š pt. 2, weeks 1-10
OOoooOoo yeah, here we go, on the road again with around 15.000kms, lots of hills and many shared cups of tea ahead of me. It's been more than two months now since Iāve departed and I wonder whether youāve thought of me. Not in any kind of attention-seeking way, just a kind of sweet wondering of how much this project is still on peopleās minds, you know? <3 I've been working on this project so long that perhaps by now itās lost some of its specialty? Or the more humble realization might be that it was never that special to begin with (admittedly it really isnāt, plenty of white boys cycling halfway across the globe with the goal āto find themselvesā or something lofty like that). Just realize though that when I left home the first time in August 2024, I planned to be in India in 9 (!) months, and itās been almost 2 years now, and I still have more than 1 year to go. How did I get myself into this mess?
I know I am not forgotten, because ššon my last post about my concussion and recovery period, a handful of you left some really meaningful responses: Vidar, Atys, Avril, Charlie, Andree. I especially liked how Andree connected the dangerous idea of āthe big solo adventure to discover the worldā to colonialism and toxic masculinity: āto put your name on the map, isnāt it the perfectly manly thing to do? Wonāt everyone be so proud of us?ā Traveling is also the perfect form of running away, because it allows you to experience "progressā and āgrowthā by sheer virtue of moving through different places without having to do any emotive introspection. Vidar added this quote from Seneca almost 2000 years ago: "Are you surprised, [...] that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of character rather than a change of climate. Though you may cross vast spaces of sea, [...] your faults will follow you wherever you travel. [...] Do you ask why such flight does not help you? It is because you flee along with yourself." (Seneca, Letters to Lucillus, XXVIII)
Whether you remember the project or not is ultimately not of big importance. Luckily for me, I write these texts equally for you as I write them for me. Just like how making a book review forces me to wrestle with the ideas a book puts forward and to make them mine, writing these texts forces me to reflect on what Iāve gone through. Kind of like journalling, but then on a meta-level, spanning the arc of 2.5 months in a small blog post like this one.
When I was texting with Fleur this morning, the wonderful person who has translated lots of my English writings into Dutch out of sheer passion, she mentioned she had not been following my social media at all. Immensely applaudable and impressive, obviously, but it also means sheās missed out on so much cool stuff that has happened since Iāve left. And she isnāt alone in being absent from my shenanigans over on my @sebbiebikes page, I know for a fact that thereās a lot of you who are cool enough as to warrant not having social media accounts. So, for the benefit of both myself and you, hereās my first 10 weeks of being back on the bike.
the surprising wisdom of āgo outside and touch some grassā - a little excursion on overcomplicating our psychic workings.
It shouldnāt be a secret by now that this second departure came with mixed feelings. Who am I kidding, truthfully, it was pretty horrible. I immediately missed my mom, my best friends, the ferries running across the IJ and the glister on the water when you cross the Amstel river while cycling on Sarphatistraat. I missed leaving the bouldering hall feeling numb and satisfied in my body after getting totally immersed in pointless silly climbing problems with hot strangers. I missed the ability to bake my own bread and the accompanying sense of anticipatory boredom when waiting to do the next fold of the dough. I missed my room and carefully pondering which of the three types of incense sticks I owned would be lit. I missed dunking on our shitty landlord with house mates and serving them tofu scramble and I can continue for plenty longer with many other things I realized I missed when I was in the ICE train driving away from my loved ones.
But the fact was: I was driving away in a train to start my adventure again and so I had to make do with this reality. A lot of questions came at me at once: why am I doing this? Am I ready? Do I have a massively inflated ego? What if I donāt want to share my life and thoughts for the whole wide world to see? What if the toll is too big? I met my beloved Pietro for a night in Genova and spilled my heart out. I admitted I wasnāt doing so well and I wanted to disappear into some remote place for a while to gather my thoughts. Caring as he is, he suggested to bring me to a place some hour north of where he lived, to a mountain hut where heād go as a boy., trampling around the grassy fields. The idea of it brought me to tears and that surprised me. I guess I really was tired, wasn't I?
We like to think of ourselves as infinitely complicated beings whose psychological pathways we can never fully grasp when I experienced that the reality can be strikingly different and a lot more straightforward. Now Iām not saying to tell your depressed friend to "just go outside and touch some grassā but it also isn't the worst advice. Turns out that when you turn off your phone for a few days in a row, sleep a lot, spend time in nature, do conscious breathing, write in your journal and eat proper food, you will probably feel better. I ended up spending about a week camped close to the mountain hut of Pietroās childhood and when I left it I actually felt sort of ready for this ongoing adventure.
stuckness and the violence inflicted upon migrants by wasting their time
A big goal of this cycling project is to rethink āmigrationā. Iām able to move across the globe without much bureaucratic effort, picking up visa-on-arrivals along the way, getting myself all the way to Japan with relative ease. Obviously that situates me in a history of millions of people doing the exact same, but whose experiences vastly differ from mine. While last time I cycled across the Balkans, spending time with No Name Kitchen in the Bosnian/Croatian border, and the Bulgarian/Turkish border, this time I would expose myself to the Mediterranean sea border and share my learnings and reflections with you.
No Name Kitchen also has, as one of their eight bases, a base located in Ventimiglia, a coastal border town between France/Italy. The five volunteers welcomed me, offered me food, a bed and a shower, and then it was time to get to work. Ventimiglia was a strange place. Crossing from Italy into France was almost impossible. There were 3 options:
the train: in every train there are border guards that racially profile everybody in essentially every train and kick you out before the train gets to France
the highway: same procedure, the border guards seem to racially profile car drivers and cars
the hiking route: passes multiple military checkpoints, and once arrived in Menton (France) the police is immensely strict with picking out people who look like they don't have the right papers.
This means that Ventimiglia is a āstuckā place. A place where people, after having undergone the difficult illegalized migration journey (Iām always so impressed at the vast skills you need to traverse the route) are not really going further. And the violence of bureaucratic procedures became clear to me here. I spoke to Abdul Zahir, a guy a bit younger than me who came from Afghanistan to Denmark when he was 11. He went to school in Denmark, got a job, a house, a girlfriend, and then, in the snap of a finger, the Danish government decided not to renew his residency permit. They don't give out permanent residency permits to people like him anymore, a move that The Netherlands is also doing. He, along with Afghans across Europe, came to Italy to ask for protection there, since Italy is still relatively lenient towards Afghans.
The rage. The disrespect. Your life continuing in a place that you cannot return to, because if you return, youāll be put into prison and thrown out again.
