Jupiter's Travels

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Ted Simon has been a motorcycle travel mentor for riders and adventurers around the world for decades. Countless times we’ve heard from people who have said that his book inspired them or that they consulted with him before they travelled or that he helped them write their own book. Travel these days is difficult. So much today goes against the idea of discovery. It’s hard to get beyond Google. We have seen so many images and television programs of faraway places before we have a chance to see them with our own eyes. Technology makes it so you can’t get lost. It’s difficult to get that feeling of being somewhere alone, dependent entirely on your own resources and on the goodwill of people you happen to meet. I’m pretty risk averse, but there was still plenty of adventure the second time around, some of it much more extreme than my youthful trip. In the Bolivian highlands, my gearbox gave out. Again, there was nothing to do but wait for rescue. In due time, help arrived in the form of an oil tanker. The driver offered me a tow. It was incredibly dangerous, but there seemed no other way. I spent over an hour balancing on the motorcycle as I was pulled along on a 10-foot rope. Without a doubt, it was the scariest ride of my life.

We follow him through Europe and into north Africa, retracing his original route. Along the way, he looks for the characters who'd been cast in his first trip; the need for reunions seems great. Unsurprisingly, he finds them either gone or, more often, dead. Sometimes, he finds a link to them, only to learn of lives blighted by misfortune and dreams unfulfilled. In the end, while I appreciate the fact that traveling in the physical world means also undergoing an inner journey, I would have appreciated a little less navel-gazing, and a little more effort towards showing both positive and negative sides of each place. They met Ted Simon, and enjoyed an afternoon of story-swapping; my dad said this book made him want to take off across the world again. Knowing my own taste for travel and the edgy, dangerous, or uncomfortable experience, my dad lent me his signed copy of this book as a way of sharing something he cares about. 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.”From the start, the author casts his presence in the first-person whose ambition to ride a motorcycle around the world is seriously underplayed and without any grandiosity whatsoever. There are no film crews, no sag or support wagon trailing behind, no radios, apps, or phones. This is the early 70's, brother. Vietnam. Decolonization. The faces of the old men told me there had been something once that was lost and could be found again.” 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.

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.'Ewen McGregor: Hi I'm multi award winning Actor about town Ewan McGregor. I've got a totally original idea for a TV show.