Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
DYNAMIC DUO’S EPIC JOURNEYS
Two women, two bikes, two books and two great reads – but they couldn’t be more different.
Antonia Bolingbroke-kent’s previous books have been about epic adventures on completely unsuitable vehicles, and a good thing too.
The first was driving a bright pink tuk tuk from Bangkok to Brighton with her friend Jo, followed by riding an equally pink Honda C90 down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from Hanoi to Saigon.
This time the bike’s a not-so-pink Hero Impulse 150, but the journey’s just as fascinating: into the heart of Arunachal Pradesh, the land of the dawn-lit mountains of the title.
If you haven’t heard of it, no surprise: in a mountainous, almost forgotten corner of India, it’s a land where shamans fly through the night, yetis leave footprints in the snow and sacrifices appease the gods.
Antonia’s great gift, apart from flawless research which gives her work the depth and erudition lacking in some celebrity travel bikers, is a curiosity which leads her into the most unlikely places, like spending nights with families who’d never seen a Westerner before, or staying in a Buddhist nunnery.
Add writing which is insightful, intelligent, funny and wise, and you have a winner.
Elspeth Beard, meanwhile, is probably the most famous female biker you’ve never heard of. In 1982, aged 23 and recently dumped by her boyfriend, she abandoned her architecture studies and set off to ride her BMW R60 around the world, armed with only a broken heart, savings from a pub job, a tent, a few clothes and some tools.
In Australia, a crash left her in hospital for two weeks. In Thailand, she hit a dog, stayed with the family who owned it, and was served it for supper.
In between, she had a miscarriage, fell in and out of love with two different men, and showed astonishing resilience.
After two-and-a-half years and 35,000 miles, she arrived home, the first British woman to motorcycle around the world, to be greeted by her father with an: “Oh, hello,” and by her mother with: “Elspeth! You’re here! Why hasn’t the Sunday paper been delivered?”
So two completely different books by two completely different women, but the one thing they have in common is the conclusion that the happiest people on earth are often the poorest, for whom the important things are family and friends, compared with our relentless acquisition of material stuff which may make us briefly happy, but ultimately fat, miserable and yearning for even more stuff.