Tag: cycle touring

Trelograms #21 — Why Is Doing the Dishes so Troublesome?

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Soon after moving to Ukraine, i had the opportunity to meet and eat lunch with Folknery, a couple of Ukrainian musicians cycle touring around the world with their baby, who was born on the road — “but isn’t it troublesome?” — “it’s actually much easier than being at home with one,” replied Yaryna.

I can totally believe that, as i’ve been myself telling everybody who asks that cycle touring feels less troublesome across the board — it’s much easier dealing with the dishes after a meal, or finding a place to sleep, so why wouldn’t that be the case with a baby as well?

At this point many of you will dismiss my point by saying that the cycle touring process comes with its own burdensome routine, which is so true! But if that’s where you are, then you’ve completely missed my point — we all have our own dishes to wash, there’s no doubt about it — my point is simply that our choice of metaphorical dishes is much broader than we might be first led to believe.

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Featured photo: typical pile of dishes to wash after a single meal at home versus my entire minimalist hitchhiking kitchen

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking, hiking; worldwide

Trelograms #19 — Moments, Moments . . .

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This photo was taken somewhere in the German countryside between Berlin and Dresden, in the first few days of my Copenhagen–Istanbul tour back in Fall ’16. It was the first time i remember noticing a pumpkin field.

Not too far to the right of the frame, a woman crouched in between some bushes, presumably to attend to immediate necessities — i only noticed her after my uncontrollable laughter at the pumpkin field had already settled — that was what had prompted me to stop!

Why am i even remembering the woman? This is the first time i remember remembering this peripheral scene to my moment with the pumpkin field.

I pictured a time lapse of the pumpkins coming randomly about, like popcorn — someone ought to have worked that out — damned be YouTube!

So has life on the road been so far to an increasingly large extent — a succession of present moments, not always permeated with amusement, without any apparent cosmic or metaphysical significance, and yet complete — i could have spent eternity right then — in my next cycle journey, it was red vans and traffic signs that stood out.

No matter how hard i try, i can’t seem to be able to put my finger on what about life not on the road makes such experiences so rare though — i’m often pathologically and stably dissatisfied with the most trivial banalities of my routine in Lviv — “how might we possibly arrange for your brother to recover his backpack from us today, given that we will be in the same relatively small and functional city, equipped with effective means of communication, and sharing a common language!?”

If the road/not-the-road dichotomy is an illusion, i have repeatedly failed to notice it.

How about you? Have you found peace? How?

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Featured photo: a “hilarious” pumpkin field in German countryside ( Fall ’16 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring

Trelograms #17 — A Time + Money Conservation Law?

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Another question i often get is, “how do you manage to travel for so long with so little money?”

With plenty of time!

Thinking about this often brings me back to one of my training tours a couple of years ago between Copenhagen and Oslo, while i was still living and working in the former. The experiment in that short tour was to do it without direct help from hospitality networks or paid accommodation.

The most natural path between Copenhagen and Oslo is to ride north along the Swedish West Coast. Having never done anything quite like that before, i figured that would be the perfect stage for such an experiment — Sweden has one of the world’s most generous right of access culture and laws — you’re essentially allowed to camp for one night just about anywhere in the country, as long as it’s not a nature preserve, you’re far enough from developed land and leave no trace — this is literally referred to as “the every [man]’s right” — in Swedish, allemansrätten.

I had not yet discovered the amenity of a surgical water bottle bath (use your imagination), and i wanted my campsites to be near the water, so i could wash like we all should — with a skinny dip! It would often take me up to three hours from the moment i decided to stop riding for the day until i found myself sitting down to cook dinner at my campsite — this brought me to seriously consider whether i’d ever want to be on a cycle tour in those terms for longer than just a week or two.

Upon coming back home to Copenhagen, i realized that i’d been, in a very tangible way, doing just that — working for about three hours a day to “find a comfortable place to sleep at night.” Indeed, rent for a bedroom (sharing a kitchen with five other tenants) cost me roughly one third of my salary as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Copenhagen — not to mention how insanely lucky i was to even find such a deal in that city, as those familiar with the surreal housing market in Copenhagen will certainly agree.

It got me thinking — and i still haven’t quite figured it out . . .

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Featured photo: “dinner table” view from a campsite in my second Copenhagen–Oslo tour ( Summer ’16 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring; Denmark, Norway, Sweden

Trelograms #16 — Aren’t You Afraid?

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That’s one of the questions i hear the most — typically about whether i’m not afraid of people, not traffic.

I’m terrified!

— mostly of traffic, but also of people — how could i not be?

I’ve been taught throughout most of my life to be suspicious of strangers, and i always feel apprehensive when entering a new country while cycle touring, or another car while hitchhiking — gosh, i’m often apprehensive about meeting my Couchsurfing host/guest for the first time!

Whether or not i’ll finally manage to update this misleading intuition, i’m not sure — for now, i’ll just share some of the questions my overwhelmingly positive experience on the road so far has raised.

  • What is your own attitude? How do you behave, as a stranger to someone else? Is your immediate impulse to assess how you could benefit from the situation to their detriment, or to consider what you can offer in answer to their request and in support of their mission?
  • I find it hard to believe it is former — why is that? — are you that much better than the average person out there?
  • I also don’t think so — aren’t we simply more likely than not to get the same indifference at worse or kindness at best from a stranger that we would show them were the roles reversed?

Indeed, there are plenty of stories of long-term, overland travelers being harmed in all sorts of ways — robbed, raped, beaten up, abducted, murdered, you name it — we’re not immune to the ills of the world those traveling in more conventional ways (or not traveling at all) also report, possibly at higher rates in some cases — a quick web search will yield several studies and reports over the past few decades suggesting that the majority of victims of violent crime actually knew their perpetrator.

While i will leave the research and statistical analysis up to the interested reader, here’s one thing most of us can do right now to make hitchhiking and cycle touring objectively safer: drive more carefully 😉

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Featured photo: hitchhiking with my wife in Ukraine after dark and under moderate snowfall ( January ’18 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking; worldwide, Ukraine

Trelograms #15 — Remember, You’re Going to Die

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“To be a truly happy person, one must contemplate death five times a day.”

Bhutanese folklore

Although i wasn’t aware of this practice in any of my previous cycle tours, there are at least two things i can confidently say about them:

  1. My cycle tours have been the backdrop for the most peaceful and mentally settled periods of my life;
  2. No other experience has exposed me so consistently and so vividly to the fragility and inevitable finitude of life.

We’ve all seen roadkill, and i’m sure at least some of you will agree that their various shapes, sizes and states of putrefaction are much better appreciated from a bicycle than from a car — dogs, deer, squirrels, badgers, mice, birds, toads, snakes, snails, or whatever that used to be during its brief, confused life come by the daily dozens on a cycle tour — their individual lives rendered relatively insignificant by the context underlying their impending but still unexpected death

That’s my own fate!

I‘m very glad i’m on a cycle tour.

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Featured photo: a freshly killed dog just outside Drobeta-Turnu Severin (Romania, April ’17) 

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring; worldwide, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine