Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (62 page)

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 be 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.

The violence was so great, so terrifying and unexpected, that I only knew afterwards what had happened. At the time I had the impression of whirling in hell and being hit. It seemed to go on for a long time, and I was sure I would die. Carol had the same recollection. I was thrown from the car on to my head, Carol fell into the back of the car. Fortunately the car did a complete roll in the air, for if it had fallen upside down she would have been crushed. It fell with its front wheels hooked over a big boulder some ten feet below the road. The boulder held, otherwise it might have bounced and rolled a long way down the mountainside. Carol escaped with a bruised arm. I was drenched in blood from a scalp wound.

The only possible explanation was that a gust of wind had filled the car from behind, through the open back, and whisked it away like a parachute. The strength of the wind that would be capable of lifting a car four feet in the air was beyond my ability to compute. It had an element of the supernatural about it, of course.

There was one other strange coincidence. The Indian rug was never found. Many people searched for it, but it had disappeared.

A week later Carol flew back to the ranch, and I went to work. Things improved, gradually, and my confidence returned. The memories flooded back, and the book was written. It is now the winter of 1978. The prospects for prosperity in 1979 seem quite good. I have a letter from Carol saying that she is thinking of getting married. Franziska, the policewoman in Fortaleza, has qualified as a lawyer and is working in Brasilia. Bruno is a buyer for the French tobacco monopoly, and travels to tobacco auctions all over the world. Tan, the old man at the Choong Thean Hotel, has sought refuge with The Little Sisters of the Poor. The family on the farm near Lusaka have been violently overrun, after all, by Mr N'Komo's Freedom Fighters, and driven out. And I have read that the Black Mountain Inn in Rhodesia is now a ruin of broken brick walls and naked rafters. There is no news of the Van den Berghs.

The Triumph 500 c.c. model T100-P, serial number DH 31414, also known as XRW 964M, is in the Alfred Herbert Museum in Coventry, and remains unwashed since Istanbul. Some day soon I plan to visit it.