This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

9th June 2007

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Moods of Future Joys - Round the World Part One: Riding into Africa

Alastair Humphreys

The chief problem with this book is hinted at in the figures provided on the back cover - its author completed a round-the-world journey of 46,000 miles over four years, cycling across five continents. Quite simply, it seems that no feat of literature could ever do justice to the magnitude of his achievement in almost circumnavigating the globe by bicycle.

Humpreys is aware of this and acknowledges in a postscript: "It has been painful for me to accept that I am better at riding than writing, and that having a good story to write is no guarantee of writing a good story." He is too harsh on himself here - in fact, insofar as self-criticism is the mark of a serious writer, his refreshing humility demonstrates a deep respect for the craft of literature and in various ways this is a consciously 'literary' work. The title is taken from a poem by Ben Okri ("All that you are experiencing now / will become moods of future joys / so bless it all"); each chapter carries an epigraph, with wise words from such luminaries as Jane Austen, TS Eliot, Mark Twain and John Ruskin (Bob Dylan also makes a few appearances); and there are quotes and allusions aplenty, from Cervantes' Don Quixote to Voltaire's Candide.

Nevertheless, what makes Humphreys so likeable as author, narrator and protagonist is precisely the lack of pretension with which he tells his story. He is honest about and even emphasises his failings - from the first day of the journey: "I stuff a tin-foiled pack of sandwiches into my bike's panniers as if heading out on a jolly day trip ... the start is inauspicious. After 50 metres my mother yells at me for forgetting my helmet ... then I realise that, despite months of research into mountain roads of the Andes and Sudanese border crossings, I have no idea which road to take out of my village."

He is not a hero. He cries. Often. And yet he makes it, from his home in Yorkshire, out of England, across Europe and all the way to Turkey and the Middle East until geopolitical events (9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan) force him off course. Instead of pushing east through Pakistan and India, as planned, he turns south and heads down into Africa.

Moods of Future Joys is not structured as a neat chronological account. Although the chapters are called "stages", and although the narrative can be traced as a linear route on a map, not every stretch of the journey is recorded in the book. Humphreys glosses over the terrain covered in Europe and only starts to provide details about land- or cityscape, language and culture, and to sketch portraits of the people he meets, once he has entered Syria en route to north Africa. Even then, he does not depend on these staple elements of travel writing because his unique method of transportation demands a different focus. He points out that travelling by bicycle allowed him to "appreciate the world as a single, gradually morphing blend rather than the separate, isolated communities that air travel and television suggest."

Descriptions of specific places and events - and, as a nice touch, numerous recipes for peculiar dishes - are interspersed with meditations on experiences that were repeated thousands of times on the trip: preparing to cycle in the morning, pain and sweat on the road, setting up camp in the evening. Humphreys no doubt suffered the monotony of ongoing solitude, physical pain and mental anguish, but the reader is spared.

He describes his "delirious highs howling at the sky" and "numbing lows of forsaken desolation on empty, endless roads" with the even temper of retrospect (even when most sentimental, pining for his ex-girlfriend back in England). Likewise, he views the continual stumbling block of his own prejudice and ignorance with a self-deprecating sense of humour.

The author's reflections on South Africa compared to other African countries will be of interest to people in this country - Cape Town represents the final destination in the book. Humphreys continued by sea to South America, where he began cycling again, and the rest of the trip is covered in a second book, Blue Mountains. It is to be hoped that he finds a publisher for this work (Moods of Future Joys is self-published) as, even though a consistent theme in his writing is loneliness, he is excellent company.