Category: Europe & The Near East 2007

The second in this series of Janapar bonus video clips will raise a smile with many cycle-tourists. For some of the best two-wheeled travel tales derive from overnighting under the most unlikely of circumstances.

On this particular evening, Andy and I found ourselves kindly gifted the use of a small-town football field changing room somewhere in rural Turkey, in which I had the chance to demonstrate my highly sophisticated sleeping system to the camera.

This scene didn’t make the final cut for a similar reason to the first clip: there was a limited opportunity to encapsulate the six months for which Andy and I rode together before the film’s attention had to return to why we went our separate ways and the story that unfolded as a result.

Many short scenes of our journey between England to Armenia were assembled in order to do this, including the cashpoint incident, the Stambouli musicians, and the spontaneous roadside party you’ll see in the full-length feature. This clip (as well as next week’s) is an example of a perfectly good scene that couldn’t make the cut.

Janapar: Love on a Bike is available instantly as an iTunes-compatible HD digital download from janapar.com. There’s also a handful of first-batch DVDs still available (purchases of which now include a free digital download too). 

Alternatively, you may find that one of the public screenings I’m hosting this summer happens to be in your area.

One of the tragedies of art is how much perfectly decent stuff is chucked away. The 300 hours of footage I shot for Janapar is a case in point. The finished film is 79 minutes long, so for every minute of footage I shot, another four hours were binned. (Admittedly, plenty of it was shite, but a lot of it wasn’t.)

Beginning today, then, I’ll be bringing the best of this extra material back to life. For those who’ve seen Janapar, these clips will explain a few things glossed over in the main feature. For those who haven’t seen it, they’ll be entertaining glimpses of life on the road in their own right.

The first clip answers the question of why Tom appears to be exhibiting the remains of a black eye in some of the Armenian winter shots.

This dramatic scene was included in the main feature until quite a late stage in the edit, but it needed to be quite lengthy to make sense, and so it stalled the momentum of the story, which at that point was resolving the earlier question of how Tom & Andy came to be separated.

We found that we could ‘hide’ the injury in later scenes and explain the conflict more concisely and poetically through Andy’s parallel love interest, and so it had to go. (This particular tale is fully recounted in the book, as it did become a significant turning point.)

As always, your questions and comments are very much welcomed. Next week’s clip will bring a touch of comedy in some rather unusual sleeping arrangements.