The CS Clancy Centenary Ride

[monty]

For all you bikers who wish they could just jump on the bike and do something extraordinary. Check out and follow the banter and progress of Geoff Hill and Gary Walker on their epic journey follwing CS Clancys 1912 route on a mototcycle around the world over the next 3 months.

www.adelaideadventures.com/

[monty]

Geoff Hill’s latest update on

THE CS CLANCY CENTENARY RIDE
Supported by Adelaide Insurance Services and BMW Motorrad.

Recreating the first around the world ride 100 years on.
Carl Stearns Clancy and Walter Rendell Storey arrived in Dublin 100 years ago all set to ride around the world on their Hendersons except for one small but significant detail.
Storey had never ridden a motorbike in his life: a fact which even the normally imperturbable Clancy admitted people might find a little queer.
Undeterred by such a hurdle, they did what any men in their right minds would do: saw the sights and went shopping.
Two days later, after Clancy had spent a day teaching Storey to ride in Phoenix Park, they set off at last on their grand adventure: only for Storey to be rammed by a Dublin tram, damaging his bike and shaking him badly.
Storey’s machine would take some days to repair and so, with Clancy riding, Storey astride the petrol tank and 75lbs of baggage on the back, they finally made a “third and triumphal start” on roads made slippery with rain.
One hundred years later to the day, it was raining again as Gary Walker and I stood waiting for the Clancy cavalcade to arrive at Joe Duffy’s, the BMW dealer on the north of the city which Feargal O’Neill, the Dublin biker who’d alerted me to the Clancy story, had chosen as the starting point after the Phoenix Park authorities asked him for a €6.5 million Public Liability Insurance Indemnity which he couldn’t quite lay his hands on, then told him that in any case they couldn’t have the innocence of their leafy glades sullied by commercial razzmatazz.
At nine, the party began, like a reunion of old friends we had never met. There was Feargal, pulling in on his own GS Adventure, as friendly and convivial in person as he had been on phone and emails.
There were the bikers who had signed up with him to recreate the Irish leg of Clancy’s journey, at least 60 of them roaring up in spite of the rain on everything from a spotless 1959 BMW to start of the art machines.
And there, too, was Paddy Guerin, the owner of the only Henderson in Ireland, who had risen at dawn with his wife Rena and driven up with it from Cork in spite of a streaming cold.
Paddy cranked the starter, and after a deep, sonorous cough like history clearing its throat, the engine settled into the rhythm of all the years between then and now as Gary rode it around the block several times for the benefit of cameramen and photographers, Clancy’s boots planted firmly on the footboards of a Henderson for the first time in a century.
We shook Paddy’s hand, then climbed on our GS Adventures and pressed a button to bring them too coughing into life; a sound that grew like rolling thunder as the dozens of bikers around us climbed aboard and started their own engines.
We rode north, my head giddy with nervous euphoria that the great adventure had actually begun, and full of wonder at how Clancy must have felt as he rode along the same road at 20mph with 75lbs of luggage on the back and Storey on the front, his feet balanced on a rod pushed through the axle.
Wobbling north on this same road, their way blocked by numerous herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, Clancy had covered an impressive 88 miles by the time they rolled into Newtownbutler as darkness fell at 5.30pm.
There, as they rode up the main street past the thatched town hall, they spotted the yellow and black Cyclists’ Rest spoked wheel sign above the door of the Temperance Inn, and inside found shelter for the Henderson and bed and breakfast for 6s 6d, or $1.56.
It had, without a doubt, been a grand first day.
Today, the inn was boarded up and its door weathered by the wind and rain, but the hefty cast iron knocker which Clancy would have used to gain admission was still there.
I was giving it a hearty knock just for old time’s sake when a local man came wandering by.
“Och aye, it was still a hotel up to the Fifties or thereabouts, then Harry Sewell the postman and his wife lived there,” he said in answer to my question.
“And what was his wife’s name?” I said.
“Mrs Sewell,” he said, and wandered on.
As we rode into Donegal, we could not have asked for a better finale to the first day of Clancy’s boots on their second journey around the world, and you could see why Clancy had loved Donegal: it was like Middle Earth, with white cottages nestled in the nooks and crannies of its hills and dales, their aromatic turf smoke rising into the limpid air.
Parking their machine in the yard of a hut where a fisherman lived with his wife and five children in a single room containing only a plate rack and a bed, they were led by the eldest boy up to the cliffs.
Although he was clothed in rags and had never been to the nearest town 10 miles away, he was well versed in Irish history, and could even tell them the height of Niagara Falls.
At last we stood just where Clancy and Storey had stood 100 years before, as the sun sank in a blaze of glory and a half moon rose to take its place.
Keen to see if their young guide’s global knowledge had been passed down the generations, when we stopped at the next petrol station, I said to the teenager behind the counter: “Listen, my mate and I are trying to solve an argument. You wouldn’t happen to know the height of Niagara Falls, would you?”
“Not a bother,” he said, tapping the Google app on his iPhone.

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[monty]

Geoff Hill’s latest update on

THE CS CLANCY CENTENARY RIDE
Supported by Adelaide Insurance Services and BMW Motorrad.
Recreating the first around the world ride 100 years on.

In Glasgow, Clancy declared the people individuals to a man and the accent almost unintelligible from the red-nosed, bare-kneed women who gathered around them at every stop, rolling their r’s and sounding like Harry Lauder.
Storey was still too nervous to ride through the heavy city traffic, so Clancy gave him a lift to the city limits then went back for his Henderson.
By this time it was almost dark, and before long they were lost in the gathering gloom, made almost infernal by the lurid glare of countless iron foundries, and were forced to stop for the night in the unprepossessing Black Bull in “the dreary town of Stonehouse. Still, at least it only cost them $1.15 each for a hearty supper, a big feather bed and breakfast the next morning, during which a clergymen, as Clancy puts it, “told us that although he had been a weekly visitor at The Black Bull for several years, we were the first guests he had met; the bar being the inn’s principal mainstay and pure whiskey its principal staple”.
Naturally, it could only go downhill from there: a peeling monochrome pile on a windy corner, it’s finally been closed because of the inability of its customers to pop in for a small glass of sherry without finishing the bottle then breaking it over their neighbour’s head.
Warmed, fed and watered, we found a hotel and fell gratefully into bed. Gary and I took turns at keeping each other awake by snoring in shifts, and we rose at seven and were on the road at eight, heading for the balmy south.
Indeed, the snow looked ever so slightly warmer as we rode into Northwich in Cheshire, where Clancy and Storey had stayed at the Crown and Anchor, which had closed in 1960 and was now Madison’s Bar and Restaurant, the forthcoming attractions of which included the Playboy Bunny Party on Friday, with free bunny ears and a prize for the best costume.
“I can just see Clancy and Storey rolling up the street on their Hendersons and saying: ‘Playboy Bunny Party? That’ll do us’,” said fellow biker and journalist Peter Murtagh, who was riding with us as far as Spain, and whose hands had gone a funny shade of blue which matched my nose.
It was time to find somewhere warm to stay the night, and after riding around for a bit, we found the Blue Barrel, a pub with rooms and a sign outside advertising a Psychic Evening.
Funny, I had a feeling we were going to stay there.
The next morning, we rode between the frozen fields the next morning to stand in the exact spot where Clancy had a century before when he took a photograph looking up St Werburgh Street towards the cathedral.
It hadn’t changed in all that time, apart from the large Chrysler parked on the double yellow lines. And the double yellow lines, come to that. Still, at least Clancy would have been pleased that it was an American car.
In Birmingham, we took shelter from a blizzard in the Witton Arms, which turned out to be the worst Irish pub in the world, a cavernous hall occupied by a gloomy Mexican and an inexplicably cheery Jamaican watching the horse racing on a giant screen.
Things got much better in London, where two mornings later we pulled up at the stroke of nine outside the Ace Café, which Clancy didn’t visit for the simple reason that it only opened in 1938, to accommodate traffic on the new North Circular Road.
Because it was open 24 hours a day, it started to attract motorcyclists. It then became popular with the Ton Up Boys and girls in the 1950s and the Rockers in the 1960s and many bands and motorcycle enthusiast groups such as the 59 Club formed there.
It was, you’ll be glad to hear, exactly as it should be: down one end was with three Triumphs, a Royal Enfield, a BSA and a Brough Superior; the first time I had seen in the flash the machine favoured by Lawrence of Arabia up to the point where he met his death on one.
Down the other was a jukebox on which Mick Jagger was complaining yet again that he couldn’t get no satisfaction, and in the middle, a bunch of grizzled chaps with faraway looks in their eyes were sitting at scrubbed wooden tables, tucking into bacon butties washed down with mugs of tea.
In the circumstances, it seemed impolite not to join them, then buy an Ace Café sticker as a memento and a Castrol one because it reminded me of the metal one that once turned in the wind outside my dear old dad’s motorcycle garage.
All stickered up, we rode into London, where Clancy and Storey spent several happy days at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall planning their route east.
Clancy had joined the RAC associate organisation the Auto-Cycle Union of England before leaving the States, and called into the RAC, which had only been built the year before, to enlist the help of the RAC's resident experts in getting maps, GB numberplates and international passes, although only after having his riding skills approved by an examiner in the street outside.
He was deeply impressed by the magnificent building and interior, and he had every right to be, for it is a soaring hymn to tasteful opulence, from the richly carpeted reception room in which someone had carelessly parked a Bentley Continental, through the swimming pool, saunas, steam room and gym to the St James’s Room in which we were expected for a press conference; an appropriate venue, since it was named after the saint whose bones had inspired centuries of pilgrims to set off on their own adventures to Santiago de Compostela.
In deep armchairs all around, the descendants of the same chaps who had sat in the same chairs when Clancy was here were busily unscrewing their fountain pens, just as their grandfathers had, to write letters of withering erudition to the Daily Telegraph about the state of the nation’s roads.

