Algeria the man pumping petrol into her motorbike looks away from her and does not acknowledge her greeting once he realises this is a woman out in public, in other places she has to pretend that it’s a man and not her who is riding the bike in order to be given permission to travel, and in the Congo when she is stuck on the back of a train for a whole day with her strapped-down bike and surrounded by stoned Congolese soldiers touting Kalashnikovs the defining feature of this astonishingly tense passage is to do with gender – and power.
Lois is not afraid to be critical and poke fun at some of the tedious characters she encounters or travels with (she mentions the fantasy of parts of the German motorcycle industry to have the world full of identically dressed middle aged men advancing on bikes – in some latter day colonialist aspiration) but she also writes movingly about some of the positive and generous spirited people she meets in war-ravaged countries like Angola, some she considers her ‘guardian angels’. The middle chapters, mainly dealing with the Congolese and Angolan parts of the journey are genuinely scary and had my pulse racing.
Overall the style is light and humour is never far away. We don’t get the personal introspection nor the lingering political and social analysis of Ted Simon, so the book feels less serious than some but Lois is skilled at telling the story and the ending, which in this kind of book always runs the danger of anti-climax, is moving. Strangely, Lois is still in deep shit in an Angolan mine field and you notice there are hardly any pages left. Uneventful Namibia and South Africa get just a dozen or so pages.
As Ted Simon’s book jacket comment, used above to introduce this review, points out the book and the journey are in some ways at odds with each other, though not in any problematic way. As the jacket says elsewhere, the author is equipped with formidable strength of character and an immense passion for life. I’m not the first to say this, but it is a good read. Having finished it, I do wonder why the seriousness was kept at bay so much. I would have thought that an experience like this gave any author the right to offer some more extended reflections on life, humanity and the puzzle of the drive behind this kind of undertaking. Its available second hand from Abe Books here.
In August 2017 German maker of coveted motorcycle products, Touratech, announced it had gone into insolvency. The official reason was a problem when opening its new €10M factory and warehouse in Niedereschach, close to its existing premises that left it unable to satisfy demand and eventually unable to pay its creditors. But coupled with this bad news was the reassurance that a new owner would be found as indeed it was. The motorcycle travel community around the world breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But parallel to this story was the news, not quite so well-publicised, that its founder and its global face, Herbert Schwartz had been ousted from the company that he had founded, by its other directors. On April 1st 2018 Herbert posted a Youtube video of an English translation of an interview he carried out for a German travel magazine in which his anger and sense of betrayal about the whole affair is raw. The interviewer seems uncomfortable with getting to the point of asking about the bust up in the company. He does though, eventually, emphasise that Touratech and Herbert and wife Ramona Schwartz were synonymous and the public face of the company. Herbert explains that a software fault halted production and that they had over-diversified with a huge amount of products that no one wanted to buy. The board had conflicting views about how to proceed and he said this problem ‘pulled down the company’. He talks about having a personal liability for a huge debt. At the end of December 2017 it became apparent that Herbert had left because his email address had changed, says the interviewer. The new investor that came forward and saved the company did not want to continue working with Herbert so his contract was terminated. He tells how the administrator said that they did not need him any more ‘please hand over your keys and your phone and do not show up at the Christmas party’. His ‘baby’ of over thirty years has been taken from him, he says. ‘They could take my company from me but not my authenticity…’ The interviewer asks about any new projects and Herbert hints that he has something in mind and drops a few grandiose ideas but since then, three years later, nothing has emerged. Surprisingly, for such a prominent figure in motorcycle travel, the video has been little watched with just over 1000 views to date and just 14 likes.
In 2006 Herbert had met the woman, Ramona, who later became his wife and the two had two children quite quickly as he says in the interview. There must be tens of thousands of photographs of the two of them, and sometimes with their small children, dressed in Touratech garb and travelling the world. The catalogue from 2017-8 is full of them. But it was clear from Herbert and Ramona’s Facebook pages, soon after the company’s split that the two had also gone their separate ways. So 2018 was not a great year for them.
