I WAS BORN IN 1942, the eldest of five brothers. My parents met in the thirties at the University of Oklahoma, where both belonged to academic honor societies. During the war, my father served as an artillery officer in Germany. After the war, he joined his brother in running a factory in Demopolis, Alabama, a state in which my people had lived since the early nineteenth century.

With the birth of so many boys, my mother, an only child, was rapidly in over her head. She made us competitive and full of high jinks. The five of us learned drive from our father, who taught us to push to make happen whatever it was we wanted to do. From him we learned how to work hard.

My entrepreneurial efforts started early. I had my first job at the age of five, picking up bottles at baseball games. In 1948 I won the concession to sell soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. At a time when it was a lot of money, my father gravely loaned his six-year-old son one hundred dollars to buy a peanut parcher, a start-up loan that put me in business. Five years later, after taking out profits along the way, I paid off my start-up loan and had one hundred dollars in the bank. I felt rich. (I still have the parcher. Never know when such a dandy way of making money might come in handy.)

With this one hundred dollars, the investment team of Rogers & Son sprang into action. We ventured into the countryside and together purchased calves, which were increasing in value at a furious rate. We would pay a farmer to fatten them, and sell them for a huge profit the following year.

Little did we know that we were buying at the top. In fact, only twenty years later, on reading one of my first commodity chart books, did I understand what had happened. My father and I had been swept into the commodities boom engendered by the Korean War. Our investment in beef was wiped out in the postwar price collapse.

I did well in our isolated little high school, finishing at the top of my class. I won a scholarship to Yale, which thrilled and terrified me. How would I ever compete with students from fancy Northeastern prep schools?

When I went to Yale, my parents couldn’t take me up to New Haven. It was too far. So on that first Sunday, when all college students are supposed to call home, I got on the phone and told the operator I wanted to call Demopolis, Alabama. She said, “Okay, what’s your phone number?”

I said, “Five.”

She said, “Five what?”

“Just five.”

She said, “You mean 555–5555?”

“No,” I said politely, “just five.”

She said, “Boy, are you in college?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She blazed, “I don’t have to take this from you, college boy!”

Finally, persuaded I meant no disrespect, she gave it a try. This was back in the days when the Connecticut operator had to get the Atlanta operator who had to get the Birmingham operator who finally got the Demopolis operator on the phone.

My Connecticut operator spoke first. “I’ve got a boy on the line who says he’s trying to reach phone number five in Demopolis, Alabama.”

Without missing a beat, the Demopolis operator said, “Oh, they’re not home now. They’re at church.” The New Haven operator was stunned speechless.

As my college years sped by, I considered medical school, law school, and business school. I loved learning things, always have, and I certainly wanted to continue to do so. In the summer of 1964 I happened to go to work for Dominick & Dominick, where I fell in love with Wall Street. I had always wanted to know as much about current affairs as I could, and I was astounded that on the Street someone would pay me for figuring out that a revolution in Chile would drive up the price of copper. Besides, I was poor and wanted money in a hurry and it was clear there was plenty of money there.

At Yale I was a coxswain on the crew, and toward the end of my four years I was lucky enough to win an academic scholarship to Oxford, where I attended Balliol College and studied politics, philosophy, and economics. I became the first person from Demopolis, Alabama, to ever cox the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames.

I began to use some of what I had learned in my summer job on Wall Street, investing my scholarship dollars before I had to turn them in to the Balliol bursar.

After Oxford I went into the army for a couple of years, where I invested the post commander’s money for him. Because of the bull market, I made him a tidy return. I came back to New York and went to work on Wall Street.

I eventually became the junior partner in a two-man offshore hedge fund, which is a sophisticated fund for foreign investors that both buys and sells short stocks, commodities, currencies, and bonds located anywhere in the world. I worked ceaselessly, making myself master as much as possible of the worldwide flow of capital, goods, raw materials, and information. I came into the market with six hundred dollars in 1968 and left it in 1980 with millions. There had been costs, however. I had had two short marriages to women who couldn’t understand my passion for hard work, something my brothers and I had inherited from our father. I couldn’t see the need for a new sofa when I could put the money to work for us in the market. I was convinced, and I still am, that every dollar a young man saves, properly invested, will return him twenty over the course of his life.

