Conclusion

A rational explanation of the term “finding yourself”

When people go away from their normal lives for extended periods of time they often return home with a slightly different outlook on life. This could be labelled with the mushy term: “finding yourself”. Some may return and speak of the incredible kindness of complete strangers from far-away lands, the irrelevancy of material possessions and of a general desire for a simpler way of life perhaps similar to that of people they’ve met on their travels. However these are merely observations and I believe that they actually have very little to do with “finding yourself”…

Consider a typical 21st century day and its routine: you wake up, often to an alarm, and proceed to eat, shower, get dressed and do any small chores you may need to do. Then you commute to work. At work you focus on the task at hand for eight to ten hours with a few breaks in between. Finally you head home usually to relax and unwind in the evening before going to bed.

For the majority of the day your mind is either occupied by work or with the chore immediately at hand. At any point when you are not focussed on the aforementioned things, your mind is likely looking to switch off and take a break. It will do this in the form of getting lost in thought, wanting to listen to music, read articles, eat food or, more likely, wanting to casually consume some form of media.

Let’s examine ‘getting lost in thought’ more closely. These thoughts could be along the lines of ‘what to have for dinner tonight?’ or ‘what should I do on the weekend?’, but often they are about more involved matters such as family problems or doubts about work life or whatever other pressing issue may be on your mind. Eventually this hard thinking, particularly about the more complex things on your mind, becomes tiring. The allure of other entertainment becomes more appealing and you are happy to escape the taxing things on your mind by delving aimlessly into your mobile phone, or by watching TV or searching for the end of an infinitely-scrolling facebook news feed. Perhaps you just decide to go and focus on a simple task like making a cup of tea, or going to the loo. Maybe you even decide to clean the dishes or tidy up your desk. Eventually your mind feels rested and able to go back to focussing on the job at hand. However, an hour or so later and your mind needs yet another break. It wanders and revisits similar trails of thought as before. After repeating this cycle thousands of times you come to firmer conclusions about the more complex things that are going on in your life.

Now, picture yourself on a long trip riding a motorbike. Motorbikes are speedy, exciting, dangerous and deadly, but in reality you spend 95% of the time relaxed and just calmly cruising along racking up hundreds and thousands of kilometres. You have ridden enough that the technical aspects of riding a bike are subconscious. You don’t even think about the gears, the balancing or the wind noise. It’s much like driving your car around at home.

Picture a typical day of a motorcycle trip. You wake up and do a few chores: have a wash, pack up your tent, and get some breakfast in your belly. Next you have a quick look at the map and decide to ride vaguely in the direction of one place a few hundred kilometres away. You hop on your bike, put your warm and snug helmet on, fire up the dependable engine, give your companion a nod and off you go. You ride along in your own little world. Roads are very easy to follow as they are sparsely distributed, often the traffic is heavenly light too. The surrounding scenery also has a remarkable ability to switch off the muscles that keep your lips held together. Occasionally you stop to take a picture, pull over for fuel or spot a good place to stop for lunch.

There are only really three things that you can do whilst riding: 1) marvel at the surroundings, 2) listen to music, and 3) get lost in your own thoughts. At this point it is important to remember that there is no TV on a motorbike, nor is there an internet connection, nor a kettle to make a cup of tea. In short, there are very few distractions from your mind. Often the road won’t throw any concerning distractions at you for tens of kilometres either.

When you combine an environment that encourages getting lost in your own thoughts with a truly liberating lack of distractions the result is a somewhat terrifying level of introspection. You spend the first few days pleasantly pondering the things from home life that were regularly on your mind, but then they begin to vanish. Not because you no longer care, but because you have had a decent amount of time to properly think about them and reach conclusions. You also realise just how far away they are, both in time and distance.

As the days on the road become weeks and months on the road, the smaller questions get answered and gradually placed out of mind. Then the deeper thoughts about life and what not come along. The really difficult questions get pushed aside in favour of gawping at the landscape or properly listening to the lyrics and rhythms of songs. But before long you’re back getting lost in your own thoughts, only now you dive straight into deeper thought because you’ve gotten the ‘shallower’ thoughts all sussed out.

This becomes routine. You are happily tucked away in your own mind thinking about anything and everything for a good three, four, five or six hours a day. Only you repeat this for months. You soon realise that you are thinking about questions so profound that they’re probably unsurmountable. Before you never really even knew these questions existed, let alone attempted to answer them.

