by Ted Simon
Rage could still kindle a fire of sorts, as I accused myself of stupidity, betrayal, waste, weakness, every failing under the sun.
How could I have let it go? How could I have let it shrivel away like this? The whole thing was preposterous and frightening. I must have something to say after four years and sixty thousand miles, after all I had seen and done in forty countries.
'Excuse me, Mr. Simon, but can you tell me please what message you will be carrying back to your country when you return?'
I did not have a message, I seemed to have lost it on the way.
'But surely, Mr. Simon, you have learned something. What about death, for example?'
Yes. True. I did learn something after all.
It was at the end of my two weeks at Boddhgaya that I packed a small bag, hired a rickshaw to Gaya and took a train to Benares. I stayed there only one full day and towards the end of that day I shared a small boat with a New Zealander and floated on the Ganges, as everyone does, down to the ghats where the bodies are burned.
As we approached the ghats, going upstream, an unburned corpse drifted slowly past us. I did not, at first, recognize it for what it was. It lay back in the water as though in a very deep, soft armchair, with only the knees, toes, arms and head above water. A crow was perched on its forehead, pecking.
Nobody in normal times could be indifferent to the sight of a dead human body. I certainly was not, and to see it being ripped into by a bird was even more shocking. Yet the shock lasted hardly a second. I had been preparing for this sight a long time, and Benares itself gave my conditioning a last powerful shove.
What was there to be shocked by? Nothing could suggest greater peace or purity than the Ganges. To watch that broad expanse of shining water, so massive and unruffled in the evening light, is like watching life itself slide past. No Indian could wish a better fate on the poor clay of his body than that it should float away on this river. Was I going to be shocked then by considerations of hygiene? Hardly, knowing what is pumped regularly, if invisibly, into the world's rivers.
Was it the bird then? But why should a bird be harder to contemplate than a worm? So it must have been that I simply didn't like being reminded of death.
In time, that body floating down the river was transformed for me into an image of great beauty and simplicity. It allowed me to think more calmly about the prospect of death. Unless I could do that, I thought, how could I possibly hope to appreciate without fear the pleasures of being alive.
'Thank you, Mr. Simon, but what about God? It is reported that at one time you imagined yourself to be God. Do you not consider that to be rather blasphemous?'
No. I do think it is possible to be God for brief moments. I am certainly not God now.
'But surely, in your country, most people believe there is only one God?'
I think God is the composite creation of large numbers of people being good for a moment - the way football fans keep a steady glow going in a stadium because there is always someone lighting a match. If people stopped being good altogether, God would vanish.
'This is all rather airy-fairy, isn't it. Don't you have anything more specific to tell people?'
I could tell them to refuse to be afraid, and to try always to do what is right. It comes with practice. We are gifted a compass in our hearts which will guide us to all success in life. ,
'Mr. Simon, after your many experiences people will certainly want something more concrete and pertinent to the world we live in. What can you suggest?'
They can always leave a tip for the starving millions on their way out.
The eastern border of Turkey was the halfway mark. Only three and a half thousand miles to go. So far it had been easy. The worst I had had to face had been an oil leak in Afghanistan and some filthy weather by the Caspian Sea. I had steered my way safely between all the wrecked tankers and trucks littering the side of the highway and, so far, had successfully outwitted the fate prophesied for me.
The entrance to Turkey was a yellow stucco gateway, built presumably for horse-drawn traffic. In this wasteland between Turkey and Iran, it stood as a romantic relic of the Ottoman Empire, comprehensively stuck in an age of bound ledgers entered by hand with scratchy nibs. Waiting to go past was a mile-long queue of forty-ton TIR trucks, parked two abreast in the hot sun. The drivers, mostly Hungarians, Bulgarians, Yugoslavs, Englishmen and Scandinavians, were out sunning themselves in singlets and shorts, and playing interminable games of cards. They expected to be there for two days or more, but private traffic passed through quite quickly and easily.
