INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURE

A bike tour through Morocco whittles away at daily concerns until all that’s left is what matters.

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY PETOR GEORGALLOU

In modernity, we’re not really people. We eat and shit and do all the other things animals do, but for most people – myself included – where art and music and ideas should be, has been transplanted by work and tax and two-step authentication. Suddenly, creativity, cycling and good humour feel like an emergency, because if we’re not alive now, and there’s no future, why are we even here?

Each unit of art needs at the very least seven units of nothing to make it, because you need space psychologically to catch an idea and more space to distil the idea into art. In modernity there’s always something, but usually ten things – which is seventeen more things than the maximum number of things that are conducive to making art, playing music, or any part of humanity. When you can wake up to videos of people being burned alive in their homes, 1,700 unread emails, a threepage to-do list, and a neatly placed revenge poo under your desk for not having initiated your dog’s morning walk promptly enough, minus seventeen seems like an impossible figure.

Seven units of nothing need to come before making art, so you have to save up on nothing before you can even think about art. You can decide to go cycling and then just go cycling – however irresponsible an idea that is – and hopefully everything will still be there when you get back.

While you’re cycling you’re not doing anything else, which is a shortcut to zero things, at least temporarily. I realised that as a byproduct of cycling, I’d have some nothing. I figured that if I only have a very small amount of nothing I should leverage that nothing against a second activity and kill two birds with one stone – by trying to think about making art at the same time.

I HAD A DREAM

I had a super vivid dream that a guy with long yellow teeth, leathery skin and a gaunt face with hollow cheeks stole my gold watch. I gave it to him because I was scared not to, but then he got on a camel and was kind of friendly and invited me back to his house, which was a tent in a scrubby desert made from blue plastic tarps tied down with red and white braided rope. He put my gold watch in a black cast-iron pot on a fire in front of the house and sat me down opposite it in an old wooden chair, and we both watched the pot boiling for hours… maybe days? I was hungry and thirsty and tired, and I started crying because I was so thirsty that I thought I was going to die. It had been weeks, but I wasn’t allowed to stand up or look away from the pot. Suddenly, he stood up and shouted ‘You see!’ So I stood up, and it hurt because I’d been sitting for so long that my muscles had begun to waste away. He put his hand in the boiling water and took the gold watch out and made me eat it. It was soft, like halfway between boiled chicken and a very moist, dense cake. I ate it all and it felt amazing. I got on my bike and rode away – and it felt amazing – like a downhill tailwind.

EXISTENTIAL EMERGENCY

A few days later, my younger, fitter, taller and better-looking colleagues from Germany asked if I’d like to join them on a ride over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, and because I had the dream, and existing even momentarily felt like an emergency, I said yes. I didn’t mean I would actually go, it felt like a lie, because, however well intentioned, I still had emails to read and reply to, my teeth hurt and I was out of shape, who would walk the dog? Being a parent is hard enough with two people when you both have to work, so the idea of shirking on that responsibility seemed like something I shouldn’t do. I’d just play along and fantasise until it actually became impossible. If I have no free will then I can do no wrong.

You reckon it’s fine, yeah? Wait... where’s your bike gone?

The WhatsApp group began, and the back and forth about routes and equipment plans was quite irritating because I didn’t actually plan to go, but I also couldn’t tell the others that. Cornered by my own lie I smiled and went along, amassing equipment and a plan as a contingency in case it somehow accidentally came to fruition. I had a bike, it was ready to go, except for a couple of bits that I definitely couldn’t get at super short notice. I made the trip into work: if it can be monetised it can be justified, and that could be the decider. I reached out to a few people and got a decent amount of support to make a little film about the trip, which mostly covered the cost of going, while also making it impossible not to go because it meant someone besides me was tangibly invested. There was no time to get fit, but a little time to get fitter, so spurred on by the looming promise of actually getting to ride properly over mountains for consecutive days, I wedged little rides into my work days. I bought an ‘extra genuine’ gold Rolex watch on the internet to honour the dream.