One year of Bimbling By Bike

Much to our amazement, we started our tour a year ago today. We’ve done a few things to celebrate this, including:

• Enjoying an extended break on a lovely island, featuring the consistently best evening meals we have had on the whole tour, and some trips about the place
• Having a stab at answering the questions below about how it has gone thus far
• Releasing a load of field recordings made during our journey - details below

Before we get into all that, let’s have a quick look at what’s next…

What’s next?

This has been hard to decide. Partly, we are really drawn further south. Not least by the knowledge that—given our unwillingness to fly—we are unlikely to head down this way again (although not impossible if we sail down sometime…). That’s why we spent more time in Saint-Louis and are doing so again on the Bijagós Islands. This has been a bit tough on the budget but we don’t want to end up having finished our tour with a bit more money in the bank but regretting the things we didn’t do when we had the chance.

Heading north again also has its benefits. Not least our route to our intended future point of Japan feels poorly served by travelling south from here. We are constantly looking at options and did at one point think we might be able to head from Dakar to Cape Verde by boat, to get an onward sailing boat to South America. Regrettably, it looks to be the wrong time of year for that. Additionally, the rainy season is starting here and heading north and away from it holds that appeal too. It also rarely dips much below 30ºC overnight at present, which is proving a tad wearing. We also partly relish the reset of heading to places more familiar. Somewhere we can give our bikes (and ourselves) some TLC before we kick on again.

So, in the short term, we plan to head back to Dakar to try our hardest (we’ve had no luck with emails and calls so far) to get a freight ship up to Agadir in Morocco. This was originally planned as a freight and passenger route but the passenger bit seems to have been dropped. Failing that, we’ll see what overlanders we encounter that might have space. Dakar is a popular end point for overlanders, although this is not a good time of year to find even the lesser spotted variety. Failing that too, it’ll likely be a ride up to Rosso, a tour of Mauritania with our pal Issa, and then buses up through Morocco. Did we mention that riding the Sahara once feels like once enough…?

Right, on to those questions…

Three questions about Year One

We decided to do that thing again where we each answer some questions independently and then they meet for the first time in the blog post. Maybe this is something we do to check we are still sufficiently on the same page ;)

Q1:

Over the last year of Bimbling By Bike, what has surprised you most about how this “very long bimble” has actually felt day-to-day, compared with what you imagined back when you were first planning the idea?

Beck:

To many (probably most people) a trip like this feels like an enormous challenge, and perhaps feels beyond their comprehension. And yes, the bit at the beginning when we gave away all of our possessions and sold our house was a major upheaval, stress-making and difficult period. There have also been some other overwhelming moments like when waking up, sweating, in the middle of the night at our accommodation in Nador wondering what I was doing. Or feeling like we were totally in the middle of nowhere in the northern edge of the Sahara. Or arriving into almost any major city and competing with the traffic and the sensual overload.

But, day to day, it’s each pedal stroke, one after another. Each meal, water refill, shout of ‘hello’, each sleep taken as it comes. When looked at from this perspective, seeing what happens and accepting the complexities and unknowns, rather than worrying about the bigger picture it’s very much living in the present and problem solving when needed, not stressing about what might happen.

In that way, being on the road is not so different to living a more ‘conventional’ life. You never know what’s going to happen in that setting either (the boiler breaks, your cat needs a trip to the vet…) and you have as much control over these things as I do, but perhaps I’m surrounded by mangroves.

Sam:

It’s hard to imagine what a trip like this really means until you set off. I’m certainly quite surprised by how it has affected my mood and general wellbeing. In some senses, I’ve been on a lifelong mission to chill out, and the way in which I deal with stressful situations on the road shows the progress I have made in that regard over the first year. I think it’s also a great testament to my relationship with Beck that it has withstood the near constant presence of the other person, including during some testing times. Thankfully, Beck’s Long Covid has also not featured too heavily, as there was a point in the early planning where the whole idea looked like a non-starter.

I think the greatest change that underlies all this is a shift in terms of what we accept and what we try to change. Our day-to-day is very often a series of hard to predict or control variables, that we have found ourselves leaning into far more than I imagined we might manage to.

Q2:

Pick a favourite photograph from the first year of your bimble. Why does this particular place or encounter stick in your mind?

Beck:

I’ve picked this photo - one of the toughest days we’ve had on the ‘road’. As a bit of background, we set off on 12th June from Worcester with a plan to travel in Norway but then pass back through the UK. After this short return to the place that had been our home for so long, the plan was to make the big leap to travel further afield without knowing when we’d be back. This photo was taken on the second day in Spain after we made this leap.

After deciding to take an off-road route, the trail started off well with a gravel track alongside a stream but quickly turned into a quagmire in a recently felled eucalyptus forest. The mud was knee deep, with steep uphill sections, tree debris and it was tough. Progress was unbelievably slow and we had to help each other get the bikes through sections. I fell over and got horribly muddy and it was getting late in the day with no wild camp spots in sight. To me, it felt almost too much. I was questioning whether I could do this trip, physically or mentally.

There were some extremely tough climbs in Norway but somehow I felt braver because there was this ‘safety net’ of returning to the UK and if we had decided that this long-term touring wasn’t for us, there was a get-out. In Spain, we had set forth on a trip with no determined end and for some reason that gave it an added level of mental challenge for me.

But I chose this photo because through all of that, we helped each other, problem solved, accepted our situation, realised the bikes could withstand a lot, and gained confidence in our ability and that almost all the time, things work out in the end. Despite the stress and physical tiredness, we made it to the top of the climb and exhausted, in the dark, we set up our tent in a still-standing forest with the smell of eucalyptus.

Nowadays the daily challenges seem far more manageable, I don’t sweat the small stuff and let the day unfold as it will.

Sam:

This was a hard one to choose. We’ve had so many remarkable encounters. So, I decided to just go with the first photo that spoke to me. I *nearly* included a photo of us riding the school run with three of my four nephews and my brother, but I figured that missing them was a given…so, I chose the image above.

This was our first night camping in Morocco, and our second night on a new continent. It’s amazing looking back at this now, knowing how apprehensive we both were. We’ve come a long way, both in terms of kilometers and in how we now experience the world.

Q3:

After a year of living this way, how do you think Bimbling By Bike has changed what “home” means to you, and how is that shaping the way you’re thinking about the next chapters?

Beck:

I’m surprised by how little we need to survive and be happy. We’re living with whatever we can carry on a bike and our current ‘home’ is a tent or whatever accommodation we book. Almost every night is different and we have to adapt to that. The cliché is that ‘home it where the heart is’!

Looking to the future, I think I’d be happy with a really simple existence. We have also seen how others in other countries live simply (I accept not always through their own choice) and all the clutter that fills the western/European world feels quite unnecessary. We’ve never been very materialistic but I think that should we settle down somewhere (still a question as to where and when), our place will contain carefully selected items that we choose to live with and have a value to us. Filling a house with things seems difficult to picture now.

I don’t know yet what the future will look like. Right now, I’m enjoying the day-to-day riding and the discovery of new people and places. I think that when (if) the time comes, we will possibly know when it’s time to stop. I’m just looking forward to what comes next.

Sam:

This one feels quite obvious to me now, though I’d have struggled to answer it before leaving. To me, “home” means somewhere where constants exist and the place where your community / family are. As alluded to in the recent Everything Quicksand post, our days lack much in the way of constants and, as we’ve also mentioned before, we pass through places too quickly to really have a community. Of course there are many great pros from our lifestyle, but these are things I miss at times. I certainly wouldn’t refer to anywhere we have visited on our tour thus far as “home”. If I had to pick somewhere that gives a taste of it, I’d have to choose snuggling up in our tent together after a day of riding.

In terms of the next chapters, our possible—plans always in flux—return to Europe could phase back in some more familiar variables for a period of time. I think we are both looking forward to this as a time to recuperate a little before heading into more unfamiliar territory again.

More broadly, I’m being shaped by this tour in ways that will impact me longer term too. The bricks and mortar aspect of what one might call “home” holds less and less appeal, but some sort of development of a calm and supportive place to make art with others is a future “home” that’s really starting to gain traction in my brain…should we ever stop bimbling that is.

Bimbling By Bike - Year One in field recordings

Lastly—but hopefully not leastly—I have been recording a fair bit of audio on this trip and I decided to cobble it together into a release on Bandcamp.

Head to the release page on Bandcamp for the full experience - blurb / images / context / etc.

Thanks for reading, listening and commenting. Your interest and support has been a real boon in Year One. Here’s to much more Bimbling By Bike…