Breaking Free: A Journey of Self Discovery

by Chett Vosloo

  ***

  Johnny and I had been warned that if the winds were unkind to us, then crossing the Gobi desert in China could be tough going, as it was renowned for gale force winds. The first day we were okay, as we had a tail wind, but for the next ten days after that we either had very strong cross winds, or head winds to face, that made it absolute hell. As well as the strong winds, the cultural and language barrier didn’t make things any easier. The locals that we met along the way seemed to be quite weary of us. Then, to make things even worse, Johnny picked up a stomach bug, which was not the sort of thing you wanted to have in Western China. To my horror, most of the public toilets that we used along the way were often nothing but a room with a line of long drop toilets right next to each other. There were no toilet doors, and no partitions separating one long drop from the next. So, not only did you have to look through the hole in the cement floor down into the pit of urine and faeces below, and put up with the horrific smell, but then you had a Chinese guy squatting a foot or two away from you, doing his thing as well, invariably with a cigarette hanging from his mouth. The worst was still to come, however.

  One day I asked where the toilet was and got led to an empty room out back. I was shocked to look inside and see human landmines and pieces of used toilet paper spread out all over the room. Walking on tiptoes, I had to find a free spot and do my thing right there on the floor, with all the human faeces and used toilet paper around me. It was this sort of experience that would leave you with nightmares. As dreadful as the bathrooms were, thankfully I was able to dodge as many of them as I could, but Johnny wasn’t that lucky. With his stomach bug he was in and out of the bathrooms faster than he could finish a bottle of water. For the first time since the start of our trip, both Johnny and I weren’t enjoying ourselves one bit. In Iran everything had felt so alive, and there was such an unmistakable heartbeat and soul to the country, whereas where we were now seemed to be the complete opposite. I couldn’t wait to see the back of the Gobi desert. However, this wasn’t to say that our time in the desert didn’t come with its moments and its lessons.

  ***

  One of the things that I had noticed since arriving in China was that there was a lot of construction taking place, and very often in the most remote of places. A few days after leaving Urumqi, we reached a construction site in the middle of the desert with nothing around. Before carrying on, Johnny and I thought that we had better take a look to see how far it was to the next town. According to the map, it was 30 kilometres from where we were. We had just about run out of food and had only a litre of water between us, but a 30-kilometre ride would take us more or less an hour and a half, and so we figured that we may as well carry on. After a fifteen-minute break to rest our legs, Johnny and I were about to climb back on our bikes and head off when, very similar to what had happened to us in Iran, a huge wind seemed to come out of nowhere. I immediately got the sense that this wind was no coincidence and that we were getting a clear message not to continue. We hung around for another two hours to see if the wind would die down, but it never did. Left with no other choice, we went to the construction site and asked if we could sleep in one of their shelters for the night. Not one of them spoke any English at all, but they got the gist of what we were asking and offered to help us out.

  Johnny and I took off first thing the next morning with our water and food supplies topped up, and it was only then that I understood the reason for the sudden wind the day before. As it turned out, there was no town within 30 kilometres. In fact, there was absolutely nothing but desert country for the next 150 kilometres. If we had left like we did the day before, without any food and only 500 millilitres of water each, we could easily have found ourselves in serious trouble. The sudden wind, I liked to think, was life’s way of protecting us to make sure that nothing went wrong.

  CHAPTER 36

  After ten days in the Gobi desert, covering as much distance as we could, Johnny and I then caught an overnight bus back to Urumqi, as we still had to pick up our Kazakhstan visa and have enough time to cycle the six hundred kilometre distance from Urumqi to the Kazakhstan border before our thirty-day visa expired. I was very happy to discover that on the western side of Urumqi it was very different. The land was far more green and fertile, the people were more welcoming and friendly, and we were able to find good hotels along the way for dirt cheap. On most nights, Johnny and I were able to find a hotel room with two queen size beds, an en-suite bathroom, TV, and sometimes a computer with free Internet set up in the corner of the room, for as little as $15. After a long day on the road, these air-conditioned hotel rooms were like heaven.

