How to have a mid-life crisis in 10 easy steps
Fed up and 42, Mike Carter decided to live out the fantasy of every middle-aged male - he bought a big bike and hit the road. He charted his trip across Europe in an Observer column and now he's written a book about his adventures. Here he shares what he learnt on the road
1. Don't tell anyone
It took a divorce, a bad back, hair spouting out of my nostrils, a sudden aversion to young people and an industrial quantity of Stella before I was ready to face the obvious - I was in the throes of a mid-life crisis. I chose the Observer Christmas party as the place to drunkenly announce I was going off on a six-month journey of indeterminate shape on a large motorcycle. This was unwise. By the next morning, as I was reaching for the Nurofen and scrolling through the haze of the previous night, trying to recall whether I'd said anything stupid, a column had been commissioned and there was no going back. Alas, I had failed to share with my colleagues the fact that I'd never ridden a motorcycle before. This, if anything, only fired their enthusiasm further. So, once you are committed, try not to tell too many people that you are planning to go off on a motorcycle adventure. For everybody - everybody - will have a story to tell you about a friend of a friend who did something similar. This friend of a friend always dies.
2. Make sure you can ride a motorbike
I recommend BMW's rider training centre in South Wales (bmwridertraining.com), in the small town of Ystradgynlais: light on vowels but heavy on pensioners crossing the road without looking, thus handy for practising those emergency stops.
Once you've got yourself a bike (I went for the BMW R1200GS, because I have no imagination and it was good enough for Ewan McGregor), you'll need some luggage. I opted for a couple of Ortlieb Dry Bags and Metal Mule panniers - chunky aluminium boxes that, combined with the bags, turn your previously sleek bike into the sort of overladen vehicle normally only seen fleeing war zones.
Get yourself some custom earplugs. Bikers recommend them to stop you going mad and/or deaf from the constant engine and wind noise. I got mine from a company called Green Leopard. A nice chap came to my house and poured silicon into my ears, an experience I believe that some Tory MPs and judges would pay handsomely for. They are easy things to lose - mine are probably still sitting on top of a petrol pump in Groningen, Holland.
3. Book a nice hotel for your first night
I didn't, and I ended up at a travelling salesmen's hotel on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Dunkirk, trying to pacify a violent drunken Spaniard and then having to convince the French riot police not to arrest me.
Beware hotels that have spent most of their budget on the facade and reception area. Just like Venus Flytraps, they are all display, designed to lure prey. I lost count of the number of foyers I passed through modelled on the Palace of Versailles, only to be greeted by a room full of filthy carpets, fag-burned bedspreads and the smell of rotting meat. Luckily, after a day on a motorcycle, you'll fit right in.
I joined globalfreeloaders.com shortly after hitting the road but there are plenty of similar sites, such as couchsurfing.com, where people advertise their spare (free) accommodation. This can range from a room in a house to a spot to pitch your tent in a garden. Even if you don't need accommodation, the websites are a good way to meet locals who might even show you around their city. The trade-off is that, when you return home, you will have endless requests from spotty teenagers to stay on your sofa.
4. Remember: You are not Peter Fonda
Assuming you're heading off on your own for six months, I am taking it as read that you are not in a committed relationship. If you are a guy, you should be prepared to become like every badly drawn road-movie character. When a member of the opposite sex asks you, 'What are you doing here?', you'll find yourself saying things like: 'Goin' where the road takes me, sweetheart.'
If you're a man of a certain age, convinced that riding a large motorcycle will allow you to punch above your weight with the ladies, I would counsel caution. Women are supremely indifferent to motorcycles. Expect to get mobbed by small boys and excited men every time you pull over. If women responded to bikes the way men do, I'd still be on the road. Maybe next time I'll take off in a giant shoe.
5. Befriend bikers
Motorcyclists are the nicest people on the planet. Once you're on a motorbike, you're in the fraternity. Nothing is too much trouble for them. And the bigger and nastier they look, the nicer they are. It's a biker law. But please don't test my theory by nicking Hagar the Horrible's pint. I cannot be responsible for your emergency dental work.
Devoted to all things motorbike, horizonsunlimited.com is chokka with blogs from the road and tips from bike travellers. It also allows you to liaise with bikers in every country you pass through via its communities section.
If you are the suggestible type, and at this stage only warming your hands on the idea of telling your boss where to shove it and taking off, approach this website with caution: it's seriously inspiring and as addictive as crack cocaine.
