After two days in a row of hard riding and camping on the edges of farms and orchards, Krisztian and I are taking a day off at a campground outside Estella. There´s a group of New Zealanders and Australians on the site next to us, setting up for a large group of partiers who will be coming out for the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona. We are going to bypass Pamplona based on a lot of rumors that it is overrun by tourists. Still, it´s nice to run into English-speaking people. We will probably go into town with them tonight to watch the Euro Cup finals, Spain vs. Germany.
When we watched the semifinals in Bilbao, it seemed that Krisztian and I were cheering more for the Spanish team than any of the other people at the bar. We quickly realized that it was likely that most people in the area identified as Basque more than Spanish and dont care so much. Now, at the campground cafe, it became apparent that Basques are much more interested in ROWING. A large group of men are hovering around the television to watch a number of Basque teams competing on some unknown, huge river.
You may have noticed that I haven´t posted any pictures thus far. There are a few reasons for that. First of all, all of the most dramatic scenes tend to appear when I am climbing up a mountain pass; if I were to stop then I would not be able to keep going. I never want to get off my bike and walk, it will feel like defeat. Second, I have never been too interested in taking photos of things that I am expected to as a tourist. Maybe that´s a bit pretentious, but I just feel like they have been taken a million times before. With that said, I have consistently seen a landscape of beautiful mountains rising above the clouds, medieval villages in which architecture is still functioning as part of the city walls, and extensive farms that seem almost placeless. The soundtrack my day tends to be cowbells, sheep, motorcycles hurtling by me at 160 km/h, or perhaps a logging truck or church bells.
Informal camping, as we call it, comes with a certain amount of fear. Though we have been told numerous times that it´s not a big deal to camp out on someone´s land, there is always the fear of not asking- whether because we don´t know where the farmhouse is or in fear of having to travel further before we find another suitable site. Yesterday, a truck drove across the farm, only about 4o yards from where we had set up our tents in the orchard. There´s no way to know if they noticed us our not, but we were well camouflaged and they kept on driving. Though I am by no means a claustrophobic person, being in a tent, where you can see nothing of the outside, can be frightening. It´s difficult to gues the distance of sounds such as cars driving by, voices, or even the less threatening sheep or cow.
Today we rest. Tomorrow, we ride 100 km off into the plains, in a leg of the trip through a much mors sparsely-settled area, and, thankfully, a much flatter landscape.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Bilbao
The old addage that "it´s the journey, not the destination" is only half-true in our case. Since we are riding for such a long time, it´s much easier to think of this trip as a network of cities separated by countryside (so far, mountains).
Rainsoaked, we woke up to the sound of alarms and dynamite from the worksite next to us in El Regato. The ground shook, my immediate response was to duck and cover. We rushed to pack our things together, loaded our bikes, and rode the rest of the way to Bilbao. Right now, we are drying our gear with a fan in our room at the hostel.
This city is amazing, and I am glad we are not leaving until tomorrow. There is a peculiar juxtaposition of old squares and narrow streets, contrasting the numerous cranes erecting ultra-modern skyscrapers. Much of this development was spurred by Frank Gehry´s late-90s Guggenheim Bilbao. It has been so hyped as the rise of the "starchitect" and an example of how iconic architecture could revitalize a city that Krisztian and I felt we had to see it. Luckily, there was a great retrospective on Surrealism; many of the pieces hadn´t been exhibited since 1939, and it filled the entire third floor.
Tonight we will go out to the bar and watch Spain play Russia in the semi-finals of the Euro Cup. I expect and hope that there will be riots in the street either way.
Rainsoaked, we woke up to the sound of alarms and dynamite from the worksite next to us in El Regato. The ground shook, my immediate response was to duck and cover. We rushed to pack our things together, loaded our bikes, and rode the rest of the way to Bilbao. Right now, we are drying our gear with a fan in our room at the hostel.
