Happy Birthday Ride Earth

I really should write some­thing. It’s been weeks. Yes­ter­day was a com­plete non-event. I spoke to Andy on the ‘phone and we wished each other a happy one year Ride Earth anniversary, whatever that means. That’s right – at 12:30pm one year ago on the 17th of June 2007, I was rid­ing away from my home and into the unpre­dict­able world, eager to sample all it could offer!

This morn­ing, I woke up at about 10 a.m. in the flat that I now call ‘home’. I lazed about for a few minutes before mus­ter­ing the energy to stand up and begin another routine day. Right now, I’m sit­ting in front of the com­puter in my box­ers, switch­ing between writ­ing this blog entry and pro­gram­ming a new web­site for a prop­erty com­pany. They’re going to pay an unima­gin­ably large amount of money (in bicycle-tramp-travelling terms at least, not much more than a month’s salary for most Brits), and in exchange I have resigned myself to a few weeks of for­get­table slog­ging, day-in-day-out, in front of the screen. In my boxers.

The gas bottle that sup­plies my stove seems to have decided it doesn’t want to play ball any more, so I’m eat­ing taste­less corn­flakes (you know, the ones you find in cheap hotels on the break­fast buf­fet) three times a day. Oh well – at least the water sup­ply seems to be a bit less tem­pera­mental than it was a few weeks back. The neigh­bours are frantic­ally drilling, cut­ting, sand­ing and saw­ing away next door, as they have been since I moved in nearly 3 months ago. Yes­ter­day they painted the cor­ridor walls in a pleas­ant, sum­mery shade of yellow.

Oh my, how excit­ing this round-the-world bicycle jour­ney has become!

Think­ing back, it’s not sur­pris­ing that the former six months of the last year’s jour­ney seems infin­itely longer than the lat­ter. Every day brought new adven­ture, new people, new places, new prob­lems, new solu­tions. I can run through the entire trip in my mind, remem­ber­ing even the tiny insig­ni­fic­ant details – drink­ing cof­fee with a French road worker… jump­ing off an old diving-board in the Danube whilst pulling a vari­ety of com­edy poses… swat­ting a mos­quito on my left shoulder at our camp­ing spot just east of Brat­is­lava while try­ing to do a video diary… rid­ing under a bridge in the sub­urbs of Bud­apest late at night whilst ped­alling with one leg… noti­cing the sud­den abund­ance of trees as we entered Geor­gia from Tur­key… and count­less more memor­ies that still stand clear as glass in my mind.

In com­par­ison, since I have been liv­ing here, I can’t remem­ber more than a few not­able land­mark events. Of course! If you go to sleep and wake up in the same place every day, how much vari­ety could you pos­sibly invent in those short few wak­ing hours, even if you really tried? I don’t want to grow old and not be able to remem­ber what I did with my life, do you? Six months on a bicycle gen­er­ated far more dis­tinct memor­ies than at least the pre­vi­ous five years put together. I’m not try­ing to play down my uni­ver­sity days, nor the things I did achieve in the two years there­after, but the travel has offered so, so much.

Now I’ve had a taste of it, I’m greedy for more. Who wouldn’t be? It’s not just the memor­ies, either – it’s the les­sons learnt through exper­i­ence, the meet­ing of a vast cross-section of human­ity and nature, the per­sonal chal­lenges passed and failed, the ever-broadening view of the world and what defines us as spe­cies and our inter­ac­tion with the rest of life on earth.

But what good is all of this if I pass out of life and take it all with me? How self-indulgent that would be. I would have missed the most import­ant les­son of all, which is the insig­ni­fic­ance of my own internal desires and ideas when com­pared to my par­ti­cip­a­tion in the unima­gin­ably vast and com­plex world I live in. Many people expend their life’s ener­gies con­fined to a tiny sphere within a massive sys­tem that they don’t under­stand. Some­times, these ener­gies are con­sid­er­able. In today’s world, our actions can and do affect the rest of the world. This is the nature of global com­mu­nic­a­tions, eco­nom­ies, trade, trans­port, defor­est­a­tion and war­fare. But if we don’t under­stand the rest of the world, how can we judge whether our actions are bene­fi­cial or detrimental?

This is turn­ing into a real rant, but I might as well con­tinue. It’s my blog – dis­agree if you want to, just be good enough to make it pub­lic in the com­ments box below!

Another prob­lem is that many of us think we do know what the world is like! Why? Because we’re stuffed full of tele­vi­sion, news, web­sites, school geo­graphy les­sons, and dis­cus­sions with other people who watched dif­fer­ent TV shows and read dif­fer­ent books and magazines. So of course we’re qual­i­fied to make sweep­ing gen­er­al­iz­a­tions on people and places we’ve never met or seen, because we’re fed these facts as if they can single-handedly rep­res­ent the world, and as a race we’re eas­ily con­vinced, because why would any­one in our social group lie to us or tell us half-truths?

But really, I can’t ima­gine think­ing I know any­thing about the world I live in, unless I’ve exper­i­enced it for myself. I know this because since day one my concept of the world has been sys­tem­at­ic­ally des­troyed by every new day’s les­sons. I’m the product of a soci­ety con­sist­ing of mil­lions of oth­ers just like me, so it would be fair to argue that the soci­ety con­sists of a great many people with sim­il­arly warped views of the world and what is import­ant within it. Not too long ago, I used to con­sider myself know­ledge­able and worldly. How arrog­ant and short-sighted that was.

That’s why it’s deadly import­ant that I con­tinue. I have a moral oblig­a­tion to bet­ter under­stand how my life fits in with the other 7 bil­lion lives out there, so I can make a more edu­cated guess as to whether the way I’m liv­ing is appro­pri­ate, help­ful, mis­guided, self-indulgent, respons­ible, sus­tain­able – in short, whether or not it’s right. Once I think I’m in a pos­i­tion to decide how I, as one of mil­lions, should best con­duct my life, and if I believe it and can jus­tify my belief, I should make sure that I don’t let that go to waste by keep­ing it all for myself. I should show other people the hows and whys, not least my own future fam­ily, but any­one who wants to lend an ear. Then, maybe, there will be a chain reac­tion in which my influ­ence on other people causes them to change the way they oper­ate in the world, and maybe oth­ers will see that and also start to change. And maybe that will shift things ever so slightly in a pos­it­ive direction.

If that happened, it wouldn’t make me in any way spe­cial; it would just rep­res­ent the part I play in human soci­ety, albeit a con­scious and determ­ined one. This knock-on effect is a fun­da­mental part of our social life. What defines a soci­ety, any­way? A group of people with some­thing in com­mon might per­haps be a bottom-line defin­i­tion. Why do soci­et­ies – groups of people with some­thing in com­mon – come to exist? Soci­et­ies where people speak the same lan­guage, use the same kind of greet­ing, eat the same type of break­fast, sit (or stand) on the same kind of toi­let? Maybe because an idea that seemed to make sense was copied, and gradu­ally became the irre­fut­able norm…?

So can we say the same thing about the Atlantic slave trade, the gen­o­cides of Nat­ive Amer­ic­ans, Abori­ginal Aus­trali­ans, and more recently Armeni­ans and Jews? Well, it seemed to make sense at the time, some­times say the des­cend­ants of the per­pet­rat­ors. Yes, at the time, it was nor­mal for the Span­ish to slaughter count­less thou­sands of nat­ive South Amer­ic­ans, because God told them to cleanse the land of the hea­thens. Nobody gave it a second thought. It was nor­mal­ity, even some­thing to be cel­eb­rated and to be proud of.

Maybe I’m draw­ing too many con­cepts under one umbrella here, but think about what we today con­sider nor­mal. Let’s start with car cul­ture. (Oh dear, I’m going to get lam­basted for this one!) Every­body owns a car, right? It’s nor­mal! Erm… well, that’s kind of the point. It’s nor­mal for every­one to own a car (many fam­il­ies own sev­eral). You can’t see the dam­age that your car does to the world. Nev­er­the­less, it’s not just your car, but the com­bined effect of all the cars on the planet that is the prob­lem, and not just the cars, but the flights we take on hol­i­day or busi­ness, and the coal-fired power sta­tions that fuel your armada of appli­ances left on standby every night because it doesn’t mat­ter whether you turn it off at the power switch or not. The Chinese alone put 16,000 – six­teen thou­sand – new cars on the road every single day. While this ‘nor­mal’ use con­tin­ues, there are also alarmingly-frequent get-togethers of people who cel­eb­rate ‘car cul­ture’ by con­ven­ing on a suit­able piece of tar­mac and loudly boast­ing to each other about engine size, fuel con­sump­tion, size of wheel, amount of burnt rub­ber gen­er­ated, etc. While it may be quaint and comic to watch, it all sud­denly seems incred­ibly short-sighted. A bit like Jeremy Clark­son, when recently inter­viewed by Jonathan Ross.

I’m not a fun­da­ment­al­ist. I don’t want to take a rocket-launcher and blow every passing auto­mobile to smithereens (though while rid­ing in heavy traffic I have, on occa­sion, felt the need). I don’t even have that much against cars per se, so let’s break the prob­lem down. They’re a motor­ized means of private trans­port. In some situ­ations, where you need to travel a rel­at­ively long dis­tance in a short time and pub­lic trans­port is unavail­able, there’s little altern­at­ive. The issue is with the prob­lems caused by the internal com­bus­tion engines of most mod­ern cars. This is what is con­trib­ut­ing to our CO2 emis­sions, because someone inven­ted it, it seemed to make sense, and the idea took off and became irre­fut­ably normal.

