Ride Earth

I really should write something. It’s been weeks. Yesterday was a complete non-event. I spoke to Andy on the ‘phone and we wished each other a happy one year Ride Earth anniversary, whatever that means. That’s right – at 12:30pm one year ago on the 17th of June 2007, I was riding away from my home and into the unpredictable world, eager to sample all it could offer! (more…)

Last night I went to teach my English speaking lesson at the ‘Georgian-Scottish-House’ in Tbilisi. Recently I have had another gear-change with regards to my thinking on how I can do my bit to help reduce the now widely accepted human-induced climate change that is happening.

A main aim of Ride Earth is to observe and document the effects of climate change and to promote bicycle use. My time in Tbilisi is allowing me to realign how I approach achieving these things. I have been researching climate change on the internet and did a search for climate change documentaries.

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I’m in Tbilisi and hopefully this blog will fill in what has been happening with me. As you may know I arrived in Yerevan for the first time, by bicycle, on the 24th January. I met up with Tom in the city after we had cycled alone from near the Georgian border. Fanny came out to visit me in Yerevan and we stayed with friends, Max and Irene. We had wonderful times which passed too quickly. Whilst bargaining for sweet and spicy paprika at the market, Fanny and I met a very interesting American Armenian called Manoog.

It turned out he is a very interesting person who is very active in the community in Yerevan. We met and exchanged stories and he took us to see some excellent jazz music in the ‘Stop Club’. He helped organise an event at a local NGO, where Tom and I made a presentation and showed our film footage from Turkey, Georgia and Armenia.

We were still waiting for our sleeping bags to be released from customs so I decided to hitch-hike back to Tbilisi. This was partly an exercise in hitch-hiking and partly to spend more time with friends in charming Tbilisi.

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When Sylvester, the Polish cyclist we met on Christmas Day in Batumi, was explaining that conditions were difficult here for local people in Georgia, coping with the cold midwinter, I remember thinking, surely it’s not as difficult as cycling round the world? What a weird comparison and abstract concept. People in places with extreme weather conditions, are obviously tough, live and learn to deal with it. Cycling round the world means something different to any person who cares to think of the concept. These 4 words represent, for someone who has already cycled round the world (or travelled a long distance by bike), a body of memories, a once experienced truth of a moment, part of a process. Memories, skewed and evolved over time, the mind puts it’s own spin on things, censoring some things, making it’s own story which makes some kind of sense, or is maybe useful to life.

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After a week of relentless and sometimes masochistic cycling covering almost 500km, we arrived in the snowy Georgian capital of Tbilisi on New Year’s Eve. At 2 a.m.

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