(PV note) I just completed a long and fascinating ride in Anatolia revisiting famous historical, artistic and natural locations: for some of them was a return after 20 years and I was touched by two elements: the untouched grace and beauty of the monuments, remains and architecture touching the soul with the same intensity, emotional as in the past and better presented or restored by the Minister of Culture of Turkey.
Secondly, the infrastructure of Anatolia so dramatically improved in transportation and quality of life, from small villages to great cities. As a Turkish resident for a long time, I was at the same time grateful and proud of the work done by the State.
Back home I received Ted Simon blog on the joy and “philosophy” of riding alone with an open mind inspired by his Jupiter Travel and other books. “ Nothing can compare with riding out alone into the world -writes Ted- and yet, even as I’m talking, I can’t help feeling a little sad. I know that no one today could hope to experience it in the way I did”
Still I humbly join Ted in hoping that reading his blog and his last book “Boiling the Canary” will convince some of my few readers to go out and look at people in the eyes, look at the sign of the past and take lessons for the future, go and see for yourself what the common world is.
| (Ted Simon Blog) I suppose it’s about time I started believing what people tell me. For forty years now they have been saying that it was my book that inspired them to get on their bikes in the first place, and then out into the world. I have always been afraid of letting all that praise go to my head but now, at 91, perhaps I can let go and be proud of that achievement because I believe strongly that individuals travelling in that way can only be good for society. And yet, at the same time, when I’m asked to talk to an audience about my experiences I have very mixed feelings. I talked to a tentful of friends at the Overland Event near Oxford (pictured above) and a few days later I talked to a room full of people at a lovely pub called The Richard Onslow in Cranleigh, Surrey. Sara Linley, who runs a motorcycle apparel shop in Guildford with her husband Chris, approached me two months ago. It was their friend, Elspeth Beard, who lives nearby in a converted water tower, a quite extraordinary building, who suggested that they ask me to talk when I was over in the UK for the biker festival at Ragley Hall. The talk was such a success that when I came back to the UK this time for Paddy Tyson’s Overland Event they asked me to do it again. My job is still to convince people that nothing can compare with riding out alone into the world and yet, even as I’m talking, I can’t help feeling a little sad. I know that no one today could hope to experience it in the way I did. I was lucky of course, very lucky. I set off around the world at a very good time – in 1973 – long before ordinary people like us dreamed of communicating with anything more sophisticated than the telephone. The world was divided up, more or less, into compartments. Unless it was your business to know what was happening outside your bailiwick people generally had only a vague idea of what was going on in the rest of the world, or what it looked like. True, after the war “Wogs” didn’t begin at Calais anymore, but people and places beyond the edges of Europe were only dimly recognisable to most people. No Instagram, very few pictures at all, and no blogs. The little I knew of South America was mostly coloured by my stepfather’s description of various sordid ports he visited when he worked as an engineer on merchant ships, and my ideas of Africa were shaped by the war, and novelists such as Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad. Today we all see and know too much about the outside world, but what we know is shaped by others who decide what we should know, and what they want us to believe. How often travellers today find, when they arrive at some distant destination, that what they see and hear is nothing like what they’ve been told? You could say I’m guilty too; that if you had travelled to, say, Zimbabwe at the same time I did, in 1974, you might have seen it quite differently, but in my defence, I say Jupiter’s Travels is not reportage. It is as much about how the world affected me, as it is a picture of the world, and one of its purposes is to persuade you, the reader to go and see for yourself. And although the world is very different today that is still my purpose and it seems, to some extent, I have succeeded. I think the people who listen to me, know that. And I’m grateful. Cheers Ted |
Yes Paolo, I share the idea of riding alone is the most intense way of perceiving your environment. Last summer I spent days and weeks in finding side roads of side roads to well known destinations around the Alps. (“if a road has a centre line, it is already far too wide”) sometimes only gravel roads, but all legal to use. It was a wonderful, very satisfying experience. Now this summer, I received a phone call from an old friend and colleague from my BMW MC days asking me if I would be available for a day of riding. the first person I was ready to share one of ‘my ‘secret routes’ .The result in a nutshell: the old German proverb was proven again “sharing the joy means doubling the joy” At least with someone ‘on the same wavelength’
Paolo, please send me an email. My recent mail to you has apparently gone into parallel space, not your in box.
Bob Higdon