Sunday 8 September 2013

Five weeks with friends: From Bath to Ljubljana by bicycle

A couple of photos of England
 on the three day trip to Dover

This summer I spent five weeks cycling East from my home in Bath, accompanied most of the way by my two friends Zack and Owen. Originally I had intended to cycle to Athens but the trip developed the way any should with its own daily dimensions and final destination. I have been on bicycle trips before of longer duration and in more exotic climes, but in some respects this one was to prove the most challenging yet.


Zack and I the day we set off
 together when we met up in Orleans
The three of us united, setting off from Chamberry into the Alps
Owen is my sister’s long term boyfriend and we have spent lots of time together in familial situations but not so much by ourselves. He was taking three weeks of precious leave to be on this trip for the majority of its duration with us. This, to Zack’s amusement and my sister’s contempt left him with very little holiday for the rest of year and it was a big commitment of time for him. It was also the first time he had done something like this and I really wanted it to be a success for him. Zack is a experienced cycle tourist, 6 months into a 12 month+ world tour. He passed through my house in Bath in the early summer and his arrival time on the European continent coincided with my summer holidays and so it was agreed we would meet up. Being less pressed for time and carrying more weight it was understandable that his regimen was more leisurely and his direction more ponderous. In order that his efforts were sustainable on the bike Zack also had a desire it would be fair to say, to keep things in better check: washing regularly, bike maintenance and top notch nutrition. So by way of further contrast:  I was keen to get across the continent in good time to see a fair chunk of Eastern Europe before my return and was keen on big mile days and some roughing it along the way to add the greatest contrast to my suit and tie job that I would be soon returning to.

Travelling and living by bicycle has its own unique set of idiosyncrasies that the foot traveller does not have to contend with. 27 nights of the 31 I was away I slinked away at nightfall into woods, into fallow fields, under bridges and struck camp. Choosing these spots when you are travelling together, to illustrate a broader point about the decisions made throughout the whole day, has its contentions. Do you push on when becoming tired to find a spot where you can bathe as well as camp together? How much do you attempt to conceal yourself at the expense of having to sleep on uneven ground or rip your tent on brambles and experience difficulty in stumbling around in the dark? Who cooks? How often? And so on and so on. Of course all the answers lie in compromise. This is not the same as concession nor it is it the same as bargaining. It is distinct from them both and if it is to be done successfully it needs to be done with good will at every potential pitfall. It soon became apparent therefore that developing and maintaining the friendships that I had with Zack and Owen at the start of the trip were the most essential elements in ensuring its success. I didn’t always succeed in this as selfishness and ego didn’t always give way to the common good but learning to make the necessary concessions to live in harmony with others is most probably a lifelong project to which I am glad I committed my summer to understanding, in some small part, in a better way.

The lessons that I learnt about successful travel with others, by way of succinctness, I have compiled below.

1)      There is more than one way to skin a cat.
Pedalling by yourself into the wind, spinning your wheels in a monotonous rhythmic motion that is all your own does take you down some interesting and uninterrupted channels of thought. I have spent a lot of time in the past pursuing such ends and writing about such thoughts. With hindsight these are often however far less fruitful and insightful than you first imagine, as, once outside the wind tunnel of your own musings, no longer deaf to the contributions of others, the smooth cadence of reasoning that you had moved along it is shown to be clunky. You can be as cool and collected as the Dali Lama whilst left to your own devices, but once challenged by the divergent thoughts and feelings of others, you are all adrift.

Being constantly challenged or at least learning to concede or appease in relation to your own thoughts and feelings is difficult and is a skill that has to be constantly practised. Open debate about the best course of action gives three minds to solving a problem. Inevitably some of the ideas raised and the actions followed will not be the preferred of every individual, but being receptive and, at times conceding, are more valuable skills to bring home afterwards than the stoicism and single mindedness practised in following your own convictions from dawn to dusk.

2)      Sharing is caring.
Keeping everyone topped up from the bread
 Owen had stashed on his bike: 'The rolling buffet'
We are unusual as I understand it in England to sit down to a meal, especially with family, place the food to be shared on the table and then divide it up into discreet little islands of ownership to be consumed at the four corners of the table. I first learnt of our strangeness in the UK when in Patagonia with Kim, a Korean friend, in 2011. We ate rice and vegetables from the same bowl, every night for 25 days and never went to bed hungry or a with a harsh word spoken between us. In Orleans south of Paris on day seven of this  trip when I had just met up with Zack and a friend of a friend of his from Albuquerque, we ate a 2foot diameter plate of homecooked Senegalese chicken and Rice, all from the same platter with 5 people around the dish. We sat that night closer, and listened more attentively and laughed harder.

A week later we had reached the top of the highest pass of the trip and Owen and Zack and I were sitting to share some food at 2,400 metres beneath Mont Fukhur. There were several mouthfuls of cous cous to share each and a tube of Mayonnaise left from our joint rations. We passed the bowl along the line until it was finished, each of us taking a sparrow’s portion each time until it was gone. This was done with good grace despite the stress that I believe we all felt from having to share such meagre rations after 4 hours of steady exertion on a steep gradient to arrive here. It is easy at times on any adventure for any element, such as nutrition, to overshadow the overriding objectives and achievements when the members are fatigued. We kept on the right side of this here, and with our bellies half full, we shortly got up, took this picture and then rode down the other side on one of the most memorable descents of the trip, toasting our success.

