Truck It! by Bobby Bolton: 53 countries, two dogs... one new girlfriend

If I ever have to drive around the world with someone, I want it to be Bobby Bolton. Not just because he’s an interesting and likeable bloke, but because he’s practical.

The six-and-a-half-ton truck that is his chosen transport from Britain to Australia needs many repairs along the way, and Bolton is up to all of them. When he gets stuck on an Italian hill track, he cuts down trees to put under the wheels, thereby giving him traction.

When his fuel lines freeze in Montenegro, he thaws them with a hairdryer, having first had to extend its lead by wiring in a five-metre extension piece.

Why is Bobby on his odyssey? Because of a split from his fiancée, and his construction company getting into financial trouble. But, even before all that, he’d felt a disenchantment with life.

So when he sees a Land Rover driven by a couple off on an expedition, he finds himself saying: ‘I’m going to drive to Australia.’

He buys a truck and adapts the back so he can live in it. His companion will be Red, the labrador who has already endured the discomfort of sharing Bolton’s temporary home, a caravan on a derelict farm.

Driving through France, Bolton meets a woman with her dog, Rubia.

The next day he cooks her a meal on his barbecue, having dressed smartly for the occasion (‘my least stained trousers and an actual shirt’). When he’s in Italy, he gets a text from Marie (as he now knows she’s called) saying that she can’t stop thinking about him. The feeling is mutual, so they meet up in Genoa, ready to continue the adventure together. Rubia comes along too, and in Slovenia the foursome go mountaineering.

We know it must be love – Bolton’s mum meets them in Romania (where she’s on a short break with friends) and tells Bobby ‘you’ve got that twinkle back in your eyes’. There’s also the fact that Marie sticks with him even after he accidentally flies his 5kg drone into her face at 20mph.

The pair work their way southwards and eastwards. They discover ajvar,a Balkan spread made from roasted peppers and a restaurant on a Turkish island that has a menu that reads, in its entirety, ‘Meat or no meat. Wine or beer.’

On a horse-riding expedition in Romania, Bolton foolishly lies about his ability, and is given an animal called Ferrari. He ends up wishing that ‘I’d worn tighter underwear’.

It rains all the time in Georgia (‘like Wigan, but without the pies’), the trip sees more than one bout of food poisoning, and it’s only after lots of drivers in Pakistan have driven straight at Bolton on his side of the road that he realises the country actually drives on the left.

In Afghanistan, where no women appear in public, the men look at Marie with hostility or ignore her completely, making her ‘feel like a ghost’. But the Taliban soldiers

Bolton asks for directions are ‘remarkably helpful once I told them I wasn’t American’.

Books like this can be corny or forced, lacking in proper stories and full of cliché. Bolton himself is aware that the trip, which eventually includes 53 countries, could be seen as just a ‘glorified gap year’. But he’s a genuine traveller, doing it for real reasons that came out of a real crisis in his life, and the book is a pleasure to read. Plus there’s a twist at the end that sets up a possible sequel.

If that happens, Bolton will doubtless be careful not to repeat the mistake of letting his mates smuggle a sex toy aboard the truck before he leaves. The Kyrgyzstani border guard who finds it isn’t impressed. Though Bolton finds a solution: he convinces the man it’s a neck massager.