  One night in the hotel room we were staying in at the time, there was an unexpected knock on our door. “Will you get that, mate?” I said to Johnny, as he had just stepped out of the shower and was standing right there with only his towel wrapped around his waist. When Johnny opened the door, we were both surprised to see a lady dressed in a revealing mini skirt and wearing a lot of make-up standing in the doorway. Without saying anything, she stroked Johnny’s chest with her index finger, and then walked into our room and came and stood beside my bed.

  “Massage?” she smiled, looking down at me as I lay on the bed with the remote control in my hand. It had been a long day and I was feeling a lot of aches and pains in my legs. A good oil massage would be a nice way to finish off the day, indeed, but by the little twinkle in her eyes and the revealing mini skirt that she was wearing, it was clear that she wasn’t talking about the massage that I had in mind.

  “No, not for me,” I answered, “but my friend Johnny over there would love to have one of your massages.”

  “Yeah… whatever, mate!” Johnny said with an innocent smirk on his face.

  The lady must have got the message that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with the two of us, as she left our room without saying another word. That was the last we saw of her. The next evening we didn’t have anyone knocking on our door, but we did get a phone call shortly before midnight. We heard whispering on the other end, then the line suddenly went dead. It seemed as if this was all just part of the whole hotel experience in China.

  ***

  The one thing I was really looking forward to in Kazakhstan was for us to be able to camp again, as during our entire month in China we had slept in either a hotel or a guesthouse every night. After making the border crossing, Johnny and I changed some of my money into the local currency and then set off towards the Aral Sea on the western side of the country, roughly 2 000 kilometres from where we were. The roads in Kazakhstan were riddled with big potholes, the driving was notoriously fast, but the countryside and people were both awesome. Being in Kazakhstan gave me a small taste of what it had been like for us in Iran.

  Other than us staying with the occasional family that we met along the way, we spent every other night in our tents, which we pitched on the side of the road. As great as it was to be camping again, the one thing that made it a little uncomfortable at times was the heat. June was fast approaching, which meant that it was coming up to the hottest time of the year in Kazakhstan. If we were lucky we found a tap on the side of the road that we could use to take our daily bath at the end of the day, but more often than not we found nothing and therefore had no choice but to climb in our tents as filthy as we were. For one night it was okay, but three or four nights in a row without a wash was pushing it a little.

  With the temperature as warm as it was, Johnny and I both liked to spend a few hours each day cycling with our shirts off. My skin condition worried me very little these days, and ever since leaving Korea I hadn’t once experienced that same anxiety that I had felt so many times before. In fact, I had even noticed that since leaving Korea the pigmentation on certain areas of my body had become a lot lighter. Dare I say it, but sometimes I wondered whether they were even fading away, and isn’t it funny? For years, I would have done just about anything to be cured of my skin condition. I would have tried any cream, taken any medicine, even
undergone an operation if that’s what it would have taken to get rid of the disease. The irony was that now that I was no longer so utterly desperate for it to heal, for the spots on my body to go away, it was looking better than it had looked for years. This showed me that the best chance I had of healing my skin condition, and perhaps many other diseases as well, for that matter, was to not only take all necessary treatments to heal the disease, but just as important was to accept it. Not so easy, I know, but by accepting and not fighting against what you had gave your body the chance to heal. Of course this wasn’t to say that all diseases would be cured when you didn’t resist them, but I’m sure that it would make the odds that much greater. What was the most important for me, however, was that the spots of my body didn’t trouble me nearly as much as they had in the past.

  ***

  After making our way across Kazakhstan, we then spent the next five days in buses and trains to make it back to where we had cycled to in the Gobi desert in China. After three long months on the road, we were now on the home straight and all that we had left to cycle was 1 800 kilometres before reaching Beijing.

