This Road I Ride

by Juliana Buhring

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOLITUDE

  OCTOBER 16, 2012

  The weather forecast predicted sunny skies today, so I set off early from Sadao to make good time and clock up some extra miles. About sixty miles north of Hat Yai, my front tire goes flat. Thankfully I still have a spare tube, so I pull off the highway to change it. I used my other spare back in Malaysia after a suffering a bad puncture, courtesy of a giant nail on the highway. I’ve also broken another two spoke nipples, and they need changing, so finding a bike shop is becoming a top priority. It will also be nothing short of miraculous. So far I’ve encountered next to no cyclists in Malaysia and Thailand, which means bike shops are few and far between. Fortunately I still have plenty of tube patches and glue, so I am optimistic I will reach Bangkok before they run out.

  My grip has steadily weakened from holding on to the handlebars for hours on end, day after day, and I struggle to change the tube. Popping the tire back onto the rim becomes a ponderous ordeal. My thumbs have no strength, so I use the cumbersome lever tool to force it back on. It takes half an hour, but at last the rubber pops into place. A quick pump, and I’ll be back on the road. The tire inflates . . . but then deflates just as fast. No, no, no! I must have nicked my last good tube when popping the tire back on the rim.

  No matter, I’ll patch it and try again. I pull out my pack of patches and feel around for the glue. A bike bag is a bit like a woman’s purse: once something goes in, you can never find it again. I take every last item out of the frame bag. Still no glue. I check the little front pack. Nothing. Somewhere, presumably in Perth, when I packed the bike for the flight to Asia, the glue must have fallen out. With no glue to patch the damaged tube, I am stranded, sixty miles from the nearest town that may or may not have a bike shop.

  The sun beats down mercilessly as I sit in the ditch next to the highway, trying to figure out what to do next. My head is aching, and the salty beads of liquid running down my cheeks are not sweat. I feel totally alone. While crying does nothing to resolve my immediate problem, it does at least relieve some of the pent-up frustration. I give in to the moment and let myself blubber. But only for a moment.

  Come on, you big baby. Nobody will get you out of this mess except yourself. Where there is a problem, there is always a solution. Think.

  I know that Hat Yai is my best option for finding bike parts, and that will mean turning around and going back. There are few worse things for me than retracing my steps, but I have little choice. I’ve noticed buses passing by every so often, so I carry Pegasus a few miles south until I find a bus stop on the road. The driver is nice enough to let me on after I show him my flat tire. I awkwardly shove Pegasus between myself and a group of students at the back of the bus. A couple more passengers get on behind me. One has a bundle of paralyzed chickens tied together by the feet, swinging indolently next to the bike wheels. The other is carrying two giant barrels of milk that are almost the same height as himself. It must be market day. Nobody gives me or my bike a second look. Everything and everyone uses the bus in rural Thailand.

  After the air and the space of the open road, I feel clammy and claustrophobic in the turbid heat of the packed vehicle. I close my eyes and try to relax. Breathe in. Breathe out. I manage to doze.

  When the bus finally pulls into Hat Yai, I set off on a fruitless search for a bike shop. Not wanting to destroy the delicate rims, I half-wheel, half-carry Pegasus all around the city. After an hour I’m exhausted. A Thai father, mother, and two daughters are shopping in the market and notice me wandering aimlessly with my bike. They ask what I’m looking for, and I show them the flat tire and the broken spokes.

  “Aaahhhh. A moment.” One of the teenage daughters says something to her father, who nods and says something back. Then she turns to me. “You come.”

  “Okay,” I say, and follow them.

  We don’t walk far before they stop in front of a motorcycle repair shop. The girl takes over once again, explaining the situation to the man inside, who calls his colleague. They look over Pegasus gravely, shaking their heads, comparing motorcycle parts to see if anything matches up to the bicycle’s tiny parts. The Thai family are starting to get restless. They have shopping to do.

  “It’s okay if you want to go,” I tell the girl. “Thanks for your help. Cop coon ca.” I put my hands together and bow my head in a wai, the respectful way of saying hello, goodbye, and thank you in Thailand.

