LOVE ON A BIKE: ONE CYCLIST’S JOURNEY OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE
New film follows Tom Allen’s bike ride of four years and three
continents that brought him together with his future wife Follow Bike
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Tom Seymour Wednesday 5 February 2014 12.03 GMT theguardian.com
Still from Janapar, Love on a Bike
Tom Allen was stuck at home and feeling trapped, so he went for a bike
ride. He ended up camping on a deserted beach in Yemen, surrounded
by crabs and dreaming of an Iranian girl.
In 2006, Allen cycled from his sleepy Northamptonshire village with
a tent, a camera and a budget of EURO 5 a day. Three years, three
continents and 32 countries had passed before he cycled through the
English countryside again, returning with an Iranian woman called
Tenny for company.
“I committed myself to cycling round the world without a map,” Allen
says. “I wasn’t interested in cycling, I had never toured on a bike
before, or travelled far. I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t
know if it was possible. I was a beginner in every sense of the word.”
Allen was 23, a recent graduate working as a freelance web developer.
“I couldn’t have been more miserable,” he says. He felt scared at the
prospect of sitting in front of a monitor every day. “I didn’t feel
in control of my own decisions. I had a horrible feeling that other
influences were steering my life, that the world had more to offer. I
wanted to be completely independent, and I wanted the self-propelled
nature of being on a bike.”
Allen started out with two friends, but they gave up within weeks. So
he continued “a lonely, solitary journey”, cycling across central and
eastern Europe, central Asia, the Middle East and the north-eastern
spine of Africa; Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti. Along the way,
he haphazardly shot 300 hours of video that show him running out
of food and eating a mixture of spaghetti, peanut butter and jam,
choosing a road forked between Damascus and Baghdad, contracting
malaria in Sudan and realising he had met his future wife.
Janapar: Official Trailer from Janapar Film on Vimeo.
Janapar: Love on a bike by Tom Allen – official trailer
With the help of BBC director James Newton, the footage Allen shot on
the road has been shaped into a feature film titled Janapar, Love on a
Bike (janapar being the Armenian word for journey) whichhas recently
been released online, while Allen has crowdsourced the funds needed
to self-publish a book of his experiences.
“I grew to love being on the road, because you don’t think about the
big picture,” he says. “Almost every journey is about getting from
one place to another, but travelling by bike is purely about what
happens along the way. You live day-to-day, you don’t need to worry
about money, you just think about what to eat and where to sleep. You
do whatever feels right at the time, and you realise the world is a
lot less threatening than it might appear.”
That’s not to say the journey was easy. The lowest moment, Allen says,
was arriving in Sudan and realising the next town lay across 1,000km
of desert – and he just had a compass for guidance.
“I had a limited amount of water, a limited amount of food, not much
shelter and a sandy track for a road. I’ve never felt so vulnerable
or helpless, before or since.”
At this point, Allen was thinking of Tenny, a 28-year-old Iranian
graphic designer he fell for in Armenia. He lived with her for eight
months, but was getting itchy feet. So he convinced her to cycle
on with him, even though Tenny hadn’t cycled since she was a child
and had never travelled beyond her native Iran and adopted home of
Armenia. Their first trip, they decided, would be to Tehran, the
capital of Iran, to meet her parents.
“It was extremely foolhardy for us to even try it,” Allen says. “She
agreed to cycle with me out of passion rather than pragmatism.”
“When you meet someone and you realise he’s the person you’ve always
been waiting for, it allows you to make very big decisions,” Tenny
says. “But cycling was completely new to me, and the whole idea was
pretty confusing. He convinced me that cycling to Iran would be a
great idea, and I remember thinking it was something I can do to be
with him. But by about the middle of the first day, I wanted to go
home to Armenia.”
When they reached Tehran, her parents went berserk.
“We’ve had an evening of shouting, crying and being told in no
uncertain terms there is no way on this planet we are going to continue
the journey,” Allen says in the film. “Everything I hoped for us has
just been mercilessly blown away.”
“My parents were very upset with us,” Tenny says. “They were upset
we did it in secret, and they were very worried about me. Part of the
challenge was knowing I was doing it without my family’s support. But
I felt I had to make a decision for myself.”
Tenny’s parents grew used to the idea. Tom and Tenny got married in
Armenia and cycled back to the UK. They now live between Norfolk and
Armenia and work as professional “adventure cyclists”, still spending
months on the road. Yet Tom is more settled now, more willing to spend
eight hours a day in front of a computer. “I know what I’m doing now,”
he says. But, reflecting now, what did he learn from the experience
of naively doing it in 2006?
“A journey like that can go on and on and on. It can feel there’s no
end to it. I packed in everything to do it, so it could be scary,”
he says. “But you’d be surprised how quickly you realise there isn’t
supposed to be an end – just the present moment, just the next bend
in the road – that there’s always a road that hasn’t yet been taken,
but that’s no reason not to take it. I’d encourage anyone to try it.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2014/feb/05/love-on-a-bike-cyclist-journey-film