  With more roads to choose from the further east we went in China, the more chance there was of us getting lost. To make things a little easier, and to save us time as well, Johnny and I liked to stay on the highways wherever possible. I’m not so sure that this was legal, but other than the occasional hoot from someone driving past, there didn’t seem to be much of a problem. The only tricky part was getting on to the highway itself, as to get on to the highway we first had to pass through a toll booth. Johnny didn’t seem to worry that much about it at all, but my conscience got the better of me. So whenever we made a run for it onto a highway, I’d put on my head phones, turn up my music as loud as it would go, take a few deep breathes to psych myself up, and then I would work up some good speed on my bike and fly by the side of the toll booth like a getaway car trying to escape from the crime scene. The person sitting inside would invariably be waving and yelling at me to stop, however if I didn’t see them and I couldn’t hear them, I liked to think that it was nothing but an innocent mistake. We were foreigners after all, and so surely there had to be a little leeway.

  This same technique worked for us most of the time. There was one occasion, however, when we made it through the tollbooth, but what we hadn’t anticipated was that there’d be a security guard standing 200 feet in front of us. When he got the whistle from a lady to tell him that there were two guys on bikes trying to make a run for it on to the highway, he came sprinting across the road and seemed about to tackle us off our bikes unless we came to an immediate stop. He may have told us to turn around and to get back on to the secondary road, but we did get the last laugh in the end as a few hundred feet before the toll booth we found a hole in the fence and were able to sneak on to the highway this way. I kept looking behind us, expecting to see a whole fleet of police vehicles chasing us down like you see in the movies, with helicopters flying overhead shouting down at us to stop otherwise they were going to open fire, but it was just Johnny and I and the open road ahead.

  Cycling on highways was one way to make life a little easier for ourselves. Another way was for us to ride alongside a slow moving truck on its way up a mountain pass and then to grab hold on the side. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether it took more energy to hold on to the truck, or to just peddle up the pass, but it was fun to see how long we could hold on without the driver noticing that there was a cyclist catching a free ride. When the driver did cotton on to what we were doing, the next game was to see how they would react. One time I could see that the driver was waving frantically at me in his side view mirror. I started waving back at him, smiling and enjoying the game just as much as he was, but then he started edging the truck closer to the side of the road with a big drop off below. I quickly let go, as if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that he was trying to push me over the edge. Well, you can’t win them all. However, saying that, most of the time the drivers were only too happy to take Johnny and I along.

  ***

  Other than a few tourists who we had met in Urumqi, we hadn’t seen any other tourists along the way. For us to pass through a town completely unnoticed was therefore next to impossible. Very often the same thing happened. We’d arrive in a town, find a hotel to sleep in for the night, then somehow word must have got back to the police, as they’d send someone to come and check us out. If they came at a decent hour it wouldn’t have been that bad, but more often than not two policemen would knock on our door after 11:00 at night.

  One evening I was lying on my bed reading when there was the standard knock on the door.

  “The cops are here to look at our passports. Will you let them in, Jed?” Johnny asked. This time, however, they hadn’t only come to check our passports, as they had in the past, but rather they had come to find out what we were doing cycling on a national highway. The policeman in charge was clearly livid as he took our bikes from us and told us that the next morning we had to meet him outside the hotel as he was going to personally escort us in his police vehicle off the highway and put us back on a secondary road, which is where we should have been all along. That was the last we saw of the national highways, but we were so close to reaching Beijing by now that we didn’t really care.

