Why am I making this trip?
As an eight-year-old I rode my first bike trip. Together with my parents and my little brother we rode a tour through the Netherlands. Not too much luggage, short distances, maybe 40kms a day, and at least one day of rest after arriving on the campsite. I still remember us kids sitting along a great bonfire, holding a stick with a lump of dough on top, baking a 'stick-bread'. What a great time that was.
Climbing hills wasn't one of my specialties yet; on the very first hill I climbed, which must have been somewhere around the Veluwe, the gear system of my three-geared bike wouldn't work, so my dad had to literally scream me up that hill (something, I found out later, he was very good at in similar situations).
After having spent two holidays on our bicycles, we turned back to our usual habit of getting into the car, drive somewhere (Greece that year, if I recall correctly) and pitch our tent, until the moment my dad's colleagues decided they would like a change from the normal three-week holidays, by going off for it's double, six weeks, just for once.
So it happened, and a couple of years later, it was our turn to celebrate an extra-large holiday. Indonesia was chosen to be our destination, and to keep the cost somewhat down, we decided to ride our bicycles there. By means of testing this we rode from Gothenburg back to Amsterdam the year before. This trip was a great success, so the year after we were off to Indonesia.
A trip I will always remember followed. The long air flight before we arrived, the typical tropic sticky smell once you get off the plane, everything different, lots of vendors on the streets, getting ripped-off, massive forest with little monkeys walking over the streets, nice people, beautifully colored dresses and strange dances, spending several days on a small fisher's boat with the toilet in the kitchen and pancakes with bananas and cockroaches for breakfast, the Komodo dragons, and a beautifully crafted wooden chess-game; a great trip that was!
Once I got home, I had already taken my decision; I wanted to get back to Indonesia, but I would bike there all the way. I was fifteen years old, and browsing trough my atlas, and came up with an impossible route, going straight through Russia, Abchasia, the desserts of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan and also a little tour through the Burmese jungle. What did I know on the fact all of these were places that were impossible to visit or better not to go to..
Two years later I set off for my first solo bike-ride, and every time I came back home again, I was thinking about the wonderful feelings travel, cycling and being on the road gave me, and started dreaming away, looking at my atlas.
During my studies, it didn't take me long to find out the ideal moment for such a trip would be just after graduation, but before my hospital internships. My feelings for Indonesia had faded a bit, and I came up with a plan to go to South Africa for a mandatory research project, and ride back home from there.
Due to the fact my studies had slowed down a bit, my mother got ill and died, and the fact I couldn't find the right research project, the idea of going to South Africa passed away. Just until I was riding a tour of Scotland, we write August 2004 and I was riding a great road in the beautifully rough countryside of the Hebrides, and I decided I would set of for a ride East on the 1st of August 2005. During that one year I would have to finish about one-and-a-halve year of my studies, but I was sure that would workout somehow.
