Reflecting on Danube/4
Dimensions exist in a lot of senses. As covered in a previous post, cycling long distances certainly has a physical dimension to it, but while you’re at it, there’s definitely something else going on in your brain too. What consitutes it, how “real” it is, is mostly up for philosophical meanderings, but it’s well worth looking at - and that’s precisely the point of this post - the more “meaning” stuff from our bicycling trip, since the chronological one is done.
Having a lot of thoughts during this activity is but natural, but personally I find it hard to say with certainty which set of thoughts is more “important” and/or “profound” than any other - not to say that they are all equal in magnitude in this sense - but they are fluid and can connote something frivolous or very profound depending on timing, state of mind, location, and other arbitrary factors. Sounds a bit abstract? Think of a thought like “meeting friends and family in person is highly underrated” - I believe most people would think of this as just another truism without any substance per se - and it very well is, when looked at without context. However, when you have something like COVID-19 and all its mix of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and other secondary concerns occupying the top shelf in your mind for a couple of years, that thought really hits home a lot harder than it would have pre-2020; most of us have had some adverse experience that’d make normal meetings like before feel much more valued.
And thus, likewise, for all the points that I put below, they aren’t in any specific order but their importance or meaning can vary based on who’s reading, when it’s being read, or any specific associations that may be evoked in the reader’s mind from previous experience.
Connections to literature…
Several books have been written pertaining to long-distance travel and the emotions it evokes; maybe it is a very fundamentally human experience. Naturally, considering the general vastness of literature, I haven’t read all of these books! However, among the limited literature I’ve spanned, an association with two particular books really stood out during this journey - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and On the Road. It felt as though I was really “living” the writing - perhaps due to the expressed themes of free-spiritedness, gumption, and just the mere thought of being present in one’s activity (…and also because they’re among my favourites)! Though I already had an appreciation for those books, this trip only deepened it further - leaving me with a special kind of connection felt to the authors and their mental labyrinths that produced their work. It isn’t something words can really describe, but the feeling certainly was perceptible - and the fact that the content of those books felt so relatable despite their being written several decades ago only made the concept of experience-based literature even more special.
There are several other books that are more descriptive in nature that I’d read and they have their own place too - but the poetic (and maybe a bit corny?) notion of “making your own trip”, i.e. controlling your means of transport - feels very different from just travelling. Being a driver is certainly very different from being a passenger - and in the case of cycling, it feels even more “raw”. In vehicles, there exist complicated mechanisms converting fuel into motion - but when you’re cycling, it’s just your feet driving the motion of your wheels, only linked via pedals and a chain…
It really makes you feel the literature from books on this theme!
…and empathy
This also led to a not-so-profound-at-first kind of realization. When it comes to books, there are just so many niches and sub-niches - be it as general as travel, history, or sports, or something very specific as technical volumes on neuroscience - and one can spend an endless amount of time gaining knowledge on various topics, and in a sense “knowing” a lot more than before. But to truly “feel” the essence of those specific works and understand what the authors mean more deeply, a reader should really have had some first-hand experience of those elements in their lives; words are just an approximation in this regard. To put it simply - it is the difference between knowing vs knowing about something - and those are very different things (similar to the idea of illusions of competence - thinking you’ve leared something vs actually learning something).
It sounds rather limiting (and also pretty obvious in a way), but only after the journey did I really feel much more strongly about this opinion. In a broader context it makes me wonder how infinitely vast the actual Realm of Experience really is, and how starkly different the lives of individuals truly are - and yet we somehow manage to find some common ground of Shared Understanding despite knowing that we are severely limited in our capacity to truly grasp others’ “experiential feelings”; the same piece of text could mean so much more to some than to others based on prior experience. It is truly remarkable! It is empathy, but without the general connotation of suffering typically associated with the word “empathy”.
This knowing of “so much is unknown to me”, though seemingly inducing a feeling of missing out, is certainly a very humbling feeling, and one that is sort of a inspiration to keep learning and experiencing new things over and over again…
Arbitrary motivations
Put very brusquely, there wasn’t a specific goal or motivation for this trip. The three of us had met in June 2021 after quite a few months and were just having breakfast somewhere in the Netherlands, when the usual flow of conversation ended in our talking about cycling next to pretty landscapes. And somehow we just thought it’d be wonderful to go on a trip involving lots of such sceneries, tied together by a common thread of a river guiding us throughout. It sounded rather poetic, and was enough for us to really consider it as a serious activity. Notwithstanding the fact that none of us had any experience with long-distance cycling, or for that matter even having bicycles, the thought somehow stuck.
Initially, as with most plans that are made in this fashion, we didn’t think it’d materialize - but we were proven wrong…by us. In short, the motivation was pretty much arbitrary. And maybe it ought to be so, in general?
A new community
It is pretty natural that there are lots of bicycling forums and communities around the world given how popular the activity is - but prior to the trip I didn’t know about any of it - and in the process of looking around, it opened quite a rabbit hole! Before and during the trip we got to talk to a lot of people enthusiastic about it, got to know so many platforms (like Warm Showers, the EuroVelo network, Accueil Vélo, and so on), that it felt like we were introduced to a completely new community we were absolutely unaware of - and it felt really rewarding. It’s happened before with other activities (and I suppose that’s probably how fandom works in general – or by stretching a bit further, even parasocial relationships?) and I believe this will be the case every time a new kind of activity gets taken up (say, lock picking?). It feels uncomfortably good to be a beginner over and over again - or maybe that’s how it works for some people.
I had heard some of my friends talk about such adventures they’d undertaken at some point in their lives, and though I found it interesting to listen to them I never fully connected with them on this front. But only after doing it myself did I truly “get” them and felt much closer to them. Now, when I step outside and see someone riding a touring bicyle with a couple of panniers clipped to the rear, it feels like they’re weakly connected at some level in the same community, absolute strangers as they may be.
Company matters
During our ride, we had several hiccups en route because of bad weather, bad equipment, bad planning, random chance, or whatever else there was - and it could easily have been a very frustrating experience for all of us. But thankfully the two friends I went with provided excellent company! Though I had known them for years, it was always in a comfortable, leisurely setting - and we’d never tested ourselves in such ways as going a long journey involving minimal planning and so much uncertainty. But I’m glad I went with them, and it served as an important positive lesson about the importance of good company in any venture. None of us complained much despite the circumstances, we worked together throughout, and we were all…laidback. Not on a single day did we begin cycling before 11 in the morning!
This synchrony helped us quite a lot throughout the journey, and any mismatch in our mindsets would certainly have caused some friction. So I’m quite convinced that you really need people you get along quite well with on such adventures!
(or maybe more generally speaking, for any group-based activity)
Wheel rolling
I doubt there’s any possibility of my not deciding to go on such journeys again unless circumstances force me to remain stationary. Not only are there so many routes to wander on, rivers to flow with, but also so many cycling types and terrains still left to explore! This journey was a simple enough one in that it was mostly on asphalt roads with a bit of trail cycling, but it was all well-tested and treaded on by other cyclists enough times - so there wasn’t anything that could go too wrong. However, as with mountaineers and deep sea divers, there are incremental challenges that one can always take up; no mountain is tall enough, no dive deep enough to call it a day and consider oneself “done”. There’s always room for some humility, and always some room for challenge as well in these ventures - and so I believe also is the case with long-distance cycling. It’s unlikely I’ll ever do something truly “dangerous” (say, like cycling in the Andes) but considering the fun-danger tradeoff, I’m sure there that there are lots of challenges to take up in the future. The wheel truly is going to roll for a long while…
Planning?
In general I’d consider myself mostly towards the “planned” end of the planned vs spontaneous spectrum (if there indeed is a cleary defined one) - but with the occasional spike of spontaneity here and there. And this trip was one such spike which made me realize that sometimes it’s okay not to have everything planned beforehand - even when there are lots of variables, lots of moving parts, and that too over a considerable span of time. To put things into perspective, we:
- jokingly discussed in June over a lazy breakfast conversation that it’d be fun to go cycling next to a river for a considerable distance;
- and suddenly in July we really thought of making it happen;
- and just over a month later, in August, only to keep the joke going and prove that “you better put your money where your mouth is”, we actually went ahead with the whim!
Also, we didn’t have:
- bicycles, even a month before our “scheduled dates”
- any experience of cycling for more than 50 km at a stretch
- COVID-19 vaccines, not taken until a couple of days before our scheduled dates
- train tickets to get back from Budapest to Munich after the trip
- any camping reservations
- tents until the day before departing
- an idea of what the route would be like, where we’d have halts
Additionally, one of us, a PhD student, had two “virtual conferences” during our trip in which he had to present his research findings - and so that had to be accommodated in our timeline and routes too, somehow. There were just too many things to really think of this actually materializing. But materialize it did, and in quite a spectacular fashion!
But of course, a lot of things could have gone wrong too - so there are no thumb rules, I guess. Only some judgment and luck?
Generally speaking, planning certainly has its place in most cases, but sometimes it perhaps is okay to Be Here Now.
Travel diaries
The internet is rife with travel stuff in various forms - be it vlogs, blogs, podcasts, or whatever (there are too many travel channels/platforms to list) - but one thread that wounds through all of them is the effort it takes to create and maintain such a thing. I had/have no plans of creating a vlogging channel (a blog, however, was always on the cards) but I wanted to capture tidbits of the experience in the form of short video snippets from various places; such videos have a certain expressivity to them that mere words or images cannot capture. And thus, I did manage to record lots of such tiny videos (as compiled here on YouTube) but that was without the intention of making a full-fledged travel channel (like Drew Binsky or Eva zu Beck); it was only for posterity and memories.
But even merely managing this raw media in the form of all these videos, photos, and notes made me think a lot about how tedious the process of running any of these travel platforms really is - there is just so, so much of raw footage to obtain and store, so many photos to take (and think of angles, lighting, subjects, and so forth), and so much research to do (i.e. a la a tour guide - one wouldn’t want to read/watch a travel experience without some contextual information from the presenter) - that it makes managing all of it and coming up with an engaging, coherent video narrative a very tough job. And this is assuming there are no live, on-the-go social media engagements! If one considers that factor (like constant updates on any platforms) the “diarying” gets even more intense as an experience. Maybe there is a certain point beyond which the travel itself isn’t enjoyable anymore and the “extra” stuff consumes all your mental capacity.
This cycling trip really made me appreciate the work of full-time travel content creators quite a lot more. As an audience/consumers it is just so easy to romanticize the notion of “full-time travelling” as your job description and not notice the effort that goes into putting it all together! And I can only imagine the pressure that also comes along with the travel when your main source of income is all the content that you create and you really have to invest your time into making it high quality. I really wonder how much one truly gets to enjoy the places they visit in this form of travel/profession.
Memory
As of 2021 we haven’t figured out how exactly information is encoded in our brains in the form of our memories. But we do know how powerfully this plays out in our lives - and one such instance was during this cycling trip, which involved processing a lot of information and absorbing a great deal of memories out of all of it! There were sights to see, instructions to follow, phrases to learn in various languages, thoughts to flow, conversations to have, and on and on - just so much information!
When I was plotting our routes on ArcGIS for the other, “timeline-oriented” blog post I thought I wouldn’t be able to recall our route given the length of the trip and the time that had elapsed since then (say, a couple of months or so) - but as I started putting the points on the map, I could suddenly recall all the scenes we’d witnessd, the paths we’d taken, the places we’d crossed - and almost like magic I was able to reconstruct the entire route piece by piece. It made me realize how strange memory really is - you can’t remember what you had for lunch a couple of days (or hours?) ago but you remember everything from a couple of months ago - just because you were excited about something!
I don’t have a background in neuroscience, so I don’t know in depth how memory works - but there surely is a general tendency to remember things more clearly when you’re in certain states of mind. So the quotidian, mundane stuff doesn’t really stick - but novel experiences do make their way into our long-term memory (probably as some form of evolutionary optimization) - and it was quite evident through this trip. Just something to marvel about, this concept of memory and its selectivity in picking what to remember depending on the situation!
Wrapping up
These reflections weren’t in any particular order - they were rather just a typed version of all the accumulated thoughts that were recalled as I started writing this post. They may be relatable, or may have sounded absolutely bizarre - but in either case, I hope there was something to take away for the reader! Perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to say that everyone should do something like this, but for those who can ride a bicycle - I would really encourage going on a ride that is farther than your typical, leisurely one - but of course, taking all the necessary precautions! It certainly won’t be enjoyable to the same degree for everyone, but without trying, one would never know!