In 1980 I retired at the ripe old age of thirty-seven to pursue another career and to have some time to think. Working on Wall Street was too demanding to allow reflection. Besides, I had a dream. In addition to wanting another career in a different field, I wanted to ride my motorcycle around the entire planet.

I’d always wanted to see the world once I realized Demopolis, Alabama, really wasn’t the center of the Western World. My longtime lust for adventure probably came from the same source. But I saw such a trip not only as an adventure but also as a way of continuing the education I had been engaged in all throughout my life—truly understanding the world, coming to know it as it really is. I would see it from the ground up so that I would really know the planet on which I walked.

When I take a big trip, like a three-month drive across China, Pakistan, and India, the best way to go is by motorcycle. You see sights and smell the countryside in a way you can’t from inside the box of a car. You’re right out there in it, a part of it. You feel it, see it, taste it, hear it, and smell it all. It’s total freedom. For most travelers the journey is a means to an end. When you go by bike, the travel is an end in itself. You ride through places you’ve never been, experience it all, meet new people, have an adventure. Things don’t get much better than this.

I wanted a long, long trip, one that would wipe the slate clean for me. I still read The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and I wanted to wean myself away from the investment business. I wanted a change of life, a watershed, something that would mark a new beginning for the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I would do when I got back, but I wanted it to be different. I figured a 65,000-mile ride around the world ought to be watershed enough.

In 1980 it was difficult to circle the planet—you couldn’t get anywhere. There were twenty-five to thirty wars going on, and the Communists wouldn’t let you pass through Russia or China. If I were going to go around the world, it was going to be like everything I do: I was going to do it to excess or not at all. My dream was to cross six continents completely—west to east across China, east to west across Siberia, from the top of Africa to the horn, across Australia’s vast desert, and from the bottom tip of Argentina right up to Alaska.

In 1984 and 1986 I went to China to approach officials about crossing the country. I even rented a motorcycle, a little 250-cc Honda, and drove around Fujian province to see what I could learn. Fujian wasn’t all that big, maybe the size of Louisiana, but with 26 million inhabitants it had almost seven times Louisiana’s population. I drove and flew to several provincial capitals, and put two thousand miles on that bike as research. Then, at last, in 1988, I drove clear across China on my own bike.

Back in New York, I went to see the Russians, as I’d often done before. Russia was still the big stumbling block to a drive around the world. I wrote letters and got others to write testimonials on my behalf. I hit an absolute stone wall. I’d go down to Intourist, and Ivan Kalinin, the director, would tell me it wasn’t even conceivable. There’s nothing out there in Siberia, he’d say, except bears and tigers and jungle and forest. Nobody goes there, nobody wants to go there, and in fact, all the people the Russians sent there had wanted to come back.

To my astonishment, no Russian I’d met had ever been to Siberia or knew anyone who had. No Soviet citizen seemed to have a clue as to what was in his equivalent of our nineteenth-century Wild West, just as most New Yorkers today know nothing about Alaska. Take the train, the Russians told me—the Trans-Siberian Railroad—or fly. Only a fool or a madman would drive.

I finagled a proper introduction to the Russian ambassador in Washington, but even he was no help.

I was slowly getting the point. Siberia wasn’t like driving across the United States, one boring freeway after another. It would be different. Maybe they were right. Maybe there wasn’t much in the way of roads. But you couldn’t drive around the world without going through Siberia, and if I were to fulfill my dream, I’d have to find a way across.

The maps told me that Siberia was seven thousand miles wide, about twice the width of the United States. As far as anybody knew, it had fewer than 20 million people, about the size of New York State’s population, but nobody knew for sure because no one had ever gone there and counted noses. I figured it was no wilder than northern Canada and Alaska, which would be fine with me.

