Ted Simon

Finding the Road Again: Reflections on Jupiter’s Travels by Ted Simon

I can’t remember exactly when I first picked up Jupiter’s Travels. Amazon tells me it was ordered on March 30, 2020 so we’ll go with that. What I do remember is how it made me feel when I read the back of the book: Alive. It was just like when you get that quiet hum in your chest when you realise someone else has put into words what you’ve always half-understood about yourself and your experiences.

Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels was first published in 1979, recounting his four-year, 78,000-mile motorcycle journey around the world. He set off in 1973 on a Triumph Tiger 100 — a machine known more for its charm than its reliability — and somehow made it through 45 countries and countless border crossings, breakdowns, and revelations.

I first came across Simon’s journey long before I read Long Way Round while I was planning my own trip of a lifetime: to travel overland by public transport from Cape Town to Cairo in 2017. I remember reading snippets about his adventure in travel magazines and blogs, but even then, the idea of crossing Africa — let alone circling the world on two wheels — seemed almost mythical. To ride through Africa, Asia, and South America, through war zones, remote villages, and endless stretches of road, was (and still is) the stuff dreams and madness are made of. The very material that makes my heart skip a beat.

At the time, I knew my own strengths were in the slow lane of backpacking. Where I would be found talking to people, moving at the pace of local buses, and letting the road unfold without too much planning. I didn’t have a carnet de passage (that passport of sorts for vehicles), and I definitely didn’t have a motorcycle. Maybe I should have considered one. (or at least a bike) — I say that now, living in Amsterdam, where two wheels rule the streets.

Now, decades later, I’ve come back to the book fully. I’ve since swapped my youthful restlessness for the grounded rhythm of raising my son, though a part of me, this website included, still remembers drifting across South America on local buses, touring Southeast Asia with a 15L daypack, and inching through infinite Australian landscapes.

So when I noticed Jupiter’s Travels again on my bookshelf, it wasn’t just nostalgia that pulled me in. It was recognition.

The Road That Changes You

Simon’s story isn’t just about motorbikes and miles. It’s about transformation. The kind that creeps up on you when you’ve been away too long to go back unchanged. There’s a line from his book that captures it perfectly:

“What happened on the way, who I met, all that was incidental. I had not quite realised that the interruptions were the journey.”

That sentiment hit me hard. After years on the road myself, I know exactly what he means. The moments that stand out aren’t the grand arrivals or the bucket-list sights, they’re the small, strange, human ones. A stranger who offers you water in the heat, A bus driver who insists on waking you up when you over slept and miss the 2am stop and or the the kid who laughs at your broken Arabic in Egypt.

Simon writes with that same quiet honesty. He notices the world, and in doing so, helps you notice it too. In one passage, he reflects on the Latin American spirit, torn between cultures and histories:

“Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion.”

It’s an observation that feels both empathetic and timeless and above all painfully relevant even now. Reading those lines, I thought about the people I’d met on my own journeys across South America, the pride and vulnerability so often intertwined. Simon doesn’t romanticise; he just pays attention in way that we all try but frequently miss.

The World Then Vs The World Now

One of the things that struck me, rereading the book today, is how much of that world no longer exists. The borders Simon crossed are now militarised or closed. The small acts of hospitality he encountered have, in many places, been replaced by suspicion, bureaucracy, or simple exhaustion.

Despite my own extensive travels, there are moments, usually after a long day when I’ve neglected to care for myself and ended up doomscrolling for too long, when I truly believe a journey like his couldn’t be repeated today. Not in 2025. Not with wars raging in Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan. There are simply too many hateful people in the world. Too much division and misunderstanding. And that makes me sad.

I honestly feel a deep sense of loss, a quiet grief for a world that once seemed open and welcoming to me when I travelled, but even more so in 1973. When I read Simon’s stories of drifting along the Nile, of sleeping under stars so bright they “emptied [his] heart into the sky,” I felt the ache of recognition.

“The sunrises and sunsets are so extraordinarily beautiful that my body turns inside out and empties my heart into the sky.”

It reminded me of nights I’ve spent on long desert roads, the world reduced to a single hum of motion and starlight. It’s a kind of loneliness that isn’t empty. Quite the opposite, it’s full of something you can’t quite name, something you’ll never be able to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived on the Road out of a backpack.

And yet, as melancholy as Simon can be, Jupiter’s Travels is also fiercely alive. There’s humour, humility, and a stubborn optimism running through it. When his bike breaks down (as British bikes did, often), he doesn’t rage, he tinkers, he jokes, he makes it part of the story.

“British bikes liked a bit of trouble. They thrived on attention, like certain people, and repaid you for it.”

That line always makes me smile. There’s love in it, for the machine (YES the bike is always referred to as a machine), for the journey, and for the whole messy business of being human.

Borders, Bugs and Becoming

One of my favourite moments comes when Simon reflects on what it really means to travel. No not as a tourist, but as someone truly in the world:

“It is not a trick to go round these days… but to know it, to smell it and feel it between your toes you have to crawl. There is no other way… You have to stay on the ground and swallow the bugs as you go.”

That’s it, really. That’s the difference. Whether it’s a Triumph Tiger, a rattling old bus, or your own two feet, you have to crawl. You have to stay on the ground. You have to swallow the sh*t that comes your way.

I’ve done that. Through dust and diesel and delayed border crossings, through endless checkpoints and the strange comfort of motion. Reading Simon’s words brought back that feeling. The exhaustion, the exhilaration, the sense that the world is both infinite and impossibly fragile.

There’s another line that will stay with me for years to come, one I kept uttering in my head this week while out on the race cycle whenever I feel restless or unconnected IT all.

“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.”

That’s what travel is, at its best, not an escape, but a trial. A conversation with the world, where you find out what you’re made of. That is to say, that we are all made up from the universe itself: Stardust

Coming Home (and Never Quite Arriving)

The hardest part of travel isn’t the road itself. No, that’s the easy part. It’s the coming home. You step back into the same streets, the same conversations, and yet everything feels slightly off. The world hasn’t changed, but you have. The distance between who you were when you left and who you are when you return can feel like a chasm. For me, it was utter chaos every time i return from a year on the road.

When I finished Jupiter’s Travels, I felt that same mix of admiration and sadness. Admiration for Simon’s courage, his curiosity, his willingness to truly see and sadness for how small and disconnected our world can feel now, despite being more “connected” than ever.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the world still needs people who will crawl, who will take the long way, who will see with their own eyes. Maybe it’s less about the roads we take and more about how we choose to travel them.

Right now, after reading Jupiter’s Travels, I think my next read should be Dreaming of Jupiter (Simon’s later retracing of his original route.) Not just to relive his story, but to remember my own. For the miles I’ve crossed, the people I’ve met, and the quiet truth that while everything around us might look the same, it’s we who have changed.

As I read, I also realised something else that, like EMDR therapy, the past itself can shift. I now cherish things differently than I did when I first experienced them. I feel it in my bones when Simon says, “The interruptions were the journey.”

Here in the safe, organised world of the Netherlands, I’m reminded that the delays, the detours, the breakdowns, and the border crossings aren’t getting in the way of the journey they are the journey.

Is that’s the reminder we all need when the outside world doesn’t quite live up to our inner one?