Changing Time Zones, Changing Perspectives

• Imapilot's Profile
• About this blog
• Entry from Denver

Trip Start Oct 17, 2007 Previous
Entry Trip End Nov 17, 2007

  Denver, Colorado, United States
Monday, November 26, 2007

Final blog from this wondrous trip.
Already back for over a week.
The US, clean and familiar; Africa, so long ago, already a dream, India fading fast
The memories live on, jogged by the pictures
A bubble in time, a separate life, a great privilege to be able to take so much time to go and to see, try to understand, and then come back. And now, hardest of all, to try to keep that, somewhere, somehow, as normal life resumes.

It was quite a trip, an amazing trip, an experience worth every penny, yen, lira, euro, and rupee spent.  Every day a new place, new sights, more pictures, more memories. And just when we'd be getting a handle on how to find water, where to sleep, what to eat, and how the currency works, we'd cross a border and start learning all over again.  Most of the time this is great fun, although what oft gets overlooked in the rosy spectacles of recollection is that traveling is work, sometimes a lot of work. Moving every day, the need to get up, pack everything up, get on the bike, and set off for a full day of the unknown, can be a lot of work. Especially the unknown bit; perhaps what we miss least being off the bikes is not spending all day every day wondering where we'll be tonight. Will there will be a place to camp? With water and a toilet? Will we need a hotel? Can we even find a hotel?? And if so, will it be in budget? clean enough?  For a while, this is a fun game, part of the adventure, part of the challenge. But when the excitement wanes, and the challenge becomes the routine, then it's time to go home.

Mt Kilimanjaro

Over the last 9 months we have been baked, dried, drenched and fried. Exhausted, elated, hungry and sated.  We've crossed forest and desert, plains and mountains. We've been sand blasted, mud caked, sweat soaked, sun baked, and, on rare occasions, clean and dry. We've camped in parks, camped alone, camped with gypsies and camped with truck drivers.  Traveling so slowly, by our own power, we placed ourselves in a position of vulnerability, reducing the gap between ourselves, and the people we travel among. And in all of the trip, never once was this vulnerability exploited, quite the opposite really; we have been the recipients of amazing hospitality from Kilimanjaro to Miyazaki.  Our bikes have been broken, fixed, patched, re-broken, re-fixed, and re-patched. The riders, fortunately fared much better; in all of the trip, we were never seriously sick, never in an accident, never injured, never even crashed the heavily loaded bikes.

It was an amazing trip for adjusting perspective.  It's easy to say "we're lucky here in the US", it's another thing to understand that there are much lower levels of poverty than having to drive an old car.  It's this rolling accumulation of perspective which affected me most by the end of the trip, both from what we saw, and how we lived. Four months in Africa put a very different perspective on Europe, and India, and then India to Japan.  The Germans we met in Japan were marveling how different it all was; we were marveling how similar to home it felt.  And always in the back of the mind the question "what keeps Africa from being like this?"

Living on bikes means living simply, making do with as little as possible.

Our daily routine for 9 months

My  kitchen was 2 pots, 2 utensils, 2 cups, a knife, and a single gas burner. My pantry was a stuff-sack, and today's vegetables from market.  My clothing? 2 shirts to change out when riding, one for sleeping, 1 pair of pants, 2 pairs bike shorts, 3 pairs socks and underwear, and a few warm clothes for the colder climes.  And yet in too many parts of Africa, India and Nepal, this amount passed for luxury. So many times we realized we had more on our bikes than the possessions in the houses we passed, and that's just quantity;  don't even think of comparing cost.  Now back in the stuff-centric US consumeristic society, there are so many choices.  Choices of clothing, what to wear?  Where did I put my other pants?  Why do I need the other pants if I can't even find them?  I go shopping for breakfast cereal, stand dumbfounded in front of a wall of cereal. "Can I help you?" asks the chipper Whole Foods staffer. "I don't think so, but thanks."  Think of the months in Africa when we set out with 5 days of oatmeal, rice etc. not sure when we could buy staples again. And now, the supermarket tells me I need whole grain organic crushed flax seed puffed wheat thingies high in isoflavosomethingerothers, a box of which can be mine, all mine, in exchange for some of those green printed paper things I carry in my pocket, and, in fact, nothing so substantial as paper, but a mere flash of electrons at the cash(??) register.  Culture shock sometimes takes on the palpable sense of drowning in stuff, too much stuff.

