Silas Jelley's Corner of the Web / Wandering

Only the FSB

2025-10-11T11:28:52Z

It’s 1am and I’m playing table-tennis with FSB agents after a three hour interrogation in a fortified compound somewhere near Bryanskii Rybozavod, Dagestan, while I wait to be released. Surreal doesn’t quite cover it.

It’s my fifth (or is it sixth?) encounter with the Federal Security Services, to say nothing of the dozens of stop and searches from the regular police, and from the army at the border checkpoints that delineate North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and now Dagestan. I’ve lost count, and that in itself is a strange realisation. In Turkey, I was stopped by police 50-60 times over three months but only arrested twice — one of which was my own fault. Here though? I’ve lost track in ten days.

The agent’s final question had been, “Do you have any friends in Russia?”
“Only the FSB”, was my reply.
I was relieved when they laughed, and continued, “Yes, we see each other often.”

As I’m learning is always the case when arrested in Russia, once all the many rounds of questioning are done, a very specific person must be reached, an unseen official vested with the power to approve my release. This person is invariably not to be found in the same building, nor reached with any expediency at all, being either perpetually engaged or (given that many of my arrests have run through the night) off duty, at home, and fast asleep. Whatever the case, even once everyone is happy that I’m not the scheming foreign agent they first took me for, it always takes another 1-4 hours before my release is approved.

I’m not sure if the table-tennis is meant to cheer me, or just to entertain my very bored hosts, and I’m not about to ask. We start out just volleying, but once we’re both warmed up he wants to play a match and, as I win both of the first points (courtesy of some recent tutelage from Paul down in Cornwall) I get to wondering: should I play to win, or make sure to lose? I’m saved from this conflict of ego and sensibility by the arrival of a very serious, very shouty officer in one of those tall, broad-brimmed, funny looking hats that Russian army officers are forced to wear. The agent I’m playing against is called away, and an army man who just wants to volley takes his place.

An hour later I’m laying in the foot well of a truck, forbidden to look out the window as we bump along a rutted track in the dark. They’re taking me back to Kizlyar, I’ve been barred from going anywhere near the Caspian sea in the state of Dagestan. Thankfully, despite the setback, they’ll be depositing me right back on my line of footsteps, almost as though the last day and night of walking had simply been erased. Almost.

The road improves as we near Kizlyar, and my escorts permit me to sit up and look out the windows. I find myself thinking about how calm I’ve become. My first encounters were intense, my nerves electric. Now, I feel like I’m just… here.

In Chechnya, I was detained for eight and a half hours in Alkhan-Kala — held as a “precaution” because the next day was Ramzan Kadyrov’s birthday. I’ve been picked up walking through little villages and big cities, at a small hydroelectric dam, in broad daylight and the middle of the night, and seemingly everywhere in between. In Kizlyar, I’d answered a knock at my hotel room door wrapped in a towel to find a pair of police officers and the receptionist, herself somewhere between suspicion and sympathy. Thankfully they were able to reach the FSB officer who’d grilled me two nights before, but not before they’d instructed me to get dressed.

As we arrive back in Kizlyar I wonder if I’ll see Artur again, the member of parliament for the Communist Party of Dagestan who had generously put me up in the aforementioned hotel room.

Because I apparently have no sense: here's a sneaky photo taken inside a police station in Kizlyar, Dagestan, between separate interrogations by local police and the FSB

I’ve learned the rhythm of it. The waiting. The good-cop/bad-cop routine (which I nearly fell for once in Chechnya). The same questions, over and over. The painstaking, arbitrary, repeated searches of my bag. The moments of genuine tension — where I’d have had difficulty standing up if I’d needed to — like an agent adamantly accusing me of Ukrainian allegiance, of being in Russia to sabotage infrastructure. The absurd farce of being fingerprinted on a ancient machine running Windows 95, whirring like a dial-up modem with every computation, only to then be taken to another such machine to repeat the protracted affair because “we must add you to other database as well.”

At times I catch myself thinking that caprice is the only real law of this land.
And yet.

We look at all the terrible things that powerful people do and we think that that is the world. But that is not the world. The world is every small act of kindness made by billions of people every day.

I say this to Imran, a man who all but pulled me into his car, drove me across the border back into Chechnya to his home; fed me and loaded me up with cucumbers and spring onions from his garden, all the while peppering me with questions about the walk, the what and the why of it, before, true to his word, dropping me back exactly where he’d picked me up. Most of all he’d wanted to know what I felt the walk had taught me. I was tired from lack of sleep, so the above was the best I could manage, but he appreciated it. Imran had only recently returned from fighting in Ukraine. He’d quit, grown sick of being on the other side of “someone else’s bloody sacrifice”, he’d said, but was struggling to piece himself back together after what he’d seen and done. Imran felt like a man torn between state and country. Just as the map appears to us more real than the land, we often co-associate state and country. But a country is not its state, a country is its people. There exists that other Russia; everything between the checkpints, everything that isn’t steel tables, stark lights, and stern questions.

This Russia is Robert, a truck driver I met on my first day, who, after I took his portrait, hopped into his cab and returned with a fistful of sweets. It’s Ramzan, who called out to me in the darkness in Nazran and bought me a shawarma. It’s Asya, the shopkeep in a tiny convenience store, who got on so well with my few Russian words that she insisted on giving me my drinks and snacks for free. It’s Hussein, in Dagestan, who took me to his doma (дома) for a massive breakfast of salmon from the Volga river with his wife and sons. It’s Nurick, a Chechen man living in Norway on a visit home who stopped his car and insisted I take a thousand roubles “for anything you might need.” It’s Ruslan, who, having heard stories of me from some locals who’d met me before, toured me around his shop, stuffing two carrier bags with every snack imaginable for my journey. It’s Artur, that eccentric politician of the communist party in Kizlyar who hailed me as “a guest of the city”, took me to a performance of Dagestani singing, bought me a feast of food in an old Soviet style canteen, a Stolovaya (столовая), and put me up in the hotel room I am writing this from.

How do you hold these two realities at once? The men with guns who wave them in my face, but/and the men with guns at checkpoints who fill up my water bottles and bring me coffee. The flinching every time a car pulls alongside — anticipating being hauled off to another brightly lit room — only to find this time it’s someone offering a place to stay, or offering food from an outstretched arm. In me the Russian state would spy a spy, but the people here have made me a guest.

I don’t yet know how to express the whole sensation of these two realites, this unrelenting unreality-meets-ur-reality, but 2 days ago — sitting in a dark recess of a compound that looked like a KGB torture kremlin at 1 a.m., waiting to be released after another 5-hour detention (hilariously, not the same occassion as at the top of this page), wondering if any of these many ~~KGB~~ FSB offices communicate at all — I stopped short of thinking of it all as wasted time because… where is the waste?

To have experiences like this, to live through them and be free to tap them out as best I can; to be challenged by these experiences, yes, but also to learn from them, to find the blessings in and around them. There’s something exquisitely liberating about accepting that things happen, that they are out of my control, that the only thing I can control is my reactions to them. These later interrogations have felt softer, not because my interlocutors have became more gentle, but because I have. I’ll say this much: in these republics of North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, I have not been bored, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more present.

11:28am on October 11, 2025 from Kizlyar, Dagestan, Russia

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The Larsi Checkpoint

2025-10-01T21:16:39Z

It has taken nearly six weeks to get permission to enter Russia. Beginning at the Russian office inside the Swiss embassy in Tbilisi then, when family crises pulled me back to England for September, continuing at the Russian embassy in London. In all, I have spent more money (on application fees, mandatory insurance, transit, accomodation in Tbilisi) and time trying to get into Russia than I am likely to spend inside it¹.

Applying for a Russian visa involves carefully filling out a very long application, printing it, delivering it (in person, because they have to take your fingerprints), answering the same old dreary round of questions (“are you a terrorist?” etc), and then leaving your passport with them… for a month! For someone who relies on their passport as much as I do, handing over that consecrated little rectangle of international permission felt like taking an anxious sabbatical from even existing.

When the approval finally came, the starting date on my visa had already passed. I walked out of the embassy in London on the morning of September 29th, visa in hand, and booked a flight back to Georgia for the same day, withdrew a thousand US dollars to exchange for Rubles once I reach Russia², hopped a train back to Catford to say goodbye to Jonny, then another train to the airport. Arriving in Tbilisi in the early hours of the 30th, two buses and a taxi shuttled me to the dilapidated Dmitri Bridge bus station, from there a coach spirited me back to where my footsteps had halted at the Georgia-Russia border a month before.

My long awaited (redacted) visa permitting entry into the Russian federation.

At the checkpoint on the Georgian side, one of the women in the passport control booths has this funny habit of bobbing/wobbling her head like one of those dashboard hula dolls whenever she’s waiting for another person to approach her counter. While we wait I help a little old Babushka install a Russian SIM card in her 30 year old Nokia and get a kiss on the cheek for my trouble. Why she asked me and not one of the thirty people in the line who speak Russian, I don’t know. I stick with her though, and she makes a show of pointing out each of the dogs curled up in the corners of the passport control building, sheltering from the rain that started almost two hours ago. She doesn’t like how chilly it’s gotten, keeps rubbing her arms and going “brrrrr” in a melodrama of cold.

On the Russian side the officer has to lean out over the counter to see Babushka, who can’t be more than four and a half feet tall. She’s just ahead of me, having waived others ahead so that we can hang out and mime to each other a bit longer. Perhaps she too expects that I won’t be getting through any time soon.

Unsurprisingly, I am pulled out of line and subjected to hours of questioning by Russian Border Police, repeated bag searches, further questioning from the secret services (FSB), and a lot of waiting on steel benches in brightly lit, whitewashed holding rooms.

“Why Russia? Why these cities? Who do you know here?”

After being advised by staff at an immigration centre in Tbilisi that neither my visa application nor border entry would succeed if I said I was walking across Russia, I have concocted an elaborate but plausible story for my planned visit to Russia, including the all important mandatory itinerary of every city I intend to visit and on what days. Looking down at this itinerary, and then back at me, the FSB agent remained deeply sceptical that any of these cities besides Volgograd shoud be of interest to a tourist.

I trot out my prepared answers to first these, and then more, and more questions before being banished back to the holding room while the agent checks my story. Phones ring in adjoining rooms, radios squawk outside, diesel engines slumber and roar at intervals as the solemn procession of goods trucks that stretches almost five kilometres back into Georgia is slowly processed. During the last days of the walk to the Russian border, before this whole visa debacle, I’d several times sat and lunched with truck drivers who had been waiting more than a week in that endless column of wheels and steel.

Walking toward the Russian border a month before, I'd spent a lot of time talking (and eating!) with truck drivers who had been waiting a week or more in the queue at customs.

More than an hour later I’m called back for more questions, and the same questions again, checking, I suppose, that my story remains consistent. A bit of unintended comedic relief comes when the agent asks me if I am carrying any weapons, so I fish out my folding knife, an Opinel Number 8 I have been carrying since France. He looks at it, looks up at me, and without any trace of humour says, “but do you have any weapons?”. Mon petit Opinel, how shall it ever recover from such scorn?

At last, after eight hours at the Russian border, the FSB are satisfied (for now) that I don’t pose a threat to Russia and I am given a loose, fragile wisp of paper that is my “Migration Card”. Apparently if I lose or damage this 10cm tall slip of paper at any time in the next month, I will have great difficulty leaving Russia, and will be banned from ever returning.

My passport is stamped; my bag is put through the scanner a fourth and final time; and an armed guard, rifle slung across his back, walks me across the holding pen for cars that have been deemed suspicious, their contents spread out on the tarmac. “Welcome to Russia,” he says, and I almost laugh at the absurdity of it after eight hours of suspicion. The incongruity of it doesn’t escape the guard, but he just shrugs, and then gestures at my phone, asks me to open the translator.

обязательно попробуй осетинские пироги во влаликавказе, особенно с мясом. (“Be sure to try Ossetian pies in Vladikavkaz, especially the meat ones.”)

Once assured that I will try the pies, he waves me on and weaves his way back through the order that is almost indistinguishable from disorder of the checkpoint.

Russia, at last. Now what?

It’s nearly midnight, it’s cold, and the rain shows no sign of letting up, so I hop a bus to Vladikavkaz rather than risk further scrutiny from the border guards, I’ll return to the checkpoint in the morning to continue drawing out my line of footsteps.

With the visa clock having begun before I even set foot in Russia, I have at most 27 days in the country. I anticipate spending 300 USD (approximately 10 USD per day) while in Russia. I have easily spent more than that in the bureaucratic maze that has brought me here.↩︎
Sanctions make getting a hold of Rubles challenging. The most reliable means is to take US dollars into Russia and exchange them. While the rates at Russian banks are not great, this is the only legal way. The banks stipulate that the bills must be crisp, unfolded, and unmarked, so I carry them sandwiched between two sheets of cardboard, tucked under the lid of my laptop.↩︎

9:16pm on October 1, 2025 from Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia

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The walk across Russia

2025-10-01T20:58:04Z

For 26 days in October, the walk led me into and across five republics and one Oblast of the Russian Federation: North Ossetia–Alania, Ingushetia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Kalmykia, and Astrakhan-Oblast.

So as to still have time for some days off, I opted to walk just over a marathon a day, and so covered the 750 kilometres between Georgia and Kazakhstan in 16 walking days, taking days off in Grozny (Chechnya), Kizlyar (Dagestan), Liman, and the city of Astrakhan.

While in Russia, I had to hide any writing from the regular scrutiny of the police, the army, and the FSB. Now in Kazakhstan I can begin sharing that writing and, for the sake of continuity, I will back date these to when they were written, beginning with what I wrote in Vladikavkaz on October 1st after crossing from Georgia via the Larsi Checkpoint.

Part 1: The Larsi Checkpoint

8:58pm on October 1, 2025 from Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia-Alania, Russia

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Snake Highway

2025-08-27T09:56:07Z

July 9th, 2025

06:44 The sun hasn’t yet cleared the mountains that enclose Dilijan and Jonny is still asleep. I’m stuffing cold soaked oats and an instant coffee down me and in ten minutes I’ll set off alone. Last night we agreed that we’d split for today, Jonny will take a rest day and catch a bus later, I’ll try and knock out the 37 kilometres to Sevan by mid-afternoon so we can still hang out this evening. Tomorrow we head for the volcano.

It’s strange. More than two years since I set off from Bristol, thousands of kilometres walked alone and only three days of walking with Jonny, yet setting off this morning without him feels… wrong.

But even this feeling I’m grateful for. Today I want to reflect on this walk-within-a-walk which has been a success beyond anything I could have hoped for. What has made it so?

08:36 Turning off the main road onto a dirt track through the wilderness, I pass four men repairing a water main and almost immediately the track deteriorates to an overgrown mess and I feel relieved not to be putting Jonny through this.

Within a half hour I have probably ten thousand nettle stings and find myself involuntarily cursing aloud in anguish and frustration. The vegetation towers above my head, concealing hollows in the ground that snatch at my ankles and every three steps forward I seem to lose my footing completely. I could keep pushing through it, but I want to spend today in reflection, not frustration, so I beat a thrashing retreat, descend a steep gully, wade across a stream, stumble across an animal trail and follow that until it vanishes into the undergrowth, before hauling myself up the wall of the valley for a half hour to reach what I will later christen The Snake Highway.

That level of overwhelming bush reminds me of planting trees amidst ten-foot-high fields of brambles and gorse in New Zealand, of spending days tangled in bushman’s lawyer. Above all, it expands my empathy for Jonny. That first full hiking day after Alaverdi began with an intense couple hours of bush bashing — not so dense as what just beat me, but close enough. That he stuck with me and barely complained is testament to his good nature.

The old road is completely deserted now that the new one and its 2.2 kilometre tunnel have been cut through the mountain. Deserted except for three elderly women from one of the hamlets up here, with whom I share a very joyful and satiating early lunch. They have a typical spread: bread, cucumber, tomatoes, meat, cheese, juice, coffee, vodka, biscuits, chocolates. They insist, with the particular insistence of Armenian grandmothers that cannot be refused, on sharing the lot of it with me. They come down to this spot because there’s a natural spring around which a memorial to a young soldier has been built. He was a relation but I can’t quite figure out to which, later I wonder if they are three sisters, and they all grieve him. They arrange some food on a cloth beside the memorial as if setting a place for him too.

Lunch over, I return to the snake highway. “Snake” both because like all old mountain roads it snakes back and forth through hairpin turns, but also because I’ve already seen plenty of snakes laid out sunbathing on the tarmac. As I pass they remain motionless except for their heads, which raise up ever so slightly and turn to follow my movements. There have been a couple of those fifteen to twenty centimetre long brilliant green lizards as well, the ones that seem partially transparent under the bright sun.

Alone with my thoughts again, I wander back to the questions: what has made these days so rich?

The credit for them belongs to Jonny first of all: it was his idea to come and join me out here, he made the time, he made the trip. Beyond that prime movement though, what is it about us/{him}, that has made these days such a triumph? There are strong similarities between us, sure — that easy familiarity where so much is known without needing to be expressed — but without forestalling communication, but rather making space for us to dig into those things that matter much more. To lift a line from day four,

By his own experience, his abundance of empathy (and his ongoing psychology degree), and within the vivid crucible of this walk together, with Jonny those same conversation have risen to that hallowed plane of dialogue where there is no need to translate between two worlds, where nothing is diminished in the telling, and so to a place where things are said, heard, and understood in a way that is simultaneously effortful and effortless, such that our growing understanding of the other expands our understanding of self equally.
— The Booky Chronicles, Day 4: The Dilijan Plan

It is this trust above all that has made these days what they have been.

Armenia deserves credit too though, it has put on a very good show for Jonny and I, and I will be forever grateful for that. My foremost fear in his coming was that my spartan, precarious lifestyle wouldn’t yield such joys to him, that there would be too much discomfort. I made accommodations, tried to smooth some rough edges, but rough is rough and bears are bears and some discomforts are just inherent to this life.

This day off marks the midpoint of his visit and already there has been a fullness to it that borders the absurd: the bustle of a strange capital; the battle of a belligerent taxi journey the devoted singing of a lone monk in a monastery; the delight of finding derelict shelter at the end of a day’s walk twice over; salvation delivered by an 8-year-old boy on a horse when the threat of the wild felt too great, the hospitality of a large shepherd family at their summer pasture up in the mountains; a trip to space in the ISS and yesterday, the simple pleasure of a guilt-free afternoon of rest after such a window of maximally full days.

Later, in the small and somehow strange village of Semyonovka (the whole place felt both very alive and very dead), I photograph Yova, a young boy carrying a bucket, his expression serious with the weight of the task assigned to him, and Arpine, waiting for the village bus to take her and her dog to the vet. “I speak English book,” she says proudly, and proceeds to demonstrate with a welcome few words she’s learned from a simple English book she has at home. She can’t understand much when I reply, so I use my few words of Armenian and Russian while she tries to answer in English. We meet somewhere in the middle, in that improvised language of gesture and goodwill.

At the edge of the village a half dozen children wait for a bus going the opposite direction, toward Dilijan. Not far beyond them a woman fights with an unruly calf on a leash that’s pulling her across the open grazing of the hillside. Before I can get close enough to help, she manages to wrest control of it long enough to stake the tether into the ground. A little further on I meet two men raking hay. The younger takes an interest and I, newly equipped with the Armenian word for year (տարի/tari), tell him I’ve been walking for three years from England. That blows his mind a little. He’s sad when his phone rings, interrupting our chat, but I’m happy just to have met him and eager to maintain my pace toward Sevan.

In Tsovagyugh I’m called over by a man sitting on a bench wearing a military uniform. Beside him is another man, civilian clothes, looking increasingly uncomfortable as his friend proceeds to deeply embarrass him by begging me for some monetary contribution to a free Armenia. The civilian leaves quickly, repeatedly imploring his friend to stop.

Moments later I meet an old woman in a beautiful blue dress and headscarf. She operates a tiny shop, no larger than a Lada Niva stood on its end, its shelves crammed with a few of the odds and ends a village might need, but mostly with sweets. She introduces herself only as Babushka and won’t let me leave until she has stuffed my front shirt pocket with all the sweets and chocolates it can carry, her weathered hands pressing them in one after another, nodding firmly each time as if to say and this one, and this one too.

And one more kindness before I leave this town: Hamayek and Daniel, each knowing a few non-overlapping words of English, come to an understanding of the breadth of the walk through my couple words of Armenian and Russian. They receive it with such warmth as further fills my heart. Hamayek asks me to take his photograph, and I steal one of Daniel despite his protests because his face is so striking — first for his large-nosed, long-faced appearance, best described as Adrian Brody-esque, and second because it’s covered in grey plaster powder from the tiling work he’s just taking a break from.

