Jupiter's Travels

Product Information

The best you can do is to trace your long, infinitesimally thin line through the dust and extrapolate. On the cover, the BMW is riderless and a photo of the septuagenarian Ted Simon - the man who dreamt of doing what Jupiter did - floats above, removed, like an apparition. Colonna sonora: Roger Waters - In the flesh (live 2CD) �il grande schermo non � il cinema � la visiera del mio casco�? It's not really the "must read" all my motorcycle pals said it is, but it is also not a stinker or even two stars. Along the way, he looks for the characters who'd been cast in his first trip; the need for reunions seems great.

Ted Simon has been a motorcycle travel mentor for riders and adventurers around the world for decades. 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. It had taken years to achieve that measure of confidence and calm, and as I waited I allowed myself some pleasure in knowing it. To make journeys seem as exciting and valuable as they did in the past requires a specific interest in something.In October of that year, I left Britain with only a rough idea of the path I would take: down to the southern tip of Africa, then by boat to South America and up to the US, before Australia, Asia, India, the Middle East, and finally back through Europe. The interesting thing to me is how completely different everything that had happened to me in life up until then was from the journey. In Sudan, at a roadside teahouse, he notices how the local people stare aggressively at him, 'whereas 27 years earlier, they would have respected me and stared at the bike .

He was sacked three times by the Express, with Ted explaining that, in the cutthroat newspaper business, “you weren’t anyone until you got the sack”. The quality is spot on and the 300 plus photographs aren’t so over engineered that the sensation of time has been lost. There were plenty of times when I didn’t feel particularly adventurous or daring, when I really would have liked to have just stopped.The title of Jupiter’s Travels has its origins in an encounter Ted had at an Indian wedding with a man said to be a clairvoyant and a seer who could read a man’s soul and destiny. But that's okay -- he also get's a little tired of writing the book, with each continent getting a shorter description than the previous one. 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.

Having explored much of Europe and most recently Thailand on two wheels, he’s now got his sights set on exploring more of the world by motorcycle. As the narrative continued, I wearied (much as Simon did) and struggled to find the point (much like Simon did).As many of you will know, that tale was documented in Jupiter’s Travels, a book that is widely credited with bringing adventure motorcycling into the mainstream. And I often did, sometimes staying for weeks at a time at a place that, for a short moment, became my home. You are travelling not with some blue eyed all English super hero of popular fiction but with a person much more real and closer to his reader.