A few friends in Malawi

And we still have two storage boxes in a warehouse, whatever the hell do we have in there anyway?

Then there is the concept of money. By the time we reached our fourth or fifth currency, money in the physical sense, was a mere abstraction.  We had pieces of paper with numbers, and the goods necessary had other numbers, match the numbers, and exchange paper for goods, but sense of value had gone missing.  Yet, for all the abstraction, the influence of money was very, very real. So many differences in what we saw in daily life came down to simply a question of money.  The poor of Japan still enjoy a strong infrastructure, cheap electricity, clean water, clean food, access to well trained doctors, well equipped hospitals, and proper medicines; all of which are unfathomable in rural Africa. A tsunami in Malaysia kills over 100,000, overwhelms the government and infrastructure; medical care must come from outside the country. A tsumani in Japan bounces off the big concrete walls they build to block the ocean view.   It's a vicious chicken-and-egg problem; if the people have money, the government has money to provide infrastructure, health care, and education for the people, leading to higher prosperity of the people, and again more money for civil expenditures. The poor countries of the world fibrillate, no whole eggs, no functional chickens. Is it too late to start climbing up the boot straps?  And too often, the startings of a real egg, a real hope, is crushed when a few dogs in the 'government' embezzle the majority of the treasury and split for another continent.  So many good people in countries we saw, with such potential, but thwarted by governments ranging from inept to impotent, from non-existent to self-destructive.  Nepal could move forward if the government could just be stable for more than 12 months.

Okavango Delta Lilipad

India is moving forward, all billion+ of them, but the government teeters on the edge of collapse - a scary thought, such a large ship without a captain.

And what is 'forward'?  Any good American will say "more like US".  And perhaps that was forward for many people, for a long time, but no longer. Africa looks to the East, to India and China for role models.  Zimbabwe is the first Chinese colony in Africa. One thing is certain at least;  everyone wants to work a little less, earn a little more, and at the heart of it, everyone, us included, just wants to be comfortable.  Somewhere along the line, the US confused "a little more" with "bigger", something I hadn't really noticed until returning to the land of jumbo coffee, bucket sized soft drinks, monster SUVs, and palatial mini-mansions.  This confusion seems to be almost purely American; the rest of the world either doesn't have the space, or doesn't share the American infatuation with filling it.

So now we're back. Sorting through 10 months of accumulated mail, thinking about where to live, jobs, once again assuming our lives as productive citizens of a first world nation. Lives that will entail more complexity than living out of 4 panniers and a backpack, rising early every morning, pedaling all day, reveling in the newness of it all, and sleeping soundly at night.  Make no mistake; we were ready to give up the nomad existence; the comforts of home are very nice! But this sort of transition is not particularly easy in the best of times, and  returning to the first world these days, particularly to the US, is pretty difficult.

Assortment of stripes

The oceans are melting, we're changing the climate, it's too late to stop it, hang on for the ride, and it won't be fun, the media tells us.  Iraq moves closer to my generation's Vietnam by the day. The foreign debt is crushing, and China owns it. But this is meaningless to a citizen. More relevant to the traveler's brain, the US $$ is fast becoming worthless currency, making the sort of trip we have been privileged to take even more financially infeasible in the future. We live in a country of freedom and democracy, a role model to so many struggling nations, yet the approval rating of the current administration is under 35%  This is not something to be proud of. On the other hand, the number of countries we visited where the citizens really liked their system of government was.... none.  Of course, it's hard to stay optimistic even in the best of times with the media dribbling all the sensational bad news they can find into our skulls day after day. It's a wonder anyone watching CNN stays sane at all. Yessir, that bicycle looks mighty good many mornings after checking the news! The people of Tanzania survive quite well without a news pipeline, and are some of the most cheerful folks we've met anywhere. Very poor, but quite happy. Someone has probably looked into that already. 

Quite enough philosophizing. In the end, we're grateful to have been able to take so much time out of the rat race, and remember how much more there is to life. I hope this irregular, personal news service has been at least entertaining for everyone else as well.

