10 Adventure Motorcycle Audio Books For The Road
Stay entertained on long highway rides by listening to an audio book.
Sometimes we have to travel vast distances on the highway to get to the more interesting points of our journey. Those long highway runs are a great time to listen to music or just disconnect and clear your mind. Audio books are another way you can unwind on those long rides. They can also make your commute more enjoyable if you ride to work.
The most popular websites for downloading audio books are Amazon, Audible and iTunes. Just set up an account, purchase an audio book and follow the instructions for downloading to your Smartphone or MP3 player.
Audio books are a great asset to long distance travelers that want to stay entertained on the road. There are not a lot of adventure motorcycle audio books available today, but we were able to put a list of ten titles together that are of special interest to Adventure Motorcyclists. Hopefully, you’ll find one that you’d like to give a try.
Adventure Motorcycle Audio Books
1. Into Africa: Africa by Motorcycle – Every Day an Adventure
Publisher Summary: A liberating motorcycle journey through Africa with descriptions of the amazing people and places, the joy of big skies and the open road, and the sometimes harrowing events that would shape destiny.Into Africa tells the story of a novice motorcyclist who takes on the challenge of riding the length of the continent just because, ‘it seemed like a great idea’. Sam Manicom had only planned to take a temporary break from his successful retail career, but the one-year ride was so life-changing that he continued adventuring around the world for another seven years, covering 55 countries and 200,000 miles. Sam had no idea how liberating motorcycle travel would be. Revelling in a new-found freedom without timetables or routines, he became fascinated by his ability to explore side roads at a whim and reach remote parts of the continent that many travellers never find. Though Africa is just 5,000 miles from top to toe, Sam explored over 22,000 miles on every kind of road imaginable.
Narrated by Sam, ride with him as he describes Africa’s amazing people and places, the joy of big skies and the open road, and the sometimes harrowing events that would shape his destiny. This is a genuine tale of the unexpected.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
2. To Dakar and Back: 21 Days Across North Africa by Motorcycle
Publisher Summary: Recounting the three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears that make up a 7,000 mile journey from the glitzy streets of Paris to the hinterland of northwestern Africa, this incredible tale highlights the most arduous and notorious off-road motorsports event on the planet, the Paris-Dakar Rally.Since its inception in 1979, the rally has attracted more than 3,000 participants from all walks of life. Fully detailing what is considered by many to be one of the world’s top five adventures, this book reveals amazing true tales of danger, from blinding sandstorms to endless vistas of towering dunes. Enduring these incredible hardships with perseverance, tenacity, ingenuity, and sometimes tragedy, the adventurers profiled here truly embody the triumphs of the human spirit.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
3. One More Day Everywhere: Crossing Fifty Borders on the Road to Global Understanding
Publisher Summary: In 2001, martial arts-trained biker Glen Heggstad began a journey from California to the tip of South America on his motorcycle and made it as far as Colombia, where he was kidnapped by local rebels and held captive. Undeterred by more than a month of traumatic incarceration, the ‘Striking Viking’ finished his trip after being released. Three years later he set out into the world on his bike again, this time searching for truth on his own terms in a world that had become strangled by a climate of fear.Starting his trip in Japan, he traveled through Siberia, Mongolia, Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Africa, stopping in more than 30 countries to deliver his message of the real United States, as he knew it. Unique stories and gritty adventure fill this quest for new sights and insights amongst extreme temperatures, knee-deep mud, bureaucratic roadblocks, health problems, and loneliness.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
4. Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road
Publisher Summary: In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. That lack of direction lead him on a 55,000 mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again.He had needed to get away, but he had not really needed a destination. His personal odyssey is chronicled with his travel adventures, meeting up with friends and family, and the grieving, thinking, crying, and storytelling of life as he rides. Along the way, he plays music from his internal jukebox, yet nothing seems to let him find peace. And without peace, all he could do was keep riding until he found it.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
5. Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers
Publisher Summary: Legendary investor Jim Rogers gives us his view of the world on a 22-month, 52-country motorcycle odyssey in his best-selling business/adventure book, Investment Biker, which has already sold more than 200,000 copies.Before you invest another dollar anywhere in the world (including the United States), read this book by the man Time magazine calls “the Indiana Jones of finance”.