In a desperate moment, I took a videotape of my trip to China to Ivan, the Intourist official, hoping it would show him that I was serious. He smiled wearily as he took it, but he actually watched it. The next time I came, he said, “There is one group you could write.” He didn’t know the English name of it, but he looked up the group in his official handbook. He found that he couldn’t translate the group’s name, so he just wrote it down in Russian, along with the address and everything else. It seemed to be an esoteric group called Sovintersport. I took the paper home, Xeroxed it, and pasted it on an envelope containing a letter in English stating that I wanted to drive my motorcycle from the Pacific Ocean to Moscow and on to Poland.

I said I’d meet any conditions the group wanted to impose—stay wherever they wanted, take any escort they needed to send along, even soldiers—I didn’t care. I had to go. Whenever I looked at a globe, Russia’s huge landmass jumped out at me. If I didn’t go across Russia I couldn’t tell myself I had actually gone around the world, and if I didn’t go around the world, it wasn’t the trip I wanted to take. I didn’t have much hope. Over the years I’d sent out twenty letters like this one.

Months later—after I’d forgotten about sending the letter—an answer arrived. It said, “Dear Mr. Rogers: Yes, you can drive across Russia. When would you like to go?” Three or four lines, two paragraphs, and a Mr. Valeri Sungurov was saying yes.

I couldn’t believe it. It was as if I’d been sitting outside a door, knocking on it every day for nine years, and it never opened, and then one day the damn door did open and a guy said, “Oh, come on in.” How could he have known I’d been standing there for nine years?

I promptly flew over to Russia to meet the people who’d said yes. I kept asking Oksána, the translator, “Do these guys mean this?” and she would reply, “Yes, what’s the matter with you?”

“Is this really gonna happen?”

“Yes, it’s going to happen. Why are you so perplexed and curious and disbelieving and questioning?”

Sovintersport was a Russian sports group that sponsored one-of-a-kind international sporting events. I’d been beating up on the diplomatic and tourist channels, and here were these Russians who considered long-distance motorcycle riding a sport. Lesson number one in going around the world: Know enough about the culture you’re entering so you can maneuver in it; otherwise you’ll get locked out.

I was elated, still a little disbelieving—could you really trust the Russians? Would one hand know what the other had agreed to? I might arrive at the border and be turned away.

But this might be my only chance. This trip was something I desperately wanted to do. I was going around the world! Full of excitement, I flew back to New York in December of 1989, planning to set off the following March.

HOW’D YOU LIKE to go around the world?” I asked Tabitha, my companion over the past few years.

“They said yes?” she asked. She’d traveled with me across Pakistan and India the year before, two saddlebags and one bike, five thousand miles, and she’d loved it.

“I want to leave in March; that’s four months,” I said. “Are you game? Africa, the Sahara, Siberia, across the Andes, and this time you can go to China, too.”

“What about my job?” she said. It was a job she loved, administering the grants for a small foundation, a great job for someone not long out of college.

“Quit it,” I said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime trip.”

I loved the way she ran her hand through her long blond hair, scrunched up her face, and cocked her head to think.

“How can we carry enough stuff?” she asked. “Some of these places—we’d need parts, gas, extra tires.”

She was right. I’d driven BMW motorcycles for the past twenty years. Being hopeless mechanically, I wanted the bike that needed the fewest repairs. Still, when I looked at the worldwide list of BMW repair shops, it didn’t include Zaire or Siberia or China, stretches of thousands of miles along the world’s worst roads.

“The ideal would be to take two bikes,” I said.

“But I don’t know how to drive a bike,” she said.

“Maybe you could learn. There’s a motorcycle school in Queens.”

She winced, not answering. She loved riding with me as a passenger. The motorcycle associations said 90 percent of their riders were men, but that was changing. There were even a couple of magazines now devoted to women’s motorcycle riding. At twenty-three, Tabitha was as adventuresome as any woman I’d known. Now in my mid-forties, I would have twenty years of motorcycle driving experience to draw on; Tabitha would have her youth.

“If something happens to one bike,” I went on, “the trip won’t be over. You take the driving lessons, and we’ll both sign up for the BMW mechanics course so if we break down in the middle of the jungle, we can fix the bikes.”

While I had sometimes spied her in the background as she was growing up, I first really met Tabitha Estabrook when her mother, Biffie, an old friend, dragged her over to my house so I, who taught finance at the business school at Columbia University, could tell her it was in her best interest to go to business school.

