Investment Biker
Investment Biker
UP FRONT
David Edwards
As THE STORY GOES, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD once remarked to Ernest Hemingway, “The rich are different from you and me.” Hemingway responded, “Yes, they have more money.”
Jim Rogers is different from you and me.
At age 6, when most of us are thrilled with simply running a slappedtogether lemonade stand, Rogers won the concession to sell soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. At 11, he was into cattle commodities, paying local farmers to fatten calves for later sale. After high school came a scholarship to Yale, followed by further schooling at England’s Oxford University, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics. Rogers also crewed on the rowing team, “the first person from Demopolis, Alabama, to ever cox the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames,” he says.
Next came two years in the Army, then in 1968 a move to New York City with $600 in his pocket and a job as junior partner at a Wall Street investment house. By 1980, 37 years old, Rogers was a heavy-hitting multimillionaire.
He was also tired, twice-divorced and in need of a change of life. Teaching finance at Columbia University helped. So did riding motorcycles.
“I had a dream,” Rogers says. “In addition to wanting another career in a different field, I wanted to ride my motorcycle around the entire planet...I would see it from the ground up so that I would really know the planet on which I walked.”
He did, too. In 1990, Rogers set out on a two-year, 65,000-mile aroundthe-world adventure. He writes about the odyssey in Investment Biker, a 393-page book published in 1994 by Random House.
Rogers, who favors bow ties and suspenders, is an unlikely looking transcontinental trekker with an admittedly scrimpy supply of mechanical knowledge-“! can’t operate Venetian blinds without getting tangled in the cord,” he says. While his choice of a new BMW R100RT for the trip was a sound one (though a GS model would have been better), his selection of a traveling companion almost scuttled the journey several times. Joining Rogers was girlfriend Tabitha, “a tall, leggy blonde” half his age, who would ride his 1967 R69US, a classic Beemer better suited for concours competition than global circumnavigation.
A bigger problem was that Tabitha had never ridden and had just three months to learn how, hardly enough time to arm herself for the rigors of two-wheeled world travel. Predictably, she crashed early in the trip, cartwheeling the R69 after sliding on an oilslicked road in Hungary, launching the bike into a ravine the very next day in Yugoslavia after an ill-timed pass. Factor in mechanical breakdowns, including a holed piston in China that had to be welded up in a back-alley shack, and by the time the duo reached Tokyo, Tabitha was ready to throw in the towel.
Seduced by a brand-new R80 Boxer, though, she continued on, back across Russia and Europe, down the African continent, around Australia and up the Americas, from Cape Horn to Anchorage. The couple survived stripped cylinder studs and boulder-strewn roadways in Siberia, choking dust and bottomless sand in the Sahara, knife-fights and house arrest in Zaire, renegade kangaroos and high-speed blowouts in the Aussie outback, snowstorms in the Andes and Shining Path guerrillas in Peru, not to mention the interminable red tape of border crossings in five different continents.
Rogers writes about these escapades in an entertaining, rambling style, though he has the annoying habit of “driving” rather than riding his bike. Still, you’ve got to like a guy who can order beer in 40 languages and suggests a “stamp kit for forging entries in documents” as an essential item to pack in your saddlebags. Where Investment Biker breaks from ordinary travelogues is Rogers’ mix of historical perspective, close-up examination of everyday life, geo-political commentary and home-spun philosophy. You’ll learn a little about a lot in this book, everything from trading dollars on the Turkish black market to an overview of the international gold standard.
On higher education: “I told (Tabitha) what I tell all my students, that she shouldn’t go to business school, that it was a waste of time. It would cost her or her parents more than $100,000, money better spent starting a business, which would succeed or fail, either of which would teach her more about business than would sitting in a classroom for two or three years listening to ‘learned professors’ who had never run a business prate on about doing so.”
On the imminent fall of Communism: “The Soviet Union looked like nothing more than a Third World country with a big army and a space program.”
On international cuisine: “In Mexico, I bought some grasshoppers cooked in thick hot sauce. Tabitha wouldn’t eat them, but I thought they were even better than the grilled termites back in Africa.”
On why he chose to see the world by bike: “The best way to go is by motorcycle. You see sights and smell the countryside in a way you can’t from inside the box of a car. You’re right out there in it, a part of it. You feel it, see it, taste it, hear it and smell it all. It’s total freedom. For most travelers, the journey is a means to an end. When you go by bike, the travel is an end in itself. You ride through places you’ve never been, experience it all, meet new people, have an adventure. Things don’t get much better than this.”
Which proves, come to think of it, that Jim Rogers isn’t that much different from you and me after all.
It wouldn't be much more than a warm-up routine for Jim Rogers, but Cycle World is going overseas touring, too, headed for the Alps and the Italian Grand Prix this May. To join us or for more information about CW 's GP Euro-Tour IV, see the ad on page 129.
