by Bishop, John
When I was to return, some ten months later, they would both look at the state of the bike after its 10,000-mile journey and say in unison, ‘Keep it!’
CHAPTER 14
LEARNING TO RIDE
In January 1992 I left England to travel to Sydney, Australia and ride back home on a bicycle that I had been given just two weeks earlier.
I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had no experience of riding a bike long distance, I had no fixed route planned, and I had no idea if I would actually be able to complete the ride at all. But I knew I had to do it. It felt like I had managed to climb to the top of that diving board in the swimming baths: if I didn’t jump now, there was a chance I would never do it. I also knew that if I was not going to commit myself to Melanie, there had to be a very good reason: riding a bike home from Australia for charity seemed like a good one; thinking of riding a bike home from Australia but not doing it didn’t seem like such a good one. I could not face the humiliation of not even trying, particularly when so many people had offered me support. As my dad had told me when I had decided to go back to sixth form, I had to at least give it a try. Sometimes in life that seems the best reason to do anything.
I left England full of anticipation. My mum and dad, Kathy, Carol and Eddie came to see me board the Cathay Pacific flight, which was the cheapest ticket I could buy. I was to fly to Hong Kong, then on to Australia, over a 30-hour period. The fact that the time zones meant I would land before I had set off caused much amusement.
‘Let me know the football scores so I can get a bet on,’ was one of the last things my dad said to me as I walked through to departures. Making a joke was a good way to reduce some of the emotion, as my mum began to cry before putting a golden St Christopher in my hand, which had been bought by Eddie, Kathy, Carol and Mum and Dad. Before I became too choked, I went through security and prepared to travel to the other side of the world.
I have to admit to loving long-haul flights, and this love has only been enhanced by the ability to sit in posher seats in recent years. The idea that your main purpose of being on the plane is travelling means that anything else you do in addition is a bonus. You get on the plane to go from one place to another, but if you happen to watch a movie, read a book, do some work, drink some wine, eat some food, have an afternoon nap, even do leg exercises to avoid thrombosis, it’s all a bonus. The older I get, the more I relish any activity that involves me being seated, eating, drinking and watching a film, whilst still doing what is being asked of me.
Even in the economy section of the Cathay Pacific flight on 14 January 1992, I was excited at the prospect of the journey. Only to find that we were landing at Frankfurt airport two hours later. The travel agent had failed to inform me about this short stop-over, but I felt sure that German efficiency would not delay my journey too much. Little did I know at the time that it was going to delay me by four days.
As we set off from Frankfurt, I began talking to the man next to me, a mechanical engineer from Swindon called Paul. As we chatted, we became aware that the cabin crew were passing through the plane and asking people to identify their hand luggage. This obviously aroused some suspicion, which was confirmed when the pilot came on the intercom:
‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. I have asked the cabin crew to check all hand luggage and request you identify your own luggage as we have been informed by the authorities in Frankfurt that they have received a phone call saying there is an alien package on the plane.’
As you can imagine, this was met with varying degrees of stunned silence and panic as people deduced that ‘alien package’ was code word for bomb, although not everyone worked this out straight away and seemed to roll their eyes at the inefficiency of the baggage handlers for putting luggage that was intended for a UFO onto an earth-bound plane. The worst thing was that the English announcement was after the Mandarin and German version, so Paul and I had had to watch Chinese people, then German people, hold their hands to their mouths, look around suspiciously and then rush to identify their bags without knowing what was going on.
It was appearing more and more to me that my great adventure was to end before it had begun, and that the last person I was going to talk to in my life was a bloke from Swindon called Paul.
I don’t think I could have been any more disappointed with the situation. I am sure had the plane been blown out the sky I would have felt aggrieved anyway, but something told me I would have felt happier talking to a couple of supermodels going to Hong Kong for a bikini shoot.
As it happened, after an unscheduled night in Frankfurt and then another in Hong Kong, I found myself arriving in Australia four days late.
I immediately knew that I liked the country. Coming from England in the middle of winter, Australia looked like someone had just gone outside and painted everything: the grass, the flowers, the trees, the sky, the buildings – everything looked shiny and new.
I spent a week in Sydney preparing for the trip, during which time I made contact with a group called ‘Scousers Down Under’, whom Arthur had put me in touch with. Now I know ‘Scousers Down Under’ sounds like a fly-on-the-wall documentary involving lads in tracksuits having BBQs whilst their numerous kids and wives jump in and out of a swimming pool somewhere sunny until the whole thing ends with a fight and one of the women shouting, ‘Leave it, Tony, he’s a dickhead anyway,’ but the reality was that it was a network of people from Liverpool who had moved to Australia at various times and now supported each other where they could, as well as offering support to strangers with the same accent, like me.
I left Sydney for Cairns on 26 January 1992. The date had been chosen by Ray Pont, a ‘Scouse Down Under’, to coincide with the ex-pat football competition held at Centennial Park. It provided a good opportunity to send a picture back to Arthur of myself surrounded by well-wishers dressed in Liverpool and Everton football kits. The picture looked good and was used in the Echo, but the reality was that football is, after all, an important game, and the players’ interest in the lad on the bike riding home for charity lasted the duration of the automatic wind on.
