Act Big. Live Small.

“It’s dengue fever.”

With those three words, the doctor confirms what I know already – I’m seriously sick.

 I’ve been on my back in a little hotel in Cambodia for three days with a 40°C (104°F) temperature, losing it from both ends and so achy I can’t move from the bed except for the regular painful sprint to the toilet. Because my sodium levels are tanking, my brain is swelling inside my skull, giving rise to a constant debilitating headache that could drop an elephant. I haven’t slept in those three days.

It’ll be ten days before the fever breaks and I can take comfort that I’ve escaped the worst that dengue can throw at you, the bleeding-from-everywhere-haemorrhagic fever that half a million people develop and 25,000 die from every year.

It’s another month before I can get back on my bike. A visceral reminder of a principle that has guided my wife and I since we set off on a bicycle journey from Istanbul to Singapore: don’t be in a hurry. If I’ve learned one thing on this, my first big adventure, it’s the importance of time and toil. Just about anything can be accomplished with them, and nothing truly great is accomplished without them.

As I try to keep a warm, de-fizzed can of Sprite and a few crackers from rapidly exiting one or more orifices, I think about the significance of time. It’s ultimately what this trip is about; a chance to slow down. A chance to strip my life bare of the complexities I’ve saddled it with – career, money, house, relationships, hobbies, stuff – and pare down every day to its simplest elements: water, food, shelter and turning the pedals. It’s a chance to live, on the bicycles, at the speed of life.

While I sit in bed sweating like a pig, I cast my fevered brain back over a journey that so far has covered 11,000 kilometres, eight countries and eight months. Slowly, over days, an idea starts to form from these seemingly disconnected memories of my trek and my thoughts about time. A simple idea about not just getting more out of my time, but doing more with it:

Act Big. Live Small.

It sums up for me the lessons learnt on the road. It’s about getting more out of life by increasing the effects of how I act, while reducing the impact of how I live on the world around me. I flash back to moments in time that form the building blocks of this little epiphany; the first being the day the seed of this journey was planted 11 years ago.

Like many big ideas and great adventures, it starts with a trip to Ikea…

*

 My wife, Esther, and I bought our house in London in 2007. As you do when you have no stuff, we made the slog to Ikea to buy lots of it. Nearing the end of the Nordic retail labyrinth, thinking we couldn’t possibly need another Swedish thing in our lives, we spied a six-foot map of the world. We stood in front of it, open-mouthed, like kids glimpsing the bounty under the tree on Christmas morning. This is the kind of random stuff we needed.

Once up on the wall, the Big Bloody Map’s Mercator format made Asia look even more massive; trust me, it is. There might as well have been a huge neon sign on it blinking,

Go there…

Go there…

Go there…

From its modest beginnings in Scandinavian homewares, the idea of taking A Big Asian Trip ebbed and flowed through our day-to-day lives. Sometimes thinking about it was almost orgasmic, like an injection of adrenaline. Some days it was like Nelson from The Simpsons, pointing and taunting me with a “Hah hah!” as I sat, adventureless, in an office. For long periods – years – it barely got a thought, like that bit of damp on the bathroom wall you know you should do something about, but don’t.

In the end, Esther lit the adventure touch paper with a simple yet bold question. One grey January night in 2017, ten years after hanging the Big Bloody Map, she came home and said,

“Don’t feel you need to answer right now, but how about riding bicycles across Asia?”

The bikes we’d bought years ago on a cycle-to-work programme saw more action as drying racks for my underwear. Esther probably didn’t expect me to quickly say, “Why the fuck not?”

It’s like when you dare your brother to jump off the roof of your parents’ house with you, not expecting him to actually take you up on it. At that point we were both committed.

*

Dr. Kosal, a charming Cambodian man with delightful cartoon mannerisms, interrupts my reminiscing to hang a sodium IV. Mercifully, it keeps my brain from feeling like it’s going to explode through my eye sockets. Esther and I laugh about this knee-jerk ‘Say Yes’ moment that brought us from London to this moment – a doctor searching for a vein in my arm in a Cambodian guesthouse.