My motivation to write this has been a puzzlement that there is so little out there on any of this. Strange that a couple whose faces have launched a thousand motorcycle trips can just disappear from prominence with so little apparent interest. Also unknown is why the board and the new investor wanted rid of Herbert knowing that he was such a key figure for the company. I can only guess that he was difficult to work with, maybe never there to take responsibility, maybe with unrealistic ideas that had exasperated the others over the years. Perhaps we’ll never know.
This book by Ted Simon, and the journey that it describes, fits chronologically between his well-known account of his ground-breaking motorcycle voyage around the world and the repeat of that journey that he started as he was turning 70 years old. Here, Ted has left his motorcycle parked at home (when he lived in California) and set off on a 1500 mile walk (he takes some trains and busses too) through Germany, Poland and Ukraine to Romania where his father and his father’s family came from. The subtitle makes it clear that he is searching for traces, both physical and in his own imagination, of his father. His father, a sometimes orthodox jew who migrated to London in the 1930s, left his mother, and Ted, when Ted was 8 and had died many years before this journey.
The book, for me, started off badly – but I have to say it improved till by the end it was Ted at his profound and moving best. It’s Ted’s feet that disturbed me, though his sketchy account of his tense three’s-a-crowd type relationship with fellow travellers Manfred and partner (of the long-suffering kind) Ginny was not comfortable reading either. First the feet. Ted writes that he was hoping that his body, which he acknowledges was no longer in the flush of youth, would rise to the challenge of a thousand miles of walking but instead during the first morning’s travels his feet became excruciatingly painful and continued to cause distraction and trouble for many weeks. I share the hope that my body will also rise to any new challenge I present it so the news that this may well be vanity was not something I wanted to hear. Especially at the beginning of a story. Second, and this will be the last criticism, the unconsidered plan of heading off on this voyage of personal discovery with your partner and best mate, who do not get on with each other, fell apart. First Manfred stormed off and then Ted appears to unceremoniously send his parter away so that he can savour the journey alone. And suddenly she is gone from the narrative. Romantic relationships do not seem to be Ted’s priority. That’s plain from the way that women in his earlier books have only a shadowy and often negative presence. But his honesty about both has to be appreciated and makes a good foundation for the rest of the story. In fact, he makes it plain that he has not grown up with a model of a sustained loving relationship.
Travelling at a few miles per hour instead of 40 or 50 or more slows down his interactions with people and atmospheres and slows down his writing in an illuminating way. He sets out his modus operandi for travelling quite plainly. In a new and unfamiliar place Ted selects someone and throws himself on their hopeful cooperation. This takes an openness and not a little courage. He always hopes for the best from people and this openness, that we saw in Jupiter’s Travels, nearly always pays off and the exchanges, relationships, experiences and often deep insights into people’s lives is at the heart of travelling for Ted Simon. (Some motorcycle travel writers seem more interested in simply how many miles they can cover.) He describes many times how total strangers take him into their homes, though they are usually extremely poor and pressed for space and resources, and show him hospitality. It is very moving. And Ted is both curious and generous in his views and his descriptions of those who have taken him in. At one point he says that part of his travelling philosophy is never to spend his way out of trouble.
One of the funniest aspects of the book is Ted’s accounts of encounters with individuals where there is virtually no common language. He describes how he has to guess at what is being said and meant and often this is to do with vital instructions about how to travel or how to navigate some important piece of bureaucracy. He describes, for example, his long conversations with railway workers in a signal box in Ukraine as forming great bonds of closeness without any actual meaningful communication. He understands a sense of being wished well by strangers.
In the background to this journey is the unfolding horrors of war in the former Yugoslavia and Ted is clearly very disturbed by this barbarity in the heart of Europe. His thoughts about it pop up from place to place and are rather unedited, often a little incoherent which probably reflects the situation itself, or rather the impossibility of responding rationally to its horror. The journey was taken in the early to mid 1990s at a time when the fall of Soviet Communism was recent and the countries of the former Soviet block were plunged into the worst of economic states. I kept wondering whether things are still so tough in these countries now, twenty five or so years later.
Of course, at the heart of the book is Ted’s inner journey (as it is in all his books) and in this case it takes the form of his reflections on his early life in post-war Britain and his jewish heritage and identity. He recounts scenes from his boyhood, his few memories of his father, and speculates on where his father came from in terms of his religious background and practices. He searches out jewish communities across Romania for traces of him and in fact finds mention of him in one small town’s records.
