Adventuring on Wheels

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23009, 9 April 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

Adventuring on Wheels

ROUND the world on a motor cycle! This is surely an undertaking few would contemplate if ordered to do it. But a voting American, Robert Edison Fulton"Jr. did it for no better reason than that on a sudden impulse he said he would, and as one of his hearers promptly presented him with a motor cycle, lio had no excuse for backing down. Still, the unsuspected urge must have been there, for the job fitted him like a glove. Across Europe he "cannon-ballecl. to use liis own word, into Turkey, Syria, Irak, Afghanistan, India, Malaya. Siam, China and Japan, thus to the United States, and over the Atlantic to his starting point, London. He developed a f .... flair for crossing forbidden frontiers, all unaware that they were tor bidden. His sheer ignorance of restrictions often got him to places where more experienced travellers would have bungled. i , , . He had some luck—an Afghan whose only word of German happened to be "Ja" (yes), the chance acquisition of a military helmet and the tact that his arrival' unbidden was too surprising to question. But he had the faculty of turning his luck to good account. On arrival at any new place lie soon learned to set out for the gaol—he was. sure to land there in any event, and it was more comfortable, and created n better impression to report there ot his own free will than to be dragged there by the scruff of the neck. Wiselv he attempts no detailed analysis of the peoples he met so fleetingly, but is content to tell incidents and scrapes he actually ran into, and let the recital create its own impression. There are no fewer than 132 photographs, and many sketches and maps to illuminate the text, "One-Man Caravan," by Robert Edison Fulton Jr. (Harrap).