I’m on the highway now, hugging the edge of Lake Sevan, when six police cars and trucks pass in convoy, a train of flashing lights. I watch them disappear around the bend and wonder what they’re up to. Turning back to the road, I come face to face with a sweet old man named Heraj who offers a very strong handshake and an intensity of eye contact that I’m becoming accustomed to in Armenia, and which I enjoy. It feels very earnest, very respectful, and after months of walking where communication is always improvised and incomplete, there’s something grounding in that directness.

I spend ten minutes chatting and laughing with three Chinese tourists: a woman my age and her parents. They’ve just come from Mestia in Georgia, tomorrow they’ll be in Iran. What strikes me, in contrast with perhaps my prejudice against Chinese tour groups, is that they’re all very genuinely having a lovely time, even walking beside this busy highway to get photos of themselves in front of the lake. The walk stuns them a bit. But I’m glad to have told them because they engage with it in a genuine way. The questions they ask are the usual ones but they meet each answer with sincere curiosity. They’re very affectionate. As we take photographs together, walk together a little, and say goodbye, we embrace each other with an ease and familiarity that surprises me.

In Sevan Jonny has found us a guest house, another night of luxury before we walk back into the wilderness tomorrow, including a gorgeous dinner and spirited conversation with our hosts. Through the evening we find we have both been reflecting along similar lines through the day.

9:56am on August 27, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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The Dilijan Plan

2025-08-26T23:27:22Z

From its perch atop the saddle, the space station offers a grand view across the valley we would be descending through. As the air warms and our breath stops curling in front of our faces, the thought crosses our minds to stay put, but despite the lush environs yesterday’s walk yielded no flowing water sources, the same may yet be true today, and we’ve only a few hundred mils of water between us.

We opt to use the last of the water to brew up a morning coffee, worst case we can wet our tongues on the abundant dew that has descended on the mountain overnight. If all goes to plan, today should only be a half-day anyway, to the town of Dilijan. Once Jonny has wrapped his feet in half a roll of tape and scarfed his ritual multi-vitamin, the promise of a dinner more elaborate than what we can put together in a single pot on a camping stove gets us moving. Setting off, Jonny and I try to work up a rap to remember the things we want to do when we reach town. We abandon the effort after about a verse and half but day four remains The Dilijan Plan in honour of the song.

Worst-case scenario, you step on a blunt-nosed viper going that way, I shit myself, a bear comes and eats our shitty, poisoned remains. We’re both dead.

As we try and make up our minds which side of the valley to descend, Jonny remains committed to the dramatic view on things. In fairness to him, the days walk to Dilijan begins with a long, steep, and slippery descent through grasses taller than Jonny or I, a textbook setting for startling and being bitten by a snake if ever there was one. Ten minutes after setting off we’re wet through with dew. But for the fact that it is steeply down hill, moving through the high grass feels as much like swimming as hiking. After stumbling more than a few times in spite of his poles, Jonny sends me ahead to tread down a path.

Jonny, almost completely swallowed up by the high grass.

Six hours after putting our shoes on in the mountains we’re gleefully kicking them off in a guesthouse in Dilijan. I sling our clothes in the laundry, Jonny takes a nap, and later we sniff out a restaurant for a well earned feast and chat. At a corner table in the first restaurant we found, we order food enough for four and tip back fizzy drinks until it appears.

Leaning into some of the threads we began up in the mountains we touch on how the dream has changed and grown in recent years as I have shared more of it; the often unrecognised difference between managing and leading; how, given total control, I would find myself in a hell of my own making, a prison of the mind, yet the difficulty of relinquishing that control; and about the beginnings of a plan to get into Russia; and about patterns of male shame and insecurity, at scales personal and societal. But the main thread of the evening becomes apparent as we spend nearly five hours talking about the calamity of having parents, and the journey toward understanding them. I tell him that, strange as it might seem, this walk is in part an attempt to connect with my father, and I realise I’m not sure if I’ve ever really told anyone that? I haven’t been concealing it exactly, I guess I just haven’t known many people who I can have that conversation with without it slipping into platitudinous waste. My relationship with mum is marked or marred by our (my?) saying too much, things that shouldn’t be said, but Who is my father? it’s the opposite“), we live mute under the weight of things that shouldn’t have happened but about which we cannot speak.

These things are not kept secret from the people I love, and who love me, but when I do talk about them I often feel that those conversations are for them that they might know me better, but are rarely useful for me, that I might know myself better. We are equipped for life first by experience and then by empathy, beyond that we try to fill in the gaps with education. By his own experience, his abundance of empathy (and his ongoing psychology degree), and within the vivid crucible of this walk together, with Jonny those same conversation have risen to that hallowed plane of dialogue where there is no need to translate between two worlds, where nothing is “diminished in the telling”, and so to a place where things are said, heard, and understood in a way that is simultaneously effortful and effortless, such that our growing understanding of the other expands our understanding of self equally.

I think often about the sisterhood of women, how, for the women who find it, that wellspring of understanding, of shared experience, and community can be a (literally) super-human resource for living, and for coping with the world as it is¹. For much of my life I had no grasp that their could exist a brotherhood of men beyond that spirit numbing, social fabric shredding maelstrom of male bravado and misogyny that seemed to ooze out of everything, and so I mostly swore off men. But people like Jonny (and Paul, Dale, Cy, and Kyle) remind me that there can be brotherhood among men that stirs and ignites the spirit toward better, more honest and open-hearted living. And it is this sensation that will rein in my memory long after Jonny has returned to London, and I to the lone wander.

Weeks after he’d returned to London I asked Jonny if he could remember the Dilijan rap and he kindly sent back this little recording (I’m sure he doesn’t mind my sharing it with all of you…). Not included and long forgetten: the fragments of a shopping list that were the initial impetus for the song.

I know this isn’t every woman’s experience by any stretch. Some women never find their way to the sisterhood, or find themselves shut out of it, or are met by a cruel incarnation of it. I’m not trying to paint some rosy picture of universal feminine solidarity, but it is useful to me to acknowledge something I’ve long witnessed, envied, and regularly drawn inspiration from.↩︎

11:27pm on August 26, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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Cherry vodka and a trip to the ISS

2025-08-21T01:45:20Z

The two men who shared a single bunk enact a Buster Keaton routine as they wake. The first, swinging his legs out of the bed and sitting there in his underwear, reaches for a cigarette and lights up before even putting weight on his feet. A few minutes later the other stirs, shoos the other off the edge of the bed, and repeats the selfsame performance.

Breakfast is simple: bread, tomato, a little cheese. We taste the fresh, hot cheese that Lilit is busy coagulating over the stove¹, and I make the nearly fatal mistake of comparing it to mozzarella. I want to take a photo of her in her work but she is shy, so Arpine gamely stands in for her, after which the cheese is hung up on a line like sweaty socks, something to do with whey I gather :)

Samvel tries to get a head-start on the days water-fight by flicking water at me from a cup, I toss a little water back at him for his trouble but Lilit gets caught in the crossfire and Eleftheria — his grandma, four-and-a-half feet of pure matriarch — clips us both round the ear. I feel part of the family. We’re invited to stay for the water war that is to come, but from experience I know that it won’t kick off until well into the afternoon and there are days and miles ahead.

Only a handful of kilometres away from Arpine’s, we encounter what I come to think of as The Vodka Committee. They come lurching along the track in a UAZ and a Lada Niva, and stop in the shade of a tree where Jonny has just tested his bear spray for the first time (and not been too impressed with its performance). Men pour out of the Lada like it’s a clown car, and vodka pours out of plastic bottles like it’s a party (again, I drink Jonny’s share). Before long we’re back on our way, me with a little stagger in my step and a coke bottle of home-made cherry vodka in my pack. As best as we can tell, the party is heading to Arpine’s.

Jonny arrived in Armenia with pain in his feet already from Plantar fasciitis brought on by basketball, but his squishy metropolitan feet soon adopt the blister as their preferred discomfort after we hit the mountains, and the fasciitis seems to wander off. We stop semi-regularly to admire (and attempt to avert, with tape) the determined disintegration of Jonny’s feet, but he rides it out gamely regardless.

Our conversation meanders like the trail, winding through philosophical valleys and over spiritual ridges. Love, commitment, and acceptance are the themes of the day. I talk about realising that perfect comes after we’ve accepted good enough; Jonny reflects on accepting a person, wholly and without caveat, because anything less isn’t acceptance. I’m reminded of something I heard once about forgiveness:

If we are to forgive, then of course it must be our enemies—for who else is there to forgive?

Likewise, it means nothing to say we would accept a perfect person, because that wouldn’t take any acceptance. We talk about how acceptance isn’t passive – it’s an active choice, renewed constantly. How it’s different from resignation or tolerance. How it requires seeing someone clearly, flaws and all, and choosing to stay present with them anyway.

A trailer, a Soviet relic, abandoned and rusting, lies in a natural saddle between two mountains. Just beyond it lies another trailer that the elements have much more rapidly reclaimed, the earth heaving up through the floor, swallowing what has been forgotten. The first, the better of the two, looks grimy, mournful, and perfect.

Plainly nobody lives here, and hasn’t for a long time, but their echoes linger: two plastic disposable plastic cups on the counter, a discarded tissue, and a single old boot whose sole has escaped its body. The trailer’s only residents now are the dozens of twin-striped skinks that scatter at our every step, and two mice that can occasionally be heard chewing fresh tunnels through the polystyrene insulation in the walls, but who are shy in their work, falling silent just as soon as we actively listen for them. Not long after we move in one of them ventures out through an electrical conduit, quickly thinks better of it at the sight of the trailers new, larger residents and vanishes back down another hole.

Thanks to its cupola-esque windows we nickname our shelter the ISS, but we’re not astronauts. Journeying across a former Soviet satellite, adrift in the endless unknown of this planet, hanging in that larger infinity of the cosmic canvas, we can make-believe our refuge is a module of the Mir space station, and we are kosmonavts.

This world-order (kosmos), the same for all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: ever-living fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.
— Heraclitus, 5th century BC

The stars put on a good show for Jonny, he keeps sticking his head out the door to check on them, to check they’re all still there, and each time more have appeared and he comes back smiling anew.

This is the most stars I’ve seen, for sure.

Until he steps out without his glasses on and can’t see a thing, then he’s in mourning for his once clear vision.

We stand outside for a while after the true darkness descends, once those pinpricks in the black velvet curtain are most clear. Jonny spots Mars; we watch satellites and the odd shooting star respectively slide and slice across the canvas; talk about the sci-fi tingle of seeing Starlink satellites skate overhead like a string of pearls tossed into orbit, knowing that they’re only clumped up for a few days after a launch, like newborn tadpoles, before they boost themselves off to their own orbit, never to see each other again.

