Jupiter's Travels

Product Information

After studying chemical engineering at Imperial College he began his newspaper career in Paris with the Continental Daily Mail. I’ve come to think that if you learn about things from the ground up, you have a better chance of being able to convey information to others. The dark-stained and timeworn wooden walls and verandas still stand strong and I found myself wishing they could tell tale on Ted!

The choice of word just shows how narrow minded he is and it was not easy to read through paragraphs of him putting down the people around him and lifting himself up as this wonderful hero who is able to drive through Africa and with this tough man imagine. Ted will do it, but he did admit that, “Lifting the heavier beams to the roof has been hard going this time around. There’s nothing wrong with a person heading out to explore the world on a motorcycle, or any form of transport, with no greater aim than to see some of the world and to be out of the places they know well.In October 1973, sponsored by The Sunday Times, I began riding around the world on a 500 cc Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle. Then his mature face peered up from his craft to be immortalised by a black and white photograph now pressed between the hundreds of thousands of copies of Jupiter's Travels sold worldwide. There were a lot of men on the beach and they were absolutely beautifully brown, they had glistening brown bodies, and they were dragging huge amounts of fish in from the sea.

With the aim of discovering how the world had changed in the intervening 28 years, on 27th January 2001, aged 69, Ted embarked on a second journey. Back in England, whilst undertaking National Service with the RAF he founded Scramble, a magazine for recruits, which caught the attention of Arthur Christiansen, redoubtable editor of the Daily Express, and worked in Fleet Street for ten years.

There was an island somewhere in the South Seas where people were supposed to be terribly poor but the pictures showed the most beautiful beaches, with tropical trees and fruit and stuff like that. However, when Ted rolled into Egypt early in his journey, he found more pressing matters than road conditions were of concern.

He couldn’t have known back then that, more than a decade later, he would pass on that first edition to his as yet unborn son.The construction of the sentences and the paragraphs and the general form of the book, that’s what’s hard to do. I'm pretty sure that Schopenhauer never rode a motorcycle, but those sentiments could easily be applied to Ted Simon and his epic revisiting of a round-the-world journey he did in 1973. Sometimes, he finds a link to them, only to learn of lives blighted by misfortune and dreams unfulfilled.