Tag: cycle touring

It Begins Again!

Published on by Mika5 Comments

One of the questions i got after my Ossobuco presentation last year was, “how do you begin preparing for such long journeys!?”

With a map on the wall!

That’s where preparations for all my months-long cycle touring or hitchhiking journeys so far have started — a map on the wall.

It’s no different this time around — my partner Nastia and i are planning a tour de Ukraine for this coming Spring/Summer, and we started by pasting a map of the country on our living room wall. Now every time one of us hears about or remembers a place we’d like to see, we pin it on the map, then take a few moments to stare and point at it, fantasizing — we have made no commitments whatsoever yet — just gradually installing a qualitative map of Ukraine and its immediate surroundings in our imagination!

There’s this saying that goes something like, “if you want to make your dreams come true, then you must first wake up.” Subsumed in this saying is the fact that the zeroth thing you have to do is to dream — what would you wake up to otherwise!? And “maps are fail-proof fuel for wanderlust,” as self-unemployed creative explorer Tom Allen notes in #4 of his 15 Unorthodox Ways to Train for Cycle Touring & Bikepacking (Bicycle Optional) — if my memory serves me well, that’s where i got the inspiration for this practice.

I don’t mean to neglect or oversimplify other aspects of the preparation — although the same Tom has another great piece on why you should probably disregard most of it. There’s a lot more we need to do until we’re ready for our departure, including the crucial (even by Tom’s standards) bit of getting a bicycle for Nastia! I just see the rest of the preparation as quite circumstantial, and it would be pointless for me to tell you what else to do other than ask yourself some questions and factor in your own constrains.

For instance, i want to be able to have deeper conversations with locals than i’ve had in my travels before, so i’ve been studying Ukrainian for a couple of hours every day — you might not have to do that — i’ve traveled myself in places where i didn’t even know how to say hi in their language upon my arrival, and that constituted at the time its own, duly contextualized and valuable experience.

There’s one other thing i would personally like to try this time around — what would you ask somebody who just came back from a few months traveling by bicycle around Ukraine? Where would you go? What would you pay attention to?

Comment below or send me a message. I promise to pin all your cues on our map — learning what may have value to you will be of great value to me 🙂

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Featured photo: map of Ukraine on our living room wall (February ’19)

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Trelograms #26 — “Don’t Forget to Shower”

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— “you may even want to use some soap,” said my partner the other day, just before heading out.

Anybody who knows me will attest that i don’t normally like to shower any more than i enjoy doing the dishes — it’s a largely instrumental procedure. Perhaps for that same reason, bathing when i’m on the road is a priority — i do it every evening, with very rare exceptions!

“And how/where the hell do you do it,” people interested in my process will often ask?

My partner especially loves to bathe — she’ll actually soak in the bathtub for at least half an hour almost every morning — this is one of her greatest sources of apprehension about our upcoming journey later this year. Even if i don’t care that much about a shower at the end of a whole day sitting in front of the computer, a whole day on the road has always been a whole other story — the uncertainty of an evening bath was also one of my greatest sources of apprehension until i got used to the wealth of solutions available out there.

In hindsight, there’s actually nothing exceptionally creative or unusual about them. Besides the occasional “standard” showers you’ll still find at some of your hosts’, you’ll also find lots of lakes, creeks, rivers, waterfalls, beaches, buckets and ladles (photo below), public restroom sinks, rest stops, locker rooms at the local public pool or whatever, portable camping showers (photo below) — plus all the variations and inconspicuous implementations therein — and counting.

I’ll add that, no matter how cold the water is, it’s totally worth it — and i’ve bathed from glacial streams in Iceland to a partially frozen lake in the Romanian Carpathians — “freezing cold” was not an understatement in either of those cases!

Even if none of that is available, or if you don’t have access to much water or it’s polluted (i always ask the locals), i will still take a “surgical” bath with my water bottle (use your imagination) — just about half a liter of water has turned out to be plenty.

By the way, i also change and wash my underwear every day. If there’s not enough water for that where i stopped for the night, i’ll just do it at the first gas station along my way next morning, and then hang it to dry throughout the day on my rear rack 🙂

So, if you want to clean up at the end of the day, you will find a way — many ways — you might even wonder whether it isn’t that shower back home which is the most unusual and counterintuitive of all methods?