This city is amazing, and I am glad we are not leaving until tomorrow. There is a peculiar juxtaposition of old squares and narrow streets, contrasting the numerous cranes erecting ultra-modern skyscrapers. Much of this development was spurred by Frank Gehry´s late-90s Guggenheim Bilbao. It has been so hyped as the rise of the "starchitect" and an example of how iconic architecture could revitalize a city that Krisztian and I felt we had to see it. Luckily, there was a great retrospective on Surrealism; many of the pieces hadn´t been exhibited since 1939, and it filled the entire third floor.
Tonight we will go out to the bar and watch Spain play Russia in the semi-finals of the Euro Cup. I expect and hope that there will be riots in the street either way.
Laredo to Bilbao
I write most of what I post on this blog in my tent by the light of a headlamp, so by "today" I really mean yesterday.
Today was probably the most physically stenuous day of my life. We I biked over 60 km from Laredo to the outskirts of Bilbao- Krisztian said it was the most hilly day he´s had since starting in Madrid. We rode up septuple switchbacks and on roads that were overlooking cliffs where Europe meets the Atlantic. The hilly areas and scenic roads always have the most breathtaking views, and sometimes it almost feels like the twenty minutes going down a 10% grade makes the suffering more tolerable.
We stopped for lunch in a village and ate on the beach. Our lunches consist of a baguette each, a pile of meat and cheese, a few pieces of fruit, maybe some pre-packaged gaspacho, etc. It´s amazing how much you have to eat to have the energy to keep on climbing hills.
Later in the day, we crossed into the Basque nation. Quickly, the names of everything changed- long words with k´s and x´s. As night fell, we scouted out a "guerrilla" campsite off of a walking path which circumscribes a waterway, located in a beautiful village called El Regato. We found a footpath off of the walkway which was next to a huge construction site where workers were building a highway tunnel through the mountain. We both thought it was a pretty good spot, and I wanted to go spelunking in the tunnel once the workers went home.
The workers never went home. Apparently, this was a 24 hour worksite. I laid in my little coccoon, hearing machines and voices, losing all sense of their distance from me.
Today was probably the most physically stenuous day of my life. We I biked over 60 km from Laredo to the outskirts of Bilbao- Krisztian said it was the most hilly day he´s had since starting in Madrid. We rode up septuple switchbacks and on roads that were overlooking cliffs where Europe meets the Atlantic. The hilly areas and scenic roads always have the most breathtaking views, and sometimes it almost feels like the twenty minutes going down a 10% grade makes the suffering more tolerable.
We stopped for lunch in a village and ate on the beach. Our lunches consist of a baguette each, a pile of meat and cheese, a few pieces of fruit, maybe some pre-packaged gaspacho, etc. It´s amazing how much you have to eat to have the energy to keep on climbing hills.
Later in the day, we crossed into the Basque nation. Quickly, the names of everything changed- long words with k´s and x´s. As night fell, we scouted out a "guerrilla" campsite off of a walking path which circumscribes a waterway, located in a beautiful village called El Regato. We found a footpath off of the walkway which was next to a huge construction site where workers were building a highway tunnel through the mountain. We both thought it was a pretty good spot, and I wanted to go spelunking in the tunnel once the workers went home.
The workers never went home. Apparently, this was a 24 hour worksite. I laid in my little coccoon, hearing machines and voices, losing all sense of their distance from me.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Greetings from Laredo!
I left Manchester at 6 yesterday morning, after a night of drinking Polish beer. In my typical form, I almost missed my two bus connections and my flight from London Stansted to Santander, Spain. Though I still have yet to spend any time in London outside of the bus, I feel like i got a fairly good tour on the two buses that seemed to meander endlessly through the city. I saw Parliament, Big Ben, the London Bridge, the Thames River Gateway and all of the Olympic construction, various ostentatious Imperial monuments, and a number of neighborhoods and roads that I recognized from Rolling Stones songs.
Once I finally got there, i saw Krisztian, who seemed especially jubilant to be around someone who speaks his language for the first time in weeks. We re-assembled the bike, loaded everything on it, and set off to ride from the Santander airport to downtown. It was pouring, and we had to ride on a road that was nearly a highway. Not the best start to the trip. We stayed with a guy named Manuel, a high school philosophy teacher, who I met on the Couch Surfing site.
