Tortillas to Totems: Sidetracked by the Unexpected

Sam Manicom’s fourth book, which is based on his partner Birgit’s diaries, takes the reader exploring through Mexico, the United States and Canada. Lands that Sam feared would be relatively ordinary after over six years riding the roads of developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America. He’d worried that there’d be few of the challenges or the dramas that had kept his ‘guardian angel’ working overtime for so many years.

The Oxford English dictionary says, ‘Culture Shock. A disorientation felt by a person subjected to an unfamiliar way of life.’  Sam understood this. After all, wasn’t this part of the main reason for going travelling on a motorcycle? To experience as many different things and ways of life as possible. To have preconceived ideas challenged?

Birgit, having hitch-hiked and bused through America when she was younger, rode those first weeks waiting and watching for North America to work its magic on Sam.

Just a few weeks in, Sam realised that he’d been wrong to be so worried that the continent would be rather tame; his preconceived ideas were more than challenged. In part because after those six years on the road he faced a reverse culture shock; he hadn’t anticipated just how different things were going to be.

Sam wrote, ‘The cultures and countries of North America are so varied and so full of surprises that they are just as fascinating, and just as much a challenge to the traveller as the most rugged countries in the third world. Being on motorcycles was a key factor. The freedom the motorcycles gave us to roam to our hearts’ content through the three nations of this continent was of phenomenal value.’