LILITH POLLOCK

Adrift: Nine Months on a Bike

I drop my bike at the side of a potholed road, somewhere in central Tajikistan. I let it fall against the ground, disregarding anything in my panniers that might dent or shatter or spill. The front wheel spins against cool air, going nowhere. Rough-edged peaks rise on either side of the valley. I walk away from the broken tarmac, heading towards a river that meanders through the Pamir Mountains. Follow the water back the way we came, and you will reach the border with Afghanistan.

Blades of parched grass snap beneath my feet. Above, the sky is washed out blue—its vibrance faded by a sheet of cloud. I find a rock to sit on, put my chin in cupped hands. Stare at the water and wonder if it is deep enough to drown myself in.

Since leaving my home in Berlin to set out on this eight-thousand-kilometre-long journey, I’ve been living a dream. While biking from Germany to Nepal might sound like a nightmare to many people, it’s the dream I’ve nurtured (along with my partner, P) for the past ten years: to cycle across Europe and Asia.

And here we are—finally doing it.

And I want to die.

I make a mental audit of the painkillers we’re carrying. A half-finished blister pack of Sainsbury’s own brand paracetamol, another open packet of prescription ibuprofen (six hundred milligrams each), a couple of Paramols. I don’t know how much I would need; push the intrusive thoughts away.

Footsteps approach. P circles the rock next to mine and sits down beside me. He asks what’s going on. A truck rumbles along the road behind us, kicking up dust. Gravel crackles beneath tires. I begin to cry.

I don’t want to be here anymore, I say.

P tells me it’s alright, that we can go home whenever we like. We can book flights back to Berlin from the nearest airport. He hasn’t understood me.

No, I say. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be anywhere.

He sits beside me in silence for a moment.

He sticks out his tongue and licks my arm.

A cross-continental cycle tour is something we’ve wanted to do for almost a decade, but somehow the timing was never right. Something would come up for one or other (or both) of us. A place on a course, a new job, a global pandemic. Perhaps because there’s never a perfect time to abandon your life for an entire year. We would delay again—the trip remaining a vague pipe dream.

In the end it was desperation that forced a shift from talk to action. After sixteen months spent watching my mental health rapidly deteriorate, P began to worry I would abandon my life entirely. I needed a change. Getting on our bikes was the most different way of existing we could imagine.

That’s how we find ourselves in the middle of the Tajik mountains, cycling from Berlin to Kathmandu. For the past five months, I have woken almost every day in a different place. Scrubland, field boundaries, a river’s banks, pebbled beaches. Patches of bare earth, lakesides, and abandoned motorway flyovers. As we travel further from home, my eyes consume the contours of countries I’ve never visited before. I pedal to the rhythm of unfamiliar languages. My tongue twists around words that are foreign to me. I smell the air changing: the earthy damp of winter in Central Europe, salt and pine resin along Turkey’s Anatolian coast, desert herbs in Kazakhstan. I gorge on the flavours, sights, and sounds of unknown places.

I stuff myself with newness, hoping to become new in turn.

*

Berlin, Germany. The second of March, 2024.

Sunlight warms the winter air. We couldn’t have asked for better weather. Friends are waiting outside our apartment building to send us on our way. A few of them will ride out of the city with us. They stand around for almost an hour, stamping feet to keep warm while we carry one final box down to the basement, tighten the bolts on our luggage racks, check we haven’t left anything perishable in the kitchen cupboards.

It’s mid-morning by the time we’re ready to go. We lock our apartment door, haul the bags down to the courtyard. Our friends greet us with cheers as we wheel our bikes through the building’s front door. We gather in a tangle of arms. Our group fills the cobbled pavement, forcing weekend shoppers visiting the Boxhagener Platz market to skirt around bodies, bikes, bags. I can feel myself stalling—checking for my passport, leaning in for another hug, one last goodbye. But it’s time to leave.

