When it comes taking the leap and pursuing a dream of adventure travel, it’s easy to roll out the standard cliches about ‘expanding your horizons’, ‘experiencing other cultures’ or (*shudder*) ‘gaining a better understanding of your place in the world’.
And it doesn’t take much to buy into the romance attached to the idea of jumping on a motorbike, hitting the road and riding off into the sunset.
But for me there’s always been several hard-nosed reasons for this trip.
First and foremost it’s about ambition; fulling a long-term goal and finding new challenges that define my abilities in a new way. I wanted a trip that when I return to the regular 9-5, left me able to savour the lessons I’ve learnt for years to come.
There’s a huge amount of organisation that needs to be done on a long-distance motorbike trip; when Charley Boorman and Ewan MacGregor did their famous London to New York ‘Long Way Round’ motorbike journey, they went so far as setting up an office in London with a dedicated team just to handle all the visa applications, customs forms, route research, and security considerations involved.
Being here for a month in Bishkek has given me the time to reflect on the lessons I’ve learnt out on the road that I think I can take back to life back home when the bike is parked up for one last time and I’m done with eating super noodles cooked by starlight on a camping stove in the middle of some desert.
So here’s what I’ve learnt:
It’s all about moving parts…This trip is best looked at as a huge machine with many parts. Some of those parts are fixed or can be easily fixed, so you don’t really need to worry about them. But others are moving and if one of them goes wrong then the machine grinds to a holt.
On the road you quickly learn the importance of establishing an order of things when it comes to managing day to day life - to prioritise sorting out carrying cash, extra petrol, food and water as key staples ahead of everything else because if you tick those boxes then that leaves the most options open to you to deal with the things you don’t have control over - whether that be weather, road conditions, delayed border crossings, lack of accommodation, absence of petrol stations, security scares or mechanical failures.
The potential for things to go wrong is what German thinker Clausewitz once famously described ‘friction’ - all the little, unexpected things that add up to slow things down to the extent that you’re prevented from achieving your goals.
The language barrier here is a serious source of friction, because it slows things down and creates misunderstandings.
Immigration is because of it’s unpredictability - sometimes it’s fast, sometimes it’s slow, and its demands vary hugely - what the Chinese Embassy in Bishkek requires to issue a visa is different to the Chinese Embassy in Tbilisi.
Losing a bearing in the rear wheel of the bike can set you back by 2 weeks, because of the time it takes to get the right parts to replace it.
So when faced with a task, I’ve learnt that the first thing to do is to identify which parts are moving and thus most likely to fail - i.e. identifying where the greatest risks lies. And to reduce or eliminate that risk as much as possible when the opportunity arises.
Patience, m’boy, patience….Back home in working life, I would have said that one of my biggest strengths was an ability to manage several spinning plates at once; whether that be balancing the time demands of work and an amateur sport expecting 15 hours of training each week ,or managing a small comms team covering everything from regulatory compliance through to financial PR for a company at the centre of the UK renewable energy debate, at a time when that subject was at it’s most controversial.
But on this trip, with no-one else to share the load with, you soon realise that you need take a more patient approach; that there is only so much you can do at once and, indeed, you yourself are a resource that needs to be carefully managed. This isn’t a 40, 50 or even 60 hour a week job. It’s a 168 hour a week job.
The lead-in times for items like visas and spare parts are long - often measured in weeks, rather than days - and require a rich variety of bureaucratic hoops that need to be jumped through.
Often, there’s an order that things have to be done - getting visa A in order to get visa B, but visa A requires you waiting around for a week when you don’t really have a week and visa B requires a formal letter invitation from the Foreign Ministry of a Central Asian, tourist-shy police-state.
Oh yeah…and your bike needs to be repaired and you’re not quite sure where you’re going to find the parts to do so, let alone a mechanic who speaks English.
…you get the picture.
Trying to handle too many processes all at once is either simply not possible or risks burning you out. You learn to accept this. All of this helps you develop a clearer understanding of what you are capable of in the time available to you, when many things (security, varying immigration/customs policies, weather) are out of your control - and how you can accommodate that.
"A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week"….It’s one thing being able to make a decision. But it’s a totally another one to know when you should make that decision when you have so many moving parts.
How long do you wait to pin down those things you’re unsure of that a decision relies upon? Do you wait as long as possible to hope to have all the information possible and risk sacrificing an opportunity in front of you? Or do you take the opportunity and hope for the best?
You have to learn to grow to be comfortable with both.
One real-time example is that I’m currently waiting for a Pakistan visa from the UK. I need that visa so I can cross China into Pakistan. Before yesterday's tragic news about the earthquake, I was faced with a bit of conundrum; common sense says not to lay out a £400 deposit for the stack of immigration paperwork for China until I have that visa. The problem is that that paperwork takes 3 - 4 weeks to do. And the 4,700m mountain pass the road crosses closes in 4 weeks time because of winter.
So I've learnt that the best way to make these kind of decisions is to be very clear about what you want to achieve and why that's important to you, because on that basis you can decide a) when you need to make a decision and b) what level of risk you're prepared to take on board when choosing one of several options.
Red-lines….Another key part of making decisions is understanding when you need to lay down a red-line - i.e. a non-negotiable requirement that influences the decisions you take.
The principle of exhausting all overland options before air freighting is a red-line that’s important to me, because it’s a key part of the ethos of the trip. That’s informed my decision to spend a very frustrating month sitting around in Bishkek. I put that ahead of air freighting direct to India - and led to me ditching my self-imposed deadline of making Sydney by Christmas.
I’ve learnt that knowing when to establish red lines is key when it comes to risky decisions in particular - when I got the fourth puncture in a row on my front wheel, the last one of which led to a pretty nasty 50mph scare, I took the decision that nothing - even missing crossing China as planned - was more important than having confidence in my bike, for my own safety - and sanity.
So I decided to fork out the cash for a whole new front wheel and take an 8 hour round taxi-trip to solve that problem, rather than riding on and hoping I wouldn’t get a fifth puncture, as I could have done…or indeed I might have done when I was less experienced.
I’m only halfway through this trip, and I always knew that Central Asia was probably going to be the most demanding part of it.
But it’s already been hugely rewarding to be able to reflect on a range of different things I’ve learnt from it, that I’ll be able to take back to normal life back home.