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Featured photo: A skinny dip in the Neman River, Lithuania ( Summer ’17 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking, hiking; worldwide

Trelograms #24 — Checklists

Published on by Mika2 Comments

The Check Yourself episode of Hidden Brain (one of my favorite podcasts these days) talks about checklists — a simple productivity hack that hurts the egos of some and saves the lives of many.

Unlike pilots and surgeons, i can’t be sure my checklists have saved a life. They have no doubt saved me a fair amount of time and spared me a fair amount of stress though — even, perhaps especially after hundreds of nights outdoors, i don’t know how i’d manage to pack for a five-day hike (in the middle of unpacking from having just moved into a new place) without a checklist.

I’ve been a fan of checklists for a long time now. I’m particularly fond of my grocery shopping system, which i employ at home as well as on the road:

  1. Anything i remember or notice i need to buy goes first into an inbox where i collect everything else that asks for my attention, GTD-style (more on that some other time);
  2. I regularly process this inbox, adding the “grocery store stuff” to the “grocery shopping list” — tomatoes, toothpaste, if i can get it at the supermarket or from the grannies across the street from it, then it goes on that list;
  3. I regularly budget time to go do the groceries;
  4. When the time for it comes, doing the groceries is then best described as a mission to complete that checklist as effectively as i can;
  5. I allow myself at most one “wild card” item per shopping trip — something not on the list because i only thought about it at the store, an improvised treat to myself, or a random new item to be tried out — believe it or not, anything that comes to mind during the shopping process goes into the inbox, and won’t make it into my shopping basket until the next trip!

I acknowledge this rigidity might have caused some psychological pain to the occasional shopping companion unfamiliar with my process. It has nevertheless saved me a fair amount of time and energy — then available to be spent in situations where i don’t mind inefficiency at all — for instance, long-distance hiking 🙂

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Featured photo: (un)packing upon moving in ( Fall ’19 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking, hiking; worldwide

Out of My Head and into the World! — My Ossobuco May ’18 Presentation

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I gave a presentation earlier this year at the May edition of Ossobuco – Mais tutano pra sua vida, a local “TEDx-like” event in my hometown (Brasília). The presentation is in Portuguese, but i’ve now added English subtitles to the video, so more of you may enjoy it!

In the presentation i talk about my journey from growing up protected by my grandparents, to a nomadic career in academia, and the eventual transition into my current lifestyle as a full-time long-term traveler. I talk, in special, about how i gradually learned to stop indiscriminately fearing strangers along my way.

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Featured photo: courtesy of Jataí Fotografia

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Trelograms #22 — Why Travel?

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My first source of inspiration to leave on a long-term cycle tour was easily Dave Conroy, whom i hosted in 2011 when i was still attending graduate school at Rutgers University and living in Central Jersey. Dave was the fist long-term cycle traveler i ever met in person, and might have also been my first source of intimidation — he had essentially checked out of his “previous life,” and been cycling for a couple of years already! That was something i couldn’t even remotely imagine myself doing at that time.

Fortunately, he was not the only cycle traveler i got to meet back then — in the course of the following couple of Summers i hosted many more, and was positively struck by how different their motivations were — for Steve and Taylor, cycle touring was part of their gap year adventures, while Greg had used his bike as a tool to connect with people and places around his country, and i understood it to be part of a mourning practice for Odin. Although it took me another four years to finally get on the road myself, i eventually felt duly validated to ride on account of the underlying process and technical challenge — in other words, whatever it was about it that interested me the most at the moment.

Along my way over the past two or three years, there came yet another big surprise — while space for self-discovery and adventure were what first put me on the road, i gradually discovered and gladly assimilated other dimensions into my process. Most notably, i could have never anticipated how inspiring, energizing and fruitful my encounters with people along my path would have been! That’s why i’ve emphasized people in my writing.

So, you already have a reason to travel also — but you might not find out what it is until you surrender to the journey 😉

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Featured photo: photomontage of just a few of my countless encounters on the road

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring; worldwide