Investment Biker Read online

  At the BMW dealership in Berlin the mechanics were agog at how much damage we’d done to the bikes. The bikes looked as if they’d been through a war, banged up, with jerryrigged parts, fork seals gone, mud in every part, loose wiring, wobbly brakes, beat-up tires. They had to put a new crankcase in mine, and the head bearings were blown, too.

  We explained that these were the wrong bikes for the trip we’d just taken, that we’d needed cross-country bikes, their GS model, which had higher wheels and fenders and stronger shock absorbers.

  As it happened, both of our bikes were under their original warranties. BMW had never assumed they were warranting such hard riding, but with a smile the BMW executives said they would honor them. So they proceeded to rebuild the bikes, giving us thousands of dollars of repair work in what seemed to be a salute to our trans-Siberian journey.

  We went to the world’s largest motorcycle show, in the Cologne-Essen area.

  I was struck by how extraordinarily modern, neat, clean, rich, and vibrant these cities were. I wouldn’t have had the same impression on riding into Pittsburgh or Cleveland. These cities were dynamic and bustling. Everything was new, well maintained, gleaming. And this was the Ruhr, Germany’s Rust Belt, where the Allies had blown up all the factories they could, and through which their armies had marched.

  I’m often asked how we could have won the war by blowing up the German industrial heartland and then find ourselves fifty years later on the short end of the stick.

  The guys who lost had had a good workforce to begin with, real craftsmen with real discipline. After the war they hadn’t been arrogant or sassy, but eager and grateful for a job.

  In America everybody had been making a higher wage than those in Germany. Our currency had been worth something, whereas those guys had had nothing, no assets, no currency. Their workers had to work for a lot less and work a lot harder because they knew they had been beaten and they felt suppressed. They didn’t have a choice. No pretensions there, absolutely none.

  During the Depression our citizens had hoarded every penny, fearful of the future and putting off purchases. During World War II, even if they wanted to spend their savings, nothing was available on which to spend them.

  After the war, fifteen years of pent-up demand exploded. No matter what you manufactured, you could sell it. To gear up for the demand, vice presidents of production were promoted to company president. Marketing people wouldn’t be needed at the top until the sixties and seventies, when demand would become sluggish as other countries brought their factories on stream. The reality of the late forties for the United States was that the rest of the world had been destroyed and our business managers could sell everything they could produce.

  Also, when you build a new factory, you use the most modern technology, whether in your manufacturing process or in the products you develop. Back in America we said, “Look, this is how we built phonographs in 1939. We’ve gotten a little better; here’s the 1947 version. We haven’t innovated for eight years because we couldn’t, everything was going into the war effort, and why do we need to now?”

  The Germans weren’t hidebound by their success; they had leapt forward in processes and products.

  People don’t change their ways till they’re forced to. Even if a visionary sits there and tells them what’s going to happen, if it ain’t broke, they’ll do nothing. It takes real vision for a guy making a pile out of a ten-year-old phonograph design to revamp his product and cannibalize his own success with a cheaper product that has twice the features. It’s not human nature, especially when currently you can sell all the machines you can make.

  However, it leaves you vulnerable to the guy who will produce such a product. Over the past thirty-five years these have been the Germans, the Japanese, and only a few American manufacturers, such as Hewlett-Packard with its laser printers, who have made a vigorous policy of leapfrogging not only their competitors’ products but also their own.

  A people’s mindset becomes wrapped up in the way things are. Even if people can believe something will happen a few years from now, they’ll still say, “Well, that’s in years, that ain’t now.”

  After World War II, Memphis, Birmingham, and Atlanta were approximately the same size and had approximately the same commercial chances. The business leaders of Memphis and Birmingham decided to rebuild and modernize their railway stations. Atlanta’s leaders, however, decided to put their money into a new and large international airport.

  Atlanta became an international city—even able to attract the 1996 Olympic Games. Lacking reputations or infrastructures suitable for the big time, Birmingham and Memphis didn’t make themselves into international laughingstocks by applying.

