From A to P

We had a plan when we left Vancouver, Canada, on a cold, damp February morning last year. We were going to ride our bikes from Alaska to Patagonia. We’re now a year into that journey, and we’ve come a long way, in terms of miles pedaled and in what the journey means to us.

Halfway through our trip, we made the decision to swap out our bikes and gear from a traditional touring setup to something lighter and better suited for off-road touring. With nearly 2,200 miles behind us on our new rigs, we started to feel something else undergoing a change as well. Our plan.

After riding the Baja Divide route, a 1,700-mile off-road track along the Baja California Peninsula, we headed over to mainland Mexico. During the last six months we’d been riding on existing routes, and the thing about those is, someone else has already done all of the work for you. Once you download the GPS track online and print out the resupply list, the sole task left for you to do is to push the pedals. Easy, comfortable, and fun. Well, more or less.

While attempting to make our way through Mexico, we were confronted with the challenge of making our own off-road route across a country for the first time in our trip. The many toll roads and highways we passed weren’t an option for us. We wanted to continue doing what we’d come to love, pedaling along the roads less traveled, and sometimes on no roads at all.

There were no limits to our creativity. Riding relatively light bikes capable of traversing off-road routes, we’d cut through old river beds, share trails with donkeys and cattle, or end up bushwhacking along mountain ridges. We’d excitedly plot the next day’s route each night, eager to explore new ground. We used cached satellite maps on our phone to draw lines over mountains and across valleys, sometimes unsure of what we’d find when we got there. As a consequence we got used to dead-ends and riding that was anything but straightforward. Our days were often filled with failure and errors, but also with success and a rewarding sense of exploration. We didn’t mind the physical effort it took to avoid pavement or the moments when a trail that looked promising at the beginning ended up leading us nowhere. Charting our own route felt both exhilarating and refreshing.

But the further we progressed south into Mexico, the more we encountered areas where one village was immediately followed by the next, only separated by fields of corn or fruit. The people we met there were kind, greeting us with big smiles and warm welcomes, but we nonetheless started to feel trapped and overwhelmed by the the increasingly urban environments. Finding places to camp became impossible, resulting in our having to ask locals for a place to sleep or needing to check into nearby hotels. Moving back toward less populated places felt hopeless, because we kept finding the same thing each time we’d try setting off in a new direction. The initial buzz we were feeling on our trip was slowly being replaced by the sobering question of whether or not we were still enjoying ourselves. The idea we had in our minds of a bicycle ride around the world was starting to feel like some other mysterious thing, unlike what we’d set out to experience.

The initial buzz we were feeling on our trip was slowly being replaced by the sobering question of whether or not we were still enjoying ourselves.

If we were going to make it the rest of the way across Mexico by bike, we knew we’d need to accept our new surroundings. We’d need to sacrifice our desire for solitude, our longing to be camping in the woods. And so we pushed on, at least for a few days, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. Over the last 11 months, we’d spent so much timing riding through the backcountry that we simply no longer had a tolerance for noisy, crowded environments. It hadn’t just happened overnight. Rather, it had slowly made its way into our minds. As much as we enjoyed some elements of the route, we craved the silence and solitude we’d been missing since we came off the Baja Divide. Stubbornly continuing no longer felt worth it.

As with all the great plans we make in life, sometimes letting go can be really hard. Giving in can leave you with a feeling of weakness, and it’s difficult for us not to see our experience of abandoning the ride through Mexico as a failure in some ways. Maybe Confucius had already figured this out 2,500 years ago when he said, “Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.” As for us, we’re learning not to get too set on attempting to cross countries from point A to point B, and we’re doing our best to stop focusing on the destination.

Written and photographed by Franziska Wernsing & Jona Riechmann