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[monty]

Geoff Hill’s latest update on

THE CS CLANCY CENTENARY RIDE

In Glasgow, Clancy declared the people individuals to a man and the accent almost unintelligible from the red-nosed, bare-kneed women who gathered around them at every stop, rolling their r’s and sounding like Harry Lauder.
Storey was still too nervous to ride through the heavy city traffic, so Clancy gave him a lift to the city limits then went back for his Henderson.
By this time it was almost dark, and before long they were lost in the gathering gloom, made almost infernal by the lurid glare of countless iron foundries, and were forced to stop for the night in the unprepossessing Black Bull in “the dreary town of Stonehouse. Still, at least it only cost them $1.15 each for a hearty supper, a big feather bed and breakfast the next morning, during which a clergymen, as Clancy puts it, “told us that although he had been a weekly visitor at The Black Bull for several years, we were the first guests he had met; the bar being the inn’s principal mainstay and pure whiskey its principal staple”.
Naturally, it could only go downhill from there: a peeling monochrome pile on a windy corner, it’s finally been closed because of the inability of its customers to pop in for a small glass of sherry without finishing the bottle then breaking it over their neighbour’s head.
Warmed, fed and watered, we found a hotel and fell gratefully into bed. Gary and I took turns at keeping each other awake by snoring in shifts, and we rose at seven and were on the road at eight, heading for the balmy south.
Indeed, the snow looked ever so slightly warmer as we rode into Northwich in Cheshire, where Clancy and Storey had stayed at the Crown and Anchor, which had closed in 1960 and was now Madison’s Bar and Restaurant, the forthcoming attractions of which included the Playboy Bunny Party on Friday, with free bunny ears and a prize for the best costume.
“I can just see Clancy and Storey rolling up the street on their Hendersons and saying: ‘Playboy Bunny Party? That’ll do us’,” said fellow biker and journalist Peter Murtagh, who was riding with us as far as Spain, and whose hands had gone a funny shade of blue which matched my nose.
It was time to find somewhere warm to stay the night, and after riding around for a bit, we found the Blue Barrel, a pub with rooms and a sign outside advertising a Psychic Evening.
Funny, I had a feeling we were going to stay there.
The next morning, we rode between the frozen fields the next morning to stand in the exact spot where Clancy had a century before when he took a photograph looking up St Werburgh Street towards the cathedral.
It hadn’t changed in all that time, apart from the large Chrysler parked on the double yellow lines. And the double yellow lines, come to that. Still, at least Clancy would have been pleased that it was an American car.
In Birmingham, we took shelter from a blizzard in the Witton Arms, which turned out to be the worst Irish pub in the world, a cavernous hall occupied by a gloomy Mexican and an inexplicably cheery Jamaican watching the horse racing on a giant screen.
Things got much better in London, where two mornings later we pulled up at the stroke of nine outside the Ace Café, which Clancy didn’t visit for the simple reason that it only opened in 1938, to accommodate traffic on the new North Circular Road.
Because it was open 24 hours a day, it started to attract motorcyclists. It then became popular with the Ton Up Boys and girls in the 1950s and the Rockers in the 1960s and many bands and motorcycle enthusiast groups such as the 59 Club formed there.
It was, you’ll be glad to hear, exactly as it should be: down one end was with three Triumphs, a Royal Enfield, a BSA and a Brough Superior; the first time I had seen in the flash the machine favoured by Lawrence of Arabia up to the point where he met his death on one.
Down the other was a jukebox on which Mick Jagger was complaining yet again that he couldn’t get no satisfaction, and in the middle, a bunch of grizzled chaps with faraway looks in their eyes were sitting at scrubbed wooden tables, tucking into bacon butties washed down with mugs of tea.
In the circumstances, it seemed impolite not to join them, then buy an Ace Café sticker as a memento and a Castrol one because it reminded me of the metal one that once turned in the wind outside my dear old dad’s motorcycle garage.
All stickered up, we rode into London, where Clancy and Storey spent several happy days at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall planning their route east.
Clancy had joined the RAC associate organisation the Auto-Cycle Union of England before leaving the States, and called into the RAC, which had only been built the year before, to enlist the help of the RAC's resident experts in getting maps, GB numberplates and international passes, although only after having his riding skills approved by an examiner in the street outside.
He was deeply impressed by the magnificent building and interior, and he had every right to be, for it is a soaring hymn to tasteful opulence, from the richly carpeted reception room in which someone had carelessly parked a Bentley Continental, through the swimming pool, saunas, steam room and gym to the St James’s Room in which we were expected for a press conference; an appropriate venue, since it was named after the saint whose bones had inspired centuries of pilgrims to set off on their own adventures to Santiago de Compostela.
In deep armchairs all around, the descendants of the same chaps who had sat in the same chairs when Clancy was here were busily unscrewing their fountain pens, just as their grandfathers had, to write letters of withering erudition to the Daily Telegraph about the state of the nation’s roads.

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[monty]