When on the road, learn to wave in a macho way. British bikers don't wave at each other. It's not because they are too cool, but more to do with the fact we drive on the left, and removing your right hand from the throttle to wave at someone isn't advisable unless you want to come to an abrupt halt.
When riding on the right on the Continent, you will wave with your left hand. Keep it flat and static, slightly to the front, as if Mussolini were poised to pat a small boy. Do not try to wave like the Queen, like I did: it not only looks very effete, but at high speed you'll almost have your arm ripped out of its socket.
6. Beware of border crossings
Do your research about what documentation might be needed for various countries - better if this research extends beyond a drunken encounter with a random bloke in a London pub. Telling an angry, heavily armed Ukrainian border guard that he should let you in because a bloke in a Camden pub told you - everything was cool with visas after they'd hosted Eurovision will only result in an armed escort back to Hungary. If Pub Guy also told you that it was fine to slip said border guard a pair of Levi's and a few yankee dollars, remember real life is not a John le Carr? novel; read carefully the English notice behind Homo Sovietus about the penalties for bribing officials before going ahead. For while you rot in a Ukrainian jail cell, Pub Guy will still be in the pub in Camden.
Culturally and linguistically, some borders are more stark than others. From garrulous Sweden, where everybody speaks English, to Finland, where nobody does and people seem as melancholic as the characters in a Russian novel. And from first-world Greece to Albania, where horses and carts fill the roads, the potholes are so bad that people fish in them, and everywhere you look there are so many bunkers built by Enver Hoxha that the entire landscape appears to have been riveted.
7. Let postcards be your guide
When arriving in a new city, always head for the nearest postcard rack. This will tell you everything you need to see. This only failed me once, in Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where every postcard in every shop showed the same statue of a man wearing a very large hat sitting on a horse. It was a fine statue, though.
Cities were a conundrum on my trip: while they have the most people, they are the loneliest places in which to be alone (see above for a solution). But, then again, there are always places to visit to cheer yourself up, like Bergen's leprosy museum, or one of Kaunas's many museums, which include exhibits covering Lithuanian pharmacy and the history of taxidermy in the former Soviet state. At least I now know what an aardvark looks like.
Other random highlights: the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania; the salt mines just outside Krakow (in the running for most stunning-looking city of the trip); the abandoned and fly-blown Soviet missile silos on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia; the miles and miles of deserted beaches of Albania; Kotor bay and Tara canyon in Montenegro; Mount Etna belching fearsome puffballs in Sicily; the countless sunsets as spectacular as a Florentine painting; the literally endless sunsets of northern Norway - just thinking about it all makes me want to leave again.
8. Get your knee down
Sometimes it seemed that the world was created by a higher being with motorcycling in mind. If I had to nail a few of the best biking roads on my trip, they'd be as follows: the near-vertical ascents and descents of the Transfaragas pass through the mountains of Transylvania; the Amalfi coast road from Naples to Salerno; the Croatian coast road from Split to Dubrovnik; the drive up from the arid coastal plains to the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas in Spain; the roads through the drowned glacial valleys of Norway's western fjords; the infinite barren landscapes of eastern Turkey; riding through the other-worldly moonscape of Cappadocia, also in Turkey; the list could go on.
But the one thing motorcyclists crave above all else from a road are bendy bits, a chance to get your heart-rate up, your knee down and the chicken strips (the used/unused bits of rubber on the edge of your tyres that denote how hardcore/mild a rider you are) removed.
There's a saying that driving a car is like watching a movie, while riding a motorcycle is like being in one, and it's true. The vulnerability you feel exposed to the elements and to other road users, aware that a single slip could be catastrophic, makes all your senses acute.
Biking creates a relationship with nature that I'd never experienced in a car. You spot weather fronts on the horizon, feel the barometer drop, peel off in a different direction to avoid thunderheads, or else just pull over under a bridge and sit out the storm.
But if God built the world with bikers in mind, he must have subcontracted out Naples. Neapolitans see rules of the road and traffic lights as just another Roman conspiracy to curb their fun. 'If you can ride a bike around Naples,' my hostel manager told me, 'you can ride a bike anywhere.'
Turkey presented its own problems. From trucks loaded perilously high with sacks of grain like a drunken Jenga game, to young boys running out trying to thrust hazelnuts into your hand at 70mph, to minivans overtaking each other on blind corners. This might have been tricky enough, but frequent landslides on the Black Sea coast road could mean anything deposited in the road around the next bend, from trees and boulders to, on one memorable occasion, an entire mosque, upright and intact. I should really have removed my boots as I rode through it. Apologies.
