10 Strange Things Bicycle Travel Has Done To Me

It’s dif­fi­cult to notice the subtle changes that come over you dur­ing a jour­ney of dur­a­tion and dif­fi­culty, but cer­tain situ­ations have aler­ted me to them very strongly.

I’ve only been trav­el­ling for a couple of years, but this must be where the curve is at its steep­est. Here are a few, both good and bad, of the weird things that have sur­prised me recently:

1. I’m mor­tally afraid of mov­ing faster than a bicycle. Travel has made me res­ist­ant to many of the com­mon fears of my home soci­ety, espe­cially regard­ing the so-called ‘unknown’. But put me in a taxi or minibus head­ing out of town, and I break out in a cold sweat! It seems like such a silly idea to bomb around in a tin box on wheels at such speeds!
2. I can’t sleep in beds. I’ve spent the months since I returned from Africa sleep­ing on the floor. Any­thing softer than a thin sleep­ing pad makes my body ache in strange places.
3. I can’t take hot showers. They put me to sleep, and all of a sud­den seem extra­vag­ant. Morn­ings bring with them the need to embrace the day, not to remem­ber how nice and cosy it is to stay at home in lethargy.
4. I can’t sleep after dawn. The first light wakes me up and I’m com­pelled to jump out of bed. The clock is irrel­ev­ant. A lie-in is an impossible dream, and stay­ing out late requires great stam­ina or strong cof­fee. This is a far cry from uni­ver­sity days of get­ting up in time to watch the sun set!
5. I don’t con­tem­plate ‘what if’. The decision to do some­thing big now leads in a straight­for­ward man­ner towards doing it, rather than think­ing about what might go wrong/what other people might think/what if I fail. But some­times this means that I rush into some­thing and find myself in a pickle, hav­ing not thought it out very well.
6. Every­where is assessed for sleep­ing poten­tial. I can’t help it! If I see a flat, dark, secluded place, I auto­mat­ic­ally start weigh­ing up the like­li­hood of get­ting away with spend­ing a night there. It doesn’t mat­ter if it’s a city-centre build­ing site, a field in the middle of nowhere, or your back garden.
7. The fight/flight reac­tion has changed its bal­ance. In a con­front­a­tion, the sens­ible thing to do is to walk away. But in Ethiopia, con­front­a­tions (mostly non-violent) occurred sev­eral times a day from which I could not walk away. This affected me so strongly that it still rubs off on every day life — not good.
8. I read the news dif­fer­ently. I never really paid much atten­tion to inter­na­tional affairs before. Or national affairs, for that mat­ter. Now, events fit into a much big­ger pic­ture. And the spin and inac­cur­acy are almost as alarm­ing as the mis­con­cep­tions they gen­er­ate in nor­mal, decent people.
9. I’m more sens­it­ive. I don’t mean this in a romantic way! But I’ve found my emo­tional responses are far stronger now. I empath­ise more power­fully with the cir­cum­stances of real and fic­tional char­ac­ters. Recently I shed tears of hap­pi­ness for the first time.
10. I know I don’t fit in. When younger, I struggled to find my place amongst soci­ety. Now I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that I never will. To most people, I will always be a bit of a weirdo. So I’ve stopped caring about it.

I won­der if any of these things will ‘change back’ in the future?

Most cycle trav­el­lers I’ve met have felt their lives changed by their exper­i­ences. Many have involved an ele­ment of self-awakening, and a con­sequent struggle to accept what is revealed. It’s com­mon to hear us extolling the vir­tues of bicycle jour­neys, and less com­mon to hear of the prob­lems it has caused us.

If you’ve been on a long bicycle jour­ney, how has it affected you?

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

• Risk and Uncer­tainty in Life and Travel
• Now And Next For A Long-Term Bicycle Adventurer
• Per­cep­tion Versus Real­ity In Travel