The Postponement

A lot can change in a week. Some changes are helpful and constructive. Others just seem to throw up more questions and doubt. But all of them are, I’ve come to learn, integral to the process when your life is about to change in almost every sense.

I’ve struggled a little lately with the bigger questions.

The why and the how are the two that seem to cause me the most discomfort.

It’s mainly in those early hours of the morning, when the woods are still and the first light of the day has only just started creeping through the trees, that doubt and fear seem to fill the tent like stale air. I lie there listening to my thoughts, trying to answer the questions they throw up as best I can.

I rarely find answers that completely satisfy the doubts. It’s only once I start cycling that those bigger questions seem less important.

Being still has never really worked for me. My brain needs my body to be moving, it needs stimulus, or else reality has a habit of siding with the worst-case scenarios and everything starts to seem rather daunting. Once I start turning the pedals, though, almost immediately things begin to make sense again.

The fears fade and the doubts get pushed away with every pedal stroke.

I may never have the answers in full. I may never be able to articulate with any real accuracy the how and the why, but I can feel that it makes sense. I just have to work on convincing my brain to trust that feeling, ignore the constant need for concrete answers and relax into the adventurous joy that comes with not knowing everything.

Mornings may bring doubt but the days bring a clarity I can’t always explain.

I remember much the same thing happening in 2017 when I was preparing to cycle around the world. Pre-departure planning is both invaluable and, at times, completely pointless.

Having answers helps settle the brain, but the world has a habit of derailing even the best-laid plans. Visa rules change. Borders close. Routes that look straightforward on a screen become something entirely different once you reach them.

Spending days clarifying the exact process for every border can be useful, but it can also be pointless when that border might still be a year away. Some things simply cannot be solved in their entirety in advance.

Another question, however, has felt rather more pressing this week.

Exactly when am I leaving?

It turns out that sometimes one of the hardest parts of organising a big trip is knowing when to actually get going.

There is, after all, a fair amount to consider, and getting the timing right matters in more ways than one.

I spent most of Monday in the library once again, surrounded by the increasingly familiar collection of maps, lists, browser tabs and half-finished jobs that have occupied far too much of my life recently.

Africa feels close enough now that almost everything I do seems connected to it in some way. Website work. Equipment. Routes. Ferries. Vaccinations. Money. One job gets crossed off and another appears underneath it.

I had been working towards leaving in late September. That was mostly based on two things.

Firstly, I thought it would give me enough time to finish everything I needed to do before departure. Secondly, it would allow enough time to ride south through France, Spain and Portugal and still reach Morocco in early November, keeping me roughly where I want to be in terms of weather further down the west coast of Africa.

I’ve also always felt that having a departure date is fundamental to getting a trip like this off the ground. It makes the whole thing feel real. It gives you something to aim at, forces all the pre-departure jobs to have a deadline and stops preparation becoming something that could theoretically continue forever.

The problem was that the closer I got to that date, the more obvious it became that I would be leaving with things unfinished simply for the sake of sticking to a deadline I had set myself. And some of those unfinished jobs matter.

If I leave with certain things half done, the risk is that the journey becomes harder than it needs to be or, worse, parts of the system I’m trying to build around it simply fall apart once I’m on the road.

So somewhere between another few hours staring at the laptop and another look at everything still sitting on the to-do list, I made the decision to push the departure date back. Far enough to give me time to leave knowing the important things are in place. Close enough not to upset the wider timing through West Africa.

I told myself it was fine to move it. I also told myself that this time it was final. So I’ll now leave my woodland home here in Kent in early October.

It isn’t a huge delay in the grand scheme of what will inevitably become a very long journey. A couple of extra weeks at the beginning of something like this should barely matter once I’m thousands of kilometres down the road.

But changing the date felt right despite my desire to get going. Oddly, it also helped quieten those morning fears, not completely, but enough to allow those dawn hours to feel less doubtful.

With the decision made, diary schedules rewritten and a new list compiled, all that was left was to ensure I used the extra time properly.

There is no prize for starting a journey before you are ready. Failure is minimised through preparation. There are enough uncertainties in a trip like this that can’t be prepared for pre-departure and will no doubt determine the success of reaching South Africa. But those I can control, those I can minimise, should be given the time now.

What the delay gives me more than anything is a few extra weeks of breathing room.

The website still needs work. There are things I want finished before I disappear south because I know how much harder they will become once my days revolve around riding, finding food, charging equipment and working out somewhere to sleep.

FTtouring has become a much bigger part of the preparation than I expected. For years I could simply load the bike and go. The trip was the trip. I would take photographs, write notes, occasionally post something and worry about sorting through it all later. This time I’m trying to build something alongside the journey.

The journals need to work. The Route Guides need to be usable. The website needs to be something I can realistically maintain from the road rather than something that functions perfectly while I’m sitting in a library in Kent with electricity, decent Wi-Fi and absolutely no need to wonder where I’m sleeping that night.

If delaying by a couple of weeks means I can get those systems properly in place now, then that seems considerably more sensible than discovering somewhere in Morocco that the whole thing is being held together with hope and an internet connection.

