Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph Read Free Page A

excellent for sitting still in cold driving rain, but movement was awkward and robot-like, and produced a lot of heat.
    Drops of sweat rolled into my eyes as I struggled and juggled with the packages, unable to put them down, because every surface was streaming with water, unable to find space anywhere, for every last crevice seemed to be packed with something.
    A Good Luck postcard from a friend, which had touched me deeply, fell to the pavement and I watched helpless as the writing dissolved in the rain and the inky water washed around my boots. This, I thought, was not the heroic departure I had envisaged.
    I looked at the absurdly overloaded Triumph standing next to me in the gutter and had my first cruel glimpse of the reality of what I was embarking on. My vision had been dazzled by the purple drama of warfare and banditry. Now I saw, with awful clarity, that a large part of my life henceforth would be devoted to the daily grind of packing and unpacking this poor, dumb beast.
    'It's impossible,' I whispered.
    For weeks it had been an enthralling game, a meditation, and at times an obsession, wondering what to pack and where to pack it. The major departments were Food, Clothing, Bed, Tools, First Aid, Documents, Cameras and Fuel. The Kitchen was pretty much established in one of the side boxes. I had a neat Optimus petrol stove in its own aluminium saucepan; a non-stick frying pan with a folding handle; a pair of nesting stainless steel mugs; some ill-assorted containers for salt, pepper, sugar, tea, coffee and so on; cutlery, a tin opener with a corkscrew, matches and a water bottle.
    The problems were the same here as in the other departments. One had to fill the space completely and stop things from rattling, breaking, unscrewing themselves, leaking and rubbing against each other. The temptation was to stuff the spaces between the hard objects with odd items like bandages, spare gloves, toilet paper and socks. The results were impressive in terms of insulation, but as the software spread every-
    where amongst the hardware it became impossible to remember where anything was, or to get at it, or to notice when it was missing.
    The subtleties of packing a house and garage into the equivalent of four suitcases can only be learned with experience. At that time I was still at the loaded-wheelbarrow stage, and the bike looked and felt like it.
    The Wardrobe was in the Bedroom, and that was in a red nylon rucksack which lay across the bike behind my saddle. The theory was that if ever I broke down in a jungle I would have a rucksack to walk off with. It contained a sweater, spare jeans, long woollen underpants, a number of shirts, socks and shorts, and an impeccable white linen jacket reserved for garden parties on the lawns of tropical embassies. The Bedroom consisted of a light one-man tent, a mosquito net the same shape which could be supported on the same poles, a down sleeping bag with a cotton liner, and a small inflatable air-bed.
    Strapped down beneath the rucksack were two sealed gallon cans of oil intended ultimately to be used as spare fuel containers. The rucksack was high enough to act as a back rest, and was held by a long elastic cord.
    Behind the rucksack was a fibreglass box. This was Casualty and Photographic. I was blessed with a medical arsenal of great power and flexibility, assembled by some very conscientious friends. As well as various antibiotics and other drugs and salves, I had bandages of every description, dressings suitable for amputations and third degree burns, tweezers for extracting bullets and disposable scalpels for performing my own appendectomies. In screw top bottles I was given some horrendous white stuff for body lice, and a strange mixture of cod liver oil and glucose which, they said, was an old naval remedy for tropical sores. Packed in with all this were two Pentax camera bodies, three lenses and three dozen aluminium canisters of film, and under it all, to deaden the sound, lay a