I made it! I’m sitting out front of my little AirBnB apartment in Paralimni, Cyprus! The calendar may say February, but it feels a lot like spring to me. The last week of cycling around Cyprus has been filled with temperatures in the high teens and low twenties, as well as a plethora of chirping birds and blossoming flowers! Cyprus is a halfway-point of sorts. It the furthest south-east I plan to go before returning to Turkey and continuing through the Balkans in the spring. I figured that Cyprus would be a great place to avoid winter while waiting to be allowed back into the EU. So far so good! A quick update on the last week since writing. Mathieu and I left Paphos for Limassol - only a 70 kilometer ride, but the heat made it much more exhausting than I expected. My days in Limassol were relatively relaxed -- I walked around the old city a little, washed my bicycle, and caught up on journaling on the first day. The evening of the first day I (somewhat foolishly) got up at 1:30 to watch the Superbowl! I slept a little after the game, then headed out in search of more gas canisters for my stove. Butane/Propane gas canisters are a little difficult to find in Turkey, and in Cyprus, some places sell old puncture style canisters, while others may have big green coleman bottles, but the little canisters are much more elusive. In the afternoon I found a coffee shop to finish writing postcards at, then made my way around several different bicycle shops in search of replacement parts for Leia. Don’t worry, Leia is in good shape! But, bike parts are only made to last for so long, especially with the amount of distance and strain I have put them through! I left Limassol on Tuesday morning and made it here to Paralimni in the afternoon. The apartment I am renting is really nice! It isn’t huge, but it is just me here, so it’s no big deal! i have a bedroom, a little kitchen with adjoining dining room/living room, and a bathroom of course. Big bonus to the space is having access to an oven! most of my meals for the last 5 months have been done on a little gas burner. It’ll be nice to have some more options for a more diverse range of options for meals. I don’t mind spending a couple dollars more to have the entire place to myself, rather than sharing a room with six strangers and jockeying for the use of bathroom and kitchen facilities. Oh!, this place also has a washing machine! The last time I used a washing machine was just about three months ago in Florence - aside from that it has been all hand washing in sinks. Yesterday I spend an hour or two on bicycle maintenance. My bar tape was in dire need of replacement - I have re-wrapped them twice now with the original tape to try and move the excessively worn sections and provide myself with better grip - but now I have fresh bar tape! I’m still pretty bad at wrapping the bars, one day I’ll be able to make it all look good and uniform on the first try. I also replaced my chain for the first time since Interlaken, Switzerland (~6000km). I probably should have changed my chain a little sooner - may have been pushing my luck a little. I also replaced my front brakes, so now I have swapped in new pads on the front and the back. I’m hoping to find a replacement tire for my back wheel pretty soon, I have 8441 loaded kilometers on that tire on this trip, plus the 1000-1500km I put on the tire before I left Canada. I think I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it! My plan for the next couple of weeks is to relax a little, and take little day trips out from my temporary home base! Larnaka is well within reach, as is a pretty good chunk of the Turkish North. I am all of two-hundred meters from the beach, and maybe once these clouds clear it will be nice enough to go swimming! Rest is going to be pretty key - my plans for the spring and summer are even more ambitious than my trip from London to Cyprus. I am hoping to go further, faster, while still adhering to the the dumb Schengen Zone visa rules. Here’s some of the bike stat highlights from the last five months! Odometer - 8,441km Time on Bike - 429:59.19 Average speed - 19.63 km/h Cycling days - 86 Average distance per day - 98.15km Average time on bike per cycling day - 4:59.59 Longest Day - 7:45.00 - September 11 Furthest Day - 162.79 - January 10 Fastest Average - 25.4km/h - January 9 Top Speed - 74.7 km/h - January 27 It’s a little crazy even for me to look at some of those numbers! I went out to dinner with a German woman and a French woman from my hostel in Limassol on Monday and they asked how many countries I’ve been to on this trip - I had to count it out on my fingers! Eleven countries over the last five months - all by bicycle (with some help from ferries)! I am really really blessed to be able to take time off from working to explore the world - and extremely fortunate to be physically able to do such a trip, with little fear for my own personal safety (being a heterosexual white male), and while benefiting from being able to communicate with relative ease in my native tongue. On taking a leave from the working world - I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have been thinking about my position as a wealthy tourist in relation to the people asking for money outside grocery stores supermarkets (I’ve gotten some really weird looks with my Canadian vocabulary) or people approaching me on the street. In a very real way, I have an excess of funds that allows me to travel across the world for a prolonged period of time - giving others money could possibly improve their quality of life with nearly no detriment to my own wellbeing. In some cases poverty is the result of the structural/cultural/political climate in which the poor live in - does giving money away actually do anything to change these realities, or does it just allow the status quo to live on without challenge? The desire to give money away is dramatically lessened by the knowledge that the action would have an impact on the length of my trip and would likely mean that I would not be able to achieve all that I hope to. I don’t have an answer to these questions, I’m not sure there is a right answer. At that dinner on Monday night I was asked what I studied, I did my best to recount how in a hypothetical agrarian community, crop yields and soil health could be increased without the use of inorganic fertilizers through the intercropping of legumes, whose rhizobia help heal the soil after nutrient mining practices of modern agriculture. All of this thinking/talking about university related things reminds me about how unsure I still am about what I should pursue when I eventually return to Canada. Sorry this got a little ranty/ramble-y towards the end. I’ll be here in Paralimni until March 6th, so feel free to drop by and visit if you’re in the neighbourhood! Best, Gavyn. PS - Don’t forget to check out the “photos” page/Instagram for a the visuals behind my bi-weekly ramblings, or, head there if you get too lazy to read all the way through and still want to know what I’m up to ;)
top of page
You Might Also Like:
bottom of page