It has been a month since I returned from my ride. Memories of that journey are slowly fading in their clarity and singular days of riding have blended into a continuum. Mornings and evenings no longer punctuate those memories that do retain some lucidity, stories and events that I now draw on to define the journey to myself and when in conversation with others, and the miles that string those stories together are also blurred by time.
Reading this diary however does bring everything back into sharp focus and days are again shuffled into their correct order. The recall of detail aside though, whenever I trace my route on a map of Europe, see the countries crossed and the distance travelled, it continues to leave me with a sense of achievement for what I have done. That sense of achievement is somewhat tempered when I recall the adventures of others I met, their journeys and sacrifices providing both a sobering counterpoint to the bounds of my own relatively limited accomplishment and an inspiration for the future. But it is a sense of achievement nonetheless.
My thoughts also turn to what I took from my travels, the history, the exposure to other countries and their cultures and that subtle understanding of difference that travel brings. The Europe I cycled has provided a broad canvas for history's palette. Once the shadow of Empire extended across it providing a veneer of apparent simplicity to geopolitics, a small number of key players making the area seem more understandable. Yet below the surface lay the more complex reality with undercurrents of nationalism and identity, issues that eventually rose to define the more fragmented picture of today. As I added miles to my journey I also added understanding to that picture.
Those historic fault lines of yesteryear have not entirely gone away. The enforced homogeneity of culture and identity that was once an aim of Empires has been reinvented as a voluntary homogeneity within the realms of finance and regulation. It creeps into the fabric of a country - deep, indistinct but affecting - a subtle trace of familiarity wherever you may be. But as I travelled east it was something else that left a more tangible sense of familiarity despite the crossing of borders and the changing languages and cultures, but it was something that at first I could not put my finger upon.
It was not until later in my journey, while sitting in Golubac some four days after entering Serbia and with the rain beating against the window of my tiny self-contained apartment, that I had a sense of having entered an entirely different Europe. In part it was things that spoke of an age gone by, a world of simplicity, of community and the welcoming of strangers: sun beaten shepherds, crooks in hand, as much a part of the landscape as the fields through which they drove their flocks; Roma men and children, as brown as chestnuts and as ragged as urchins, collecting driftwood from the Danube flood plain, climbing up the levee to load their cart while I swapped words with one of their number minding their horse, neither of us comprehending a word the other said but, in that ignorance, sharing some sense of fellowship; sharing greetings with old, weather beaten, bescarved ladies sitting in village streets, sometimes chatting together, sometimes lost in thought as the world passed them by; and hunting down Romanian village shops, unrecognisable from the houses around them but known to the local community they were there to serve.
As well as the nostalgic, these things speak of a world built on poverty. But it was not poverty that marked the difference I felt in that latter part of the trip - I would still pass through towns where cars and restaurants and shops spoke of affluence - but the lack of what some may argue would represent a route out of it. That day in Golubac marked the point that I realised that the sweeping tide of commercial brands - the fast food establishments, mobile phone operators, major retailers - that I recognised so readily from home was no longer following me in my journey across Europe; the homogeneity of the high street has become the homogeneity of half of Europe. From Serbia onwards the brand names I saw were unfamiliar except in the biggest of cities. How long such a situation will last I do not know and I would wager that it is a situation that the international companies will be looking to change. But for all the cultures I was exposed to, the countries I experienced and the snippets of language I learned to get me by, it was this change, a change my mind registered before any conscious awareness, that remains one of the defining memories of the journey.