  She waves goodbye, and I sit down in the shop as the debate continues. One of the mechanics signals, palm outward, for me to stay where I am as his partner goes off at a brisk jog, I assume for the necessary parts. I wait for over an hour. Patience may be a virtue, but it’s not one of mine. I’ve already lost half a day and over sixty miles, and I feel myself growing increasingly anxious. But fretting over circumstances that cannot be changed won’t resolve the problem any quicker. Think of it as a bit of a rest, I tell myself. I settle into a chair, and someone puts a cold bottle of Coke in my hand.

  Eventually the mechanic returns with a fistful of bike nipples of various sizes and a couple of second-hand tubes. I wonder whose bicycle has been dismembered to provide them. Within ten minutes Pegasus’s spokes have been fitted with the old/new nipples and the tube has been pumped. I buy some glue and a spare tube.

  “Cop coon maak ca.” Thank you so much.

  The guy shrugs like it’s nothing. Bike mechanics are my favorite kind of people.

  OCTOBER 18, 2012

  Today a little kid with a shaved head, wearing a school uniform, nails it when he points me out to his classmates and shouts, “Look! A phalang!” The Thai word for “foreigner” is also the local term for “guava,” and that’s exactly how I feel: pink-faced, with rough, bruised skin and slimy with sweat. Not so much a sophisticated Westerner; more like a feral wild woman. Even after a shower my skin feels grimy, stained brown as much from the dust of the road as from the sun. My fingers look as if they’ve been dipped in chocolate sauce, as dark tan lines contrast the white of my skin when I take off my gloves. There is a permanent ring of black under the torn fingernails from changing tubes and pumping tires. My two sets of cycling clothes both stink, as they never quite dry overnight. I feel inhuman and unattractive, the furthest thing from female a woman could possibly feel. When clean, fresh-smelling girls pass me in their little dresses, strappy shoes, and shining hair, I feel like a mangy, flea-ridden street dog watching well-groomed thoroughbreds. At these times I long to feel like a woman again. Hell, I’d settle for feeling human!

  I stroll back from the 7/11 store with some comfort food—dried fruit, ice cream, and a beer—back to the silence of my hotel room and a fan that barely circulates the stifling warm air. I should be completely used to the solitude by now, but every so often my own company gets old.

  When I was a teenager, the realization that I did not belong anywhere was the cause of much self-doubt and grief. I was always a social outsider, a misfit, an observer looking in. The stranger in every group. The only guava in a barrel of apples. Even in a crowd, I could still feel alone. In fact, sometimes that was the loneliest place of all. As an adult, however, I’ve never been bothered by solitude because I’ve come to realize that its opposite often means wasting time in the company of people I dislike or with whom I have nothing in common.

  “I think solitude is less a conscious choice than an inevitable side-effect of certain life choices,” Hendri once told me. If anyone could speak with authority on the merits of solitude, it was he. “When what passes for normal seems the most abnormal thing in the world to pursue, those who decide to go their own way, to be different, to achieve different goals than those society considers ‘normal,’ will often travel that road alone.”

  He would tell me that the price of freedom was loneliness. “Freedom to do what you want is a heavy burden to carry and a very lonely road to walk,” he wrote in one email. “Freedom is an extreme, because it’s by definition selfish. Many search for it, but once they come close enough to grasp t
he depth and scope of the loneliness they have to cross in order to achieve it, few have the will or desire to take the last committing steps across a barrier of no return for a reward that is not guaranteed.”

  Hendri understood that there are different kinds of freedom, but the most basic kind is perhaps the most difficult to achieve and the most selfish. “Solo expeditions, mine at least, are the purest form of selfishness I can think of,” he told me. “You might not be free from your environment’s demands, but you are free to choose your response to them. If a solo mission kills me one day, I won’t be the one suffering. It only hurts if you survive. The ones who love me will be left to deal with the sorrow.”

