MEDIA MASH
Emily-Jane Cave checks out stuff to fill the gaps in your bookshelf
Two Wheels To The Sahara: A Photo Diary
Author: Paul Holroyd
£13.99 (inc P&P)
Setting out to inspire other ABRs through a series of photo journals documenting his own ‘achievable adventures’, Two Wheels To The Sahara is Paul Holroyd’s first book and charts his journey to said desert aboard his Honda Varadero. “You really don’t have to be anyone special to head out on the road,” says Paul, “In spite of what the media will have us believe, the world is a magnificent place and the vast majority of people are fantastic.”
Kicking off in the UK, the narrative quickly skips through Paul and riding buddy Kevin’s blast down to Algeciras and lands them in the thick of their African adventure. Their ride sees the pair navigate some of Morocco’s best-loved and longed-for destinations, including the Rif Mountains and the mysterious Fez Medina en route to the Sahara itself, where they venture into the dunes and get a taste of Berber whisky!
The story is told from Paul’s first-hand perspective and gives a very honest account of two ‘ordinary’ guys travelling through some extraordinary places. The glossy A4 format really shows off the colour photographs to the full, and although this isn’t a practical guide or trip-planning book, it certainly offers excellent inspiration if you’re considering riding on the Dark Continent. www.two-wheels-to.org
Los Angeles to Buenos Aires
Author: Serdar Sunny Ünal
$9.99 (£6.50 approx)
For ABR and professional photographer Serdar, the hardest part of his ‘accidental’ two-year ride from his home in LA to Buenos Aires was stepping out through the front door. After that, he says simply, “there was no going back”. Charting his 40,000-mile journey south, Los Angeles to Buenos Aires or LA2BA as it’s now been nicknamed is a mouth-watering collection of images spanning the length of South America.
Coupled with brief snatches of narrative from Serdar, picture captions, and maps detailing each section of the ride, this interactive e-book app is an engaging trip through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.
The app itself is easy to use, with a clearly laid out index and individual page plan that allows you to skip directly to a specific page or section of the journey. An interactive image tag flags up the pictures which are available to buy online as prints. If National Geographic did motorcycle trips, they’d look a lot like this. www.la2ba.com. For an extract, see page 90.
Expedition read
The Middle Kingdom Ride
Author: Colin Pyle and Ryan Pyle
£14.99 (inc P&P)
This is the story of two Canadian brothers, who set out to circumnavigate China, and in the process, set a Guinness World Record for the longest continuous journey within a single country without backtracking or repetition. Covering over 11,180 miles, the trip took them 65 days to complete and saw the pair travel from Shanghai through some of China’s most inhospitable regions.
The book is exceptionally well written by professional photographer Ryan, who’s a brilliant storyteller, and as you’d expect, the images documenting the trip are top-notch – in fact, it’s a shame that the A5 format limits the reproduction size of these pictures.
Ryan’s narrative is interspersed with extracts from brother Colin’s diary, which helps give the tale even more texture, and the careful crafting of their story, from leaving their jobs to deciding to take on China and finally rolling back into Shanghai, gives the reader a real sense of the human element behind this incredible trip.
Charting deserts, mountains, floodwaters and grasslands, their anti-clockwise journey via Inner Mongolia and Tibet is anything but straightforward, and as a result, this very personal account makes for far more than just another motorcycle travel book. www.gazellebookservices.co.uk