Motorcycle Explorer February 2015 Issue 4 | Page 112
“Just once. If you go around the world a hundred times and experience only time and distance,
then it will be as if you never went at all. The journeying will have been wasted. But if you are
fully aware of the journey, the cycle of unknowing can be broken. If you sleep through your
experiences then how can you learn through your suffering not to have to suffer again? Not to
know is not to suffer and not to suffer is not to learn. This is the basis of all spiritual reasoning.
It’s a law of life. It’s something you have to understand before you can start any journey, and
something you must know before you finish.”
Within the novel format I had turned myself into a character and was often the only person on
my stage. I was desperate to share my journeys, but after one-and-a-half decades of asking was
resigned to the solitary confinement fast travelling gives. As a technique this was risky for
several reasons: the character might lack sufficient depth to maintain interest for the reader, or
the sustained soliloquy could be so one-dimensional in content and purpose that it had no
relevance. As the beautiful poetess Sylvia Plath wrote in her 1963 novel, The Bell Jar: “I took a
deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
So the character sat up in his bed and looked wearily at the nicotine stained wallpaper, which on
the ceiling above him was the colour of sick. He remembered riding the bike in the night across
Orissa to get where he was now, twisting and turning through the forests, past the bandits, and
before that to Nagpur, and before that from Bombay and all since only two days ago. He lay down
again and lurid pictures of a bedlam seized him. And in the words of the character, he wrote a
diary:
Fastest Man Extract (India) 1997
‘...the countryside whisked by in a blur of speed. If there were to be any surprises here they
wouldn’t be topographical. I had seen it before. Stumpy drought-resistant shrubs lined the road,
ochre-coloured soil dipped into valleys browned on the edge of the Western Ghats. High on the
Deccan Plateau, copper-coloured citadels of scrawny mountains gritted vertiginous teeth into a
sky which presented little complexion, except as a backdrop for the thorny savannah; deep
bottle-green set against sepia. It was like riding inside some film society’s old movie; 16mm
reality crisping in the sun. Suddenly I felt I was dreaming. Or maybe not dreaming, but
overwhelmed by a feeling of being other-worldly; so out of context that it was like being on a
different planet... In front of me as I rode was a valley full of flowering trees. Purple-blue
jacarandas nestled against clusters of the red and yellow flowers of tamarind, handsome with its
short straight trunk and large spreading crown. I liked the trees that lined the roadside because
they were now my only view of India and I peered through the scarlet flowers of tulip and coral
trees, the light green gul mohurs feathered out like peacocks, as I wound around the empty hilly
lanes that ultimately would drop towards the plains far away.
The bike was a 900cc Triumph Daytona. It had no special preparation for the journey except that
it carried a rudimentary tracking device on a long steel pole welded onto the sub-frame. A
precursor to the global satellite positioning system developed for consumer use many years
later, the team at IBM in their offices back in the UK could use it to plot my path and relay it to a
worldwide audience. I carried no tools except a wheel spanner and had absolutely no spare parts
other than a chain. I took as little equipment as possible, although in retrospect it would have
been better to have taken a little more. Two cloth Oxford saddlebags contained a small summer
sleeping bag, laptop computer, mobile phone, a small video camera and tapes, passport and
some money. I took no spare clothing and wore the same clothes from start to finish. In my
leathers it was only a matter of time be fore I smelled like a pig.