to scream. Life is so much easier out on the road. And so I run away for a while. I’m not proud of that, but the rush of freedom I feel each time I escape keeps me coming back for more. Trading it all in for simplicity, adventure, endurance, curiosity and perspective. For my complicated love affair with the open road.
Escaping to the open road is not a solution to life’s difficulties. It’s not going to win the beautiful girl or stop the debt letters piling up on the doormat. (It will probably do the opposite.) It’s just an escape. A pause button for real life. An escape portal to a life that feels real. Life is so much simpler out there.
But it is not only about running away. I am also escaping to attempt difficult things, to see what I am capable of. I don’t see it as opting out of life. I’m opting in. Total cost: £500, including flight
(Extract from There Are Other Rivers)
CROSSING A CONTINENT
With three weeks to spare, my friend Rob and I decided to cycle across Europe. We flew to Istanbul and began riding home. The maths was quite simple: we had to ride 100 miles a day, every single day. We had £100 each to spend (plus money for ferries), which meant a budget of £5 a day.
I remember the stinking madness of the roads of Istanbul. I remember our excitement as we made it out of the city. I remember reaching the Sea of Marmara and how refreshing it felt to run into the water to cool down. Then it was back on the bike and ride, ride, ride.
Cycling 100 miles a day was really tough for me back then and this was a gruelling physical challenge. But that was what we wanted. We were invited into a family’s home for strong coffee and fresh oranges. We peered at a dead bear beside the road. I waited for my friend for ages at the top of a winding hairpin pass in Greece. I was annoyed at his slowness. But then he arrived with his helmet full of sweets – like a foraged basket of blackberries – that a passing a driver had given him. Those bonus free calories tasted so good!
I remember the satisfaction of seeing the odometer tick over to ‘100’ each day. I remember the simple fun of finding a quiet spot to camp, in flinty olive groves as the sun set over the sea. Those were good days. Total cost: £100 plus flight
© Alastair Humphreys
IS £1,000 REALLY ENOUGH MONEY FOR AN ADVENTURE?
There is an assumption that adventures have to be expensive. They need not be. This is particularly true if you overcome another assumption: that you have to fly far away in order to have an adventure. Hatching an adventure that begins and ends at your front door is not only cheaper, it’s also satisfying. It creates a story that is easier for your friends and family to engage with and get involved with, and it leaves you with fond memories every time you leave your front door in future.
So, if you are trying to do a big trip for less than £1,000, I recommend cutting the expense of a plane ticket. Cycle away from your front door on whatever bike you own or can borrow and see how far you get.
However, you can get some great bargains on plane tickets. For example, if you decide to commit £200 of your £1,000 to a plane ticket, a website like Kayak (www.kayak.co.uk/explore) shows enticing options of where you can go for that amount of money. Writing this now, I had a look at the website. I could fly from London to Nizhny Novgorod for £190. I have never even heard of Nizhny Novgorod but instantly my mind starts to fill with ideas…
Here’s a cursory budget outline to help you start making plans and to realise that trips are neither as complicated nor as expensive as you might fear.
— Boring but important stuff: insurance, vaccinations, first aid supplies: £200.
— Equipment that you don’t already own or can’t borrow from a mate: £400 will get you a lot of stuff from eBay.
— Costs along the way: ferries, repairs, visas, an ill-advised piss-up in a dangerous but exciting port: £200
— Daily food budget: £5 per day. You could easily live on half this amount, or twice this amount, according to how you like to travel. But £5 will buy you pasta, oats, bread, bananas, veg and a tin of tuna, even in an expensive part of the world. Never pay for water. Just refill your bottles from a tap, purifying the water if necessary.
With £200 remaining, you have enough for 40 days on the road at £5 a day. If you set off from your front door and cycle a pretty leisurely 60 miles a day, and have one day off each week, that still amounts to an impressive 2,000-mile journey. You could cycle from London to Warsaw and back, San Francisco to Vancouver and back, or Copenhagen to Marseille and back. New York to New Orleans and back is a bit far, but York to Orleans is definitely do-able… If you choose to walk, run or swim you won’t travel so fast but your equipment costs will be lower so you will have more days on the trail.
You might choose to spend a bit more or a bit less on different things. You’ll probably find your own budget spreadsheet to be a little more complicated than mine here. But I hope you are starting to realise that the financial element of an adventure is within your grasp.
If you are in the fortunate position of even being able to dream of undertaking a big adventure, getting hold of £1,000 may not be the biggest hurdle. After all, it’s less money than many holidays, kitchen upgrades, wedding dresses or TVs cost. But not many people have both plenty of money and plenty of time (at least not whilst they are still young enough to climb Rum Doodle without their knees hurting).
For many, the scarcest resource in life is time. That is why I wrote Microadventures, a book about squeezing local adventures into the confines of real life. Microadventures challenge you to look at how you spend the 24 hours you have each day and to try to re-prioritise things a little bit.
But grand adventures require more than 24 hours. If you’re yearning to cross a continent, chasing the days west until the sun sets into the ocean before you, you’ll need to find a bigger chunk of time. There is never an easy time to find that time. Too many people are willing to settle for waiting until they retire, and this always makes me sad. The actor Brandon Lee’s grave is inscribed with these words:
‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless …’
Have a look at www.deathclock.com; it’s one of my favourite websites! You add various parameters about your life (age, weight, gender, whether you smoke) and it will calculate the date you are likely to die. A big, unstoppable clock begins counting down the remaining seconds of your life.
I have the date of my predicted death scheduled into my diary. Morbid, perhaps, but it takes deadlines to spur most of us into action, and that non-extendable deadline scares the hell out of me. I have so much I want to get done before 8 September 2050!
Life, they say, is what happens while you’re busy making plans. Time is ticking, life is short. These days everyone is busy. We’re racing time, always chasing time. Bragging about how busy we are is one of our era’s favourite things to do. But, as the pithy viral Tweet said, ‘We all have the same 24 hours that Beyoncé has.’ It’s up to us to carve out time to make bootylicious stuff happen. When I was younger I would simply think of a trip, then go and do it. Now that I’m older and busier it’s more often a case of making a chunk of time available and then coming up with a plan that fits into that time slot.
There is no simple solution. This book will not solve the lack-of-time conundrum.