When I asked travellers about the Asian route they had always made a song and dance about this part of the world. Australian bikies riding their ex-factory BMWs home from Berlin told me chilling tales about the high passes in Eastern Turkey:
'And if they don't freeze your balls off, then the locals will probably knock 'em off for you,' they said, referring to the belligerent and oppressed Kurds who have a reputation for stone throwing.
Now the crowds at the frontier, and the familiar old-fashioned architecture, made Europe seem comfortably close. Nobody threw stones. A restaurant in a garden at the next small town served a delicious and civilized meal. The sun was shining. I decided the rest of the story was exaggerated too.
For once the traveller's tale was right, and I was wrong. As the road rose up into the mountains, the cloud took the sun away and sent a fine drizzle down through the cold air. I had expected to cross one or two high passes and then come down again, but the road stayed up on this broken and uninhabited plateau and turned to dirt and rock slides and mud, with snow-capped peaks all around, until I began to realize that this was becoming an ordeal. Astonished that I should run into such extreme conditions so close to home, I rode on one hundred and fifty miles through the freezing drizzle without seeing so much as a house, and wondering whether I would ever know the welcoming warmth of a tea shop again.
The cold struck deep into me, and my body stiffened. I tried every trick, singing, flexing my muscles, thinking warm, not realizing how far gone I actually was. When I did reach the petrol pump before Horasan, it was just in time.
Hypothermia happens easily on a motorcycle. The body temperature sinks before you know it.
In the wood frame cafe there was a coke stove burning, and I sat by it, drinking glasses of hot tea one after another, shaking and laughing at my own spectacle, but it was still half an hour before my teeth stopped chattering. I had never been so cold before, and this in spite of wearing a waxed and lined Belstaff suit over a padded leather jacket. Without that suit, which I had only been given a year before, I might well have forfeited my balls.
I put on more underclothes for the last fifty miles to Erzerum and then it was all downhill. That mountain range was the last major hazard of the journey, the dog with the cartwheel eyes, and it caught me unawares.
If I was able to enjoy myself in Turkey the credit was due, mainly, to two fellows and a girl who were going the same way on two bikes. We met in a restaurant in Sivas. Perhaps they could see how close I was to the end of my tether. They seemed to treat me gently and bore me along with them, so instead of taking the shortest possible route I saw the extraordinary conical rocks of Cappadocia, like a petrified rally of the Ku Klux Klan, and lingered for a few days on the warm Mediterranean coast between Mersin and Antalya.
The ride up through the middle of Turkey to Istanbul took three days. Once we camped out, and the second night we stayed at a small hotel. In the tea houses I spoke German with Turkish men, admiring their opulent moustaches, wondering at their baggy striped shirts with detachable collars and their heavy old-style suits and flat hats that reminded me of the Depression Years. Turkey surprised me in many ways, by its size and by a culture which inspires a special quality of nostalgia for the period one is just too young to remember. It was one country I knew I would have to come back to and see properly. Then I was in Istanbul, and only two thousand miles from home.
My friends and
I parted company and at this point I gave up all pretence of being on a journey. I stayed in Istanbul just long enough to give the Triumph one last, thorough overhaul, and then I rode as fast as I could for home, in the grip of a kind of madness. It was lucky for me, perhaps, that the engine had begun to vibrate badly, and was too painful to ride over sixty miles an hour.
The roads were heavy with holiday traffic and big trucks, a dangerous mixture. Most of the cars were German and I met them in an unending stream flowing south through Yugoslavia to Greece, until I felt I must be in the new German empire. There were some obscene and
terrible accidents on the Yugoslav Autoput, which must be a serious contender as the world's worst road. I felt fortunate to get through unscathed.
For three nights I camped by the roadside, and the fourth night I was in Munich, staying with a friend. A day's riding took me to another friend's house in Switzerland. There, only a day's ride from my house, it felt safe to believe that I was really going to make it.
