No Thru Road: Confessions of a Traveling Man

Moto-journalist Clement Salvadori has been riding motorcycles since the age of 15 and traveling all of his life, accumulating well over a million miles in the saddle across more than 70 countries on six continents. No Thru Road covers 30 different trips he has taken, to places like Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, since his first ride through western Europe in 1957. The stories are all original, though the subject may have appeared as a magazine article in a very different rendition.The book will appeal to adventure-travel enthusiasts and to motorcyclists and travelers of all persuasions. Adventurous riders will thoroughly appreciate the book, as in the description of kick-starting a 500cc single - never easy to do - at 17,200 feet in the Tibetan Himalayas. Or going up to Cape Tribulation in Australia's Queensland in 1974 when the only access was via a once-a-week ferry across the Daintree River. Or riding a bike to Pamplona, Spain, in 1960 in order to run with the bulls. Activists who want to get on their motorcycles and ride down into Mexico's Copper Canyon will enjoy the book, as will the arm-chair traveler who is happy reading about traveling from Peru's Great Ica Desert over the Andes Mountains to the Amazon basin. Clement's adventures are arranged so the reader can open the book to any chapter, be it India, Nepal, the Sahara, New Zealand or Viet Nam, and not have to worry about following a thread. Lots of adventures, lots of good reading, lots of photos and illustrations. This book promises excellent entertainment and a glimpse into life as a moto-journalist.

Clement Salvadori was raised and schooled mainly in New England, graduating from Harvard College with a BA in government. Being the age of the draft, he did his military service as a demolitions expert with the U.S. Army’s Special Forces (Airborne). College and army out of the way, he then traveled extensively in Africa and Asia until heading to graduate school at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. With a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies in hand he joined the U.S. Department of State, which assigned him to Vietnam for a year and a half and then was kind enough to post him to Italy. However, not being very happy as a diplomat, he tendered his resignation in 1973 and set off on his motorcycle to take a trip around the world. He was quite experienced with the art of motorcycling, having learned to ride when he was 15, buying his first one when he got his license at age 16, and taking his first long trip around Western Europe when he was 17. While riding north from Panama in 1975 he stopped off at San Miguel de Allende in Mexico to sign up for a Master of Fine Arts degree (ABT) at the Instituto Allende, with the notion of learning how to earn a living by writing. In 1980 a motorcycle magazine in Laguna Beach, California, offered him a staff job. He accepted. Seven years later he chose to go free-lance. He has published upwards of a thousand articles and five books.