Travels with Rocinante.
It was the end of autumn. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, staring at the bones of a bike. Metal debris littered the carpet. My phone stood propped against the cardboard bike box as YouTube explained how to screw pedals on. I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
To make sure I hadn’t forgotten some vital bolt, I checked the bike box one more time. There, lying flat at the bottom, almost invisible, was a card. It had pictures of all sorts of bicycles across the front with the words “Les Bicyclettes” in the centre. Inside was a message from Jasmine, the lady who had sold the bike to me over Facebook Marketplace. She had scribbled how much she’d loved the bike over the years, where I could find a good mechanic in Christchurch, and where it had previously lived: Adelaide, Cairns and Nelson. Just like that, Jasmine had blessed my bike. I hadn’t even attached the pedals yet, but it was starting to murmur a tale.
There’s a term, contagion magic, which anthropologists use to describe the belief that an object can bear traces of those who have come into contact with it. This might be someone inflicting pain from afar because they have a piece of your hair. Or, a master potter imbuing a piece of their work with their own expertise, which gets passed on to the person who receives it. Jasmine was not to know I was planning a rather large and rather ill-prepared voyage on my new steed, but I now had some of her magic to take with me. And I would need it. My bike and I were going to India.
“Why?” would be a sane question right about now. Mostly, I was inspired by type II fun loving friends and the promise of adventure. Riding a bike seemed a well-paced, tactile way to travel; a way of plunging into a place and being soaked to the bone. That, and we’d met a guy once in Mozambique who had cycled from Belgium. He’d ridden through Tajikistan shortly after some other cyclists had been murdered there, he told us cheerfully. He had no helmet, and was travelling on a crappy old bike with a bunny he’d found along the way. I thought he was mad. Mad, but intriguing.
That I decided on India for my maiden voyage was in keeping with a tendency to bite off more than I can chew. Like the sentiment Johnny Wray of South Sea Vagabonds uses to justify sailing the Pacific with no prior experience, if one wants to travel by bike, one must simply hit the road, right? And one must start somewhere. So why not head for the Himalaya?
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My new bike was a black, steel framed Surly Cross Check from the late nineties. It was, according to the guy at the bike workshop (thanks J), all good for touring, but would probably “noodle” when fully loaded and travelling at speed. An alarming description, but I quickly realised I probably wouldn’t get my full load up to much speed. I’m not really a Strava-using, lightweight set-up, glucose syrup kinda gal. Meandering laden with stupidly heavy keepsakes is more my style.
In August I went to a poetry night at the Canterbury Museum. Surrounded by velvet dresses and colonial-era cabinets and mirrors, we were read a poem called ‘This Chair’, by Nicholas Williamson, part of which goes as follows.
This kitchen chair
has held some special bums:
Jeff, who doesn’t visit now
cos we’re not talking
& Don, who cooed from it
I love you
to my wife
I was stunned by the reminder: the layers of meaning a singular object can hold, the stories it can tell. I thought about my recent Marketplace escapades. A cabinet-slash-writing-desk left on my porch for the lucky buyer after a quickfire exchange of messages. Cash stuffed under the pot plant, no ceremony. Only owned it for six months. Had the person who made it designed the desk for writing? Or had it been used to feverishly sketch the outlines of a passion project, a shed out the back? Were the scribbles and scrapes from one toddler, or many? Now I’d reduced it to shallow and empty. I thought about my bike.
The ritual of preparation for the trip had begun, and the Surly was gathering contagion magic at speed. I’d been told that as far as panniers go, I’d have to splash out on Ortliebs. German, waterproof, $250ish a pop, and I’d need four. Shit. I jumped online, and lo and behold, someone was selling a ten-year old set for reasonably cheap.
Here’s the gist of our conversation:
“Hey Bryce, I see these are ten years old, are they still waterproof? I’m planning on taking them on a big mission.”
“Awesome, where are you going? I’ve cycled through Peru and Bolivia, I’d love to sell them to someone going on a big trip!”
Travel note-swapping ensued, and the next time I checked my phone, there was a message from Bryce telling me he wanted to gift me the panniers (which are mostly waterproof). Just to pay it forward for all the kindness he’d received in his time cycle touring. Bryce, if you’re reading this, thank you. You are a legend.
And so it continued. Back at the bike shop, I was looking for a front rack on which to clip the gifted panniers. Apparently, because my bike was so old, the right one was going to have to be shipped from the States. Until (of course) Scott, a seasoned cycle tourer who was waiting behind me, piped up: he had the exact rack I needed gathering dust in his attic at home. He sold it to me for peanuts, and threw in a retro, faded purple handlebar bag, too.
Then, there was Mark from the Sumner community bicycle workshop, who helped me take the Surly to bits and replace everything that needed replacing, teaching me basic bike anatomy as we went. And Olly, who showed me how to change an inner tube, and, critically, how to pack a bike in a box so that it doesn’t get smashed to bits on the plane ride over.
I was discovering that folks who ride bikes long distances are a giving bunch. As well as the gear, the wisdom and the technical expertise, none had hesitated to indulge my romantic enthusiasm. Perhaps because they have it too. Maybe they agree with Steinbeck, who writes in Travels with Charley, “I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not stronger.” Either that or I reek of incompetence. Probably a bit of both. I decided to call my bike Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s skinny black horse and Steinbeck’s house-on-wheels from Travels.
Each one of these kind cyclists was layering my bike with meaning. Rocinante had – I felt, anyway, as I rode her to work every day, Bryce’s panniers stuffed with spare clothes – deep personality, already. Like one of those stories where everybody writes a line and passes it on, then laughs at the final piece. Though there had been satisfaction in preparing for a solo journey, in getting ready to be self-reliant, everyone’s blessings gave me the sense I wouldn’t really be alone. Rocinante was about to become my roaming home for a few months, and many hands had built her.
So, at the time of writing, here we are. Rocinante and I have landed in India. We’ve joined the loudest, most colourful wobbling peloton in the world. We get laughed at a lot. I’m doing a month warming up in the comparatively flat southern state of Kerala before I head up to the mountains.
Time to see what kind of contagion magic awaits us next.
Georgia Merton
