Books

by Ted Simon

In 1964 Ted Simon set out on a round-the-world trip by motorcycle. His account of his four year odyssey, Jupiter’s Travels, was a huge bestseller, and is now hailed as a classic.

In 2001, at age sixty-nine, Simon decided to retrace his journey. Would the trip be too arduous for an older man? How much had the world changed? How much had he changed? Traveling through Europe, Africa, South and North America and Asia, Simon rediscovers the thrill of riding solo across the world, catching up with old friends, experiencing new dramas, breaking some bones and even falling in love.

Set over two and a half years and passing through forty-eight countries, Dreaming of Jupiter is at turns thrilling, philosophical, hilarious and moving. A fascinating read for bikers and armchair travellers alike, it is a hugely inspiring read with a positive message at its heart: that the world is still full of wonder, with adventure waiting around every corner.

“Ted’s book Jupiter’s Travels has been my inspiration for this trip. I’d read his tale of taking four years in the early seventies to ride a bike around the world and it made a big impression.” From Long Way Round by Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman.

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by Ted Simon

First of all there was Jupiter's Travels...

For 25 years this book has been a favourite for travellers of all kinds, but in the world of motorcycle travel it has been a true phenomenon.

Simon rode a motorcycle around the world in the seventies, when such a thing was unheard of. In four years he covered 78,000 miles through 45 countries, living with peasants and presidents, in prisons and palaces, through wars and revolutions. What distinguishes this book is that Simon was already an accomplished writer. In 25 years this book has changed many lives, and inspired many to travel, including Ewan McGregor.

Jupitalia Productions, 456 pages, paperback, 2005.

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by Ted Simon

Then came Riding High…

Adventures never come to an easy end. The beached sailor gazes wistfully at the horizon. The house-bound wanderer pines for the road to Xanadu. Simon wound up his epic four-year motorcycle journey
around the world to choose marriage and domesticity, but found it
harder to end the journey than it had been to begin it.

In Riding High, Simon recounts many untold episodes, both dramatic and hilarious, from his "Jupiter" travels, and he interweaves them with scenes from his later efforts to lead a settled existence. The contrast makes it all too clear that great journeys become an expression of life itself, and that, once begun, they continue as long as there is life left.

The Jupiter journey lasted four years. There were far too many stories for just one book. Riding High tells the rest of the story, and also why it was so difficult, afterwards, to come home.

Jupitalia Productions, 5.6 "x 8.5", 316 pages, paperback, 1998.

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by Ted Simon

“Simon is a connoisseur of travel and travel writing, and his story shines with an understated brilliance.

He weaves a vibrant, detailed tapestry of character and experience; his discoveries are manifold.”

His mother was German and the father he didn't know was a Romanian Jew. And at the age of 50, shortly after his mother's death and long after his absent father's, Ted Simon embarks on a 1,500-mile journey (mostly by foot), covering the lands between his mother's Germany and his father's Romania, discovering as much about his paternal ambivalence as he does about the cultures and realities of Eastern Europe. The book is a fine example of the travelogue, with humor, evocative description, and a poignant inner journey as interesting and well-explored as his Romanian-bound route.

In this affecting travel memoir, Simon pursues both a component of his own history and a vision of post-Soviet Europe circa 1994. Reared in wartime England, Simon decided to check out eastern Europe, the one area of the world he had not traveled. He knew virtually nothing about his estranged father's background other than that he was a Romanian Jew who emigrated to London as a young man… The result, this book, is lush with personality and anecdote on subjects ranging from the author's shrewd reading of the nature of life behind the now vanished Iron Curtain, to Eastern European youth's “tangible sense of self-worth” in the face of drastic economic decline and hardship.

When, with luck, he finds in the town of Botosani, in Romania, the original record of his father's birth, he notes that “the handwritten page had for me something of the quality of… a piece of clothing that a loved person might have left behind.”

Random House, 318 pages, hardcover , 1997.

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