  It was as if he were predicting his own end with those words. Just a few months later he set off on the expedition through the Congo that would be his last. For those of us who loved him, the loss was devastating.

  Now I think about his words, sipping my Chang beer in the silence of the hotel room. I was so angry with him for leaving me behind. There were dark days when I thought about joining him. Endless days dragging by in a lifetime in which he did not exist—that was too abysmal to consider. Setting off to cycle around the world was the only way I knew how to keep on going, to give myself a purpose, a reason for existence. On the bike, I can pound out the emotional pain, and I feel that pain a little less with every mile I travel. Here on the road, all his words have become more real and more relevant to me. Here on the road, I’ve come close to touching the essence of him. He feels nearer to me now than ever before.

  Maybe that is why I’ve never felt completely alone on this journey.

  OCTOBER 19–20, 2012

  Traveling as a lone woman, I am usually careful to stick to heavily populated areas as much as possible, especially in developing countries. Today I have decided to break that rule, intent on relaxing and sleeping on the beach. This is the first time I have consciously chosen such an isolated spot to spend the night. I turn off the main road and head toward the coast near Chumphon airport, far from any villages or much civilization. Only after finding a bungalow camp ten yards from the ocean and paying four dollars for a little wooden hut do I discover there’s no phone signal. No matter. What could possibly go wrong?

  As I finish eating a dinner of green chicken curry on rice, a well-dressed Thai family of four pulls up in an expensive gray jeep. They take the bungalow next to mine, which makes them the only other camp occupants tonight. I relax into a reclining chair on the bamboo porch with a Tiger beer, watching the teenage girls posing for selfies on the beach. A few shaggy mutts that have been frolicking in the sand pad come over for a scratch. They settle on the porch at my feet, and we lie there contentedly as the tide comes in and the sun sinks under the water. The sound of the waves and the gentle evening breeze are powerful sedatives. Growing sleepy, I soon head inside to bed.

  It is the dogs’ furious barking that wakes me around one a.m. I hear voices and a woman sobbing next door. Through a crack in the curtains, I can see three men outside the family’s bungalow. The father is standing at the open door in his pajamas, and one of the men roughly pulls him out. I recognize two of them from earlier in the evening: they were eating at a nearby table and watched me ride up, dusty and disheveled. They left about the same time the family arrived.

  Something about the developing scene seems very wrong—and very familiar. My body begins to shake violently, and a terrible heat rises from the pit of my stomach up to my chest. I’m immediately back in Uganda, where I had gone to help my father start a radio show. At twenty-one years old, I’m tied up next to several of my youngest siblings with an AK-47 pressed to my temple. My father is being held down while our assailants threaten to hack his foot off with a machete if we don’t give them money. The terrifying ordeal goes on for three hours. For the next two weeks, every noise would wake me. Every footstep in the hall would send my body into a fit of post-traumatic convulsions. The memories have mercifully faded over time. Until tonight.

  With the latent trauma reawakened, panic rapidly takes over reason. My body trembles, and bile burns a path from my stomach to my throat. I fight to reassert control over my body. I remember something I read once about fear having either of two meanings: “forget everything and run” or “face everything and rise.” The choice is mine.

  Mind over matter. Calm down. Think. Nothing has happened to me yet. If they come to my door, what can they do? They would have to break down the door to enter. What could they take from me? I have nothing except my bike. They saw me roll in, so they must guess I have very little money.

  I sit down on the bed, considerably calmer, my body no longer shaking. I’m also thinking more clearly. Are the emergency services 911 or 999 in Thailand? It doesn’t matter. Even if I knew which number to call, there’s no phone signal. And even if I could contact someone, I don’t know the name of the road or the campsite. I turn on my GPS, but it fails to pick up a satellite signal, so its emergency button is useless. If something were to happen to me out here, I suddenly realize, no one would ever know.

  I lean back on the pillow, alert to the slightest sound outside, and have a long think. After running through every potential outcome and exhausting every possibility, I arrive at the last and worst-case scenario. Death. There have been times during the ride when I have thought that I wouldn’t care if I died just then, in a place I want to be, doing what I most want to do. In those moments, I hardly cared if I’d finish the journey. Dying did not scare me; it was living without feeling alive that was frightening.