One morning in June 1977,I rode over the Jura Mountains into France. The Triumph had stopped protesting and was running freely. All my equipment was in working order. I sat in the saddle with the same ease that others find in an armchair, and could maintain that position comfortably for twelve hours or more. I was very light, some thirty pounds below the weight I set out at four years earlier, but my body functioned better than ever except in one respect: my right eye was less efficient after the accident in Penang. To read a telephone directly in twilight I needed glasses. I still smoked cigarettes, and still wished I didn't.
I was carrying rice from Iran, raisins and dried mulberries from Afghanistan, tea from Assam, curry spices from Calcutta, stock cubes from Greece, halva from Turkey and some soya sauce from Penang.
In a polythene screw top bottle, bought from a shop in Kathmandu, was the rest of the sesame seed oil I had bought in Boddhgaya. The rice and raisins were in plastic boxes from Guatemala. My teapot was bought at Victoria Falls, and my enamel plates were made in China and inherited from Bruno at La Plata. A small box of henna leaves from the Sudan, a vial of rose water from Peshawar and some silver ornaments from Ootacamund were all tucked into a Burmese lacquered bowl. This in turn sat inside a Russian samovar from Kabul.
My leather tank bags and saddle cover were made in Argentina. The tent and sleeping bag were original from London, but the bag had been refilled with down in San Francisco. I had a blanket from Peru and a hammock from Brazil. I was still wearing Lulu's silver necklace and an elephant hair bracelet from Kenya. The Australian fishing rod was where the sword from Cairo had once sat, and an umbrella from Thailand replaced the one I had lost in Argentina.
By far the most valuable of all my possessions was a Kashmiri carpet, a lovely thing smothered in birds and animals to a Shiraz design, but it would have been hard to say which of my possessions was the most precious.
I came down through Lyons and stayed off the motorway, crossing the Rhone at St. Esprit and heading off for Nimes. I was still playing that clip of film in my head: the avenue, the plane trees, the sun flicking between the trunks and leaves. Within hours, even within a modest number of minutes, the film would merge with reality. I would be riding up that avenue, and by that single act I would be sealing off for ever the four most eventful years of my life. Any minute now . . . The End.
It should have been intolerable. I should have turned and fled the other way. It was after all a kind of death. The only Ted Simon I knew was the one who moved on. The Hello-Goodbye Man. From person to person, country to country, continent to continent. Half man, half bike: if not Jupiter, then Pegasus, perhaps, or at least a Centaur.
But soon, no more. I would take my things off the bike and put them away in cupboards. I would wear ordinary clothes. And this bike, which had been 63,400 miles round the world, I would ride to the shops. And most of my days, from then on, I would spend trying to remember. Yes, it would be a bit like death, but I welcomed it. I rode on through the sunshine until I came to the avenue, and the sun flickered through the plane trees exactly as I had remembered.
The end of the journey was even more confusing than the beginning. In fact it was just as arbitrary and meaningless as any of the other milestones along the way. Did it end in France, or in England? In my own way I had even ended it in Istanbul, when I crossed the Bosporus into Europe.
My friends welcomed me back. I could feel their excitement, and I enjoyed it. As long as I was in their company I could feel some satisfaction through them. Alone, though, I was in great trouble, tossed on a storm of conflicting emotions. I felt exactly as though I were at the mercy of great waves, without the strength to hold on to anything firm. The one task which might have centred me on something steady and reliable was the book I had to write, but I found it impossible. The memories I had relied on refused to come to life, and I knew that to try to force them into the open might cripple them. These things of the imagination are so delicate, they can be strained and fractured just as easily as the muscles and bones of one's body. And they can grow old and lifeless too. I was afraid.
