Espirit de Battuta: Alone Across Africa on a Bicycle By Pamela Watson. Arum Press. 342pp, £18.99 in UK
A Ride in the Neon Sun: A Gaijin in Japan By Josie Dew. Little Brown. 548pp, £18.99
In 1942 an aunt of mine and her 12-year-old daughter cycled from Dublin to Lismore in two days. No one thought this remarkable - nor was it, during "the Emergency". Cycling 70 miles a day is well within the capability of any being over the age of 10. In those days our local hurling fans pedalled 50 miles to Thurles for the Munster Final and were home soon after sunset - something their descendants find hard to believe, as they motor one mile to the shops. However, we mustn't despair. A new generation is discovering the multiple rewards of travelling by bicycle and a return to two-wheeled sanity may enhance the next century.
Josie Dew, now aged 32, is celebrated on five continents as a leader of that generation. In childhood she developed cyclomania and at 16 she left school to set up a catering business in London, delivering meals by cycle-trailer - which flourishing enterprise continues to finance her journeys. Already she has pedalled more than 200,000 miles through 41 countries and established herself as the bicycle's most vocal PR agent. Questioned in Japan about her religious beliefs, she replied: "Well, let's just say, my bike is my God." To the reader she explains, "Flippant as it may sound, this is in a way very true. My bike is the Light of my Life. It harms no one and only does good. It leads me onwards and upwards and downwards, and even sometimes backwards . . . It provides a means for seeing this wonderfully topsy-turvy world that we live in - slowly, quietly and efficiently."
Even when pedalling along the potentially lethal motorways of over-populated Japan, Josie was happy in the saddle. An adaptable extrovert, stimulated by the unfamiliar and genuinely interested in the minutiae of a people's daily life, she brought out the best in the Japanese and gratefully records their numerous impulsive acts of generosity and helpfulness. This unexpected welcome counteracted the daily horrors - being exposed to lung-searing pollution while enduring the visual and aural ugliness of a society mesmerised by the most tawdry elements of our global pop culture.
Japan's split personality fascinated Josie: "It was such an enchantingly topsy-turvy place, with imported ideas flipped inside out and back to front, all rubbing shoulders with century-old traditions in such beguiling ways."
A Ride in the Neon Sun is a light-hearted book, too often incoherent but offering much entertaining information. Pamela Watson's Espirit de Battuta is more sombre, shadowed by the author's earnest introspections. Unlike Josie - at ease with herself and the world - Pamela is prone to loneliness and apparently impervious to the funny side of life. Her relationships with the Africans seem stiffly self-conscious, not lacking in sympathy but hampered by a compulsion to analyse encounters, to discern what they teach her about herself. With admirable honesty she admits that when scores of children followed her or groups of men stared at her (the rural Africans' normal reactions to a white traveller) she often lost her temper and shouted - then felt guilty but soon repeated the error. On the evidence of their books, Pamela is a much less fortunate person that Josie - now we are talking about temperaments and our temperaments are not of our own making.
As a youngster, Pamela backpacked from Alexandria to Dar-es-Salaam and her longing to return to Africa persisted. Then a Royal Geographical Society lecture by Hallam Murray, describing his marathon cycle through South America, inspired her to pedal from coast to coast. She recalls, " During his talk, something - a latent masochistic gene, or perhaps my suppressed spirit - jerked free like a butterfly from its cocoon." Pamela had spent the previous 10 years "working for global corporate clients on major issues of acquisition and divestiture, growth strategies, downsizing and change management". No wonder she needed to cycle across Africa.
Seeking "a more serious purpose than adventure", Pamela decided to link her journey to a good cause - WOMANKIND Worldwide, "a charity that helps women in developing countries to be empowered to help themselves". Through one Catherine Shovlin, a trustee of WOMANKIND Worldwide and a senior manager at Shell, "all the Shell marketing companies of Africa were lined up to provide the assistance I had requested". It is not clear why a high-earning project manager with an international firm needed the support of Shell, DHL, The World Travel Centre and British Airways. Oddly, the corporate sponsorship of individual travellers, as of sports, seems to be taken for granted by most of the younger generation. In 36 years of travelling and writing 20 books, I've never been given a free bicycle pump, never mind an air ticket.
Unlike many recent accounts of unusual journeys, every line of Pamela's travel narrative rings true. Her descriptions of the hardships en route - flooded rocky mountain tracks, agonising miles of corrugated dirt roads, bicycle-wrecking acres of mud imitating liquid concrete, relentlessly pursuing swarms of torturing tsetse flies etc. etc. etc. - are graphic but never exaggerated.
The one hardship she rarely mentions is heat and her heat-tolerance arouses my envy. Around 80 Fahrenheit I cease to function, therefore my pedalling in Africa has been climatically limited. Pamela pedalled many hundreds of miles, without complaint, in temperatures of 100F or more.
This 18-month journey covering some 9,000 miles (14,527 km) required rare courage. Not because Pamela cycled through 17 African countries - that merely requires stamina - but because several of those countries were in a state of military and/or political upheaval that would have deterred most people, including me, from venturing across their borders alone on a bicycle. Her almost hassle-free ride suggests that the vast majority of Africans, however troubled their circumstances, are kind to innocent travellers who trust them. And solo cyclists are, very obviously, trusting. Driving a motor vehicle, Pamela might well have encountered serious problems.
At journey's end, Pamela spent two years in Australia with her family, then returned to London and accepted a job with Shell. Naively she explains, "The chairman of the Shell Group apologised for their handling of . . . the negotiations with the Ogoni people in Nigeria . . . So, I was being offered a job to change Shell and Shell were saying they wanted to change. I jumped at the opportunity." Seemingly she is unaware that Shell, Monsanto et al. have lately adopted "a caring posture" to placate their proliferating critics.
Blaise Pascal famously observed, "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter." Both these volumes needed a lot more time to cure their obesity; they read like promising but unedited MSS. The semi-literate marketing consultants who some time ago seized power in the publishing world evidently imagine that Bulk is Beautiful - or that paying skilful editors is a waste of money. So now there is nobody to teach young writers the art of pruning.
Dervla Murphy's most recent book Visiting Rwanda was published last September by Lilliput.