by Ted Simon
The route of my first seven thousand miles to Nairobi had become so familiar to me that it lit up in my head at the touch of a button like those maps in the Paris Metro with their strings of little coloured bulbs. I knew I was utterly committed to that route by a thousand considerations, climatic, financial, geographic and emotional. War or no war I would have to go through, but it filled me with trepidation. The only consolation I could find was that fate had obviously marked me out for something special. If the omens were dark, they were at least vigorous. It seemed uncanny. I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. Star-crossed.
I stood alone in the gutter with my laden Triumph in the black and rainy night, fumbling with my parcels and wondering where to pack them. I was wearing a lot of clothing I still had not found room for on the bike, in particular an old RAF flying jacket and, over that, a waterproof anorak. The anorak was too tight. To get it on at all I had first to stuff the jacket inside it and then struggle to pull this whole rigid assembly down over my head. It usually took several minutes and made an amusing spectacle at the roadside, but I was sentimentally attached to the jacket and did not want to spend money on another waterproof. The effect, once inside, was excellent for sitting still in cold driving rain, but movement was awkward and robot-like, and produced a lot of heat.
Drops of sweat rolled into my eyes as I struggled and juggled with the packages, unable to put them down, because every surface was streaming with water, unable to find space anywhere, for every last crevice seemed to be packed with something.
A Good Luck postcard from a friend, which had touched me deeply, fell to the pavement and I watched helpless as the writing dissolved in the rain and the inky water washed around my boots. This, I thought, was not the heroic departure I had envisaged.
I looked at the absurdly overloaded Triumph standing next to me in the gutter and had my first cruel glimpse of the reality of what I was embarking on. My vision had been dazzled by the purple drama of warfare and banditry. Now I saw, with awful clarity, that a large part of my life henceforth would be devoted to the daily grind of packing and unpacking this poor, dumb beast.
'It's impossible,' I whispered.
For weeks it had been an enthralling game, a meditation, and at times an obsession, wondering what to pack and where to pack it. The major departments were Food, Clothing, Bed, Tools, First Aid, Documents, Cameras and Fuel. The Kitchen was pretty much established in one of the side boxes. I had a neat Optimus petrol stove in its own aluminium saucepan; a non-stick frying pan with a folding handle; a pair of nesting stainless steel mugs; some ill-assorted containers for salt, pepper, sugar, tea, coffee and so on; cutlery, a tin opener with a corkscrew, matches and a water bottle.
The problems were the same here as in the other departments. One had to fill the space completely and stop things from rattling, breaking, unscrewing themselves, leaking and rubbing against each other. The temptation was to stuff the spaces between the hard objects with odd items like bandages, spare gloves, toilet paper and socks. The results were impressive in terms of insulation, but as the software spread every-
where amongst the hardware it became impossible to remember where anything was, or to get at it, or to notice when it was missing.
The subtleties of packing a house and garage into the equivalent of four suitcases can only be learned with experience. At that time I was still at the loaded-wheelbarrow stage, and the bike looked and felt like it.
The Wardrobe was in the Bedroom, and that was in a red nylon rucksack which lay across the bike behind my saddle. The theory was that if ever I broke down in a jungle I would have a rucksack to walk off with. It contained a sweater, spare jeans, long woollen underpants, a number of shirts, socks and shorts, and an impeccable white linen jacket reserved for garden parties on the lawns of tropical embassies. The Bedroom consisted of a light one-man tent, a mosquito net the same shape which could be supported on the same poles, a down sleeping bag with a cotton liner, and a small inflatable air-bed.
Strapped down beneath the rucksack were two sealed gallon cans of oil intended ultimately to be used as spare fuel containers. The rucksack was high enough to act as a back rest, and was held by a long elastic cord.