I sit in the leather saddle. It is hard, unyielding. The bike feels solid but unstable beneath me. Pushing off, I weave along the pavement for a few meters before dismounting to avoid taking out any pedestrians. I wheel the bike to the end of the road and try again. On tarmac I’m less unbalanced—but this will take some getting used to. It’s the first time I have cycled with this much weight: full front and rear panniers, bar and saddlebags. The unfamiliar bulk is simultaneously comforting and daunting. It feels like a tank compared to the beaten-up road bike I use for commuting.

We ride off in convoy, flanked by our friends. At last—we’re on our way. Until we stop two minutes later. P needs to adjust his saddle. Then again, to change the height and angle of his handlebars. Our GPS isn’t working so we stop once more to pull up the route on his phone to navigate by. It’s a faltering, hesitant start.

We head southeast, following the Spree in the direction of Köpenick. Past the Plattenbauten lining the streets of Rummelsburg and Karlshorst. Along a cycle path beside the train line that leads to Erkner, Frankfurt Order, and onwards to Poland. Continuing south on dirt tracks, we skirt around Müggelsee. Joggers and dog walkers stare at our heavily loaded bikes. I feel uncomfortably conspicuous. We cross over the Dahme to leave the city limits and enter Brandenburg.

One by one our friends turn back towards the city centre. We are five, then four, then three. A stab of homesickness hits me each time we lose a rider, although home is barely out of sight. As the sun dips closer to the horizon, the last accompanying rider turns around. We wave until he is out of sight, and it’s just the two of us. Only then does this journey begin to feel real.

We stop at a supermarket to buy a picnic dinner. Brötchen, salami, cherry tomatoes, hummus, apples. I’m trying to keep my spirits up; but eating a cold meal in the cold woods is less than appealing. Back on our bikes, we turn off the road and head down a track through pine trees. Following the path, we travel deeper into the woods and look for a place to camp.

P spots tyre tracks—long mossed over—leading away from the main path. We follow them up a short hill, hauling bikes over fallen branches. Thorns snag at sleeves, trouser legs. The forest floor is thick with last autumn’s leaves. They whisper underfoot. Aside from the leaves and the wind in the branches, these woods are silent. There are no birds or insects. No signs of any life at all.

Cold creeps in swiftly once daylight has faded. I strip off my cycling clothes and splash water from my bottle onto my face and armpits. I then pull on every layer of clothing I have with me. As soon as we’ve finished our sad picnic in the empty forest, I crawl into the tent, climb into my merino wool liner, bury myself deep within my sleeping bag. I try to get some rest in the eerie quiet.

I wake the next morning questioning all of my decisions. I have to remind myself that I chose this—and that means I can un-choose it too.

*

Serbia. The beginning of April.

Leaving a city is usually unpleasant by bike. Getting out of Belgrade is no different. We follow the waterfront and join up with an official EuroVelo cycle route. I imagined this would mean quiet roads and well-maintained bike paths. Instead this route takes us onto a ramp that leads to a four-lane motorway, across a bridge, and deposits us on a dirt track alongside the Danube. The riverside path is rutted with tire tracks. It’s gruelling cycling. We clatter over the pitted ground at a painfully slow pace. Every pothole sends a jolt through my body.

We cycle through towns, past smallholdings. Alongside industrial sites and power stations leeching fumes into the sky. Past the open rubbish dumps that are dotted across the countryside. On the banks of the Danube, the scenery unfolds like a gift as the river runs its course towards the Black Sea. The landscape shifts from wide open floodplains to rolling hills and deep gorges. Plastic waste tangles with driftwood along the banks of the river.

People go out of their way to help us, and to make us feel welcome. In one town a middle-aged man on a bicycle stops to ask if we are German (a common question).

Aha, just as crazy! he laughs, when we tell him we’re English.

When he learns we need to stock up on food, he escorts us to the nearest supermarket. At a campsite in Zatonje, the owner greets us with a shot of brandy and a glass of homemade elderflower cordial. When we take a coffee break one afternoon, the cafe owner asks where we’re headed—and proceeds to dictate directions into a translation app to guide us there.

