So the other night I was up playing GTA V, cruising the contours of the fictitious Los Santos when a stretch of wooded hills smacked me with a sweeping flashback of the big bike trip. It triggered a short montage of the long road from Turkey to London. And despite being seated firmly in front of the tele, I swear I felt a ride day’s wind brush across my face and heard the faint sound of truck tyres crunching gravel tinkling in my ear.
I was, for a moment, stalled by nostalgia. Transported back to scenes of sweat and spokes, back to roadside farmhouses and campsite meals and impossible mountains and all those peaks and pits piled up in between.
Admittedly, the stretch of road in GTA V was little more than a disposable bit of scenery, forgettable trees on an unremarkable hill. And if you pressed me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which particular hill in which country it resembled, just that the chance assembly of those pixels rushed upon me a small flood of sweet nostalgia.
And now, over a year past when I had joined the boys on the road, and almost exactly one year since we stormed the steps of Buckingham Palace — memories of the journey are still just as vivid as the day we crossed Tower Bridge.
Over the four months of my big bike trip, I cycled 7000km, about a sixth of the circumference of the globe — a commendable achievement to any reasonable ear.
Of course, the others never fail to mention that they in fact crossed 23,000km over fourteen months — which is in fact over half of the world’s circumference. My fault for showing up ten months late, I suppose.
Much has changed since. In the immediate aftermath, Arthur, Sean, and Freddie returned to New Zealand shores following a post-bike trip tour around European festivals and some well deserved celebration.
Inescapably, when they did return, they came home to a bittersweet welcome. As good as it was to step on familiar soil, it all the more foreign to be travel by foot once more. For all the unique splendour and distinct joys of the trip, it was countered by relationships which fell apart, friends turned strangers, and the omnipresent wondering about what comes next.
Not all was lost, though. Freddie found love with a Belgium architect, Isaura, in a dramatic global romance involving a chance meeting in Malaysia which culminated in a second rendezvous almost 9 months later in Brussels, which then blossomed into a book-worthy love affair.
Sean, being the unrelenting romantic that he is, has also recently journeyed across the continents for love and to discover the many wonders of long distance relationships. A sharp shooter in more ways than one, he continues to make everything so beautiful, and those of us in his presence, so plain.
As for Arthur, the best of us all. He is now braving the sea to test where his sails may lead. His toned and (some may say) godly figure cutting a shapely silhouette against the light of an indifferent universe, daring the world to deny his destiny in unrivalled brilliance.
Predictably, in a desperate attempt to relive the trip (and also to raise a commendable amount of funds and awareness for a good cause), those three crackpots also went on to do the 190km Round Taupo race in full gear — tour bikes, panniers, and all. And to top that off, the boys also managed to nab a book deal with Penguin, with the mandate to produce a photographic and literary gem to garnish coffee tables across the world.
After a few months back in New Zealand, though, Freddie and Sean grew tired of staying grounded, so opted to pack their bags and move to London like every other kiwi — while Arthur took on a more patriotic stance and chose to remain in Aotearoa.
But what of Tim, your favourite member of the big bike trip, you ask? What happened to the Chinese-New Zealand powerhouse so full of will and grit? Your inspiring source of relatable but heroic struggle and good natured entertainment? Well, after some spectacularly unsuccessful job hunting in the UK, I briefly lived in France binging wine and cheese (yes, my waistline has since stretched wide once more) before relocating to Berlin, where I found a new gig in the startup scene. I have since moved in to a polished apartment with my girlfriend, Tena, where we spend our days tending to plants and gentrifying our local neighbourhood.
I often find myself pondering the sweet meaning of life, my cheek kissed with soft brush of the wind, hair moistened by the salty perspiration of a days hard work and my inner thigh soothed by my beloved Johnson's following a ravaging from the department of chafe.
Despite all the time that has elapsed, though, I still find myself reminiscing about the road, about those moments camping in the long grass, and the many, many hours cycling from city to city.
When I landed on my feet again, I found that I needed a way to continue the trip, to establish a sanctuary where it could live on and stay fresh. I found it difficult to accept that the adventure had ended, that we had, in fact, come to a finish.
So for the first month or so, I revelled in recounting tales of the trip to friends and family. And when those friends and family got tired of hearing the same stories and started avoiding me, I found myself bringing the topic up to anyone who’d listen — at parties, in taxi rides, during job interviews, to a stranger in a pub, to myself in the mirror.