At the moment, I am in Laredo- a beach town in the Cantabria region. We set up our tents at a campground and headed downtown to relex. It was my first day of riding, and I think that we went about 45 kilometers. I learned that, as grueling as it might be, a huge hill is worth enduring of there is a 12th Century chapel on top. I am sore, but feel pretty good. We will be heading to Bilbao in the morning, and should get there some time tomorrow evening. I´ll upload some photos soon.
Once I finally got there, i saw Krisztian, who seemed especially jubilant to be around someone who speaks his language for the first time in weeks. We re-assembled the bike, loaded everything on it, and set off to ride from the Santander airport to downtown. It was pouring, and we had to ride on a road that was nearly a highway. Not the best start to the trip. We stayed with a guy named Manuel, a high school philosophy teacher, who I met on the Couch Surfing site.
At the moment, I am in Laredo- a beach town in the Cantabria region. We set up our tents at a campground and headed downtown to relex. It was my first day of riding, and I think that we went about 45 kilometers. I learned that, as grueling as it might be, a huge hill is worth enduring of there is a 12th Century chapel on top. I am sore, but feel pretty good. We will be heading to Bilbao in the morning, and should get there some time tomorrow evening. I´ll upload some photos soon.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
A Farewell (I Never Say Goodbye)
My experience in Manchester has had a much greater effect on me than I ever could have imagined. I had thought of it as a small interlude between leaving the States and the beginning of a long adventure. I hadn't given enough thought to the fact that the whole point of me coming to Manchester was to meet with other adventurers.
The conference/festival that I attended, Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives (TRIP), was a gathering of people who are interested in psychogeography. It's a rather pretentious sounding word that represents the concept that has driven my interest in street art, urbanism, and activism: re-thinking the seemingly banal and benign aspects of the built environment. Through various maps, lectures and art presentations, participants talked about the way that walking frames the experience of the city, ways to intervene in the landscape, the implications of gentrification, and some more metaphysical ideas about experiencing places. In short, it was about purposefully getting lost, critically engaging with the city, and meeting up with geographers, artists, activists, architects, archaeologists, and writers.
Among other things, I went on a number of walks, with varying degrees of structure, with other participants at TRIP. One of them involved walking along the canals of the city, which appear in the interstitial spaces of the city and then disappear just as quickly under the overbuilt city center. Along the canal was the long-gone site of a Roman trading outpost, locks which represented the varying topography of a canal that connected the eastern and western British coasts, the site of the first train tracks and passenger train station in the world, the sites that might be considered the birthplace of industrial globalization, and a few industrial ruins that were left behind as the city scurried to "regenerate" itself as a neoliberal center. At the same time, it was a canal. There were birds, trees growing from the mortar of old brick walls, and beautiful wooden houseboats. Much of this area has been converted from a corridor of vice to sanitized public walkways, but I was most drawn to the traces of the past and the plants that grew from mortar where the groundskeepers could not reach, reminding us that the city, too, is an ecological unit. I got interviewed by the BBC on this walk, but I have no idea how to get the podcast.
The experience at TRIP has reinforced my desire to shape my bike trip as a psychogeographical experience- to drift through countries and cities, paying attention to the minutiae of new landscapes. Beyond looking for magnificent beauty, I'll try to keep my eyes open to the banalities that I might often overlook.
Maybe it might just be because I am in a new place and know I have to move on, but I managed to fall for a wonderful person here. I wonder if only happened because of the near-impossibility of it ever really working out. My time with her has certainly overshadowed all of the other wonderful things I have seen and done in Manchester. It's made me confused, and helped me to realize how emotionally numb I have become.
Emotional openness is like taking photos with a slow shutter speed- it leaves you with an impression of less detail but more richness, uncertain of the elements that will reveal themselves in the risk of capturing a "moment."