I had forgotten how much I loved Holland. Everything is neat and tidy, and the people are polite, charming, funny yet pragmatic and liberal yet decent.
All around us, impossibly healthy folk cycled to work looking as if they had just emerged from the shower after being scrubbed all over then dusted lightly with sunshine, while others were engaged in that uniquely Dutch pastime of walking the dog by bicycle.
Clancy’s first impression was not quite so idyllic: his grumpy mood after an expensive crossing and a lukewarm meal wasn’t helped by having to wait two hours on the docks at Rotterdam in the rain while the customs officer was roused out of bed to examine their passes.
They then managed to lose each other, met up in Delft on the way to Den Haag, then missed the signpost for Amsterdam and, after a day of being shaken to pieces by the bumpy brick roads, rode into Amsterdam as darkness fell and climbed off wearily outside the garage of a friendly Dutchman they had met on the boat.
He came out wiping his hands on an oily rag, greeted them warmly and got them sorted at the Rembrandt Hotel with bed and breakfast for three shillings each.
He would have been moderately stunned by the silky tarmac today, not to mention the cycle paths with their very own traffic lights, complete with red, orange and green bicycles, I thought as we followed his tyre tracks to Delft, best known as the home of the blue and white ceramics of the same name and two famous dead people, namely the painter Johannes Vermeer and William the Silent, who is buried in the cathedral.
As an army commander who fought several campaigns against the Catholics, he was a sort of quieter version of William of Orange, who was supported by the Pope to defeat the Catholic King James, thus creating the surreal logic which has become the basis for Northern Ireland politics to this day.
Mind you, it’s no surprise they were confused: their compatriots call their country the Nederlands, everyone else calls it Holland, their language is called Dutch, the national colour is orange, and the national flag is red, white and blue.
William the Silent, being just as Orange as William of Orange, was assassinated in 1584 by a Catholic fanatic called Balthazar Gerard.
Protestant legend has it that the dying William, speaking up for once, asked for Gerard to be treated mercifully.
However, since he was then dismembered with red-hot tongs, quartered while still alive and had his heart cut out and placed on his face, although according to contemporary accounts he remained calm throughout, I wouldn’t have liked to have seen them treat him unmercifully.
William’s dog, meanwhile, took his master’s demise so badly that he went on hunger strike and perished, a custom later adopted by the other side of the fence.
There. With the future of Irish politics secure, we remounted and followed the Clancy trail to Amsterdam, where the Rembrandt Hotel where Clancy and Storey stayed is no more, since of the two hotels of the same name in the city today, the one on Herrengracht was a private home when he passed through, and the one on Plantage Middenlaan was a house for single Jewish ladies and is today a pleasant four-storey brick building in the door of which is a sign asking guests to not let Bink the cat out – with a photograph of Binks just in case they accidentally let another cat out.
Mind you, knowing cats, Bink has probably faked the photo so he can come and go as he pleases.
Sadly, both of the Rembrandt Hotels that Clancy hadn’t stayed in were full because it was Good Friday, although after trying another half dozen in vain, we were wondering what was good about it.
We finally ended up in an average establishment charging prices which were anything but: €229 for a room without breakfast.
Clancy and Storey, meanwhile, realising at this stage that since they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, piled into the 1898 De Kroon for a feast and all the beer they could drink for 60 cents: the only time in the entire journey Clancy mentions getting sloshed.
In 1990, the first floor dining room of the De Kroon was restored to its former glory, and as we were tucking into boeuf bourguignon with chips and mayonnaise, Peter suddenly straightened and looked out of the window across Rembrandstplein.
“Good grief,” he said. “Look at the name of that hotel above the Smokey Café.”
We looked. It was the Rembrandt Square Hotel, and it all made perfect sense. If Clancy and Storey had stayed there, they would have emerged hungry, and made straight for the De Kroon across the square.
Sadly, when we crossed the square to make enquiries from the callow youth behind the reception desk, he hadn’t a clue how old the hotel was, whether it had been called the Rembrandt 100 years ago, or who would have a clue.
Defeated, we walked home, stopping in several pubs along the way to ease the pain of our disappointing lack of success as Clancy detectives.
On Clancy and Storey’s next morning, they found their bikes cleaned, topped up with fuel and oil, the tool bags supplied with metric spark plug adapters and a road map, for all of which their good Samaritan refused payment except for a short ride on the Henderson.
Mind you, it was hardly surprising: the Dutch are model Europeans, and bikers are always friendly to each other, generally stopping to see if another rider stopped by the roadside is OK, and nodding to each other when they pass, which along with the visored helmets, the armoured suits and the gauntlets, always makes me think of them as modern day knights.
Or possibly ants, the only other species to nod at each other as they pass.

Pics:

1. Holland Delft: BIKE STOP. Parked up for the night for a little rest and a few libations. Photo by Gary Walker.

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2. Holland Amsterdam: The boys arrive in Amsterdam. Photo by Peter Murtagh

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3. Clancy Pic: Clancy’s route through Holland, Belgium and Northern France route

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4. Clancy Pic: Historic Rijkmuseum Amsterdam

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Clancy photos courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier.
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[monty]

On French roads which were no better than the Dutch and Belgian ones, it took Clancy and Storey three exhausting days of punctures and spills to get to Paris.
It took us three hours, through a rolling landscape whose names when they passed through – Flanders, Ypres and the Somme, were synonymous with chocolate, roses and weekends in the country for the good citizens of Paris or Brussels, but in two short years had become bywords for blood, mud and carnage.
We checked into a little hotel, and the next morning made our way to the destination every tourist wants to visit the moment they arrive in Paris: the Algerian consulate.
Quite.
You see, because we had got the bike details much later than promised, never mind the actual bikes, we couldn’t book the ferries needed to get the Algerian visas.
“Where are you from, messieurs?” said the polite chap at the desk.
“Irlande du Nord, monsieur,” I said.
“Then it is impossible. I can only issue visas for French citizens,” he said with a shrug which showed that the Algerians had picked up more than just the language and a taste for decent bread from the French.
Oh well, at least that answered that question; so all we could do now was to ride down through Italy, get the boat to Tunisia and ride to the Algerian border to see if we could blag our way in there.
In the meantime, we may as well see the sights of Paris, which Clancy and Storey liked instantly, for architecture which far outshone New York or London and for the “vigorous, throbbing life of the French people”.
In fact, they liked Paris so much that they decided they needed at least two months to do it justice, and for $20 a month booked a room at the Grand Hotel Corneille at rue Corneille 5 complete with electric light, steam heating and a valet who every night polished the very boots which were snug in my right pannier as we pulled up outside the very same building a century on.
Today, I found a plump and pleasant workman called Alphonse standing in the doorway at No 5 in a pair of faded red dungarees, having just finished painting the hallway of the pale stone six-storey building.
“Ah yes, it was a hotel right up until the Second World War, when it was occupied by German officers, although they got a bit of a shock when a bomb went off inside,” he said, wiping the last of his paintbrushes clean.
“I imagine it was the Resistance, but of course no one knew. After the war, this part of the building became the Bank of France, and the part down to the corner became apartments above, and on the ground floor a bistro, a brasserie and a cheese shop, as you see.”
As I did. Thanking him for his help, we got back on the bikes and rode to the Pigalle district to find some other Clancy haunts: the famous cabarets at the Moulin Rouge, the Chat Noir and the Rat Mort.
The Moulin Rouge still embodies all the romance of turn of the century France, while its admission fees embody all the attraction of emptying your wallet, at a whopping €105 per person, or €175 with dinner, which was well beyond our means.
Down the street was the site of Le Chat Noir, generally thought to be the first modern cabaret.
Today, it houses a bistro of the same name, while the neighbouring buildings are home to an erotic museum and various houses of ill repute.
By now, it was lunchtime, so we secured an outside table in the sun at the bistro and had a coffee and a pear tart, since we were happily married men on a budget and the tarts up the street were beyond our hearts and wallets.
Le Rat Mort, another club which Clancy and Storey visited, was a favourite of Harry Thaw, who inherited four million dollars from his father the railroad and coal baron, spent half of it on drugs and prostitutes and squandered the rest, lit cigars with $100 bills, coined the term playboy, murdered his love rival Stanford White then got off on grounds of insanity, threw a party costing $50,000 when he was in Paris, and otherwise lived a quiet and unremarkable life until he died at 76.
Le Rat Mort was also a famous lesbian haunt, but since I’m not one and Gary wasn’t sure, there seemed little point in going.
Remarkably, Clancy then dismisses his companion Storey’s decision to return to the States in a couple of lines:

“At this point Storey was imperatively called back to America and, knowing no one to take his place, I determined to continue all around all alone,” he said, then set off with a heavy heart; not because he was leaving Clancy, but because he was leaving Paris, which he only realised how much he loved as he was leaving it.
Men, they’re all the same.
He reached Chartres that night after 55 tough miles on muddy roads, and when we followed the same route, the twin spires of Chartres Cathedral slowly appearing out of the mist were as astonishing as they must have been to medieval pilgrims, to Clancy and to me the first time I saw them, Inter-Railing around Europe in September 1975.
Pics:

1. Bikes outside Le Chat Noir, Paris. Please click link below to download pic:

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2. Bikes outside Chartres Cathedral. Please click link below to download pic:

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3. Moulin Rouge: Please click link below to download pic:

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All three by Gary Walker
4. Clancy pic of interior Le Chat Noir, Paris.

