Jo Ackroyd’s Big Biking Adventure

I’ve stopped feeling extra-ordinary and started to wonder about the mundane.

Is this how you all feel everyday of your lives?

I want back the strangeness, the unusual, the fantasy that was the life I led in my mind. Not because of the outward effect or the reason of the entertainment value it donates to others while supporting my conscious ideas of life, but because - the wrong reasons - because it was fun!

Never knowing what my next thought was to be or where I might find myself, the strange irrevicable descisions I could make and lay at the door of outragous thinking was, to me and to life, fun.

How many other people have the opportunity to not comply and conform to a predecided social tumour thats enforced only by the extent of its infection?

Now I feel very un-unusual.

I’m in the waiting room of life.

A passenger in a car Im not driving.

Is this because of the trip planning beginning to fail or is the failing of the details because of the onset of a negative mood?

It seems the circumnavigation of Afganistan through China is both expensive at $1855 for four days journey and full of wonderlust. The idea, the concept of a journey through China mixed with anticipation of  whether the Chinese guides will actually turn up at the border and not double their fee creates the wonderlust.

The alternative is Iran.

Iran is £120 for the Letter of Invite and since I would travel twice through here, it’s double the fee. Consular fees are £95 a trip and Iran only allow small motorcycles so there is a chance I will be stopped at the border for a 650 cc bike thats not allowed through their country.

To get to Iran I would need to travel through Turkmenistan, which is both unstable, unreliable and however politically complex, augmented in complexity by its consular procedures.

Unfortunately I have already stated my entry and exit borders for the Kazakhstan visa which complicates to mean I’m constrained. Further bound by Uzbekistan which according to the Agency I dont need a Letter of Invite for but for which the Embassy say I do. A Letter which will cost £120 and is only for single entry  - another constraint.

If my intention is to stay even close to true I would need double entry in Uzbekistan to go through Kazakhstan and in Uzbek, on into Tajikstan and experience the PamirPass before back tracking to Uzbek and tempting fate in Turkmenistan.

The danger is of course once you have set your route, you cannot return. All visas are single entry, all passes and fees non refundable and thereby, I can’t come back the way I went in. In some cases, ever.

A Russian visa can only be applied for whilst in your home country and Iranian visas do not allow for motorcycles. Potentially, it could go terribly wrong and I alone am flown home from a country which prophesies to be ‘tourist freindly’.

I’m lost without a map. Yours is geographic mine is emotionally eccentric.

I feel the complications are without a doubt mine by design and mine to decipher, but I also cant help but feel so particularly alone. Part of this trip is to gain strength through ambition and goal achievement, but to get there is a lonely quest.

Perhaps these twists are part of the fate that will make my year interesting, maybe they are there to be fought against to feel the reality of the world I’m living in and to change it for a sparkling, glitter filled enigma of joy thats reserved for cheerleaders and college frat parties, but of course in a more traditionally English way that might be the thought of as a lovely cup of tea at the end of a hard ride.

Perhpas we have a western idea of ironing out the creases of anally planning a trip that in any other country is the result of bribes and midnight runs for the border. An idea that we dont understand until we are part of. It could be by this relaxation in our tense ideals I find the thrill I need in life.

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