She was a tall, leggy blonde who had grown up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where, at the all-female Nightingale-Bamford School on the East Side, she had absorbed the fashionable political ideas of her time and place: that in an enlightened society the state would fix almost all of society’s problems. The Republican Party was an enemy of decency, a temple to greed, possibly the Great Satan Himself. Her father had been a Navy pilot after college, and now he was practicing law. As a schoolgirl, caught in the middle of her parents’ bitter and nasty divorce, she found Nightingale-Bamford to be a surrogate parent at an important time, and she continued to have great affection for her alma mater. At Amherst she fashioned her own major, an interdisciplinary course featuring Islamic studies.

At that first meeting we were attracted to each other. Even though I taught at the business school, I told her what I tell all my students, that she shouldn’t go to business school, that it was a waste of time. Including opportunity costs, it would cost her or her parents more than a hundred thousand dollars, money better spent starting a business, which would succeed or fail, either of which would teach her more about business than would sitting in a classroom for two or three years listening to “learned professors” who had never run a business prate on about doing so.

I asked her out, one thing led to another, and we began to see a lot of each other.

We kept discussing the trip over the next few days, and she began to plan as if she were going. It was natural for me to take her along. I’d made many long-distance trips—across Europe, the United States, India, China, and to Alaska along the Alcan Highway—and often I’d taken my current woman friend.

However, while she continued to be enthusiastic, as the week wore on I began to wonder about her driving her own bike. Yes, she once traveled on the back of my motorcycle from San Francisco to New York, but five hundred miles a day on a superhighway was no preparation for what we were planning. Sure, the roads in Pakistan had been bad, but there too she’d been merely a passenger.

“I’ve changed my mind,” I announced one night at dinner. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to drive your own bike. It’s too difficult for a beginner. Remember how bad the roads were in India and Pakistan? The ones in China, Siberia, and Africa are going to be even rougher.”

She shot me a hard glance. “You don’t think I’m tough enough?”

“No, I didn’t say that. This is just a long, long trip. This is the longest and toughest ride of all.”

“I can do it.”

I sighed. What had I started? “A rider needs several thousand miles—several tens of thousands of miles—under her belt for something like this. The pace we’ll have to keep up, the terrible roads, the weeks—months—of driving day after day will wear you out. You need experience. I remember how I was as a beginner. One time I came off an interstate, for God’s sake, and shot off into a cornfield because I was green and wasn’t paying enough attention. The first time I was on a gravel road the wheel skidded out from under me. I had bruises and raspberries everywhere. Well, in many of these places, we’re going to wish we had something as good as a gravel road.”

“We’re not leaving for three months. I’ll practice before we go.”

I took a deep breath and launched in. “Look, I’m not explaining this well enough. On the China trip I set out from Turpan to Hami with a film crew in a bus behind me. This was to be two hundred fifty miles, a quick day. We didn’t take much food or water because we were assured the road was fine and we’d arrive in Hami before dark. Well, that day turned out to be seventeen hours across roads that were a nightmare. We couldn’t stop because there was nowhere to stop—no place to buy anything to eat. We were in the desert, so there was no water. It was like being halfway across a sea—you are in trouble no matter what you decide to do. Once we were out there, we had to push on. I think we’d all have died if we’d stopped. Two thirds of the way there, the film crew was ready to give up, and they were riding in the bus.”

She stared at me so fixedly, I wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

I continued. “There’re going to be times on this trip when we’ll have to bust a gut to keep going, and it’s going to be hard, the hardest thing you’ve ever done. Half the world—more than half the world—is still rough, wild, unpaved, savage.”

Her eyes seemed to stare through me as she thought this over. “You don’t think I’m tough enough.”

“I think you’re plenty tough, but you might not have enough experience, even by the time we set out, for such a long, hard trip.”

“I’ll work and make myself ready, Jim. We’ve traveled thousands of miles on your bike. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m getting into.”

“But the pace. I run six miles a day to keep fit. You know enough to know this will wear you out as well as beat you up. There’s no way you can build up enough stamina in just three months.”

“I think I can.”

“You also know I’m a real pusher sometimes. I have to be. Like on that Hami drive, when I had to make sure we made it. As a matter of fact, the same damn thing happened the next day. A simple two-hundred-fifty-mile drive from Hami to Turpan took another seventeen hours.”

“Jim, I’ll keep up.”

I was still not sure she knew what she was getting into, not sure I knew what I was getting into. “We can’t go around the world driving three or four hours a day.”

Now she gave me a direct look. “Jim, if you don’t want me to come, say so. Go alone.”

“No, I didn’t say that. I’d love you to come. It’ll be wonderful having you along. But we’re going over the world’s worst roads, through some of its harshest weather, across the Sahara and the Andes, through epidemics in places where there aren’t hospitals, telephones, airports, or even telegrams, where there are bandits, terrorists—who knows what.”

Over the next few days we looked on the darker side of the trip.

We discussed the possibility that we might get killed. Tabitha’s reaction was that she could get killed in New York, too. As for me, I expected to make it or otherwise I wouldn’t have planned to set out.

I had to figure out what to do with my investments while I was gone. Investment markets are volatile beasts, and you have to keep an eye on your positions. They’ve always fascinated me. One of the first things I noticed about them was that they went down as well as up, and I remembered how excited I was when I learned you could sell them short—sell what you don’t own, and profit from their fall as well as from their rise. Where we were going there wouldn’t be phones, telexes, or faxes, much less daily newspapers. Most of my investments had always been long term, so I didn’t need to make any major moves. I cut back on my shorts, and I kept no futures positions at all.

Then, early in 1990, most of my money was in utility stocks, U.S. government bonds, and foreign currencies, and I pretty much left it where it was. I owned utility stocks, mainly distressed ones with nuclear plants such as Illinois Power and Niagara Mohawk, because I was convinced they’d hit bottom and would solve their problems. I thought U.S. interest rates were headed south, so I was bullish—optimistic—on bonds and bearish—pessimistic—on the dollar, that is, I expected the price of bonds to rise and that of the dollar to fall. I figured the politicians would do everything they could to keep the economy going. Since they’re not very smart, all they really know how to do is cut interest rates. I bought foreign currencies, mainly certificates of deposit denominated in guilders or deutsche marks, reasoning that the dollar would go down as the politicians cut interest rates.

As an American, I hated to see this happen. But as an investor about to set off around the world, I had chanced upon the perfect investment scenario, because these were holdings I wouldn’t have to watch on a daily basis. I would make money if I were right, and I wouldn’t get wiped out if I were wrong, because government bonds and utility stocks might go down, but basically they were secure instruments over time, as were the currencies of sound countries.

Whenever I travel, because of who I am, I notice promising investment opportunities. While this wasn’t an investment trip by any means, I suspected I would visit promising stock exchanges. In addition to experiencing the world and its people firsthand in the vivid and close way you can on a motorcycle, I knew I would learn about the markets in Africa, China, and South America, which I felt might explode in the nineties. I was also curious about the markets in Australia and New Zealand. I’d made a lot of money for myself and others by investing in sleepy markets that exploded upward. In fact, one of my first stops on this trip was to be Austria, where I was to give a speech to the investment clients of Oberbank. A few years before, my investment in the Austrian stock market had quintupled in three years. I wondered if I would find more such places to invest. With the world throwing off the shackles of socialism and Communism, I figured not only was the time right, but the opportunity might not be repeated for decades, if ever again in my life.

AS THE WEEKS SPED BY Tabitha stuck with it. She was going to go. I still worried that the trip was wrong for her and that she would change her mind at the last minute, but March got closer and we kept moving forward as if we were going to do it.

We bought spare cables, mirrors, a carburetor, and extra Michelin tires. We packed rolls of 3 M’s magic construction tape, two inches wide, clear, and seemingly indestructible, my favorite item for emergency repairs. We got sleeping bags, rain suits, and an extra helmet. Tabitha hunted up the wedding band she’d used on our previous adventures. We’d learned it made traveling a lot simpler if she wore one. We bought maps and plotted routes, as AAA had no trip tickets for getting through the Central Asian Republics, Siberia, and the Sahara. We doped out ways to get money into places without American Express offices and where the sight of a traveler’s check would produce suspicious stares. I battened down my office, and I made sure someone would look after my house while I was away. There were vaccinations to take and visas to obtain.

