Beware! Motorcycles may enhance life experience

Beware! Motorcycles may enhance life experience: ”

2000 US Tour

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – When was the last time someone said you were too old to dream?

For me, motorcycles and dreams, dreaming, have always been intertwined and I was unexpectedly cut low recently when a colleague told me there are few spots he would venture to on a motorcycle in Africa today.

We were drinking beer, celebrating a successful meeting and waxing poetic about bike adventures and the beauty of being at the same time more vulnerable, and more open to transformative experiences on a bike.

I was thinking of my lifelong dream to take a bike from Nuevo Laredo, Texas (nostalgic point of departure South) to Tierra del Fuego, loaded with a tent, some food and a camera. I asked aloud if he thought it was statistically more dangerous to adventure-travel in the world of today than it was, say, 23 years ago when I was crisscrossing Central America.

Waiting for the train in Hannibal Missouri, birthplace of Mark Twain

His reply of “Good God yes man!” couldn’t have deflated me more than if he’d have hit me in the gonads. I was struck suddenly with the fear that not only had that dream vanished in time, but so would so many others, based on the fact that humanity has gone to hell.

Shortly afterwards I begged off for the evening, blaming it on a headache, and walked back towards my motorcycle, wondering if he was right.

And then another thought came to me regarding a work discussion earlier in the day on perceptions of increased xenophobia in Switzerland and beyond. One colleague pointed out that historically bigotry has done quite well in Europe, and in most parts of the world at one time or another (frequently when work is in short supply).

For two weeks I have been ruminating on this. Are we going to hell then, really? Has the state of humanity declined? Do I need to rethink my 10 year plan for trekking in the Americas? Or is this a functioning of fear-mongering and how we see the world as we get older?

A little perspective is a good thing: I bought my first motorcycle in Nicaragua, where I was living during the tail end of the Contra War and I traveled solo on local buses through at least three nations living through civil wars. Granted, ignorance and stupidity are sometimes saving graces, literally, in lieu of knowledge and intelligence. But the only near-death experience I have had on a motorcycle (that I know of) involved a drunk driver at 4AM in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The historical record would seem to show that the world is just as complicated as it has always been, that adventure is inherently risky, and that we only see what we allow ourselves to see.

Planning is back on for the 2021 TransAm(erica).

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(Via WHEELS ENTHUSIAST.)

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