Tomorrow morning I need to get a bus to London at 5:30. My knee still hurts, I have a cold, I feel out of shape and emotionally drained. I'm afraid of this bike trip, but I know there is no turning back. I know it will be amazing.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Happily, Manchester Fulfills Sterotype
Some of the effect is lost when you write in a notebook and type it up later....
I am inside an old brick house on a rainy day drinking tea and eating a crumpet (which, as it turns out, seems to be the same thing as an "english muffin"). June in northern England is still sweater weather, but I don't mind so much.
I had my first full night of sleep in days, though I couldn't sleep in because I had to be around when Aer Lingus delivered my luggage. It was lucky that my luggage got left behind at Dublin because my bike box would have never fit in the diminutive car that I was picked up in.
In my first day here, I rode around in double-decker buses, ate Indian and Middle Eastern food, went to a pub and a reggae club, drank lager on the steps of the BBC, wandered around downtown with Frank (AKA Kickball Jesus), and almost got hit by a bus because I looked the wrong way when I crossed the street. It's also notable the it's light outside until almost 11.
The neighborhood I am staying in, Whalley Range, which seems to be a working-class neighborhood with a mix of Afro-British, West Indian, South Asians, and white people. It's hard to gage the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood (and, perhaps, its safety), since the housing all seems to be in good condition and there are no outward signs of destitution. Still, the street down by the bus stop is blocked off by bollards, which I assume is an attempt at crime prevention. Since everything around here is made of brick and the housing architecture is fairly uniform, it's difficult to tell exactly how old the buildings are in this area.
A topic that has come up a number of times in the past day is fighting. When I was waiting for my baggage at the airport, I saw a man in a finely-tailored suit walking with his wife and young child; he had a black eye. This struck me as unusual, and somehow charming. An old man at the pub was lamenting that, in the old days, you could just go to a pub and start a fight with anyone, any time. Later, at the "off license, " what they call liquor stores around here, there was a drunk hooligan picking a fight with the security guard. I found it amusing as soon as I realized that his aggression wasn't aimed towards Frank, since he was standing in the doorway. At one point, he raised a metal shopping basket to swing at the guard. Then his girlfriend pulled him away, without a hint of embarrassment on her face. I think fighting still might be alive and well.
Yes, I know, this is not about biking. I start on Monday. I have to set up my photo show downtown tonight, and I will spend most of my time this week at the Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives conference at Manchester Metropolitan University. I will also be hanging out with the Loiterers Resistance Movement and helping teach the Mancunians how to play kickball.
More to come, since I am across the street from a cheap internet cafe.
I am inside an old brick house on a rainy day drinking tea and eating a crumpet (which, as it turns out, seems to be the same thing as an "english muffin"). June in northern England is still sweater weather, but I don't mind so much.
I had my first full night of sleep in days, though I couldn't sleep in because I had to be around when Aer Lingus delivered my luggage. It was lucky that my luggage got left behind at Dublin because my bike box would have never fit in the diminutive car that I was picked up in.
In my first day here, I rode around in double-decker buses, ate Indian and Middle Eastern food, went to a pub and a reggae club, drank lager on the steps of the BBC, wandered around downtown with Frank (AKA Kickball Jesus), and almost got hit by a bus because I looked the wrong way when I crossed the street. It's also notable the it's light outside until almost 11.
The neighborhood I am staying in, Whalley Range, which seems to be a working-class neighborhood with a mix of Afro-British, West Indian, South Asians, and white people. It's hard to gage the socioeconomic status of a neighborhood (and, perhaps, its safety), since the housing all seems to be in good condition and there are no outward signs of destitution. Still, the street down by the bus stop is blocked off by bollards, which I assume is an attempt at crime prevention. Since everything around here is made of brick and the housing architecture is fairly uniform, it's difficult to tell exactly how old the buildings are in this area.