Behind the rucksack was a fibreglass box. This was Casualty and Photographic. I was blessed with a medical arsenal of great power and flexibility, assembled by some very conscientious friends. As well as various antibiotics and other drugs and salves, I had bandages of every description, dressings suitable for amputations and third degree burns, tweezers for extracting bullets and disposable scalpels for performing my own appendectomies. In screw top bottles I was given some horrendous white stuff for body lice, and a strange mixture of cod liver oil and glucose which, they said, was an old naval remedy for tropical sores. Packed in with all this were two Pentax camera bodies, three lenses and three dozen aluminium canisters of film, and under it all, to deaden the sound, lay a pair of carefully ironed and folded white trousers in a plastic bag to accompany the linen jacket at consular cocktails.
The Workshop was slung on either side of the petrol tank in two canvas bags, and the Office sat on top of the tank in a zip-up bag with a map holder. Annexed to the Office was the Bathroom consisting of a rather luxurious sponge bag and a roll of paper.
The remaining side box had to cope with the biggest department of all, Miscellaneous. Here were two inner tubes, a piston, shoes, waterproof gloves, a torch, a visor, and a hundred things I had collected that had no other home to go to.
I knew I had too much stuff, but there was no logical way to reduce it. Some of the problem was, of course, pure sentiment. How could I junk anything as unique and exotic as a mixture of cod liver oil and glucose? It was worth carrying round the world, worth even cultivating a sore, to see whether it worked. But generally I was on the horns of the fork and spoon dilemma; if you take a fork, why not a spoon, if salt then surely pepper; if you are going to ride fifty thousand miles on a motorcycle then at least you want to lie comfortably at night. There was nothing I had not chosen carefully, and it always seemed that the least important things were also the smallest and lightest and least worth discarding.
How can one anticipate the unknown? Preparing for the journey was like living a paradox, like eating the cake before I'd had it. More than once I realized the absurdity of what I was doing. The whole point and beauty of the journey was not knowing what would happen next, but I could not help myself striving to work it all out in advance. My mind became a kaleidoscope of scenarios that I had conjured up out of my imaginary future, showing Me Crossing the Andes; Me in a Jungle; Me in a Monsoon; Me Fording a Torrent; Me Crossing a Desert.
The mystery deepened the more I tried to penetrate it. I bought and packed bits of this and that for emergencies which, when looked at in a different light, seemed like the purest of fantasies. A snake-bite kit like a rubber thimble, a field compass, storm matches, a space blanket to stave off death on an ice field, all beckoned to me from the shelves of the big camping shops, and when they were small enough I took them. But it was beyond me to imagine myself steering a compass course across a wilderness, being marooned on a glacier, or wanting to boil water in a cyclone.
And who can walk along the pavements of the City of London and seriously contemplate the prospect of being struck by a cobra?
I suspended my judgement and went on adding to my pocket universe like an agnostic crossing himself before battle.
In a linen belt next to my skin I carried £500 in traveller's cheques. In a black wallet locked into one of the boxes were small amounts of cash in currencies ranging from cruzeros to kwachas. In the bank, or promised, I had over £2,000.I considered that with all this I had enough money to go round the world, buy what I needed, and take two years doing it.
Fuel costs I estimated at £300, shipping costs at £500. It was 1973. Petrol in Europe cost around a dollar a gallon, and there were two dollars and forty cents to the pound. The war, which came to be called the Oil War, had just begun. In
flation was considered bad at five per cent. I could allow myself £2 a day, on average, for food and occasional accommodation, and consider that to be generous. 730 days at £2 comes to, say, £1,500. Grand total: £2,300, leaving £200 for troubles and treats. Crazy arithmetic, but the best I could do. How was I to know the world was about to change, not having been there yet?
The idea of travelling round the world had come to me one day in March that year, out of the blue. It came not as a vague thought or wish but as a fully formed conviction. The moment it struck me I knew it would be done and how I would do it. Why I thought immediately of a motor-
cycle I cannot say. I did not have a motorcycle, nor even a licence to ride one, yet it was obvious from the start that that was the way to go, and that I could solve the problems involved.
