Paisano and me.

paisano /pʌɪˈsɑːnəʊ,pʌɪˈzɑːnəʊ/

nounUS noun: paisano; plural noun: paisanos

1. a peasant of Spanish or Italian ethnic origin.

pae·sano. noun. Paesano is defined as a fellow countryman, especially a fellow Italian. A friend who lives down the street from you in your Italian village is an example of a paesano.

Two spellings, two meanings, phonetically the same. Finding a travelling companion isn't the easiest. You are going to be with them for 18 hours a day. On my motorbike trips, I have an intercom system, which means we are in each others ears all the time.

I travel with Dan. He's 6'4", an obsessive gym goer, and shares my love of motorcycles and travel. We are not similar people. He is singularly the most tight-fisted, parsimonious, skint-flint, I have ever come across. I have known him stand by the bin at a beer festival, finishing our groups dinners off, because he was too tight to pay what he deemed an extortionate price for pie and chips, (about 8 quid if I recall correctly). His goal in life is to make enough money so he can downsize to a bungalow and travel the world by motorbike. I am completely the opposite, I waste money like no man's business.

This is the process we go through when equipping ourselves for a trip. Things like bikes, jackets, panniers, I'll get whatever people recommend, I don't tend to focus too much on value for money. In fact, I'll often buy one or two different variants, and compare them, see which I like, then mothball the ones I don't like. It's why I own 7 different helmets.

Dan buys the cheapest shite that functionally will purport to do the job. Panniers, cheap throw-overs that melt on the exhaust, and a rear rack that sheared the bolts on his sub-frame. To fix the melting on the exhaust, Dan fitted a heat shield to his silencer, not like a 20 quid one off ebay, no, that's far too extravagant, one he made from chicken wire instead.

So when we travel, he looks like a refugee trying to flee the conflict zone with a rapidly packed-up house on the back of his bike. I look like the kid that is sponsored by Rukka and Klim. Funniest thing is, I am absolutely dog-shit at riding a bike, and he's really good, so I look like a complete twat.

But when we travel, we somehow make it work. We complement each other, I stop him riding too fast and causing himself damage, staying in shit holes and catching debilitating diseases, and he navigates and rides my bike up all the terrain and obstacles that I basically can't be arsed to. There are going to be lots of blog posts that refer back to our views on spending money. So remember this one well.