Circumstances we could never have predicted, surroundings we never could have imagined. We felt the same when we first cast our eyes on the mountains, and our legs strained to push us thousands of metres up into their lofty peaks…

*

It’s the mountains that rekindled a long-standing reverence for and connection with nature which is at the core of ‘act big, live small’. John Muir said, “The mountains are calling, and I must go” (1). And despite growing up in Pennsylvania, where the highest point is 979 meters, the mountains called me out on this adventure. It’s no mistake that the routes I plotted took in some of the highest roads and trails in Asia. I wanted to see the mountains up close. Esther was less convinced at first. As we painfully built our climbing legs on the up-and-down hills of central Turkey, she Googled ‘world’s flattest country’. It’s the Maldives, but much less conducive to long-distance cycling.

As we approached the Zagari Pass in the Georgian Caucasus a few weeks later, the yearning for flatness was forgotten. We climbed to 2,600 metres – it felt like I could reach my fingers into the cold snow permanently sat on the astonishingly elegant, elongated peak of Shkara, Georgia’s highest mountain at 5,193 meters. Rainbow-hued swaths of wildflowers coated her base. She ignited a torrid love affair with a mountain range that runs the length of the Eurasian continent – from the Taurus, the Caucasus, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush, to the Altay, the Tian Shan, the Karakoram and the Himalayas.

The draw isn’t just their sheer size or beauty. Legendary mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev said, “Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion”. (2) I understand Boukreev’s adoration – nature is my divine, too, and the mountains taught me that what’s important is out there, not behind my desk.

As we cycled the lunar landscape of Tajikistan’s 4,655 metre Ak-Baital Pass, the thin air created a backdrop of the deepest blue to the rusty and blood-red shades of the Pamir Mountains. I was awestruck despite the lung-busting climb and the sometimes un-cyclable ‘path’ of rubble oatmeal. And I understood the adoration a little more.

Because the mountains made us. Seventy million years ago the Arabia and India landmasses collided with the Eurasian mainland, violently thrusting up these ranges. These in turn created new weather patterns, bringing huge rainfalls to their slopes that transported sediment to fertile plains like those we cycled through in the Wakhan Corridor, which have supported human life for millennia.

And sometime in the next 100 or 200 million years, the continents as they exist today will come together again. New oceans and new ranges will form, long after the highest mountains we cycled through are eroded to nubs. I see a responsibility and purpose in considering what faint memories we will leave in the rocks.

*

Dr. Kosal interrupts my mountain reverie to stick another IV in my arm. Potassium? Magnesium? I’ve lost track. As I contemplate popping one of the Valium he’s casually tossed me, I think about ‘running away’ on the bikes at 44. It’s a lot flipping harder than I thought it would be.

It’s not like when I was seven and I threw a few Oreos and a pair of Superman Underoos in my Speed Racer lunch box and ran out the back door. I made it about 100 metres into the woods for a few hours until I started to wonder what Mum was cooking for dinner.

It takes us a second to commit to cycling across the earth’s largest landmass; it takes us months to strip away years of accumulated commitments, like layers of varnish. At one point our local Oxfam charity shop in Tooting had most of the contents of our lounge artfully arranged in the shop window, a museum exhibition on the Zimmers.

We haven’t missed much on the road, bar the odd ice cube, the Sunday papers and the football. We get more and more out of every day with less and less. ‘Less is more’ has become comfortable, normal. It’s an adage made real for us by the story of Mom and Michella…

 It was toffee pudding weather – hot and sticky. “Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot”, as Neil Simon wrote (3). Our train from the crumbling Art Deco station in Kampot, Cambodia was three hours late. Food and cold beer were fast becoming priorities.

I heard a woman in French-accented English explaining to a few other tourists what the local women were selling on the platform. I started talking with her about some of the other funkier things available – fetal eggs, alien fruit.

“I’m Mom, like short for ‘mother”, she said as we introduced ourselves over a few crunchy fingers of green mango. “You dip them in the little bag of chili and salt”, she explained.

I asked where she was from, assuming that, despite Asian features, her excellent French and English meant she’d come from elsewhere.

