To Hendri Coetzee, who inspired a dream, and Antonio Zullo, who helped me realize it.
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
CONTENTS
Prologue
D-DAY
EUROPEAN CROSSING
THE WRONG WAY
A FERRY TALE
RAINBOWS, HOBBITS, AND HEADWINDS
KAMIKAZE MAGPIES
THE TOUGH GET GOING
FINALLY ASIA!
THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOLITUDE
INDIAN NIGHTMARES
TURKISH DELIGHTS
A LONG WAY HOME
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
THIS ROAD I RIDE
PROLOGUE
DECEMBER 22, 2012
A noisy crowd of cyclists and motorcyclists has gathered outside the bar in the small town of Cardito on the periphery of Naples. Everybody wants to take pictures, but what I really want is a good espresso. “There are groups of cyclists waiting to meet you along the way,” Antonio says into my ear, checking his watch as I knock back a shot of rich, fragrant coffee at the bar. It’s a typical Neapolitan bar selling warm cornetti, lottery tickets, and cigarettes, with harsh fluorescent lighting and a small flat-screen TV airing a soccer match. I couldn’t be happier. How I’ve missed a decent Neapolitan espresso over the last five months!
“People will try and stop you to take pictures, but you’ve just gotta go. There’s no time. Remember, it’s important you don’t stop. Midday you must be in Piazza del Plebiscito.” As my logistics manager, Antonio has absorbed most of the stress of my eighteen-thousand-mile around-the-world cycle ride. He has not had a good night’s sleep since the start of the endeavor and looks to have matched my own weight loss pound for pound. His curly black hair is unbrushed, and his tired eyes, often squinting as though deep in thought, are hidden behind dark Ray-Bans. He had little idea what he was signing up for when he agreed to manage the logistics for my journey just over a year ago. Then again, neither did I. The finish line cannot come soon enough for either of us.
“Okay, I’m ready. Where’s Pegasus?” I haven’t seen my bike since Antonio took it off to the garage for safekeeping yesterday. His younger brother, Riccardo, wheels it over, filthy from yesterday’s rain, dry mud crusted along the white carbon frame. The seat leather is torn in places, and there are dents and scratches on the paint, but considering the mileage it has done, Pegasus is in fairly good condition. For all the breakdowns and problems, it has gotten me around the world. I stroke the handlebars lovingly. This bicycle was my companion on the road for 152 days. I’ve talked to it a lot. “One last ride, Pegasus,” I mumble now.
The waiting cyclists mount their bikes, and the motorcyclists rev their engines to “I Will Survive” blasting from a speaker strapped to one of the pillions. Antonio jumps into his blue Renault Clio, just ahead of us. People are whistling and clapping from the street, the apartment windows, and the balconies, shouting, “Vai, Julie!” Eager to escape from all the noise and attention, I clip into the pedals and push off.
Our procession grows along the last forty miles into Naples. Cyclists from Schiano, the company that donated my bike, join us. We head toward the bike shop, Cicli Caputo, where I first learned how to change a tube and disassemble Pegasus. The shop’s cyclists, whom I joined on training rides just eight months ago, are waiting for us there. We’re now over fifty strong: teenage boys and older seasoned cyclists, amateurs and professionals, all accompanying me to the finish line. The police are on the streets to hold back the traffic as we pass.
The motorcade, blowing musical horns, blocks cars at the junctions so we never have to stop. The atmosphere is jovial. The sun breaks through the clouds as we crest Pozzuoli, where ruins of the former Roman port city mingle with modern apartment complexes. The ocean below is silver gray, the city of Naples a colorful tangle of buildings under the shadow of Vesuvius. I laugh with euphoria and shout to the guys pedaling next to me, “What a beautiful day to ride!” They nod and give me the thumbs-up.
More cyclists are waiting for us farther along the road: casual biking commuters and several women from the Green Cycle community. The pace slows to accommodate everyone as our ranks continue to swell. The last miles leading to Piazza del Plebiscito follow the new bicycle path along the waterfront and into the city center. The entourage disperses into the waiting crowd of friends and online followers as I pedal across the cobbled square and over the finish line. A Neapolitan flag is thrown around my shoulders. People are clapping and shouting “Brava!” A makeshift stage has been set up, and someone is standing on it, shouting into a microphone, “Juliana is baaaaaack!”
Antonio is waiting for me as I climb off my bike, and I give him a giant hug. “Brava, baby!” he says, pinching my cheek affectionately, as he often does. We did it! It is his victory as much as mine. I may have done the pedaling, but he has done everything to ensure I could.
I’m led onto the stage with Pegasus, and a microphone is thrust in front of my face. They obviously want me to say something, but my mind is blank. It all feels so surreal. I’ve made it around the world, and I can’t quite believe it’s really over. I can feel the bruised, shredded skin on my thigh from yesterday’s fall. My toes are black and blistered with frostbite. My face is raw from sun- and windburn. My body is near collapse. In this moment, standing at the finish line with the crowd clapping and cheering, the difficulties, the sickness, the exhaustion, the cold, the hunger, the pain, and the tears seem like a dream, something that never really happened.
