travel

The Road Gets Better from Here: A Novice Rides Solo From the Ring of Fire to the Cradle of Civilisation (Perfect Paperback) by Adrian Scott 2008

Available from Abe Books here.

This is probably the best motorcycle travel book I have read. It manages this impressive feat in a number of ways. First, the story it tells is one of incredible toughness – both physical and mental on the part of the author – in the face of a bad accident on day one of the trip. The worst start any biking traveller could imagine. Less than ten pages in and the narrator is sitting by the side of a remote road eating a mess of his mangled food, mixed with gravel, nursing a broken ankle on the easternmost tip of Russia.

What follows is three months of usually gruelling riding. Also moving is the sense of humanity we get at just about every turn of the journey. Scott is taken in by incredibly generous and hospitable folk throughout, people who have unimaginably tough lives, living on very little by Western standards, with almost unbearable occupations, but who share what they have with him – and with real pride and nobility (usually).

Adrian Scott’s writing is impeccable. He must have spent hours each day with his notebooks. He describes, for example, the nuances of changes in facial structure of the people he meets as he journeys westward across Asia. His accounts of architecture, particularly of his extended stay in Samarkand, are vivid and detailed. He is a traveller who has done extensive research before he left (or maybe he added it afterwards – I doubt it somehow) and his book gives us detailed but readable political and social histories of many of the newly independent countries he visits. He also seems to have taken the trouble to learn Russian in preparation. His intelligent but deeply-felt engagement with the cultures and individuals he comes across puts this writing in a different class to some other authors who seem to have gathered a few superficial impressions more for merchandising reasons than to do justice to where they have been.

But the book has some oddities. First, we are told nothing about the traveller/writer. Even by the end of the story, we don’t know why he undertook his journey, what he did before he left – was he a journalist, an academic, a traveller – or how he got home? We are given absolutely no information apart from the fact that he is unnaturally tall. (As evidence of this, a small cover photo appears to show his head wedged against a ceiling somewhere.) And for the biker reader, he assiduously avoids telling us the model or make of his bike though we get plenty of fascinating detail about his relationship with his much patched together vehicle. From one of the photographs you can make out it’s a Kawasaki. And the photographs, as well as the map of the journey (the Silk Road plus) are very low quality, though strangely this adds to the believability of his story. They are often very moving, showing people in pretty grim circumstances.

So what did he do next? I have no idea. Web searches turn up nothing and the book doesn’t seem to have nurtured a cult following though in my mind it deserves to, no less than Ted Simon’s first book (OK, Ted did it thirty years before). In fact this possibly cheaply produced book (it could have done with some editing – its full of typos) is refreshingly free of celebrity endorsements. For anyone interested in travelling, biking or Asia, this is an absolute must read.

Red Tape and White Knuckles: One woman’s motorcycle adventure through Africa: Lois Pryce, 2008, Century Books

‘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.

The Gypsy in Me by Ted Simon, 1997 Penguin

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.

North Yorkshire coast – nowhere to park

Tuesday 

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)

Rain Rain and Barnard Castle

Saturday 21st August

I had left the bike pointing toward the way out so no awkward heaving around today once loaded up. Unfortunately I had to pack the tent away wet after rain in the night (I just read Adventure Spec’s advice about packing wet tents which is to unclip the inner from the fly sheet and pack them each in separate dry bags. That would have really helped me on this occasion) so my bag ended up really heavy on top of the rack leading to a wobble and moment of nearly dropping the bike at the first little junction after a few minutes ride.

That wobble dented my confidence for much of the day the bike often feeing uncertain on uneven road surfaces or tar banding. But I spent most of the day on large roads travelling north eventually stopping to get into my rain gear more from cold than the rain which just held off till I got to Barnard Castle to buy dinner for the night in the Co-op – and to check out my eyesight obviously. But from then on it rained. I ate a co-op sandwich standing in a bus shelter – not nice.

Earlier, I turned off the A1 to drive through Beadale which was a beautiful cobbled small town and Richmond also beautiful but only in places.

So when I arrived at the farm which will be my campsite for two nights it was raining quite heavily. (it had a steep stoney entrance but I wasn’t phased with this light bike.) But with the welcome from the host and her horse who licked my bike (maybe recognising a fellow traveller) had me feeling chipper. This didn’t last though. I sheltered in the tiny washroom looking out in dismay at the rain.

I was feeling desperate about what to do at this point as all my clothes were completely wet and in the tent there is barely room to lay everything out next to the space I need to sleep. Eventually I ventured out joylessly into the rain and I struggled to put up the tent looking for anything heavy to pin it down as a wind was blowing. I think the low point was unzipping the tent to find that inside was wet from taking it down wet in the morning (here’s the value of the Adventure Spec advice). A couple of expletives followed but in the end with the advance warning in my mind that these two days would be a test of my moral fibre I mopped up with my towel feeling a sense of taking some control instead of collapsing in front of the challenge. Apparently, as the hosts told me, in many anecdotes of unprepared campers, quite a few just give up and leave summarily, even some throwing their gear and clothes away in the dustbins before disappearing for ever. At least I did not join this list.