3)      Safety in numbers.
On a daily basis Zack and Owen made the trip a safer one. I think I was the main beneficiary of this as when we climbed I would take position in the middle of the tight pack we formed with both Owen and Zack taking position at the front and rear in their reflective gear. I was really grateful for this and I definitely agreed with Zack that it made cars treat us with more respect and pass wider and more slowly. I was especially grateful to Owen who, despite not having the low gears for the snail’s pace we set, traversed every pass with us across the breath of France, Switzerland and Austria in an excruciating out-of-the-saddle death march, as he stuck with us. Arriving at the top together safely and united certainly made for a stronger sense of team cohesion.

In the evening of the same day we crossed the Fukhur pass, we were camped in Rueras in a wonderfully tucked away spot that was surrounded on two sides by a very steep ravine from where the sounds of rushing water ricocheted, insulating us from the noise of passing traffic. I recced  the descent down to the water, reported it passable and recruited Owen to accompany me. I jumped down the first bank onto an unstable sloping ledge of loose leaves and other forest compost and despite my own uncertainty tried to reassure Owen that it was still a good idea. After a few moments of further indecision, reason saw good to recklessness as Owen patiently explained why it all looked like a terrible misadventure and coaxed me out of it and helped me tentatively up onto the track. I’m not sure I would have been so bold in the first instance if I had been by myself, but in retrospect I was certainly glad to have a friend strong willed enough to call me up on what would have undoubtedly been a very misguided course of action.

4)      An army of competencies
One of the greatest joys of cycle touring is leaving all those boggy things behind that are so tedious about everyday life such as housework and ironing and, well, anything but having a jolly lovely time really. Inevitably there are still chores to be carried out and it was interesting to see how much these could be reduced again when they are shared out.

We almost always fed ourselves in the evenings by cooking on our stoves and then washed ourselves in the rivers. We didn’t share the last of these chores but it was always nice with the cooking to be able to take an evening off and read your book ever so often.

‘Zak-nav’ took the lead very competently on the route finding aided by his top gadgets.

 Owen was chief mechanic and put me straight several times with his excellent knowledge. I, in my turn, helped out as best I could, putting my hand up for shopping duties and the like.


Steeping back sometimes and letting other people do the job that you conceitedly thought you could have done better is another learnt skill: Not caring if your rice is cooked the way you have always done it, was a tough one to let go for me! 


Me and Owen looking very pleased with ourselves
 with our perfect timing at the Insbruck beer festival
But awareness of not how it is done but an appreciation of what it is that is done, is clearly where the energy should be spent. When you reciprocate the favour, you can rest assured that your attempt at kindness will be conducted in its own bumbling and inappropriate way too.

5) You can’t play chess against yourself….
At times on the trip we would occasionally talk with people in the places we passed through but this happened far less regularly than when I have travelled by myself before.  By oneself you are more approachable and in turn are more in need of human interaction. And so you give more of yourself to the man who sells you vegetables and the woman who hangs her washing in the garden by which you have stopped to eat your lunch. At times however, as Zack keenly observes in his own blog, you can be guilty of giving too much significance to these moments of interaction; believing the commonplace to be invested with some higher meaning. In the darkness of your tent at night you can read more into these situations than was ever there and through ill-conceived and prolonged reflection believe that you are getting closer to the nub of it all, when really you are moving away, or at best standing still.
With Michael, a cool guy I met on my journey back to the UK.


Jon, a teacher from the Netherlands who I rode
 with for a day. He told me about how
 he once planned a trip to Moscow with
 a friend and rather than spending money on
 hotels or excursions, they blew almost all
 of the funds for the trip
before they even got there on language
 lessons and 'invested
 all the money in knowledge.'
Fleeting experiences of the warmth of strangers are gratifying. They in no way however constitute a composite experience of friendship and kindness that is made up of spending lots of time with a few select people, through both the highs and lows this entails. Indeed it would be tiring if every conversation with your close companions was engineered to explicitly develop your friendship or dig away at the essential nature of things. Oftentimes, the seemingly irrelevant things shared whilst washing pots together are as important as the more lofty ones. Indeed this bedrock of shared experience and confidences is the building blocks by which any greater understanding of yourself and your relationship with others comes from.

We played games of chess endlessly together on this trip, often keenly observed by the third party, as we weathered thunderstorms at night time or lethargy at lunchtime. Often they were conducted through prolonged periods of silence and no grand themes beyond the intricacies of the game infront of us were played out. But when it was finally time to pack the pieces away and I returned to my own tent and closed my eyes to go to sleep, I didn’t often have any pending thoughts from the day still to be hammered out. They had already been filed away quite naturally during those long silences in the company of friends. 
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After five weeks on the road from my house in Bath I popped out in Ljubljana, Slovenia roughly 1,700 miles later. Zack and I had traversed France, met up with Owen and then crossed the French Alps, run the length of Switzerland, diverted up through Lichtenstein
Welcome to the Magical Kingdom of Lichtenstein!
 and then crossed into Austria and via Insbruck we had turned south again to northern Italy before leaving Owen
 and concluding by arriving at the gates of Eastern Europe in Slovenia. In some ways I felt that the trip was just getting warmed up for me here as the food, the drinking culture, the cost of living, the architecture and way of life all seemed so startling different from the broadly homgonous and proper countries of western Europe that we had just travelled through. There is a lot left to explore in Europe and if I can help it I won’t be rushing off so quickly on my next trip to go any further afield than where I left of this time.
Me and Zack in Ljubljana