Years of traveling brought me many different insights, philosophies and countries I needed to be (over 90 in total). I lived in Pakistan, went over 15 times to India and when I stopped cycling the world, that was after 50.000 kilometer through 45 countries, I met Geo. Together we now try to be more self-sustainable, grow our own food and live off-grid. I now juggle with the logistics of being an old-fashioned housewife, cook and creative artist loving the outdoors. The pouches I create are for sale on www.cindyneedleart.com
Making plans is not my strongest asset but for a short hike near the Etna all I know is that I don’t need to go to the top. Elevation stays roughly between 1400 and 2000 meter and the loop is about 37 kilometer in total. Wild camping is not really allowed but also not really forbidden. The beauty coming my way is of another planet altogether. A world I love: barren and lush at the same time.
Rules and regulations. Do we agree with them because we have to or do we only keep the ones that fit us. Some rules come naturally to most of us while others seem to especially restrict. In a city, or anywhere people live close, rules are a must. But when city people would feel restricted, how will they free themselves from it? Or will restricted feelings turn into a new normal?
‘Are you camping?’ asks a slightly older man who sit in the front passengers seat of an overland vehicle, cranking his body forward, shining with anticipation. ‘Yes, I am,’ is my reply and the man, who has hired a female tour guide with jeep to drive through the canyons of Tabernas is beaming, as if he much rather want to camp too, instead sits in a car. ‘Oh, that is fantastic’, he bounces back. ´It is!´ I reply in a high pitched voice. The driver guide isn’t upbeat with my answer and has a look on her face as if she just swallowed a green plum. Camping is not allowed, really, and earlier she’d threatened Alex (the homeless camper I bumped into when stealth camping) with police because he was openly making a camp fire to cook.
Reaching Abla from an unintended and quite uninteresting angle might not have been so stunning, yet I find all the groceries that I wanted in the only shop open on a Sunday morning. Very satisfied pulling the trailer stuffed to its maximum capacity I enter a café to eat scrambled eggs and coffee, the two things I can’t prepare myself.
Walking (for some time) is liberating in many ways. There’s a sudden very clear goal. It is a goal made by myself and even though it is deceptive one, it brings me incredible much joy. I have plenty of challenge and every second is new to my mind. I don’t know where I will sleep the night and to not know is pleasant. Worries arises in thin air because walls that bounces thoughts back and forth are not any longer there. Hot flashes are gone and excess energy get used up. I lack no social interaction and the balance between alone and adventurous input is just perfect. I have a loving partner to whom I can share my experiences, for social media I need not to switch on the roaming data. My social media are the people I talk to and Geo who is together with cat V.
Something hits me like a comet, a tingling uplifting feeling that a young Italian psychologist delivers, just arrived from her travel to Thailand, she’s now trying to help me.
How can I be better emerged into a mountainous landscape when I am dropped right next to it and I simply cycle back home. The best of both worlds, so off to pack these old panniers (post 1).
A huge cross marks the end of the climb, a lone shepherd waves me ‘dobar dan’. As always I am hugely curious what comes on the other side. And what comes takes me by surprise: a seemingly flat landscape that stretches far, edged with peaks and a single road in an almost straight line passing through. There’s hardly any traffic and the prospect of being on a plateau high up after climbing makes me jumpy and excited.
Can the mind be mended to do a steep climb even though it haven’t climbed in years? It is just a matter of eating well, having slept nicely and wanting to do that climb. A few months ago I went along the same climb up to 1100 meter, on foot with a trailer. I want to reach that immense beautiful field of openness again, now with a bicycle. I am sure I can do it.
The blog is full and I need to divert you to my creative blog for the new write up. It is mainly because I keep photographing the beauty I am surrounded by that I want to give these images a place. Next post is about some good old-fashioned cycling (yes, on a bicycle) while this is about home. Skip it if you’re not into plants, green and beauty. So, here’s to read and see the new post…
The tapestry of being self sufficient becomes complex. There, lilac flowers hanging to dry turning deeper purple against the wooden structure that once held corn to dry, I notice a beauty I would have admired while travelling past: now it’s where I am.
Seeing, sitting from an old barn, birds accidentally flying in while buzzing overhead from insects nestling in the wooden ceiling, I know there’s no turning back into a style that I once, and still, longed for.
‘Bom caminho’ I hear loud and clear. The voice is so near to me that wind is not needed to carry the voice to my ears. I am walking on a stretch with some pilgrims behind me and I am happily surprised to be greeted with this standard line. Then I see the plump man who a day earlier was engrossed on his phone while I slung ‘bom caminho’ at him. I realize he does this to make fun of me. Sure enough he talks to me, asking whether the trailer is easier on a downhill or uphill. ‘None of them’, I reply ‘especially not now I have a shin splint.’ For some time we walk together, reluctantly, and we do talk a tiny bit. He’s American and I imagine him a leader in some business: a moody executive who uses few words, instead staring at a screen of either a phone or a notebook to plan the walk from Porto to Santiago de Compostella. A route that needs precious little planning. We walk a same pace, in the rain and I can’t help mentioning the rain. He, walking briskly from one dry hostel to the next dry hostel, covered in rain gear, appearing one black cone of melted plastic, answers: ‘All in all, it’s not that bad with the rain.’
This Snowpeak pot is a stainless steel tea kettle and was bought for the sole purpose of having it a spout. Using the plain rimmed MSR Alpine StowAway pot to pour chai was always a mess, with quite some amount of chai lost.
It took me a long time to come up with a decent meal cooked in camp. Having eaten pasta with sugared tomato paste for over a year I knew that should not have to be repeated ever again but how do you cook a tasty meal when you are not a cook and one that is also low on gas and water consumption?
I develop pinpricks in the Achilles heel and neck. Impetigo starts, a highly contagious skin infection, spreading on my hand. But most disturbing is the pain in my shin. Geo and I walk apart and have about 25 kilometer between us at the end of a day. Being a bit before Porto I feel I need a break. That means Geo has to bring himself to a halt too.
We meet in an elderly home run by Christian church that doubles as a hospital and kindergarten where also a dormitory for pilgrims is. But we can stay only one night. Geo books us a room in a private home a bit off the route for the next days and to get there is another walk through uninspiring towns. One neighborhood after the other like clay balls strung on a thread.
It took me quite some figuring out how to beat the constipation of camping food after I started wholesome healthy home grown food diet.
Long ago I was a few days in Portugal. And here I am again, much longer. And I am in a crowd of Africans, dressed in down jackets, some with slippers, some even rather fat and some also, indeed, skinny. ‘They are from Gambia, Senegal and Ghana,’ says the young Algerian doctor who left his country because of the problems he had with his boss, ‘they are from very poor countries’, he adds. He himself came by airplane and wants to become rich.
Arriving in darkness Portugal from above looks like it is filled with thick curls that glow in the dark. It are the streets, the countless lanes on hills and between that connect without much interruption. It is here we will start our 6 week walk and I wonder where I will pitch my tent in between these soft glowing lighted hills?
Every burst of sunlight is an immediate thrust of a lance, straight through my brain and heart and the only decision on such winter days are which way I go. Left or right? It isn’t that difficult, yet with the knowledge that neither left nor right is anything to see, I have to be positive and find something to go to. The cabinet of my brain is filled with connections to forgotten tombs and chapels. I can braid together the multiple forests paths to a maze of sense. Read more
Previous part of this post: It is SAD I
I don’t know where to begin. With what I learned perhaps? But is that interesting or even feasible in my attempt to inspire you? Or shall I simply write a bit about what life means in the countryside of Hungary? Read more…
Pag stood out in my mind as stark beauty. I remember that when I was there it reminded me of the Pakistan desert. Geo brings me 70 kilometer from where the ferry will erupt me on its bleak bare flanks while he himself drives on for 300 more kilometers. Not exactly ‘exploring in each others vicinity’ but I desperately want to be on Pag while Geo does not. The island with no trees I so much look forward to. The island existing of fences. Two things my mind mixed up and made its own Pag in my recollection. A week later, when Geo picks me up and we drive away from the peninsula in to the hills I meet with surroundings I much rather had wanted to be in.
Two reactions were of happily surprise: the first that I got to know a Hungarian footbiker, the second that we would meet with our footbikes. Szandra, you are a tourguide in Budapest and there are many ways to choose how to guide people through Budapest. The city is big and walking will take long. An open bus is another way. Or a boat. Maybe even these stand up electric mobility scooters. Fatbike electric rollers. You name it, it is all out there.
Since my late 30’s I started to desire my own home but it was a mild desire. Traveling always had the priority, until I reached the 45 and it became obvious I spend more time in camp spots than on the bicycle. Now that Geo and I have an own home, including 4 cats (accidently 3 too many) I find it remarkable that the pull to get back home and water-bath my tomatoes is rather strong.
Is the limit based on being-away time before this homely pull kicks in, or is it the destination that we set which has been reached?
It is not about a journey but the effects of one.
To continue with where I left in part I, about disturbing factors, it perhaps comes down to what is written a bit further down. On one of my long travels through India I wanted to form a more sturdy opinion about ashrams than what I’d red in books. Though two books in particular that I red in ashrams were eye opening (and my opinion about ashrams? That I keep for another time).
Suddenly I am less than a meter away from other people. Hordes of them are flowing past me and I am among a melange of holiday makers, culture seekers and youngsters going for adventure in Zagreb. Glad that I washed myself properly at the warm water basin before I mingled. Glad as well that I was born in 1972 where countries were still very much distinguished when I traveled through them.
Compelled to share my ideas of the forest as I have never been so much in them. Not my favorite kind of landscape, by far not as there is really not much to see when it comes to sweeping distances. Unending waves of land like a desert are none. Yet, there is this strong pull to be in the forest.
I felt the desire to write a little bit, but the tiredness from another sweaty shallow menopausal night kept me from finding a short, to the point topic. But luckily, not having a paid job, I decide to take it easy today and answer someone’s personal message which offered me an interesting topic. Read more
This post starts with part I
Like all seasoned cyclists, nervous about setting up my tent somewhere is not an issue anymore. We have done this so often that I look at every spot in nature as a potential place to camp, even when I do not need to camp.
Days roll into weeks and being absorbed into our own little bulb where silence, peace and no-nonsense makes for a supporting base to create, grow and admire, I find it difficult to leave. Yet I know that out in nature all that I don’t have in my own quiet green cocoon is present. I call it the magic of plant life; a strange realization for the traveler I was.
I know most people who read this are not interested in vegetables, and the thing is, I wasn’t so much either a couple of years ago. Same when I met a Dutch cyclist in Pakistan, I was not interested the slightest bit (a few years prior that I cycled 50.000 kilometres). May I try to inspire you once more, and promised, the next time with a touring story.
Before I can write a story about a kickbike travel, I first need to go on a tour (it’s in the planning). For now, let me allow you to share a very short story about Llama.
‘Cold is not the issue,’ says José, ‘but the fact that your holiday is over and that you need to work again.’
I told José that I am happy to go home and work, although it is a cold Hungarian home. José is our Airbnb host and he’s accommodating us from his third floor apartment in Málaga. He works behind a couple of computers, curtains drawn closed, balcony door open for the cigarette smoke to escape and a can of beer within reach.
Part 1. Kickbiking. Why and how?
Part 2. Kickbiking. Can I do this too?
Part 3. How is the set-up? From an illogical set-up to one that works.
A write-up from 2020 unearthed:
After 50.000 kilometer cycling in roughly 5 years, through West Africa, Europe, Middle East, Indian continent and South America I thought it’ll be peanuts to kickbike a relative little loop somewhere through USA. Wrong. Yes, I needed a challenge. But I sort of forgot, or took out of the equation, that every new endeavor needs practice.
The difference with a bicycle to a kickbike is that I can make more kilometers and can reach further out and therefor see ‘far-flung’ beauty in Croatia. That’s where I am heading.
I was inspired to work on this write-up after a very kind someone asked me several times to go by car and have beverages at a cafe in town, as ‘I needed a change of environment’. Soon after a second happening surprised me: the dependency of another very kind person’s expectations way beyond what has become my natural way of living.
It is not about a journey but the effects of a journey.
Days of kicking: 9. Total distance: 275 kilometer. Average on a day: 30 kilometer while average speed is about 11 km/per hour. Nights of camping: 10. Average a day spend: € 5,60 (exclusive the new tick tweezer and the food I brought along ).
Clothes laundered in a creek, wet stinky shoes and a damp sleeping bag drying in a fishy corner surrounded by overflowing containers with unwanted-clothing, far removed from the main entrance of Tesco supermarket. I feel too old for it. Like I felt too old, or outgrown, for hostels and bunk beds. The last bunked I shared was in Malaysia; a room without a window, dark as a cell, except when the only female roommate stumbled in at night and left the light on. I must have been 35 years of age. Always been a loner, I disliked these dorms.
Kéktúra: an almost 1200 kilometer long walking trail through the upper part of Hungary. I kick a tiny part. Days of kicking: 3/Days in camp: 2/Average speed: 9/Maximum kilometers in a day: 60
Distance made: 65 kilometer. Average speed: 7.6. Number of nights: 5. Coldest temperature: minus 7.
Every time Geo and I drive in the car with lake Balaton quietly looming in the distance, the low series of mountains sharply contrasting, appearing to be a man-made painting, I feel a strong desire to be on those hills, looking out over the lake and absorbing the unrealistic looking shapes embracing the lake.
Cycling Cindy