Jupiter's Travels

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Oh tell me please, how does it go, the triple jump?" She pro nounced it tripee-el She had a way of pleading for things in her Brazilian English to make you understand that they were matters simultaneously of no consequence and of life and death. You could refuse, and nothing would be changed; or you could give, and earn undying gratitude. It was a great gift, which she had won by long effort and sorrow and laughter. It was the humorous residue of cravings which had once been corrosive enough to etch her face. However, when Ted rolled into Egypt early in his journey, he found more pressing matters than road conditions were of concern.

Simon's life since has been framed by that journey. So there is almost an inevitability that, in his late sixties, we find him once more getting astride a motorbike - this time a huge, comfortable BMW - and heading off into the unknown: 'To see if I could recapture, in some way, the person I was then - this man who became for some an almost mythical figure. There are thousands who dream of doing what Jupiter did. Why shouldn't I?' There is more to this man's journey than riding a motorcycle. This guy is a man of the mind. While riding atop his Triumph, he thinks a lot about the subconscious mind. On his journey on a ship through the Atlantic, from Africa, to Brazil, he mentions he read a book by Jung and his thinking got even more complex and dark as he rode through South and Central America. He shares his thoughts with his readers and takes them through the glories and turmoils of his own mind. I thought this book was good, he allowed me to get into his head and I thought about this book frequently when I wasn't reading it. In 1973, Ted Simon embarked upon an epic journey that would take him 64,000 miles around the world on a Triumph Tiger motorcycle. Four years later, he would return to London a changed man with many a colourful tale, recounted here. Simon himself provides the introduction for his epic motorcycle journey, and hearing his voice sets a good tone for the rest of the audiobook; in fact, he quips, ‘Rupert Degas […] sounds much more like me than I do’. Narrator Rupert Degas then takes over for the remainder, with delightful results. His British-accented diction is clear, and his speech follows natural patterns, appropriate for a memoir. Degas’s accents for the various people Simon encounters add an extra dimension to the work, creating a vivid listening experience. In the end, while I appreciate the fact that traveling in the physical world means also undergoing an inner journey, I would have appreciated a little less navel-gazing, and a little more effort towards showing both positive and negative sides of each place.It seems to me I got most comfortable in places that were actually terrible places. I mean, like Chile, where there was Pinochet and all sorts of terrible things were happening to people, but I enjoyed it, partly because I fell in love with a really beautiful woman and secondly because it was all so exciting and I wasn’t personally under threat. I was alright. I remember that as being a very good time. And then there was the ranch in California. That was just something out of time altogether. I had four months at that ranch. That really was very special. Not something someone could really hope to do today. Innocent times, sort of, anyway…” Ted’s new book, Jupiter’s Travels In Camera, is a sleek, coffee table sized book and as soon as you see it you know why he’s so proud of it. “Technological advances have allowed something quite special to be produced from my old Kodachrome slides.” However, having heard his comments about his ability with his Pentax cameras, I was keen to see inside it. The quality is spot on and the 300 plus photographs aren’t so over engineered that the sensation of time has been lost. I didn’t have any problem thinking that I could ride a motorcycle because millions of people, including presumably millions of idiots, were doing it, so I didn’t see why I should have trouble. But, of course, I had no idea what it would be like to ride a bike in bad conditions. And, I had absolutely no idea what those bad conditions would be except that I knew there would be desert somewhere. I had no idea how to do that and I never had time to find out before I started. It would have been useful to have someone to tell me how to ride across sand, but I never had time to learn, or mud, or any of those things.”

Drama Shakespeare Other Drama Other Poetry Junior Classics Young Adult Classics Collections& Sets Unabridged 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. 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. This kind of contradicted the idea of poverty. If that’s poverty, I wouldn’t mind some of that. It was such a contradiction and I thought, well this is ridiculous. Despite having done the work that I’d done, I realised I was really very ignorant about the world. Most people were then. But I also felt changed in the ways he describes. Sure, my own 'trip' was a much shorter version, and factor in everywhere I've been it's still just a fraction of the ground he covered. But as he's concluding the book, and talking about finding the meaning, and finding even if there is a meaning... Have you ever stopped what you're doing, thrown it all down, and gone to look for that meaning? But at some point descriptions of dresses that held "breasts up for [his] inspection" and calling a woman a "silly cow" really spoiled my enjoyment of the book.Having fallen out of love with journalism, Ted moved to France and began restoring a ruined 13th-century gatehouse in the South of France while writing freelance celebrity stories for newspapers when actors filmed on the continent. However, it was while watching television on a visit to England that the idea of travelling around the world first came to him. Every separation gives a foretaste of death - and every reunion a foretaste of resurrection.' 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.