As I write this up, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is this:

I’ll not pretend our window onto the cosmos was as swish as ol’ mate Hubble’s, but it was good enough for us as we shuffled some boards around to make another three-plank bunk for me so Jonny could sprawl out on the floor.

My understanding of the coagulation stage of cheesemaking is probably comically wrong, forgive me.↩︎

1:45am on August 21, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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Fear, Feast, Fire

2025-08-17T16:56:29Z

It looks like at any moment the earth will just shut like a book, and we’re on the margins.

Jonny has a lovely habit of saying beautiful things. He’s right too. Pictures don’t do it justice, but looking out across the Debed Canyon is surreal; a tapestry of farmland plays out on sprawling plains which look marble smooth until suddenly it all plunges into the great yawning chasm of the canyon, the lowest point in all of Armenia.

An hour after those first bear prints, and having seen several more, I’m glad when we meet Alvard (Ալվարդ) deep in the undergrowth picking wild plants for chai. Quietly I hope it begins to settle Jonny to the idea that man has less to fear from bears than bears do from man.

Having crossed the border into Armenia only two days before Jonny’s arrival, I haven’t picked up much Armenian yet, so we rely on my few words of Russian (русский) picked up in Georgia (ჯორჯია), like пешком/peshkom (on foot), and the names of villages (Alaverdi, Dilijan) to describe the journey ahead. Alvard is of that joyful sort where our ignorance of Armenian is of no concern and she talks to us at length, while I pick out the few words I know and glean from her gestures that she and her many children live in Alaverdi in the winter, but through much of the summer she stays up in the mountains in a little shack, grazing her cows and harvesting chai into the large marsupial pouch of her apron.

Armenian (հայերեն), like Georgian (ქართული) before it, will challenge me with its beautifully strange alphabet, but everyone here is patient with the wanderer and very appreciative of the effort.

We leave Alverd to her work and plunge head first into several hours of sopping wet bush bashing. It’s only later, when I learn that Jonny hasn’t spent as much time in the outdoors as I assumed, that I fully appreciate how little he complains as we cut and wade through miles and miles of dense foliage that reaches above our heads, and conceals treacherous hollows in the ground beneath our feet. By 9am we are soaked from heel to heart and stay that way for much of the day.

Wherever the undergrowth ebbs Jonny intently searches the ground for bear sign, sometimes we spend several minutes inspecting a marginal animal track, and it is apparent that Jonny errs on the side of bear, and I on the side of probably not a bear, but still we see plenty of sure tracks and scratched trees for there to be no doubt of brown bears having passed our way within the last day or two. Wolves are much harder to be certain about as there are so many large dog breeds in the area, but by probabilities we may have sighted a few gray wolf prints too. Everywhere wildlife is accompanied by wilddeath, and carcasses of mice, stoats, hedgehogs, frogs, and snakes are the visible leavings of the buzzards and eagles that swoop and soar overhead, after which a zoo of beetles, ants, maggots, and other bugs descend on the remains.

Beyond the dense foliage are the open tops and high, steep grazing where we will meet more of the dogs that guard the herds and camps. Often the most violent dogs are kept on a chain, but there are exceptions, and Jonny gets his first experience of being charged by a gnashing, all-muscle beast.

The handsome young harbinger

Jonny’s tent is a lightweight affair I picked up second-hand for him in Tbilisi and it takes a fair while to get the pitch right. All the while he has the feeling that we’re being watched. Through the day his fears about bears have receded, but the sun has set and beyond the inky wall of the forest beside us he imagines “fantastical creatures with ferocious fangs”. As I make dinner this hangs over us, for all that he tries to manage it, but before we can confront it we are interrupted by the arrival of an eight year old boy on a horse.

His name is Samvel and he has come to warn us about those same bears (արջեր) and wolves (գայլեր) that are already alive in Jonny’s mind. I recognise this warning as the same warning I have heard a hundred times over the last eight thousand kilometres, but to Jonny it might as well have been a visit from the grim reaper himself. Thankfully, this reaper has invited us to the safety of his home, where neither real nor imagined bears roam. As the last of the evening light slips from the sky, Samvel having left us to ruminate, Jonny finds the courage to say he can’t sleep where we are.

Packing up and heading for the little clutch of buildings and tents across the valley, Jonny’s fears about bears are replaced by worries of being a nuisance on this journey, which I do my best to disarm, but which are not settled fully until we’ve had the total experience of the clan to which our young harbinger belongs. At the first bark of the dogs Samvel appears again, this time with one of his brothers, and we are led to a long room where dinner has just begun.

For Jonny the experience of being invited to eat with a large group of people with whom he shares no spoken language is more novel than for me. But by his sensitivity he quickly adjusts to the game of charades by which we come to understand the rough shape of the family tree, the seasonal activities of the clan, and gradually convey something of ourselves in return.

Arpine (Samvel’s older sister) speaks English but her attentions are divided between the wanderers at the table and helping Lilit, her mother, in the kitchen. By some sixth sense she always reappears when we have reached an impasse in the breakneck pantomime and so adopts the role of final arbiter of all (mis)understanding between Anglian and Armenian. Later we learn that it was she who sent Samvel to warn us.

The table grows heavy with cheeses, fruits, vegetables, bread, rice, and meat and more of all sorts — all except the rice having been grown, harvested, made, fermented, or slaughtered within a few hundred metres of where we sit. In the middle of the table stands a large pot of stew and while Arpine translates our intended journey to her family, Eleftheria, her grandmother, ladles generous portions into chipped bowls in front of Jonny and I, all the while conducting everyone else so that from left and right and across the table so much food is deposited in front of us that soon I have been handed a second plate.

Eight year old Samvel appoints himself our waiter and fills our glasses with water or cola at his whim, while every few minutes his uncle’s hand snakes through the labyrinth of food, plates, and glasses to retrieve one of mine and refill it with vodka before calling another toast (there were many). Jonny doesn’t drink but later notes that the uncle seemed set on my drinking a double share of their homebrew to balance that alien notion. For my part I’m just glad to see the man who an hour before had startled when he mistook a bush for an approaching wolf happily nodding along to rapid-fire Armenian as if he understood every word.

Arpine is learning to play guitar and Jonny has clocked her instrument sitting in the corner of the room beneath a framed icon of Mary cradling Jesus. As dinner winds down Armen (Arpine and Samvel’s father) announces that the fire is ready, and Jonny sees an opportunity to share that second language of his that needs no translation.

For the next hour and a half, sitting around a fire of windfallen trees and gasoline, the valley is treated to the most eclectic and international one man concert it is ever likely to see. Arpine and her sister Zoya, who both sing well but are shy about it, have Jonny playing melodies from Lana Del Ray, Blackpink, Eminem, Coldplay, and a dozen others I forget, while their aunts pull him from West to East by humming Armenian songs which he then picks up by that magic of the musicians ear. Without a doubt, the highlight are the two songs that Jonny improvises about the events of the day, his arc from fear to salvation.

Except for the photo I take of Jonny and Samvel playing together and another of Arpine and Samvel, for the rest of the night my camera is not my own, Samvel whisks it away and I hardly see it again until the morning.

Later, as I turn the work of his eye into a collage, I’m reminded how special it can be to receive your own experience back through another’s eyes, especially the eyes of a child still roaming through that wide-open realm of becoming, where all of life is immediate, visceral, and sincere. Children are not sophisticated. That might sound like a slight but it isn’t, I say it with envy. Sophistication is division, it is the tool by which we divide and diminish others and our selves. Samvel can do anything, because he doesn’t yet know any different (he who says he can and he who says he can’t are both usually right). He can ride a horse; relate to two strangers without words and invite them to his home without anxiety; act as waiter, clown, fire master, photographer, and one-half of a guitar player — he can try anything, and by trying he is becoming.

Somewhere along the way most of us find our way to the idea of sophistication, and once we do life is never the same. To be sophisticated is to spend life looking at the world through a mirror — always reflecting on how we are perceived, how we compare, how we appear in the eyes of others — while walking on the ceiling, all so as to be above. Everything is backwards and upside down and nothing makes sense, and that’s the point: the madness of it is what makes it so appealing, because it excludes. Sophistication places rules above feeling, above passion, above truth. To be sophisticated is to throw out the positivist idea that it is what we do that is most important, and adopt instead the anxious belief that we are what we don’t do. Sophisticated people don’t talk like that (with honesty), don’t express those things (real feelings), don’t go to places like that (where life has texture), don’t associate with those people (the unsophisticated). In pursuit of sophistication we learn to second-guess instinct, to suppress natural feeling, to evaluate experience always through a framework of comparison and exclusion, and we arrive at a default of not possible where once everything was possible.

As I try to save myself from the seduction of sophistication, to see it for its mere sophistry, nothing and no one is more effective than the child at laying bare how I have made myself and the world smaller as I have grown larger.

I don’t really separate them, they’re all the same thing. I don’t think children separate different artistic… they don’t separate themselves either. They don’t say as adults do “well there are artists and then there are other people”. Kids, if they want to draw they draw, they want to sing they sing, they want to pretend they’re The Lone Ranger or Aragorn or an elf or a monster they just do it, they don’t think about it. It’s only adults that make that distinction and I think that everybody, even when they grow up, is an artist, it’s just a way of living. Being an artist, […] it just has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
— Viggo Mortensen in 10 Questions, TIME, 2008

It turns out we have arrived on the eve of The Feast of Vardavar¹ and we’re invited to join the family for the customary all day water fight the following day, but we’ll decide whether or not to stay for that in the morning.

As the fire burns down, two bunks are readied in a shack just beyond the pigs and before the goats. We’re to share three beds with two of Samvel’s uncles (the one who plied me with vodka all night whose name I forget and another, Rafayel). I offer to sleep on the ground but they steadfastly refuse — somehow they, two full grown men, will share one single bed — I’m relieved when they at least let me insist on their taking the mattress. A commotion erupts — a bird has flown inside — and Jonny will spend the rest of the trip telling people how I caught a bird with my bare hands.

As I snuggle down on a pile of old coats on a three plank bunk, over a mud floor, listening to the goats just down the hill, the pigs just above, and Samvel causing trouble for his aunts a little further off, I’m grinning from ear to ear, happy that Jonny, by the end of day 2, has already been able to experience the heights of hospitality that mark all the richest memories of this walk.