Yet it did happen, against everyone’s expectations—without a sponsor or any funding, without a technical or medical support team, with only eight months of training on a bicycle. Nobody believed I would make it, certainly not all the way around the world, averaging 125 miles a day. I was not an athlete or a cyclist. There was nothing to qualify me for such a huge undertaking: nothing but willpower and the determination to finish, no matter what. I had set out to prove that anything is possible, that we can do things that are far bigger than ourselves.
D-DAY
The journey began five months earlier on a gray morning in late July. Weather reports had predicted rain, and heavy clouds were forming over the crowd of friends and curious strangers gathered in Piazza del Plebiscito, one of the largest squares in Europe. Hedged in by the imposing facade of the seventeenth-century Royal Palace on one side and the neoclassical church of San Francesco di Paola on the other, Naples’s central piazza seemed a natural starting point for my adventure.
“Are you ready?” Antonio asked, pushing through the crowd of well-wishers, photographers, and journalists who were waiting to see me off. The question was hypothetical, of course. Could one ever be “ready” for something like this? According to general opinion, I was not. All I had were a few thousand euros, a bike, and a dream.
A dream that was born out of grief. The kind of grief that makes you older and sadder—or that changes you, becoming an impetus for random yet life-changing acts.
I had first met Hendri Coetzee eight years earlier at the Rock Garden nightclub in Kampala. I was standing with my back against the bar, half-painted by the neon lights, talking with a group of friends. Hendri was sipping a vodka Red Bull at the edge of the darkness when our eyes caught and locked together for what seemed like a very long time. It was as though he had no desire or intention to interrupt this unexpected meeting by looking away. How well I remember those eyes—clear blue orbs even in the murky light of the club. Slowly he moved toward me, never breaking eye contact, till our faces were just inches apart.
“You can’t take yo
ur eyes off me,” I whispered.
“And you are just dying to kiss me,” he answered.
If another word was spoken, I don’t remember it. Our hands, co-conspirators to our eyes, found each other. We walked into the darkness without another word, away from the drunken crowd of regulars. Nobody and nothing else existed in that moment.
Hendri was an explorer whose journeys had included walking over a thousand miles down the East African coast, numerous missions through the uncharted wilds of the continent, and source-to-sea expeditions down the courses of the White and Blue Niles. He jokingly called himself the “Great White Explorer.” I preferred the “River God,” and if you had seen him agilely navigating down grade-five rapids in his orange Fluid kayak, you would understand why.
Our subsequent encounters were similarly brief and intense, without any expectation of a future together, lasting only in a series of perfect, flawless moments that, like our first meeting, always felt a bit surreal. He was working as a raft guide for a kayaking company in Jinja, taking people down the Nile’s whitewater rapids. I was living in Kampala, a quasi-missionary by day, when I would distribute food and medical supplies to orphanages and schools, and a go-go dancer at night, performing in a professional dance troupe to pay the bills. Hendri had heard there were foreign girls dancing at the Rock Bar and had come there with a friend to watch us dance some weeks before our first meeting.
The last time I saw him in person, he was preparing to lead another 4,200-mile Nile source-to-sea expedition, following in the path of the American explorer John Goddard. After he set off, my life took a dramatically different turn. I left Kampala, wrote a book, and became somebody else. We lost contact for several years.
I was in London, visiting a friend who had also lived in Kampala, when I saw Hendri’s profile on her Facebook page. I sent him a friend request, and he answered immediately.
“Well I’ll be. Never for one second did I think I would ever hear from you again. Was just thinking about you a few weeks ago. Pleasantly, I might add.”
He had just returned from a solitary expedition through the Congo and was finding it difficult to reintegrate into “normal life.” Never quite belonging anywhere myself, I understood the feeling. We began corresponding regularly. It was as if no time had passed and a lifetime had passed. A lot had changed in our lives over the preceding five years, but almost nothing had changed between the two of us.
The subject of freedom was an important one for both of us, and while we had gone after it in very different ways, our respective searches had led to similar conclusions. “You spoke to me of freedom some time ago,” he wrote early on in our correspondence, after he had bought and read my first book, which detailed my childhood growing up in the infamous cult the Children of God. The message continued:
I didn’t know how serious an issue it is for you. Viktor Frankl is my favorite psychologist. He says, We can achieve meaning through work, love, or suffering. Perhaps those who suffer most have the best chance to find meaning. You will be in a better position than myself to answer that. Frankl sums up with suffering is inevitable and states that the last of the human freedoms is to choose your reaction to your suffering. As someone who has searched for freedom from who knows what his entire life, I am positive it’s the hardest freedom to achieve.
Every email and message we exchanged was like water for a parched wanderer. They called to the wild in me, the rebel, the social outsider. Although we were continents apart, I valued his words more than anyone else’s. Even if all we ever shared was a distant friendship, that was worth more to me than a hundred close acquaintanceships.
Things sped up quickly within a few short months, as though we both sensed time was short, rushing toward some unknown collision with fate.
“I think we both know that perhaps me and you are only a symptom, neither of us a cause, for this attraction,” he wrote in one email.
