HAMBURG - ALMATA '02 evaluation

about bike traveling   -   about traveling alone   -   about people   -   general eulogy

about bike traveling. I am now more convinced than ever that traveling by bike is the best way to travel in most areas of the world. You do not depend on public transportation - you go to places backpackers never go. You are in direct contact with nature and people - you smell the flowers and talk to the people that you would just race past in a car, and there is no noisy engine to disturb the experience. Perhaps most importantly, you are comparatively slow - you have a lot of time to absorb the many impressions of your journey. Being slow, you experience changes between different places in their natural, gradual way - this sometimes leads to absurd situations, e.g., being asked in Turkmenistan about the differences between Turkmenistan and Germany, all I could think of at first was "It's hotter here." In addition, people treat you differently if you are on a bike. You are a curiosity in most places of the world, the more so because in most places where your bike takes you, normal tourists have never set their feet. This means that you are invited very often and usually treated with great respect. Granted, it also means that you have to deal with idiots more often, but that is something you can get more or less get used to. As to the physical requirements, you build the necessary physical strength as you go along. The daily physical effort is not a problem once you get into the rhythm; on the contrary, I felt a sense of deprivation whenever I stopped for more than one day.

That being said, there are tough days on a bike. 5 days of rain, a month of headwind, a narrow road with heavy truck traffic, and other unpleasant conditions can reduce the fun of bike traveling significantly. On occasions like these, I sometimes took inspiration from Pooh and sang a little self-composed song to myself: "Ich wär so gern ein Huhn, dann gäb's nicht viel zu tun, ich legt' jeden Tag ein Ei, oder auch mal zwei." This rarely helped and usually didn't. Furthermore, and as I hinted above, while bike traveling is great for most areas of the world, some areas seem more appropriate for a quicker means of (individual) transportation. Regions such as Iran, Siberia, or the Kazakh steppe do not change for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, and they can thus be pretty boring on a bike. The USA, too, seem to be an unsuitable country for bike traveling, because it is 100% adapted to car traffic - and because the USA is the only country besides Georgia-Abchasia where I have heard that cyclists have been shot at. In these regions, I would go for someone like Maggie.

Obviously, I am by far not the only person raving about bike traveling. For example, I met three cyclists from Berlin on this trip who were on their way (bike) to New Zealand. They were the first to tell me about Hans Stücke, a German who has been out in the world on his bike continuously for almost 40 years now. Claude Marthaler, a Swiss that we met in China in 1996, returned from a 7.5 year bike trip (80,000 km) around the world in October 2001. In general, I heard about bike travelers having past through a year, a month, a week, or even a day ago all the time on this trip (although the only other cyclists, besides the Berliners, that I actually met were Matthias and Paul). Saba Cycles, who repaired my bike in Tehran, told me I was the 24th cycling tourist this year (!) that they helped out. And the visitor's book of some diner on the road through the Turkmen dessert had 25 entries from cyclists over the years!

about traveling alone. I did not choose to travel alone, but none of my friends was willing and able to come along, and I did not want to go with a stranger (imagine spending 24 hours a day for 4 months with someone you do not know, sometimes in stress situations). Alone, you get bored more easily, and I felt the urge to get somewhere, rather than relaxing and enjoying the moment, much more often than when I was traveling through China with my brother. Due to a lack of input from other people, my thoughts often seemed to turn in circles. The people you meet on the road may be nice, but it is almost never possible to have a deeper conversation with them (language, background, level of education ...). It also took me some time to become sufficiently confident to camp out alone. On the other hand, traveling alone leaves you with perfect flexibility as to your itinerary and timetable. You get invited much more often when you are alone. In addition, you do not get annoyed by the locals, or you do not let the annoyance dominate your attitude, as much as people traveling in groups, probably because you need to make much more of an effort to understand and interact with the locals. Most importantly, it would have been difficult to find someone with adequate language skills for this trip - Russian and German were the most important means of communication for me, and if I had traveled with someone who does not speak these languages, meeting and talking to people would have been quite complicated. Overall, I cannot say whether it would have been better or worse to do this trip with someone else - it would have been a completely different trip. What I can say is that I would not have wanted to travel any longer by myself.

about people. The first and main thing that needs to be said about people on this trip is that the hospitality and the helpfulness that I encountered were overwhelming. I got invited to eat or sleep so often by people I had never seen before and who often had very little for themselves. People were happy to repair my tires for me, give me a ride, etc., without asking anything in return. I accumulated personal debts that I will hardly ever be able to pay off. And of course it were the human encounters, and the many many nice people that I had the privilege to get to know, that made this trip so special. I can say without exaggeration that I got to know fantastic people in almost every country I went to (and where I didn't, such as in Kazakhstan, this was only because I spent too little time there).

For the sake of completeness, though, I do not want to omit the negative side of human encounters that of course also exists. To emphasize, the negative side was by no means predominant. Nevertheless, the problem is often this: As a cyclist, you spend most of your time on (small) roads between (big) cities. But Noble laureates, presidents, and world-famous artists rarely sit along roads waiting for a passing bike traveller. As a matter of fact, hardly anybody with something to do in life will hang out on the gutter of a small overland road the whole day. Consequently, the people you are most likely to find along the road (as opposed to in the towns or villages) are do-nothings, and the lowest-skilled workers such as gas station attendants or small shopkeepers. They have never had the benefit of any education, or anything else that would prepare them for the encounter with a Westerner on a bike - in particular, they have also lost their culture and its rules for dealing with strangers. The appearance of a Westerner on a bike almost causes a system overload in these people, and they start uttering sounds of "Hey!" and the like to make that strange thing stop, and if it stops, to elicit some kind of explanation of what is going on here. Not speaking any foreign language, that is quite difficult. Nothing you can blame them for, of course, but it does tend to get very annoying after a while. To repeat, I am not complaining about the traditional rural population here - on the contrary, the farmers I met were usually among the politest and friendliest people of all, and they were often rather clever. The negative selection phenomenon as I described it seems to be linked to social change - people sitting along the roads and working in gas stations lead the exact opposite of a traditional lifestyle.

the bottom line. Anyway, I superbly enjoyed this trip. The photos on this website are just a selection of the many great things that I have seen, and the nice people that I have met. I would have liked to continue my trip in the direction of Tibet but the Chinese did not allow this.* I often wish I were back out there. And I know that one day I will be.

* I had already made arrangements with a Slovenian cyclist to go from Kashgar to Lhasa, and with Sebastian and Tobi to go from Lhasa onwards to Southeastern China and beyond. These guys had to cancel their Tibet plans, too.