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    Stories from Elsewhere
    Stories from Elsewhere
    Stories from Elsewhere
    Ebook126 pages1 hour

    Stories from Elsewhere

    By Carla King

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    About this ebook

    In 1995, Carla King takes a job as a test rider for a company who wants to import a Russian sidecar motorcycle for the American market, thus spending four months breaking down in small towns all around the USA and becoming an expert mechanic. In 1998, she sets off on an illegal journey across China at the invitation of a group of expat American bikers, with similar consequences. In turns hilarious, horrifying, and incredibly suspenseful, these tales of resourcefulness, optimism, and stoicism will either cure you of wanderlust or inspire you to ride off into your own sunset.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarla King
    Release dateOct 14, 2018
    ISBN9780964644588
    Stories from Elsewhere
    Author

    Carla King

    Carla King is a self-publishing expert and an adventure travel writer. She has been self-publishing since 1995 and has been teaching, speaking, and writing about publishing since 2005. Her Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors is in its 4th edition. She also authors a blog and book series from her motorcycle journeys in America, Europe, China, India, and Africa. Her writing has been published in Wild Writing Women: Stories of World Travel, Travelers’ Tales anthologies, and In Search of Adventure: A Wild Travel Anthology. Her book, American Borders, is the first in a series of misadventurous travelogues.

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      Book preview

      Stories from Elsewhere - Carla King

      Introduction

      Stories from Elsewhere is an anthology of stories about solo travels by bicycle, motorbike, and sidecar motorcycle in America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. I first put it together as a special edition for Overland Expo, a non-profit whose event profits ConserVentures, whose charter is to explore our world and preserve our heritage—a mission dear to any conscious world traveler. In 2016, I decided to release it in ebook format.

      Follow me

      You can follow me at CarlaKing.com and sign up to get more stories from the road as I write them. Currently I’m writing about adventures in Baja, California. Let’s connect on social media, too. The links are at the end of this book, or you can visit my website to find them.

      About the stories

      Aren’t You Scared? is from my book about motorcycling around America on a Russian sidecar motorcycle, American Borders. It is a reader favorite I think because so many of us who travel have been asked the same question, and many who are only considering an adventure so often timidly ask it. (For that reason I also included Tips for Traveling Solo at the back of the book.) Another story from American Borders is Milk River, popular for several reasons: the setting—historic Blackfoot Indian country—and the three little girls who adopted and charmed me, and for the surprising lessons and inspiration we offered each other.

      Fete de la Musique is about three very civilized experiences in the French cities of Paris, Lyon, and Nice during the annual music festival each summer solstice. Pass on the Primate is quite the opposite kind of travel story, about a solo bicycle journey through West Africa. It was my first published travel story and an award winner.

      I included From Somewhere to Nowhere, about an incident that occurred while I was riding a Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle in India, because it reveals so many of that country’s colorful and contradictory complications. But most of all I’m excited to offer three stories from my next book, The China Road Motorcycle Diaries, about riding a 1938-era Chinese sidecar motorcycle through the country. China was both the most difficult and the most fascinating place I ever traveled.

      I hope you enjoy this potpourri of stories and I hope to meet you on the road somewhere. Please connect with me on social media (listed at the end of this book) and sign up for my email newsletter so we can get in touch.

      — Carla King

      1

      Aren’t You Scared?

      Livin’ in the USA

      Iwas twenty-four when I married a man who seemed to share my desire to travel, but four long years passed before we made real plans to go. Once the date was set, the arrangements were left to me, as my husband was busy with a big project at work. I rented two Honda 750’s to be picked up in Milan, made lists of gear, bought guidebooks, phrasebooks, and detailed maps to plan our route. But when it came time to book the trip, he backed out.

      We hadn’t taken a real vacation in four years—since our honeymoon, and had been dreaming of this trip since we had been dating, but it had been delayed too many times.

      Of all my emotions, anger won out. I booked my own airline ticket and cancelled his motorcycle, then presented him with the itinerary and motorcycle rental agency information so he could make his own arrangements. He conceded that he might join me for the last two weeks of the trip, if the project was completed. He didn’t try to talk me out of going, or suggest a new date that would be more convenient for him.

      I thought he would relent, but when the day came, he drove me to the airport and I boarded the plane alone. Several hours into my flight, panic set in. Until then, anger and disappointment had obscured all other emotions, most notably, fear: fear about the future of my marriage, and fear about traveling alone. I considered turning back once I arrived in Milan, but when the plane landed, I boarded the train, determined to keep my appointment to pick up the motorcycle, which was to be delivered to me at Milan’s Stazione Centrale.