9. When all else fails try a bribe
I was stopped regularly by police on the road. No excuses, but like the language difficulties in constantly changing countries, speed limits vary from place to place, as do road laws, like rights of way and many others. Besides, when you're in rural and poor parts of Eastern Europe, you tend to stand out on a 1200cc motorbike laden with luggage. In Romania, I was pulled over and taken off in a police car to a cashpoint; my crime never quite explained to me. The 'fine' started off at the average Romanian annual wage and, as the officer showed me a succession of pictures of his eligible sisters, eventually came down to the equivalent of a few pounds. I asked him whether, if I married one of the sisters, I'd be let off completely. 'Meester,' he replied, suddenly solemn. 'Bribing Romanian police very serious offence.'
Whatever the country, I was nearly always let off with a warning after being bombarded with questions about my trip. I came to the conclusion that cops generally love motorcycles; they're romantic, quixotic souls at heart, drawn to a career of saving people and catching the bad guys. This doesn't extend to scooter-riding traffic police in Barcelona, though. They're the bullied-at-school types who suffer from small-bike syndrome. Have your ?100, scooter boy!
10. Remember you take your mid-life crisis with you
It doesn't matter how old you are, I think the idea persists that if you wake up in another place, it is possible to be a different person. Perhaps a part of the attraction of a long trip is the possibility for reinvention or renewal. Certainly, the barrage of questions you face from your fortysomething friends on your return seems to reflect this: 'What did you learn?', 'Do you feel any different?'
The trip changed my life in so many ways that are impossible to easily communicate. I'd got very comfortable in my old ways. Not unhappy, but not particularly happy either; it often felt like sleepwalking. Being exposed to risk and failure and isolation, and being so far away from my support networks, and being taken into other people's families and making great friends and seeing some of Europe's most breathtaking sights, never felt like sleepwalking. I felt gloriously alive. So, did I manage to ride myself through a midlife crisis? Well, the hairy nostrils are still there, and the back still aches, and young people still play their iPods too loudly on the bus. But I only have to look at my motorbike parked outside my flat, with its scratches and bruises, and I can't help but smile.
? Uneasy Rider: Travels Through a Mid-Life Crisis, by Mike Carter, is published by Ebury Press (?10.99). To order a copy for ?9.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
Fed up and 42, Mike Carter decided to live out the fantasy of every middle-aged male - he bought a big bike and hit the road. He charted his trip across Europe in an Observer column and now he's written a book about his adventures. Here he shares what he learnt on the road
1. Don't tell anyone
It took a divorce, a bad back, hair spouting out of my nostrils, a sudden aversion to young people and an industrial quantity of Stella before I was ready to face the obvious - I was in the throes of a mid-life crisis. I chose the Observer Christmas party as the place to drunkenly announce I was going off on a six-month journey of indeterminate shape on a large motorcycle. This was unwise. By the next morning, as I was reaching for the Nurofen and scrolling through the haze of the previous night, trying to recall whether I'd said anything stupid, a column had been commissioned and there was no going back. Alas, I had failed to share with my colleagues the fact that I'd never ridden a motorcycle before. This, if anything, only fired their enthusiasm further. So, once you are committed, try not to tell too many people that you are planning to go off on a motorcycle adventure. For everybody - everybody - will have a story to tell you about a friend of a friend who did something similar. This friend of a friend always dies.
2. Make sure you can ride a motorbike
I recommend BMW's rider training centre in South Wales (bmwridertraining.com), in the small town of Ystradgynlais: light on vowels but heavy on pensioners crossing the road without looking, thus handy for practising those emergency stops.
Once you've got yourself a bike (I went for the BMW R1200GS, because I have no imagination and it was good enough for Ewan McGregor), you'll need some luggage. I opted for a couple of Ortlieb Dry Bags and Metal Mule panniers - chunky aluminium boxes that, combined with the bags, turn your previously sleek bike into the sort of overladen vehicle normally only seen fleeing war zones.
Get yourself some custom earplugs. Bikers recommend them to stop you going mad and/or deaf from the constant engine and wind noise. I got mine from a company called Green Leopard. A nice chap came to my house and poured silicon into my ears, an experience I believe that some Tory MPs and judges would pay handsomely for. They are easy things to lose - mine are probably still sitting on top of a petrol pump in Groningen, Holland.
3. Book a nice hotel for your first night
I didn't, and I ended up at a travelling salesmen's hotel on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Dunkirk, trying to pacify a violent drunken Spaniard and then having to convince the French riot police not to arrest me.