The worst problems were the silly ones, like finding a bike to take the driving test on. I resorted to shameless begging and deceit to borrow the small bike I needed. There was a particularly thrilling occasion when I turned up at the Yamaha factory on the outskirts of London to take a small 125 cc trail bike out 'on test'. I had my L-plates hidden in my pocket, but first I had to get out of the factory gates looking as though I knew how the gears worked. Those were the first, and some of the hardest yards I ever rode; now it can be told.
I failed my first driving test and I thought I might just as easily fail the second. Since that would not do at all, I obtained a fraudulent licence and was quite prepared to go off with that, but fortunately it turned out to be unnecessary, and my life of crime ended there.
I was lucky to get the support of the Sunday Times, and in particular its Editor, Harold Evans, and it was partly to acknowledge my good fortune that I chose to ride the Triumph rather than the BMW. The British motorcycle industry had crashed to its lowest point ever and I felt that a journey started in England and sponsored by a great British newspaper ought to be done on a British bike. The decision gave me some heartaches later on, but no real regrets. It always felt like the right thing to have done, which was all-important.
The bike was essentially the same Triumph that had been on the roads for decades; a simple, solid piece of engineering, difficult to break and easy to repair. It was a vertical twin, with pistons that moved up and down in unison and had a reputation for drilling the marrow out of the rider's bones, but I had low compression pistons that allowed me to run on low grade fuel and also flattened out the vibration. In fact it was a comfortable bike to ride. It was the 500 cc Tiger Hundred that had been used by the police. Its single carburettor was easier to tune and more economical than the twin carburettors of the Daytona. Good petrol gave me sixty-five miles to a gallon, so that even a standard three-gallon tank offered a range of nearly two hundred miles. It had high, wide handlebars so that I could sit up and take notice as I went, and good ground clearance to take me over rough going. And it was light as well as sturdy. Of all the bigger machines it was the lightest by thirty pounds or more, the equivalent of about three gallons of petrol.
We had planned all sorts of interesting modifications at the factory, a list as long as a sheet of foolscap, but when the time came to fetch it, I was lucky to get a machine at all. The workers had just decided to lock the management out, it was the end of the road for the old-style Triumph company, and I think my bike was the last one to leave the factory for a very long time. It was totally unmodified, and so hastily prepared that a pint of oil fell out of the chain-case on my way down the Ml from Coventry.
I know Triumphs are supposed to leak oil, but this is ridiculous.
But it was nothing, a paper seal slipped in assembly, easily put right. You could stop the oil if you took the trouble. That was what British bikes liked, a bit of trouble. They thrived on attention, like certain people, and repaid you for it. Not a bad relationship to have.
We got on well together from the start. I thought of us as constituting a sort of space capsule that could travel at will, at least in two dimensions, unconstrained by the need for hotels, shops, restaurants, good roads, bottled water and sliced bread. I was aiming at self-sufficiency because I wanted to travel the way Livingstone did, or Columbus; as though anything could happen and all of it was unknown. It was going to be the journey of a lifetime, a journey that millions dream of and never make, and I wanted to do justice to all those dreams.
In spite of wars and tourism and pictures by satellite, the world is just the same size it ever was. It is awesome to think how much of it I will never see. It is no trick to go round the world these days, you can pay a lot of money and fly round it non-stop in less than forty-eight hours, but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way. Not flying, not floating. You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go. Then the world is immense. The best you can do is trace your long, infinitesimally thin line through the dust and extrapolate. I drew the longest line I possibly could, that could still be seen as following a course.
Generally the great overland journeys follow the Asian land mass East until the traveller is at last forced to take to the water at Singapore. I chose a different way because I was powerfully attracted by the challenge of Africa, and in great awe of it too. If I could conquer Africa, I thought I would be able to face the rest of the world with confidence.