Spring announces itself in an effusion of insects. We stop to dig winged bodies from the corners of our eyes. The temperature climbs from the low tens to high twenties in a matter of days—skipping the mild weather I’ve been waiting for. Wildflowers creep up between blades of grass, turn their petals towards the sun. Leaf buds are opening in every shade of green.

I feel myself unfurling too. A gentle sun warms my skin. The ever changing scenery provides constant stimulation, without being overstimulating. The restless searching feeling that needles at contentment is slowly beginning to fade.

We’re introduced to Serbia’s wildlife through its roadkill. Snakes and toads are the most common casualties. We see an owl, a hedgehog, a pine marten; crumpled bodies abandoned at the side of the road. In one slightly apocalyptic scene, we cycle past a stray dog—muzzle stained red with blood—tearing at the carcass of a Eurasian otter twice its size.

Almost every house has a dog or two. In the mornings and evenings (and in the middle of the night) a chorus of their howling keeps us from sleep. Mostly they bark at us from behind the safety of gates or fences. But strays chase after our bikes, snarling at heels. While I know they’re unlikely to bite, each of these encounters leaves me rattled.

Although we haven’t been away for long, I already feel as if we’re existing outside of society; occupying a separate, parallel reality. Norms of behaviour no longer apply. We take out our stove to boil water for tea in public parks. A spoon licked clean is clean enough. Daily washing rituals are beginning to slip. We brush up against people’s lives—but we are just passing through. It’s a strangely dissociative experience.

At the same time, it is a deeply satisfying way to live. I begin to feel more at home in the world, closer to animal than human. Our needs are stripped down to basics—food, water, shelter. There’s a simplicity of purpose, where all we have to do each day is get a little closer to our destination. Yes, it is difficult. But in some ways it is easy too.

*

Early May, southeastern Turkey.

I’ve been so convinced I will love cycling in Turkey, that it takes a few days to admit I’m not enjoying this stretch. At least not as much as I expected.

We spend a morning riding along the hard shoulder of a four-lane highway. As the temperature increases, the scent of roadkill takes on violence. I pedal fast to outrun the stench of rot. Plastic bottles filled with piss litter the side of the road. Drivers beep a greeting as their cars pass by. Each time this happens, irritation rises in my chest.

They’re just being friendly, says P, waving a hand in return.

Conditioned by years of catcalls, wolf whistles, and unwanted comments hurled from the windows of passing cars, I can’t help but get annoyed.

The scenery is dull but the tarmac is flat. We’re covering distance quickly. By midday we arrive at a city called Milas. After navigating through busy streets, we join a quiet road that leads towards the seaside town of Oren. We pass olive groves, farm fields, and meadows as we gradually climb into the hills.

Rounding one curve in the road, the tree cover vanishes—revealing an open wound. The hillside has been stripped bare. Natural slopes carved into geometric terraces. A convoy of lorries roll across the exposed earth, sending up clouds of dust behind them. From a distance they look like ants. We stop to watch their progress; mesmerised by this monstrosity.

I’ve never encountered an open-pit mine on this scale. We continue riding, scarred earth stretching out alongside us, and debate what precious material is worth such destruction. The mine goes on and on. The surrounding air begins to feel heavier, thick with some unseen pollution. We pass over another hilltop and the power plant this mine feeds comes into view. They are digging for coal.

The hills in this region are punishing, pitching steeply down into green valleys and rising as quickly again. We descend beyond the coalmine and the power station to reach sea level once more. It’s just past five o’clock in the evening. We are still twenty kilometres (and a four-hundred-metre ascent) from the campsite we’re aiming to sleep at.

The climb is brutal. Sweat and sunscreen bleed into my eyes; a salt and chemical sting. Whenever I release my grip on the handlebars to wipe away the pain my bike veers into the middle of the road.

I cycle ahead, stopping at regular intervals to wait for P to catch up. To both of our surprise I’m faster on the inclines than he is. P thinks this is because I have a better power-to-weight ratio. I think it’s because I have a higher tolerance for suffering.

