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

pair of carefully ironed and folded white trousers in a plastic bag to accompany the linen jacket at consular cocktails.
    The Workshop was slung on either side of the petrol tank in two canvas bags, and the Office sat on top of the tank in a zip-up bag with a map holder. Annexed to the Office was the Bathroom consisting of a rather luxurious sponge bag and a roll of paper.
    The remaining side box had to cope with the biggest department of all, Miscellaneous. Here were two inner tubes, a piston, shoes, waterproof gloves, a torch, a visor, and a hundred things I had collected that had no other home to go to.
    I knew I had too much stuff, but there was no logical way to reduce it. Some of the problem was, of course, pure sentiment. How could I junk anything as unique and exotic as a mixture of cod liver oil and glucose? It was worth carrying round the world, worth even cultivating a sore, to see whether it worked. But generally I was on the horns of the fork and spoon dilemma; if you take a fork, why not a spoon, if salt then surely pepper; if you are going to ride fifty thousand miles on a motorcycle then at least you want to lie comfortably at night. There was nothing I had not chosen carefully, and it always seemed that the least important things were also the smallest and lightest and least worth discarding.
    How can one anticipate the unknown? Preparing for the journey was like living a paradox, like eating the cake before I'd had it. More than once I realized the absurdity of what I was doing. The whole point and beauty of the journey was not knowing what would happen next, but I could not help myself striving to work it all out in advance. My mind became a kaleidoscope of scenarios that I had conjured up out of my imaginary future, showing Me Crossing the Andes; Me in a Jungle; Me in a Monsoon; Me Fording a Torrent; Me Crossing a Desert.
    The mystery deepened the more I tried to penetrate it. I bought and packed bits of this and that for emergencies which, when looked at in a different light, seemed like the purest of fantasies. A snake-bite kit like a rubber thimble, a field compass, storm matches, a space blanket to stave off death on an ice field , all beckoned to me from the shelves of the big camping shops, and when they were small enough I took them. But it was beyond me to imagine myself steering a compass course across a wilderness, being marooned on a glacier, or wanting to boil water in a cyclone.
    And who can walk along the pavements of the City of London and seriously contemplate the prospect of being struck by a cobra?
    I suspended my judgement and went on adding to my pocket universe like an agnostic crossing himself before battle.
    In a linen belt next to my skin I carried £500 in traveller's cheques. In a black wallet locked into one of the boxes were small amounts of cash in currencies ranging from cruzeros to kwachas. In the bank, or promised, I had over £2,000. I considered that with all this I had enough money to go round the world, buy what I needed, and take two years doing it.
    Fuel costs I estimated at £300, shipping costs at £500. It was 1973. Petrol in Europe cost around a dollar a gallon, and there were two dollars and forty cents to the pound. The war, which came to be called the Oil War, had just begun. Inflation was considered bad at five per cent. I could allow myself £2 a day, on average, for food and occasional accommodation, and consider that to be generous. 730 days at £2 comes to, say, £1,500. Grand total: £2,300, leaving £200 for troubles and treats. Crazy arithmetic, but the best I could do. How was I to know the world was about to change, not having been there yet?
    The idea of travelling round the world had come to me one day in March that year, out of the blue. It came not as a vague thought or wish but as a fully formed conviction. The moment it struck me I knew it would be done and how I would do it. Why I thought immediately of a motor-
    cycle I cannot say. I did not