The gypsies in the title refer to Ted’s thoughts about the gypsies he sees in Romania and one particular instance on a train platform. He understands them as uninhibited, unrepressed and free individuals in contrast to the burdened souls of both his jewish father and Lutheran mother. He wishes he could be a bit more gypsy and a bit less jewish/Lutheran I think. Personally I’m not sure I found this ‘othering’ of the gypsies convincing but I can see that it is a genuine response and a way to take thinking about family, destiny and identity forward.
If you are a fan of Ted Simon and have read his accounts of motorcycle travel, and are perhaps wondering whether to read this more pedestrian story, I would recommend it. The voice, of course, is recognisably Ted’s and its a rewarding and enjoyable read, highly moving in parts and usually highly insightful.
After yesterday’s riding and weather bliss, today was a little disappointing. It was not a sunny day.
I put together a ride made up partly of the Biker’s Britain route up to the coast. And for sure, I rode through some beautiful lanes and stopped by this ruinous religious building. I was hoping to ride through Ampleforth where there is an abbey and a Benedictine school that, way back in the 1960s and 70s my old school in west London with a besmirched reputation used to play rugby against. Somehow the road I was on did not go through it. The first part of the ride was beautiful and enjoyable.
Could do with some repointing
Once on to one of the Bike routes, coupled with greying skies and not quite so nice scenery, the enjoyment of the riding faded a little though I can see that the route was chosen because the riding, the sweep of the roads, was fun. I have a memory that the roads and everywhere I stopped, including a large lay-by with a catering truck was crowded with staycationers like me.
I headed toward a small seaside town, Saltburn by the Sea, but every single parking place was full so I rode back up the hill to the main road envying the people sitting by the sea eating ice cream. Likewise a smaller place, Sandend, very close to Whitby up the coast. I remember, earlier in the journey, telling myself a joke that I thought I could try out on a carefully selected person in Whitby or close to it. ‘Am I on the right road to Whitby? I’ve come for the synod and am afraid I might be late.’ The comic answer would be ‘You’re fourteen hundred years late, mate.’
On the edge of Whitby the traffic was heavy so I headed inland back into a new route that would take me back to Baxby hopefully through some less busy and beautiful roads. There were very steep climbs on this road for one of them and I, and a dozen cars in front of me, were stuck behind a very slow moving truck carrying a house on the back. Moving was so slow that it involved clutch slipping to keep moving at all. No good so I pulled off down a narrow lane and set coordinates back to the campsite. I was proud of the steep and narrow turn I had to make to get back out onto the road. I know I keep saying it, but on the Beamer with its metal panniers that would be a really pulse-quickening manoevre. The ride from there in was much better.
This campsite is a joy to return to. I had deliberately held off buying food intending to try their much talked about pizza but that night the promised pizza van did not open so I finished my supply of yesterday’s vegetables and noodles instead of throwing them out which is good.
Just to prove there really was a pizza hut – taken the night before
Here’s the GPX route: (woops I need to replace the plugin)
One of the shorter rides in Biker’s Britain is a 16 mile dash from just south of Haverhill to Great Dunmow in Essex and not too far from Saffron Walden. Haverhill is about 20 minutes or so ride from Cambridge city centre and then its a right turn down the beautifully twisty B1057. After an annoying train and bus replacement journey up from London I headed off on this route, to avoid the sometimes aimless rides I find myself doing on these sometimes rushed fortnightly trips. On making that turn into the B1057 I immediately realised why this route is in the book – it is full of unpredictable turns with generally good visibility and not too much traffic. In fact because I did the journey in the opposite direction to the guide’s recommendation,All the bikers I saw were coming toward me. I had no one driving a white van in front of me to slow things down and spoil and view and, more importantly, no one behind making me think I should go faster. Also heading toward me was the strong and dazzling winter sun which is the only reason I would do this route again from south to north.
About half way down is the beautiful Finchingfield, with its lovely sloping village green, packed full, on this perfect sunny Sunday late lunchtime, of travellers and parked up motorcycles, not a place I wanted to linger in but good to ride through slowly.
The ride home was via the lovely B184 to Saffron Waldon and Cambridge. My repaired puncture is holding up.