However, I wasn’t going to get any letters of introduction, nor did I pack my address book. We made the choice to make this trip serendipitously and spontaneously. We wouldn’t depend on old friends, personal or business, to put us up and pull us into gatherings of their friends. It would be more of an adventure to meet our own new friends, friends of the road. In this way we would have a different adventure, maybe better, maybe worse. We would play the trip as we found it.

And still I was holding my breath, hoping Tabitha wouldn’t change her mind, hoping she’d come.

Finally the big day arrived. I couldn’t believe it. March 25, 1990, was a bright spring day, and I was about to set out around the world. The way we planned the first leg, we’d leave from the west coast of Ireland and drive across Europe and China to Japan, becoming the first ground travelers ever to ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The second leg would be to return to Ireland across Siberia, Russia, and Central Europe, another first—the Pacific to the Atlantic. Back to back, the trip would be twenty thousand miles.

Tabitha crated the bikes and took them out to the Aer Lingus freight terminal. I wondered if we’d taken care of everything. Had I given enough instructions about the boiler for next winter? What would the housesitter do if the roof leaked? Too late now. We were in the air. For a few minutes a sense of unreality and strangeness struck me, and I mused on who I was and how I happened to be hurtling over the Atlantic on what might prove to be a fool’s errand.

We had pored over our maps and decided that the westernmost point in Ireland was Dunquin, population less than one hundred. It would be our starting point. In Ireland, after uncrating the bikes, we drove from Shannon Airport through the lush countryside to Dunquin, where we looked for the post office.

It was Saturday afternoon when we arrived in the tiny village of thatch-roofed stone cottages and haystacks, its lush green slopes topping slate-gray cliffs. The post office was closed. We knocked on the door anyway. It turned out that the postmistress lived there—just as post-office officials sometimes did back in Alabama when I was a child—and we told her we were traveling around the world and wanted to prove we had been here in Dunquin at the start. Ruddy faced, sixty, and plump, Mrs. Campion reminded me of dozens of Alabama churchwomen, pillars of their communities, who had clucked approvingly as I’d served as an acolyte in the Episcopal church. Would she sell us some postcards, then postmark and date them?

She laughed with Irish delight at the whole absurd idea and invited us in for a cup of tea. She signed the cards, then a Gaelic student who was there signed them, and then we signed them, and then she stamped them. It was like a party. The official start!

Riding through this part of Ireland was wonderful, great for motorcycles, the roads curvy and small and convoluted, green and beautiful. All my life, from my history courses at Yale to my work at Oxford and later on Wall Street, I’ve studied geography, politics, economics, and history intensely, believing they are interrelated, and I’ve used what I’ve learned to invest in world markets. I was on the lookout for investment opportunities, for some country—and its investment market—about to take off, where I could jump in and make five, ten, fifteen times what I put in.

Ireland wouldn’t be one of those countries. In fact, the lush countryside made me sad. For centuries Ireland has been in a state of war or rebellion or depression. It seemed such a shame that despite all this beauty, despite the ebullient, warmhearted Irish temperament, there should be for so long this raging instability. All the country had was tourism and pastureland, although I figured with its pool of semiskilled labor, it might make it as the back office for English or German banks, insurance companies, and brokerages.

Ireland is a victim of statism, which my dictionary defines as the concentration of economic controls and planning in the hands of a highly centralized government, and which I further define as the belief that the state is the mechanism best suited for solving most if not all of society’s ills, be they health related, natural disasters, poverty, job training, or injured feelings. Statism is the great political disease of the twentieth century, with Communist, socialist, and many democratic nations infected to a greater or lesser degree. When the political history of our century is written, its greatest story will be how a hundred variants of statism failed.

When a country is run by the government, when the government not only owns the post office, the telephone system, the railroads, and the utilities but also the service sector and light and heavy industry, the country begins to have the air of the U.S. postal service in the nineties compared with what it was in the fifties. A couple of generations later, all vigor is drained out of that society.