Sometimes, I catch myself trying to come up with a reason for why we undertook the journey in the first place, pouring over memories in search of some profound lesson learned while pedalling our way from coast to coast — because surely, it’s more than just a long gap year, it feels almost sacrilegious to call it a holiday. Because even after the sobering test of time, the trip still seems ripe with undiscovered epiphanies, and its impacts etched into our very bones.
One of the things I think back to often is having a day’s goals being reduced to simply getting from one place to another, and where to get water, food, and shelter. Between you and the day’s rest might stand a hundred, or two hundred kilometres through mountains and valleys, but all you had to do was get there in one piece.
Now though, back participating in wider civilisation where goals aren’t so clearly delineated. Purpose is now more murky, its fruits abstracted and more removed. The mountains we climb now come in the variety of spreadsheets and business calls. The reward of completing a day’s work isn’t as immediate and defined, and sometimes the cold beer at the end of the day feels more like a coping mechanism than a celebration.
In between point A and B were myriad landscapes unfolding for you to experience. When you start the day there are so may possibilities of how that day could go, every new stretch of road was a fresh corner never seen before (though at times long highways could get a bit monotonous).
The coastal riding when we could camp on a beach some place and wake up to the sunrise over a gentle sea. You get to smell the flowers and the roadkill, you feel the dust kicked up by trucks rushing past. You could start the morning on a seaside town, and spend the afternoon crossing a misty mountaintop. On the next stretch you might crash, or your tire could give out. You might run into a warming encounter with a friendly local, you may be harassed by a couple of stray dogs. You might run out of water at just the wrong time, you might find a well placed fountain at just the right moment. You could be reduced to tears by a particularly testing climb, or you might be laughing and singing your way through a deserted tunnel. Unpredictable and exciting, arduous as it was rewarding.
There’s a moment that I think back to often. We were cycling along a Turkish motorway when we came across a man waving at us. We waved back, and kept going. Maybe ten or twenty minutes later further down the tracks the same car was parked on the side of the road, by a strawberry stand. An enthusiastic gentleman of late 40s was jumping, swinging his hand about in the air yelling for us to stop. We did, and introduced ourselves. His name is (name), he said his summer home was about a 5km down the street in a waterside town, and he invited us to stay for the evening before heading out tomorrow morning. He’s a cyclist as well, in his spare time, he said — the fields ahead weren’t that good, he said.
I was immediately suspicious of his offer, thinking he had some ulterior motive at hand. But against my better instincts we followed him to town, through a bustling enclave of a town by shimmering waves. Upon reaching his home, he pulled out food, and beer, and saying he had some business to attend to, left us in his home to shower a freshen up till he was finished.
The generosity of the man. The willingness to give without any thought of reciprocation Merely giving a fellow traveller a night’s rest on a quiet mattress and a belly full of beer. In the morning we said our goodbyes and moved on, but this encounter has stuck with me since.
... and boy did those strawberries taste good!
So in comparison to everyday living, something like cycling through the world makes for a tempting point of reference. It’s a peculiar exercise to reminisce about wheeling through the Croatian coast, baking in the dry heat in the day while you’re shuffling through the working commute — exchanging in your mind the scenes of a cityscape passing by the train window for blue seas some place. Or, on a windy day, recount the thrill and terror of a thunderstorm raging overhead, rain and savage gusts cleaving at you, only a thin plastic sheet held to the ground with bent pegs between you and the violence beyond.
There were cold days, there were hot ones. There were mornings waking up to a grey sky and a wet tent, a hundred a fifty kilometres of unforgiving landscape ahead. One hill after another, every rest only a prelude to more punishment. There were days waking up charged, thighs still throbbing from a hard day’s ride, but pumped for more action nonetheless. However testing the journey, though, each day I went to rest feeling like I’ve accomplished something, seen something, and was ultimately better for it.
Perhaps the scale and beauty of the trip was so immense, and infused so deeply with our sense of existence that the metaphor of the journey will be forced upon all other endeavours from now on.
Aside from a lesson in alternative methods of living and a source of questioning about the nature of work, the trip also taught me comprehension of the sheer scale of the world. It feels weird to say it, because of course the world is huge — but spending months riding through a continent or two gives you a lot of time to think about how big the world is. And with that same perspective, how trivial so many of our problems seem to be. To a driver tooting their horn with vindictive rage, a couple bickering over their soured love, or an irate customer berating the waiter over an overcooked steak, you might point to the hills and seas beyond, and say, relax, you’re a very tiny part in a colossal world, it really doesn’t matter so much.