Only 137 miles today but in nearly 4 hours

Motorcycle trip to the southwest day 3

Friday 27th

I’m writing from under a tarpaulin shelter at the amazing Hole station campsite. You’d have to describe it as alternative and eco conscious. Campsites reflect the character of their owner, that is obvious. This is a woodland site, not a field in sight, and a working farm with a variety of animals some of them wandering around. I arrived here the day before yesterday and have three nights here. On arrival the owner gives you a map showing a circular stones path through the wood where there are about a dozen or so cleared spaces each with a tarpaulin shelter and an old car wheel where you can light a fire. You take the circular path and come back and tell him which vacant spot you want. Nearly all seem empty though we are fuller now. The buildings are clearly home made out of reclaimed timber, the toilets are composting and there are two small wooden cupboards where you can charge up your device.

 

 

 

 

 

They even serve breakfast and nice very hot coffee, though this morning I brewed my own espresso and ate it with a sticky bun. I am waging war with a squirrel and a mouse who have a sweet tooth and found a way to get at my food how ever I secured it. So I have brought a pannier down here and keep everything locked inside. I also have a collection of stones to throw at the very audacious squirrel. My bike is parked up by the farm and you bring your stuff down here in a wheel barrow. It sounds a little inconvenient but is absolutely fine and the site would have a different character if you could drive a car up to each tent.

The site is down a stoney drive offering a few minor wobbles and which is definitely first gear at least to my level of riding skill. The roads round here are lovely, sometimes with traffic but often not. Yesterday I took one of the Bikers Britain routes across Dartmoor which was amazing, with grazing animals of all kinds by the road, a mixture of gentle and tight bends and again sometimes a queue of traffic usually not. On the way back I dropped in at my favourite Waitrose and even searched out a camera shop that sold me a micro SD card for my helmet camera. There is something slightly euphoric about having enjoyed a beautiful ride and know you are heading back to cook something nice and have a good book to read. I am rereading The Emigrants by Sebald and looking out for how he writes. I can see some of the advice he has given to aspiring writers in his work, the inclusion of meteorological  detail for example. And the first two stories are about people who have killed themselves, reminding me of the stories I am writing and how one reviewer thought they were too downbeat.

This morning at 8 am while I was still in my sleeping bag it started to rain. Not very hard but enough to make me jump up to tighten up the guy ropes and move things away from the edges inside. So sitting here under the tarp, digesting my breakfast, each gust of wind brings down more water from the trees and there is a kind of shifting equipoise in the sky as to whether is is overcast or brightening. The forecast on my phone shows showers for the next three days and it flashed across my mind that I could leave early – a foolish thought. It is meant to rain in the middle of the day which presents a dilemma for riding. I was planning to ride north taking in another part of one of the routes up toward the north Devon coast but I am uncertain how to time it. Nice as it is I don’t want to sit here all day, and riding the bike is how I charge everything up that needs charging.

Today I had some great riding particularly on the north Devon coast road to Porlock, including some slightly scary first gear hairpins and I noticed some people two up with luggage on big adventure bikes heading my way and heading to go up those same bends that I had just come down. Exmoor really does meet the sea along this amazing road. Apart from that there was probably around 100 miles of twisty roads with rain on and off, tiring but getting into a rhythm. When the road was first wet I was nervous but eventually got into a more confident stride on  fourth and fifth gear bends, stopping again at my favourite Waitrose to buy some sea bass for supper which I’ve just had.

This campsite is filling up with people, much younger than the middle aged folk that populate the more conventional sites, like, I imagine the one I will be staying at from tomorrow, Rosebud Farm, with the very polarised reviews on the net. I really like this place and feel as at home as I probably can get (I do remember as a standout campsite San Francisco in the north of Spain which I might say is a favourite) in a campsite but I do not enjoy the constant battle with squirrels and mice for my food. Today I packed everything I thought edible in my metal panniers but cam back to find my small bottle of olive oil spilt everywhere with its plastic lid bitten through. Annoying. Tomorrow I will call early for breakfast here then pack up which I have the feeling will take a while.

This is also a holiday where I have been in constant touch with the house, getting update photos of the amazing carpentry work in my study at home as well as seeing the temperature on our Nest. It was just a minute ago 29 degrees while here I think it is around 20 or less. Yesterday was 33 in London. This is a real heatwave summer, like 76 which I remember vividly along with the troubling girlfriend that I had then.