To Be Totally Free and Totally Alone

A Guide to Forgetting One and Remembering The Other

Harry Hughes  

“You have heard of the ocean?” My older sister asks incredulously after I tell her my plan: to cycle from England to New Zealand. 

I laugh. Not the worst response I’ve had so far. Since I left school five months ago, I’ve been looking for something. Something big. In Whanganui, I’ve felt stuck, ready to burst out into the world and do something real. 

I sat at dinner with my dad three months ago, staring at my Sprite as it fizzed, chewing on my local Indian place’s lamb rogan josh. Average, but comfortingly so. He raised an eyebrow at my proposal: travel. Not groundbreaking, except… England to New Zealand. My birthplace to my adoptive home. By bicycle. Cheaper? Hopefully. A great story? Definitely. To him, just another idea destined for the dustbin. 

I sit shivering on the 1 a.m. ferry from Dover, England to Calais, France. Two hours earlier than planned, I make the crossing I have been thinking about for months, ready to begin. 

For a brief 48-hour window, I was truly free. I could go wherever I pleased, eat and drink whatever I wanted. One moment stands out: halfway through my initial cycle in France, from Calais through Lille and past Valenciennes. Tired and wanting a break from my bony behind on the angular bike seat, I found a small bend in the road. I hid my bike in some nearby foliage and settled onto some grass by a pile of golden dirt. Ah! My Laurie Lee moment. Taking in a beautiful day of spring in the French countryside, surely the first of many. But in hindsight, after taking so many deep breaths in the weeks and months leading up to this, I forgot to exhale at the pivotal moment. 

I wake up. The sun has already risen, and the road is quiet. The day before, I cycled over 200km, drastically shortening my predicted time to cross Europe from 60 days to a mere 15. A mistake. I realise a second mistake as my eyes open and I roll over in my sleeping bag: French weather forecasts are not to be trusted. Among the waves of fatigue and impatience the night before, after finding a suitable roadside ditch, I had briefly checked my phone's weather app, flicking on my costly roaming package for mere seconds, before deciding that pitching my tent would not be necessary. My soaking sleeping bag tells me something different. I sheepishly wipe down and pack up my gear, hoping no judgmental French families will drive past and see the sorry, sopping English boy emerging from a roadside trench. 

If you have read Laurie Lee’s memoir As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, you may be thinking this is where I meet a fellow intrepid traveller of the French countryside backroads, or perhaps you are wondering at what point in this essay I will wheel out a violin to help make ends meet. If so, unfortunately, you have been taken by the romance in a similar way that an 18-year-old me was while planning this trip. Not only did I not meet any fellow wanderers, I didn’t see anyone at all, either on foot, two wheels or on four, for nearly six hours. So I did what any self-respecting global explorer would do: I parked up my bike, sat on the side of the road, began to cry, and called my mum. 

For a couple of days, I hole up in a hotel in a small French town at my parents' suggestion. During this time, I run the included breakfast buffet out of all bread-related products, something I think, at this point, I realise is much more in my wheelhouse than cycling from England to New Zealand. I look again at the next week's weather forecast, closer this time. Perhaps my first admission that this trip isn’t what I thought, or perhaps just in search of some more favourable weather, I book a bus to Nice at the opposite end of the country. The bus leaves 24 hours after I check out of my hotel in Valenciennes, a 160 km ride.

Almost immediately upon exiting the city limits, I feel an explosion inside my knee. As I hobble off my bike and onto the pavement, I immediately begin to doubt the wisdom of any of it. I inhale an unhealthy number of ibuprofène and flex my knee. I look at the clock on my screen saver and set off again. 

As the sun begins to set, and I shake the last drops out of my 500ml water bottle, I start to scan the roadside for a source of drinkable water. Nothing. A lack of planning and an excess of naivety had led me to believe that, like back home in New Zealand, drinking fountains would be plentiful across the European continent. Unfortunately not. 

So when I see an empty truck stop, my thirst insists I at least check whether the truck-cleaning hoses are working. They are not. However, a bucket of stagnant water begins to look rather appealing, and so I take a big scoop into my bottle and take a sip. Soap. It is literally a window cleaner. Disgusting. Not only am I now without water for the remaining 70km of cycling, but all I can taste is soap and the equally disgusting cherry Bakewell gel that was my sole remaining food source. 

After sleeping in the woods on the outskirts of what I have since found out is a French military base—once again sans tent; don’t learn my lessons, do I—I get back on the road. And I do eventually make it. Loudly amping myself up, I trundle at an embarrassing speed over the final hills and into the station. Famished, I inhaled some bakery items and two bottles of water, to the visible horror of the elderly American tourists sitting next to me. 

Cut to: me, several days later, halfway up a corniche between the Mediterranean coasts of France and Italy, a French woman stopped me and asked if I was okay. Looking at me, she probably knew the answer. Comically dressed in full biking attire and with about 15kg of gear strapped to my bike, it’s a miracle I wasn’t met with laughter. Instead, she offered me a water refill and chocolate. 

It was either at this moment, or sometime after, that I became acutely aware that the explorer-traveller life was not for me. Within four weeks of my arrival by bus in Nice, I was sitting on a British Airways flight to Australia, via Istanbul, minus one bike. 

There is a hope, I think, that among the people who knew of my trip, the illusion has yet to be broken for some. That, despite my own disappointment, perhaps someone I spoke to in the street, or someone who I never knew was watching, still thinks I’m out there. While the wheels both figuratively and literally fell off quite some time ago now, for someone out there, perhaps I am now far away, exuberant but exhausted, drifting off to sleep like Laurie Lee in a golden field of wheat, the sun still shining. 

I really did get out of the trip what I wanted to. Good stories, a bit of exercise, and the knowledge that no matter where you go, people are generally pretty decent. 

Still, there are probably easier ways to learn this.

I have also learned that it is inadvisable to make decisions throughout your life, whether small or big, through the lens of how it would sound in a well-distributed and read obituary. Though, a good story is still a good story, even when the person telling it has gone home early.