These are the Days That Must Happen to You

‘Riding a bike removes the need for clutter, toys, rubbish that other men have to take on holiday. If I want adrenaline, I’ll rush a giddy overtake, not rent a jet ski’. The world through the eyes of Dan Walsh is never less than Technicolor, and always uninhibited, rebellious and on the edge. Not since the days of Jupiter’s Travels has one man embarked on such an angry, narcotic-fuelled bike trek around the world. ‘For me, Chile will always be South America’s supermodel sister - very beautiful but too long, too skinny, and too expensive to ride, and despite the groovy exterior, unpleasantly right-wing underneath’. Dan has travelled the length and breadth of the world on his BMW F650 GS Dakar. Along the way he’s visited Buenos Aires, where ‘revolutionary’ means the angry poor invading the presidential palace, not a really small phone that’s also a camera. He’s been mistaken for a bum in New York, bashed by deadly tequila in Mexico, contracted typhoid in a dilapidated Bolivian hotel, and visited The Most Beautiful Road in the World in Peru. ‘I get my bum pinched by a tranny, my pocket picked by a grifter and get a gun pulled on me by a one-eyed, one-armed midget who’s upset cause I winked at him. These are the days that must happen to you’. Soaked in adrenaline and coruscatingly funny, Dan Walsh is the rightful heir to Ted Simon as the pre-eminent biker-rebel of our generation.