Vardavar is an Armenian ritual dating back to pagan times, but which survived the Christianization of Armenia in 301CE.↩︎

4:56pm on August 17, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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Alaverdi via the Tense Apricot Police Taxi Scam

2025-08-04T20:44:29Z

I feel like we’re in a budget old people’s home where we can’t afford separate rooms.
— Jonny

July 25th, 2025 It’s 1am and Jonny has just arrived in Yerevan from London to walk with me for a week or so along the spine of some of the mountains that more or less allow Armenia to exist. Compared to my usual, sleeping on a pull out sofa feels luxurious (Jonny can have the bed), but I can appreciate how this dimly lit shoebox buried in the back of a slightly crumbling building in the village of Parakar (Փարաքար), sandwiched between Zvartnots International Airport and a gypsum mine, might seem a little spartan to a man who makes his home in Catford, London.

This first test of Jonny’s adaptability wasn’t intentional, there was nowhere else available near the airport, but it has confirmed my sense that he’ll be up for what lies ahead. I say “sense” because Jonny and I have only met once before (in Pëllumbas, Albania, that village of 200 people I called home for the first winter of the walk) so this week will be a walk into the unknown in more ways than one.

I have come off my line to collect Jonny so in the morning we grab some supplies and head to the bus station in order to get back to Alaverdi where my feet have so far carried me. No buses are running any time soon so we haggle with a taxi man to drive us the 4 hours north. Said taxi man is a former soldier but by the way he barges through traffic and makes a hundred blind overtakes on the winding highway, we imagine he spent his childhood dreaming of being a Formula 1 driver instead.

On the road to Alaverdi we are: castigated for daring to wear our seatbelts, as though it constituted a personal insult to our driver; duped into buying two kilos of perhaps the tastiest apricots I’ve ever eaten, and which cost barely a quid; nearly strong armed into buying lunch for said driver at a restaurant with 400 things on the menu, all of which we must ask for to determine the 3 things they’re actually serving; moderately alarmed as we find ourselves slipstreaming behind a police car as though under escort, only to overtake it at 110mph somehow without any problem; forced to remind our driver that we agreed a price all the way to Alaverdi, not 50km short in Vanadzor; and told that we talk too much (in fairness, we do talk for the entire journey) and this is why the music must be at deafening levels else, our driver says, he’ll fall asleep… it is without a doubt the best, most memorable Armenian taxi experience we could have had.

That first night — after returning to my line of footsteps, being quizzed by young Anissa in a market, leaving the birthplace of the father of the MiG-21, zig-zagging up the walls of the Debed Canyon, watching an Eastern Orthodox monk sing hymns alone in the hall of a monastery, and passing two teenagers on horseback carrying an AK-47 — we sleep in what was once home to seasonal shepherds in the mountains but now lies in near ruin.

We’re barely ten minutes back onto the trail in the morning when we meet the first of many sets of bear prints in the mud, fresh too. A week before flying out Jonny had caught wind of the bears in Armenia and sent me a concerned message, in the end we settled on arming him with bear spray. For my part, people have been strenuously warning me about bears in every country since Italy so I no longer register any concern about them. In Croatia I had my only close encounter when I was woken in the middle of the night by a bear who came to investigate the smelly human sleeping on a mat in the middle of the forest, ever since then I’ve felt more or less immune, but Jonny’s visit is reminding me what it’s like to be in bear country for the first time again.

8:44pm on August 4, 2025 from Yerevan, Armenia

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The Booky Chronicles

2025-08-04T12:41:28Z

I’m at about a seven or eight on the booky scale right now.
— Jonny, after an eight year old boy on a horse told us we were certain to be eaten by bear or wolf if we slept where we’d pitched our tents.

Jonny has brought some roadman slang with him from London. Booky quickly becomes the word of the trip — we adapt it to our purposes by choosing to believe it’s a fitting amalgam of Bear + Spooky — Jonny then fashions it into a 1-10 scale of his level of terror in the wilds of Armenia.

Jonny and I have only met once before (in Pëllumbas, Albania, that village of 200 people I called home for the first winter of the walk), but we have stayed in touch since then. Last year he wrote and recorded a song for/about me and we have have been having semi-regular phone calls for a while. Earlier this year he reached out to ask if he could join me for a section of the walk, and on the night of the 24th of July he landed in Armenia and walked with me into the unknown.

So began The Booky Chronicles.

Much happened in those nine days, too much to write it all up, but we both journaled as it unfolded, and I plan on gradually turning some of those experiences into legible artefacts here. Stay tuned as I add more.

Day 1: Alaverdi via the Tense Apricot Police Taxi Scam
Day 2: Fear, Feast, Fire
Day 3: Cherry vodka and a trip to the ISS
Day 4: The Dilijan Plan
Day 5: Snake Highway

12:41pm on August 4, 2025 from Yerevan, Armenia

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A little update from Tbilisi

2025-07-20T01:17:43Z

გამარჯობა/Hello! Been a while since I’ve shared anything, and even this is really just to tell some of you concerned folks that yes, I’m still alive. I’m still a little stuck on the larger project of writing about Turkey, so I’ll skip all that for now and give just a short update on what I’ve been doing since.

I left Turkey almost a month ago, crossing into Georgia around midnight on the 23rd of June and reaching Batumi at around 4am. I realised I was moving fast enough that I was in danger of having already crossed Armenia before Jonny arrived in Yerevan to join me, so over the last 26 days fewer than 10 of them have been walking days. I spent more than a week in Batumi, but wrote very little, instead spending the whole time working on a programming project that has been turning over in the back of my head for the last two months.

On the 4th of July, I set off in the direction of Tbilisi through the hills but fell ill after five days, probably from eating a home made Kupati (a kind of sausage common to the Caucasus) given to me by a generous villager. I was nursed back to health over three days by Anna, a very lovely Polish woman I met in the town of Aspindza. Another four days walking brought me from Aspindza to Tbilisi late at night on the 15th, and from there began The Great Georgian Shoe Saga wherein I have been back and forth by email, telephone, and in person with two government offices (customs & revenue/treasury) and a freight forwarding company in two Georgian cities in order to finally receive a pair of shoes I ordered more than a month ago to replace the pair under my feet that are now more hole than whole after 2300 kilometres of walking so far this year. Of course, such convenience would have been unimaginable for most of human history, so I’m not really complaining :)

My thanks to all the lovely people I have met in Georgia so far with special mention given to Simy of Portugal and Gregory for making my time in Batumi memorable; to Anna from Poland for nursing me back to health; to Makvala at the Revenue Office for her (successful) efforts to unite me with my shoes and her (unsuccessful) efforts to refund the duplicated customs charge; to Niklas and Damien for their kindred spirits and refreshing conversation; and to Nato and Thomas for making Tbilisi another place I don’t want to leave.

Tomorrow or the day after I will cross into Armenia and on the 24th Jonny arrives to join me for a week hiking through the Debed Canyon and Gegham mountains.

Much love from Tbilisi, talk soon x

1:17am on July 20, 2025 from Tbilisi, Georgia

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Güle güle, goodbye Turkey

2025-06-30T20:59:36Z

This year of the walk feels like the best of the first two years in one. The physical nirvana of that first year, pushing myself, in part against the clock of a visa, but mostly because I love the feeling and the purpose of it. I gave up that pace, that purpose, in the second year, that year of avash, to answer a different purpose: feeling like I had new tools to move the needle on this anxiety that found me at nine years old and hasn’t let go in the twenty years since. Going slow forced me to confront what going fast let me ignore. I couldn’t even say exactly what those tools were/are… the nascent nerve endings of presence I s’pose? Opening myself up to connection by first accepting this: I have always been running away, and then turning and squinting to rewrite the story so it looked like a moving towards.

I knew I wanted to stretch out the limbs again, and I’ve done that — walking almost as far in the first two months of this year’s walk as I did in all of last year’s — but I didn’t want to sacrifice the connection that characterised year two, and, tentatively, I think it’s working? This isn’t a controlled experiment by any means, but these last two months have been spectacularly connective, maximally so, like almost everyday was just opening itself to me (which is the anxious way of saying: I have opened myself to almost everyday, to everyone). Turkey has been kind, and I have been kind; we have listened to each other, and found that we each have much to say. Slightly ironically, it’s all that connective tissue that has so far overpowered my ability to share much of anything with you lot; because it is so lovingly consuming that I haven’t wanted to pull myself away to simply reduce it to mere words. But now I must, because Turkey is behind me for now, and if I don’t try to so reduce the experience of it — and make space for a new language, new ground, and new encounters — I risk grieving its passing from here to the Caspian sea.

2.5 million steps across Turkey this year brings the walk north of 10 million steps total, but it would be truer to say this year is the third step. I still catch myself writing the story just so sometimes, but I also know that I am getting closer to the truth, to being able to articulate what it is I’ve been running from all this time. And I know that I am getting closer to speaking fully of what it is I am moving towards. The right words come to us in fragments, from a thousand different people, most recently from a winter of experiences with two remarkable people I met beside a highway near Babaeski in Turkey last year; an encounter with a profoundly inspiring South African woman who opened her heart and home to us on a cycling trip to Vancouver island; from the volatile camaraderie of a winter drawing club I started that surprised and delighted me a hundred times in those months, and delights me still now that I am far away by stretching its own limbs out further than it could have had I stayed. There will come a day when I won’t remember any of these things, but each and all of them will always have made me who I am.

These tales, in the “just-so story” tradition […], do not prove anything.
— Stephen Jay Gould, The Return of Hopeful Monsters, Natural History, 1977

8:59pm on June 30, 2025 from Batumi, Adjara, Georgia

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Day 37

2025-06-03T23:26:09Z

Heavy cloud all day. Patches of blue poke through but not for long, and never in the right place to bring with them any direct sunlight. The forecast promised heavy rain, but thankfully it never came. Chill breezes throughout the afternoon but only once lasting long enough that I needed to put my jacket on. Mild night.

11:12 I find myself in a window of disillusionment. 1,000 km into this year’s walk, nearly 2 weeks into a fight with the flu, and I’m tired.

11:42 The apartment sprawl of Kayseri is staggering. I remember seeing it from up on the mountain as I made my descent and thinking it looked unreal. Down here it looks real at least, but somehow feels more endless.

15:50 I just can’t enjoy these cities. Definitely this flu has knocked me about this last week and a half, but the real drag on my mood I think has been these cities and their orbits. Ever since Konya I have been in the orbit of cities. From the outskirts to the inner of Konya, back to the outskirts but only in order to move toward Aksaray, from there to Nevşehir, to Develi, and latterly to Kayseri, in the orbit of which I am still trapped. No wonder I have been struggling.

