“True happiness is being able to carve your own road into the horizon.”Six in the evening, and the departure is running a little late. On the family farm, the bike carries fifty kilos of luggage: his home for more than two years. Ahead of him, twenty-seven countries to cross on the strength of his calves alone. Christophe Cousin travelled the planet alone, a camera in his hand, witness to his joys and his doubts, like a diary. He did not film the encounters. He only wanted to keep a few memories, until the day the shoebox full of cassettes turned into films.
“I’m 25 when I decide to shake up my destiny”, says Christophe Cousin: to leave a rewarding job for a childhood dream full of naivety, and to set off without training. He has also decided never to wear a watch again: “On the dial of the road, I want the sun for a second hand.” He crosses France by its little country lanes, the Morvan, Vézelay, Burgundy, as far as Lyon. In the Alps come the first bouts of tendinitis in his knees, a pain that will flare up again throughout the journey. The pass he planned to take into Italy is closed: he has to take the bus under Mont Blanc. A night in an abandoned caravan, a fall in the fog, fifteen kilos lost since setting off, then the Adriatic coast, Slovenia and his first border stamp, Croatia, where he is strongly advised against the road to Montenegro and Albania.
Almost every day, the warmth of the sun gives way to that of a refuge: here, a Croatian hotel at ten euros a night, cold shower included.After more than two months on the road, Tunisia marks, in his eyes, the beginning of the adventure. A month, a little over a thousand kilometres with a young Swiss cycle tourist, the Chott el-Jérid, the sand of the Sahara. A travel principle is born there: never knock on doors, but accept the invitation when it is offered generously. At the Libyan border, the visa is refused; it will be the plane to Cairo. In Egypt, the tourist police forbid cycling along the Nile: three days in a convoy to Luxor. He goes back to Cairo to make the journey again by bike, by the oasis road and the White Desert, where it is 50 degrees at midday. On arriving in Jordan, he learns that the war in Iraq has just broken out. In Syria, he is arrested at dawn for having slept too close to a military zone. Five interrogation centres, a cell in Damascus, the charge of espionage, and his personal belongings as exhibits: “What recklessness, to take the risk of filming.”
Ten kilometres from the Bahariya oasis. A guide there tells of a Frenchman on a bike who died the year before between Kharga and Luxor.
In Wadi Rum, the room for the night costs zero dinars; the stones for the fire are already there.“Always choose the hardest path: that is my first rule of travel.” While waiting to make his peace with people, he crosses Turkey through its nature, the Taurus Mountains, the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia. The Iranian visa runs from its date of issue: he has to reach the border by bus, then move fast, by the back roads, the camera at the bottom of the bag, with the feeling of being followed. Unable to withdraw money, he is finally helped out by the French embassy in Tehran. In Leh, the capital of Ladakh, his brother joins him for three weeks of walking across the Zanskar, and a first pass at more than 5,000 metres. Then the road to Manali, hours of pushing the bike, fear too; the Ganges valley as far as Varanasi, where death is not taboo; and Nepal, which comes “like a deliverance”, between the roadblocks and the general strikes of the Maoist rebels.
Some of these rocks were hollowed out and used as dwellings; in Selime, he will have one to himself, for one night.
Twelve hours of walking a day on average, in search of the smiles of the Zanskar.In Hué begins the Asian loop, which sets out from the China Sea and must return to it. In Vietnam, women, absent from the streets in the Middle East and even in India, are everywhere and dare anything, even to make fun of the traveller who persists despite the monsoon. The roads are flooded, a typhoon is on its way, the bridge to the west has collapsed: he has to go back to Route 1, then follow the country along its beaches. In Ho Chi Minh City, he meets Manu, a Frenchman who also set off by bike a year ago. Together, they reach Cambodia and look for a forgotten temple in the heart of the jungle, by a track that seems to exist only on their map. In the forest, it is forbidden to stray a single step from the path; three days on the same bearing, 330 degrees, and they end up at Angkor. Then Thailand, almost a month in Laos, and China, where he spends nearly three months, on the laterite tracks of remote regions.
In Cambodia, six million anti-personnel mines, hidden under stumps and stones, are still ready to explode.
At the end of the track, the heart of the largest Khmer monastery city in the world and, for one night, a refuge.In the depths of the southern winter, the challenge is to cross New Zealand’s South Island by trails alone, without meeting a living soul. Minus 20 degrees one night, the water bottle bursts; at each ford, five crossings, for the bike, the panniers, the bags. At the bottom of a steep-sided valley, he wants to question a glacier “as if it were an oracle”: it takes him three days longer than planned to reach it. Turned away again and again by land behind barbed wire, he catches himself finding more wisdom in the gaze of a seal than in that of a man. Then Santiago, and the Andes by the most remote tracks and valleys of Argentina, where he spends his finest nights at the end of the handlebars. On a salt flat, the wind rises with the moon and tears the tent, at more than 100 kilometres an hour. Bolivia at last, the Salar de Uyuni, and the cities where he makes his peace with people, Potosí, La Paz, before Peru.
“True freedom is to have, as your only landmark, an island full of cacti.”Santiago, Madrid, Casablanca, Dakar: four nights, seven hours’ sleep in all. Africa is the last land of adventure. From the bush onwards, an invasion of locusts; in Saint-Louis, for the first time, the distress of the streets and of the road overwhelms the traveller. A fever, the treatment for malaria, and the only therapy found: keep moving, since the closer home gets, the more happiness lies at the end of the handlebars. In Mauritania, the desert, impassable by bike, forces him onto the longest train in the world to reach the coast. Then the Moroccan Atlas, crossed from south to north, roamed in every direction, with a broken stove, to put off the moment of giving back his nomad’s blanket. Spain is left aside: the boat takes him straight back to France. In Paris, a first look at the Eiffel Tower, which has not changed. “People will want to know whether I found happiness at the end of the handlebars.”
“Travel makes you and unmakes you endlessly. It embellishes what is finest in you and darkens what is worst.”Christophe Cousin