I put on my brand-new white helmet, having first checked that my green rear panniers with reflector strips were secured to the rack of my bright red, spanking new bicycle. I put my hands inside my blue cycling gloves and, waving goodbye, dressed in my new cycling kit of blue and grey shoes, black shorts and the cycling shirt which managed to combine the colours yellow, blue, pink, white, red and black, I turned left out of the park.
I was beginning the greatest adventure of my life. After so much build-up, there was now no turning back, and I had to muster every ounce of self-confidence I could find, because if ever I needed faith in myself, it was at this point. Never before had I thought of my own limitations to this degree. Taking a deep breath, I glanced at my reflection as I rode past a glass-fronted building.
I looked like a half-chewed packet of liquorice allsorts.
• • •
It took 30 days to ride the 1,600 miles from Sydney to Cairns, and along the way I learnt a few invaluable lessons:
1. Riding a bike on your own for days on end is boring. I mean mega, super boring. Of course, the scenery was beautiful and there was something spiritual about transporting yourself through a country at a pace where you could absorb the environment around you. But this was 1992 – there were no iPods to listen to, no mobile phones to text mates during breaks, and no internet cafés to pop into when you arrived at a town to check your emails or Skype people back home. In 1992, if you were riding a bike in Australia, you were alone with your thoughts whilst sitting in the saddle for seven or eight hours a day, and it’s surprising how quickly you can get bored of yourself.
2. I quite like being bored. I learnt, however, that I liked to be on my own and, after the first two weeks of talking to myself, I liked the silence of the road being disturbed only by the sound of my very slow peddling. Even now I am very happy with no external stimulus, and I have oft
en driven to London and back without noticing that I have not turned the radio on.
3. The vast majority of people in this world are warm, caring and helpful, while some people are twats. That is an obvious statement and the words have been chosen carefully. There are some people in the world for whom there are not adequate insults, but I have always found the word ‘twat’ useful in these circumstances. I am not sure that I even regard such an onomatopoeic word as swearing; it is just a great way of describing a contemptible person that everyone who speaks the English language understands, and even if you don’t speak it, the sound of the word lets you know something is wrong with the person you are talking about. The poetry inherent in the word allows all of us who use to it express our opinion and then move on. ‘Twat’ is a beautiful word.
In Australia, I was introduced to the random acts of kindness that make you feel blessed: from people offering a place to sleep and food to eat, to others giving me cash for the charity. But I also came across a few twats, only a few, but I think they deserve listing here before I balance it off with a story that epitomises the beauty of the human spirit.
TWAT NUMBER 1
The man who put the sign up near Bundaberg saying, ‘Come Visit the Whitsunday Islands, only eleven hours away.’ That is like arriving from France on the ferry and in Dover seeing a sign saying, ‘Come and visit the Isle of Skye.’ I knew Australia was big, but seeing something like that when you are travelling on a bicycle, it is impossible not to think someone, somewhere, is taking the piss.
TWAT NUMBER 2
The cartographer who drew the map I used. Australia is so devoid of people, it is very easy to find your way from Sydney to Cairns because there is basically only one road going north, so as long as you are on the Bruce Highway you will get there. The big problem is that, despite the majority of the country living along this coast, there are very few towns. As maps of Australia would be virtually bare if they just showed towns, instead they just put ‘stuff’ on them. When I say ‘stuff’, I mean everything from bridges to collections of trees.
The problem is that these places are marked with small dots on the map. In England, if a map gives something a name and a small dot, you expect to find a community, a place where there are people, shops, garages, banks, things that you may actually need when riding a bike alone. Instead, in Australia you find that the town called ‘Two Mile Creek’ you rode two hours to get to is, in fact, a bridge.
TWAT NUMBER 3
The person who stole all of my valuables. When I reached Cairns I had the number of two people I could call for a bed: Gus and Bill were doctors from Ireland who were working in the local medical centre for a few years as part of an exchange programme. Their number had been passed on by a friend of theirs in Townsville, Queensland. When I called, though, it was clear they had not been warned of my impending arrival. They still insisted that I take the spare room in their house, however, and that night we went out to celebrate me completing the first leg of my journey.
In true Irish fashion, the drinks flowed till the early hours. When we returned to the house, we found the patio screen door had been forced open and my bag, which contained my traveller’s cheques, credit card, passport, camera and cash, was gone.
TWAT NUMBER 4
The person who investigated the robbery. A policeman arrived shortly after we reported the theft and, taking one look at the crime scene, said, ‘It was an Abbo who did it.’ I couldn’t believe my ears, not only at the speed of the decision, but also the certainly in which it was delivered. ‘How can you tell?’ I asked him. This is where the tremendous Australian detective work came in. ‘Well, you can see,’ he said. ‘It’s the Abbos around here who do all the stealing, and if you look at the hole in this mesh, it’s two inches away from where the lock is, and it’s only a small hole. That means it’s got to be a small, thin finger, but long enough to get round. So, that’s a long, thin finger, and if you ever look at a black hand, they’ve always got long, thin fingers.’ Needless to say, with crack detectives like that, I never saw my belongings again. The most heartbreaking loss was the camera, which contained pictures of the ride that I would never get back.