Jim Rogers became a Wall Street legend when he co-founded the Quantum Fund. Investment Biker is the fascinating story of Rogers’s global motorcycle journey/investing trip, with hardheaded advice on the current state and future direction of international economies that will guide and inspire investors interested in foreign markets.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
6. Is That Thing Diesel?
Publisher Summary: At forty years old, a successful writer, husband and father, no longer toiling on offshore drilling rigs, was Paul Carter happily nestled in the cotton wool of suburban life enjoying the fruits of his labour? Was he f**k!With his manic life left far behind and the perfect opportunity to take it easy stretched before him what else would a middle-aged, bike obsessed, man want? Yes, that’s right, he’d want to be the first guy to ride around Australia on an underpowered experimental motorcycle that runs on used cooking oil, wouldn’t he? Preferably without getting hit by a semi-trailer full of bridge parts. Is he out of his mind? Quite possibly. Carter is back to his old balls-to-the-wall style of writing, prepare to laugh out loud.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
7. Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World
Publisher Summary: It started as a daydream. Poring over a map of the world at home one quiet Saturday afternoon, Ewan McGregor — acclaimed actor and self-confessed bike nut — noticed that it was possible to ride all the way round the world, with just one short hop across the Bering Strait from Russia to Alaska. It was a revelation he couldn’t get out of his head. So he picked up the phone and called his fellow actor-slash-biker friend Charley Boorman and told him it was time to hit the road….Beginning in London, Ewan and Charley chased their shadows through Europe, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and Russia; across the Pacific to Alaska; then down through Canada all the way to New York. Long Way Round is the result of their four-month, 20,000-mile joyride. Featuring original diary entries, travel maps, mileage charts, and dozens of photographs, this is a freewheeling, fully charged, and uproariously entertaining book about two world-famous individuals who chose the road not taken…and made the journey worthwhile.
Shopping Options:
Audible |
8. Long Way Down: John O’Groats to Cape Town
Publisher Summary: Eighteen countries. Five shock absorbers. Two bikers. One amazing adventure. After their fantastic trip round the world in 2004, fellow actors and bike fanatics Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman couldn’t shake the travel bug. Inspired by their UNICEF visits to Africa, they knew they had to go back and experience this extraordinary continent in more depth.Joining up once more with producer/directors Russ Malkin and David Alexanian and the Long Way Round team, and with two new BMWs loaded up for the trip, their route took them from John O’Groats at the northernmost tip of Scotland to Cape Agulhas on the southernmost tip of South Africa.
Riding though spectacular scenery, often in extreme temperatures, Ewan and Charley faced their hardest challenges yet. With their trademark humor and honesty, they tell their story: the drama, the dangers, and the sheer exhilaration of riding together again, though a continent filled with magic and wonder.
Shopping Options:
Audible |
9. The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing: Long-Distance Motorcycling’s Endless Road
Publisher Summary: Long-distance motorcycling is not a pastime but an obsession. In this candid, eloquent, sharply observed book, Melissa Holbrook Pierson introduces us to this strange endeavor and the men and women who live to ride impossibly long distances, eating up road, almost without cease. And who find it nothing but fun.Perhaps the most determined of them is John Ryan, a magnetic, enigmatic man who loves nothing better than breaking records of amazing distance – at no small risk to himself and his health. But why? Pierson, who rediscovered the joys of motorcycling in the midst of a personal crisis, puts on her helmet and joins Ryan in his element in order to understand his singular desire and discipline, his passion and his obsession.
The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing offers an intimate glimpse of an unusually independent yet supportive community as well as a revealing, unforgettable portrait of its most daring member. In electric, pitch-perfect prose, Pierson gives us rare insights into not only a subculture but also the deeply human craving for something more that drives it.
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
10. Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies
Publisher Summary: Charley Boorman is back on his bike exploring the world’s second-largest country – home to some of the most stunning and challenging terrain known to man.Canada is a country of extremes, and Charley knows all about pushing the limits. He goes dirt biking in New Brunswick, dives through old shipwrecks in Tobermory and rides along Butch Cassidy’s old Outlaw Trail.
He also meets a fascinating mix of people on his journey. As he heads across Canada, he plays ice hockey with a legend of the game; spends a day as a Mountie cadet and nearly meets a ghost in Winnipeg….
Written with Charley’s trademark enthusiasm and humor, Extreme Frontiers is fast-paced, hugely entertaining, and packed with adventure (and rather a lot of mosquitoes).
Shopping Options:
Amazon | Audible | iTunes |
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