Cycle Nomad

I

Malaysia to Tibet

On Pangkor a cloudburst traps a boatload of strangers under a tin roof. For a few seconds everything comes into focus: an old couple whispering, the shadow of a woman's cheekbone, a boy caught going through her bag. Then the rain stops, and it is gone.

In Thailand I pick up some Thai. In Laos soldiers guard the opium fields. A girl sees my face and screams “Falang!” Foreigner. The whole village runs inside.

I had come to Asia to dissolve the self. It turned out to be the only thing anyone could see.

China is the opposite. In the villages a crowd closes in; most have never seen a white face. Small children reach up to touch my hair. Some days it is too much. The first grey hairs come in China.

I want to quit nearly every day. The permit to ride from Chengdu to Lhasa is refused, and refused again. In the end I fly.

On the Tibetan Plateau the nomads laugh at me and pour me yak-butter tea, which is the worst thing I have ever tasted and the only thing they have to give.

Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, China, Tibet.

II

Nepal and India

From the top of the plateau the road falls toward Nepal. I leave it for the dirt and cut straight down the switchbacks built for trucks with weak engines. For one day there is nothing but speed and dust.

Then the hospital, and the appendix. Two months on my back, then the road again, down into India.

In a stone temple in the Himalaya a sadhu passes me his pipe. In Dharamsala I hear the Dalai Lama speak.

The town is full of young Israelis just out of the army and Western seekers trading one set of bells and incense for another. Translation, not transformation. It is easy to say what is wrong with it. Harder to say what I have instead. They at least have a form to give themselves to. I have the road.

Nepal, India.

III

Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon

The dust of Pakistan: chickens, bicycles, chaos, and everywhere someone offering tea. If I have a religion, it is this. The road does not move. You move on it and take what comes, bliss or fear, chaos or calm, and keep going.

The Swat Valley, years before the Taliban. Among strangers I keep seeing faces like my own. The history that put them there runs through me too.

The plan is to ride west. Iran refuses a visa, again and again. By October the way through Central Asia is closing. Saudi Arabia will not let me in. I fly from Islamabad to Amman.

Syria gives me the kindest welcome of the journey, except in the mountains, where the security men sip mate and look straight through me.

In a Shia mosque in Damascus I pray behind an imam until nothing is left but the prayer. I walk out under the stars certain I have finally understood.

Some days later, in the mountains of Lebanon, a man pours arak and makes me drink to the health of George W. Bush. Then he puts a gun to my head and orders me to ride into the dark.

Between the certainty and the gun: a few days, one mountain range.

Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon.

IV

Turkey to France

Rhodes. White yachts wait out the winter, and in a youth hostel I read Thucydides: the strong do as they can, and the weak suffer as they must. I underline it, and for a long time I am sure it is about other people.

In the middle of Italy the bicycle falls apart, and so do I. I decide to walk to Rome and fly home. Then, through the salt and sunscreen in my eyes, a sign for a bicycle shop. A mechanic named Marzullo, hands flying above his head as he talks, takes me in like kin.

I keep riding. Over the Alps in a snowstorm. Across France beside my father. For a thousand kilometers the road gives us something we can share, and some days we laugh. It does not last. For a while it is enough.

Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, France.

V

Panama to California

Honduras. Soldiers at the roadside: if you are robbed, do not fight. They kill.

In Chiapas I ride with Carlos, a young Nicaraguan going north at the risk of his life, toward the country I can fly home to whenever I like. For two years I have called this journey a quest. Beside his, it is a holiday with hardships.

By Mexico I speak Spanish. Above Cuernavaca the road turns to dirt and fills with pilgrims walking to the cave at Chalma, where the Aztecs prayed to the god of caves and their descendants now pray to Christ. An old man carries Him in a glass box as long as his back. God is a verb, Buckminster Fuller said. Here He is the walking.

In the fir forest of Michoacán the branches hang strangely low. Then the sun breaks through and they come apart: monarchs pouring down in an orange swirl, landing in my hair, on my back, on my legs. They winter here and fly north to breed and die, on a road no single butterfly finishes.

Darwin wrote of caged birds that throw themselves at the side of the cage facing their migration until they are bare and bloody. Our ancestors walked for ninety thousand years and settled only eleven thousand years ago. Perhaps what drives me is no more than that, an old instinct dressed in meaning. Or perhaps I have only collected extreme experiences, the way a graduate with a rail pass collects photographs of himself in front of cathedrals.

In the Baja desert a van passes at more than a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour and takes the mirror off my bicycle. The shock comes that night, in the dunes, where I lie shaking and watch the sand drift past like something leaving. The next morning I pass the same van in a ditch, blue tarp and all.

Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico.