Off The Rails.
by: Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly

If you call long distance motorcycle travel as an Adventure , what would you call a similar distance
(10,000 Kilometers) bicycle tour.

"Adventure" is too small a word to describe Cycling 10,000km from Moscow to Beijing. Yes I have not added Zeros wrongly , they cycled TEN THOUSAND Kilometers through some of the harshest terrain and weather.
The Cyclists both have done a fair bit of adventure in the past, so they did have some good experience before starting off on such a journey. Tim has cycled around Australia and Chris was a member of a wilderness guide course.

The book is an excellent read and a real Mega adventure. The Guys cycle through Russia, Siberia, Mongolia and then on to China. Their experiences in such an epic journey are stuff of legend.

The book is very well written , at least reading it you can feel the pain and the difficulty of such a long journey. You can see the snow bogging down the wheels and the cold freezing off the toes. You can see the colorful personalities of the people they meet on the way. The pleasure of interactions with helpful and kind strangers and the pains of being arrested in China and being robbed in Russia. The best part here is their experiences with the Russian Babushkas, the motherly women in Rural Russia who take care of and feed the boys for days together when they are struck with frost bite.

Also the host of people they meet along the way , Mongolian horsemen, Chinese students, Russian drunkards , the Land Mafia, and a whole lot of policemen. All these profiles come alive with character as you read this book.

I think the judge of if a book is good enough is to see whether it rouses your emotions , do you feel being a part of whatever it is that you are reading. This is easier, if say you are Nancy Friday writing about men's sexual fantasies, but writing about such a hard grueling adventure and keeping it interesting is tough. And Tim and Chris do very well in this.

They both have fairly different personalities and this is evident in their writing styles, the chapters are alternatively written by Tim and Chris, each with his own ideas and reasons for being on the road. Though at times they don't get along too well on the road, I think it can be expected for they have been together for almost 2 years on the road, with only each other for company. They have petty fights and arguments over small things but the good thing is that they are honest about their experiences on the road. There is no effort to sugar coat their experiences in order to be seen as Politically correct (or in this case make a god impression)

The book overall is very very readable and I recommend it heartily to everyone interested in adventure travel. They also have a TV documentary Off the Rails.

In general a very good adventure travel book, though the book didn't motivate me to pick up my push bike and start pedaling around Australia it did kindle the desire to travel far off , visit strange places, meet different people.

So, as they say in the biker's world, See you on the road some day.