August 31, 2014
It's like Will Smith said to me once: 'You got a dream, you've gotta protect it': The day my dream was resurrected
I was left at the side of the road as the relatively attractive woman, who had paid me no attention whatsoever during the whole border process, sped off in a cloud of dust before I even had a chance to say thank you. One way or another I was in Mongolia and now I had to find a way to pick up the pieces of what had just happened.
Almost immediately I saw a couple of cars with British number plates, evidently from the logos adorning them participants in the 'Mongol Rally', an event in which teams drive beat-up old cars from London to Mongolia. I stopped to talk with them and was greeted by a cheerful young Englishman with whom I exchanged stories. Mine was thus: "I was cycling around the world, but I'm not anymore. They wouldn't let me cycle across the border just back there, so my trip is over." That brought his cheerfulness down a notch I can tell you. Just one notch though. "Oh, come on," he said, "it's only a few hundred metres. Just don't tell anyone mate." I don't know why everyone kept saying that. As if what other people think we have done is somehow more important than what we have actually done.
I wished them well and carried on, cycling through a small border town of brightly-roofed houses where young children chased horses down the main highway. The main highway in this case being a small road with no traffic on it that led me out into a wide open grassy plain. I soon stopped and set up camp - with the trip being over there seemed little point in rushing to cycle anywhere - and sat to think things over. My location was perfect; a sandy spot sheltered by a tree from which I could watch the sun curve towards the horizon before dropping below it and setting the sky alight with a bright orange, that faded gradually to a deep purple, and eventually a black peppered with pinpricks of light commonly referred to in the literature as stars.
And during all this time I reflected back on what had happened and tried to work out what I was going to do now. My attempt to circumnavigate the world using only my bicycle and boats was over, clearly. There was no getting around that. I knew most people wouldn't care about a few hundred metres, but for me it was all or nothing, and it was over. I came to terms with that surprisingly quickly. But what was I going to do next? The difficult challenge of cycling across Mongolia had lost all of its appeal now and so I decided that I would fly out of Ulan Bator, the capital city that was just a few hundred kilometres away. I already had my working holiday visa for Australia, so why not just fly there and start a new life with the kangeroos for a while? But I really wanted to cycle across China (I have my reasons) and so maybe I could fly to Urumqi, cycle a bit there, and then fly on to Australia. As much as all this might sound like I was quitting, I wasn't really, because whatever happened I was still going to try and cycle around the world, I was just going to have to start again somewhere new, at some time in the future.
In the middle of the night I woke up in a moment of inspiration and decided that the thing to do actually was to fly back to Bishkek or Almaty and start the new circumnavigation attempt immediately from there. That way I would still get to cycle across China and continue the trip almost exactly as planned. It seemed like a great idea.
The next morning I cycled into the town of Sukhbatar and found a hotel and restaurant with wifi. The girls working in the restaurant showed little interest in me and appeared to have little interest in life in general. It was that kind of town, nobody seemed to care much for anything, with the exception of the man that pushed in front of me in the supermarket to buy his bottle of vodka. He had some zeal about him at least. But the wifi was good in the restaurant and I felt it necessary to inform the world as soon as possible about the sudden demise of my circumnavigation attempts. I knew it was going to come as a shock to everyone, perhaps the kind of devastating blow to the public spirit not seen since the day the revered musical phenomenon 'Take That' announced that they were splitting up. I sincerely hoped no teenage girls were going to slip into bouts of depression as I wrote about the sad events of the previous day, but the world needed to know.
Now I was still left wondering what I should do and started looking at my options. It struck me that I really shouldn't fly anywhere, or take any other transport. I mean, I had been forced to at the border, but doing so out of choice, that would actually be ten times worse. By chance I had this insightful revelation at approximately the same time that I saw the price of flights out of Mongolia. Purely coincidence you understand.
I was wrapping things up and preparing to leave the restaurant, and staring one final time at the challenges that I set myself at the start of the journey in Paris, when I was suddenly struck by another moment of inspiration. Much better than the last. In an instant I understood just exactly what I was going to do, exactly how I was going to make everything better. And as I cycled onwards back out into the plains the idea solidified. It was perfect... simple... brilliant. It was such a fantastic idea I wondered how it could have taken me 15 hours to have thought of it (and not, as one would expect, much longer.) The idea, simply put, was this:
I would just keep going.
Now I know what you're thinking, (and yes, you're right, I am) but wait, there's more! Obviously, as I said before, the attempt to circumnavigate using only my bicycle and boats had ended, but why end everything? All I had to do was 'reset' the circumnavigation aspect of the journey, and keep going with everything else as before. I would just carry on with the trip exactly as planned but then if I made it all the way around and back to Europe instead of stopping there I would keep going east until I arrived at a point, most likely in China, that was reached after the fateful events of 30th August 2014.
I'll just pause for a moment for you to take in what I just said.
Yes, essentially this meant I still had to cycle all the way around the world.
But as recent meetings with Hera and Petr had shown me, with a direct-route approach I could probably do the extra bit from Europe to China in three months. And what was another three months going to be on a journey that was obviously going to be counted in years? As for the country-count, the kilometre-count, there was no reason to reset those. They were still a part of the whole journey, I'd still done them, I hadn't suddenly not cycled them just because of the one kilometre in a motor vehicle. Mongolia was country number 36, I'd cycled 27,000 kilometres, the circumnavigation aspect had been reset, the blog could continue, the book deal was still possible, the movie was still running, and I was on top of the world.
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That evening I had to camp out in the open on a sloping hillside where I sat and waited for it to get dark before setting up the tent so as not to be seen. I was just above a man-made ditch of some sort and a trail of cows were walking the other side of it, traipsing single-file back to their home (no doubt a yurt up the hillside) instinctively as the daylight waned. I was wearing my dark green down jacket and I was well camouflaged in the grass, but they all knew that I was there, each one in turn growing nervous at my presence and slowing, looking my way anxiously before hurrying on. It was fun to watch them, how the braver ones came close to me, how the more nervous veered around in a big circle to avoid me, how intelligent they were, how they knew their way home, how they knew when to go, where to go. I looked beyond them at the huge empty spaces of Mongolia and at the last of the days light glowing orange on the hillsides opposite. I felt a cold breeze on my face, the grass between my finger tips. I was still going! And I had a long, long way to go, and I was happy.
30/08/14 - 27km (14km in Mongolia)
31/08/14 - 98km
Today's ride: 112 km (70 miles)
Total: 27,209 km (16,897 miles)
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