During this bad, mad time, the wedding prophecy came to my mind quite often. I had never before been specially superstitious, but the experiences of the journey had changed the way I viewed things. In particular, the incidents with the flying fish and the saddhu had affected me profoundly. I saw that things could happen in other ways than according to the physical laws I had been taught, and I found the world a much richer and more satisfying place because of that.
All the same, astrology and fortune-telling did not fill me with confidence. They seemed far too deliberate and much too vulnerable to ordinary wishful thinking to have a firm place in my new mythology. If I thought about the prophecy, it was mainly because I had lost control over my own future so completely that there was a vacuum which had to be filled with something.
The prophecy had promised me two years of trouble and internal conflict, and I was certainly getting a full dose of that. It had promised me two accidents 'not major, not minor', and I had not had either of those. It had promised me great happiness and prosperity from 1979, and that was what I was looking forward to. I allowed myself to believe that, however bad things felt now, happiness and prosperity were on their way.
At the end of August I put all my bags and boxes back on the bike, reassembled my gear, and rode off to London to appear at the Motorcycle Show. Once again, The End. Finally, I rode the bike up the Ml Motorway to Meriden and was received by the factory work force assembled inside the gates. Although it had been arranged for television and newspapers, this last arrival, which was really the end of the end, was the one that moved me most.
While I had been riding their bike round the world, most of these men had been fighting a bitter battle to keep their factory going, and had wound up as proprietors of their own business. Triumph was now a workers' co-operative, the first in the motorcycle industry, and I was very proud to be representing them. I had always hoped that they would understand that, and draw some value from the publicity I was giving their motorcycle. When they gave me three old-fashioned but rousing cheers, I thought they meant it, and the questions they asked afterwards seemed to confirm my feeling. It was a difficult time. The bike would be theirs now. There was talk of putting it in a museum. I knew it was the sensible thing to do, but I was immensely relieved to feel that it meant something to them too.
They gave me an almost new Triumph 750 in its place. Craven gave me new boxes and a windscreen to fit on it. It felt very strange, and I struggled to get used to it. Most difficult of all was the switch of gear lever and brake pedal to opposite sides of the bike. Four years of living with the old Triumph had made my reflexes instinctive, and it was hard to relearn them. I put a thousand miles on the bike, before taking it back to France, and by then I felt more comfortable with it, but I was riding with great care. It had always seemed to me that, having ridden nearly sixty-five thousand miles without a serious accident, the period after my return would b
e the most dangerous of all.
In the south of France near Avignon, I came to a crossing. There were no traffic lights, and I was on the minor road. I stopped the bike completely and looked up and down the major road. I saw no traffic, and set out to cross it. I could hardly have been doing five miles an hour when I saw myself within yards of a big van coming straight for me very fast. It should have hit me side on and I would undoubtedly have been killed if it had, but I braked and the driver didn't, and so his van was just past my front wheel when I hit it. The bike was torn away from underneath me, and the front end was smashed beyond repair. I fell on the tarmac with all the bones in my body shaken in their sockets, but otherwise unharmed.
The worst was having to face the fact that I could look directly at a speeding van and not see it. My confidence was more shattered even than the bike. After all that I had done, with all the care I was taking, I could not explain how I could ride blindly into such a disaster. If ever an accident qualified as 'not major and not minor', that was it.
I felt positively glad that I would have no bike to ride for a while. It was time to give it a rest. I borrowed a little open Citroen with a plastic body and a soft canvas top, and drove around in that during the winter.
It was a very hard winter. Emotionally I was as disturbed as ever. The house still did not feel like home, the book would not come, nothing was right. I took shelter with friends and hoped for an early spring. Then Carol came to visit me.
One day we went to see my house. The weather was very bright, winds were tearing the clouds across the blue sky. While we were there I decided to bring the Indian rug back with me to protect it. We drove back up a steep road on a stony hillside to rejoin the main road. I stopped the car at the crossing, to look for traffic. A giant hand plucked the car from the ground, raised it four feet up in the air, rolled it over and threw it down the hillside.
