His 1970s round-the-world adventure made Ted Simon the envy of bikers everywhere, and inspired Ewan McGregor's journey. But aged 69, the same trip proved a bit more gruelling, he tells Rosita Boland
Everyone wonders as they get older: is it possible to return to the places and experiences that made us the people we are? In 1973, when journalist and novice biker Ted Simon was 42, he got up on a Triumph motorbike in England and rode it through 48 countries. It took him four years and he covered 78,000 miles. Afterwards, he wrote what turned out to be a cult book about the journey, Jupiter's Travels (Jupiter was the name he gave his bike). Later, he moved to California and wrote other books, but none had the same popular appeal as his first classic book of biking through Asia, Africa and Central America in the 1970s.
In 2001, aged 69, Simon decided to retrace his route of three decades previously. He was 72 when he completed the journey, and now, aged 76, his book about that second adventure, Dreaming of Jupiter, has just been published. So it is possible to return to the past, then? "No," he says decisively. "It's not. It wasn't history as a farce, but it was a journey of some humiliation."
A distinguished-looking man, who still has his trademark moustache, he's sitting in a Dublin hotel with the easy confidence and assurance that most actors unconsciously possess when being interviewed. In a way, Simon is a kind of actor, as for the several years of his travels, he dipped into so many different kinds of lives and cultures and had to constantly adapt to new roles.
"I had been very detached from the experience of the journey of Jupiter's Travels for a long time," Simon explains. It wasn't until he reached his late sixties and started being invited to visit rallies held by the motorbike community in the US, where people quoted large chunks of the book to him verbatim, that he thought again about what he had achieved.
"I had a nostalgia for these countries," he says. "I'm a very political sort of person. I really wanted to know how those countries had changed in the interim." The idea of another journey and another book began to form. It took some time, but he had built up many contacts over the years, and a network of people came forward to provide offers of help, support, sponsorship and an R80 GS BMW bike. The bike was offered on loan by an Englishman who had read Simon's books, and bought the bike with the intention of making his own long-distance journey. He never did make the journey, but wanted the bike to have adventures anyway, and thus Simon accepted the loan.
His route involved a complicated series of ferries and flights, and took him through western Europe, through much of north and east Africa, up through South America and Central America, New Zealand, Australia and parts of south-east Asia. Apart from Pakistan and Iran, his second route was largely similar to the original one.
In 1973, the occasional letter, postcard and very infrequent phonecall were the only links Simon had with home. On his second trip, he carried two mobile phones, a GPS gadget, a laptop and digital camera, filed a column for the London Independent on Sunday, had a documentary film made about him, and posted reports on his website. "I never really felt I was away at all," he admits. "You can rarely get lost now in the world." The advances in communications was not the major change for Simon between the two journeys.
"It was the people - the population growth everywhere I went. Cities everywhere were swollen beyond recognition. And as a result of that, there was much more evident poverty and crime. Rural communities always have a culture of their own, but everything gets much more homogenised the more urbanised they become."
From a personal viewpoint, the two journeys were hugely different. "The most valuable thing from the first journey was the self-discovery that came through moving on constantly, and the different people I met. You break down all the preconceptions of yourself. It gave me a huge degree of self-confidence in the world, and an ability to see people for who they really were."
It was primarily men who wrote to him after the publication of Jupiter's Travels, to tell him he had inspired them to make their own adventures. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman credited their four-month, 20,000-mile motorbike ride in 2004, later a book and TV series called Long Way Round, to being inspired by Simon's original journey. However, he also got plenty of letters from women - on quite a different topic.
"I got a lot of letters from women saying that they were fed up reading about men strutting through their experiences, and how they had enjoyed reading my book, which was honest about my fears, inadequacies and follies," Simon explains. He also wrote about two love affairs he had en route, neither of which worked out, because he decided he needed to travel alone. "Men being more open about their feelings is a lot more common now, but that kind of writing wasn't so common in the 1970s," he says.
On his second journey, he twice broke bones in falls from his bike. Over and over again in Dreaming of Jupiter - a sharply-written read of incisive observations - he writes of his fear of his physical abilities letting him down. Although fit, healthy and still a biker, such a huge journey, undertaken between ages 69 and 72, was sometimes simply too physically demanding. In fact, this book is as much about where the boundaries of age and ambitions collide, as it is about the 48 countries Simon travelled through, and it is those passages which make the most impression.
After one gruelling ride, where he falls off the heavily-loaded bike and has trouble lifting it, he writes of his exhaustion: "Perhaps, given my age, I should have felt proud to have got as far as I had, but I wanted more than just to survive on this road. I wanted to relish the struggle, not to be drained by it. I had to recognise that I had really gone beyond the limit of my endurance."
Yet he made it all the way to the end of his journey, falling in love en route with a feisty woman who rode behind him on the BMW for weeks, through Thailand and India. You can only cheer for the spirit of a man who declares: "Of all the various emotions I have experienced in 70-odd years, there is nothing more intense and more joyful than being in love."
The Triumph he rode for Jupiter's Travels is on display in Coventry Transport Museum in England. The BMW he rode for Dreaming of Jupiter is back with Stephen Burgess, its owner, and is stored in his garage in Hampshire. At the age of 76, Ted Simon still rides a motorbike in California. "There's nothing to it," he declares. "Mostly, you just sit on it."
Dreaming of Jupiter, by Ted Simon, is published by Little Brown (£18.99 in the UK)