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[monty]

At the border crossing between France and Spain at Le Perthus, (Photo on left shows Geoff & Gary at this border crossing) Clancy ran into trouble.
“A villainous Spaniard, bedecked in the most dressy of uniforms, blocked my entrance into sunny Spain,” he fumed in his diary that night.
This “veritable brigand” then charged him a whopping $55 customs deposit, or almost a month’s wages back home, in import duty, then had the audacity to demand a tip.
Giving him six cents, Clancy set off into Spain, only to be slowed to 15 miles an hour by the dreadful roads.
“To all those who are planning to motorcycle in Spain, let me give one word of advice – don’t!” he wrote grimly.
Then, a broken crankshaft bearing forced him to spend the night in Figueras, where his complete lack of Spanish led to him being led to a hotel with half the town at his heels when he asked for a garage, and the waiter bringing him a bottle of wine in his hotel that night when he asked for the bill.
Today, Le Perthus is a long, steep street lined with shops, off-licences and tattoo parlours, its pavements hiving with shoppers carting crates of cheap booze back to France, the entire scene watched over by a disturbingly glamorous blonde policewoman.
“I wonder how I could get myself arrested and strip-searched,” said Gary as we looked in wonder at a scene in which the only thing Clancy would have recognized is the ancient customs post at the bottom of the street.
Leaving the Henderson in Figueras to be repaired, Clancy boarded a “wretched hencoop train” which took seven hours to get to Barcelona, during which he decided that he preferred the Spanish to the French both in looks and temperament and they were “even more gay than the Italians in nature”.
Ah, how the language changes. If we’d told any of the Spaniards we met that they were more gay than the Italians, a riot may well have ensued.
Wandering around Barcelona the next day, Clancy felt refreshed by the constant laughter and play of children, and deeply impressed by the fact that the hard dirt streets were swept and sprinkled with water every night.
Most enchanting of all, though, was the paseo, or evening walk, in which the citizens strolled hand in hand or arm in arm.
He would be pleased to know that both the paseo and the sprinkling of streets are customs maintained to this day, and although the children he saw laughing have grown up and old and died, their grandchildren are laughing still.
He went to bed a happy man, then took the train back to Figueras to see how the repairs to his Henderson were coming on, only for an “exasperatingly slow mechanic and his two ornamental assistants” to take three days for the job, leaving him with only 24 hours to ride the 120 miles back to Barcelona port or the boat to Algiers.
He set off at 5.30 on wretched roads which shook him to a pulp, and by the time darkness fell at nine, he had only covered 60 miles.
The fact that he could not even see the holes and rocks in the road added to his misery, and after an hour in which he saw neither a living soul nor a house, he fell twice, the first time smashing his light and the second almost breaking his leg.
He pressed on into the night, pushing the bike across countless fords and rivers, until his nerve was badly shaken when the shadows at the bottom of a steep descent suddenly turned out to be a raging torrent.
“After a while I got so I didn’t care – philosophically reflecting that one must die sometime and to die with one’s boots on is very noble; so I rushed all the fords that came later, and surprised myself each time by reaching the other side alive. My dear old Henderson seemed to enjoy the excitement,” he wrote in his diary.
I wonder what he would made of the eight-lane motorway along which we sped at 80mph to Barcelona, since we had a hot date at the statue of Christopher Columbus in Mirador de Colom with Adelaide director Sam Geddis and his wife Gloria.
It was an appropriate choice, not only because Columbus was an adventurer, but because we were being watched over by the ghost of Clancy, since he’d stayed in a two-room apartment overlooking this very spot.
In the previous Adelaide Adventure around Oz, Sam and Gloria had flown out to ride with us for the first three weeks, and this time around they’d planned to do the same, after Sam had gone to some trouble persuading his fellow directors that Adelaide should sponsor this to a degree which they were reluctant to do in the middle of a recession.
Then, when Triumph, the original providers of bikes, had to pull out because of a black hole in the sponsorship funds which they couldn’t fill, it was Sam’s suggestion to go to Jim Hill at BMW Motorrad Mallusk, a good friend of BMW’s UK head of marketing, Tony Jakeman.
Although work commitments ended up scuppering his original plan of riding with us through Europe, he and Gloria had come out to join us for a day in Barcelona, and there they were at the Columbus statue, Gloria looking immaculate as ever, since on the Oz trip she’d managed, by my reckoning, to fit 4,386 changes of clothing into a single suitcase.
“Geoff, great to see you. Fancy a Magnum?” she said.
That’s right, I’d forgotten: one of the rituals in the baking heat of Oz was the daily stop for a Magnum, possibly the finest ice cream bar on the planet.
“Gloria, are you mad?” I said. “I’ve seen enough ice in the past fortnight to last me a lifetime.”
“Nonsense. It’s a lovely day,” she said, nipping off and returning with Magnums for all.
After all the photos were done, I took Gary on a motorcycling tour of the sights of the city: the Sagrada Familia, Casa Batllo and Parc Guell
That night, we all met up again for a slap-up meal in Los Caracoles, an ancient restaurant in the old quarter, and after the usual argument, Sam ended up picking up the bill, as he does.
And so, fed and watered, we sped south through Italy, heading for Tunisia to see if we could blag our way into Algeria at the border.

Pics:
1. Gary Walker & Geoff Hill at the old customs post at Le Perthus, France-Spain. Please click this link to download pic:
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2. Gary Walker, Geoff Hill, Adelaide Insurance director Sam Geddis at the Christopher Columbus statue, Barcelona. Please click this link to download pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Gary-Walker-Geoff-Hill-Adelaide-Insurance-director-Sam-Geddis-at-the-Christopher-Columbus-statue-Barcelona.jpg
3. Original Clancy pic, market place in Figueras Spain. Please click this link to download pic:
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Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier
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[monty]

At the Tunisian border with Algeria, the guard listened politely as we asked if there was any chance of getting a visa on the spot.
Then he thanked us for giving him a laugh, and went back to inspecting his fingernails.
Sighing deeply, we got back on our motorbikes and rode back to Tunis, which when Clancy arrived in 1913 was home to 100,000 Arabs, 50,000 Israelis, 44,000 Italians, 17,000 French and 5,000 Maltese inhabitants
Wandering through the narrow, winding streets of the Arab Quarter past the barred windows of harems and with the warm air redolent with sandalwood and myrrh, he declared that here was the Orient in all its purity and the Arabian Nights come true, with richly costumed, dark bearded Orientals sitting cross-legged in dozens of tiny stalls, sewing industriously on fine silks, working beautiful embroidery or working intricate engravings into ivory, brass or steel.
Naturally, as we stepped out of a taxi earlier outside the souks of the medina, we were immediately befriended by a chap called Abdullah, whose friendship inevitably led to his brother’s perfume shop and his other brother’s carpet shop, allegedly in the king’s former palace, and with a vast bejewelled bed upstairs in which the king allegedly slept with his four wives.
“Only four?” we said, and Abdullah and his brother laughed, although their laughter wore a little thin when it became obvious that we were not going to buy any carpets, special discount and shipping or not, that day or any other.
The souks of the most honourable professions, such as gold, cloth and perfume, are closest to the Grand Mosque, with the noisy and less exalted ones such as dyeing and metalwork relegated to the outskirts, and somewhere in between is the ancient Souk of the Genuine Fake Watches, where we found another chap called Mohammed, in his mid-forties and wearing a pullover which had seen better days.
“Forgive me, monsieur, but the only bigger fool than a man who buys a fake designer watch is the fool who buys the real thing,” I said.
“Of course, monsieur, but luckily for me, there is one born every minute,” he said, glancing at my wedding ring. “Now, can I interest you in some jewellery or silks for your wife? My brother has a little shop just around the corner…”

From Tunis, Clancy took a boat to Naples, where even the dirty, noisy inhabitants failed to quench his happiness as he hopped on a tram to the National Museum to gaze in wonder at relics recovered from Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Forum.
Coming from a country whose history was measured in a handful of centuries rather than millennia, his vivid imagination found joy in the smallest things, like the bunch of grapes, the charred English walnuts and a half-baked loaf of bread recovered from Pompeii – “all carbonized into immortality, and each with its own story of the end of its world”.
The loaf, the walnuts and the grapes are still there, and still looking almost good enough to eat, even though they’re 1,966 years past their sell-by date, but how strange it felt to stand there in my own boots on the very spot on which Clancy’s had all those years ago.
And even stranger to emerge alive from a city where at any given moment a Fiat 500, Vespa, pedestrian or crazed dog will leap out in front of you without warning. It would be far too uncool, of course, for any of them to have even glanced in the direction of the oncoming traffic
Like Clancy, we rode south for a few miles and took refuge in the cypress glades of what was once Pompeii, where he paid 60 cents admission and fought off a horde of guides offering to show him around for a mere $20.
He emerged in a dream from the city of death into modern life again, shaken by the experience and wondering what New York would look like 2,000 years from now.
I’m not surprised he was shaken, for Pompeii is astonishing.
Although 20,000 people lived there, most of them had scarpered by the time it erupted after several days of ominous rumblings, and it was only the city's 2,000 optimists, who put the noise down to indigestion, and were in any case reluctant to leave a town containing 25 brothels, who were left.
Clancy, meanwhile, had left the Henderson in Naples and hopped on the express train for the four-hour journey to Rome after declaring the roads in Italy too wretched to even consider motorcycling.
Surprised to find the ancient Rome of his dreams now a bustling modern city, Clancy made straight for the Forum, which he found packed with “Americans of the noisy tourist type”, all being ripped off by guards who would only brush sand off to reveal the floor mosaics when paid.
St Peter’s impressed him more as a beautiful, rich place than as a house of worship, and it still seems like a monumental tribute to man's sense of his own importance far removed from the humility of Christianity’s roots.
Today, to get in you have to pass through airport-style scanners which presumably remove all traces of Protestantism, and inside, the opulence is as stunning as Clancy found it.
Almost as stunning, and since Clancy doesn’t mention it we can only hope he was spared it, is a souvenir shop where the Italians' normally impeccable sense of style has momentarily deserted them.
Here, you can buy everything from 3ft high plastic virgins to holograms which turn from Jesus to Mary and back again.
From far above, if you listen, you can hear God weeping quietly.
At the Vatican, we’d hoped for a private audience with the Pope, but in spite of mentioning the fact that I knew Ian Paisley Jnr, not to mention his dad, we were turned away as peremptorily by the Swiss guards as we had been by the Algerian border police.
Honestly. You call the Pope the Antichrist once, and they just never let you forget it.

