Rides, endings and new dreams
It has been quite some time since I found time to write and now I have so many stories to tell I don’t really know where to start. Strange, right? I am travelling, so I suppose many will assume time is the only thing I have, at least, that is what I thought before I left, but oops, I was mistaken yet again. Don’t take this the wrong way, I have heaps of time, but most of it I spend driving my bike, eating, talking, sleeping and repeating the previous. The few days we decide to stay in the same place are easily filled with discovering the new location, planning the next part of our trip, applying for visa, calculating our budget, booking flight tickets and reading into border crossings… I suppose you catch my drift. During our planning this time we decided to stay in one place for at least 5 days before we finalize our last stretch in South East Asia on a motorbike leaving Laos behind and heading back to Vietnam. We actually took a scary decision, we booked our flight tickets back to Belgium from New Zealand on the 27th of September, as such putting an official end date to this journey. Luckily, also this ending comes with a new beginning. The plan? In about 6 years, have two bikes ready to travel the world! No end date, just new horizons to discover and an adventure to live.
Being on the road for such a long time made me realize there is a difference between travelling and holiday. It may be hard to believe, but also when travelling we need to take a break, rest a little and let our body recover from the constant new impressions and experiences. At home life may be busy, but at least you’re constantly within a protected environment with people around you that you can trust, a cup of tea when you feel like you need it and food on the table when you get hungry. And oh, how I miss my big cup of hot tea after a long day of riding! Luckily I can sometimes get an ice-cream instead. Talking about riding, this actually brings me to one of the biggest challenges we faced this past month, an off-road track of 118km combining burning fires, river crossings, dirt tracks, narrow ridges and suspension bridges. A track going from Muang Hiam to Phonsavan, Laos. A dream come true and yet we could not have expected such distance to be such a challenge. Dirt tracks filled with ruts, puddles and sandy downhills with the latter not being my favourite, to be honest! I am an uphill kind of girl, the slipping/riding down always scares me that little bit more. Luckily, we got to cool down with plenty of river crossings. Most went perfectly well, till I made a slither that somehow, I mysteriously saved. From the stress and adrenaline, I started the next river crossing in too high a gear with the result that my bike decided to turn off in the middle. Not once, nope, three times! Go me! Shoes wet and trousers soaked up to my knees, ready to catch some of the beautiful red sand. After all the river crossings the path got narrower each second, placing us in front of a ridge that was just wide enough to ride the bikes across without being able to put a foot on the ground, but going straight down for at least a metre on both sides. As we knew there should be a real dirt road within 5 kilometres, turning back the 75 kilometres we just rode didn’t feel like an option. Getting up the ridge was the real challenge as it meant getting up without driving of the other side and then, most importantly, keep on going as stopping meant falling off. In this occasion, I can only thank Jonas for getting both bikes across safely! I didn’t feel up to it and still don’t know if I would have been capable. Those who know me a little know this actually means, next time I will just have to discover it for myself and get across one way or another. To make the day even more adventurous we came across an enormous forest fire singing a disastrous song, throwing ashes high up into the air. I can keep trying to describe the adventure, but instead, I would recommend you to check out our riding video we made on our Instagram or Facebook page (A Travellers Tale; www.facebook.com/ATravelersT).
After this day it felt as if nothing was left of us. Luckily the feeling of achievement we got in return made up for every drop of sweat and energy lost.
Something about this way of travelling, of living, only invites you to continue to discover. Discover your own limits, break through the boundaries you built in your own head and meanwhile challenge yourself taking properly calculated risks, learning, enjoying and most of all, living! Living a life that, the moment you look back, puts a smile on your face and a twinkle in your eyes.
