A New Look For Me — And My Blog

In case you’re won­der­ing why I seem to have dis­ap­peared for the last few weeks, I am finally able to bring you news of my predicament.

For what seems like an etern­ity I have been locked in a small, darkened cell in Yerevan, sen­tenced to the dis­mal task of pro­du­cing a com­pletely new web­site for Ride Earth. Only a few hours ago I com­pleted this mono­lithic feat of endur­ance, and the fruits of my anguished suf­fer­ings can now be enjoyed by you, the reader.

As you will remem­ber, Andy and I took our sep­ar­ate roads back in Janu­ary. From that decision came a pair of remark­ably sim­ilar stor­ies of love in a for­got­ten, far-flung city, and many months of rest from trav­el­ling as a res­ult. Now, the next stage of my jour­ney will yet again coin­cide closely with that of Andy. With Geor­gia and Tbil­isi thrust into the pub­lic eye by the recent escal­a­tion of the con­flict between Geor­gia, its break­away ter­rit­or­ies of South Osse­tia and Abkhazia, and their sup­porter from the north, Rus­sia, I’d agree that it’s an oppor­tune time for him to leave for Azerbaijan, where he will only have to deal with the occa­sional explod­ing mosque. Head over to his blog to see what he’s up to right now.

For me, I’m no longer going to pos­tu­late any long-term plans. I know I keep try­ing to hypo­thes­ise as to where I’m going to be and when, but to be hon­est this has many times proved fruit­less — how did a 2– or 3-day visit to Yerevan back in Janu­ary turn into a stay of over 8 months?!

I’m frankly quite happy to keep you on your toes for now, so I’m going to say only this. One: I’ll be leav­ing Yerevan with Tenny within the next couple of days to cycle off into the Armenian coun­tryside; two: I have a visa for Iran, and the bor­der is about 400km south; and three: it’s nearly Septem­ber, and we’re not plan­ning another winter at –30°!

Two gurn­ing fools spoiled this nice photo of someone’s liv­ing room

It’s going to be a shock to the sys­tem to be on the road again, and not just for me. Tenny is now exactly where I was nearly 15 months ago — over­whelm­ingly nervous in the face of the great unknown, but know­ing that the most import­ant things she should do is to leave, and then see what hap­pens. I remind her that the act of leav­ing is the most dif­fi­cult part of the jour­ney — a sen­ti­ment I heard ump­teen times myself before I left. “Every great jour­ney began with a single step.”

It was reas­sur­ing, but I didn’t quite believe it. Now I know that it was true, but I can under­stand from my own exper­i­ence why Tenny is still so scared, no mat­ter how many times I give her these words of encouragement.

I’m aware, although I don’t like to admit it, that cycle tour­ing is prob­ably not for every­one. But I’ve never met a cycle tourer who regret­ted choos­ing this way of life. I know that Tenny loves cyc­ling, but also I know that leav­ing home com­forts behind is going to be very tough. Some­times she’s incred­ibly enthu­si­astic, and at other times she’s ter­ri­fied to the point of tears. As a res­ult of her per­sonal back­ground and nation­al­ity, the moun­tain she is facing is many orders of mag­nitude greater than the one I stood at the foot of. I think she’s incred­ibly brave.

And I try to tell her that we’re just going to give it a go — we’re going to cycle to Lake Sevan and camp on the banks, the next day pot­ter a bit fur­ther into the moun­tains and camp again, and see how it all works out — that we should think about the now, not about the next week, month or year — but I can’t stop myself dream­ing of far-off lands, epic moun­tain ranges, trans-ocean voy­ages, vast red deserts, the silence, the noise, the smells, the pain, the joy, the pro­cess, and how all this could bear on our rela­tion­ship and future together. It’s a swirl­ing mix of emo­tion, worry, ambi­tion and optim­ism, and it’s highly volatile.

But I digress — I should take my own advice and think about the now!

It was about time, really

My mother will no doubt be pleased to hear that I had my flow­ing locks chopped off the other day, 14 months after my first pre-departure shav­ing, and I am now sport­ing a rather dash­ing crop for my second big departure.

The film­ing con­tin­ues — I have so much enthu­si­asm for this sub-project, and a small, impa­tient part of me wants to see the res­ults right now! We are hop­ing that a sixth and final epis­ode of the ori­ginal pod­cast series will soon be released in order to wind up the story so far.

On a related note, I hear that the BBC recently broad­cast a short series on Marc Beaumont’s world record attempt to “cycle round the world” (I use inver­ted com­mas to sig­nify my cyn­icism at the Guin­ness defin­i­tion), and his exper­i­ences on the major high­ways of a few uncon­nec­ted parts of the planet. Well done to him for break­ing the record, but it’s impossible to over­state just how far removed this must have been from my exper­i­ence of bicycle travel. Tak­ing my time over this idea has led to the most pre­cious exper­i­ences and meet­ings of my life.

Finally, it would be great to hear what you think about the new web­site. Split­ting the blogs in this way seemed to be the logical thing to do, and we think the new design will make it much easier and more enjoy­able to find some­thing inter­est­ing to read. If you’ve got a little spare time, why not start read­ing my journal, which is a kind of self-contained continually-evolving book that I’ve been work­ing on? At over 30,000 words already, it’ll hope­fully keep you busy for a while!

I’m count­ing the hours now — once we’ve left, I’m cau­tiously hope­ful that everything will fall into place. Wish us luck.

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

• Leav­ing Yerevan. And Then Returning