Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (2 page)

'No. No. Not palmistry. You will see.'

And several times after he had introduced me to his father he asked me: 'Has my father told you yet?'

But no, he had wanted to wait, for the right time, for a quiet moment, and since in their eyes I had become an important guest, having been gifted to them, as it were, my fate and he had a reputation to sustain, I fancied that he was probably looking at me too from time to time when I wasn't looking at him.

Long after midnight, when the flow of ten rupee notes had ceased and the dancing girls had wilted away, we all stretched out on the floor and went to sleep, with our wallets tucked under our heads. At the bride's house, a farm building about three hundred yards away where other festivities were being held, the loudspeakers were switched off and the last Hindi pop song went rolling away under the moon across the great luminous plains of Northern India. The lights in the tent went out, but the curtain of coloured lights that covered one whole side of the bride's house from roof to ground went on glowing, at least until I went to sleep.

The following morning, after we had all wandered off into the appropriate field, and washed at the pump, and breakfasted, the bride and groom came together at last. They were led into a small, cloistered courtyard which formed the heart of the bride's family house. There they sat on cushions with the bride's pundit between them and the groom's pundit on her other side, and as many of us as could manage crammed into the remaining space. To my amazement, and enlightenment, the chief dancing girl was also there with her musicians. The bride was obscured by veils, flowers and a brilliant wedding sari. The groom wore a paper hat from which sprouted and hung an extraordinary array of tinselly objects. To my Western eye he looked like something between a Christmas tree and an old-fashioned Martian, and his face also was invisible behind the things dangling from his hat.

The bride's pundit had some sheets of paper torn from an exercise book and covered with sacred texts which he read in a harsh jabber, stopping frequently to decipher an illegible word, or to seek counsel with the other pundit. Meanwhile the dancing girl and the musicians sang and played the same sexy songs as the night before, and people chatted loudly to each other trying to make themselves heard. The groom also had to perform various movements at certain points in the ceremony, like spooning milk with a folded leaf from a crock onto a pat of smouldering cow dung. At one time he had to do this with a cloth held in front of his face, though it is unlikely that he could see much anyway. I thought his ordeal was quite awful. Half starved, stifled by far too much clothing, blinded and enveloped by the most shattering din, and propelled through these complicated symbolic acts, I wondered whether any part of him remained quiet enough to know the meaning of it all. It looked to me like a ceremony devised by women in revenge for all the overbearing authority and pomposity that an Indian husband is capable of.

After half an hour no end seemed in sight and I left to walk outside for a while. Everything and everybody was at peace. I noticed clearly how all the man-made structures, the mud-walled houses and cowsheds, grain stores, tanks, irrigation channels and hay ricks, were at one with the earth and the trees. A poor and backward harmony, some would say, best appreciated from a distance, but surely there must be some middle way . . .

My appointment with destiny was approaching. Raj's father was getting ready to leave for his office in Patna.

'Come,' he said. 'We'll sit in the car.'

We sat turned towards each other, and he said:

'Give me your hand.'

I held it out, and he grasped it as in a handshake, but held it in his grip for several moments. Then, releasing it he gave my thumb a quick backward flip, and murmured, 'Achcha!'

'You have a very determined soul. This also is reflected in your mind.

'You are Jupiter . . .'

Why not, I thought. I like the sound of that.

Trouble with Mars

Officially the journey began at six p.m. on Saturday the sixth of October, 1973. The announcement was to appear the following morning in the
Sunday Times.
I had just stepped out of the newspaper office with a last armful of film and other oddments, and I had seen the story in proof.

MARATHON RIDER OFF

Ted Simon left England yesterday on the first leg of his 50,000 mile motorcycle journey round the world. Etc,
etc.

I really had to go.

It was not an auspicious day, far from it. Unknown to me it was the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. More importantly, it was the day chosen by the Egyptian High Command to begin a devastating assault on Israel. Soon after midday the radio began to report massive attacks on Israeli positions in the Sinai. By the end of the afternoon the Middle East was at war again. The 'Yom Kippur' War.

The war lay right across the route I had been planning and preparing for six months. I thought they had done it on purpose. Maybe you know how it is when you have decided to do something really enormous with your life, something that stretches your resources to the limit. You can get the feeling that you are engaged in a trial of strength with the universe. Dock strikes, assassinations, revolutions, droughts, the collapse of the Western world, all those things you usually say 'ho-hum' to in the papers begin to look as though they were designed as part of your personal fate. I mean, I had trouble enough with the Ethiopians over their Moslem guerrillas, with the Triumph factory going on strike, with the Libyans running a holy crusade in their visa department. But a full-scale tank war, I thought, was going a bit too far.

The route of my first seven thousand miles to Nairobi had become so familiar to me that it lit up in my head at the touch of a button like those maps in the Paris Metro with their strings of little coloured bulbs. I knew I was utterly committed to that route by a thousand considerations, climatic, financial, geographic and emotional. War or no war I would have to go through, but it filled me with trepidation. The only consolation I could find was that fate had obviously marked me out for something special. If
the omens were dark, they were at least vigorous. It seemed uncanny. I felt blessed and cursed at the same time. Star-crossed.

I stood alone in the gutter with my laden Triumph in the black and rainy night, fumbling with my parcels and wondering where to pack them. I was wearing a lot of clothing I still had not found room for on the bike, in particular an old RAF flying jacket and, over that, a waterproof anorak. The anorak was too tight. To get it on at all I had first to stuff the jacket inside it and then struggle to pull this whole rigid assembly down over my head. It usually took several minutes and made an amusing spectacle at the roadside, but I was sentimentally attached to the jacket and did not want to spend money on another waterproof. The effect, once inside, was 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 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.