I’d like to introduce you to a motorcycle travel book that had me smiling and almost horrified from the start. Only ‘almost’ because actually, it reminded me of how I travelled when I was younger. As in, have the idea and then spend my time focussing on making a trip happen, rather than on how inadequately prepared and underfunded I was.

Michele Ricucci is a very well-known and respected photographer and drone pilot. He has had photo exhibitions in multiple places around the world and the footage he gathers is simply fantastic.

‘The Gringo’s Tale’ is his first attempt at writing a book, and let me start my comments by saying that I hope it’s not the last.

Good photographers, to my mind, create pictures that tell a story with a magic blend of either subtlety or bluntness, drama and beauty. The very best seem to weave in an element of ‘clever’ that they see and few others do, until the photographer shows it to them. When I first heard of this book I wondered if Michele could create similarly impactful pictures with words. He can.

‘The Gringo’s Tales’ takes you riding over 9,000 miles across Mexico. Michele sets off with Roberto, a restauranteur friend from Italy, on two decidedly dodgy bikes. Bikes that ‘everyone’ was telling them not to ride across Mexico on. The point was that their budgets were tiny; that saying about tailors cutting their suits according to the cloth they have, came straight into my mind.

Michele is a man who when he made this trip had already bought a second-hand Honda XR 150 in South America and explored on it for over 21,000 miles. Oh, and I should mention that he didn’t have a bike license…

There are a series of layers to the book which kept my attention more than held. One of those is that he has a desire to see the world away from booking dot com and tourist sites. He’s driven to explore off the beaten track and to meet, to spend time with people who have no choice but to make life work with courage and ingenuity, the hard way, but yet have kindness and appreciation firmly in the front of their minds.

Michele is a man who spends less time worrying about how clean a place is but focuses on the point that there is a place to sleep. He’s a man who listens to advice, and then makes a plan to follow his instincts. Most of the time his instincts are both courageous, and spot on. At times they had me asking if he had all his marbles. But read on respectfully and full of hope.

Other than saying that his ‘word pictures’ are great!, I really don’t want to give more away about this book, or I am going to detract from the raw magnetism.

What I do want to say is that if you ride a motorcycle, you will be interested in this book. If you love to travel by motorcycle, you’ll be in awe, and yep perhaps horrified in sections. At others, you’ll be blown away by the stories – the tales of the unexpected, and the skill of the storytelling. I suspect you’ll end the book thinking , ‘Wow, what a ride.’

I had to have a long moment’s silence to let what I’d been reading settle in my mind. It still hasn’t. For sure it’s a keeper and I have no doubt that I’ll be reading it several times more.

Published in January, ‘The Gringo’s Tales’ is available from Amazon.