  However, I wondered if there wasn’t a dangerous worm in the apple of this economic paradise, one that would gnaw at the center of Europe until it consumed the best part of this lovely fruit.

  The European Common Market was a trading group of 500 million people that had finally broken down the centuries-old economic walls that had divided them. Nearly everyone within its umbrella was benefiting from this large new open market. Now they could trade freely, just as citizens of Virginia could trade freely with those in California. This major economic development had huge ramifications for the world.

  The economic effect of integration, however, had been far less positive than had often been argued. At the same time these countries had been opening up their borders to each other, they had been erecting protectionist walls against the outside world. In the past two decades these restrictive trade policies had protected sectors such as motor vehicles, consumer electronics, and office machinery. This would seem good for a while, but Europeans had been sowing the seeds of their own destruction. The Common Market’s share of world markets since 1970 had been concentrated in less sophisticated products. It could make wine efficiently, but not computers or electronics, since there was less pressure to innovate. In five to fifteen years, I believed, they would pay a heavy price for this protectionism.

  Protectionism exists because local producers always clamor for it. French wheat farmers want to be protected from American wheat farmers. German steelmakers want to be protected from steel manufacturers in Korea. American autoworkers want to be protected from their counterparts in Japan and Mexico. Japanese rice farmers want to be protected from those in America. In turn, American sugar growers want to be protected from Latin American producers. The list is endless—and highly organized and loud. In every country around the world such groups contribute to political campaigns, hire lobbyists, and call for protection.

  After all, it sounds as patriotic as Mom and apple pie to protect American autoworkers’ jobs, as well as those of Northeastern shoemakers and Southern textile workers. We all want that, don’t we?

  The answer is no, we don’t. Protectionism not only picks our pockets, it robs us as a society. We consumers, however, have no political leader active on our behalf, we have no lobbyists, and we aren’t all that vocal. If Congress erects a wall to keep out foreign steel, the price of a tin can will go up, but perhaps only by an eighth of a cent a year, scarcely enough to notice. The cost of a car might rise by 4 or 5 percent instead of 2 or 3 percent a year; again, not enough to make you hire a lobbyist and hit the streets in protest.

  Over time, however, the effect is ruinous. Protected industries stagnate and don’t innovate. Their products become shoddy and overpriced. American cars back in the sixties, without foreign competition, are a prime example. Once Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors had all the business, nature took its course and gave us poorly built cars at high prices.

  The world over, politicians face constant pressure from well-organized special interests clamoring for favors. The rest of us aren’t organized well enough to clamor for our eighth of a cent off tin cans and cheaper Fords.

  Over the past couple of decades, the Common Market has tended to look backward and preserve itself from change rather than embrace it. It has used protection to avoid indus
trial restructuring, which has contributed to its falling behind the United States and Japan in producing high-tech goods. It has been doing okay relative to India and Africa, but not so well relative to Taiwan, southern China, and Korea.

  But an iron law of modern economics says that countries cannot protect themselves as the world changes by avoiding restructuring, by dodging the need to redeploy assets constantly into the most productive, most efficient facilities.

  And the world will change. Anybody who doubts that is brain-dead. Not only will it change, but it will change with even more speed as the new decades arrive. The only question is how nations will meet these changes, whether they will innovate and compete or put their heads in the sand. Was America to produce 1970s shoddy cars forever while the Japanese sold their well-designed, cheaper ones to the rest of the world? Were Americans never to buy Walkmans until an American company knocked off the design?

  A government’s job must be to set up an environment that forces its culture, society, businesses, and institutions to adapt or perish. This sounds harsh, but the changes come almost unnoticeably—but it’s a lot more gradual and less harsh than economic stagnation, high unemployment, and finally catastrophic collapse, which is the result of long-term protectionism.

  Cases in point? The Soviet Union, Africa, Mexico, and every country in Latin America.