I’m a draught horse and you’re a show pony, I tease him.

The sun dips below the horizon as we arrive at the peak. We turn on our lights and drop down to the seafront as darkness falls around us. Finally we have found the Turkey I imagined. Unblemished coastline waits where the road levels out. The air is fragrant with pine, eucalyptus, fig. When we reach the sea, the water is astonishingly clear. I struggle to accept that a place this beautiful can lie one hill beyond an area so thoroughly destroyed by human activity.

We’re tired, hungry. Drained by a day of climbing. We need to cook and set up the tent. But practicalities will have to wait. First, we swim.

*

Nukus, Uzbekistan. June in Central Asia.

We wake before the sun comes up and are pedalling by 5:30 am. There’s only one road heading east—a highway still under construction in places. We follow it out of the city and back into the desert. The air is still, windless.

This is fine, I think to myself as light creeps into the sky.

By nine o’clock, it is no longer fine. The sun is high overhead. The intensity of its heat scares me. I begin to feel panicked, trapped. Early morning’s stillness evaporates and the wind rises. Soon we are battling a headwind, muscles burning from exertion.

The roads here are mostly populated by white Chevrolets and Damas minivans—although we see the odd Soviet-era Lada, painted in shades of mustard, forest, turquoise, orange. These vehicles are funneled into single lanes alongside one another where the road is being built, leaving no space for our bikes. Ignoring piles of gravel and roadworks signs, we take the unopened new lane to avoid the traffic.

After a few kilometres we turn off the highway and cross the Amu Darya river, leaving the barren expanse of desert behind. Heavy irrigation sustains this pocket of greenery along the Uzbek-Turkmen border. Rice paddies surround each settlement and scraggy trees line the roadside.

By mid-afternoon, it’s forty degrees in the shade—and there is little shade to find. Our bodies are slick with sweat. The water in our bottles is hot. The thin cotton trousers and shirt I’m wearing (to cover every inch of skin) cling to damp limbs. In the evening I’ll find my thighs have burnt through the material.

We arrive at a village where many of the buildings are marked on our map as homestays. But none of the listed addresses have a sign outside, or show any indication of being somewhere we could stay. We decide to cool off in a restaurant while we discuss what to do.

The restaurant owner’s ten-year-old daughter speaks a little English. She is relaying our requests to her mother. Once our bodies have started to feel normal again—after a jug of iced tea, a few bottles of water, and an hour lying down in front of a fan—we ask the girl if there is anywhere in the village we can spend the night.

She says yes, without hesitation.

The place she has in mind is her own home. Her mother shuts up the restaurant and we cycle behind the family car on the two-minute ride to their house. Inside, her mother makes up a bed where we can sleep. Picks fresh cucumbers and apricots from their garden. Brings out a basket of bread, dishes piled high with walnuts, golden raisins, sweets, biscuits, and a slab of chiffon cake held together with layers of cream. She lays out towels and offers to wash our clothes. Apologising, she says she has to return to work but will be back later.

Once the sun begins to set, P goes outside to clean our chains. By the time I join him, a group of curious locals has gathered around. We are given two further offers of a bed for the night. One man jumps into his car and returns with bottles of fridge-cold Fanta, ice creams, and a watermelon. Another neighbour brings round a steaming platter of plov—enough to feed a family. We eat as much of these gifts as we can, feeling like pigs being fattened for slaughter.

Our hosts shut up their restaurant early and return to entertain us. We communicate through another neighbour who speaks a little English, with the help of a translation app. At one point, the mother asks what our salaries are. Apparently this question is common in Uzbekistan—but I bristle, wondering whether the evening is about to take a different turn. When P shares his monthly salary as a software developer (a number that sounds obscene even by European standards) the mother appears both shocked and delighted in equal measure. It’s more than they earn in a year, she tells us.

The conversation continues. A hard edge of shame presses into my chest, that I assumed malignance in her question. At the end of the evening we ask if we can repay their generosity. The family won’t accept any money from us. And we have nothing else to give.