“We left Cambodia in 1975 when I was seven on the day the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh. We’ve lived in Paris most of our lives. I’ve returned since, but this is the first time Michella [her sister at her side] has been back since we left 44 years ago”.

Esther and I were stunned for several seconds. We’d heard about the emptying of Phnom Penh but never met anyone who’d lived through it. The day the Khmer Rouge took the city, they walked the streets telling every resident to leave because the Americans were going to start bombing. The motive behind the lie was to drive people into the country to work the newly collectivised farms. Phnom Penh lay abandoned for the next four years.

“I just have flashes of pictures, but I was only eight,” Michella said, sometimes looking to Mom for a word. “I can’t remember the horror of that time as people describe it”.

“I do remember the soldiers saying we had 24 hours to leave”, said Mom. “There were six children in our family, my mother had lost another four children at birth”.

Their mother was a cousin of King Sihanouk, deposed shortly before the civil war, so they had been raised in a position of some privilege.

“At that point, my mother had never given me a bath. Each of us had our own nanny and when it was bath time, we were handed over to them”.

I can’t fathom what went through their mother’s head at that moment. She had lost four children and never fully raised the other six without a team of nannies. Now she was told she had a day to leave their entire lives behind. But I imagined a determined woman – a formidable woman – similar to the two standing on the platform with me.

“Even after we left Cambodia, she didn’t bathe us. My older sister raised us mostly while my mother did business, selling jewellery and family things to provide for us. My mother is now 78 and still smokes twenty cigarettes a day”.

She didn’t bathe her kids, but she dragged six of them through an unfathomable hell to a new life. Mom and Michella’s mother may lack certain old-fashioned ideals of maternity, but in my opinion, she’s an effing badass. In less than 24 hours, she started the family on a 300km walk to Saigon.

“We had a small car, but the family pig rode in the back while we walked alongside”, said Mom with a giggle.

I can picture the family marching out of Phnom Penh, their mother with a cigarette clamped firmly between her lips, and the pig's head poking out of the car window like a Far Side cartoon. An illusion of humour amidst a life-or-death predicament. They made it to Vietnam, where their father was imprisoned as a Cambodian air force officer, and eventually immigrated to France three years later.

There wasn’t a hint of sadness in Mom’s voice even as she described their return to their old house. They asked the current owners if they could look around. When Phnom Penh was liberated they were a world away, unable to reclaim their home.

“We remembered where we slept”, Mom said simply. I got the impression this is a situation many Cambodians have come to terms with – uprooted families, lost homes, lost loved ones. But Mom surprised me and drove the lesson home when she said she was going to sell her Paris flat and move back to Phnom Penh.

“My children are here. And you don’t need things here, you don’t need much to live and enjoy life. In Europe, you need lots of things to live. In Cambodia, you need a room to sleep in. Everything else is outside. Easy”.

*

The fever finally breaks. I breathe a wheezy sigh of relief that the Internet images of Ebola-like bleeding haven’t become reality. I get back on my feet, slowly – the Mekong is an ideal environment for sluggish convalescence. I walk along languid stretches of the river, evocative of a different time, slowing my stride to match the pace of life in Cambodia and Laos, where I spent several weeks recovering in Vientiane. I find myself slowing down more and more to absorb what’s in front of me.

The impetus for taking to the bikes wasn’t about seeking a life-changing experience. It was about seeking a perspective-changing experience. Adventure, at the end of the day, is simply doing something that’s out of the ordinary for you, whether big like cycling Asia or small like spending a few hours in the woods as a kid with my lunchbox. In trying something out of the ordinary, we challenge our point of view.

Getting on the bike allows me to see the world at a human pace, rather than it whizzing by through a grimy windscreen. And it’s the perspective shift that lets me empathise with things outside my frame of reference. We’re inundated with references to environmental crises and social breakdown. It’s easy to become numb to it. But on the bike I can see, intimately, the impact of the life I’m leading, a realisation delivered to me like a punch to the gut as I cycle through some of the most striking landscapes on earth…

*

It wasn’t until vomit rose in my throat from the stench of household rubbish dumped down the greenest of green hillsides in the Vietnamese jungles that the realisation hit me.