The gateway to Switzerland
In our previous posts on this blog, you’ll get many juicy insights into the suffering we all enjoyed in physical and mental terms. But what I find particularly astounding is not the height of the mountains we crossed or the agony we endured, or even the people we met along the way — but the risks we had all taken in our personal and professional lives to pursue something we were passionate about. Passion in the face of danger, the romance of the struggle, there was beauty in believing in something, then setting off and doing it. In seeing an opportunity for something different, and following through. To hell with common sense, let’s knock back a shot of madness and indulge in what may come.
On the eve of my departure from London to Istanbul, I took a taxi ride to the airport and conversed with my driver, telling him about the trip I’m about to go on. We joked about my physical state, and how I shall face many painful hours, but in a moment of touching sincerity, the driver confessed how he wished he had done something similar in his younger days, before he had a family to take care of and when he still had friends stupid enough to ride with him. Throughout the trip, we met many such characters, people who would get this far-off look and relay their retrospective envy at not having undertaken a similar journey. Whether they intended them as such, I took those comments as the deepest compliments one could give — we would hear all sorts of praise for the effort, but those heartfelt confessions felt like validation of what we were doing, as something worthy.
Sean on what could be considered his darkest day of the trip. The coldest day in the Georgian calendar, back spasms and giardiasis made for a great combo. The deeper the pit, the sweeter the peak.
For all the vagaries of existential ponderings, though, the trip did definitely make its mark in more obvious ways.
Supermarkets, for one, have taken on a new significance. Supermarkets meant food, and a break from riding when you could recollect and have a few laughs before pedalling on. Making sandwiches in an assembly line of four, cutting tomatoes and gherkins on a frisbee, sitting on the pavement by the parked bikes — just a bit of innocent fun, a few overgrown kids smelling like sunscreen and sweat digging greedily into big loaves of bread.
When I do my shopping now, I chuckle at myself when passing those three litre cooking wines selling for $3.50, and think about giggling while popping open those joyous buckets at camp. On that note, frisbees have taken on a new meaning, too. When I see the general folk frolicking at the park with a frisbee, I feel almost obliged to inform them that these sweet plastic disks are also employable as chopping boards, dinner plates, and on occasion, as tools to fend off over-curious stray dogs (now writing, it seems quite clear how we all ended up with long-term digestive issues).
Another definitive mark is the respect I have developed for mountains. They sit firm, stern and unrelenting: climb past, if you can. The pain of it I didn’t like so much, and I didn’t much enjoy tasting blood, either. But what I do appreciate was the invitation to challenge myself, to learn about just how much I could endure — and to learn that it was more than I thought possible. When driving uphill in a car, I now marvel at how mute and painless the ascent feels, how understated the summit looks when you haven’t had to claw your way to the top. So when I drive past a mountain, or spy a summit out of the plane window, I see not rocks nor snow, but an invitation for a challenge.
After battling the rolling coastal terrain of Turkey's western regions, the Swiss Alps were simply a formality
So, after all the time I spent trying to think up a justification for the significance I’ve attached to the trip, and why it was such a bloody great idea — the only thing I came up with, pathetically, is why not? If in the end we are to die unspectacular, unremembered deaths, why not do something a little differently? It’s good to have a little variety in your tales. It gets to four o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve got another hour or two to pump out before work’s end, and you’re feeling a little deflated, the tank a little low. Your mind drifts off and you realise that by this time of the day, just about a year ago, you were breaching the summit of the alps, having traversed a path first laid by Napoleon in a mood for conquest. Your body on the rougher side of exhaustion, been gasping for breath so hard you’re swallowing cacti. Your shirt soaked by sweat into a different hue of dirty orange, your arse peppered with blisters from a hard leather seat. But then pedal by pedal the gradients tick away into a sweet plateau, and against your better judgement you’ve reached the top. The elation comes, washes over you in triumphant bliss. The whole world in front of you in scenic congratulation. It helps you enjoy the little things a little more. A roof over your head and a soft bed on a rainy day, no leaking tent to battle, ready access to a hot shower and a warm cup of tea.
What remains, ultimately, is something that no one can take away from us. A mark of how far we can stretch, if we wanted. That we felt every inch of road between Istanbul (Bali) and London. That we can sleep just as easy in a warm bed or on some anonymous patch of grass you have called your home for the night. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So, a toast to adventure, a long drink for a long ride. A good night to you all, and may be wheels spin once again.
THE END.