*

Zanskar, India. Late August in the high Himalayas.

The unpaved road follows the curve of the mountainside, continuing uphill. This climb feels impossible. I keep attempting to shift into a lower gear, forgetting I’m already at the lowest limit. We’re travelling at less than three kilometres per hour. It would be faster if we got off and pushed. Eventually, we round one final bend in the road and begin to descend. And suddenly the pain feels worth it.

I struggle to describe the scenery without falling back on superlatives. Breathtaking, stunning, astounding. And yet these words feel empty. They can’t capture the scale: row upon jagged row of peaks fading into the horizon. They don’t describe the joy humming deep within my body—a low, animal vibration. Their meanings are not wide enough to hold terror alongside beauty (because death is always close at hand in these mountains).

The reminder of danger draws closer as our descent shifts from gentle to sheer. What once was a road has been submerged beneath a recent landslide. We follow vehicle tracks over uneven ground—mud, sand, fallen rocks. I’m comforted by the knowledge that cars have passed this way before us. The tyres slip out from underneath my bike at every hairpin bend in the road. Fingers tighten over the brakes until they begin to cramp.

A bridge has been washed away where our road reaches the valley floor. We stop to take off shoes and socks and wheel our bikes through the stream. Cold water burns bare skin. A little further on, the valley hits the Zanskar river and we turn in the direction of Padum.

The road here is under construction. We pass a digger clawing at the cliff face. A truck overtakes us, filled with labourers who are being delivered to one of the worksites up ahead. The air is thick with rock dust. It fills our eyes and clogs our noses. I keep my mouth shut, still feel grit between my teeth. We meet the truck once again, around the next bend, where it has stopped to unload its human cargo.

In this narrow river gorge, the mountains are almost vertically pitched down into the river below. In places, the road is being blasted out of the rockface. We cycle through these almost-tunnels, the weight of the mountains hanging above us. I begin to feel claustrophobic; try to force my legs to push harder. I want to get past this stretch as fast as possible. But we are tired, slow. The off-road surface makes us slower still. Then P gets a puncture.

We stop at the side of the road and he takes off his back wheel. Searches for levers, a hand pump, an inner tube, spilling the contents of his panniers onto the dust. I sit on a newly-built barrier wall that is already sinking into the river. The same truck approaches for a third time and grinds to a halt beside us, engine still running.

Do you need help? the driver calls out of his open window. He is dressed in military fatigues.

P and I glance at one another. No, no we’re fine, P says.

The road is very bad. There are roadworks for twenty kilometres. You need a lift, the driver says—more statement than question.

Okay! Yes! I shout, before P turns him down again.

The driver is right—this road is terrible. I don’t want to cycle if I can avoid it. P climbs the metal rungs of a ladder that leads to the truck bed. First I pass up our bags. Then stand on tiptoes, using all my strength to lift the bikes above my head while P hangs over the metal siding to receive them. There’s no space for us in the cab, so I climb up after the bikes and we set off.

The back of the vehicle is filled with sweet wrappers, juice cartons, and empty plastic bottles. At first I try to stand—but we’re flung about as the truck heaves itself over boulders and deep holes. There is no crash barrier on the river side of the road; just a sheer slope of rock and scree. The truck tips steeply from side to side. I worry it will lose balance and roll down into the water below. I sit on a bundled pile of tarpaulin, trying to avoid my anxious thoughts and the oil stains smeared across the truck bed.

After twenty slow kilometres the river gorge opens up into a wide valley, flanked by peaks. The sun is out, spilling the last of its golden light across the landscape. For another ten kilometres we drive along fresh tarmac to the outskirts of a village called Zangla. The driver drops us here, waves a cheerful goodbye, and continues on to wherever he is going.

*

Gauriphanta, on the Indian-Nepali border. October.

We’re surrounded by jungle, thirty kilometres deep into a national park known for its tiger population. Monkeys pick through the packaging strewn alongside the road, searching for scraps. There is nothing much to signal this place is an official border crossing—besides a few Nepali people making their way towards us from the opposite direction. There are no barriers blocking the road, no signs to signal entry or exit from India.

