Customer Reviews

Japan - 6,000 miles on a bicycle

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Let me just start by saying that I review this having jsut read the sole review that was posted at the time of writing. I too would not have been happy if I had purchased this book to help me plan a cycling tour of Japan. But, having read the synopsis this would not be the book I bought for the planning of that activity! In fact I would not have bought the book at all if it were a travel guide book, lonely planet do it so much better.

Now, i am most certainly not the travel book kind of person, they are usually about places someone else is interested in, written by people who concentrate only on the scenery and not how they feel, but most importantly I always feel they are written by people I'm never likely to meet, nor would indeed want to.

This book is different, it's written by a seemingly normal guy. the type of guy who likes a pint, like a smoke, likes his music and then just suddenly decides to ride a bike around Japan. The kind of guy you meet in any bar, club or football ground. It's personal, funny, sad, triumphant and yet somehow it seems to leave the reader with a strnage sense of trepidation all through the book. The trepidation that the writer is terrified that this step out of his usual life cycle will end.

It reads like a novel, not some dull trawl around some foreign place. Beers, love hotels, near misses with trucks, pretty girls, homeless folks and more beer. not an ounce of tea and sympathy. No ego, just a bloke, doing what he usually does, but outside of his fishpond struggling to put his bleedin tent up in the rain.

This should be read, it truly shows that we are not always what we see ourselves as being, that we can step out and still be ourselves. ut it also made me feel that stepping out coes with a price, the price that you pay when you have to step back into your own pond.

Buy it. Read it.

Since I'm preparing for a bicycle tour of Japan myself, I bought this book for a whooping 30 USD from Amazon. After reading an article about it on japanprobe.com I had moderately high expectations about it's usability for my own tour.

To make a long story short: This book was a total waste of money for me. Poorly written with an absurdly bad typographic layout (no hyphenation). Offering no practical advice whatsoever for anyone attempting something similar. This is a travel diary of a foreigner who, despite having lived in Japan for several years lacks a decent understanding of culture and language and drinks himself through 6000 miles on rainy roads while being hungover most of the time. As entertaining as this may sound, it is not. Mainly because of Norries lack of writing skills and his lofty poems scattered throughout the book. No resolution at the end, no aftermath, nothing. As a blog this would have maybe been something worth looking at from time to time but not as printed matter.

I highly respect Mr. Norries effort and it has certainly been a great project for him personally but there is no value in sharing this with the world unless it carries either some sort of practical advice (route planning, biking in Japan in general...) or at least an aesthetically pleasing language.