Investment Biker Read online

  Praise for Investment Biker

  “[Written with] charm and incisive financial commentaries.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A great book about a motorcycle adventure … This Indiana Jones of finance made his bundle in exotic foreign stock. His book is especially timely now that country funds are all the rage. Unlike the rest of us, he actually visits these places before he invests.”

  —Time

  “Rogers’s advice is sage: Stick with nations where hard-nosed bureaucrats push fiscal reforms, maintain sound currencies, advocate free trade, and stay out of areas best left to the private sector. And Rogers also dishes up ample adventure.”

  —Business Week

  Many individuals’ names and personal circumstances have been altered to protect their privacy and, in some cases, to protect them from retaliatory governments.

  2003 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1994 by Beeland Interests, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING: Excerpt from “See See Rider” by “Ma” Rainey. Copyright © 1943 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA, Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  TIMES BOOKS AND BARTHOLOMEW: Maps from The New York Times Atlas of the World, New Family Edition, to illustrate the text. Reprinted by permission of Times Books and Bartholomew.

  All photos from the author’s collection.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Rogers, Jim

  Investment biker: around the world with Jim Rogers

  by Jim Rogers.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80928-5

  1. Investment. 2. Adventure. 3. Travel. 4. Political Analysis. 5. Political Philosophy. I. Title. [B]

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  PART I: DUNQUIN TO TOKYO 1. A FLIGHT TO RUSSIA

  2. NEW YORK

  3. CROSSING EUROPE

  4. LINZ

  5. CENTRAL EUROPE

  6. ON TO ISTANBUL

  7. OLD TURKISTAN

  8. CHINA

  9. XI’AN

  10. XI’AN TO BEIJING

  PART II: TOKYO TO DUNQUIN 11. FIRST CLASS IN THE FIRST WORLD

  12. AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  13. ACROSS THE WILD TAYGA

  14. SIBERIA

  15. ULAN-UDE, ZIMA, AND KANSK

  16. NOVOSIBIRSK AND WEST

  17. MOSCOW

  18. ON TO IRELAND

  PART III: DUNQUIN TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE 19. AFRICA: THE SAHARA DESERT

  20. SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

  21. DOWN A LAZY RIVER

  22. HOME OF THE ALWAYS VICTORIOUS WARRIOR

  23. ESCAPE

  24. ZAMBIA AND THE GREAT ZIMBABWE

  25. BOTSWANA

  26. SOUTH AFRICA

  PART IV: ROUNDING THE HORN 27. OVERLAND DOWN UNDER

  28. THE UTTERMOST END OF THE WORLD

  29. BUENOS AIRES

  30. CHILE AND EASTER ISLAND

  31. ON THE SHINING PATH

  32. ON DARWIN’S TRAIL

  33. THE DARIEN GAP

  34. THE CANAL TO THE RIO GRANDE

  35. HOME AND BEYOND

  AFTERWORD

  APPENDIX I: HOW WE PACKED FOR OUR TWENTY-TWO-MONTH MOTORCYCLE TRIP

  APPENDIX II: DAILY LOG

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  I was born in 1942, the eldest of five brothers. My parents met in the thirties at the University of Oklahoma, where both belonged to academic honor societies. During the war, my father served as an artillery officer in Germany. After the war, he joined his brother in running a factory in Demopolis, Alabama, a state in which my people had lived since the early nineteenth century.

  With the birth of so many boys, my mother, an only child, was rapidly in over her head. She made us competitive and full of high jinks. The five of us learned drive from our father, who taught us to push to make happen whatever it was we wanted to do. From him we learned how to work hard.

  My entrepreneurial efforts started early. I had my first job at the age of five, picking up bottles at baseball games. In 1948 I won the concession to sell soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. At a time when it was a lot of money, my father gravely loaned his six-year-old son one hundred dollars to buy a peanut parcher, a start-up loan that put me in business. Five years later, after taking out profits along the way, I paid off my start-up loan and had one hundred dollars in the bank. I felt rich. (I still have the parcher. Never know when such a dandy way of making money might come in handy.)

  With this one hundred dollars, the investment team of Rogers & Son sprang into action. We ventured into the countryside and together purchased calves, which were increasing in value at a furious rate. We would pay a farmer to fatten them, and sell them for a huge profit the following year.

  Little did we know that we were buying at the top. In fact, only twenty years later, on reading one of my first commodity chart books, did I understand what had happened. My father and I had been swept into the commodities boom engendered by the Korean War. Our investment in beef was wiped out in the postwar price collapse.

  I did well in our isolated little high school, finishing at the top of my class. I won a scholarship to Yale, which thrilled and terrified me. How would I ever compete with students from fancy Northeastern prep schools?