So I chose Africa, and logic prescribed the rest. Cape Town led naturally to Rio de Janeiro. A cruise ship sailed that route three times a year at very reasonable rates, and as an act of faith I booked my passage for 24 February 1974. From Rio a long loop of fifteen thousand miles round South America would bring me up the Pacific coast to California. Across the Pacific the picture was more confused. China was only interested in receiving coach parties, and South-East Asia was seething with the war in Vietnam, but there was Japan, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Coming home through India seemed absolutely right. That was a challenge I would be better prepared to meet after being loose in the world for a while.
Dutifully I collected information about Pacific fares and sailings, about
road conditions in the Andes, ferry services in Indonesia, the weather in Northern Australia, but it was all foolishness and at heart I think I knew it. When I spread the Michelin maps of Africa on the living room floor (and they must be the most beautiful road maps ever made), when I gazed down at the enormity of that continent, the physical variety and political complexity of it, and when I considered my complete ignorance of it, Cape Town seemed as distant as the moon.
What point, then, in worrying about the stars. It was enough to know they were there and that I was heading for them. I thought myself to be the most fortunate man alive to have the whole world almost literally within my grasp. There was no one on earth I would have changed places with.
Or so I thought - until that black night on the pavement of Gray's Inn Road, when I stood dripping rain water, sweat and despair, crushed by the unwieldiness of the monster I had created, and the enormity of the prospect I had invented for myself.
Only three yards away, behind the thick glass doors of the Sunday Times lobby, was the bright and comfortable world that suited most people well enough. I could see the commissionaire, smoothly uniformed behind his desk, looking forward to a pint of beer and an evening with the telly. People in sensible light-weight suits, with interesting jobs and homes to go to, flaunted their security at me and I felt my gut scream at me to strip off this ridiculous outfit and rush back into that light and the familiar interdependence. It struck me very forcefully that if I went on with this folly I would forever after be the man outside in the gutter looking in. For a moment I was lost beyond hope, utterly defeated.
Then I turned away from all that, somehow fumbled my packages away, got on the bike and set off in the general direction of the English Channel. Within minutes the great void inside me was filled by a rush of exultation, and in my solitary madness I started to sing.
All the way I was saying goodbye.
Goodbye to parents and friends, goodby
e to London. Goodbye to Snodland on the Canterbury road, always good for a laugh. Goodbye to the lambs and oasthouses and orchards of Kent. Goodbye to Friday night piss-ups and Saturday football and Sunday roasts.
In Dover I bought a big blue and white golfing umbrella for £4. How can I explain such craziness? It fitted neatly alongside the bike.
Goodbye to the White Cliffs, to Boulogne and the sugar beet of Picardie, to Grandvilliers ('Son Parking, Sa Zone Industrielle') to the saucisson of Beauvais and the Paris Peripherique, all intimately known to me for a decade or more.
In Orleans I slept in a hotel and basked in the admiration of a garage proprietor. 'I owned many English motorcycles, AJS, Norton, Matchless,
Sunbeam. I wanted to make a journey like yours, but . . .' He shrugged. 'All this Japanese rubbish they make nowadays.' Not true, but I appreciated the sentiment, so goodbye to him too, and to the fog over the tree-lined avenues and the high passes and the fairy citadel of St. Flour, all so familiar but all seen with fresh wonder because of where I am going, because of knowing that maybe, possibly, I might not quite make it back here again.
And the swoop down into Millau where I just, and only just, miss being killed. With my lungs full of adrenalin I shout 'Madman! Assassin!' at the blind commuter who overtook me in his liver-coloured Simca and pushed | me off the road against a stone wall. I squeezed past on the dirt, very shaken. How can I possibly anticipate such insanity? Yet I must, somehow, to survive. I will survive. Remember, then, that outside cities, towards evening, when the light is failing, people are driving home in a hurry, tired and bored by their work. And you will be going the other way, also tired. So at the end of the day, when you're anxious to go quick, SLOW DOWN.
Lodeve. A Last Night in my house. How can I bear to leave something so beautiful? The contradiction is too painful, and the pain makes me anxious to be gone.
