The odyssey of Gertrude and Bertha: Part Three – Variety is the spice of life
Distance so far: 594 km
Bike repairs: Bertha’s front brakes squeak something fierce in the mornings, when it rains, at night, during the day, and when the temperature changes. Solution: front brake now doubles as my horn.
Gertrude has developed a quirk with changing gears. She has become a supporter of the two steps back, one step forward school of thought. Solution: to downshift by one, Sophie downshifts two, then upshifts one.
Tents are abysmally not waterproof. Solution: mediocre tarp that mostly covers the tents.
Tent poles have cracked. Solution: Sellotape, dental floss, and a needle.
Panniers are not even water resistant. Solution: line them with hole riddled garbage bags and some thick shopping bags.
Each morning begins in a fairly similar fashion. I wake up in my tent, my body glued with sweat to my sleeping mat, my limbs against three or more of my tent walls, the light from our camping spot streaming through the seams of my tent (my high quality “waterproof” tent), and a wall of panniers surrounding me. I turn off my alarm, wake Sophie, respond to her usual “five more minutes” with my usual “I am not your f*$&#ing snooze button”, put on the less sweaty of my two biking outfits, pack my belongings onto Bertha, and then prepare for whatever the day has in store. Once I leave the safety of my tiny tent, it’s game on.
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Tolkein sure did know what he was talking about. And though I am not walking, and my door is a tent flap, I think the sentiment remains the same. Our days never end the way we think they will, nor do they start as we would suppose. And frankly, the middle is usually a surprise as well. The variety of adventure and experience we encounter daily is remarkable.
Perhaps the day starts with highways, and ends with holy cows, a locked toilet, and sleeping next to a temple, with dodging an angry rain cloud sandwiched in there. Or maybe it begins with a potentially aggravating (or seducing) game of round the motorbike with a puffed up turkey, filled with kilometres of circling around, ignoring no biking signs, only to end up where you started several hours earlier, joining an informal motorbike race starting line to get onto and off of a ferry, and end with reverse culture shock of finally seeing other tourists. Or a gloomy morning becomes an unforeseen forest hike, and ends with fluorescence on a beach under the stars, with terrible pop music being blasted by a group of underwear clad men in the background of a national park campsite. My favourite is when the day begins with an incredible sunrise alone on a beach, becomes a game of hopping from shade to shade (still with disastrous sunburnt results), and ends with a Buddhist group feeding us as much campfire cooked food as they possibly can.
At some point each day, whether when we’ve accidentally found ourselves at the bottom of a long, hilly detour being unceremoniously turned away from an army base we didn’t know was there, or when we meet new people and find ourselves stargazing together, Sophie and I look at each other and point out how weird yet wonderful our lives are.