  CHAPTER 37

  Johnny and I arrived in Beijing in early July, four months after setting off from Istanbul. Neither Johnny nor I carried odometers on our bikes and so we had no accurate way of measuring how far we had cycled, but judging by the maps that we had with us and the time we spent on the road, we guessed that we had cycled roughly 10 000 kilometres from start to finish. Despite the fact that there had been many unbelievable experiences and life lessons that I learnt along the way, when we got to Beijing I felt relieved more than anything else that it had all come to an end and that we wouldn’t have to wake up in the morning and get back on our bikes. It’s strange. For so many years my most cherished dream had been to cycle all the way around the world, and now that day had come. It was all over. Did it give me any more happiness or peace of mind that I had realised my dream of cycling around the world? Did it make me feel any better about myself? The answer would have to be no, it didn’t. I was still the same old person with the same habits and the same thoughts repeating themselves in my mind. Yet something that had changed was my desire to do these big adventures. During the second half of our journey along the Silk Road it had become very clear to me that my heart was no longer in doing these big endurance adventures by foot and bicycle, as had been the case before. They didn’t excite me as much and I didn’t feel that same sense of freedom that I had in the past. Perhaps what also added to this change of heart was that I no longer looked at these wild and crazy adventures as ‘the thing’ that was going to make me happy and complete, because the adventure, I knew, would only make me feel happy and complete for a while. Not long after it was over, the feeling that something was missing in my life and the urge for me to chase after the next thing would resurface. In this way, one adventure would always have to be followed by the next, and still, this could bring only temporary happiness into my life at best.

  Yet despite my realisation that I was no longer as passionate as I had been before about the bigger and longer adventures, this wasn’t to say that I had lost all desire to travel. The thrill of putting on a backpack and exploring was still there. Kim and I were, after all, set to leave in only a few weeks for the start of our trip to India and Nepal. The two of us had been in contact the entire time since I left Korea and every time I spoke with her she seemed to be more excited than she was before. I couldn’t wait to see her and spend time together again, and to see how she would take to backpacking. Would it all work out between the two of us in the end? Would Kim love the ashram and Amma as much as I did? Were we destined to be life partners roaming the world together like two little gypsies? I didn’t have a clue, but if there was one thing that our cycle trip across Asia had taught me, it was
that I wasn’t the one in control. Life moved according to its own rhythm, it followed its own rules, so what was the point in me trying to figure out how it would all turn out in the end? My job was only to concentrate on living the best possible life that I could in the present and to let everything in the future unfold as it was supposed to. Of course this didn’t stop me from being curious. Many times I had wished that I could take a look into the future to see what was around the corner and where life was going to lead, but this, I knew, would only take the mystery and the fun away from it all.

  The one thing that I was sure of, however, was that my journey of ‘inner awakening’ was still far from over. Despite the fact that I had learnt so much and grown enormously during the past few years, there were still so much more that I had to learn. By learn, I don’t mean that I had to read countless spiritual books and fill my mind with any more information, but rather there were still fears and old habits that I had to let go of. To let go of these fears and old habits simply meant that I had to stop identifying with them. In many ways, I guess you could say that the spiritual journey is more about undoing than it is about doing. It is like taking an onion and slowly peeling off one layer after the next, each layer of the onion representing all the things in our lives that are no longer serving us and causing us to suffer. For this letting go to happen, time is needed. I heard Amma once say that the spiritual journey is much like a bud that is about to blossom into a flower. If you try to force open the petals before it blossoms, then you will only ruin it, but when you let the bud open and blossom in its own time you get to enjoy the full beauty and fragrance of the flower. In the same way, I felt like I too was in the process of opening and wonderful transformation. Before the series of panic attacks and the skin problems that came my way, I was like a stubborn bud that wanted to remain closed and as a bud forever, however through the pain and the suffering that followed in the wake of my panic attacks it forced the unfolding and blossoming in my life to begin. It was, therefore, my suffering and the darkest time in my life that had served as the catalyst to open me up and show me that hidden deep within me there is a treasure chest to a far deeper peace and happiness than anything I could ever have imagined, if only I was prepared to look for it. As long as I continued to simplify my life and apply the spiritual principles that I had learnt over the past few years, so the unfolding and blossoming in my life would continue. However, as Amma says, the process cannot be rushed. The lessons that I still had to learn and the old bad habits that I had to overcome had to happen slowly and in their own time. This didn’t scare me though, as perseverance was one quality that I had plenty of.