16:53 The impulse to journal has waned a lot since those first couple weeks of the walk. I think partly it’s the novelty wearing off again, getting back into the rhythm etc, but/and another major part is surely that I’ve been giving in to distraction. I say but/and because the two things are not exactly distinct, part of why I’m distracting myself is because the novelty has faltered. I want it back. But how?

Novelty is newness — but more than new places — new possibilities, new ideas. I fall into boredom because I fall into a pattern, padding out the same rhythm, playing out the same interactions. The best days are those I spend meeting curious people in rural places while I’m actively engaged in learning the language. This was true in Albania, and it was true here in Turkey in the two weeks after Istanbul. Each day I would try and add just a few words, a phrase, and the locals, sensing this, were endeared to me. But since Konya I have been just so lazy. In the last week I think I might have learnt three or four words.

17:11 I have been thinking of Helen and Irfaan a lot, especially since that message asking if I’m likely to return to Georgia for the winter after this years walk is done. I want to. I don’t doubt I can learn as much if not more from them as I did in that first winter in Albania, only this time I think I can do it with less of the insecurity that still rang so loud in me then.

18:24 Woah, the thoughts are coming back! I became aware of having been non-present, and gradually that awareness pulled me back to the present. I managed for an hour or two to resist every urge to distract or divert my mind, and that was enough to bring me back to where my feet are. I realised I was smiling as I walked.

18:51 It’s incredible. I wonder if I will have to be forever relearning this same lesson, that it is never the story of the world that is faulty, it is my story of the world that finds fault. Since my mood has slipped, I have dared to feel that untrue feeling again, the one that lets me believe that it is others who are unwelcoming or incurious. But it is always me. And as soon as I realised that today, truly as soon as I realised it, I found my way back to connection with people, and was reminded that the world outside always reflects the story within.

As that first smile of a present awareness swept back over my face, I fell into a short but sweet conversation with three young children in the village of Agirnas. They were leaning far out over their front gate, their feet not touching the ground on the other side. A moment later, in a tiny little shop, I got talking and laughing and sharing with Oğuz and Ibrahim. I tried something new with them, something I’ve been thinking about, instead of saying as I usually do that I am walking across Turkey I said I’m walking from England to India. Their reaction proved this the right choice, they were bowled over by the idea and as a few other customers popped in and out of the shop they excitedly spread this news. As I made to leave with the few groceries I had bought, I took Oğuz’s photograph and he liked that too, I’ll send it to him. Afterwards he leapt up, grabbed a bag, and scurried around his shop stuffing it with snacks and thrust it into my hands, bidding me good journey.

Most interesting to me was how effortless and natural it was. Interesting because only a couple of hours before my re-re-awakening, I had decided to end the daily portraits which I have kept up on every walking day so far this year. I had decided to give it up because it no longer felt true, the last couple days I have been phoning it in, doing the minimum, that is, making the minimum connection necessary to “get” a photograph. This I knew was not the authentic project that has brought me so much joy over these last few weeks, so I was on the cusp of letting it go, and then my mind came back to where my feet are and it is good again.

19:13 The body holds the mind, the mind holds the spirit, and the spirit meets the world.

19:20 I look out over this beautiful landscape and I see the work, the harm that we do to it and, this time at least, I am not concerned for the earth. The earth is going to be fine. Even then I almost said, “our planet is going to be fine” before catching myself, saw the very human hubris in that, that we claim this planet as our own. No, it’s not our planet. But this earth will be fine. When it has had enough of us, it will rid itself of us, as it now threatens to do. And when the human age is over it will reclaim everything we dared to call ours, exfoliating its skin until nothing remains of the eczema we have been on this body.

We are a cosmic speck, one of countless species who make a home on this bright blue marble that hangs in the three-dimensional canvas of a universe that extends far beyond our imagination. We are a rounding error next to nothingness. Sometimes I think we continue to exist by hubris alone, certainly I do not think our survival is essential except by recursion, we survive in order to go on surviving, we survive out of habit.

But this isn’t nihilism, at least not in the way I understood nihilism in my teens. This is a kind of liberation. We are free to imagine our own meaning and to make ourselves in that image, because that is all we can do.

20:36 I’m walking these beautiful dirt back roads through farmland, and it’s dark, and I’m casting around for a place to pitch my tent when I see headlights coming my way. The car comes to a stop as it reaches me and two men begin there good humoured interrogation. They are heading away but they have a house 2 km back the way they have come and want to deliver me there. I insist that I must walk so they point out the house to me on the satellite view and tell me to ask for Hasan when I get there.

Ask for Hasan, he is güvenilir (trustworthy) they say, tell him Rıdvan sent you.

(All delivered in Turkish, but translated).

By the map those 2 km are more like 3, but it won’t take very long. I wonder if the invitation to stay at the house means in the house, or beside the house?

20:59 I can see the lights of the house, I’m less than 10 minutes away.

21:32 What a welcome! Turns out Rıdvan, who I met out on the road, is the boss, so he was heading home to his family and this is the accommodation for his workers. Hasan is feeding me as much çorba and ekmek (soup and bread) as my heart and stomach can handle, while another four chip away at the story that has brought me here.

There is a younger Afghan man here, Tevik (?), whose been here for 7 years, he came overland of course, in the back of a relay of trucks. He speaks Turkish but cannot read it so I play my translations through the speaker.

22:08 I have been settled in the “upstairs”. This I think is where the boss stays if he doesn’t go home for the night. It is a large apartment. The rest of the workers sleep downstairs in bunk beds mostly. I feel unduly privileged but they wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am left, as I so often am, in wonder at this world. How is it that for much of the last few days I have been in a fog, in doubt, and as soon as that doubtful fog clears and I open myself to the beauty of this land, all of this reveals itself to me. All this kindness, all the grace of all these men, their generous gifts to me.

It is remarkable, so I remark. But how do I return this grace to the world? What is the gift that I give? That I must learn.

11:26pm on June 3, 2025 from a farmhouse East of Sarımsaklı, Kayseri Province, Turkey

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From a shed in Doğanhisar

2025-05-18T01:28:00Z

Merhaba! It’s been about two weeks since the last update, and much too much has happened to give an exhaustive account, but here’s an abridged version :)

The persistent throb in my left knee — a lingering souvenir from a fall during my (thankfully successful) efforts to evade the police on Osmangazi bridge two weeks ago — has finally lifted today, for that I am very grateful. And tonight, an abandoned construction office with a desk (from which I am writing this) becomes a welcome, quiet shelter after a rich, connective day.

By preference and natural fact, this walk is predominantly spent in the rural tapestry of the countries I pass through. Cities are usually more similar than different, it’s in the in-betweens and the flyovers that the tenor of a culture is most clearly heard. Turkey, the largest country of the walk so far, is becoming the archetype of this — it’s expanse has much to say to a wandering boy who is slowly learning to listen.

The path through these hills and villages is paved with an almost overwhelming generosity, each day an unfolding map of landscape and human connection both. In Osmaneli, a man by the name of Alp, carrying two cups of çay clearly destined for another, simply looks at me, smiles, and places one in my hand (fittingly, Alp means hero). Later, Mustafa offers not just lunch but a whirlwind tour of the town on his sputtering motorcycle, while he makes his best effort to mask its petrol fumes with clouds of cigarette smoke puffed over his shoulder. On said tour, standing in the ruins of an old Orthodox church, he mimes the ringing of ancient church bells with so much gusto I feel I can hear them echoing from the walls. These generous encounters, repeated daily, feel like the world giving a nod, affirming this way of moving; though it does make an enjoyable challenge of trying to pay for a çay or a kahve, as someone almost always insists on paying for me.

Mornings have been reliably exquisite, the sun collaborating with mist to cast spectral light over dew-laden forests and fields, but the sun climbs quickly and by mid-morning it is usually sweltering. Thankfully, for these two weeks the wind has been singing the same tune, at the same time; just after midday, when the temperature has me casting around for a siesta shelter, it begins to pick up sticks, and once it’s blowin’ it seems to take fully ten degrees off the day, so I walk on. Some days, as today, a breeze starts early in the day and I imagine the rhythm has been broken, but sure enough, a little after midday that breeze is swallowed by the real wind and I know the rhythm isn’t done yet.

Evenings are almost invariably breathtaking; the temperature drops, a gentle breeze blows, and the sunset is a cocktail of pink and orange. These are my favourite walking hours; when clear skies and a bright moon permit, I stretch them well into the night.

In the midst of it all, after two weeks and five hundred kilometres — another of the many small milestones of this wander — a break. I left my line of footsteps for four perfect days (12th–15th) spent exploring Cappadocia with Mizuki while we were still in approximately the same part of the world, happily happening to coincide with the full moon (Mizuki means beautiful moon). We see the famous fairy chimneys, hike the full length of the beautiful Pigeon and Love valleys, get some climbing in while exploring the old cities carved into the volcanic rock, and watch a hundred hot air balloons make an unreal painting of the sunrise.

The return to the solo path is abrupt — marked by a frantic sprint the full length of the Konya bus station, a fistful of cash at the ready, in order to catch a connecting service to Sultandağı where I left off to visit Cappadocia — yet the rhythm of the road, and the kindness of strangers, quickly reasserts itself. Volkan and his son Mustafa seem to materialize just when I begin to doubt the next portrait. Cevahir and Süleyman rush from their lunch to pour handfuls of fresh almonds into my shirt pockets. An entire village, Çamözü, seems to turn out for an impromptu çay and question the turist session, their warmth a balm.

It’d be a distortion (though not a very large one) to paint every moment as peace and tranquillity. What I’d hoped would be a peaceful camp in the hills above Akşehir turned into dodging late-night revellers who’d brought guns up the mountain for some kind of celebratory target practice, eventually settling down when the police came to break up their fun. Dogs too — wild and domestic — are a frequent intrusion on that tranquillity; the Turkish Mastiff, Kangal, and Akbash are legion, large, and often aggressive here. But these blips are a small part of the whole that serve to deepen my appreciation for all the grace and goodness of all the rest. I imagine in my memories of Turkey it will forever be 6.30pm in early summer, the sun having not yet set, while a breeze ushers me into a village square. There, men wearing thick waistcoats sit around drinking çay, women in beautifully patterned clothes trade gossip, children shout out every combination of the six English words they know at this wandering “turist” who is once again left in awe of that easy hospitality with which he is welcomed day after day.

