Bikers' Bookshelf

In 2005, motorcycle journalist Dan Walsh rode out of London on a Yamaha XT Desert Rat, headed for Africa. From Dakar to Ghana to South Africa, then on to North and South America, he kept his readers posted about his travels, along the way earning the label “the savior of motorcycle writing.”

Whether he’’s delivering judgments (“Chile will always be South America’s supermodel sister–very beautiful but too long, too skinny, and too expensive to ride, and despite the groovy exterior, unpleasantly right-wing underneath.”) or just describing another day on the road (“I get my bum pinched by a tranny, my pocket picked by a grifter and get a gun pulled on me by a one-eyed, one-armed midget who’s upset cause I winked at him.”), these reports from the gonzo frontier of motorcycle travel are never less than Technicolor, adrenaline-soaked, and coruscatingly funny.

Lyrical, edgy, fraught with danger, despair and surreal highs and lows–this is a travelogue like no other. Walsh’s postings take readers to Buenos Aires (where “revolutionary” means the angry poor invading the presidential palace, not a really small phone that’s also a camera) and across the sub-Saharan savannah (like riding across a piece of toast with a mouthful of crackers); they feature Walsh being mistaken for a bum in New York, bashed by deadly tequila in Mexico, contracting typhoid in a dilapidated Bolivian hotel, biking “The Most Beautiful Road in the World” in Peru, being kidnapped in Kenya and finding downtown Soweto about as threatening as Stockport. And again and again they reveal Dan Walsh as the rightful heir to Ted Simon as the pre-eminent biker-rebel of our generation.