  When I went to Yale, my parents couldn’t take me up to New Haven. It was too far. So on that first Sunday, when all college students are supposed to call home, I got on the phone and told the operator I wanted to call Demopolis, Alabama. She said, “Okay, what’s your phone number?”

  I said, “Five.”

  She said, “Five what?”

  “Just five.”

  She said, “You mean 555-5555?”

  “No,” I said politely, “just five.”

  She said, “Boy, are you in college?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She blazed, “I don’t have to take this from you, college boy!”

  Finally, persuaded I meant no disrespect, she gave it a try. This was back in the days when the Connecticut operator had to get the Atlanta operator who had to get the Birmingham operator who finally got the Demopolis operator on the phone.

  My Connecticut operator spoke first. “I’ve got a boy on the line who says he’s trying to reach phone number five in Demopolis, Alabama.”

  Without missing a beat, the Demopolis operator said, “Oh, they’re not home now. They’re at church.” The New Haven operator was stunned speechless.

  As my college years sped by, I considered medical school, law school, and business school. I loved learning things, always have, and I certainly wanted to continue to do so. In the summer of 1964 I happened to go to work for Dominick & Dominick, where I fell in love with Wall Street. I had always wanted to know as much about current affairs as I could, and I was astounded that on the Street someone would pay me for figuring out that a revolution in Chile would drive up the price of copper. Besides, I was poor and wanted money in a hurry and it was clear there was plenty of money there.

  At Yale I was a coxswain
on the crew, and toward the end of my four years I was lucky enough to win an academic scholarship to Oxford, where I attended Balliol College and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. I became the first person from Demopolis, Alabama, to ever cox the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames.

  I began to use some of what I had learned in my summer job on Wall Street, investing my scholarship dollars before I had to turn them in to the Balliol bursar.

  After Oxford I went into the army for a couple of years, where I invested the post commander’s money for him. Because of the bull market, I made him a tidy return. I came back to New York and went to work on Wall Street.

  I eventually became the junior partner in a two-man offshore hedge fund, which is a sophisticated fund for foreign investors that both buys and sells short stocks, commodities, currencies, and bonds located anywhere in the world. I worked ceaselessly, making myself master as much as possible of the worldwide flow of capital, goods, raw materials, and information. I came into the market with six hundred dollars in 1968 and left it in 1980 with millions. There had been costs, however. I had had two short marriages to women who couldn’t understand my passion for hard work, something my brothers and I had inherited from our father. I couldn’t see the need for a new sofa when I could put the money to work for us in the market. I was convinced, and I still am, that every dollar a young man saves, properly invested, will return him twenty over the course of his life.

  In 1980 I retired at the ripe old age of thirty-seven to pursue another career and to have some time to think. Working on Wall Street was too demanding to allow reflection. Besides, I had a dream. In addition to wanting another career in a different field, I wanted to ride my motorcycle around the entire planet.

  I’d always wanted to see the world once I realized Demopolis, Alabama, really wasn’t the center of the Western World. My longtime lust for adventure probably came from the same source. But I saw such a trip not only as an adventure but also as a way of continuing the education I had been engaged in all throughout my life—truly understanding the world, coming to know it as it really is. I would see it from the ground up so that I would really know the planet on which I walked.

  When I take a big trip, like a three-month drive across China, Pakistan, and India, 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.

  I wanted a long, long trip, one that would wipe the slate clean for me. I still read The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and I wanted to wean myself away from the investment business. I wanted a change of life, a watershed, something that would mark a new beginning for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I would do when I got back, but I wanted it to be different. I figured a 65,000-mile ride around the world ought to be watershed enough.

  In 1980 it was difficult to circle the planet—you couldn’t get anywhere. There were twenty-five to thirty wars going on, and the Communists wouldn’t let you pass through Russia or China. If I were going to go around the world, it was going to be like everything I do: I was going to do it to excess or not at all. My dream was to cross six continents completely—west to east across China, east to west across Siberia, from the top of Africa to the horn, across Australia’s vast desert, and from the bottom tip of Argentina right up to Alaska.

  In 1984 and 1986 I went to China to approach officials about crossing the country. I even rented a motorcycle, a little 250-cc Honda, and drove around Fujian province to see what I could learn. Fujian wasn’t all that big, maybe the size of Louisiana, but with 26 million inhabitants it had almost seven times Louisiana’s population. I drove and flew to several provincial capitals, and put two thousand miles on that bike as research. Then, at last, in 1988, I drove clear across China on my own bike.

  Back in New York, I went to see the Russians, as I’d often done before. Russia was still the big stumbling block to a drive around the world. I wrote letters and got others to write testimonials on my behalf. I hit an absolute stone wall. I’d go down to Intourist, and Ivan Kalinin, the director, would tell me it wasn’t even conceivable. There’s nothing out there in Siberia, he’d say, except bears and tigers and jungle and forest. Nobody goes there, nobody wants to go there, and in fact, all the people the Russians sent there had wanted to come back.