Assume that four hours a day is spent in this motorbike-induced mind haven. Multiply that by a conservative 80 days… and you have 320 hours of hard, uninterrupted thinking. Imagine spending eight consecutive 40-hour work weeks (i.e. 320 hours) in a beautiful new environment, utterly content merely thinking about everything and anything that crosses your mind. Only you’re now able to think to a level of detail never before possible as the hindering distractions available to you normally are no longer present. You might think you’d go crazy. Perhaps you do? Perhaps you go crazy and come out the other side? Or perhaps you become satisfactorily entertained with the wonderful workings of your human brain as it ticks away seemingly on its own accord.

Sufficient time to introspect, whilst crucially maintaining an essential air of optimism, helps clarify very important things within your head. You have taken the precious time to really work out what it is that you want, rather than falling into something in later life and accepting that it’ll do. You can move forwards with a clearer vision of what you want to achieve, big or small, with the meagre 100 years of life you have been given here on earth.

In my view, that is the definition of the term ‘finding yourself’. It’s about being able to spend such a ridiculously selfish amount of time thinking without interruption about all the questions you have. It involves climbing out of the temporary and meaningless comfort zones provided by day-to-day distractions, and attempting to answer the big questions, the real and challenging important life questions. It’s about becoming satisfied simply spending time in your own head without need of external entertainment.

For me it is the understanding that I must always strive for improvement whilst remembering to relish the strive itself. There will never be a point of complete satisfaction, nor should there be. It’s about being appreciative of what is, whilst also enjoying making continuous ethical attempts to improve ‘is’.

There’s also coming to the conclusion that I don’t like doing things badly. There is absolutely no point in doing something half-heartedly, either do it to the best of your ability or don’t do it at all. I must set my mind to work on something and stick at it until it is complete. There must be no half measures.

And then there’s also the realisation that I have a debilitating tendency to think far too much and do too little…!

 

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The Trip

In April 2015 Raph passed his motorcycle test. A week later we flew to Chile and managed to buy two beautiful Honda 150cc motorbikes. We named them Kenny and Xena and left with a rough plan to ride a small loop of South America and return to Santiago three months later to sell the bikes and catch our return flight home. 19,213.8km, 14 countries, almost five months away, four continents, two serious crashes and one 29-day transatlantic cargo ship voyage later and we made it back to the UK… only now we were somehow accompanied by our two trusty Chilean steeds.

After a couple of weeks sorting out bike paperwork and partying hard with the friendly Chileans in Santiago, we rode through the emptiness of the Atacama Desert for a few weeks, camping in an astronomer’s heaven beneath the galaxies above. Raph crashed twice and I caught hypothermia, but the red waters and countless wild flamingos of Laguna Colorada in southern Bolivia swiftly helped us forget those events. Then we traversed the incomprehensible Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, for an entire day. This was followed by a tough day traversing the lesser known Salar de Coipasa before heading back into Chile and riding with a flat front tyre for 160km until reaching Arica. Kenny and Xena took us north, day and night, up the Peruvian Pacific coastline along the living and breathing Pan-American highway to Lima, where we ate some of the tastiest food imaginable and stumbled across the mesmerizing music of Laguna Pai. After Lima we headed up and over the Andes and into the beating Amazon.

The jungle and it’s tremendous volume of life captured our hearts. I will see the jungle again. We hopped on a river boat for a week, sleeping in hammocks at night whilst spending the daylight hours meandering 500+km south in zig-zag fashion through the jungle along the murky Rio Ucayali. We then unloaded the bikes in Atalaya and received the best motorbike service in the history of mechanical services, before pootling along an enchanting road to Cusco, occasionally getting stopped in our tracks by flocks of butterflies. After a nice break in the Incan Capital, and a visit to the remarkable feat of human effort and engineering that is the Incas’ Machu Picchu, we headed on to the world’s highest lake at the border between Peru and Bolivia.

We celebrated my 22nd birthday in Puno in style, treating ourselves to an AirBnB apartment which overlooked Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest lake, at a cool 3812 metres above sea level. We stayed in La Paz for a couple of nights before heading along an eerily foggy Road of Death to spend a few days in the unexpected jungle paradise of Coroico. After being told by locals that the road ahead didn’t really exist we came back up the Road of Death for a second time, and then across the south of a bewilderingly breathtaking Bolivia for a week to the Paraguayan border.

