Around the World on a Motorcycle

Book excerpt: The year was 1928 when two young Hungarians decided to travel around the world on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with sidecar. Like Robert Fulton, whose circumnavigation of the globe is chronicled in his popular 1937 book One Man Caravan, Sulkowsky thought his was the first around-the-world journey on a motorcycle. This account of his trip with friend Gyula Bartha gives a very clear-eyed view of the world in the 1930s -- a world where the colonizing influence of Europe had affected much of Africa and Asia but not all. The two experienced the riches of sultans, witnessed remote cultures and extreme poverty in far-flung villages, travelled through wilderness with the ever-present danger of wild animals, and traversed roads of all descriptions. They dealt with mud, sand, extreme heat and cold, and rivers where the motorcycle had to be taken apart to cross in a small boat. This intelligent and engaging book, now in a paperback edition, offers a unique world view between the World Wars, flavored by the great diversity of cultures and the wide variety of human life that exists on the planet.