Jupiter’s Travels

Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon
Published: 1978
Narrated by: Rupert Degas, Ted Simon
Length: 16:51 (447 pages)

As I mentioned in my October wrap-up, I’m a new motorcycle rider! After getting my license, my immediate thought was to read or listen to something related to the topic. I knew of Ted Simon from Long Way Round, the motorcycle travelogue book and television series from Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, so he was my first thought. He’s been inspiring motorcycle tours since this came out, so it seemed like a great place to start.

Ted Simon is one of the earlier pioneers of motorcycle adventuring. I was expecting him to have grown up as a bike enthusiast, but he actually got his license just before leaving on the trip. In fact, he rode the bike for the first time out of the dealership, which is just crazy to me – planning a trip that covered 54 countries and 126,000 km before having ever sat on a bike. He did it all on a Triumph Tiger 100, a 498 cc motorcycle which is quite different from the Tigers you get today. I’ve always really loved Triumph motorcycles (I’d love that new 2019 Scrambler for Christmas, Lee-Ann), even before I had any real inclination to start riding, so that was a bonus.

I’ve included a map I shamelessly stole from his website. I’d forgotten that McGregor and Boorman had followed his route so closely down the African continent on their Long Way Down trip. This is a four-year journey in a 450 page book, so it really just picks out highlights, which is probably the correct way to go about it. Many countries are skipped or glossed over and he focuses on specific experiences rather than writing country from country. Doing this did leave me feeling like I didn’t really grasp the enormity of his trip, however.

Before leaving his life in England, he worked as a journalist, and his experience shows. He’s a great writer and storyteller. He really can waffle on, however, and you have to be able to tolerate some navel-gazing if you decide to read this. It is, thankfully, balanced with a lot of interesting events – a month or so in a Brazilian prison and a stint in a Californian commune, for example.

In 2007 he wrote a follow-up to this book, Dreaming Of Jupiter, in which he writes about tracing the entire journey again thirty years later, so I’ll eventually be picking that up.