It wasn’t until my eyes burned and streamed from the nuclear winter-style smog in northern Thailand, caused by fires lit to clear forest for grazing, that I understood the giant bloody pickle we’re in.

It wasn’t until I saw the hundreds of artificial limbs lining a wall in a museum in Laos, the legacy of 100 million unexploded bombs from America’s undeclared war on the country, that I wondered when we were going to get our heads out of our collective butts.

It wasn’t until I cycled the streets of Sihanoukville – where the unfettered, corruption-fuelled pursuit of economic growth has driven the construction of over a hundred Chinese casinos, turning a once sleepy coastal Cambodian town into a polluted wasteland – that I thought, “Damn. I don’t think we’re going to turn this around.”

But a simple handshake in Georgia helped me understand that individual actions can build to something bigger.

As we pedalled through the Caucasus, a landscape that would send the average Instagram junkie into a sexual euphoria, we stopped to fill our bottles at a small mountain spring far from anything. Rubbish was scattered everywhere – bottles, bags, wrappers, cans. In that moment, I saw Esther’s heart break a little. Without thinking, we started picking up a few things. Soon we’d filled an old concrete sack with several hundred bits of discarded rubbish. A 4x4 stopped a few metres ahead and a Georgian man walked up to us. With a leathery, sun-creased smile, he looked us each in the eye and shook our hands slowly. Lacking a common language, his modest ‘thank you’ was a lightning bolt.

His validation of our actions hit home – how I act can make an impact, even if for one person. At times, when the pollution, poverty and inhumanity seemed like the constant background noise to otherwise intoxicating people and landscapes, the challenge felt insurmountable. We loved every minute of every day on the bikes, but the journey pointedly brought to life the knife-edge we seem to be balanced on.

* 

My recovery continues, fortified by cold Beer Laos - one of the world’s great hot weather beers – under a sultry haze in Vientiane, a sleepy gem of a city. It’s surprising how completely comfortable I feel as part of the Vientiane furniture. But if I’d have followed others’ advice, I would’ve never got on the bike in the first place, let alone found contentment a world away…

*

 As we shared plans for our trip and sought advice from other adventurers, an American cyclist on a touring forum wrote:

“You’re brave to be going to the ‘Stans. Especially your wife”.

It’s the ignorance that got me, the assumption that anything ‘different’ equals ‘worse’ or ‘dangerous’. It’s vanity and insecurity that blocks us from divorcing a government from its people, a religion from its practitioners. All Americans aren’t narcissistic, egomaniacal morons. So why assume someone from a ‘Stan is anything like their autocratic leader?

My parents taught me the ‘all are created equal’ ethos from the moment I could think for myself, so I was surprised that getting them to ‘sign the permission slip’ for my trip ended up being the hardest bloody part of the whole odyssey. When we told Esther’s 78-year-old mum about our adventure, she asked, “Can I come?” She was serious.

My parents, two very well educated and liberal people, took the express train to, “Are you nuts?”

They assumed that people would treat Americans with the same disdain that the current insular American government now treats the rest of world, so travelling through the ‘Stans on bicycles invited a kidnapping scenario out of some crappy Steven Segal movie. I was angry that I had to rationalise the trip. I also came to appreciate their perspective, fuelled by the constant barrage of alarmist media.  

With regular phone calls, an expensive personal locator beacon and my patience-of-a-saint sister who taught them to follow us online (neither Mum nor Dad had ever turned on a computer), we got them on board.

Then, two weeks before we were due to cross the border into Tajikistan, four cyclists were killed along our planned route by a lone ISIS fanatic. As the murders hit the front page of the New York Times, Dad dictated the equivalent of a ‘cease-and-desist letter’ – his lawyerly habits die hard – to my sister begging us to return. We didn’t think twice about continuing.