  Back in civilization as we know it, Tabitha again had doubts about continuing. Our original plan was to cross Europe, dive through Africa to the Cape, jump to Australia and New Zealand, fly to the tip of South America, and drive up to Alaska. Crossing China and Siberia had been feats enough for her.

  We bumped into a German, Felix, who had ridden a BMW motorcycle through Africa. He gave us information about the roads, visas, and problems. On the Theresienstrasse in Munich we window-shopped at Därr’s, a large store that outfitted overland journeys through Africa.

  Felix and Därr’s seemed to bring Tabitha around, sweep her up into the potential adventure. After all, here was Därr’s, a good-sized store set up specifically to outfit travelers crossing the Sahara and plowing through the jungle. We had certainly never seen a store that outfitted anybody to cross Siberia, and we had made it, hadn’t we? Därr’s made it appear as if traveling through Africa was something a lot of people did. If there was an entire store devoted to it, how remote and difficult could it be?

  Africa! Had we really meant all that talk about going around the world?

  Africa by motorcycle, through the Sahara Desert and the mud swamps of Zaire. We’d heard of people—the lucky ones who came back—partially paralyzed or blind, others crippled or missing limbs, others mere skeletons with protruding eyes, discolored skin, and lips drawn away from their teeth.

  While Siberia was wild and unknown, at least there had been no war or epidemic. Africa, however, meant elephantiasis, lice, leprosy, typhoid, guinea worm, two kinds of hepatitis, yellow fever, yaws, tuberculosis, and, of course, malaria. Africa meant plague, brucellosis, beriberi, typhus, amoebas, cholera, smallpox, polio, three kinds of dysentery, giardia, river blindness from running water and bilharzia from still water, plus the tsetse fly and sleeping sickness. If we got sick, much less very sick—at least one was inevitable—there would be few drugs and fewer hospitals. Books on Africa described travelers succumbing to sun-stroke, dehydration, delirium, vomiting, prostration, and two kinds of diarrhea that lasted days on end.

  Other African travelers had to fight for their lives or were killed for no ever-discovered reason. We knew about the bribes and payoffs. Someone asked me my greatest traveling fear, and I said it was crossing the borders. Border guards have complete power over travelers, with no appeal granted. Even if our consular officials figured out which route we had taken, once we disappeared, few questions would ever be answered. Most African border crossings were too remote, too isolated, with little if any outside communication.

  Then there were the wars—tribal, civil, guerrilla—many undeclared, unreported, and spontaneous. In Africa there is no such thing as a “civilized” war where the participants are delighted to help two naive travelers on some quixotic adventure. In these wars, everyone is desperately trying to survive and kill in a primitive struggle.

  More important still, I wasn’t much of a prize other than for my bike, the traveling gear, and some money—but Tabitha! Tabitha was young, tall, blond, and beautiful. Did I dare take her any farther?

  Where would we stay? Could we ever be safe? Animals in Siberia were one thing, but we didn’t even know all the animal dangers that awaited us in Africa, and beyond there, South America. We knew nothing about the predatory habits of crocodiles, hippos, rhinos, puff adders, hyenas, mambas, boa constrictors, panthers, rabid bats, wild dogs, lions, tigers, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, gorillas, poisonous spiders, baboons, and pythons. All these and more were in the jungle. The leopards were exceptionally bold and clever, we’d heard. They would wait patiently in your tent for your return.

  Yet suppose all this was just the imagination of some soft American? Suppose all this was a bygone Africa? We still had to worry about gas, money, spare parts, roads, languages, food, water—who knew what? We did not even know what we did not know.

  Tabitha and I had driven our motorcycles from Ireland through China to Tokyo, then from Tokyo back across Siberia to Ireland, and now we paused in London. If we were going around the world, Africa was next, Tunis to the Cape.

  “I’m game to carry on,” I said to Tabitha after a week of rest in London. “I’ve started around the world, gone halfway, and I’ve got to finish it right.”

  For another few days we discussed it, and once again I wasn’t sure she would come.

  Finally one night at dinner she said, “Okay, I’ll go, but promise me we’ll take it easy. No more pushing.”

  It wasn’t a hard promise. The twenty thousand miles of roads across China and Siberia had been rough, often unpaved, full of mud wallows and potholes. In Africa they would be in even worse shape.

  There was so much to do—get vaccinations for yellow fever, cholera, tetanus, typhoid, polio, and hepatitis. Round up the dozen visas necessary for African countries. Buy tents, mosquito netting, and a water filtration system. Buy spare parts for the motorcycles: gaskets, spark plugs, points, filters, fuses, and cables. Find chlorine tablets. A folding shovel. A compass. Antibiotics, salt tablets, and bandages. Chap Stick—Chap Stick was essential for lips constantly dried by the wind and sun for hour after hour, day after day. Maps, we needed maps. The list seemed endless, the time short if we were to avoid the winter.

  After hours, Tabitha and I wandered around the streets of London, happy to be with each other. I couldn’t imagine anyone else in the world with whom I would rather have made this journey.

  To make it a true trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again, we lit out for Ireland.

  For her fiftieth-birthday present, we invited Tabitha’s mother, Biffie, to come stay with us, hoping a visit would lessen her worries about her daughter. She flew over. She had Irish ancestry, but she’d never been here. A Wellesley graduate, she had been a beauty queen as a young lady, and now wanted a second career, in nursing, after a first as a wife and mother.

  Biffie wept and pled with Tabitha not to go with me any farther, begging her daughter to come back to the States before she became a paraplegic. By now Tabitha had made up her mind and was determined, but she tried to reassure her mother.

  In Dublin, we examined the Book of Kells, three hundred forty pages handmade in 806 A.D. and justly described as the most beautiful book in the world. Modern tourism had caught up with the Book. In its honor, the library that housed it had special guides, souvenir shops, and tours. Back when I was a student you simply went up to the library and looked at it; now we had to go through a whole rigamarole to view it.

  I wanted to see the Nelson Pillar, a monument to the great British hero, which I remembered climbing as a student, but the IRA had blown it up. A hundred and fifty years of history, and bam, gon
e. People always do these things—destroy George III’s statues in the States and Lenin’s in the Soviet Union—as if they can change history by blowing up and pulling down.

  At Dunquin we looked up Mrs. Campion, the postmistress, who howled with delight that we’d driven all the way to Tokyo, through China and Russia, and had come back to see her. More cups of tea, more postcards and displays of maps, lots of loud stories.

  Down on the southern coast we found the motorcyclists, Kevin and Barry, who had helped us out the first time. We took Biffie with us on the back of my bike when they invited us to a motorcycle bar. This Connecticut matron in a leather motorcycle bar was perplexed by our entire trip but had to admit she liked the wild freedom of riding motorcycles. She was also perplexed by her reaction to bike culture, a little stunned she should find the rough bikers charming and delightful.

  She rode with us for a week, back into England, unable to tear herself away, afraid it might be the last time she would see her daughter alive.

  In London we visited the Algerian, Zimbabwean, and Nigerian embassies, seeking visas. Tabitha had made up her mind; she was ready to go. Next stop, North Africa, then right through the Sahara Desert, central Africa, and South Africa to Cape Town. After all, we’d now been about a third of the way around the world, why not go all the way?

  Like some unstable explosive, the machismo produced by the combination of Arab and Italian mentality in Tunis was the worst Tabitha had ever encountered. Men leered at her, followed her when she was out alone, and made obscene noises in her direction. In the street she was deliberately jostled. Even though the majority of Tunisian women wore Western dress, her black leather jacket and sunglasses probably screamed “loose Western blonde.”

  Moreover, we arrived in November 1990, a couple of months before the Allies began bombing Iraq, and the air crackled with political tension. Tunis was a haven for Islamic political activists from the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was a modern city, the Switzerland of the Arab world, and a meeting place for many Islamic supporters whom the West considered criminal.