Much love to you all,
S

1:28am on May 18, 2025 from An abandoned construction shed above the town, Doğanhisar, Turkey

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The first days of the third year of the walk

2025-05-03T00:40:21Z

Hi everyone, Silas here. Back for another season of walking to India.

It has been 178 days since I sent the last message in the WhatsApp group that has been the hub of this multi-year walk, and there hasn’t been much on the site here either besides a little vignette on my way out of Istanbul, hence putting my name up top here in case some of you have (quite reasonably) forgotten all about me :D

I guess this is kind of a re-introduction, for me and for you, to the walk to India. Welcome all, to year three!

Some of you know that I’m already back in Turkey and on the move — today was the fifth day of this third year of the walk. Currently I’m somewhere east of İznik, following tractor and goat tracks through rolling hills covered with olive groves and vineyards.

The first couple of days always offer a bit of a shock to the system – that familiar feeling of getting the walking legs back, the weight of the pack settling in. There was a moment on Day 2, reckoning with what felt like new depths of muscular atrophy, where I wondered if the physicality might be too much this year. But thankfully, the body is already adapting, reminding me that getting stronger often just means hurting a little less each day. I even clocked in my first marathon of the year yesterday, which felt good! There’s been plenty of rain, which makes packing up a slow comedy routine, but once I’m moving I love the rain walking.

The biggest shift for me so far hasn’t been physical, though. Some of you know I had a bit of unfinished business with some bridges near Istanbul from last year. I returned having made peace over the winter, ready to let go of those 500 suspended metres. I felt that I had learned the lesson that the bridge was there to teach me… And then I came to another bridge (the Osmangazi), and stubbornly, foolishly, I tried again and, predictably, almost got myself arrested (again!). Initially it was frustrating, but standing there seeing (and then fleeing) the flashing lights again, it finally began to click.

Later that day I met Ibrahim. Standing in his shop chatting and laughing with him, I was able to understand how I was completely missing the point. I had made an “enemy” out of those bridges, allowed my frustration and stubbornness to overshadow my reason for being out here: to connect with people and witness something of the world. And the bridge wasn’t the obstacle in that; I was.

That realisation ties into something I’ve been learning a lot about lately, especially thanks to my time in Canada with Kyle & Avvai – the power (and practice) of being present. It’s the simplest of things, but has been a lifelong struggle for me. When I’m actually here, not lost in thought or worry about bridges or anything else, Turkey (and the world) feels incredibly welcoming. I’m having wonderful, albeit often hilariously mime-filled, conversations with people everywhere – farmers offering biscuits, Imams inviting me to stay at the mosque, kids demanding photos, men sharing tea and earnest questions via Google Translate. Yesterday, I spent time with two farmers, Isfim and Algud, and despite barely sharing a word of language, we understood each other perfectly. Presence, it seems, has a way of dissolving barriers.

It’s making me reflect on old habits too – how often a lack of presence made me a poor listener, or led me down paths of needless concealment. It’s a daily practice, but feeling more present allows for so much more gratitude – for the walk itself, for the incredible kindness of strangers (like the prayer beads an elderly mosalman gifted me and which give thoughtful work to idle hands on a walk like this), for the beauty of these landscapes (even amongst the signs of industry), for a delicious fruit smoothie after a long stretch, for the shelter I have tonight.

So, I’m feeling really positive and powerful in this years walk so far, in a way I’d lost sight of a little in my grief after leaving Albania last year. It feels like I’m finally shedding some old weight (metaphorically, still working on the literal pack weight, and the many pounds I piled on over the winter) and ready to truly see what this part of the journey has to show me.

Hope you are all doing well. Sending warmth and peace from the trail.

12:40am on May 3, 2025 from Turkey

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Out of Istanbul, meeting Günseli

2025-04-29T11:56:53Z

Those first steps felt drunken. Not sloppy drunk, no, drunk like that feeling of being eighteen and sprinting back from the pub because running drunk feels like flying at ground level. Weightless. I soak in it because I know that by day’s end I’ll feel anything but weightless. The weight of the pack will compress my spine a little, my shoulders will pinch, my feet will swell and turn tender. But to begin with — blissful, sober, drunkenness.

The sun shines all day but the wind bites. I sit down for 5 minutes, in full sun, and pretty soon I’m shivering, pressed onward. East of Istanbul, where Pendik comes down to the water, I turn off the shore to escape the frigid howl and fall into a patchwork of bustling streets. If you don’t look up at the sooty apartment blocks that crowd out the sky, it has the feeling of a bazaar. I imagine the apartments having arrived like UFOs, settling into a hover directly above the stalls of the busy market, and everyone simply pretending nothing’s changed, going on as before. Beneath each apartment block the muddle of stalls (now shops) remain, and the streets heave with energy. The crowd occasionally, begrudgingly, parts to admit a car or a scooter, but otherwise they rule the street. The towers are welcome for now at least, in that they shut out the wind.

The day offers its highlight in the form of a girl who barely reaches my waist asking, nay demanding, that I take her photograph. As is almost always the case, I find myself wishing I had a different lens on the camera, but we make a go of it anyway and she’s thrilled. She becomes bolder, begins harassing her friend to have her photo taken too, but her friend isn’t so keen and hops on her bike, giggling. From a window two stories above a woman cloaked in a Khimar looks on and laughs.

I ask the first girl her name, “Günseli! Günseli!” she says. We part ways, or so I thought. About half a kilometre down the road, I hear the rapid patter of feet and that same shrill shout of “fotograf!”. I turn to find not one but two girls bearing down on me. Günseli at full sprint, and another friend she’s just pulled out of a back alley, peddling hard on another little bike, this time with a rattling pair of training wheels. “Fotograf!” she yells again as she points at her friend. They both vibrate, barely able to stay still for a second, no sympathy at all for my using a 45 year old Soviet copy of a 67 year old lens¹, with pretty finicky manual focus.

By evening my spirits are still high but that weightlessness is long gone. I feel like a sack of bricks, heavy and hurting. The winter weight has reached new heights this year. After 35 kilometres I call it a day and surprise myself by opting for a bed for the night, wild camping in Istanbul has been consistently unpleasant and I want a good nights sleep to mend these aches.

I don’t imagine I’ll have any more luck this year than last crossing Turkey’s mega bridges so, assuming Osmangazi Bridge is off limits, I’ll be heading as far as İzmit — the eastern extremity of the Sea of Marmara — before I can turn south into the heart of Turkey. But first, sleep.

The lens is a Helios 44M, a Soviet copy of the 1939 Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2, likely produced at the Krasnogorsk Mechanical Works near Moscow. The serial number suggests mine was produced in 1980. I paid £36.90 for it in an auction.↩︎

11:56am on April 29, 2025 from Istanbul, Marmara, Turkey

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In (multi) medias res

2024-12-16T23:43:42Z

In conscious and unconscious ways, I’ve always partitioned my life.

Over the winter, Helen and Irfaan at times struggled to reconcile the version of me that is walking to India with the one that can sit all day in front of the fire without the slightest restlessness.

In a hostel in Plovdiv I met Partha, a programmer from India, and he witnessed a version of me that few see: awake ‘til 3am every night, waking again before 7am, a quick walk through the city — every remaining moment given over to that intent focus that I often dream of but which comes only rarely.

Joining me for the walk across Montenegro last year Mizuki, who has seen more of the life I choose to create than anyone else, saw something that she had seen before but not so completely, my comfort on the fringe. The comfort with which I trespass and occupy neglected spaces was unnatural to her, unnerving. We adjusted, figured out what was mutually comfortable,

Since then, Kyle and Avvai have probably come closest to witnessing the walking of the walk, first out on the road, then in Istanbul after back to back fifty kilometre days, the arrest on the Bosphorus Bridge. Now, in Vancouver, they are witness to another version of me, one who can join in an impromptu stand-up comedy show, go to art classes, and write something into the world each day. I talk about my shyness and they raise an eyebrow, they still haven’t seen that version of me, the one that used to swallow up every other version of me.

Every person and place that we meet is in medias res — in the middle of things, enacting only one part of a story — but for the traveller this becomes acute. To be in motion is to be ever in the middle of things. As in a kind of lucid dream, we become the true keeper of our story, freed to enact a different way of being. At times it feels like the only true way to know myself, at others it feels like a perpetual ab ovo, lingering at the beginning of things, locked in the interstitial. In my wandering, even close friends bear witness to me mostly in the second degree.

To stay in place is to distribute our being among those who witness us, in that reflection we become solid, durable, but changing our story is made harder, sometimes impossible. So for now I try to balance the two. The walk lets me into a dream — the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot¹ — so I lean in,

When you come over a ramp and go into an abyss, you would shrink back from it. You would lean back and that would somersault you backwards. But you have to lean into it. You have to do the unnatural. When you are really flying far, you are not a human anymore, you transform yourself. You transmute yourself into a bird.
— Werner Herzog in Thomas von Steinaecker's, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, 2022

But if I stay stay away too long will I become unmoored? Will anyone else be witness to enough of my story to say it wasn’t just a dream?

— Werner Herzog ↩︎

11:43pm on December 16, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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The best Mushke this side of the Vjosa

2024-12-15T23:30:07Z

July 9th, 2024
West of the Vjosa river. Kushaj, southern Albania

Fejzir woke me early. We’d stayed up late drinking Raki, but he was up and dressed bright ‘n early, looking down at me with a face that seemed to say “it’s 5am, were you going to sleep all day?”
If I was surprised I was a fool, he’s a farmer — up here where life seems to have been very little changed by this century, or last — and I’ll be grateful for having started early when the heat creeps up toward 40°c. Farfuri brings Turkish coffee to extinguish my ethanol breath and she’s back in the kitchen cooking something up for me before I can protest.

We met last night. Well, first I met their dogs. I was climbing out of the Vjosa valley, headed vaguely in the direction of the coast, putting more places on my map of Albania, and well aware that I was trespassing. Alerted by the barking, Fejzir comes out to meet the vagrant at the gate. He’s appropriately suspicious as I explain myself as well as I can with my pak Shqip (little Albanian) — he doesn’t know even a word of English — but he waves me through the rickety gate in his hand made fence while beating back the dogs with his other hand.

He and his wife live alone on the ridge. That is, alone with three dogs, two cats, a cow, many chooks, a handful of goats, and a mule. When I asked what the mules name is he grins and shouts “Mushke!”