*

I gradually rebuild my strength in Vientiane – if you’re looking to eat yourself back to good health, you can’t do much better than Laotian cooking. As I shove another handful of sticky rice in my mouth – dipped in a bowl of jaew, a fiery tomato dip – I reflect on what made continuing our journey a foregone conclusion despite the deaths of our fellow cycling adventurers. It’s not the bikes or the food or the landscapes. It’s the many random acts of humanity that made staying in the saddle an easy decision. And two in particular remind me that goodwill is a universal language, no matter where you go....

*

We left Istanbul at the beginning of Ramadan, having no idea what to expect of the places we’d see or people we’d meet. We hadn’t even ridden our bikes with the panniers on and loaded until that point.

Within a few miles of Istanbul, the first of many people pulled over to pop their trunks and hand us wobbly cyclists a bag of freshly picked cherries. After a hot morning drinking tepid water, they were like ambrosia. Our handlebars and panniers soon groaned under the weight of greengages and mulberries as fruit sellers regularly flagged us down. The women often took pains to tell us, proudly, that they did the picking.

In the Ottoman town of Tarakli, we walked down an old market street looking for a place to eat. We tried to respect our Turkish hosts and not eat in plain sight while they fasted, so some days we were famished by sundown. We passed an open door with tables out front and peeked in. Before we could decide if it was a home or restaurant, a Lovely Old Woman, as she will forever be known, motioned us in.

If there is an idyllic example of the Lovely Old Woman, it was her – from the wise, twinkly eyes to the beautiful, round, crinkly face and the simple scarf framing it, to the way she tut-tutted about us and the warm, weathered hand she used to pull us here and there.

She guided me to the table out front and pointed Esther inside. We were confused until I realised that I was to eat with the men and Esther was to eat inside with the women. I heard a chorus of friendly laughs and chirping as Esther entered. I later learned that these were sounds of welcome and approval. We were conscious to dress to the local norms, and the Lovely Old Woman, seeing Esther’s effort, made a big fuss to show her off to the other women. They whole-heartedly approved of Esther’s shawl and long skirt, welcoming her like an old friend.

A hugely satisfying meal of lentil soup, salad, rice pilaf, beans and trays of fruit – a typical Ramadan meal – was laid in front of me and other guests, some who seem familiar to our hosts and some strangers. The local mosque fired the cannon signalling 8:21pm – sunset – and we tucked in with relish. By 8:27, plates were licked clean.

Eventually Esther was released to join me outside for the mandatory cups of tea, but not before the women hugged the stuffing out of her. At some point I tried, using my Google Turkish, to pay for our meal, but the Lovely Old Woman quickly made it clear that it was her pleasure – if not duty – to welcome strangers to break the Ramadan fast. She sat between us with her arms on our shoulders, like we were children returning home from a long journey.

*

Another bottle of cold Beer Laos cools the jaew’s chili fire, but the warm glow of that night with the Lovely Old Woman remains, a glow that subsequent Turks, Georgians, Azeris, Uzbeks, Tajiks – and one truly wonderful Kyrgyz grandmother – would only intensify…

*

We were 50 kilometres from Osh, on the home stretch of four weeks cycling the unforgettable Wakhan Corridor and Pamir Highway – high passes, 360-degree mountain views, lives lived above the treeline. We were setting up our tent along a roadside stream when a determined looking Kyrgyz woman – Apa was her name – marched purposefully our way, pushing a pram. We expected to get an earful from her for maybe camping where we shouldn’t. If she’d been my grandmother, Naomi, she’d have had a wooden spoon in her hand, ready to crack it across my bum. She had that look on her face.

We got the earful, but not quite for the reason we expected. We managed to figure out with a couple of Russian words that she was saying,

“You can’t sleep here – it’s too cold”.

We told her we’d been camping for months across Central Asia, but she wasn’t having it. We had no choice but to repack our gear – she had a force of character that demanded compliance – and follow her up the hill to the house she shared with her son, his wife and the world’s most adorable baby granddaughter.

She showed us to a simple, warm room, and we watched her issue orders to her daughter-in-law like a field commander. Tea appeared in seconds, a hearty dinner of soup and dumplings shortly after.

