The older I get, the harder I find saying goodbye. I’m not entirely sure why that should be but now the time has come for the last goodbyes.
You might think that after years of leaving, returning, leaving again and spending long periods away from the people I care about, I would have become better at it. If anything, the opposite seems to be true. The excitement of departure is still there, as strong as ever, but it now sits alongside a much greater awareness of what leaving actually means.
The Goodbyes Begin
This week the goodbyes have properly started. For months, Africa has been something I’ve talked about as though it existed comfortably in the future. I’ve been planning it, researching it and gradually preparing the bike and myself for it, but there was always another week ahead and therefore no real need to think too much about the leaving part. Now there isn’t. Time is running out and some of the people I’ve seen over the past few weeks may genuinely be people I won’t see again for a very long time. Every goodbye carries a little more weight because of that.
I don’t particularly enjoy this part. Each day I feel a little more excited about what lies ahead on a journey I’ve been thinking about for more than a year and will take me through places I’ve only ever daydreamed of and across a continent I know relatively little about. That prospect still thrills me. But alongside it sits a feeling I’ve found increasingly difficult to ignore over the years: guilt.
Dealing With Guilt
I know people worry about me. If I’m honest, that is something I probably thought about less when I first started travelling this way. Back then, the unknown was almost entirely exciting. I was younger, perhaps a little more convinced of my own invincibility and certainly less aware of how my choices affected the people waiting at home. Now I understand that side of it much more.
When I look at a map and see a remote road disappearing into somewhere I’ve never been, I see possibility. I wonder what is beyond the next ridge, where I might camp and who I might meet along the way. Somebody who cares about me can look at exactly the same map and see isolation, danger and all the things that might go wrong. Neither view is necessarily unreasonable.
That is probably where some of the guilt comes from. I’m making a conscious decision to do something that I know will cause people I care about to worry. However much I reassure them of my experience, that I’ll make sensible decisions and that I’m not deliberately seeking unnecessary danger, there is no way of completely removing that worry. Sometimes I wonder whether that makes what I do selfish. Perhaps, to an extent, it does.
I’m choosing a life because it makes me happy, even though that choice has consequences for other people. The difficult part is explaining why I continue to choose it.
Trying To Explain The Why
I get asked why I live this way quite often and, despite having had years to come up with a convincing answer, I’m still remarkably bad at answering it. There are easy words I can use. Freedom. Travel. Challenge. Exploration. They are all true, but none of them really explains it.
Saying that I like freedom sounds vague and rather cliché. Saying that I enjoy travelling makes it sound as though I simply prefer being on holiday. Saying I enjoy a challenge probably makes me sound as though I’ve developed an unhealthy relationship with suffering, which may contain a certain amount of truth but still doesn’t quite get there.
Much of it is a feeling rather than something I can neatly put into words. If I could take somebody with me for a while, I think they might understand much more quickly than if I spent hours trying to explain it.
I would take them to a woodland early in the morning, just as the sun begins to break through the trees. The tent would still be delicately sparkling with condensation but the air warm enough that getting out of the sleeping bag requires little negotiation with yourself. In a tree above, squirrels would already be leaping from branch to branch, dusting the air with falling leaves, and nearby a bird would have decided that five in the morning was a perfectly reasonable time to begin singing the rest of the forest awake. And rightly so.
For a while, though, everything would be still. The nearby roads would be quiet. The towns and cities would not yet have properly woken. The first of the sun’s rays would filter through the trees and, for a few precious minutes, the whole world would seem to belong just to us. Then we pack the tent away, load the bike and start riding with no real idea what the day will contain. It is a feeling I find difficult to explain to somebody while standing in a kitchen.
Then there is the extraordinary freedom in knowing that everything you need is attached to the bicycle beneath you. It allows you to turn left because a road looks interesting, stop because a place feels right or change the plan completely because yet another kind stranger tells you about somewhere worth seeing twenty kilometres in the opposite direction. Or you can stop it all and return the way you came, back home. I don’t think any of us are ever entirely free, but living this way gets me about as close to the feeling as I’ve found.
