From the Library

[Biggles]

Tent erected (25 minutes), I walked up a nearby slope. From there, there was a view over the entire campsite.
All I could see for miles was canvas and motorbikes, each bike stationed outside its tent like a guard dog. There must have been a few thousand bikers milling round, stopping to admire the machines and draw on the bottles they produced from their pockets.
Nearly all the bikers were men, mostly corpulent middle-aged, wearing leather caps and waistcoats, studded wristbands and extraordinary configurations of facial hair. It was like a huge open-air gay bar where everybody had let themselves go a bit - although that was an observation I kept to myself. The air was suffused with beery breath and the fug of farts.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p69

[Biggles]

Then the tunnels started. On the road to Bergen there were 45 in all, drilled through the mountains. The first went sharply uphill and then corkscrewed, like a Disney ride, shooting me out high above a fjord with waterfalls tumbling down the massive bluffs and minuscule white cruise ships humbled below. Then, plunging back into another, over 15 miles long, this time the road falling away from me steeply down into a diesel fug, like a descent into hell.
I took in the clutch and (look away Kevin Sanders) let myself roll, bottling it when the speedo glowed 60 mph and I was still accelerating. After an eternity in the gloom, I was fired back blinking into the bright light again and flying, leaning sharply into the bends, buttocks clenched, the tyres slipping slightly. Inside my helmet I was screaming at the top of my lungs. For this was the landscape I had imagined when I first dreamed of hitting the road: majestic and vast, wild and remote.
And whether it was because I'd got a few thousand miles under my belt or something else, I didn't know, but for the first time it was difficult to feel where the bike ended and I began.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p81

[Biggles]

I logged on to the Internet again. It had been over 45 minutes since I'd last checked. There were dozens of messages from the motorbike site inviting me to come and stay in countries on my route. This only confirmed my growing conviction that motorcyclists, along with gardeners, are the nicest people on earth. Put motorcycling gardener on your CV and I guarantee St Peter will have you down on the VIP list.
One Aussie couple, Joe and Sue, emailed me to say they were riding around Europe and were currently heading for Poland. After that, they'd be going to Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. If our paths crossed, they said, it would be great to tour around together for a few weeks. I emailed them back.
'Would love to,' I wrote. 'Hopefully see you in a few days.'
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p155

[Biggles]

On the single-lane 'motorways', the tarmac was warped from wear and cold and heat, and the ruts trapped my wheels from time to time like tram tracks and took them off towards the oncoming juggernauts. Target fixation's not an issue in Poland. It's perfect midlife crisis territory. You just get in a rut and see where it takes you.
Leapfrogging a track at a time was the only way to progress - escaping the fog of exhaust, a brief face-off with a wall of metal speeding my way, a sonorous blast of a horn, and a return to a warm lungful of diesel. It was like a perpetual game of chicken.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p167

[Biggles]

I rode through one of Europe's last primeval forests in Bialowieza, and as I emerged an acute pain shot up my left leg. At first I thought I might be having a stroke, but then it occurred to me that it was possibly even worse: there was a wasp in my boot.
Ignoring the sensible action of pulling over and removing my boot, I started to smash myself in the left foot while riding one-handed through the traffic. This only seemed encourage the wasp to intensify his attack.
It also encouraged the attention of the local police who'd been sitting in their squad car in a lay-by and, in this most Catholic of countries, probably concluded that here was some kind of self-flagellating tour of penitence.
They drove behind me and gave their siren a quick toot. I pulled over, dismounted Frankie Dettori style and hopped around in circles, simultaneously punching myself in the foot while trying to get my boot off, shouting "Wasp! wasp!", which, in all probability, was not the Polish for wasp. The two policemen looked confused, unsure of what the appropriate action was to take.
The stings kept coming. Finally they stopped. I removed my boot and a battered wasp fell out. Can wasps smile? This one looked pretty happy. The policemen looked pretty happy, too.
"Wasp, wasp," I said, pointing to the lifeless stripey corpse.
"Osa, osa," they said together.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p168-9

[Biggles]

