Stillness and Realisation

I arrived in Yerevan last Wednesday. I have been staying with some wonderful new friends who work at the French Embassy here. From the first village after crossing the border into Armenia from Georgia, Tom and I decided to cycle alone to Yerevan.

Tbilisi Beneath the Ice

When Sylvester, the Polish cyclist we met on Christmas Day in Batumi, was explaining that conditions were difficult here for local people in Georgia, coping with the cold midwinter, I remember thinking, surely it's not as difficult as cycling round the world? What a weird comparison and abstract concept. People in places with extreme weather conditions, are obviously tough, live and learn to deal with it. Cycling round the world means something different to any person who cares to think of the concept. These 4 words represent, for someone who has already cycled round the world (or travelled a long distance by bike), a body of memories, a once experienced truth of a moment, part of a process. Memories, skewed and evolved over time, the mind puts it's own spin on things, censoring some things, making it's own story which makes some kind of sense, or is maybe useful to life.