Reading List

Websites

Horizons Unlimited is the home of motorcycle adventure travel where you'll find help on just about everything you can think of regarding motorbikes and travel. Route planning, paperwork, recent experiences, technical gubbins, it's all in the HUBB.

They're a good bunch and are equally at home with 4x4 travelers.

ADVrider always seems to be heavily US-oriented but it is also home to the really gnarly tales of hardcore adventure riding. The BAM Road is probably the epitome of modern adventure riding.

Books

The archetypal story of motorbike travel is Ted Simon's Jupiter's Travels. A novice biker thrown into a four year round the world adventure. That was back in the early 70s. At the age of 69 he decided to trot round again to see how the world had changed in Dreaming of Jupiter.

Ewan and Charlie famously went the Long Way Round. What you may not be aware is that they were following in the footsteps of Mondo Enduro, seven friends who blagged their way round in the early 90s. Rather than a story in recollection, it's the daily diary written by each person in turn of the trials and unexpected joys of knocking on doors and asking for help.

Notice that's the hardcover version. I spoke the Austin Vince and he indicated that the hardcover was done by a different publishing house where an editor bothered to add the numbers up and spot date and mileage errors!

Mondo Enduro is also a DVD. They failed to cross the Zilog Gap so technically they hadn't ridden all the way round but went back a couple of years later and were successful in Terra Circa.

Austin is married to Lois Pryce of Lois on the Loose fame (although, he wasn't at the time). Lois on the Loose is her solo trip from Alaska down to Ushuaia (at the bottom of South America). She then rode solo down through Africa in Red Tape and White Knuckles.

Lois' journey was along the lines of Theresa Wallach's The Rugged Road where she and her companion rode a motorbike with sidecar and trailer down through the Sahara, the Belgian Congo and onto Cape Town in the mid-30s.

The earliest tales of motorcycle adventure and one of the best is Robert Edison Fulton's One Man Caravan, his story of a casual remark at an early 1930s London dinner party that he would return to America by riding a motorbike around the world -- a pretty safe bet as he didn't own one. His bluff was called by someone at the dinner table offering to lend him a motorbike from his factory. D'oh!

Suffice it to say that travel in the North West Frontier Province (and the exotically named North and South Waziristan) were as dangerous then as they are now.

If you haven't a clue as to what you're doing then you could do worse than buy a copy of Chris Scott's Adventure Motorcycle Handbook.