The emptiness of the Paraguayan Chaco was perplexing (two thirds of the country consists of a single road and grassland). However the Mennonite colony of Loma Plata was even more bizarre. We, and Englishman and a Frenchman parked our Chilean-registered, Japanese-designed motorbikes built in Brazil outside a Chinese restaurant in Paraguay, ordered our food in Spanish to Chinese waiters whilst sitting amongst people of German, Dutch, Russian, Canadian and Ukrainian descent largely speaking German. Confused, we pushed on to Asunción where we stayed for a few days and watched the Chileans win the Copa America.

Next we breezed into Brasil, completely hassle-free. The majestic Iguazu Falls blew our minds for a day. Then we had a major change of plans. Time was running out to return to Santiago and the thought of having to sell Kenny and Xena was actually painful. I’d been trying to blag a free ride home to Europe aboard a cargo ship via email for a couple of weeks but understandably had no luck. By some fluke, the bank deemed me a worthy applicant for an online bank loan. A worryingly small amount of clicks later and my bank balance was looking unusually healthy. A few more emails to Grimaldi Lines, the shipping company, and the balance was back to more feeble familiar figures… only now we were booked in for a transatlantic cargo ship voyage from Uruguay to Germany via Africa in five days time!

Unfortunately we had to rush through Brasil. It rained ridiculously relentlessly, lightning illuminating the sky as we clung on to Kenny and Xena through the darkness. It wasn’t fun. Our clothes were wet for four days and three nights as we rode the 1900km to Montevideo, despite our best efforts each night to dry them. The third night we were forced to take refuge in a school at midnight as it was the only shelter we could find and we were simply too cold to continue riding. We woke up to a bus full of school kids arriving the next morning. We soon made it to the Uruguayan border. The sun was gleaming and blue skies were abundant as we rode Kenny and Xena along a pristine empty sandy beach on the Atlantic coast. We’d made it across the continent. From the Pacific to the Atlantic. What a feeling! That same night we raced into Montevideo and began looking for a place to stay, only to be accosted by a friendly stranger and end up staying at his house for two nights. On the 11th of July we rode Kenny and Xena the last few metres on South American soil in the port of Montevideo, onto Grande America’s ramp and up into the depths of her cargo holds.

We spent the next 29-days at sea. Grande America stopped at a few ports in Brasil. Rio de Janeiro was one of them, giving us just enough time to enjoy a beer on Copacabana beach. After one last stop in Brasil at Vitoria, we headed transatlantic for six days to Dakar, Senegal. We drank and sang endless karaoke with the crew, got initiated for our first crossing of the equator, ate Filipino lechon (similar to hog roast), watched an ungodly amount of TV series and films and ate like kings (Italian ship = Italian chef).

The air was warm and the tropical water calm. There were probably less than a few hundred other humans within 3000km of us, so the light pollution was zilch. The stars above were unrivalled, even more alive than they were in the Atacama Desert. With a show on in the sky above things couldn’t get much better, that is until we looked to the water surface below where fluorescent plankton pulsated exuberantly in their thousands. Africa soon appeared on the horizon after not seeing another ship for days.

We wandered around Dakar, then had a heavy night out with some of the crew. Soon Grande America took an unexpected detour to deliver some cars from Dakar to Banjul, The Gambia. A couple of days passed in The Gambia waiting for a suitably timed tide sufficient for the ship’s draught. Before long we were full steam ahead up the Moroccan coast, past the Canary Islands, past Portugal, across the Bay of Biscay and within sight of Brighton’s seafront lights. We continued direct to Hamburg in Germany to disembark. Kenny and Xena were unbelievably permitted into the EU without any hassle despite arranging no paperwork whatsoever.

Not long after arriving in Hamburg, we had hit the road and were back in Amsterdam where we’d started the trip four months before. Only this time we had two motorbikes with us. We met up with two friends, Kris and Max, before the four of us headed two-up on each bike to the Mediterranean coast of France to relax for a couple of weeks. After basking in the sun on the French Riviera for a while we headed back to the UK. Customs at Dover didn’t say anything and just like that we were back to home life. This trip completely satisfied my desire for a true adventure, something that I’d dreamt of repeatedly since a young age. Many thanks go to Raph for generally just being a stupendously sound human being, but also for having the balls to go on a full-fledge motorbike adventure having only ridden a bike for the first time a few weeks before the trip began.

