Two Wheel Travel: the Honest Guide to Crossing World by Motorcycle.

Two Wheel Travel The Honest Guide to Crossing the World by MotorcycleEveryone knows someone who has always meant to do it. The big trip. The one that starts at the end of the driveway and does not stop until it has crossed a continent or two. Most of them will never go. This book is for the ones who will.Tony Friday has spent the better part of thirty years and more than a hundred countries riding the long way round, and Two Wheel Travel is everything he learned doing it, set down plainly for the rider planning their first great journey. This is not the glossy dream the brochures sell. It is the honest version: what a long trip really costs, which bike will save you and which will strand you, how to cross a border and ship a motorcycle, how to carry fuel across a desert, handle a shakedown, mend what breaks, and stay solvent, healthy, and welcome while you do it.The practical ground is covered in full, by topic, so you can find what you need when you need it. Choosing the journey and the machine. The money, the paperwork, the carnet, the visas, and the insurance nobody reads until it is too late. Luggage, gear, camping, navigation, and the ruthless art of packing light. Health and safety, fear and loneliness, cooking on the road, and the long grey middle that turns so many trips around. Riding where the rules are different, crossing the empty places, dealing with police and bribes, and getting help when it all goes wrong. Ten working appendices put it into checklists you can act straight off: spares to carry, camping kit worth its weight, a daily inspection, a road-trauma safety list, and a shipping guide that will save you real money.Woven through it are the stories that taught these lessons the hard way. A Dutch sea captain swinging motorcycles onto his deck bound for Timor. A dead clutch on the Nullarbor, paid off by painting a roadhouse forecourt in the heat. A pistol at one African border and an entirely fake one in Central America. A numb mouth, a nomad's endlessly reheated goat curry, and a jungle mechanic who refused payment because a smile was enough. None of it is decoration. Each story carries a lesson you will want in your pocket before you turn a wheel.More than a manual, this is a companion for the whole arc of a great journey, from the first honest reckoning with whether the trip is really for you, to the strange and difficult business of coming home changed. It is written for the complete beginner and the seasoned tourer alike, in a warm, plain, unhurried voice that treats you as a rider it is glad to help rather than a customer it is trying to impress.If you have ever stood at the end of the driveway and wondered which way round, this book will send you out the door. The horizon will not wait. Ride well, be kind, and come home changed.