Beware hotels that have spent most of their budget on the facade and reception area. Just like Venus Flytraps, they are all display, designed to lure prey. I lost count of the number of foyers I passed through modelled on the Palace of Versailles, only to be greeted by a room full of filthy carpets, fag-burned bedspreads and the smell of rotting meat. Luckily, after a day on a motorcycle, you'll fit right in.
I joined globalfreeloaders.com shortly after hitting the road but there are plenty of similar sites, such as couchsurfing.com, where people advertise their spare (free) accommodation. This can range from a room in a house to a spot to pitch your tent in a garden. Even if you don't need accommodation, the websites are a good way to meet locals who might even show you around their city. The trade-off is that, when you return home, you will have endless requests from spotty teenagers to stay on your sofa.
4. Remember: You are not Peter Fonda
Assuming you're heading off on your own for six months, I am taking it as read that you are not in a committed relationship. If you are a guy, you should be prepared to become like every badly drawn road-movie character. When a member of the opposite sex asks you, 'What are you doing here?', you'll find yourself saying things like: 'Goin' where the road takes me, sweetheart.'
If you're a man of a certain age, convinced that riding a large motorcycle will allow you to punch above your weight with the ladies, I would counsel caution. Women are supremely indifferent to motorcycles. Expect to get mobbed by small boys and excited men every time you pull over. If women responded to bikes the way men do, I'd still be on the road. Maybe next time I'll take off in a giant shoe.
5. Befriend bikers
Motorcyclists are the nicest people on the planet. Once you're on a motorbike, you're in the fraternity. Nothing is too much trouble for them. And the bigger and nastier they look, the nicer they are. It's a biker law. But please don't test my theory by nicking Hagar the Horrible's pint. I cannot be responsible for your emergency dental work.
Devoted to all things motorbike, horizonsunlimited.com is chokka with blogs from the road and tips from bike travellers. It also allows you to liaise with bikers in every country you pass through via its communities section.
If you are the suggestible type, and at this stage only warming your hands on the idea of telling your boss where to shove it and taking off, approach this website with caution: it's seriously inspiring and as addictive as crack cocaine.
When on the road, learn to wave in a macho way. British bikers don't wave at each other. It's not because they are too cool, but more to do with the fact we drive on the left, and removing your right hand from the throttle to wave at someone isn't advisable unless you want to come to an abrupt halt.
When riding on the right on the Continent, you will wave with your left hand. Keep it flat and static, slightly to the front, as if Mussolini were poised to pat a small boy. Do not try to wave like the Queen, like I did: it not only looks very effete, but at high speed you'll almost have your arm ripped out of its socket.
6. Beware of border crossings
Do your research about what documentation might be needed for various countries - better if this research extends beyond a drunken encounter with a random bloke in a London pub. Telling an angry, heavily armed Ukrainian border guard that he should let you in because a bloke in a Camden pub told you - everything was cool with visas after they'd hosted Eurovision will only result in an armed escort back to Hungary. If Pub Guy also told you that it was fine to slip said border guard a pair of Levi's and a few yankee dollars, remember real life is not a John le Carr? novel; read carefully the English notice behind Homo Sovietus about the penalties for bribing officials before going ahead. For while you rot in a Ukrainian jail cell, Pub Guy will still be in the pub in Camden.
Culturally and linguistically, some borders are more stark than others. From garrulous Sweden, where everybody speaks English, to Finland, where nobody does and people seem as melancholic as the characters in a Russian novel. And from first-world Greece to Albania, where horses and carts fill the roads, the potholes are so bad that people fish in them, and everywhere you look there are so many bunkers built by Enver Hoxha that the entire landscape appears to have been riveted.
7. Let postcards be your guide
When arriving in a new city, always head for the nearest postcard rack. This will tell you everything you need to see. This only failed me once, in Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where every postcard in every shop showed the same statue of a man wearing a very large hat sitting on a horse. It was a fine statue, though.
Cities were a conundrum on my trip: while they have the most people, they are the loneliest places in which to be alone (see above for a solution). But, then again, there are always places to visit to cheer yourself up, like Bergen's leprosy museum, or one of Kaunas's many museums, which include exhibits covering Lithuanian pharmacy and the history of taxidermy in the former Soviet state. At least I now know what an aardvark looks like.
