Why are we doing this? What do we want to achieve? How can we communicate these ideas effectively. These are the topics we have been discussing in preparation for building our website and reaching out to others for advice and possible sponsorships. Building the website has forced the 3 of us to try align our ideas and brush them up to create one easy-to-understand outward facing ideology. This has been incredibly helpful for us, because honestly we ourselves don't know exactly what it is that we want to achieve or why we are doing this trip.
We are aware that the opportunity to take on a journey like this is a huge privilege not enjoyed by many. The ability to even think that we can take a year or so out of our lives when we would otherwise be starting off our careers and earning a living displays this privilege. The fact that we have family and friends who are encouraging and allow us the freedom of dreaming is amazing. We want to make the best possible use of this privilege. It is essential and useful to acknowledge it, but it is also possible to be crippled from taking action by feeling bad about it and the other inequalities in the world. We would rather acknowledge the fact and then move on and take action in the best way possible. We would like to use the opportunity to bring some small benefit to others and hopefully make some small positive impact on the world as we go about this trip. We'd love to raise funds for charitable causes, as well as expose ourselves and those who choose to follow our trip to some of the unseen and honest sides of the spaces we will pass through.
Choosing the charities to support was a difficult process, but ultimately we had to narrow down the list to only 2 which we believed were doing valuable work. See the Support Us page for an overview of these charities, and expect a blog post describing the motivations behind the choice.
We wish to show not only the typical beautiful landscapes of South-Eastern Europe and East Africa, but hope to rather give a more realistic picture of what it means to live here, for both human and non-human animals. We don't want to rush through different areas, but rather try and engage with them at the slower pace facilitated by a fully loaded bicycle and not-quite-athlete riders. We would love to learn from local people, both from those living traditional lifestyles as well as those challenging the status quo by trying out new things. We would also love to observe other animals in their environments and actively dissolve the huge gap that us humans have artificially constructed between ourselves and the other beings we walk the planet with. Aside from these more abstract motivations, we also just want to enjoy ourselves and immerse ourselves in places firmly outside of our comfort zones. We will be camping and that allows for something that all of us cherish: being in remote natural places. We also enjoy one another's company (for now at least) and look forward to the many hours in the saddle, slowing down and hopefully appreciating our surroundings. For Emma and I at least, it will also be an interesting alternative to the flight that we have taken a good few times between our childhood home in South Africa and our more recent home in Germany. We will continue to develop this philosophy and our motivations as we go obviously, but we are happy to have had the time to think about them in the months before our trip actually starts.
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