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talked about his motorbike and the moods it had and its living, breathing soul. And you think, "For crying out loud, I know you've had a nervous breakdown, matey, but it is only a machine."
But here's the thing. You spend hour after hour, day after day, listening to your bike, and you do begin to hear it speak. Some days, there's a sweet mellifluous, contented purr and on others a distinct grumbling and weariness.
And the really weird thing is, you start to talk back to it encouraging it, patting it gently on the petrol tank like you would a horse when it's done something desirable, like stop in time in an emergency, for example, and gently scolding it when it does something not so clever, like wobble or slip on a bend.
And you know logically that this is arrant nonsense, that maybe you need to seek out more human company, that a BMW R1200GS is not a horse, despite its dead-sheep saddle and coterie of flies, but simply a marvellous piece of Teutonic engineering, that the only variable here is the lump sitting astride it, and that if I were reading this instead of writing it, I'd be making that twirling gesture against my temple, but...
I'd been talking to my bike a lot in Turkey.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p224

[Biggles]

So, as the bike pointed due west for the first time in three months, I opened the throttle and hurtled, helmetless, across the desert, touching 70, maybe 80, miles per hour, egging the bike on, patting it on the petrol tank, slipping and a sliding and a hollering and a screaming in the pouring rain; the exhilaration and sense of freedom quite indescribable.
For about two minutes, anyway, until the smell of burning filled my nostrils. I pulled up and killed the ignition. There was smoke rising from my radiator grill. The engine was oil-cooled. I'd only discovered this a couple of days before when the same thing had happened after I'd pulled in for petrol.
Seeing me looking puzzled at the smoke pouring out of the bike, the garage owner had come over.
"Your bike is oil-cooled," he'd said.
"I know that," I'd said.
"Tsk.  In this heat, it will use much oil."
"I know that."
"You need to fill it up more often here."
"I know that."
"Or else it will overheat."
"Obviously," I'd said.
"Tsk.  Would you like to buy some oil?"
"Of course," I'd said. "That's why I stopped here."
He'd gone off, returned with a bottle of oil and handed it to me.
"Thank you," I'd said.
We'd stood there for a minute or two. I was subtly scanning the bike.
"Nice garage you've got here," I'd said.
"Would you like me to show you where the oil goes?" he'd asked.
"Yes, please," I'd said.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p228

[Biggles]

We stood there for a minute, awkward. I was frustrated that I couldn't ask him anything about his life. I had so much I needed to tell him. So much I wanted to ask.
He looked over at my bike again.
I pointed to him, then I pointed to myself, then I pointed to the bike. His face broke into a huge grin.
I lifted him up on to the pillion seat, climbed on myself and fired the engine. Then I took off across the scrub, slowly at first, then getting faster, faster, in the rain. His hands dug through my T-shirt and into my skin. I could hear him screaming. I slowed down. The screaming stopped. I turned the throttle, the screaming started again.
Finally, I pulled up outside the tent, put the bike on its stand and lifted him off. He stood there grinning. He didn't look old any more. He looked like a boy.
He put his arms around me and squeezed tightly, then he ran off towards the tented village.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p230

[Biggles]

I stopped at a garage for petrol. As ever in Kurdish Turkey, and most other places in Turkey for that matter, I was immediately mobbed by men looking at the bike and asking me questions: always "How fast?" followed by "How much?", then gazing at the bike with awed reverence. It was always men. Women, I had disappointingly discovered- were supremely indifferent to motorcycles; if women responded to them the way that men do, I'd still be on the road. Perhaps next time I'll ride a giant shoe.
Tea was always brought out as a matter of course and, as at every garage in Turkey, I was presented with a man-size box of tissues. Finding space on a motorcycle for dozens of breezeblock-sized boxes of tissues was problematic. Refusal was impossible without causing major offence. Believe me, I'd tried.
And so I took them graciously and cleaned my visor with them, my sunglasses, my windscreen, my exhaust pipe, rocks by the side of the road, mopped up oil spills, plugged holes in dams and, just when I'd managed to get through a whole box, the petrol gauge would start flashing and soon I'd be saying "125mph", "£9,000" and "Thanks for the tissues, just what I needed".
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p232-3

[Biggles]

