You may have sometimes heard it said, ‘if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have done things differently.’ But of course that’s rubbish. I’d do it all again just the same way. You’d have to if you want to know what you know now. That’s how causality works. You don’t get the knowledge […]
“Tell of the storm-tossed man, O Muse, who wandered long” — Homer, The Odyssey “One mistek, game over” — sign on the back of a bus, seen in Nepal After many mañanas, Chema and I rolled out of Ensenada heading down the Baja Peninsula in late March. Ensenada’s climate is mild, but travel just a […]
Sunlight streamed through a thin curtain that didn’t quite cover the window. The small, spare motel room smelled of disinfectant. My head was fuzzy and my legs felt weighted to the bed. For a brief, queasy moment, that familiar feeling of uncertainty. Where was I again? Outside, engines rumbled, dogs barked and voices talked loud […]
Agent and Hedgehog I never get used to knocking on strangers’ doors. It’s easier to do it during daylight hours. Once darkness falls people are naturally more guarded and suspicious of an uninvited caller. It was dark now. Midwinter dark in the middle of nowhere. I needed water and a place to camp. I’d pinned […]
Free to those who can afford it “This door stays locked whether you’re in or out”, said Katie, my Warmshowers host and administrator for the church community centre we were standing in, in Crescent City, California. “Don’t worry if you forget any of the other things, but remember that!”. If it needed to be explained […]
I raced the sunset into enormous dunes south of Florence. The last time I’d seen the Pacific up close, I was swimming in it in Hawaii. Here in Oregon there was no question of getting in the water. Enormous breakers, having rolled uninterrupted for tens of thousands of kilometres, crashed with thunderous force into the […]
The Ambassadors of Missoula I awoke to a world transformed. My tent sagged ominously, its roof and sides weighted by some unseen external force. I lined my shoes with plastic bags, pulled on winter mitts and went out to clear off three inches of heavy snow. All about, the ponderosa pines sloughed off their […]
In a way my whole trip is Steve Coackley’s fault. Or at any rate, his 2003 world bike tour has a lot to answer for. I was working long hours as a recruiter in the IT industry back then, paying off my student loans and buying a house. Steve was a friend of a friend; […]
“When a pine needle falls in the forest, the eagle sees it; the deer hears it, and the bear smells it.” – First Nations proverb I was a willful child. My mother and older sisters delight in telling a story from my infancy, in which I escaped from the backyard by dragging aside the heavy […]
“Travelling by bicycle is a life of simple things taken seriously: hunger, thirst, friendship, the weather, the stutter of the world beneath you.” — Kate Harris, Lands of Lost Borders Alaska! The very name sets one’s adventure glands tingling. Of all the wild places in the world, this one had the strongest hold on my […]
After more than a year off the bike in South Korea, for the second time in three years I slipped the shackles of a comfortable life and made myself intentionally homeless. My flights were booked from Japan to Alaska, giving me just under four weeks to see as much of Japan as possible. I would […]
– “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.” (Søren Kierkegaard, paraphrased) – “It’s hard to be someone you’re not, or not to be the someone you are.” (David G. Myers, Intuition) I arrived in South Korea with a clear plan. I had already cycled 37,000 km across Europe, Asia and Australia. Now I was on […]
I arrived in Queenstown with the last rays of evening light, exhausted from a long day of packing, transfers and goodbyes. Compared to balmy Sydney, there was a chill in the January air on New Zealand’s South Island, summer or not. I had visited Queenstown thirteen years before, but recalled little of the layout or […]
At Uluru, Tara and I had reached the Red Centre of Australia. It felt like some kind of achievement to have cycled the length of the Great Victoria Desert on dirt roads. Now we just had to get ourselves out of the baking interior before the real heat of summer kicked in. By late October, […]
It’s been a long time coming. The events described below and in the two forthcoming articles took place in late 2016 and early 2017. They are as fresh in my mind as if they happened last week. After a year teaching English in South Korea, the time has now come to tell these stories. In a few […]
From the front passenger window of a speeding jeep I look for familiar landmarks from the last month’s ride. It is a moonless Kashmir night, the Milky Way shows bright against the endless black of the Himalayan sky. The jeep’s headlights throw a sickly greenish cast on the valley walls. We could be on an […]
It is the year 2073. I am in Kathmandu, a city at the top of the world where old hippies go to die. Okay, it’s still 2016 by the Gregorian calendar, but Nepal and much of Hindu India uses the Vikram Samvat lunar calendar, so the date is accurate. A year after the devastating earthquake […]
At the Thai–Burmese border I was even less sure than usual what to expect on the other side. Burma, or Myanmar as it was renamed by the military junta that seized power in 1989, only opened up as a viable trans-Asia route three years ago. After an incredibly dark period cut off from the rest […]
“The Vietnamese plant the rice, the Cambodians watch it grown and the Lao listen to it grow.” French Colonial saying. Crossing the border from China into Laos, the contrast in culture couldn’t have been more stark. After China, where social interactions are generally loud, expressive affairs, Laos people seemed to conduct themselves with an amiable […]
Leaving Bishkek was never going to be easy after spending such an enjoyable couple of weeks there. On top of powerful inertia, Mirlan, my host in Bishkek, was adamant that I couldn’t leave on the Kyrgyz national holiday 24th September, urging me to stay for the family celebrations. But this time I had a real […]
