Travel writing is all about dreaming. It is about imagining you are someone, or somewhere else. You’ve got to allow your mind wander away from where you are to where you might be, and forget yourself and embrace who you might be. I’m sitting at my desk and typing this as the bright light of the morning sun shines outside. I’m indoors and dreaming out. As my fingertips unconsciously tattoo the keys of my computer my mind goes walkabout, slowly loosing itself, floating beyond the computer screen, out of my room and up into the blue sky outside. At an ever increasing speed, it is doing laps of this find blue and white planet, travelling through space and time before zooming in and coming back to earth in Turkmenistan on a clear and cold Saturday night in early December 2009.
I’m wishing and imagining I was back there, in the blue of the night in Turkmenistan. I wish I was dog tired and wearing the same greasy clothes I’d been wearing since leaving Tashkent in Uzbekistan 1,000km and 7 days North. I wish I’d been cycling into a headwind all day, and I wish I could still taste the mutton shashlik I’d eaten with flat bread and washed down with tea from a bowl at a tea house hours earlier; while reclining awkwardly on a hand woven rug, my stiff legs ill equipped for sitting without a chair.
I wish I still had sand stuck in my beard and salt encrusted eyebrows. I wish I was cycling by the cool light of the moon because I couldn’t find any batteries for my head torch in the small shops that sold a little of everything but nothing that I wanted. I wish I was cycling blind, with my ears cocked for the Ladas and blacked out BMWs that bounced regardless along the lumpy road and had come dangerously close to hitting me earlier.
I wish I was alone and together with everything. I wish I felt like I’d pierced a void. I wish that I once again understood what was crystal clear to me then as I stood beneath a black velvet dome richly studded with diamanté stars. I wish I could see the warm orange glow of Sarakhs- the border town I was heading for- on the horizon across the vast flat expanse. I wish I was taking a rest beneath an elaborate Soviet bus shelter and listening to the sounds of the social wafting over a fence, catching the Russian pop music of a party that came and went with the opening of a back door as I sat like a lonely flanuer hidden in the darkness warming my numb fingers and drinking hot tea from my flask. I wish I could hear the drunken banter of the party-goers- spoken in the universal language of jocular youth- as I ate a full packet of cheap chocolate biscuits. I wish I was eating those biscuits with a hunger that a day’s cycling brings; jamming them into my mouth with grubby fingers and softening them with rude gulps of hot tea.