There is a danger in travel writing that you end up boring your audience.
You run the risk of becoming that person at the party with five packets of photographs and three hours of stories. The photos, and the anecdotes, are of major significance in this person's life, but to everybody else are about as interesting as an infomercial at 4am on a Sunday.
Belfast journalist Geoff Hill manages to avoid the yawn factor with his quick-paced, off-beat wit in Way To Go, a travelogue bringing together two motorcycle journeys, one from Delhi to Belfast, the other down legendary Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles.
He takes us through all the stages of his decision to leave his desk in the Belfast newspaper and ride through some of the most dangerous parts of the world with his biking buddy Patrick Minne, fondly referred to throughout the book as Monsiur Minne, the world-famous Franco-Belgian motorcycle mechanic.
Hill's prose is typically Northern-Irish, a type of humour best printed in black and white as it could be easily missed by southern ears. You can almost hear the accent hopping frantically off the pages with one liners occasionally interspersed with an emotional insight, a personal regrets or a personal triumph.
The idea for the India journey begins with at a dinner party when the subject of the Royal Enfield motorbikes came up. Hill could have bought one and shipped it from India, where they have been made for decades, for £800. But, after several bottles of wine the decision was to travel to India with Minne, buy an Enfield in Delhi and ride the thing back to Belfast.
So it is that Hill finds himself riding a heavy, cantankerous, British classic out of one of the most chaotic cities on earth and setting off on a 7,000-mile journey through the deserts of eastern Pakistan where guidebooks urge an armed escort, through south-east Turkey where kidnapping was a distinct risk, through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany.
"Sorry I'm late boss. We got a bit held up in Quetta. And Istanbul, come to that," he tells his editor a couple of days after returning to Belfast office and shortly before telling him another trip was in the offing. "I was wondering if I could take a month off to do Route 66 on a Harley."
The second of Hill's adventures is different experience for the reader as well as the author, who brings along imaginary friend Jim the Rabbit for company. The landscape of the US journey - 2,448 miles from the streets of Chicago to the deserts of Arizona and on to California's surf - is more familiar than Asia and the Middle East. It's also a little less interesting as the cultural differences are fewer, but the book still urges the teenager within us to sell the family saloon, get all leathered-up and take a trip.
Hill's trip to America's West coast is defined by his obsession with diner meals in almost-forgotten Route 66 eateries, with waitresses who say "Honey" a lot and pour day-old coffee and serve lashings of pecan pie all day long, and rusting gas stations with nothing for distraction except the odd tumbleweed and a good tale of days gone by.
Route 66 has long been abandonned to enthusiasts and travel writers. The road needed his kind, and imaginary rabbits like Jim, to brighten things up.
