avg_rating: 3.56
name: Bettina Selby
about: At the age of 47 I found myself free of commitments. I decided the time had at last come to do what I had long wanted, namely, to see something of the wilder regions of the world. I had already discovered the eminent suitability of a bicycle for travel and exploration, and so, with little more ado, I set out to see something of the Himalayas.My first objective was Pakistan. I planned to ride from Karachi to Kathmandhu; going first along the line of the Indus River, and then weaving my way in and out of the Himalayan Valleys of India and Nepal. Five months and five thousand miles later I achieved my goal. Back home I set to work on the account of this journey. I called it RIDING THE MOUNTAINS DOWN, after a poem by e.e.cummings.With the book At the age of 47 I found myself free of commitments. I decided the time had at last come to do what I had long wanted, namely, to see something of the wilder regions of the world. I had already discovered the eminent suitability of a bicycle for travel and exploration, and so, with little more ado, I set out to see something of the Himalayas.My first objective was Pakistan. I planned to ride from Karachi to Kathmandhu; going first along the line of the Indus River, and then weaving my way in and out of the Himalayan Valleys of India and Nepal. Five months and five thousand miles later I achieved my goal. Back home I set to work on the account of this journey. I called it RIDING THE MOUNTAINS DOWN, after a poem by e.e.cummings.With the book published and selling well,with various foreign translations, I was commissioned to write another book.This was a very different undertaking. I decided to make a journey from London to Jerusalem following the routes of the Medieval Crusaders and early Christian pilgrims. As physically challenging as the Himalayan journey, it was also one of the most enjoyable long distance rides I ever made, and not just for the many different countries and cultures I passed through, but particularly for the numerous and amazing sites of antiquity that I had long wanted to explore. RIDING TO JERUSALEM is the account. My third long journey was a far more dangerous enterprise. I followed the course of the Nile from its Delta on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, through the length of Egypt and Sudan to the Mountains of the Moon in Uganda. It was a journey that presented great contrasts - the most stunning African landscapes and wonderful and diverse peoples on the one hand, and on the other the terrible problems of drought, poverty, desertification and the plight of refugees. And always there was the problem of my own survival; of staying alive in the deserts; of finding food and clean water; and of steering a way through the skirmishes of the Sudanese civil war and the aftermath of the Ugandan massacres. The account of this journey, published as 'RIDING THE DESERT TRAIL', is available in German as 'AH AGALA' A second African journey centred on yet another of that continent's great rivers. This time I followed the strange course of the Niger, which bites deep into the Sahara Desert before turning back on itself, as Mungo Park first discovered,to flow through some of the poorest countries in West Africa. Through the remote desert lands of the Sahel, home to the last of Africa’s nomadic tribes, through Niger and Mali, I struggled with the sand and the climate to get to Timbuktu. Again beauty and hardship were the two poles of the experience. The terrible beauty of an inimical desert terrain permeated by the ghosts of the past, of black empires steeped in gold and the slave trade.`FRAIL DREAM OF TIMBUKTU' is also available in a German translation as `TIMBUKTU' I have also written two books about my own country. RIDING NORTH ONE SUMMER was intended as a celebration of the English landscape seen through the web of its history. It was as good a summer bicycle jaunt as I ever took - three months of cycle/camping through the byways of England, discovering a green and pleasant land that still existed there, away from the motorways. Like all journeys, it produced its own surprises.My other `home book’, 'THE FRAGILE ISLANDS', is about the Outer Hebrides - a string of small remote islands off the North West coast of Scotland. I find them as exotic as the remotest places I’ve travelled in, and even after spending a very wet summer there in a very small tent, my love for these Western Isles remains undimmed. More recently I travelled in Eastern Turkey, going by way of the little explored and horrendously mountainous Black Sea Coast, before heading up into the even more mountainous lands of Kurdistan and Armenia, and on through the vast plains to Mount Ararat with its legends of Noah and t ...more