Jupiter's Travels

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Something's haven't changed since the early 70's when Ted's saddlebags were stitched by one Delio Quiroz of Villaguay Argentina. Eventually, he just barrels from India to France in about five pages -- which must be a speed record, motorcycle or otherwise. I strongly suspect Ted Simon, who’s now in his late eighties, is too much of a gentleman to brag about his achievements, so I shall do it for him.

There were a lot of men on the beach and they were absolutely beautifully brown, they had glistening brown bodies, and they were dragging huge amounts of fish in from the sea. 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. Back in England, whilst undertaking National Service with the RAF he founded Scramble, a magazine for recruits, which caught the attention of Arthur Christiansen, redoubtable editor of the Daily Express, and worked in Fleet Street for ten years. Jupiter’s Travels isn’t a tale of macho bravado but is instead an insight into what happens when a man opens himself up to the world – the loneliness, the friendships, the breakdowns, the loves and the losses.It’s been an inspiring time in many ways with plenty of surprises, but sometimes I felt that I’d lost a bit of Ted Simon the individual. This book changed my life (there have been others) but the first page is still the most powerful first page I have ever read. Not only does he continue to travel around the world for book signings, shows, and for the opportunity to ride a bike in interesting pretty places, but he does much of the work on the farm himself. If we as a world are going to survive, we must all get out of our home environments with our eyes, ears and minds wide open and with a social conscience.

The end of a journey like the one I made is a very hard thing to negotiate because, after four years on the road, it is almost impossible to just resume normal service.Fast forward to the present day and that trip has inspired many others (including the likes of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman) to take a similar journey of their own. My young mind learned from those meticulously crafted pages that the world isn’t a place to be feared but embraced, that travel is about the people you interact with more so than the landscapes you pass through, and that travelling by motorcycle is quite frankly the coolest thing anyone can do.