Episode 179: Live Show Melbourne

Three Round the World Cyclists Share Their Stories

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What the Road Actually Teaches You

I’ve interviewed a lot of people on this podcast and often the lessons people bring back from taking on their adventures tend to cluster around the same handful of truths. While their journeys are all unique and different, going through different countries, different roads, different disasters even, the wisdom underneath is remarkably consistent.

A few months ago I got to test that theory in real time in a room full of people, on a stage at the Antique Bar in Melbourne. I was lucky enough to invite three previous guests of the podcast to be panelists for the night and we swapped stories and had an amazing time.

Fergal Guihen cycled from Roscommon in Ireland to Sydney via Iran, Afghanistan, the Tibetan Plateau and just about everywhere in between. Em Hulbert is still mid-journey on her solo ride around the world after spending the last two years delivering water filters to communities in need through her project The Water Cycle. David McCourt set off from Melbourne bound for Northern Ireland, and threaded his way through Outback Australia, South East Asia Bangladesh, Nepal, Central Asia, Turkey and Europe on a journey that took over 2.5 years to complete. Here’s the themes that came out during the evening.

The gap between who you think you are and who you find out you are

All three guests arrived at their trips as relative beginners. Fergal bought his bike second hand off a teenager and couldn’t even test ride it because he was on crutches. Em bought hers from a grandmother’s house in Indonesia and had to detach one of the brakes to fit on her rack. David watched his mate Tom roll back into Darwin after a lap of Australia and thought the whole thing looked absolutely mad and then dreamt of doing something similar. Each of them would admit they never felt like they were ready but they all went anyway.

The idea that you need to be prepared, to have the experience of knowing what you’re doing before you go is often one of the things that keeps people from ever leaving for an adventure in the first place. In reality, what all three guests found is that the road trains you as you go and you figure it out. We become great problem solvers along the way.

The world is not what the news tells you it is

If you’ve spent any time listening to this podcast you’ll have heard this theme before, so it’s no surprise that each of our panelists also reiterated this to be the case from their own experiences as well.

Em spent six weeks travelling China and had gone into the ride there expecting pollution and rudeness. Instead she came out with one of the most profound travel experiences of her life.

David and Fergal both landed in Iran against the well wishes of their families and came out saying it’s the first place they’d go back to. Fergal got drugged and robbed in the Iranian desert which was a genuinely terrifying experience that left him in hospital being questioned as a potential spy. Yet despite that, he still says Iran is the standout of his entire journey and it is all to do with the overwhelming hospitality of the people who live there.

The country that disappointed them? Thailand, which all three agreed had something hollow about it. Perhaps it was too much tourism.

The hard stuff becomes the good stuff

I put a hypothesis to the panel during the second half of the evening. My theory, after years of these interviews, is that the moments people most want to go back and relive are almost always the hardest ones. They aren’t the nice, comfortable nights in a good hotel. instead it’s the experiences of surviving cycling in minus 22 degrees on the Tibetan Plateau, or a 250 kilometre day in Thailand that ended somewhere extremely unexpected, to riding the Nullarbor without music or podcasts or any distraction at all.

Fergal confirmed my hypotheis immediately and David wrapped it in a very apt analogy that didn’t quite land the way he intended and had the room in stitches, reliving childbirth anyone?. Em however did declare that she would not go back and ride the Gibb River Road ever again, which I respected enormously for its honesty.

However all agreed that difficulty processed through time eventually leads us to putting on rose tinted glasses and we share the experiences with a layer of pride. At the time you’d do anything for a genie to grant you a wish to take you out of the moment, but on reflection, we are proud to have gritted through it.

The spaces in between

This is David’s phrase and I’ve loved it ever since I heard him share it on our first podcast session together. The spaces in between are the places on the map you’ve never heard of. They are the village at the top of the hill you only end up in because you got drenched coming down the other side and needed to get warm. The children’s home in the jungle in southern Thailand where Em ended up spending two weeks after sheltering from a monsoon.

You never set off from your home expecitng these to be the destinations you want to reach. But they are what invariably happens when you travel slowly enough, and openly enough, to let the road surprise you.

Planes and trains and cars can get us to an end point on a journey, but the magic of bike travel is that it gets you to everywhere in between. Those places in between are where the best stories and experiences actually live.

What you find out about people

The kindness of strangers came up again and again through the evening, as it does in almost every single conversation I have on this podcast. David put it best when he talked about the gap between what makes the news and what is actually happening out there every single day. His experience consistently showed him that people were kind andgenerous to other people for no reason other than because someone needs it.

The old cliche held true that it seemed the less people had, the more freely they gave. Bangladesh, Iran, rural Nepal, remote Indonesia were all examples given by the three panelists of this being the case. On the flipside the wealthier the country, the more transactional the interactions often tended to be. That isn’t to say that they didn’t experience kindness in wealthy countries, far from it, but there was still a difference.

I loved having the opportunity to host this evening with these three deadset legends and I’m sure you’ll love tuning into the episode and hearing the stories shared by Em, David and Fergal.

If you want to follow their journeys or support what they’re doing, find them on Instagram below:

Em at @emhulbert, Fergal at @rossi.to.aussie and David at @longwayhome__2022.

And if you want to hear each of their their individual stories, the full episodes are below.

Listen to the episode above or wherever you get your podcasts.

Previous episodes:

• Em Hulbert: Ep. 127
• David McCourt: Ep. 99 and Ep. 120
• Fergal Guihen: Ep. 144 and Ep. 145

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The Seek Travel Ride podcast