Ted Simon, author of ‘Jupiter’s Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph’, “the interruptions were the journey”

While today there are a number of stories of people setting off to circumnavigate the globe by various means, fifty years ago it wasn’t really a thing to attempt to do it on a motorcycle solo. However, that is just what Ted Simon did after he ruled out other ways of exploring a world that he realized he was ignorant of one day, despite not knowing how to ride a motorcycle.

The writer’s epiphany came when watching an “Attenborough type” program about poverty on TV in early 1973. “Despite having done the work that I’d done, I realized I was really very ignorant about the world. Most people were then,” he told Adventure Bike Rider.

What was supposed to be an 18-month-long trip turned into an adventure lasting four years. Over that time, he covered 64,000 miles, through 45 countries across six continents. Upon returning to his native England, he put his experiences on the road and the effect they had on him as a person in an uninhibited recounting, ‘Jupiter’s Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph’.

Since it was published, it has sold over 400,000 copies and inspired countless others to venture out and explore the world on the back of a motorcycle. Most notably, Ewan McGregor and his good friend Charley Boorman who have documented their own journeys in the ‘Long Way’ series.

“The interruptions were the journey”

Not only did Simon initially not know how to ride a motorcycle, he did get a license before he began his journey on a 500cc Triumph Tiger he purchased, he had no idea how to ride one on many of the unpaved terrains he would have to traverse like sand, which he encountered when he started the African section of his travels in Libya.

Those types of problems were perhaps the least of his worries as he crossed into Egypt while it was in the middle of a war with Israel without a visa to cross via land and he thought he was going to get shot. Fortunately, the border guards “were actually very nice, they were lovely,” he said.

Then he got arrested twice in Alexandria when authorities thought that he was a spy. He would go on to get arrested in Brazil for the same reason at a time when it was run by a brutal military dictatorship. However, having acclimatized to life on the road, his biggest fear wasn’t being shot anymore, it was being deported back to England and not being allowed to continue on his journey.

“It seems to me I got most comfortable in places that were actually terrible places,” he told Adventure Biker Rider’s James Oxley. In the end, he went on to meet people from all strata of society.

At a wedding in India, he met a clairvoyant who looked into his soul and mind, concluding by telling him: “You are Jupiter.” Thus, he had a better title for his book than ‘Ted’s Travels’.

“What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realized that the interruptions were the journey,” he reflected about his life-changing adventure.

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