I'd never ridden along listening to music before, because clearly that would be hazardous on a motorcycle. But whereas listening to music on a normal road might prevent you from hearing a car horn, and thus failing to take evasive action, I doubted that, on a deserted road in these parts, hearing an incoming RPG would leave you much time to do anything apart from mutter: "Fu-"
I put on my headphones, replaced my helmet, clicked play, from my Best of MGM Musicals came the soothing tones of Debbie Reynolds: "Good mornin', good morrrrrrrrnin."
It's something the world has seemingly known for some time, but only latterly discovered by me, about just how totally music can affect your moods. In no time, I was riding with a happy heart, joining in with Debbie and Gene and Donald, all thoughts of snipers and landmines and RPGs gone.
The iPod shuffled into its next song. If there's another disadvantage to listening to music on a motorcycle, it's that, what with the thick gloves and the iPod being tucked away in your pocket, and the desirability of keeping two hands on the bars, you're kind of stuck with what you get shuffled.
On this occasion it was 'The Ride of the Valkyries'.
On the shadowy ridges, there were small figures moving everywhere I looked.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p234-5

[Biggles]

I rode south from Cappadocia, across the Anatolian plateau and up into the Taurus Mountains. I was flying quickly around the bends, recklessly even, the false sense of invincibility that can infect you on a motorcycle - like riding with angels - burning strong. I was in a hurry to get to Bodrum.
But there was an atmosphere on the roads that day, a dissonance, like there sometimes is, where the synchronicity was missing.
Everybody seemed nervous or distracted, things that you are far more attuned to with the vulnerability that comes with riding a motorbike. You can instinctively tell if somebody is on their mobile, or having a row with their passenger. Bad driving just becomes so obvious.
Maybe it was the full moon, but the near misses came thick and fast. Something was going to happen; I knew it, everybody else on the road seemed to know it. 
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p245-6

[Biggles]

I came round a bend. Ahead of me was a crowd gathered in the middle of the road. As I drew nearer I could make out the body of a man, lying on his back, hideously twisted and contorted into an impossible shape, thrown clear from the mangled wreckage of the car some 50 metres away.
I noticed a big, dark stain on his trousers around his crotch, and then the woman, a wife or girlfriend maybe, bent over him, bloodied, sobbing. I pulled over and sat on my bike at the side of the road, some distance away, smoking a cigarette. I don't know why I didn't just ride on. It seemed somehow more respectful to wait, quietly.
An ambulance arrived, and they gently, tenderly, straightened out the man, put him on a stretcher and loaded him into the back. Then the woman climbed in, too, slowly, reluctantly. I followed them down the mountain, hurtling along, sirens blazing, although there was little traffic on the road now.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p246

[Biggles]

I had no idea of what was going to happen. For a split second, I stood there, all the benign and quixotic explanations rushing around my brain. They're out hunting with AK47s? They're lost? He wants to look at my bike? He's from northern Cyprus and wants to practise his English? It all went into slow motion. I stared at the scarf tied around his face. Then I stared at the gun. I remembered the border guard's warnings. I thought about Herr Flick. He was about 60 yards away now.
My legs were growing rapidly heavier and my hands had started to tremble. Any longer and I would become frozen and whatever was going to happen would happen. 
Weirdly, there was a grain of comfort in this thought, the passive prostrating before the aggressor, curling up in a ball, at the mercy of others. Fifty yards. It was now or never.
I swung my leg over the bike, kicked it off the stand and pressed the ignition. As I smashed the bike into gear and released the clutch too quickly, causing it to stutter before catching, I hunched my shoulders, waiting for the sound of the gun. The bike picked up speed, I stayed in a crouched position on the saddle, braced for the impact. It never came.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p283-4

[Biggles]

Boris drained his can, crushed it on his forehead and let fly with a sonorous belch. "Now we go to the Pit. Follow me!"
By now, Boris had perhaps drunk enough to not be considering anything more complicated than falling over. But for some reason he thought it a good idea to jump on a powerful motorcycle and speed off through the Zagreb traffic. Just in case balancing on two wheels wasn't difficult enough, Boris rode the first 50 metres pulling a wheelie.
"The cops here are idiots, plonkers. They never pull over bikers in Zagreb," Boris told me at the next set of traffic lights.
We waited for the lights to go green.
"But if they try to stop us," Boris added, "we will make a run for it. We can cut across the parks. They'll give up. Just follow me and everything will be cushtie."
It seemed to me somewhat unfair that my blood had been refused when, if anybody was showing the signs of a fondness for tainted Aberdeen sirloin, it was Boris Trotter here.
"Let's go," he yelled. "Yeehaa!" And he was off again on one wheel.
Uneasy Rider  Mike Carter  p303