Across the Irish Sea, Margaret Thatcher was the first major example of a leader who reversed this trend. When she was elected in 1979, Britain was bankrupt from its government’s efforts to solve every social problem. She began to sell off the assets and businesses that had been nationalized by the Labour Party, invigorating the country’s economy. Ireland was late in beginning this process.

I had last been in Ireland in 1964, while a student at Oxford, and it now shocked me how empty the countryside was. What hit me was that the talented genes kept leaving Ireland, and that they had been leaving for generations. That didn’t mean there weren’t some smart, delightful, wonderful people here, but there had been a great migration out of the gene pool.

On our second day out, near Cork, Tabitha’s bike broke down. I had no idea what was wrong, and for all her mechanic’s training, neither did Tabitha.

Back in New York we had both signed up for the BMW mechanics course, but with even the best intentions, I had never made a single class. Other things were always more pressing. Besides, we both knew she was far more mechanically oriented than I was. I can’t operate venetian blinds without getting tangled in the cord. Tabitha not only had time and a mechanical bent, but her father had taught her a lot about machinery, how machines worked. This was one more aspect that had attracted me to her.

Before we left, we had hired her BMW instructor, Scott Johnson, who had a passion for these motorcycles, to come over and give her extra lessons, private tutorials. Over several winter weeks Tabitha worked with him in the side yard of the house. Late in the frigid days, sometimes at night under a lamp’s yellow glare, they’d take a bike apart, put it back together, and then take it apart again.

While he showed her what each mysterious part did and how it worked, I was doing a million other things. I was the host of a TV show about economic affairs in addition to teaching finance at Columbia. But most of my attention had gone into organizing my investments and devising ways to put my New York life in the deep freezer while we were gone.

Unfortunately, all Tabitha’s training had been in the classroom and not on the road. She could strip down an engine and put it back together, but she couldn’t diagnose what was wrong when it broke down. In this case, we needed practical street smarts, not theoretical expertise.

Along came a local motorcycle gang, dressed the way they are everywhere in the world. Barry O’Keefe and Kevin Sullivan, the leaders, turned out to be wonderful folks, just good old motorcycle trash like us. They loaded Tabitha’s bike into a truck and fixed it in five minutes at their shop. The bike looked good, black with white racing stripes on the fairing, chrome exhaust pipe gleaming. They invited us to a dive called the Mojo Pub, where we had a party.

We crossed Ireland and headed for England, exultant.

After a week in England, I was antsy to leave for Europe. I needed to get to Linz to speak to Oberbank’s clients about developments in Central Europe.

As we had been to Europe many times, we zipped across its familiar face, a thousand miles in a few days. During the 527 miles from Paris to Munich we were pummeled by cold spring rains, no fun on a motorcycle but a real-world consequence of being close to the road. I led, and Tabitha complained about doing such a long distance in one day, but I was sure she would get used to the pace.

I had fond, fond memories of Austria and its stock market, where I’d made one of my best coups.

Six years before, believing the time was right to invest in Vienna, the sleepy former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I had put out feelers by calling the New York office of Creditanstalt, its largest bank. I asked the manager how I could go about investing in his country’s stock market.

“We don’t have a stock market,” he said.

I laughed. This was music to my ears. The largest bank in the country—and the New York rep didn’t even know he had a stock market!

I knew there was one and that big changes were taking place in Austria. The bank manager’s ignorance showed me how wonderfully obscure the stock market was, just what I like as an investor.

I assured him that his country had a stock market and asked if he could find out how I could buy shares. It was hopeless dealing with him. But that just whetted my appetite. The largest bank in Austria and no one knew how to buy shares on its stock market!

I knew what was going on in Germany—that it was becoming an industrial powerhouse—and how Austria, like Germany, was loosening its socialistic chains.

In November of 1984 I went to Austria. I went to the stock exchange. Nobody was there. It was dead, open only a few hours a week.

Finally I found the one guy in charge of the stock market at the Creditanstalt Bank’s main office, Otto Breuer. One guy handling shares, without a secretary, in the country’s largest bank. I felt as though I were in knee-high cotton.

