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It was getting late and we were hoping to make it another 18km or 1 hr to Stung Trung town, especially since it is the first and only town for another 160km in this northern forgotten and unpopulated part of Cambodia.  It wasn’t meant to be though, as instead we were blessed with running into two other seekers with similar goals - young people in their mid-twenties also bicycling the world for greater understanding and goodwill…but in the opposite direction.

Meet Elena and Gael, found on-line at their website: www.common-life.org

  

Elena is from Russia and Gael is from France.  They’ve been bicycling from France for 18 months, having extended their original plan of 1 year to over 2 years, planning to end also in France around December 2008, going back through China and Russia.  As we found with Kuang Sub and Su Ji from Korea, Gael and Elena were extremely talkative, pouring out many of their incredible experiences especially from Central Asia for most of our (camping) evening together, perhaps since they don’t have a larger group like us to float around in to process what they’re experiencing with different people…or maybe they’re just on fire for what they’re doing, or both.  Either way, they are an inspiration to us. 

Unlike us, they were not afraid to tackle India in the summer and parts of Central Asia (“the stan’s”) in the winter – the most direct route from Beijing to Europe.  They told us of high mountain climbs with their loaded bikes, one 50km uphill, an amazing 20km long plateau at 4000m above sea level with no one around, brakes icing up on a different occasion, and camping in -30 C (-10 F) weather.  Confirming reports I’ve heard from other cyclists, they raved about the kindness and hospitality of the people in Kazakhstan, Kashmir, Uzbekistan, and

Kyrgyzstan.  So often when they would be pitching their tent, people would come out and invite them to stay in their homes, to eat, drink Vodka, and occasionally party with their friends and family. 

However, they were perhaps most excited about their experience inPakistan.  They said they thought Pakistan was their favorite country so far on their journey, the people having given them a warm welcome with nearly all not caring much for politics (which seems to be common trend in the world among average citizens).  They traveled safely through areas close to Afghanistan and though they were there a few months before last fall’s turmoil in Pakistan over the opposition leader returning and later being assassinated, Karl Gunthard from Switzerland who runs his own bicycle touring company (www.bikereisen.ch) told us last week that he was there last October and November during the thick of it and that he had no problems from those political issues as a bicycle tourist.  “You biked through

Pakistan?” I asked Karl surprised.  “How was that?”  He looked at me with a smile, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Fine.  It was just fine.”

Gael and Elena also told us they ran into two Americans traveling in Pakistan by motorbike, who told them likewise that they had had no difficulties and instead similarly had had positive experiences with the Pakistani people.  Moreover, though Gael and Elena didn’t go to Afghanistan, they had met another couple who had traveled safely through Afghanistan, though the couple said they did feel it was a bit more dangerous which required additional caution.

One of Gael and Elena’s goals, similar to us, is to seek the truth about a country’s situation and the character of its people first hand, instead of blindly relying on bent and imperfect media sources and worse, commonly held misconceptions about countries and their people (stereotypes).  Beyond the common human error of projecting the violence and turmoil of a small number of countries onto whole regions (as in the Middle East and Central Asia with regards to Israel – Palestine, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan) and even onto whole continents (as in Africa[1] with regards to Sudan and Somalia), another such misconception, among many residual fallacies left over from the Cold War that French Gael and Russian Elena have faced together, is the idea that Central Asian people (from countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan which used to be part of the Soviet Union) don’t like Russians and didn’t like life “under the USSR.”  I mean, the USSR was a “bad” and “evil” thing, right?  Were they not the “enemy” from the American sphere’s perspective?  How could anyone possibly have liked the USSR and what they did?In fact what they found, proving Gael and his west European education wrong, was contrary to this line of thought.    1) Central Asians warmly welcomed Elena and talked with her and Gael (in Russian) about how they like Russia and Russians – in addition to enthusiastically explaining their culture and sharing their lives with them, taking advantage of their common language, Russian, unlike most cyclists that pass through who don’t speak Russian.  2) Many Central Asians also talked about how they had liked life in the Soviet Union and the advantages they had, one big one being that the Soviets brought in better education, and for free.

This is similar to what I found among a couple of my Serbian friends living in Beijing and among East Germans in Wittenberg when I studied there in 2002.  I don’t remember anyone in Wittenberg jumping to say that life now is better than before the Berlin Wall falling in 1989.  Instead, most said the DDR (East Germany) had advantages that are now lost, while unification withWest Germany and a capitalist economy have brought different advantages and the best system would combine both.

Beyond sharing their experiences with us, we were impressed with their organization and involvement in a project with UNESCO to build a database of the world’s monuments and their having a formal sponsor from a French-Swiss bank which has allowed them to extend their trip, buy a new tent and a lap top computer, in addition to a French bicycle company that initially gave them free bicycles.  This has got us thinking about how we here at Fueled By Rice could more precisely encompass our principles and goals with a product or project now, besides a probable end product like a book or video, in addition to considering possibilities for sponsorship.  Advice welcome.  For now one of our main goals is being realized with the production of this website, allowing you to experience our journey with us and to learn some of what we are learning via this blog, the photos, and the videos.  Thanks for your interest!

We only had one evening with these quality people, but their effect on us will be felt on the rest of our journey.         

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[1] Africa in fact is the second largest continent and has the largest number of countries - 47 of them- of any other continent, yet is most commonly clumped together simply as “Africa” even in sentences when specific countries of other continents are being named – listen for it while people are talking.  Although many African countries have had turmoil over the last 50 years during which nearly all fought wars to gain independence from their European colonizers and occasionally civil wars to deal with conflicts stemming from arbitrarily drawn borders by Europe, currently, there are only a few countries with war and major violent conflict: Sudan (Darfur region) 20yr civil war between north and south, Somalia – over 10 years of anarchy and war lords, and for the last month, Kenya, due to public discontent over their rigged presidential election.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 1:37 am and is filed under Pete's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.