THIS is the third time I’ve interviewed Simon Gandolfi in the last five years and he’s always good value for money.

Entertaining, eccentric, elderly (now) and apt to do daft things, he travels the world on a motorbike only one notch up from a moped. A pizza delivery bike, an astonished Mexican mechanic once called it.

As a result, he rides in fear of klaxon-blaring juggernauts bearing down from the rear, short-sighted car drivers and jaywalkers. Simon has been knocked off – or fallen off – on most of his journeys in far flung parts, but the shunt in South America was very nearly terminal.

I met him near his home at Colwall, near Malvern, and his opening line was: “I really shouldn’t be here.”

When he’d finished telling the story, I realised he should be dead.

Or at least very seriously injured.

After all, when a 30-tonne truck smacks into your bike and carries you 40 yards down the road trapped under its bumper, the next person you expect to see is St Peter waving you through the gates.

In fact, the accident was even worse than that, because the lorry was towing a trailer loaded with two other trucks.

So technically – as the Chilean police report pointed out – Simon had been hit by three trucks. And all he did was break an ankle.

It was, as he freely admitted, all his own fault. Not the actual accident, but being there in the first place to let it happen.

A couple of years before, he had ridden the 125 Honda 28,000 miles down the length of South America from Veracruz in Mexico to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuegio just for the thrill of it and because his wife wanted him out of the house for a while.

Having completed the trip and written the book – Old Man on a Bike, published in 2008 – he parked the moped in a cold store at Ushuaia and flew back to the UK.

Then he decided to go and retrieve it, but being Simon Gandolfi, this was no simple mission. Instead, he embarked on a 35,000-mile bike ride from Tierra de Fuegio to New York, where his daughter lives.

Simon has no relatives in Tierra del Fuegio, it just happened to be at the end of his first journey. But he did know the landlady of a local hotel, Graciela by name, and she was not alone in thinking him completely barmy starting his return journey on the day he did.

The weather was foul, the roads sheet ice in many parts and he would be sharing the highways with other traffic, the vast majority of which would be much larger than the little moped.

“But I really had no option,” said Simon. “They had given me a farewell party the night before and I felt I would have been cheating them if I had hadn’t set off.

“It was a man thing. I had to do it.

My greatest fear is being thought of as a coward, losing what my youngest sons refer to as street cred. Turn back and in my mind I would have been a laughing stock.”

So with Graciela’s “Be careful Little Grandfather” ringing in his ears, the white haired 75-year-old biker, bulked out by layers of thermals – “Imagine a large, greybearded blue balloon” – set off for New York.

He didn’t get far before he fell off for the first time. The bike slid on the ice and Simon crashed to the floor.

He had only been travelling at 3mph.

“Only a fool would have continued,” he said. But he did.

With one foot either side of the machine to keep it upright.

Remarkably, he had travelled nearly 40 miles and refused several offers of help from passing motorists before the lorry klaxon blared behind him.

He tried to get out of the way, but couldn’t and the truck smashed into him. After 40 yards with him under its front fender, it came to a halt. The driver and his mate scrambled out and expected to find Simon dead.

“I mumbled what every Englishman of my generation mumbles in such circumstances: ‘Please excuse me, it’s all my fault’,” he said.

When the police roared up in a 4x4 intent on prosecuting the lorry driver, Simon insisted on taking all the blame: “The driver holds me in his arms, hugs me and names me Brother. Better he had called me an irresponsible old fool.”

With his right ankle broken, the Chilean police took him over the border to a first aid post in Argentina – where a nurse examined the injury and decided to send him back to hospital in Rio Grande, the town where Simon had started his journey six hours before.

The return trip lasted 60 minutes.

Waiting for the result of his Xrays, the door suddenly crashed open and there stood Graciela.

“She grabbed my ear lobe and shook it,” he said. “Then she says, ‘So, Little Grandfather, now what have you done?’ The tone of the voice is exasperated mother.

“I try to explain, but she was having none of it. ‘Why didn’t you turn back? You’re 70, Old Man.

When are you going to grow up?’”

In Simon Gandolfi’s case, the answer is almost certainly never.

His thoroughly amusing, entertaining and educational book of his 35,000-mile road trip through South America up to the Big Apple is called Old Men Can’t Wait and is published by Shuvvy Press at £9.99.

The title is explained by an image of him peeing behind a boulder in Bolivia. “At my age, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” he said.

He had to and he did – and it makes marvellous reading.