  To my astonishment, no Russian I’d met had ever been to Siberia or knew anyone who had. No Soviet citizen seemed to have a clue as to what was in his equivalent of our nineteenth-century Wild West, just as most New Yorkers today know nothing about Alaska. Take the train, the Russians told me—the Trans-Siberian Railroad—or fly. Only a fool or a madman would drive.

  I finagled a proper introduction to the Russian ambassador in Washington, but even he was no help.

  I was slowly getting the point. Siberia wasn’t like driving across the United States, one boring freeway after another. It would be different. Maybe they were right. Maybe there wasn’t much in the way of roads. But you couldn’t drive around the world without going through Siberia, and if I were to fulfill my dream, I’d have to find a way across.

  The maps told me that Siberia was seven thousand miles wide, about twice the width of the United States. As far as anybody knew, it had fewer than 20 million people, about the size of New York State’s population, but nobody knew for sure because no one had ever gone there and counted noses. I figured it was no wilder than northern Canada and Alaska, which would be fine with me.

  In a desperate moment, I took a videotape of my trip to China to Ivan, the Intourist official, hoping it would show him that I was serious. He smiled wearily as he took it, but he actually watched it. The next time I came, he said, “There is one group you could write.” He didn’t know the English name of it, but he looked up the group in his official handbook. He found that he couldn’t translate the group’s name, so he just wrote it down in Russian, along with the address and everything else. It seemed to be an esoteric group called Sovintersport. I took the paper home, Xeroxed it, and pasted it on an envelope containing a letter in English stating that I wanted to drive my motorcycle from the Pacific Ocean to Moscow and on to Poland.

  I said I’d meet any conditions the group wanted to impose—stay wherever they wanted, take any escort they needed to send along, even soldiers—I didn’t care. I had to go. Whenever I looked at a globe, Russia’s huge landmass jumped out at me. If I didn’t go across Russia I couldn’t tell myself I had actually gone around the world, and if I didn’t go around the world, it wasn’t the trip I wanted to take. I didn’t have much hope. Over the years I’d sent out twenty letters like this one.

  Months later—after I’d forgotten about sending the letter—an answer arrived. It said, “Dear Mr. Rogers: Yes, you can drive across Russia. When would you like to go?” Three or four lines, two paragraphs, and a Mr. Valeri Sungurov was saying yes.

  I couldn’t believe it. It was as if I’d been sitting outside a door, knocking on it every day for nine years, and it never opened, and then one day the damn door did open and a guy said, “Oh, come on in.” How could he have known I’d been standing there for nine years?

  I promptly flew over to Russia to meet the people who’d said yes. I kept asking Oksána, the translator, “Do these guys mean this?” and she would reply, “Yes, what’s the matter with you?”

  “Is this really gonna happen?”

  “Yes, it’s going to happen. Why are you so perplexed and curious and disbelieving and questioning?”

  Sovintersport was a Russian sports group that sponsored one-of-a-kind international sporting events. I’d been beating up on the diplomatic and tourist channels, and here were these Russians who
considered long-distance motorcycle riding a sport. Lesson number one in going around the world: Know enough about the culture you’re entering so you can maneuver in it; otherwise you’ll get locked out.

  I was elated, still a little disbelieving—could you really trust the Russians? Would one hand know what the other had agreed to? I might arrive at the border and be turned away.

  But this might be my only chance. This trip was something I desperately wanted to do. I was going around the world! Full of excitement, I flew back to New York in December of 1989, planning to set off the following March.

  How’d you like to go around the world?” I asked Tabitha, my companion over the past few years.

  “They said yes?” she asked. She’d traveled with me across Pakistan and India the year before, two saddlebags and one bike, five thousand miles, and she’d loved it.

  “I want to leave in March; that’s four months,” I said. “Are you game? Africa, the Sahara, Siberia, across the Andes, and this time you can go to China, too.”

  “What about my job?” she said. It was a job she loved, administering the grants for a small foundation, a great job for someone not long out of college.

  “Quit it,” I said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip.”

  I loved the way she ran her hand through her long blond hair, scrunched up her face, and cocked her head to think.

  “How can we carry enough stuff?” she asked. “Some of these places—we’d need parts, gas, extra tires.”

  She was right. I’d driven BMW motorcycles for the past twenty years. Being hopeless mechanically, I wanted the bike that needed the fewest repairs. Still, when I looked at the worldwide list of BMW repair shops, it didn’t include Zaire or Siberia or China, stretches of thousands of miles along the world’s worst roads.

  “The ideal would be to take two bikes,” I said.

  “But I don’t know how to drive a bike,” she said.

  “Maybe you could learn. There’s a motorcycle school in Queens.”