★★★★☆

By Jonny Bealby, WildFrontiers.co.uk

Published by Arrow Books (1995)

ISBN: 0-09-943665-5

MSRP: $9.20 (USD; Also available for Kindle)

Like many bookworms, I’ve accumulated a “to read” pile… actually piles… around the home. For many of us there’s a tendency to read adventure motorcycle accounts, not so much for their literary style, but for the gleanable content. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s sometimes difficult to dismiss the fact that a good many of these books are self-published, perhaps needing a liberal amount of spit polish before having gone to press. And that’s one of the reasons Bealby’s book had mistakenly languished on my “to read” stack—who would have expected a page-turner?

Bealby’s account takes a two-story approach. It begins with the tragic loss of his wife while they travelled northern India, and the subsequent soul searching that propelled him into a solo motorcycle trek that looped Africa. The book is intersperced with reflections and regrets from his past, while remaining an excellent running account of his adventures in the Dark Continent. It’s all-telling that Bealby chose Africa the hard way. His travels are marked with a man with a sense of discovery, risk-taking, and lament. The anti-tourist. And it’s fascinating to witness his metamorphosis from relative naiveté to adventurer as the story unfolds.

For some readers Bealby’s account will be helpful for their own research. Although almost twenty years ago, so much remains the same. The good, bad and ugly of solo motorcycling through an often dangerous land. Bealby is candid about survival, so much of which has been conveyed in a matter-of-fact manner of a storyteller who no longer views the strange and unusual as anything other than normal everyday life. A phenomenon that has been experienced by many of us.

Given that it was written at a time when there were barely a handful of others in this genre, it’s oddly unique. In some ways Running with the Moon reads more like a novel than a travelog. Bealby’s narritive is original and well-written. It also will serve as an historical artifcact and record of method for those who follow.