Some travel writers derring-do, and other travel writers derring-don't. Tim Moore is one of the latter. You will search his books in vain for sentences of the "pass me another of those sheep's eyeballs, old chap - and don't bother with the salt" variety: come chow time, he's far more likely to be found in the nearest cafΘ, tucking fearlessly into croque-monsieur and Coke.
But though he plays the bumbling Brit with effortless ease - "Having squealed to a breathless halt down its (very) high street, I went to the only shop in town and, finding all the confectionery was behind the counter, found myself obliged to ask for 'A Snickers. . .? Un Snickeur? Un Snicquet? Une Sniqueur?'" - Moore is made of sterner stuff than he would like his readers to think. In his first book, Frost On My Moustache, the man who declared that "my idea of tackling one of the world's most appalling maritime challenges is being able to stand up on a lilo" not only survived a stomach-churning trip across the North Atlantic on a container ship, but, having arrived at Reykjavik, proceeded to cycle across the interior of Iceland.
After shifting down (up?) a gear with Continental Drifter, a sort of Grand Tour Revisited in which he loafed across Europe dressed in a purple velvet suit and driving a Rolls-Royce in which he also, quite often, slept, Moore's new book sees him back on his bike. In French Revolutions he cycles the route of the Tour de France - a notoriously gruelling marathon which he modestly describes, on the phone from his London home, as "a ridiculously demanding physical challenge". What made him think he could do it? "Well," he says, "I never intended to do the entire route, because I'd done absolutely no preparation or training. I mean, the first time I got on the bike was about four days before I went, and even then I only cycled to my friend's house and back again.
"Originally I had the idea that I'd just do representative bits - you know, one of those really long, hot days with fields of sunflowers, and one of those awful mountain stages, and whatever else. But as soon as I started, I realised that the whole point of the Tour de France is the overall challenge. Of the 200 or so riders who set off each year, only about three are ever really likely to win. All most of them want to do is finish - and even finishing makes you a 'giant of the road'. So then I tried to do the whole thing."
Recycling the Tour de France in his own inimitable style, Moore unleashes a high-energy torrent of astute observation and hilarious self-deprecation, interspersed with the odd nugget of genuine information. Hailed as the new Bill Bryson, he is in fact a writer of considerably more substance. This is not so much Tour de France as Tour de Force: the jokes come thick and fast, but the writing occasionally arrives, as if by accident, at a kernel of uncomfortable truth. Inevitably, perhaps, some of these moments concern the use of drugs in cycling.
"Paul Kimmage, in his book, was very honest about the drug-taking without remotely glamorising it," says Moore, "but you can see why people do it, because cycling isn't like most sports where you have to have tremendous hand-to-eye co-ordination and stuff. For cycling you just have to be prepared to put up with enormous amounts of pain - and drugs can help. I reckoned that a) it was authentic to take drugs, and b) if anybody was going to need some help going up the Alps, it was going to be me."
Moore's account of his pre-tour expedition to the pharmacy counter of his local Sainsbury's will reduce most readers to giggling wrecks: a couple of pages later, it is followed by a cautionary tale concerning the effects of popping a multicoloured cocktail of over-the-counter preparations while cycling up the monstrous Alpine peak of Ventoux. "I got myself into a wretched state," he admits. "I did do some research, but not quite enough, so every time I was taking what I thought were pep pills I was effectively sedating myself. Which I would then try to counteract by taking caffeine pills..."
A number of other similarly salutary lessons are to be learned from French Revolutions. It should be studied with care, for instance, by anyone who harbours sentimental notions of buying a stone house in a chic village and living happily ever after surrounded by bilingual children and all-year-round geraniums, for what emerges with stunning vividness from Moore's pages is the sheer awfulness of much of rural France.
"Does it? Oh dear," he says. "Well, France is a huge country - as I know only too well, having cycled round the whole bloody thing - and some bits are very beautiful,, but for every lovingly restored touristy village there are hundreds of places where trees grow out of roofs and garage forecourts sprout 1930s gangster-mobiles which have been left there since before the war. Of course the Tour is a lifeline for a lot of those places - so a lot of the places I went to tended to be, by definition, places which had a bit of an image problem."
Moore is himself quite capable of destroying a place's image with one swiftly applied sentence. The entire Icelandic nation - not to mention his Icelandic in-laws - still hasn't forgiven him for his portrayal of Reykjavik as a city of "off-the-peg Legoland suburbs" populated by people who, though "slender and tall and beautiful", wear "stupid shoes and glasses". But then this is the man who summed up Spitzbergen - dubbed by the Lonely Planet Guide to the Arctic "an assault on the senses...one of the most spectacular places imaginable" - as "a heap of muddy geological rubble and dumped snow-scooters". Moore is unrepentant. "Well, I did the cowardly thing and went to Spitzbergen in what passes for the summer - which is, like, slightly crap weather as opposed to life-threateningly bad weather. It looks much nicer when it's covered with pretty snow and polar bears coming across to eat you and so on."
Fair-weather explorer or no, Moore has suffered for his art. Cycling over Icelandic lava tracks left him with "a vibration-related thing which is a bit like what coal miners used to get, a sort of permanent pins and needles in my little fingers. If I squeeze the tips" - a moment's eloquent silence - "it's still there, a bit."
His Gallic odyssey, despite a rigidly observed survival routine - "le pain, le vin, le Savlon" - has also left its mark. "I've got these grotesquely over-developed calf muscles which look like huge granite chicken breasts stuck to the backs of my legs." As to what part of his anatomy may be affected by his next planned outing, it doesn't really do to speculate. "There's talk of doing something about the Roman Empire. It would involve going from Libya to Hadrian's Wall, which has a nice ring to it."Toga or not toga, sort of thing? "Erm, I thought I might do it on a Vespa, actually."
French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France (Yellow Jersey, £12 in UK). Frost on my Moustache (Abacus, £7.99 in UK)