Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
bike after a day's ride and spooning in a mash of sardines, potatoes and Russian
soup mix. In the past year, they hadn't wondered what it was like over the horizon,
nor had they ridden off to find out. Here, we just looked like a couple of ragged
tramps.
It made me acutely aware of just how lucky we had been. The million and one
unique experiences had been more than just sights, people and places; they were
pots of happiness and growth to hold close to the heart.
Eventually, we were brought to life by the intense cold.
'C'mon, you lazy bloody New South Welshman, let's get this tent up!' I mur-
mured in an attempt to rattle some life into Chris.
'Yeah, all right. Gee, glad I'm not on cooking tonight!' he replied, with a cheeky
smile.
We went to bed in the wet and woke with the ugly task of sliding sopping wet
socks back onto our feet. I climbed onto a bike that was in tatters. Many parts were
held together by grey tape like a crude life-support system - the bikes and our gear
should have died long ago.
Two days later we crossed a mountain range, saw the Great Wall of China at a
distance and pulled into an apple orchard on the outskirts of Beijing.
All day my mind had flicked over fond memories: the shimmering lakes of Fin-
land where I took a rowboat out in the morning fog and watched the waterbirds
flutter off, leaving ripples in the glassy water. My first time in an abandoned village
in Russia, where I had been transfixed by a white line of hooting swans flying over
the taiga forest. I remembered the bitter cold and haunting beauty of my first winter
in the Arctic, when it had dropped to -37 degrees Celsius. Then there was the meet-
ing with Chris in Moscow, Baba Galya, Baikal, the
BAM
railway, and everything
else that had filled my life in the past fourteen months. Alone with my thoughts,
I didn't feel as if it was just the end of a journey. It was the end of a way of life,
and of two and a half years away from Australia. Now that we were so perilously
close to finishing, I realised that relief wasn't the overriding emotion. There were
two others: a sense of achievement and a sense of great loss.
We worked quietly in the dull evening sun to set up camp and cook dinner. We
were both deep in thought, quietly contemplating the gravity of the moment.
Although there was something comforting about having a gander down memory
lane, I also found it unnerving - each and every experience was unique. Although I
could think about the past, I could never truly experience it again. Rosy predictions
of the future also seemed to fall short. As I peered into my last ever stodgy bowl
