Travel book: On Simsons to India

Posted on by admin

Table of contents

Travel book: On Simsons to India
Publishers Monsenstein and Vannerdat

to travel

Travel book: On Simsons to India

On four Simsons to India
Just drive

Old GDR mopeds, no experience with them, zero tools, but a lot of naivete: an unusual travel book describes the trip of five students. Planned odyssey with wit and 80s charm.

Michael Schumann

07/17/2014

The oil stains on the cover look so real, as if the paperback had actually been there on a thousand-kilometer journey. But the supposedly spilled over two-stroke oil is just as much a concept of the five authors as the idea of ​​not having a concept. Except to start with the crazy plan to get from Halle to India on four Simson S50 or S51 mopeds. That was what five students thought. That’s how they did it.

Buy complete article

Travel book: On Simsons to India

On four Simsons to India
Just drive

4 pages) as PDF

€ 2.00

Buy now

And the book describes how it all came about. Namely – of course – completely different. In the form of two diaries printed at the same time, Elle, “the female”, and Joseph, who first joins the others in Canakkale, Turkey, replaces Sven and takes over his Simson, describe the journey of the “moped gang”. The upper half of each book page belongs to Elle, who draws colorful pictures with her words and tries to make imaginative comparisons. Or, in a wonderfully laconic way, how Joseph first has to learn to drive in Canakkale: “After a few hours, he also confidently operates second gear. He doesn’t mind a small flesh wound on his knee. ”The lower half of the page belongs to Joseph. Often, as dry as dust, he only describes what bothered him the most at the respective location: “The moped was repaired, but don’t ask how! Something like that coil that makes the spark for the engine was broken, and of course there are no Simson spare parts in Turkey, and the coil that was still lying around in the workshop did not fit in. So they straightened the coil and the motor. “

But the bottom line is that they both tell the same thing. Namely how they often wander across the Balkans, pushing rather than driving, cursing and freezing, crossing Turkey and finally finding the country in Georgia that satisfies their youthful hunger for new things, for adventure, for the flair of a long gone and lost time. After they have topped up their travel provisions, which consist of 95 percent noodles, with a canister full of Georgian home-made spirits, they finally have to turn around. India is and will remain inaccessible to the “moped gang”, and the summer semester break will soon be over.

If you just leaf through the pages, you get stuck with the drawings, but especially with the partly black and white, but mostly colored photos: cut off, frayed jeans, worn Birkenstocks, a butt in your oil-smeared fingers and a thin sleeping mat with worn elastic bands over dirty T on the back -Shirts slipped onto the luggage rack. Everything in slightly faded colors, as if the photos were 30-year-old paper prints, sometimes slightly out of focus, taken in a hot, dusty August somewhere on the Mediterranean.

Whether consciously or unconsciously – in 2013 the “moped gang” experienced and told exactly the same thing that today’s 50-year-olds will remember with fondness for the rest of their lives: how they (from today’s perspective) underpowered, with unwashed, matted hair and hardly any money, but young and full of zest for life, just drove off. With the SR 500 to Greece, with the XS 360 to Spain – it doesn’t matter. Simply thought, made and been happy. A somewhat confused, but a beautiful book.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *