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 kilometers). May I try to inspire you once more, and promised, the next time with a touring story.
This is the last post in the Little Dutch Farmer aka Permaculture series! What went before is post 3: Travel & food: a happy marriage (summer 2021). Post 2: The juggling housewife (summer 2021). Post 1: It’s all about food (early spring 2021). The little Dutch farmer shows winter and early spring when we had nothing going yet. A short update from the here and now shows our coming to Hungary.
There were times, when I cycled in Patagonia for example, that I did not look forward to the day. I’d wake up and know it’d be a hard day. A day with cold gripping at my toes, making me colder the further I’d climb towards a snowy pass. There were many days with rain, one day after the other, the only thing visible a black strip of tarmac and not much else. Cold and mist, clouds and wet camp spots. Such days I had to muster myself to see some beauty and to somehow look forward to the day ahead. Just like when I worked, at times I had to find reason why I would look forward to the day coming. I did however always succeed.
The photo below shows me not enjoying Patagonia, all the folowing pictures are of a higher Hungarian enjoyment.
Food. One can not do otherwise than loving Indian street food, in particular the dishes available at truck dhaba’s. The inventiveness of African mom’s is not to dismiss either. They cook up delicious meals with leavy vegetables and home-made palm oil. A delight for a cyclist on sandy roads through the few patches of virgin forest. I vividly remember my breakfast at restaurants lining the streets in Sana’a, though busy with clientele I would eat in quietness. Fresh fish perfectly fried, while goat heads would simmer next to where I sat. In the far away past I would wander the streets of Bangladesh and Pakistan in search of a restaurant mentioned in the Lonely Planet, sometimes it took me hours to find such place, not seldom wandering off forgetting to eat. Though my own prepared sugary tomato paste pasta in the desert was tasty and bread fried in olive oil whether at a soppy wet Patagonian patch, the hostile windy pampa or a sweltering Argentinian yerba mate grove was always good enough. Food mixed up with sand in Mauritania, quick decaying beef in warm sunny Bolivia and constipation enhancing dishes in Paraguay, it all had its charm.
Cycling the desert, the Atacama in particular, is a state of awareness, a way of living, a manner of being perhaps best comparable to be on a high. The swollen covering of such an opiate is simply all encompassing. Of course, such a state can not last, unless perhaps one sinks into it and finds himself unable to reach the utmost crosspiece of the ladder, instead hovering half way, at best, most of the time.
I’d like to say I live a slow life. A slow life in the sleepy countryside. We are relatively detached from negative influences and time does not have a play in our lives. A slow life.
My new experience of a winter in Hungary, for The ‘Farmer’ I feel, was challenging, to say the least. There was no soil to turn over (well… not that I knew of). There were no weeds to discover (well… not that I knew of). There was no comfort for a tour, not even a little one. I tried.
Cycling Cindy