      The man who rode it there was in a hurry to catch a train back home, so after a quick review of the features of the bike, I was left alone in the midst of people purposefully going about their lives. Trying to match their confidence, I loaded gear from my duffle bag into the panniers, arranged my Milan map in its place on the tank bag, and headed south to a large youth hostel where I had decided to spend the night.

      Milan is a large, confusing city built in concentric circles, and no matter what I did, I kept ending up back at Stazione Centrale. The street signs, embedded in the stonework of the buildings, were nearly impossible to read in the fading afternoon light, and traffic was unrelentingly aggressive. It was dusk when two cars in front of me collided, stopping traffic. The drivers got out with voices booming and fists clenched. When a young man on a Moto Guzzi pulled up beside me, I took advantage of the delay to ask him for directions. When he realized that I could not understand him, he led me through a maze of side-streets to the hostel’s door. There, I fell into a deep sleep, despite the excited chatter of the young travelers who shared my dormitory.

      The next day I took the autostrada to Genoa, then turned west at the coast. I ate lunch standing up in a zinc bar-café crowded with construction workers who were gulping tiny cups of espresso, stopped at a market for supplies, and found a campground on a bluff above San Remo. I pitched my tent, enjoyed the sunset, and slept soundly. In the morning I packed up and, just a few kilometers down the road, crossed the border into France.

      By then my anger had subsided and I was alternating between two emotional states: numbness and extreme self-pity. After all, I was visiting places my husband and I had planned to visit together—the Riviera, the casinos of Monte Carlo, the Roman ruins of Arles. Each evening I set up my tent in a campground filled with couples and families from all over Europe, cooked a quick dinner over my camp stove and washed it down with wine. I went to sleep early so I could rise early for another day of riding, of experiencing all the sights and smells we were supposed to experience together.

      The day I was to visit Carcassonne—one of Europe’s perfectly preserved medieval villages and the destination I’d looked forward to most—I’d been riding for a week. By then I had called home several times, and my husband had hinted that he might still join me at some point on the trip. Riding to Carcassonne, I saw a telephone booth and stopped, because suddenly, I had to know. Plunking in some coins, I waited for the clicks and silences that meant the call was going through, and the remote, tinny sound of a telephone ringing in California.

      Hello?

      Hello… it’s me.

      Hey, I’ve missed you! His enthusiasm thrilled me for a moment.

      I’ve missed you, I responded automatically. It was true.

      I don’t know why I let you go alone, he said.

      Oh no, here was that again. The only way he could stop me from going alone, I’d told him, was by going with me.

      I don’t know, either, I replied. But you could still meet me for a couple of weeks.

      There was a moment of silence, then a sigh. I can’t come, he said. I’m really sorry.

      I wanted to be brave and say it was okay, but my heart had just frozen and I said nothing.

      Hey—

      I cut him off. Okay. I just needed to know. Well, I’m out of coins. We have to say goodbye.

      I hung up the phone and stood for a moment in the glass telephone booth, sweating in my leather jacket. When I stepped out into the warm breeze, I felt disoriented, but strangely lighter.

      Toward Carcassonne, the smooth black asphalt wound through small villages and farms, past fields dotted with yellow flowers where black and white dairy cows grazed. My map was neatly laid out in its holder on the tank bag, the route precisely highlighted. Ahead, the sky was dark, black clouds gathering, and when my turnoff appeared I surprised myself by veering away toward a sunny blue sky. The road became a series of switchbacks that led up a mountain, and soon deteriorated into a mere path that abruptly ended at an outcropping of rocks and a small medieval village.

      My wheels thumped across a wooden bridge that was lowered over a moat and I passed under a wide, arched doorway to find that the village had been invaded by a traveling carnival. I parked the Honda in a crowd of motorbikes and scooters and proceeded to explore the town, an anonymous tourist amongst the clowns and the music. Children lined up for carousel rides and others gathered around a puppet show in the village square. I bought a pink cotton candy cone and strolled down some rough-hewn stairs to a wide balcony overlooking the surrounding countryside. Rain was falling on Carcassonne, but here it was cloudless and sunny.

      When I returned to the Honda, two elderly Frenchmen were circling it, examining the luggage racks and talking excitedly. They wanted to know where I was going, but my French wasn’t good enough to explain so I took my carefully marked map from the tank bag to show them my route. They gave me lots of nods and smiles and, with my limited French, I understood they’d been

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