What would I do differently for my next bike adventure? First and foremost I wouldn’t blog like this again! It’s far, far, far more time-consuming than I first realised. I would try and write a few posts in-situ about more specific events or more general summaries, but I certainly wouldn’t embark on the daunting task of documenting an entire trip. I also would take a different attitude to filming the trip, having now learnt an awful lot about what goes into making a decent video edit. The idea to produce a video edit began to develop and expand as the trip progressed, rather than being the intention beforehand. Next time I wouldn’t obsessively timelapse countless kilometres of riding as there is simply no point; no one, not even I will ever really watch that footage again. Although it did often yield some fantastic action shots, and captured a harrowing shot of a serious accident, I would certainly look to capture footage with a quality over quantity approach, rather than the other way around. I am quite looking forwards to the next trip containing zero writing and zero editing, but if I went into another trip with the intention of producing an edit at the end of it then that is of course an entirely different story. All this said, I certainly do not regret creating the film or this blog. It may have taken countless hours, but in the grand scheme of things those hours are minimal. I will be able to fondly look back at this trip until the day I die. If there’s ever an overland adventure you wish you documented properly, surely it’s got to be the first big one?

I would learn to tune carburettors for altitude, and learn to always keep a spare inner tube handy so that you don’t have to ride on flat tyres for hours. I would also take tyre levers because screwdrivers and spanners are utterly inadequate when it comes to removing a tyre from a rim. I would also refrain from buying large furniture items midway through the trip and then having to ride with them home. I would aim to take less things, especially books. I optimistically took four books… and read six pages in five months. Sleeping mats are essential, and sleeping bags rated for +13 degrees celsius really don’t cut it when camping at 4800m. I would actively try and learn the language at the beginning or before the trip rather than just picking it up in dribs and drabs on the way. As always, there is the desire for more time. We had a very vague plan which resulted in us being able to be flexible and spontaneous. The best times are had when the route is completely made up, and if something looks or sounds good you can simply ride there and check it out.

The trip has taught me many things, but it’s easy to forget what you have learnt which is partly the reason for writing this blog. I have a greater appreciation for the little things: being able to hold and drink a comforting cup of warm tea whenever I want, being able to use a glass to drink water from, being able to walk around in socks or barefeet at home without having to keep half an eye on the floor ahead. From the remarkable variety of fruit that is literally just the conversion of soil into edible sweetness, to the vital simplicity of the humble grain of rice which millions of people depend upon. A computer mouse is exponentially better than a laptop trackpad, the internet is beautiful but addictive, having a towel specifically dedicated to drying your hands is ridiculously excessive but beats using your trousers, cars are considerably more comfortable in the rain and cold than a motorbike, toll-roads are terrible and while motorways are bad for fun, they are unbeatable for speed when trying to get from A to B. It’s taught me that I’d forgotten to appreciate the bigger things: running water, a roof, the trancelike effect of fire, to the great outdoors itself, to the vista provided by each sunset regardless of location and, of course, to the stars all around us that we must strive to further comprehend.

In my opinion overland travel is the ultimate way to experience what the world has to offer, moreso if you are in control of both your time frame, and the vehicle in which you are travelling. You can stop and go anywhere at anytime. It gives an unrivalled freedom to explore.

This kind of travel affords you extra time to notice the small details and therefore gain a more in-depth understanding of the countries that you are passing through. You see the gradual changes in people’s appearances as you rack up the kilometres, both in their faces and their attire. You taste how the food changes as the surrounding landscapes from which it is grown morph into the next landscape. You notice subtle changes in people’s behaviour from country to country but realise that, on a global scale, everyone is the same. It’s these nuances that make overland travel the most engaging way to travel.

But the thing that does it for me is being able to look at a map a draw a line from one point to another and know that you have seen every single bit of the way first hand. Your eyes have seen our world change from plains to jungle to desert to salt to forests to mountains to sea. Your actions are solely what have made it all possible. In this I find great satisfaction, and cannot wait to see what the next journey brings.

Thank-you for reading,

Joel