Pics:
1. Geoff Hill at the Algerian border in Tunisia. Please click this link to download pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Geoff-at-the-Algerian-border-in-Tunisia.jpg
2. Clancy pic: Customs post between Algeria and Tunisia. Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier. Please click this link to download pic:
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3. Market place in Tunis. Please click this link to download pic:
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4. Bikes outside St Peters in Rome. Please click this link to download pic:
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5. Bikes at the Colosseum in Rome. Please click this link to download pic:
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[monty]

Sri Lanka has been likened by travellers to a teardrop or a pearl at the southern tip of India, and by those romantic Dutch to a leg of ham.
As our plane approached it, at first there was only the deep aquamarine of the ocean, then an endless golden strip of beach, and beyond that the verdant smack of jungle punctuated by the terracotta roofs of colonial-style bungalows.
You could see why the early Arab traders who stumbled on it had called it Serendib, which became in English serendipity, the art of happy coincidences, and we had stumbled on one ourselves in the form of Alfons van Hoof, a Belgian ex-teacher who was going to take a few days off from his job as a freelance translator and show us around.
He led the way through streets which were like a more relaxed and less crowded and chaotic version of India to a pleasant guest house a short walk from the beach in Negombo, a seaside resort about 25 miles north of Colombo.
All in all, we’d done slightly better than Clancy, who stepped ashore in Colombo with scarcely a penny to his name, since his letters to the Motorcycle Review asking for payment for his articles had either disappeared in transit or vanished into the bowels of the magazine’s accountancy department.
Stepping into a rickshaw, was borne to the Globe, a favourite watering hole of expats and the cheapest hotel in town, at which he arranged a line of credit for a room at $1.65 a day, including meals.
That night, sitting on the hotel verandah with the palm trees swaying in the warm, aromatic air, the sun sinking to the ocean and a large lizard at his feet eating a moth in instalments then retiring for the night, Clancy had already fallen in love with the tropics.
He retired happily to bed, interrupted only by a beetle resembling a baby elephant which he dispatched with a well-aimed shoe.
And if he had dined like a pauper on board the Lutzow, he feasted like a prince in the Globe, for he was woken at 6.30am by a boy with “early tea for master”, followed by breakfast at 10.30, tiffin at 1.30, afternoon tea at 4.30, dinner at 7.30 and supper from 9 to 12 – all but afternoon tea and supper seven-course meals involving heaps of curry so hot he thought it would have been more appropriate to Iceland, and all washed down with lashings of lemonade or lime and soda.
Since the Globe is long gone, possibly as a result of feeding its customers six meals a day for $1.65, that evening we met Alfons and a couple of Dutch friends, Hans and Henk, at a little restaurant by the beach for lashings of beer and that well-known Sri Lankan delicacy, lasagne.
As we sat down to eat on the patio, thunder rolled across the city, lightning split the sky and great, warm drops of rain came plummeting onto the courtyard with such ferocity that it was difficult to tell where they ended and their splashes began.
“Here,” said Gary, “whose stupid idea was it to come to Sri Lanka at the start of the monsoon season?”
“Possibly the same person whose idea it was to leave Belfast in the worst snow in living memory,” I said, catching sight of the culprit reflected in the restaurant window.
With Clancy’s stomach as full as ours, if not with lasagne, his wallet followed suit two days later with a cablegram bearing the news that he was back in funds.
“It was wonderful what a store of inspiration and courage came with the feeling of money in my pocket again, and the knowledge that the confidence of the powers at home continued,” he wrote in his diary, then took a rickshaw to the docks to get his Henderson, fit it with a new pair of Goodyear tyres and bid a genuinely sad farewell to the ones which had carried him through seven European and two African countries with only three punctures.
Having got his tyres sorted, he rode through the “fascinating but odorous” Pettah bazaar district, across the great Victorian bridge and off on the jungle road, dodging naked children, small alligators and large bullock carts.
We were probably doing about the same speed as him the next morning when we rode to Colombo, which rated about 8 out of 10 on the Naples scale of traffic chaos, but had the added twist of taking place in what felt like a Turkish bath.
As I was riding alone glowing damply, a man on a Honda 250 pulled alongside me.
“Pardon me, sir, would you like to rent a motorcycle?” he asked.
“Er, I already have one,” I said hesitantly, not wanting to state the obvious.
“No, no, I can rent you a much better one for Colombo traffic, only 10 dollars a day.”
“You’re OK, thanks.”
“Oh well, never mind. Tell me, what is your name, your profession and your home?”
“Mohammed Singh, clothing exporter, Amritsar,” I said.
“Oh, you are jesting me, sir. You look more like Hindu to me,” he laughed, and sped on.
Victoria Bridge was a modern concrete replacement rather than the ornate wrought iron structure Clancy rode over, and Pettah bazaar was just as fascinating as when he was there, give or take a mobile phone shop and internet café or two, and possibly less odorous, but the tall neoclassical building which once housed the Globe now lay an empty shell.

The next morning, we had planned to set off with Alfons on the Clancy trail around the island, but were awakened by a clap of thunder so alarming I feared the windows would break.
As we were tucking into a hearty breakfast of white toast washed down by Nescafe with powdered milk, Alfons arrived and we sat, and waited.
At noon, it cleared slightly, if only to the extent that we could now hear each other, and we set off into the jungle.
Pics:
1. Explorers Geoff Hill, his Sri Lankan guide Alfons van Hoof & his son Roshan. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Explorers-Geoff-Hill-his-Sri-Lankan-guide-Alfons-van-Hoof-his-son-Roshan.jpg
2. Cats and dogs monsoon rain. Please click link to access pic:
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3. Gridlock Colombo traffic can be a little trying. Please click link to access pic:
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4. Only way to travel Clancy era Rickshaws. Please click link to access pic:
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Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier.

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[monty]