The lure of a horizon is another part of the ‘why’. I’ve long been attracted to them and the thought that beyond lies a world I most likely know nothing about. Maybe that comes from growing up on the south-east coast of England and being able to gaze out across the English Channel. Some days all I could make out was a hazy mist hovering above the water, hiding what lay beyond. Other times I could clearly make out the white chalk cliffs of the French coastline and it was easy for my imagination to run away with thoughts of what the world might be like in what, to a young boy, seemed so far away. Horizons continue to spark that boy-like imagination in me and I have continued to want to go and find out.
But seeing new places doesn’t account for the full ‘why’ either. Plenty of forms of travel can get you to them far more quickly and considerably more comfortably. The bicycle changes the relationship with distance. There is no skipping the spaces between the places somebody has decided are worth visiting. You see the villages that don’t appear in guidebooks, the roads that gradually deteriorate until you begin to question whether they ever really qualified as roads in the first place, and the ordinary bits of a country that are usually passed at seventy miles an hour behind a windscreen.
You meet people because you need help, because you are slow enough for them to stop you or simply because a fully loaded bicycle has a strange ability to start conversations. It’s through all of that that I’ve developed a simple belief about the world: most people are good.
That doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen. Of course they do. But years of travelling have shown me far more kindness than hostility. When I’ve had problems, people have helped. When I’ve been lost, somebody has pointed me in the right direction. People have housed me, fed me and shown remarkable kindness to someone who, to them, was a complete stranger. That trust in the process is a large part of why I keep going.
Knowing When To Stop
None of that means I can reasonably ask the people at home to simply stop worrying. Their concern is justified because there are risks, particularly with a journey like the one ahead. I can research routes, borders and regions as much as I like, but circumstances change and no amount of planning guarantees that everything will be safe.
All I can really promise is that I’ll make the best decisions I can with the information I have at the time. If something feels wrong, I’ll back off. If a route becomes too dangerous, I’ll change it. There was probably a time when I would have found that harder to accept. The challenge itself could become the point and turning around could feel too much like failure. Experience has softened that a little.
The road will still be there for another day, another attempt when things feel more right. A mountain will not take it personally if I decide today is not the day to cross it. A country will not disappear because a visa application fails. There is nearly always another way and, if there isn’t, there is usually another time.
I still crave challenge. I still want the difficult routes and the places that require effort to reach. That part of me hasn’t changed and likely never will, but that doesn’t always equate to danger. What has changed is my understanding that knowing when to stop can be every bit as important as knowing when to keep going.
I hope that reassures the people I leave behind. I can’t promise nothing will go wrong. Nobody can. I can promise that I won’t knowingly continue into something simply because pride tells me I should.
Happiness Looks Different
I also hope that, as the years have passed, the people close to me have begun to understand that I am genuinely happy living this way. I know it isn’t for everyone. For plenty of people, the thought of waking in a damp tent, packing everything onto a bike and then spending the day pedalling towards an uncertain sleeping place, only to climb into a wet sleeping bag and do it all again the next day, probably sounds less like freedom and more like an elaborate punishment. That’s fair enough.
Happiness is personal. For somebody else it might be a house they love, a career they have worked hard for or simply having the comforts that come with knowing where they’ll sleep that night. There is no reason my version should make sense to everybody else.
But this is mine. There are difficult days. There are times when I’m cold, wet, exhausted and wondering why I didn’t choose a lifestyle that seemed less punishing. There are mechanical problems, terrible roads, headwinds and moments when the challenge becomes considerably less entertaining than it looked on the map. Yet even then, it is a rare day indeed that I wish I had chosen a completely different life.
There is something about moving through the world slowly, under my own power, carrying what I need and not knowing exactly what comes next that continues to make sense to me. I’m happy not being able to explain every part of it to myself. It is harder not having the right words for other people, and it doesn’t make the goodbyes any easier.
If anything, the older I get, the more I understand what I am leaving behind. I feel the worry I cause other people more than I once did, and I carry some guilt about choosing to go despite knowing it is there. But the alternative would be to stop doing something that makes me deeply happy simply because leaving is difficult. I’m not sure that would be right either.
So all I can do, until perhaps one day I find the right words, is say goodbye and hope that the people I care about understand that leaving is not the same as wanting to be away from them. There is simply still too much beyond the horizon that I want to see.
And, for now at least, I still need to go and find out what is there.