The Austrian exchange had less than thirty stocks listed, and it had fewer than twenty members. Back before the First World War there had been four thousand members on the Austro-Hungarian stock exchange. Then it had been the largest stock market in Central Europe, dominant, as New York and Tokyo are today.

I got Otto to take me to see the government official in charge of the stock market, Werner Mehlberg, who assured me there would be changes made in the laws that would encourage people to invest in stocks. The government recognized that it had to have a capital market.

“What changes?” I asked, masking my excitement.

Lower taxes on dividends, said Herr Mehlberg. We’re going to make the dividends tax-free if you reinvest them in stocks. Give tax credits for investing in stocks. Give special provisions in the laws for pension funds and insurance companies to invest in stocks, which they hadn’t had before.

Other countries had done these things, and they had achieved dramatic results. These were copycat measures. The Austrians had seen the German stock market going up. But at the same time, I thought about the portfolio managers in Germany. They read German, while Americans might not, and these German portfolio managers knew where Austria was, practically a suburb of Germany. If this market started to move they would pile in and drive it up even higher.

But ever cautious—the first rule in investing is not to lose any capital—I went to the head of an Austrian labor union and asked him about the position of the socialist party—capitalism’s loyal opposition, so to speak—on all of this. He told me the socialist crowd was in favor of these changes. They didn’t like stock markets, but they knew they were necessary to make the country go. That was it—no opposition from the opposition. I decided to pile in.

My attitude is, if you believe in a country, you should buy shares of every decent stock on its exchange. If you’ve got the right concept going for you, they’re all going to move up together. I bought shares in everything that had a solid balance sheet—a home-building construction company, finance and manufacturing companies, banks, other construction firms, and a big machinery company.

A few weeks later I was on the Barron’s Roundtable, an annual forum for discussing investment ideas. I reminded the other members that the year before, I had invested in Germany, but this year the country to invest in was Austria. I laid out my reasons.

The paper comes out on Saturday morning. Saturday, Sunday went by, everything was quiet. On Monday morning Otto Breuer, the guy without the secretary at the Creditanstalt, came in late. His desk was covered with phone messages, and the market was going through the roof. Calls were pouring in from London, Munich, New York: “Buy me Austrian shares.”

Otto had no idea what was going on. People just kept calling from everywhere—Barron’s is read all over the world—wanting to buy shares on this dead stock exchange. Finally, somebody said to him, “Hey, don’t you read Barron’s?” Of course he didn’t, because this was a backwater job. The market started to move up, which naturally attracted even more interest.

Now, I can’t move a stock market. All I can do is point out the reality of a situation. It was one of those things, a simple idea, but once you looked at it, it was dead clear and everybody piled in.

To this day people say I kissed the sleeping beauty and woke her up. The smart ones say that, while the dumb ones think I actually did something magical. But everybody said what a beautiful thing it was when the princess woke up, because everybody made so much money. The stock market went up 125 percent that year, and then went up more and more.

Well, when the Austrians figured out that I was Prince Charming, the Creditanstalt invited me to speak at their quarterly forum, at which Kissinger had spoken not long before—a forum where I would definitely be heard.

So I went, and I said, “This ain’t over yet, folks; hang on. You are all gonna make a whole lot more money in the Austrian market. This thing is big. You’re going from a state of gross undervaluation to a normal valuation, and your economy’s growing. Just because it’s double up now doesn’t mean more money’s not going to be made.”

The newspapers gave this lots of coverage. The Creditanstalt people rented me a motorcycle and I, the “eccentric Jim Rogers” according to the newspapers, drove up to Prague. I finally sold out of Austria in the spring of 1987—the market was up 400 percent or 500 percent by then—because I was worried about stock markets around the world. I was worried about a financial crisis, yet the Austrian market was one of the last ones I sold.

Now the Austrians had asked me back to make another speech. I was eager to get to Linz—I prefer to ride hard and arrive where I have to be and relax—but the closer I got the less keen I was on speaking.

The flattery of being called the father of the Austrian stock market was nice, but this time around I was terribly bearish on Austria and all of Central Europe.

The Austrian stock market was ripe for collapse, and like people everywhere, those involved weren’t going to be happy to hear the bad news.