A topic that has come up a number of times in the past day is fighting. When I was waiting for my baggage at the airport, I saw a man in a finely-tailored suit walking with his wife and young child; he had a black eye. This struck me as unusual, and somehow charming. An old man at the pub was lamenting that, in the old days, you could just go to a pub and start a fight with anyone, any time. Later, at the "off license, " what they call liquor stores around here, there was a drunk hooligan picking a fight with the security guard. I found it amusing as soon as I realized that his aggression wasn't aimed towards Frank, since he was standing in the doorway. At one point, he raised a metal shopping basket to swing at the guard. Then his girlfriend pulled him away, without a hint of embarrassment on her face. I think fighting still might be alive and well.
Yes, I know, this is not about biking. I start on Monday. I have to set up my photo show downtown tonight, and I will spend most of my time this week at the Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives conference at Manchester Metropolitan University. I will also be hanging out with the Loiterers Resistance Movement and helping teach the Mancunians how to play kickball.
More to come, since I am across the street from a cheap internet cafe.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Mental Preparation
Since I left Ithaca, NY this May I have been in Providence, RI, camping out in the sunroom of my gracious hosts, Adam, Corinne and Josh. I've been getting used to sleeping on the floor in my new sleeping bag and waking with the sun to the horrible sounds of pigeons on the roof. My preparations for camping have been more adequate than my physical conditioning for cycling- I hurt my knee riding on the Bristol bike path two weeks ago and had to stay off the bike for most of the time since then. Lately, I haven't made it any further on my bike than North Providence. Now the bike is in a cardboard box, ready to be loaded into the belly of a trans-Atlantic Airbus. Aer Lingus, if you are reading this, please take good care of it. Also, the non-Irish think your airline's name borders on innuendo.
It seems appropriate that, as I sit in Coffee Exchange, Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" just began playing on my iTunes, a random shuffle of 5,681 songs. You don't have to believe me, but I save up my white lies for less trivial and more hyperbolic stories. It's merely a cosmic omen, you see. Maybe you can point the real tall tales later along Tour de Awesome, when I sight a snow leopard in the Pyrenees.
Since readers from around the world have asked, I will now describe the gear that I am taking. I will be riding a Bianchi Volpe touring bike with clipless pedals, a Brooks leather saddle, front and rear racks, four waterproof pannier bags, and a handlebar bag. I'm trying to keep it as light as possible to slightly counteract my unpreparedness for a 2,000 mile journey. Otherwise, I am just bringing camping gear, a few pairs of biking and street clothes, tools, maps, and a little Lumix DSC-LX2 digital camera. I'll post a picture of the bike when I get to Spain. I also got a cool techie gadget- a solar charger for my iPod and mobile phone- it connects via USB port with multiple attachments and I can just stick it on my rack while I am riding.
I leave from Boston on Monday afternoon to spend a week in Manchester, England, the world's first industrialized city, where I will stay until the 23rd. I'll post again when I am there.
Also, my pal and riding partner Krisztian has a blog about the trip here. I also added it as an RSS feed in the top right of the site.
It seems appropriate that, as I sit in Coffee Exchange, Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" just began playing on my iTunes, a random shuffle of 5,681 songs. You don't have to believe me, but I save up my white lies for less trivial and more hyperbolic stories. It's merely a cosmic omen, you see. Maybe you can point the real tall tales later along Tour de Awesome, when I sight a snow leopard in the Pyrenees.
Since readers from around the world have asked, I will now describe the gear that I am taking. I will be riding a Bianchi Volpe touring bike with clipless pedals, a Brooks leather saddle, front and rear racks, four waterproof pannier bags, and a handlebar bag. I'm trying to keep it as light as possible to slightly counteract my unpreparedness for a 2,000 mile journey. Otherwise, I am just bringing camping gear, a few pairs of biking and street clothes, tools, maps, and a little Lumix DSC-LX2 digital camera. I'll post a picture of the bike when I get to Spain. I also got a cool techie gadget- a solar charger for my iPod and mobile phone- it connects via USB port with multiple attachments and I can just stick it on my rack while I am riding.
I leave from Boston on Monday afternoon to spend a week in Manchester, England, the world's first industrialized city, where I will stay until the 23rd. I'll post again when I am there.
Also, my pal and riding partner Krisztian has a blog about the trip here. I also added it as an RSS feed in the top right of the site.
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