By 10pm I have been toured around the property atop Mushke, Farfuri has fed me to bursting with chocolates, sweets, nuts, fruit, coffee, and raki… and just as I’m about ready to pass out from gluttony, she tells me dinner is almost ready! I survive by eating uncharacteristically slowly while my generous hosts call everyone they know to tell of the strange foreigner at their table. At some point the phone — the only admittance of this century on the farm — is thrust into my hand. It’s their daughter. She lives in Greece, is a little older than me, and speaks a little English, about equal to my little Albanian. She says Fejzir is very happy to have met me, and that I can stay as long as I like.

Fejzir still calls me every few weeks. As the months tick by and my Albanian fades it gets steadily harder to keep up a conversation, so that by the time I reach Istanbul, Fejzir has enlisted the help of his nephew living in England and we have a long video call. I think I break his heart a little when I say my plans have changed, that I won’t be coming back to Albania for the winter. He tries to persuade me, says he’s already picked out a goat to slaughter for our reunion meal.

Before we ring off I ask how Mushke is doing, he laughs, “Mirë, mirë” (good).
I know now that Mushke just means mule.

Shumë faleminderit dhe lamtumirë, Fejzir and Farfuri x

11:30pm on December 15, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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Letting go of the numbers

2024-12-13T22:50:50Z

Last year the first marathon was on day one, and five followed in that first week. The marathons came about as a fraction of that larger figure of all the miles to come. They gave a measure to what ought perhaps to have remained an intangible, and the road ahead started to narrow to that number.

I think I’ve always liked numbers. They made sense to me long before most other things did, and I was ‘good at them’, taken out of maths classes at primary school to be taught by a high school teacher. For a while I thought I’d be an engineer someday. I enjoyed the numbers the walk yielded, and I ‘had to’ walk fast anyway because of the visa, so before long I’d gotten used to it. I’d done that before.

Cycling around Australia at times became a blur of numbers. Up in the north, coming across the outback, I became fixated on the possibility of cycling 300 kilometres in a single day on a fully loaded bike. I never managed it, topping out at 270 kilometres before hitting the west coast and catching a head wind that ground me down to little more than walking speed.

Numbers feel tractable, they seem to promise to contain the measure of a thing. But numbers obliterate and obscure at least as much as they disclose. It’s easy to forget that, now that the numbers crowd have eaten the world. Gates, Brin, Page, Graham, Zuckerberg, and Meyer et al have arranged the world so that it can be better understood by machines and we have become something of those machines too. We’ve hitched so much of our self expression to a media less expressive than what came before. Heck, a barely there cave painting says things that a computer never can and, when we reduce the scope of the world to only what computers can encode, we lose all the texture that makes life magical. Above all, that cave painting exists in both space and time. In place. It relates that someone was here, at a given moment, and they were feeling something.

Time matters. Place matters. A computer would have us believe that a place can be represented by a set of coordinates, a vector map of structures, and a population counter. But a place is much much more than that. A place is a canvas for a story, expressed in character, culture, and the shared mythology of a built world. Like the story of the Illyrians, which feels almost ever present in Shqipri, in a way that icons on a screen can’t represent.

Worst of all, computers have adopted their own mythology, the pernicious idea that they can represent all of life, and therefore that anything not included in their files doesn’t matter.

The implications of this myth range from the stupid, “if it’s not on Google maps it’s not real”, to the destructive, “if this tool I’m using can’t capture what I’m feeling then I need to simplify what I’m feeling”, to the dangerous, the idea that online discourse in any way meaningfully represents real human exchange, which ultimately has changed the way people communicate in the real.

Machines will, and already have, exaggerated our worst tendency to believe that by knowing something, we understand it — rather than to acknowledge our little minds and our short-sight. I know this because I am guilty of it. Machines can ‘know’ but machines cannot understand. When we think like machines, where your understanding diverges from mine we SEGFAULT, we crash, we lock up. But when we think like humans, you and I together can understand more than you or I alone.

Computers would have us believe that life is fact, but life is a fiction, stranger than fiction, and it’s still being written. In the same way, this walk is not the numbers that it accumulates: the marathons, the cumulative elevation change, the distance covered, the index of countries visited, or the number of peaks bagged.

This year I set out to walk less and see more than I did last year, and I’ve succeeded, I don’t need any numbers to tell me that. I haven’t quantified the difference in the distances, haven’t totalled up those numbers, probably I will at some point but it hardly feels urgent. Nearly nothing of the substance of this walk is reflected in those figures. The walk is “the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, wind, rain and snow”, it is people and places met, it is the sum not of how far I have moved, but of how much I have been moved — inspired — and in turn how much I have been able to inspire others. Not in any grand way, but in little ways, through the conversations that emerge from living true to my own being, to a truth that can’t be expressed in numbers.

10:50pm on December 13, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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How do you navigate?

2024-12-11T23:56:42Z

Where are you going? How do you navigate? What if you get lost?

I see navigation as two interwoven idea pairs, feeling & intuition and knowledge & mapping.

Feeling & intuition

Sometimes it’s less about knowing where to go, and more about narrowing the field. The best way I know to do that is to set a destination, where doesn’t matter too much, just so long as it’s a good distance away.

A theme can be useful too. Once I reached the Balkans I decided I’d climb the highest peak in each country I walk through. Even if I don’t yet know anything else about a country, this gives me a heading, and from there I’m freed to discover the land I’m wandering through.

As intuitions go, I benefit from having quite a strong sense of direction, I’m confident making my own routes through the mountains by reading contour lines, planning mountain passes etc. If that’s not your style then look for established trails/routes. It can be good to push outside of your comfort zone, but listening to your instincts will signal what kind of walking you want to do. Listen to what your feet, legs, head, and heart have to say for deciding which mode to be in and for how long. It isn’t necessary to enjoy every moment of a journey like this, but if you’re not enjoying most of it you’re probably not listening to what your body is telling you.

My destination is quite far away, and I’m not in a hurry, but I do also have a sense of wanting to get there within this lifetime. So sometimes I do long sections of road walking to cover ground more quickly, sometimes I spend months almost exclusively in the mountains, but most often I do a hybrid of the two: walking (preferably small) roads to get from one set of peaks/mountains to the next.

Knowledge & mapping

I use digital maps almost exclusively — except for 10 days in the Swiss Alps after a rainstorm killed my supposed-to-be-waterproof phone. I spent those ten days mostly feeling my way through the mountains, which was lovely in its own way.

For maps I use Osmand, which pulls mapping data from the OpenStreetMap¹ project. I pay €30 a year for the Pro version because I use it all the time, and it has been my trusty companion for all of my big trips. While not perfect, the OpenStreetMap project covers a lot more trails and routes than any other database. Because of that it may seem a bit more visually confusing to someone using it for the first time, especially if they’re used to using the very simple Google Maps etc but once you get used to it it is fantastically useful. I lean on it mightily for contour lines when I’m route finding at altitude or descending into a ravine.

Using a map effectively means looking ahead too. I’m terrible at this. I usually just wake up and start walking, I rarely have more than a days worth of walking ‘planned out’, often not even an hour.

That said, the key limiting factors for my style of long distance walking are water and food. If I’m going to be in the mountains for 7+ days then I force myself to plan ahead a little bit while I’m still somewhere I can do a big resupply, and think about where I’ll next be able to get food.

More important than food is water. If I’m going into the high mountains and making up my own route I’ll usually use satellite images to check if there are likely to be alpine lakes etc, but take into consideration the season the images were taken (a lake or spring that exists in the winter may be dry in the summer).

It’s late and I need to sleep so I’ll leave it there for now, except to say, don’t get too much in your head about navigation, and don’t bury your head in a map either. Maps are terrific, but they also have a terrible power to flatten the world, to hide its magic, and steal its wonder.

The map appears to us more real than the land.
— D.H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, p. 420, 1936

Moving through the world on your own two feet is an unbeatable vehicle to reconnect with the intuition we forget we have, to play.

TLDR Trust your intuition, ask questions, wander far, and you’ll find no shortage of wonder :)

OpenStreetMap is an initiative to create and provide free geographic data, such as street maps, to anyone. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share.
— OpenStreetMap Foundation
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11:56pm on December 11, 2024 from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

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When cities stop

2024-12-07T23:47:12Z

Opening a couple of threads today, but not trying to draw any conclusions.

Cities hum along on the basis of a mind-boggling number of agreements. Formal and informal; explicit, implicit, and illicit; agreements written in law, agreements written in blood, and a whole lot of agreements that aren’t written anywhere at all. The nature of a city is laid down and built up from these agreements, agreements we rarely, if ever, consider. That’s the tacit irony of cities, “Here you can live your best independent life, because you can depend on all that other stuff just magically happening”.

Istanbul set me to wondering — as I did while living in Melbourne, as I do in any large city — about cities like this coming to a halt and how, once halted, they set about coming back to life.

The uncertainty of Covid — the lockdowns — offered up an extraordinary opportunity for looking closely at cities, at their agreements. Lifetimes could be spent looking at cities through the lens of the just-in-time logistics networks that tumbled further and further into disarray as the months passed and The Boxes¹ stopped moving, and that’s just one strand of the agreements that underwrite any given metropolis.

Rose and I were living in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, when Covid began to barge in on every agreement, everywhere in the world, all at once. From the safe little cocoon of Hataitai, we watched as a new agreement emerged — six feet apart or six feet under — as this deadly respiratory virus metamorphosed into a deadening mind virus, spreading like fire through the Black Box ², the one that waits patiently in our pockets for the moment when it can return to our hands.

Nothing shredded agreements quite like the reality of that epoch. Cities are cultures unto themselves, cultures are agreements, and agreements exist by a combination of duteous inertia and vast swathes of tacit knowledge. When that engine has been brought to a stop, people have to be reminded how the machine works. The city, having flailed a bit, regrouped, and said “hey, there has to be people living out stories here, there has to be people in these streets and in these venues, none of this makes any sense without people”. But how? Emerging from that first lockdown, social-distancing still, Wellington Council made the regional train service free for a time. Rose and I toured to the ends of each of the lines, to Waikanae and Masterton. Initially those trains were empty apart from us, but over time they filled out again, the fares were restored, and I remember thinking: this is how you restart a city.

The free fares were just one part of that. And I’m talking about The City of Wellington, sure, but really about the whole idea of cities, these great agglomerations of people, reaching out to their disoriented flock, people who, for the first time in a generation had watched the sun go down, and for a shared moment, asked, is it really going to rise again tomorrow? Like, are we sure?

Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, 2006, Princeton University Press↩︎
Jason Pargin, I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, 2024, St. Martin’s Press↩︎

11:47pm on December 7, 2024 from Istanbul, Marmara, Turkey

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