There is a con­sensus, amongst those determ­ined enough to give it a shot, about how this can all be brought under con­trol. It revolves around mak­ing more use of pub­lic trans­port, walk­ing or cyc­ling where pos­sible, and using cleaner cars, such as the elec­tric and hybrid cars that are start­ing to reappear, after the elec­tric car was unce­re­mo­ni­ously executed by a con­sor­tium of oil com­pan­ies a couple of dec­ades ago in order to make sure their own­ers remained dis­gust­ingly rich (see the film Who Killed The Elec­tric Car if you hadn’t heard about this). But you knew all that already.

It’s a hard concept to get hold of – the idea that you are one of mil­lions equally respons­ible. I know many people who are so emo­tion­ally attached to their cars that they will come up with any ration­al­iz­a­tion avail­able in order to con­tinue their ves­ted rela­tion­ship. I hope some of them have the cour­age to drop their pride and make a pos­it­ive change to the way they think and live – a ful­filling exper­i­ence, but dif­fi­cult to muster the ini­tial drive, and more dif­fi­cult as time goes by. I’m not going to force you to do it. As the say­ing goes, I can only show you the door. Some will fail, and oth­ers will succeed.

But it’s not your fault that it’s nor­mal for you to live in a way that means your grand-children might be born into a world where Peter­bor­ough is a sea­side town, is it? No, it’s been a slow and gradual move­ment towards life­styles of hard work and consequence-free con­sump­tion, because that’s the West­ern idea of suc­cess, like wear­ing really uncom­fort­able shoes in order to exper­i­ence the pleas­ure of tak­ing them off. Some­times we per­versely start to enjoy wear­ing the uncom­fort­able shoes, per­haps because we’ve for­got­ten what a good san­dal feels like. Even­tu­ally we’re going to dam­age our feet, visit the doc­tor, and end up feel­ing a bit stu­pid. Some of us will blame our par­ents, and some of us will blame Mar­garet Thatcher. But some of us will real­ise that san­dals are a bet­ter choice before any of that happens.

I think I’ve taken the shoes/sandals meta­phor as far as it can com­fort­ably go without it becom­ing laugh­able and de-emphasizing the point I’m mak­ing with this rant!

Since Andy and I settled in T’bilisi and Yerevan respect­ively, it appears we’ve had a small, uncon­scious influ­ence. Andy con­vinced his boss to buy a moun­tain bike yes­ter­day. Here in Yerevan, Tenny is shortly going to receive a new bicycle and come trav­el­ling with me. My friend Arthur has also bought a moun­tain bike and wants to make a bike tour around the Cau­casus. Another friend, Ani, is plan­ning to travel across Geor­gia in the sum­mer by bicycle with a friend. Manoog, who you may remem­ber from one of Andy’s earlier posts, now uses his new bike to get around the city centre (mainly to the Irish pub and back). Finally, on Monday I went along to give advice at a meet­ing in which a small group of Armeni­ans were plan­ning to cycle the 2000km to Istan­bul over the course of July and August. Manoog, who’s lived here for years, says that this is unpre­ced­en­ted in Armenia. It looks like cyc­ling is on the up!

In the long run, the film­ing pro­ject con­tin­ues des­pite a few pro­duc­tion set­backs, and in the future I hope that the film of this jour­ney really sets some things in motion and helps to snap us out of our com­pla­cency and real­ise that ordin­ary people are the ones who make a dif­fer­ence, when they do it together. The film is my focus for com­mu­nic­at­ing the les­sons learnt through bicycle travel, along with this blog, which will shortly be get­ting a massive over­haul, and maybe a book or two in the future.

Now I’ve got all that off my chest, it’s time to make an announce­ment about my future plans. No longer does it seem pos­sible to obtain a visa for China, so head­ing East from here would involve a major detour down to India or up to Rus­sia. The former does not really appeal to me at this time and presents a dead-end to over­land travel, and the lat­ter would be a tough ride and prob­ably bring a cold winter with it, and I would not want to put Tenny through that at the begin­ning of a jour­ney that is going to be dif­fi­cult enough for her any­way. Tak­ing a plane to an altern­at­ive part of the world is not an option, need­less to say.

So we’re going to head south! Down, down, down to Cape Town. OK, so the first real land­mark is going to be Egypt, as it will sig­nify the passing into my third con­tin­ent of the trip. After that, we’ll see how things pan out, but presently a trans-African ride down the East is look­ing feas­ible, chal­len­ging, excit­ing, and totally and utterly dif­fer­ent. All things being well, I will have fin­ished my work, Tenny will have her pass­port and visas, and we’ll be on the road by the end of July. If you want to have a sneak pre­view of what we might come across, watch Long Way Down, in which Ewan McGregor and Char­ley Boor­man push the bound­ar­ies of over­land travel on motor­bikes by rid­ing from John O’Groats to Cape Town.

On the other hand, our exper­i­ences might be com­pletely different…

Oh yes – today is my twenty-fifth birth­day. Hooray!

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