4. We take communication for granted till we have none. Travelling alone, I had nobody to talk to all day and, because of costs and logistics, it was not possible to ring home, Melanie or mates for a chat. Instead, letters became my life-blood, and I would eagerly await collecting them from American Express offices along the way.
There is no greater joy than turning up in a strange town and then walking out of an American Express office with a handful of letters. The day after I was robbed in Cairns, I collected some mail from the Am Ex office and amongst them was a letter from my mate, John Hickey. He had been raising money in his local pub for the NSPCC, and when I opened the letter $AUS20 fell out. There was no mention of it in his letter, but I could not have been more thankful; at that moment it was all the money I had in the world, and I will forever be grateful. Coupled with the fact that Gus and Bill had not known me for 24 hours, yet offered me free food and lodgings and further cash advances when I needed to pay for things like a replacement passport, it illustrated that human kindness can offset any setback.
5. Dead kangaroos smell. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is not until you are hit by the sickly-sweet aroma of a rotting carcass that is being gradually cooked under the heat of the sun that you really appreciate how powerful a smell can be. Kangaroos can be big animals: a few of them I saw were the same size as me, so if you want to know what a dead kangaroo looks like, think of a man in a kangaroo suit. I didn’t see many dead kangaroos because they were generally in ditches beside the road having, presumably, been hit by one of the lorries that would sometimes come thundering along out of nowhere. However, if the wind was blowing in your direction it was possible to smell them for hundreds of metres before you passed them. It was the kind of smell that you feel in the back of your throat before you register in your brain that this is a smell, rather than just a feeling of nausea. Peddling through the pong was a real reminder that that was what death smelt like, and, if a kangaroo could be put in a ditch, so could a cyclist – each time I passed one I reminded myself it could have been me instead.
6. New South Wales is not North Wales. Another obvious statement, but an important one that people need to be aware of, so they do not repeat the mistake I made on my second day riding through New South Wales. As a child on holiday in Wales, it was a common sight in the seventies to see children with pink or peeling skin as a result of sun exposure. Today, such an attitude may be regarded as neglect, but in those days parents were ignorant of the need to protect their children from sunburn and the attitude was very much ‘Go out, get pink, it will peel and eventually it will go brown.’
So I adopted the same attitude, and decided to take my shirt off. I then rode for five hours bent over the handlebars, which only allowed my skin to stretch even further across my back.
Bearing in mind this was the skin of a man who had come from England in January, it could hardly have been whiter. I am sure that passing planes would have been able to see the reflected rays bouncing off my white back. Other road users, if they weren’t already wearing sunglasses, quickly did so to avoid being blinded by the glare. Meanwhile, I was oblivious to the burning that was happening to my back because, as I rode, the wind was providing a cooling effect that masked the reality of the situation. It was not until I arrived at my destination and climbed off my bike that it happened.
By ‘it’, I mean the pain.
As I straightened up from my bent position, creasing my burnt skin as I did so, the pain was like being hit with a bed of nails, but more like being hit with a bed of nails that had been in a fire and had bits of glass on the end. I had to lie face-down in a hotel room for two days and have the rather attractive receptionist apply cream dispensed to me by a local doctor before I could continue. I can’t tell you how hard it is to ask a stranger to apply cream to your burnt ski
n, and it is a testament to Aussie friendliness that she didn’t bat an eyelid at the request: it was as if such things happened every day. Needless to say, I never took my shirt off again for the whole trip, which meant I was never burnt again. But it also meant I never had frequent visits from attractive female hotel staff to my room, so there is always a downside to anything positive. Afterwards, I was so careful to wear the right clothing; in fact, wearing Lycra becomes very normal after a while and you even begin wondering why nobody else does the same in their normal life, to save having excess fabric wafting everywhere.
By the time I left Australia on 6 March, nearly two months after my arrival into the country, I had fallen in love with the place and the people (the odd twat mentioned above excluded, of course). I made a promise to myself that I would go back, which to date has never happened, but I hope it will one day.
However, my sadness at leaving was quickly replaced by the sense of adventure. I was going to continue my ride through Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, a part of the world I had never thought I would visit. I also had a date with the person who had mainly occupied my thoughts during those long hours on the bike, a date I was desperate not to miss.
CHAPTER 15
ROAD TO BANGKOK
I arrived in Singapore on 9 March, where Melanie was waiting for me at the airport. We had always planned to meet at this point in the journey. She had managed to book a week off and, using a crew concession, had travelled on a cheap flight from Dubai.
I had last seen her fleetingly in January when she was on a flight back to England, but that had been perhaps for an hour; now we were to spend a week together. We both knew it was either going to make or break us, as the difficulties inherent in a long-distance relationship had been further compounded by the fact that I had no fixed abode, so phone calls were extremely infrequent. This week would either consign our relationship to the dustbin or would inspire us to continue to try to make it work.