Other random highlights: the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania; the salt mines just outside Krakow (in the running for most stunning-looking city of the trip); the abandoned and fly-blown Soviet missile silos on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia; the miles and miles of deserted beaches of Albania; Kotor bay and Tara canyon in Montenegro; Mount Etna belching fearsome puffballs in Sicily; the countless sunsets as spectacular as a Florentine painting; the literally endless sunsets of northern Norway - just thinking about it all makes me want to leave again.
8. Get your knee down
Sometimes it seemed that the world was created by a higher being with motorcycling in mind. If I had to nail a few of the best biking roads on my trip, they'd be as follows: the near-vertical ascents and descents of the Transfaragas pass through the mountains of Transylvania; the Amalfi coast road from Naples to Salerno; the Croatian coast road from Split to Dubrovnik; the drive up from the arid coastal plains to the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas in Spain; the roads through the drowned glacial valleys of Norway's western fjords; the infinite barren landscapes of eastern Turkey; riding through the other-worldly moonscape of Cappadocia, also in Turkey; the list could go on.
But the one thing motorcyclists crave above all else from a road are bendy bits, a chance to get your heart-rate up, your knee down and the chicken strips (the used/unused bits of rubber on the edge of your tyres that denote how hardcore/mild a rider you are) removed.
There's a saying that driving a car is like watching a movie, while riding a motorcycle is like being in one, and it's true. The vulnerability you feel exposed to the elements and to other road users, aware that a single slip could be catastrophic, makes all your senses acute.
Biking creates a relationship with nature that I'd never experienced in a car. You spot weather fronts on the horizon, feel the barometer drop, peel off in a different direction to avoid thunderheads, or else just pull over under a bridge and sit out the storm.
But if God built the world with bikers in mind, he must have subcontracted out Naples. Neapolitans see rules of the road and traffic lights as just another Roman conspiracy to curb their fun. 'If you can ride a bike around Naples,' my hostel manager told me, 'you can ride a bike anywhere.'
Turkey presented its own problems. From trucks loaded perilously high with sacks of grain like a drunken Jenga game, to young boys running out trying to thrust hazelnuts into your hand at 70mph, to minivans overtaking each other on blind corners. This might have been tricky enough, but frequent landslides on the Black Sea coast road could mean anything deposited in the road around the next bend, from trees and boulders to, on one memorable occasion, an entire mosque, upright and intact. I should really have removed my boots as I rode through it. Apologies.
9. When all else fails try a bribe
I was stopped regularly by police on the road. No excuses, but like the language difficulties in constantly changing countries, speed limits vary from place to place, as do road laws, like rights of way and many others. Besides, when you're in rural and poor parts of Eastern Europe, you tend to stand out on a 1200cc motorbike laden with luggage. In Romania, I was pulled over and taken off in a police car to a cashpoint; my crime never quite explained to me. The 'fine' started off at the average Romanian annual wage and, as the officer showed me a succession of pictures of his eligible sisters, eventually came down to the equivalent of a few pounds. I asked him whether, if I married one of the sisters, I'd be let off completely. 'Meester,' he replied, suddenly solemn. 'Bribing Romanian police very serious offence.'
Whatever the country, I was nearly always let off with a warning after being bombarded with questions about my trip. I came to the conclusion that cops generally love motorcycles; they're romantic, quixotic souls at heart, drawn to a career of saving people and catching the bad guys. This doesn't extend to scooter-riding traffic police in Barcelona, though. They're the bullied-at-school types who suffer from small-bike syndrome. Have your ?100, scooter boy!
10. Remember you take your mid-life crisis with you
It doesn't matter how old you are, I think the idea persists that if you wake up in another place, it is possible to be a different person. Perhaps a part of the attraction of a long trip is the possibility for reinvention or renewal. Certainly, the barrage of questions you face from your fortysomething friends on your return seems to reflect this: 'What did you learn?', 'Do you feel any different?'
The trip changed my life in so many ways that are impossible to easily communicate. I'd got very comfortable in my old ways. Not unhappy, but not particularly happy either; it often felt like sleepwalking. Being exposed to risk and failure and isolation, and being so far away from my support networks, and being taken into other people's families and making great friends and seeing some of Europe's most breathtaking sights, never felt like sleepwalking. I felt gloriously alive. So, did I manage to ride myself through a midlife crisis? Well, the hairy nostrils are still there, and the back still aches, and young people still play their iPods too loudly on the bus. But I only have to look at my motorbike parked outside my flat, with its scratches and bruises, and I can't help but smile.
? Uneasy Rider: Travels Through a Mid-Life Crisis, by Mike Carter, is published by Ebury Press (?10.99). To order a copy for ?9.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
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