Armenia to England: British, Armenian Cycling Duo Completes Bike Tour

Tom Allen, a British cyclist who lived for years in Armenia, has now completed his bicycle tour from Yerevan, Armenia, back to his home in a small village in the East Midlands in England. 

This was the first trip in which Tom, who has cycled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia, took with his wife, a Tehran-born Armenian woman who has never been on such a long bicycle tour.

In a blog post today published on his personal site, Tom reflects on the trip, the “homecoming,” and prospects for future cycling expeditions. Here’s an excerpt from his blog:

I rode into my small vil­lage in the East Mid­lands, one thou­sand two hun­dred and twenty-two days after cyc­ling out of it, whoop­ing with the recog­ni­tion of every stick and stone, fol­low­ing Tenny on her bicycle past the park gates, round the tight bend which it was always so easy to over­shoot, down the leafy hill on which my brother went over the handle­bars of his BMX aged 8, past the first houses and the spring­wa­ter trick­ling from the wall and the dingy old pub I never went to and round the bend to the third house on the left, which a long time ago I used to call home.

What a fant­ast­ic­ally absurd feel­ing to have gone so far without ever hav­ing had a des­tin­a­tion, and to end up right back where I began! It was the first time since leav­ing that I’d arrived some­where on my bike without the com­fort­ing know­ledge that I would soon pack my belong­ings back into the pan­niers and ride off again on another stage of my journey.

There was no wel­com­ing party, no TV crew, no local reporter, no home­com­ing cel­eb­ra­tion of what I’d done. An oppor­tun­ity missed for some cheap pub­li­city and a couple more news­pa­per clip­pings for pos­ter­ity? Def­in­itely. It would be easy enough to spin the story of Ride Earth towards the heroic. “Local Lad Sets Off To Cycle Round World, Comes Home Mar­ried”, would run the pleas­ingly con­densed head­line of a short fea­ture some­where in the depths of the Har­bor­ough Mail. The art­icle would skim the crests of my travelogue’s waves, sand­wiched between a story about a baby born in a car park and a page of prop­erty ads.

My mum was chop­ping veget­ables on the other side of the glass of the kit­chen win­dow and my dad hadn’t got home from work yet. Just another day — another day com­ing to a close in this sleepy vil­lage which con­tin­ued to crawl slowly through the ages while politi­cians squabbled on TV and the plun­der and van­dal­ism of the planet con­tin­ued to blend seam­lessly into every­day existence.

Just as well there was no fan­fare. In any case I con­sidered Tenny’s achieve­ments of the pre­vi­ous two months to have hugely out­weighed mine — a sens­it­ive city-girl from the Middle East sud­denly thrown into a world of heavy traffic and high prices and sneak­ing into fields to sleep under can­vas for days on end, with me pot­ter­ing along in the role of porter and navigator.

It’s time for me to stop think­ing about the next big trip. For one thing, my atti­tude to cycle-touring needs a ser­i­ous tune-up; no longer will I pedal furi­ously away in search of a com­pleted check­list of coun­tries that sound inter­est­ing, or of adding more zeros to the num­ber of kilo­metres I’ve cycled. My last rel­at­ively far-out expedition, to Mon­go­lia, epi­tom­ised my chan­ging approach to rid­ing a bike in for­eign lands. 

I need to put some­thing back into the great hot-pot we call soci­ety, which is still a hor­ribly con­fus­ing place where noth­ing that any­one does seems to bring civil­iz­a­tion for­ward to the fabled plat­eau of uni­ver­sal peace and plenty. Trav­el­ling has raised more ques­tions than it’s answered — I feel that I under­stand even less the intric­a­cies of the human and nat­ural worlds, now I know first-hand how bemus­ingly vast and com­plex they are.[…] 

[…]

With the opu­lent lux­ury of hind­sight, I have come to believe that the value of a bicycle jour­ney is the abil­ity to slow down and get as far away from the high­ways as pos­sible, in order to escape the rush and exper­i­ence the calm­ing of the soul, and to bet­ter appre­ci­ate the hon­est good­ness that the the world will pile upon you and inspire you to pile upon oth­ers. (Unfor­tu­nately, such sen­ti­ments aren’t likely to sell many books!)

[…]

So is that it for adven­ture and exer­cise and dis­tant lands? Like hell it is! There’s an ever-growing list of fantasy exped­i­tions I’d love to tackle, and it’s good to feel that to at least attempt any one of them is well within my cap­ab­il­ity and cur­rent level of reck­less­ness. But that’s a blog post for another time…

Photo courtesy of http://tom.ride-earth.org.uk.