Sousous Vlei, Namibia

cheers,
MK
P.S. Gretchen also has a very
nice final blog with a bit of a different tone

Final stats:
= Total km bicycled:  14,0000  (8,400 miles)
= Weeks spent out of the US:  42
= Number of pedal revolutions: 5,000,000 (very much approximated!)
= Number of countries:  14  (well, 15 really, but Slovakia was < 24 hours)
= Pictures taken: about 10,000
= Pictures actually saved:  4850
= Pictures used in the "whole trip" slide show: 370  (man was that a difficult task)
= Number of continents:  3
= Number of countries which drive on the left side:  9
= Number of currencies 11 (or 12 if you count the Namibian $, which is tied 1:1 with the Rand)
= Number of countries where we could drink the water: 7
= Highest mountain pass: Tagalang La, India, 18,380 ft
= Lowest "pass" 44m (142 ft), Japan!  (why they labeled this a "pass" I don't know....)
= Easiest place for English:  South Africa
= Most difficult language barriers:  Japan, followed by Turkey
= Number of times we resorted to Cipro to straighten out the digestive tract: 3 for Matt, once for Gretchen
= Cheapest place to wander around:  Nepal
= Most expensive country:  Japan
= Most amazing hospitality: Namibia, and South Africa
= Cheapest hotel room:  approx $3 (Tanzania, and Nepal)
= Most smokers:  Turkey (Japan a close second)
= Most alcohol:  Romania (Japan also a close second)
= Least alcohol:  Turkey (Kashmir a very close second)
= Most homicidal drivers:  India, Tanzania a very close second
= Most amazingly polite drivers:  Japan
= Number of times we ran out of food or water:  none.  but came damn close a few times.
= Number of times a 'travel fairy' bailed us out of a situation which was getting bad fast:  3

And just for fun, for the gear junkies, this is what all we broke:
3 bike rims (rear wheels all, mine twice, Gretchen's once)
2 bottom brackets (plus a pro-active replacement of the POS replacement done in Turkey)
1 bike helmet
2 bike bells (really)
1 headset cartridge bearing (Gretchen's bike)
1 headset completely replaced (mine, replaced very old headset with a newer, cartridge bearing set)
1 rear pannier rack (wired together for the duration)
2 bike seats (the original was totally busted + the replacement seat padding wore out and also had to be replaced)
And along the lines of normal wear and tear, 2 chains & rear sprockets per bicycle, 6 inner tubes, quite a few patches, 2 sets of pedals and, amazingly enough, only 4 tires.  The Schwalbe Marathon XR are impressive, lasting 8000-10,000 km each, so we're just on the second set which still have some life left!  Amazingly, I only replaced two sets of brake pads in the entire 14,000km.  Aside from bike hardware, we wore out pretty much 2 full outfits each (2 pair bike shorts, socks, shirts and underwear), all of which were thrown out in Japan or shortly after arriving back in the US.  

On the up side, gear which deserves commendations and kudos:
Ortlieb Panniers.  Don't tour with anything else.

Night Cathedral, Buddapest

Tubus rack. The Mountain Man Rack was quite good as well.  Blackburn Aluminum racks suck.
MSR Hubba Hubba tent
MSR customer service:  I wore out the dragonfly stove, perhaps a bit quickly using lots of car gas, and they replaced the entire stove body AND the pump, sending the replacement to Germany, for FREE.
R2Magnesium handle bar grips - we bought these in Munich, and they are awesome for wrist comfort on MTB bars.

Post your own travel photos for friends and family More Pictures

Haga Sofia, Istanbul	Got Spice? Istanbul Spice Bazaar	Blue Mosque, Istanbul	Taj Mahal (duh)
Pigeons and kids never change, New Delhi	Kashmiri Gypsie family	Lamayuru Gompa, Ladakh India	Pang Gorge, Ladakh, India
Grandma and favorite grand-daughter, India	How many candle power? Kathmandu	Tecahing Tai Chi, Nepal	Holy man, Kathmandu
Japan is lovely in the fall, but wet	Morning in central Kyushu, Japan	Holy SH*T, we MADE IT!

Slideshow Print this entry Share Denver hotels

Previous Entry