We see two young men dressed in camouflage uniforms at the side of the road. They are seated in folding chairs, rifles dangled over the backs. They gaze in confusion as we approach. One jumps up and asks if he can take a selfie with us and the bikes. Once he is satisfied with his photo, we ask where we can find the border office. He points in the direction of a bamboo hut on the opposite side of the road.

The hut has a low veranda, where six men dressed in civilian clothes are lolling on plastic chairs. One of them holds a slingshot and fires stones at the monkeys whenever they get too close. I’m confused as to why the guard has sent us here. But it becomes apparent this hut is the immigration office. The hut has no passport scanner, no computers, no electricity. It is lit by a battery powered lantern, which one of the men turns on now that darkness is beginning to fall. Neither P or I have eaten since morning, further lending this scene the feeling of a fever dream.

One of the men takes our passports. He copies our details into a dog-eared ledger in a slow, neat script. Once he is done, he hands our travel documents to another man who photographs the pages with our entry stamps and personal details. He takes these pictures on his mobile phone. Someone else copies the same details recorded into the ledger onto departure cards. I watch the man who took the photographs wandering around in front of the hut—phone in hand, arm held above his head.

No signal, he says, noticing my attention.

He needs to send the photos to an office in Lucknow, he explains, the nearest border control station with a working computer. The staff there will have to check our details against their database before we’re allowed to leave the country.

We wait around for about an hour. By this time it is fully dark. I am anxious to cross, unsure how long the border remains open for—and worried we’ll be forced to sleep in the jungle (with the tigers) overnight. Eventually, one of the men tells us our exit has been approved. We’re free to go.

He hands over our documents and I flick through the pages. You haven’t given us an exit stamp, I say.

Another flurry of activity ensues. Multiple immigration officers are involved in the process of finding the ink, setting the date, and ensuring both our passports and departure cards are stamped. We are chaperoned back to the road by one of the border officials, where two women dressed in military uniforms stand behind a trestle table. Once again, our information entered into another ledger. And, at last, we are allowed to continue.

We get into the saddle and pedal across one final border.

*

Berlin, again. The end of November.

I’ve always been sceptical of the truism that travel heals, anxious to avoid being yet another western European who goes abroad to find themselves. I could never swallow the idea that being in a different place makes you a different (or better) person. But despite my hostility to this notion, it still held an allure. I couldn’t help but set off on this journey with the secret hope that travel would “fix” me. That I would go away and return again healed.

Before we left I felt out of control. Like I was being dragged along by currents I couldn’t hope to swim against. I was directionless, drifting. In straying beyond the boundaries of my day to day life, I hoped I might find a way back to myself.

Nine months later, this long slow wandering journey ends exactly where it started. And I am still the same.

The anxiety returns almost as soon as we land in the city—a tight knot of pain lodged in the right side of my chest. At times I still find myself overwhelmed, unable to cope. I slip back into old patterns of behaviour. Black dog days prowl at the peripheries.

But while I am by no means “fixed”—I can’t deny I do feel better. Dark moods pass quickly. I’ve stopped chasing anxiety in endless loops around my own mind. I feel more competent, self-reliant, and assured. I’m under no illusion, however, that being in a foreign country is what brought about these changes.

 Instead, it was learning to yield to existence in all its knotted beauty. Over the course of nine months I was forced to surrender to uncertainty. No matter how much preparation I did in advance, no matter how meticulous my planning, these plans would go awry. There were punctures, roadworks, landslides, snapped brake levers, bare-shelved grocery shops, lost equipment, dried up springs, hailstorms, injuries, broken ATMs. I had to let go of my need to feel in control. To give myself over to chaos—and trust that I could manage whatever came my way.

I stopped struggling against the current and let the water hold me.

Lilith Pollock is a Berlin-based writer. Her short fiction has appeared in a couple of emerging magazines and she is currently working on a novel.