  Now, though, the farther I get, the more I find myself wanting to reach the finish line, wanting to see more, do more, experience more. Life has become far more attractive—not living merely for the sake of existing, but honoring the fact that I exist by really living.

  “Have you read much of Osho?” Hendri asked me once during one of our Skype chats.

  We liked to discuss the books and authors we were reading. Hendri’s wanderings started to take an internal direction toward the end of his life, and the philosophies of various gurus often reflected that. He liked to bounce their ideas off me. He said I had a way of keeping him from wandering too far. Our conversation that night had veered toward death, with Hendri explaining that he viewed dying as the ultimate adventure from which there was no return, like a one-way ticket to Mars. He talked about it as if he couldn’t wait.

  “To the man who has not known what life is, death is an enemy; and to the man who knows what life is, death is the ultimate crescendo of life.” Osho’s words—in Hendri’s voice—come to me now, as I’m lying in the darkness, listening for footsteps approaching my door. Ending up with death as the final scenario feels strangely comforting, like the thought of a soft pillow when you’re tired. If there is no consciousness after death, then once I’m dead, I won’t be aware that I ever existed. And if there is consciousness, well, fresh adventure take me!

  Tomorrow I’ll have to wake up early and pedal. And if something happens between now and then, it will happen. Sitting up and waiting for it won’t change a thing. I pull the sheet over my shoulders, shut my eyes, and sleep.

  OCTOBER 20, 2012

  Just like every other day, I awake at dawn. All is silent as I pull on my shorts, load up my bags, and wheel Pegasus outside. I look about cautiously; there is no movement from my neighbors’ hut. Did I imagine the whole thing? No police have turned up; there was no further commotion; the family’s car is still parked in the driveway. Perhaps my imagination ran away with me last night. How much of it was real? How much did my mind create?

  The three dogs are still sprawled across my porch, directly in front of the door. My mangy guardians stretch and wag their tails when I emerge, nuzzling their noses against my legs. “What good doggies you are.” I reward them with belly rubs, while the expressive mutts whine, lick my hands, and fight each other for my affection.

  With a strong feeling of relief, I pedal back on to a busy road.

  The feeling is short-lived. A couple ho
urs later I realize I’m being followed by a motorcyclist on a red scooter. He stays a few yards behind me for a few minutes, then overtakes me and rides a few yards ahead, then pulls over to the side of the road and waits until I pass, then shadows me once more. As per my usual tactic, I plug earphones into my ears and pretend not to notice him, while keeping an eye out from behind the dark lenses of my sunglasses.

  He grows bolder as time passes, coming right up next to me and launching into an impressive repertoire of dirty words. I decide it’s time to go on the offensive, so I whip out my phone and start snapping his picture. This appears to rattle him. He speeds up and turns off the highway at a sharp bend in the road. The moment he’s out of sight, I swerve onto a side road and head into a service station toilet, where I hunker down with Pegasus for a good twenty minutes until I feel it’s safe to emerge again.

  The events of last night and today have compounded my feeling of being completely alone and vulnerable. The animal without a pack is an animal without protection. It’s little wonder humans always search for a group to which they might belong. We have a subconscious need to attach ourselves to a pack for safety, passed down through evolutionary millennia. Nobody wants to be the solitary animal.

  OCTOBER 22, 2012

  A classic red convertible with painted flames licking up the sides and a deafening engine pulls up outside the 7/11 where I’m getting breakfast and stocking up on snacks. A minute later four Thai men dressed in leather and lots of silver pile through the door. I love Thai service station stops. They have everything from fresh sliced fruit served with a salt, sugar, and chili dip to green tea milkshakes, crunchy wasabi peas, and endless varieties of dried fruit. The salty mango and papaya are my favorites. I carry plastic bags of dried fruit in my little handlebar bag and suck on pieces throughout the day to make the long hours in the saddle less tedious.