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By J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming
I have a number of motorcycle travel books in my Kindle about events that happened a long time ago and of those have only managed to finish reading two; Jupiters Travels and One Man Caravan. Books about overland travel made long ago can suffer from being dated however I did not find that with this book from The Bear.
Firstly The Bear is a terrific writer so I very quickly felt engaged in his story and most of the book is about interactions and mishaps and things that happen to us still today and remain amusing unlike other books where much is written about past politics and cultures that have little to do with motorcycling now.
There are some places The Bear describes as they were long ago but these pages mostly escape from making the story of his motorcycle journey feel dated. Bangkok as a sleepy town, now it’s a metropolis of skyscrapers. Spain as having terrible dirt roads, now the best in Europe. Historic differences in this book were of interest to me having visited the same places.
I find The Bear’s writing style to be so natural and enjoyable. I breezed through this book on my flights to NZ, it’s a wonderful read and my only complaint is that I wished it was longer!
A little trivia. The name of this blog was inspired by The Bear. I read one of his articles in a print magazine late 90’s early 2000’s where he toured Northern Rivers and the border ranges NSW and wrote something like ‘this area is a motorcycle paradise’. I was living and riding that region at the time so thought that sounds like a good name for my blog.
If you want this as an eBook then note it’s not on Amazon/Kindle. You can get it from Rakuten Kobo eBooks and read it on their app as I did.