There are other reasons too.

I’m enjoying the extra time with friends and family more than I thought I would. Once I leave properly, I could be gone for a very long time. Life moves quickly, people get older, things change while you are away whether you want them to or not, and recent events have made me more aware of that than I probably was before.

So a few extra weeks here no longer feels like wasted time. It feels useful. The urge to leave may be strong, but patience and a trust in the process keep me here for now.

Changing the departure date has also forced me to rethink the first part of the journey. The original idea was the obvious one. Dover to France and then start riding south.

It makes sense. I’m in Kent. France is practically visible from this corner of England on a clear day. Get across the Channel and start pedalling.

Except the more I looked at the route, the less attached I felt to it. I’ve ridden a lot in France over the years. I like France. The cycling is good, the roads can be excellent and there is no shortage of places I’d happily return to.

But that is perhaps the point. I’ve already spent a lot of time there. If I’m going to delay my departure and use these extra weeks here properly, there is little sense in then trying to claw that time back by rushing through a country I already know simply because it happens to sit between me and Spain.

So departure day now looks a little different. Rather than taking the ferry from Dover to Calais, I’ll ride west out of Kent towards Portsmouth and take the ferry directly to Bilbao. That means missing France entirely. Normally I dislike skipping places. Part of the appeal of travelling overland by bicycle is watching the world change gradually around you. Climate. Architecture. Language. Food. Road surfaces. Everything shifts slowly enough that you notice it happening.

Taking a ferry past France removes some of that progression. But there is always a compromise somewhere.

In this case, it gives me extra time at home without really damaging the wider journey. I can still land in northern Spain, ride south through Spain and Portugal and aim to reach Morocco around the beginning of November.

That keeps the broader timing of Africa roughly where I want it while giving me considerably more time here to finish the things that should make life easier once I’m properly on the road.

For once, skipping several hundred kilometres feels like the more sensible adventure decision.

To counter the mornings of doubt, I’ve started to allow myself to slowly look at a rough route for my time in Europe.

Portugal in particular has been getting my attention.

There are plenty of quicker ways through the country, but predictably I seem to have settled on one of the less straightforward options.

The Grand Diagonal route crosses Portugal from Caminha in the northwest to Vila Real de Santo António in the southeast. It runs for roughly 1,000 kilometres, with around 16,500 metres of climbing, using quieter secondary roads across mountains, plains and the interior of the country.

In other words, it sounds considerably more interesting than simply taking the easiest line south.

It also fits the way I like to travel. I don’t want the first month of this journey to become a race to Morocco.

Africa may be the larger goal, but Spain and Portugal are not obstacles sitting in the way of it. They are part of the trip.

The Grand Diagonal gives Portugal some structure without turning the journey into a rigid itinerary. There is a line to follow and a general direction of travel, but still enough uncertainty to keep things interesting.

And there will undoubtedly be changes. There always are. A route looks wonderfully simple when you are sitting in a library looking at it on a screen.

Roads connect neatly. Distances make sense. Weather behaves itself. Nothing breaks.

Reality generally has other ideas, but reality is also the fun part. It brings the challenge I crave and is all part of what makes this an adventure and not a holiday.

Postponing the departure hasn’t made the trip feel further away. Oddly, it has probably done the opposite. There is enough time between now and then to finish what needs finishing, I hope, but not enough to feel as though time is completely on my side.

As much as it may drive me mad at times, there are many long days left staring at screens in the local library between now and my departure if I’m to leave with everything in place.

But I do now feel that familiar mixture of excitement and nerves becoming stronger.

The Africa trip has been more than a year in the planning, yet the more I research it, the more questions seem to appear.

Visas still worry me. There are border crossings that currently exist in my plans as little more than educated guesses. I wonder whether I’ve packed the right equipment, whether the new bike will cope with everything I’m asking of it and whether there is something painfully obvious that I’ve completely overlooked.

Occasionally I find myself looking at the scale of the continent and wondering whether I really understand what I’m committing myself to.

Then I remember feeling exactly the same before the round-the-world trip. I worried about routes then. I worried about money. I worried whether the bike would survive, whether I would find places to sleep and whether I knew enough to make the whole thing work.

The answer, of course, was that I didn’t. I couldn’t possibly have known everything before leaving. Problems appeared and somehow they got solved. Plans changed. Roads went somewhere unexpected. Things broke. People helped.

I made mistakes, learnt from some of them and probably repeated others. But eventually, something that had once seemed impossibly complicated simply became normal life. I’m trying to remember that now.

There comes a point where preparation stops being useful and becomes an attempt to remove uncertainty from something that is supposed to contain uncertainty.

I want to leave prepared. I don’t want to leave knowing everything. There is a difference.

The unknown is a large part of why I’m doing this in the first place. So yes, I’m nervous. I’m also ridiculously excited.

For now, I have another few weeks to finish the website, sort the bike, stare at maps, change my mind several more times and convince myself that I have finally produced something resembling a sensible plan.

After that, as experience has taught me, things have a habit of working themselves out.