Somehow I’m getting the feeling that we’re beginning to think of around-the-world and other long distance adventure travel as something to be endured. As something that’s hard to do, and miserable and lonely and even expensive. I’m sure there is no hidden agenda to discourage people from trying motorcycle adventure travel, but sometimes it almost seems like it. That is so wrong.

Yes, I’ve been miserable out on the road. Sure I have. But I look at it this way: I have a comfortable, settled existence now with friends and a nice house, but I also have major depression. I didn’t have any kind of depression when I was sitting in a two-man tent with a week-long sandstorm howling through the Sahara outside. I was pissed off, and getting really tired of playing Mastermind with Mrs Bear, but not depressed.

All right, I know that clinical depression is quite different from just feeling depressed, but I’m sure you take my point.

这是事情：在路上，我感到坐在澳大利亚中部的沙丘上的超越欢乐，看着令人惊叹的明亮，锋利的恒星。谁知道星星着色了？它们不仅仅是或多或少白光，他们在城市中的方式。在那里拿出没有行业或任何其他令人遮挡的夜空，他们都是彩虹的所有颜色！

Did you know that from the top of a seaside cliff in Norway, the ocean can look just like a huge sheet of burnished steel? That’s not a metaphor; it really did look like a vast steel plain stretching to the horizon when I looked at it from that lookout in, was it Alesund? On that same morning, the tiny Rose Church had made me, a dyed-in-the-wool non-believer, feel the almost physical impact of the faith of the people who had built this gem.

I climbed the mud battlements of the desert city of Bam in Iran before the earthquake levelled it, and found myself drawn back to a time when the bells of tired caravans sounded across the endless-seeming sand. Don’t get me started on climbing to the head of one of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, now destroyed by the strutting fools of the Taliban. I know I shouldn’t have climbed up there, just as I now know that I shouldn’t have climbed Uluru in my home country.

但我这样做了，它停止了我的呼吸，让我感受到一个小人物。

Back in Afghanistan, I’ve chatted over tea with a village schoolteacher although we didn’t know a single word of each other’s language. It’s enlightening how much you can convey by tone of voice, the use of your hands and facial expressions and a few names – “Russians!” – thumbs down. Wave hand upwards, then stab it down a few times and go “pew, pew” and get raised open hands and a fearful expression in return. Yes, he knew of aerial attacks.

Is it something about tea? We stopped at a farmhouse in Turkey, near Silifke, to ask whether we could camp on the family’s land. Instead we were invited in, given tea and fed and entertained with stories of the family’s attempts to renovate a Roman bathhouse in their banana plantation, and the father’s time in Germany as a taxi driver. I do have a few words of Turkish, but he spoke a lot more German. We were allocated a bed, and in the morning we got a guided tour of the bathhouse.

Sure, on that same trip I scratched my ankle on some limestone climbing down to a beautiful and empty beach, and got a blood infection which had me shivering so hard for a couple of nights that you could have run a generator off me. That’s life.

What I’m trying to do here is not boast of the things I’ve experienced, but to stimulate other travelers’ memories. What have you done that you could never have managed if you hadn’t been out there on the long road? Whom did you meet and will never forget? Did you have a transcendent moment somewhere, and will you be kind enough to share it with the rest of us? Plenty of room below.

不同的经历与不同的人袭击了那些神奇的笔记。我的一个朋友花了一个满月的夜晚坐在雅典雅典卫城面前（在严重的安全之前，当你仍然可以做这样的事情时）并觉得自己被送回柏拉图的希腊。这让我想起了查理的时候，我在Trabzon上面的山脊上滚动，Xenophon的士兵在徘徊后徘徊在安纳托利亚高地之后，并崩溃并哭了“Thalatta！Thalatta！“

The sea, the sea.

在你的旅行中，你的“海”是什么？

Photos: The Bear