03/07/2024
When people ask me why I’ve chosen to just get a bike and f*ck off across South America alone – and then carry on living off my motorcycle for a decade traipsing halfway around the world – I don’t have a good answer.
When I set out, I didn’t have a Mission, nor did I have a neat PowerPoint presentation to sponsors or social media followers detailing my planned route and all the lofty goals I’d achieve along the way, such as Connect With People, Discover Myself, Learn All There Is To Learn About Zen and The Art of Motorcycling, or Become The First Tall-ish Solo Blonde Woman to Make it Across the Atacama Desert While Listening to an Audiobook.
I didn’t have any plans whatsoever. I just hit the road, and then kept on going.
And, sure, I did learn some things along the way – like how to fix a flooded airbox, speak Spanish, navigate across the Bolivian Altiplano with no GPS, shoe horses with indigenous locals, travel through snowstorms, talk my way into the Rally Dakar bivouac, and ride dirt. Some of the riding was spectacular, some of it was horrendous, some utterly forgettable, and some of it has changed my life. Sometimes, I felt keenly alone, hurting bad in the witching hours; inexplicable melancholy would creep up on me, like sticky tendrils of thick, rolling Andean fog; sometimes I would fall in love; sometimes I would sing silly songs in my helmet and laugh, and other times I just wished I had a soft bed for the night, and I would feel dog tired or anxious, or thoroughly excited like a newborn foal in a summer meadow, or utterly lost and directionless, or decidedly mellow for no good reason at all except that the sun was out.
And I guess that was the whole point – simply being, rolling somewhere and nowhere slowly under the ever-changing skies, through thick and thin, rain and sleet and desert heat, feeling it all as it came, letting it all go as it went, writing strange stories and remembering the kind faces and the snow-capped mountains – and that, I think, is what I miss the most now that I sometimes find myself willingly selling my anxiety to Netflix, my quirks to over-analysis, and my fire to the gig economy. I feel scattered and spread thin sometimes, and worried about things I never worried about before, drowning restlessness in noise and carelessly trading solitude for memes.
The thing is, not every upset is a sign of depression; a little melancholy isn’t a mental health issue; ambition doesn’t make you a narcissist. We throw labels around so easily, diagnosing ourselves and others with a myriad of dysfunctions, distracted by shallow catchphrases and band-aid solutions to problems we don’t have, guided by mindless apps for mindfulness and online Experts of Everything… failing to simply be, face the thick and thin head on, feel it all out, then let it all go - and just keep on rolling under the stars, gently carrying with us the kind faces and the sunrises over the blue mountains like fragile treasure.
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