We spent some time ‘chatting’ with Apa – she’d say something to me in Kyrgyz and when I’d apologetically shrug my shoulders, she’d put her hand on my arm and laugh hysterically. Esther was sure she was flirting. We also tried subtly but desperately to finagle a cuddle with the baby. Apa held onto her with some sort of grandmother tractor beam that even Obi Wan couldn’t breach.

In the morning, fresh bread and homemade jam awaited us. I offered a small thanks to the gods (and to Apa’s imperturbable daughter-in-law) for a break from the standard breakfast Esther and I made ourselves; paper-paste porridge.

As I loaded up our bikes, Esther achieved the unthinkable as the baby was passed to her; she looked at me like Indiana Jones securing the golden idol.  

We tried to give Apa the going rate for room and board; I didn’t need to speak Kyrgyz to understand her response. I’m surprised she didn’t give me a slap on the hand. We did sneak a note and a few dollars under our pillow; I’ve always wondered if my shaky Cyrillic printing made any sense.

The moral of my time in these ‘no go’ countries was an affecting one – that the most basic act of humanity is to show hospitality to another. A roof under which to rest road-weary bones, a cup of tea, a bag of cherries. I wondered if, on seeing a stranger in my city, I’d be so quick to invite them into my home before even knowing their name?

*

My time in Vientiane has me feeling recharged. Esther and I sit in our ‘happy place’ – a little street stall selling heaping bowls of spicy noodle soup – and decide I’m ready to get back on the bike. I miss the daily routine of the bikes. Esther thoughtfully suggests we restart with a route up some of the steepest climbs in Laos. Thanks for that, Sweet pea.

For the first time, there is some urgency in our planning; as we plan our first ride in a month, we’re also contemplating the end of our journey. I could easily cycle for another year or more, despite coughing up a lung on the first Laotian hills. A streak of practicality runs through our thinking – we’ve had a glorious run of good fortune (barring dengue) and a job offer has come up back in London; an offer that allows a big step towards the life we want to live. We’re still working to define what that is; but we’re 100% certain, after a year on the road, that it’s something dramatically different.

As with the start of our journey, a random question provides a jolt to the system at the end…

*

I’d been following a few long-distance cycling groups online. Not knowing my elbow from a Rohloff hub a year ago, I used them for research. Now I’m enjoying answering questions posed by others about to take to the road. Close to passing out after my first post-dengue rides, I see a post from a cyclist about to return from his own year-long journey. He asks the group:

“What should I expect when I return home, and what will it be like settling back into normal life?”

His question immediately makes me feel mentally queasy, but I can’t place why. I read it to Esther; her reply clears my unease like some sort of brain enema.

“That’s the wrong bloody question”, Esther says. “You should ask yourself, ‘What do you want your life to be like when you return?’”

She’s instantly turned the question from a passive one to an active one. We made the big decision to take to the bikes to challenge our way of living – why the hell would we want to go back to things as they were? What I left is not what I want to return to. So I had to take the initiative, apply what I learnt on the bike and make my life what I wanted it to be.

When you confront things – people, places, ideas – that make you a little uncomfortable, you learn. When you do things that are out of the ordinary, whatever your definition of ordinary may be, you learn. And ‘when we know better we tend to act better’, as conservationist Darrick Thomson said to me once.

What I learnt on the road, with a bit of dengue-facilitated introspection, was as important as the journey itself. Discovering that I don’t need much to be happy. How a reverence for nature made me rethink the impact my lifestyle was having on the world around me. Recognising that every small positive action matters. Understanding that goodwill is a universal language. If I read these thoughts to a few friends, they’d probably say, “Zim, don’t be a wuss”. But these pedal-bound bombshells crystallised an idea painfully obvious to my now 46-year-old self that I wouldn’t have appreciated in my 20s:

Act Big. Live Small.

I got off of the bike thinking that I didn’t just want things to be different when I returned – I wanted to, for once, be the difference, even if in my own small way.

Now I know how.

*

(1)  Letter from John Muir to Sarah Muir Galloway, University of the Pacific, ©1984 Muir-Hanna Trust.

(2)  Anatolie Boukreev & Linda Wylie, Above the Clouds (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002).

(3)  Simon, Biloxi Blues (New York: Samuel French, 1986).