March 2009, Esfahan, Iran.

I was having breakfast at the Amir Kabir hostel in Esfahan, where I was staying. As is common at hostels and while traveling, I was joined at my table by a fellow traveler. (In my ~17 days in Iran, I ate alone on only maybe three days. At least one meal a day with company.) I didn’t ask him his name. Lets call him Hans.

Hans was German, and had just gotten to Esfahan the day before. It took him about nine months to get there. From Germany. On a bicycle. He was about 55 years old. Hans was an interesting guy to talk to, to say the least.

He takes these long bike trips every few years. On this trip, he started out from Germany the previous summer, biked through Germany, Austria and down to Italy. From Italy he took a ferry across the Mediterranean to Tunis, carried on through Tunisia and Libya, and on to Egypt. After crossing at Suez, he carried on through Jordan, Syria, The Lebanon, on to Turkey. He took a break in Turkey for two or three weeks, and his wife flew in from Germany to spend Christmas together, and to experience Istanbul together. Then he carried on around Turkey for a while, before crossing over into Iran. Ending up talking to me in Esfahan.

He wasn’t even close to the end of his journey. The mere thought hadn’t even begun to explore the remote possibility of eventually crossing his mind. Like so many travelers, he wasn’t sure of his intended route. He was going to meander around Iran for a while, gradually heading north into Central Asia. From where he’d head east, across Central Asia, Mongolia, south through China, and through south-east Asia. Finishing off near Vietnam or thereabouts. Good times.

Hans’ motivation and drive was stunning. He biked across the Libyan desert in 40C+ heat and just shrugged it off. He did encounter his share of challenges though. He tows a small cart behind his bike, in addition to his saddlebags, with all his supplies in it. For a trip of this length and across terrain like this, carrying adequate water and food every day was essential, especially in the parts that cross the desert. He was good for food or water, but encountered an interesting problem. He couldn’t exactly stockpile bread. Bread goes bad quickly, especially in the heat. However, it’s an essential part of your diet, especially if you’re burning more than four thousand calories per day. You need the nutrients.

So, Bread was a problem. He couldn’t exactly buy bread along the way, the little villages and hamlets he stopped at didn’t have shops that could help with that. What they did have were poor residents, scraping for their daily bread every day. Eating meagre meals. And they would make bread for themselves every day. (Bread in this context = unleavened flat bread) So every day, in each village, he would have to ask villagers if they could possibly spare some of the bread they had made to feed their families that day.
Imagine if you will, this scene. You are a small family, living in a small village in the Libyan desert. The women of the family have made the daily meal, with about one, maybe one and a half pieces of bread each, and a stew. And then a strange white person on a bicycle knocks on your door and asks if you could possibly spare him some bread. He offers to pay, in fact he offers an amount that would far surpass the value of your entire meal. You can’t possibly accept. In fact what you do is give him half of the bread your family was planning to eat, and refuse all payment, above his protests. You refill his water for him. You offer him a place to sleep if he needs one. Such was Hans’ experience, fairly consistently, across Tunisia and Libya. Not so much in Egypt.

This is one of the reasons I love travel. Real travel. To see people. And often, the good as well as the bad side of people.

Then there was the time he said he had to stop bicycling for a few days because he had such severe diahhrea he couldn’t pedal. I get that, one can get severely dehydrated with diahhrea. He spent a couple of days in hospital in Lebanon, and then took the bus around Lebanon for a few days, instead of pedaling, with his bike on top of the bus. And got himself back on the road in just a few days. That is real strength. I think I would rapidly be exploring flight options if in that position, but he just kept on going. That kind of mental strength deserves a lot of respect.

Hans was an unusual guy. But not unusual in that he found his passion and spent a lot of time pursuing it. I think we all say we do that to varying degrees. He also took to heart and seemed to have implemented in his life one of the lessons I’ve tried to implement in mine: A healthy appreciation for the value of time off.

This is a graph illustrating roughly how the average person in developed countries spends most of their lives. Roughly the first twenty five years being educated, then the next forty years working, then the next fifteen to twenty years retired.

Now, what if we took five of our retirement years (in yellow) and used them better?

As you can see, in the second graph, the person is taking time off about every few years. I’m suggesting that taking time off every few years would be a good thing to do, as long as it’s well planned and with direction. Use the time to pursue a passion and develop yourself. If done right, it’ll pay off in terms of personal development as well as direction. You come back energized, and hopefully with ideas that translate into a more fulfilling career as well as more money to your bottom line. Or if seeking direction, it will help you to take a step back and see what direction you want to go in. Additionally, there are some things you can only do when you have a certain level of physical fitness. Waiting till you retire may not be the best time. These were conclusions I came to before I started my travels, and they’re a big part of why I traveled for so long, and what I hoped to get out of it. I decided to try it out to see how it went. It’s fairly soon to judge how it went in my case, but in a couple of other similar situations I am aware of, it has usually worked out successfully.

I recently came across this very interesting TED Talk from which I drew the graphs above. The presenter has, independently of me, come to similar conclusions regarding the value of time off from work and a career. He manages to get his point across much better than I ever could, so I recommend the talk when you get a chance.

As for Hans: I can’t help but envy him his very supportive spouse.