Recreating the first around the world ride 100 years on.
The rain poured down in sheets as the road climbed out of the suburbs of Colombo and wound up into dank, dripping jungle interspersed with paddy fields.
Mind you, the road was so flooded in places that it was impossible to tell where it ended and the fields began.
On the sodden verges, women like birds of paradise sheltered under umbrellas, waiting for the ancient rattling bus which plied this route.
Above their heads at one stop, a row of fruit bats hung from the telephone wire, waiting for an urgent call from Colombo on when the mangos were due to ripen.
As the road twisted and turned up the Kadugannawa Pass towards Kandy, I was yet again filled with admiration for how Clancy had ridden these roads when they were rutted dirt and mud on a heavy, underpowered machine with one gear, no front brake and only a handful of horses to fling at these hills.
When Clancy finally reached Kandy, he found a picturesque lake bordered by restful hotels and luxuriant foliage, and checked into a small native hotel called the Kings, where a travelling English circus troupe tried to steal his US flag for a laugh.
Today, there is no indication of where the hotel was, so we motored on and rounded a corner to be greeted by the lake, cradled by terraces of graceful white buildings rising into the forested hills all around.
It was a stunning setting, blessed even more by the sight of families strolling or boating, chaps playing tennis on the lakeside courts, or couples courting on park benches under giant umbrellas bought specifically for that purpose.
In the cool of the afternoon Clancy headed for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peradeniya, where he was most impressed by the giant fruit bats, either flapping languidly overhead in scores, or hanging like shrouds from the trees, filling the air with the deep hum of their constant cries.
Mind you, those could have just been the moans of hangovers, since as he noted in his diary, they were partial to a diet of palm wine from the vessels set to catch the flowing sap, as a result of which they were almost permanently batarsed.
The next morning, he arrived in Matale just in time for elevenses at one of the many government rest houses set up around the country and in India for unpretentious but affordable accommodation.
The Number One Boy brought him a huge glass of lime and soda, and as he was sipping it gratefully, an American globetrotter Clancy had met in Colombo waltzed in with a native in European dress.
In a flash the Englishman was on his feet and out of the room, and when a baffled Clancy followed him out to see what on earth was wrong, the reply, “Isn’t your friend a bit weird to hang around with natives like that, and especially to bring them into a room with gentlemen?” instantly summed up for Clancy the English attitude to colonials.
In Matale today, we found the rest house, a handsome white three-storey building in which, Clancy would be pleased to hear, several locals were tucking into Sunday lunch washed down by pitchers of beer without a snooty Englishman in sight.
By now, Clancy had tarried so long that by the time he got back to the Henderson it was 6.30pm, and darkness was only minutes away as he prepared to ride through the jungle to the rest house at Sigiri; only for the locals to tell him that the rogue elephants, cheetahs, bears and wild buffalo that came out at night made the road so dangerous that they wouldn’t dream of doing it in a group, never mind alone.

“I’ll chance it. I hate to give up what I’ve started,” said the indefatigable Clancy, hauling out his Savage automatic and setting off into the jungle night with a cry of “Sigiri or bust!”
As did we, with a cry of “Sigiri or drown!” after yet another monsoon downpour, which stopped as quickly as it had started, leaving us proceeding onwards steaming gently.
He had bought his fifth headlight of the trip in Colombo, but dared not light it for fear of attracting wild animals, and within seconds he was plunged into darkness, riding as fast as he dared along a sandy track until he dimly saw a huge shape appear in the road ahead.
Blowing his horn like mad and opening wide the throttle, he charged the monster with wild yells, and as it snorted and crashed off into the jungle, he saw that it was a wild buffalo.
When he finally rolled up at the rest house, startling the two lady guests, they told him he was lucky to be alive.
The next day, although many of the hundreds of rest houses in Sri Lanka have been abandoned, we found the one in Sigiri still spick and span, with its shady verandah, easy chairs, ceiling fans slowly stirring the warm, aromatic air and monastic rooms exactly the same as when he stayed there.
Standing beside the old red post box by the gatepost, you have a clear view past the elephant carelessly parked on the other side of the road to the 1,000ft rock with the remains of Sigirya, built in the fifth century as a combination of pleasure palace and impregnable fortress by King Kassapa, on top.
Claiming he hadn’t seen a pretty girl for two months, Clancy was feeling frisky enough to climb a precarious wire and bamboo ladder to see the so-called Sigiriya Damsels, frescoes of 500 girls who were either Kassapa’s consorts or celestial nymphs.
Staggering into the cave and dusting himself off, he was delighted to find that the gals not only had fresh teenage complexions in spite of being almost 15 centuries old, but were, to a woman, topless.
Pics:
1.Golden Temple at Dambulla. Please click link to access pic:
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2. Clancy’s boots & postbox at Sigiri Rest House. Please click link to access pic:
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3. Sigirya Rock and a badly parked elephant. Please click link to access pic:
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4. King Street in Kandy, where Clancy stayed. Please click link to access pic:
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Pics by Gary Walker
blogs on www.adelaideadventures.com

[monty]

When Clancy arrived in San Francisco and stepped onto home soil for the first time in over eight months, his first shock was that everyone was speaking English.
For while his head knew of course they would, in his heart it felt like sacrilege for Frenchmen, Italians and Chinese to be wantonly using his home language as their own.
However, he was in for an even bigger shock when he went to the docks to collect his Henderson to find that it had crossed the Pacific from Tokyo upside down, the Japanese for This Way Up obviously having been lost in translation.
As he was rolling up his sleeves and preparing to laboriously clean the oil off it with kerosene, he heard the sound of another Henderson, and looked up to see a young man called Robert Allen rolling up on his brand new machine.
Bob, as everyone called him, immediately set to helping Clancy with the job, and by the time they’d finished, had agreed to scrap his plans for a riding holiday and join Clancy in riding across the States to chart a route for a new northern transcontinental highway.
However, if Clancy had thought he was returning to civilisation, he was in for a shock, for after two days of hunting around San Francisco in vain for information on the road north, he finally tracked down the secretary of the American Automobile Association, who announced confidently only 40 of the 900 miles between San Francisco and Portland were poor.
If he’d said only 40 were good, he might have been closer to the truth, muttered Clancy grimly to Allen as they set off for Sacramento on dirt tracks which made the highways of Tunisia seem like ribbons of silk.
At least we arrived at the Virgin Atlantic freight depot in LA to find the BMWs the right way up in their crates.
Feeling like boys on Christmas morning, we freed them from their bonds of wood, gaffer tape and bubble wrap, brought the engines coughing into life and rode north to San Francisco to meet Dr Gregory Frazier, or Dr G, as he had become dubbed in our email correspondence.
After a successful motorcycle racing career, he had ridden around the world five times, the last time with a 63-year-old grandmother of six who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
In 2010, after 16 years off digging up Clancy’s original magazine articles on his trip and turning them into the book Motorcycle Adventurer which had inspired me to recreate Clancy’s journey, Dr G was off again around the planet with his friend Richard Livermore, with us joining them on a recreation of Clancy’s last leg to New York as a gentle warm-up.
Outside our hotel the next morning were two immaculate 30-year-old Honda GL650 Silverwings, and as we were admiring them, the doors opened and there stood a figure I had never seen before, but who was all too familiar, with his hair as black as the bird from which his Crow tribe ancestors took their name.
“Dr G!” I said, shaking his hand warmly. “Er, just out of interest, why are you and Richard wearing shirts and ties?” I said.
“Well, Clancy did, so we felt we ought to,” said Richard.
At the docks where 100 years ago to the day Clancy had stepped ashore, there were several bikers there already, and before long Dr G and Gary were ensconced in a conversation with the gathered throng about their respective bike collections.
By noon, all the photographs had been taken, and all the bikes in the world had been discussed, and it was time to go.
By teatime we were in Sacramento, where Clancy and Allen were so delighted to find a hard driveway encircling the Capitol that they rode around it twice, then went around every motorcycle dealer in town trying in vain to interest them in stocking the Friel’s backrests they’d fitted before leaving San Francisco.
“Sacramento always has and always will be dead’, they’ll tell you in San Francisco, and they sure are right!” fumed Clancy, who at least got some solace when one of the dealers invited him to a hill-climb challenge on a nearby railway embankment.
When the dealer’s well known twin, probably a Harley, got stuck, Clancy whispered in the old boy’s ear to do his best, and the Henderson responded with pride, sailing past the dealer with ease in spite of its 14,000 miles on the clock.Only for hubris to strike with a bang: heading north out of town, they ran straight into 20 miles of deep sand, and a fall which broke off his magneto distributor. Wiring it back in place, they ploughed on through the choking dust of the horse-drawn wagons known as prairie schooners.
Covered in dust, they treated the bikes to fuel and themselves to ice creams in the mining town of Oroville, arrived in Chico just before dark, and after riding up and down the main street, found a local mechanic who spent the evening fixing the distributor bolts and giving them copious but erroneous information on the roads ahead.
The dirt track which Clancy and Allen had ridden to Sacramento is today a six-lane freeway, but Sacramento was as sleepy as they found it, with the only sign of life a solitary ice cream salesman and a handful of Sunday strollers.
Still, the hard driveway around the Capitol, a fine neoclassical building topped by a dome glittering white against the deep blue sky, was still worth riding around twice, although our plans to challenge the local Harley dealer were doubly foiled by the fact that he was closed, and those twin spoilsports, health and safety, had fenced off the railway embankment.
The next morning, we were loading up the bikes when Richard pointed to a rough dirt mound on the edge of the parking lot.
“There you go. There’s the hill climb you missed,” he said.
Dr G needed no further encouragement, and within seconds he had his Honda firmly stuck halfway up with a wide grin on his face.
Pics:
1. BAY STAY - Gary Walker, Dr G. Gregory Frazier, Richard Livermore and Geoff Hill at San Francisco docks. Please click link to access pic:
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2. Clancy & Allen leave San Francisco. Please click link to access pic:
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3. Cruiser The SS Persia on which Clancy sailed from Japan to the US. Please click link to access pic.
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4. Flagbearer Dr Gregory Frazier and his Honda Silverwing. Please click link to access pic:
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Pics by Gary Walker