That we seek each other in desperation, an outside chance that someone who is unlike the others could be the thing we are looking for, having searched everywhere else—a last resort. For us who run at things, the fear of testing such a theory could be painful. For us, slow and tentative is hard. Intensity flows thick in our veins. Still, I think we have things to tell each other and things to share. We are under each other’s skin.
He was planning another expedition with two American kayakers, paddling down one of the least explored rivers in the Congo. He would be back for New Year, so I booked a flight to Uganda for December 30, 2010. We had decided to meet up and see what happened.
On December 3 I logged into Skype to find him online, waiting for me.
Hendri: I was just thinking about you.
Juliana: I just had the sudden fancy that I should log on.
Hendri: Thank God.
Juliana: Where are you?
Hendri: In Kalemie, Congo. Been stuck for a few days. Waiting for some permissions to travel.
Juliana: But you still have access to the Internet! Well, go figure. Africa—contradiction in all things.
Hendri: Been thinking of you hard all day.
Juliana: Strange. So have I.
Hendri: When will I have the privilege?
Juliana: Of?
Hendri: You.
Juliana: I arrive on the 31st.
Hendri: If ever there was an incentive to survive a mission . . .
Juliana: You’d better. I’m waiting for you. A month seems like a very long time.
Hendri: Feeling close to you. Amazingly so. Just a few hippos and some savages between us. Will take care of it asap.
Juliana: Oh good. You work on that. And I’ll work on getting myself over to you.
Hendri: Soon.
Juliana: Yes.
Hendri: This is probably the last time I will have Internet until the end of the trip. 3–4 weeks if all goes semi to plan.
Juliana: Please come back in one piece. I need all of you.
Hendri: And you shall have it.
Juliana: :)
Hendri: Sleep well. Dream of me. I will of you.
Juliana: I usually do. You are never far from my thoughts.
Hendri: I’ll let you know as soon as I’m back in Uganda.
Juliana: Okay. Until then.
Hendri: Love and light.
Juliana: Safe journey, my River God.
I awoke on the morning of December 8 and logged into Facebook while sipping a cup of coffee. The news feed was filled with tributes to Hendri, punctuated with statements of shock and disbelief. I frantically messaged a mutual friend: “What the hell is going on? What’s happened to Hendri?”
“He was paddling down the Lukuga River, the two American kayakers he was with were just ahead of him, when a giant crocodile came up out of nowhere and dragged Hendri from his kayak. His body has not been found,” our friend informed me. “I’m still in too much shock to process it right now. Hendri’s always cheated death. I just can’t believe it’s true.”
I sat motionless, unable or unwilling to process any of it either. Of course it was not true. He would crawl out of the river somewhere with that cheeky smile of his, dragging a fresh croc skin.
When the news finally sank in, I fell to pieces. The first couple of days I stayed curled up in bed crying, calling his name over and over as though by some miracle that would bring him back. Sometimes when I thought there were no more tears left in my dry, swollen eyes, I’d think, I’m better today. Today I will not cry. Then something would trigger a memory, and I’d crumple over in a spasm of tears, the ground would blur, the world would spin, and I’d lose my breath.
Deep sorrow marks you more than any physical scar. After weeks of crippling grief, I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and knew I had to do something to save myself or be swallowed up by the profound melancholy I was drowning in. Death has a way of putting the temporary nature of life into sharp perspective, reminding you that time is always racing toward that one inevitability, inspiring an urgency to do everything now, quic
kly, while you still can.
What started as an act of desperation soon became an all-consuming purpose, one that really began the night after Hendri’s memorial. I caught the flight I’d booked to Uganda and arrived, as originally planned, on December 31. Then I joined his family and friends on the banks of the Nile a month to the day after his death, to commemorate the life of the man we had all loved.
“Perhaps he could not have gone any other way. Hendri would have been furious if he’d died in his bed,” one of his closest friends commented.
A few of us were sitting around a log table on the veranda of a layover house for kayakers and social misfits who were passing through Jinja. Hendri had stayed there himself for a time. Bamboo torches burning citronella kept the mosquitoes hovering on the periphery of our little circle of light. The cicadas were chirping loudly. The African night is never silent.
“I want to do something big before I settle down,” said a cute English blonde who had known Hendri only briefly.
Why must we settle down? I thought. Why do we feel this is expected of us after a certain age? I would be turning thirty in a few months’ time. Did all women start a biological countdown at that point? Or was settling down just what all mature people did?
“Something like cycling across Canada,” continued the blonde. Then she turned toward me. “Would you want to do it with me? It wouldn’t be too hard to find sponsors if we did it for some charity. We could raise the money and just go.”
“Maybe,” I said. But the more I thought about it, the more bored I became with the whole idea. Why Canada? Why not somewhere else? Somewhere I had never been.
The idea continued to ferment after I returned home to Italy, so I started researching interesting cycle journeys on the Internet. It was not long before I stumbled upon Mark Beaumont’s bicycle ride around the world. His solo journey, during which he covered 18,296 miles in 194 days, had been well documented by the BBC and other news outlets. A little knot of excitement twisted in my stomach. Now that would be the ultimate cycling adventure. The fact that I had never really ridden a bike would make the challenge greater, and the entire world more interesting.
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