Original Clancy pics courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier
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[monty]

In northern California, we tilted east through the foothills of the Sierras, with Mount Shasta in the distance covered in snow even in June.
Which is where it all started to go horribly wrong for Clancy and Allen.
With the mountains looming, they stopped at the express office in Redding and shipped their 50lb panniers on to Portland, then bought cheap blankets in the General Merchandise store for camping.
That sorted, they tanked up with more ice cream, fuel and oil, and set off late in the afternoon for the dreaded road that lay ahead.
They didn’t have long to wait: within a few miles out of Redding, they were climbing an endless succession of rocky grades with hairpin bends, then sliding down the other side to be greeted by small but lethal lakes full of boulders.
Often the road got so steep that they had to dismount and run beside the machines, and as they were sliding down one hair-raising slope with their back wheels locked, they came upon a young couple in a Cadillac stuck fast on a tree stump.
They got it free, but the hill was so steep the fuel couldn’t make it up to the carburettor, but not to beaten, the resourceful Bob blew into the top of the fuel tank, his face slowly turning the colour of a beetroot, while the driver cranked the starter handle until the engine spluttered then fired into life and settled down into a steady rhythm.
The grateful couple gave the riders six eggs, a small can of baked beans, an even smaller can of condensed cream, a little bread, sugar and coffee, and a pail to cook it in, and since by now it was growing dark and they were still in the heart of the mountains, they found a grassy spot near a crystal stream, and while Clancy cooked up a feast in the pail, Bob made a bed of weeds and leaves between the Hendersons, they wrapped themselves in their blankets and, with strange sounds from the woods all around and lightning crackling overhead, finally fell asleep just before the grey light of dawn woke them again.
At 5am, tired and hungry, they fired up the Hendersons and set off on roads which, impossibly, were even worse than the day before.
A ferry carried them across the raging Pitt River, and halfway up the next mountain, Clancy’s Henderson ground to a halt with a dry and slipping clutch.
He greased it with oil from his tank, but the clutch was so worn and the track so steep that he could only push the Henderson up it in the fierce sun, stopping when he was so exhausted he couldn’t hold the bike upright and resting until he could try again.
It took him 20 attempts and two exhausting hours to get up that one hill, and there were a dozen more beyond.
“If ever a man was bitter against motorcycling, it was I and then,” he wept, but when he had the strength to lift his head, realised for the first time the extraordinary beauty around them.
Compared to that, we had it easy as we swooped along silky tarmac through a landscape of pine-clad mountains and rushing rivers and across the state border into the alpine glories of Oregon, filled yet again with respect and admiration for Clancy and Allen getting through this landscape on what were basically mule trails.
Shortly after passing a prairie schooner with a prospector, his wife, small son and dog aboard, they encountered the worst section yet: the 12 miles of Cow Creek Canyon which Clancy described grimly as like an endless frozen pig pen as steep as a roof and littered with logs, rocks and ruts.
Arriving in Roseburg as darkness fell, they collapsed into the first inn they could find, and emerged to find that someone had stolen Clancy’s gloves.
The next day, the road was so bad, and the scenery so glorious, that as Clancy put it perfectly, a poet would have been in heaven, and a motorcyclist in hell.
When they finally rolled into Portland at 11.30 at night, their misery was compounded by the sight of the crowds going home from the last night of the annual Rose Festival, which they had been looking forward to all the way from San Francisco.
Cow Creek Canyon, Clancy’s endless frozen pig pen, which we rode with local bike journalist Bart Madson, was now a perfect motorcycling road, twisting and turning under the dappled trees, over the railroad tracks and past a river sparkling in the sun.
Greeted by the paved streets, electric lights and tuxedo-clad waiters of Wallace, Idaho, Clancy and Allen decided that the Wild West only existed any more in movies, only to have their certainty overturned the very next night when they arrived in Missoula, Montana, to find a posse in hot pursuit for a gang of desperadoes who had shot at their landlady, stolen the sheriff’s six-shooter and terrorised the town before heading for the hills.
Wincing at the outrageous bill the next morning, they rode off into a thunderstorm so bad that by dark they had only covered 20 miles and were forced to spend the night in the shack of prospector Isam Cox, who rustled up a feast of bacon, beans and coffee for the exhausted but grateful duo.
In Wallace, we found the electric lights were still working and the streets still paved, but the brothel had closed in 1988 and was now in a museum. The girls had left in such a hurry that they’d left their clothes behind, and by the looks of it they didn’t have much to wear but a few skimpy under things, poor dears.
“Greg, want to phone the hotel tonight and confirm our reservation?” said Richard as we put on our helmets.
“No need. Dr G’s from the Crow tribe, and they’ve already got a reservation,” I said.
Laugh? I thought they’d never start.
Pics:
1. Ione, Oregon today. Please click link to access pic
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Ione-Oregon-today.jpg
2. Ione, Oregon when Clancy was there a century ago. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Ione-Oregon-when-Clancy-was-there.jpg
3. Geoff Hill (left) & Gary Walker at Pitt River, Oregan. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Geoff-Hill-left-Gary-Walker-at-Pitt-River-Oregan.jpg
4. On the road in Oregon. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/On-the-road-in-Oregon.jpg

Pics by Gary Walker

Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier

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[monty]

As we crested a mountain to be met by all its cousins stretching all the way to the horizon, Dr G pulled into a lay-by.
“Welcome to Montana. Fourth biggest state, size of Germany, only a million people, and you can see why they call it big sky country,” he said.
This was home to one of Dr G’s three houses, as well as Denver and Arizona. Not to mention the one in Thailand where he wintered for six months with his wife, a Thai physiotherapist.
“I did live for a couple of years in the Seventies in a converted 1958 school bus I used as a race base. My then wife and I decided to change our lives and move to California, so we sold everything, put two motorbikes in the bus and a car on the trailer hitch and set out for San Diego,” he said.
“Only for a guy in Albuquerque to offer me a job and mess everything up. Then in the divorce, my wife got the money and I got the bus.”
Further down the road, a series of billboards heralded the forthcoming week-long Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, presumably culminating in a series of gala balls.
This, since you ask, is a celebration of the time of year when young bulls and rams are deprived of their family jewels, which are then fried and eaten as a delicacy known as prairie oysters.
They are, by all accounts, delicious, but you’ll have to take Rock Creek Lodge’s word for it, since although I’ve eaten everything from grasshopper to guinea pig, a chap has to draw the line somewhere.
In Butte, we spent the evening at a barbeque at the home of John and Linda Davis, friends of Dr G.
“Mmm, this elk is lovely. Where did you get it?” I said to their daughter Gina.
“Shot it. Like another beer?”
Leaving Butte with no regrets, Clancy and Allen camped that night east of Whitehall, only to spend the entire sleepless night being tortured by the biggest and most voracious mosquitoes yet.
After a bleak breakfast of apricots and unripe bananas in the barren crossroads town of Warren Creek, they met a fellow biker who was on his way to Chicago.
A keen reader of the Bicycling World and Motorcycling Review, he asked Clancy if he’d read about the bold youth riding around the world on a Henderson, then proceeded to regale Clancy with his own adventures until Bob spoiled the surprise by revealing the truth.
After getting separated from Bob in the dark, Clancy finally spotted a light and was glad to find his companion waiting on the steps of the Corwin Hot Springs Hotel, where after 16 hours in the saddle they were glad of the eponymous springs around which the hotel had been built in 1909, boasting 72 rooms, a large swimming pool and hot showers fed from the springs.
Barred from riding into Yellowstone National Park the next morning, Clancy and Allen joined a coach party tour, then set off on a road so bad that they were forced to ride on the railroad sleepers, at which point Clancy’s saddle broke, treating his nether regions to miles of painful bumping along so slowly that it was dark by the time they got back on the road.
Remarkably, none of his travails had sapped Clancy’s boyish enthusiasm, for the next day he begged a ride on a locomotive, then almost regretted it when it sped into a tunnel and he almost suffocated on the sulphurous fumes while the fireman cheerily related how his predecessor had been asphyxiated in that very same tunnel the previous summer.
Leaving Butte the next morning, we rode out of town and up the hill to the Continental Divide.
West of here, all rivers flow to the Pacific, and east, to the Atlantic, and by the roadside was a small puddle left from the overnight rain trying to make up its mind.
At Bozeman Pass, we stood right over the railway tunnel where Clancy had almost been asphyxiated, while beside us a wooden sign related the history of John Bozeman, the adventurous Georgian who led a wagon train through hostile Indian territory and across this pass in 1863.
“Hostile is right,” said Dr G. “The Crow were so feared that when they stole horses and women from the Sioux, the Sioux would only come over in raiding parties of up to 15,000 to get them back. Then of course the Crow would steal the horses back.
“Why not the women?” said Gary.
“The women would come back by themselves because the Crow were such good lovers. Still are, of course,” he grinned.
At Livingston, we found part of the railroad line that Clancy had ridden along because the road was so bad, and since there were no trains in sight, we had to follow suit and ride the tracks, then went in search of Corwin Hot Springs.
The sumptuous hotel they were so glad to find after 16 hours in the saddle that day was a magnificent Gothic creation with a red-tiled roof with the mountains on one side and the Yellowstone River on the other, according to contemporary photographs.
It was destroyed by a fire in 1916, and today, according to my research, all that remained of the original clubhouse was the great stone fireplace.
We had given up searching for it and were riding away when Richard suddenly swerved off the road, down a rutted path and into a grassy meadow by the river.
And there we found the great fireplace.
As Richard and Gary wandered off to take some photos, I lay down in the warm grass at the spot where I imagined Clancy and Allen lounging in a leather club sofa and toasting their toes by a roaring fire.
I closed my eyes, all the better to see the image of Clancy gazing into the firelight and looking back on an entire lifetime of hopes and dreams which had been condensed into his past few months, as it had for us.
And in that moment I felt at one with him, and strangely content.
Pics:
1. Geoff Hill at Yellowstone National Park entrance. Please click link to access pic
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Geoff-Hill-at-Yellowstone-National-Park-entrance.jpg
2. Geoff Hill at Corwin Hot Springs fireplace. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Geoff-Hill-at-Corwin-Hot-Springs-fireplace.jpg
3. Clancy pics Corwin Hot Springs Hotel. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Clancy-pics-Corwin-Hot-Springs-Hotel.jpg
4. Gary Walker recreates Clancy riding the rails. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Gary-Walker-recreates-Clancy-riding-the-rails.jpg
5. On the road in Montana. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/On-the-road-in-Montana.jpg
Pics by Gary Walker

Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier



Follow the blogs on www.adelaideadventures.com

[monty]

This week sees the culmination of Geoff Hill and Gary Walker’s incredible three-month journey retracing CS Clancy’s historic trip around the world. Geoff Hill is available for interviews: [e-mail] 028 9028 6000 or 079 0510 5925
I was lying on the ground checking the rear tyre pressure of the BMW when Dr G came wandering past.
“What you doing?” he said.
“Practising my Indian tracking skills,” I said. “Three white men just passed this way on horses, one with three quarters and a dime in left pocket.”
“Impossible. Horses don’t have pockets,” he said, proving that my Indian tracking skills had some work to do.
Still, at least we managed to find our way to Anamosa in Iowa, the home of former racer John Parham, who in 1975 with his wife Jill opened a small shop which went on to become J&P Cycles, the USA’s biggest motorcycle parts and accessories mail order business.
In 2010, to accommodate his growing collection of motorbikes, he’d bought a disused WalMart down the road and turned it into the National Motorcycle Museum of America.
And that, at the end of this trip, would be the last resting place of Clancy’s boots, pith helmet, original diaries and photographs, and Irish and French driving licences.
Inside the faded red lining of the pith helmet in clear black letters were the words “Real Sola Pith, specially made for Selecta, Port-Said. Made in India.”
Inside the museum is an astonishing private collection of 400 motorcycles, not to mention a fulsome tribute to the lunacy of Evel Knievel. I defy anyone to watch the videos of him jumping 200ft over a row of buses then trying to land on a Harley with only a few inches of suspension travel and not wince.
In the British section are some fine examples of the Rudges my dear old dad raced in the Fifties, the Norton International and Manx Norton he would have raced if he’d had the money, and Brough Superiors and Vincent Black Shadows we’d all own if we had the money.
One Brough, the SS100 Pendine, was named after the long, flat beach in South Wales where every model was tested to 110mph before being handed over to customers, and on which George Brough set a world record of 130.6mph in 1928.
More within my means was an NSU Quickly which was the first motorbike I ever rode, racing up and down the avenues of Termon in my teens.
In the US section, there was Peter Fonda’s Captain America chopper and helmet from Easy Rider, and past all the Harleys and Indians, exquisite machines from companies such as Reading-Standard, Racycle, Emblem, Thor, Pierce, Royal Pioneer and Flying Merkel which failed to make it past the Twenties and Thirties.
And then, at last, the holy grail: the only original 1912 Henderson in the world.
Of the 15 or so Hendersons made that year, John Parham knew of only three in existence today, and the other two had been restored with later parts, making this
the only unrestored one, down to the original paint and tyres.
And while the Henderson Cork man Paddy Guerin had brought to the Dublin launch of our trip had been a 1922 three-speed model, this was the real deal, with 7hp, one gear, a hand-crank starter and no front brakes.
I stood there looking at the motorcycle which would soon be joined by the effects of the man who had ridden one of them around the world a century ago, and as much as I had marvelled at Clancy’s courage in making the journey we had followed, I now marvelled even more to see what he had done it on. To contemplate it was the act of a madman, and to complete it the act of a hero.
By now, Clancy was on the scent of home: visiting his brother in nearby Beloit, he made the front page lead in the local paper, then was brought down to earth yet again by a crash 20 miles from Chicago which bent his rear wheel.
Riding on carefully, he came on two bikers repairing a puncture who regaled him with thrilling tales from their 200-mile adventure, then guided him to the Henderson branch factory on Michigan Avenue.

There, he had a hero’s welcome: they placed his battered Henderson in the front window and entertained him royally for two days solid before sending him on his way to the main factory in Detroit, where he was feted even more, while the brand new Hendersons coming off the production line looked at what he fondly imagined was mute admiration of their older and wiser brother.
We were now in the last few days of our own grand adventure, and when I looked back through the pages of our daily schedule, it felt like we had gone through an entire lifetime in just three short months, with events like leaving Belfast in the snow, sitting on the boat to Tunisia, riding through Sri Lanka in monsoon rain and marvelling at our first sight of Hong Kong bay or the skyscrapers of Shanghai like something we had done years ago, when we were young.
After a brief surprise visit to his delighted parents, Clancy rode into New York State and rolled in splendid happiness along the finest roads of the entire trip, and on the morning of August 27, 1913, a moving picture camera captured his triumphant return into Manhattan at the end of an 11-month, 18,000-mile odyssey which had tested him countless times to the limit and taught him lessons he would learn for the rest of his long life.
And now, at last, having carried the boots he wore on that incredible journey on the recreation of that journey a century on, we handed a replica of the Around the World pennant that Clancy had carried to his great-niece Lynda Clancy, then handed the boots over at last to Dr Gregory Frazier with respect and pride at having followed in the tyre tracks of such a fine man.
I hoped, as I handed them to Dr G, that they had had the time of their lives for the second time.
If boots could talk, I think they'd be very pleased indeed, and I hoped that we had made a pair of old boots very happy.
In Clancy’s Boots, Geoff Hill’s book on the epic recreation of Clancy’s journey, will be published on October 23 by Blackstaff Press, www.blackstaffpress.com.
Pics:
1. Dr Gregory Frazier and Geoff Hill with Clancy poster outside museum. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Dr-Gregory-Frazier-and-Geoff-Hill-with-Clancy-poster-outside-museum.jpg
2. Clancy's boots & pith helmet. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Clancys-boots-and-pith-helmet.jpg
3. Clancy on Henderson. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Clancy-on-Henderson.jpg
4. Paper runs story on Clancy's journey. Please click link to access pic:
www.adelaideinsurance.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Paper-runs-story-on-Clancys-journey-1.jpg Pics by Gary Walker
Original Clancy pic courtesy of Dr Gregory Frazier
Follow the blogs on www.adelaideadventures.com