Cycling Home From Siberia -- Book Review

Cycling Home from Siberia.  By Rob Lilwall.  New York:  Simon & Schuster/Howard Books.  2009. 

I bought this book for my nephew, who is a top level cross country mountain bike racer.  I wasn't going to read the whole thing, just a cursory overview to insure it would hold his interest, but the book caught hold of me and I read it all the way through.  I recently bought a new bike myself (an eBike) and am thrilled with it.  I've been riding it every day and taking longer and longer trips with it.  So I related to Lilwall's adventure quite readily.  I don't think I will cycle through Siberia in the winter time, but I do feel inspired by his example to take more ambitious journeys on my bicycle. 

The book is a narrative of Lilwall's grandiose project of cycling back to England from the eastern coast of Siberia by way of Japan, Korea, China, The Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, Australia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Greece and back through Europe to England.  It took three years to complete this 35,000 mile trek, most of it done on a bicycle, some of it by ship or ferry.  He cheated a couple of times and flew back to England leaving his bike in storage at the disruption point in his journey.  Once for the illness of a family member and once for the wedding of his sister.  After a brief rest at home he flew back to the point where he had left his bicycle and resumed the trip.  But who is to call it "cheating" since, after all, he was the one making the rules. 

He started off with his friend Al Humphreys through Siberia in the winter time -- a very ill advised venture -- but they made it.  Al was a more experienced biker and adventurer, and had it not been for him, Lilwall would probably have not survived the Siberian winter.  They split after reaching Japan, Humphreys deciding to take a more direct and safer route back to England.  LIlwall continued on through jungles, deserts, mountains, war zones, and, probably most hazardous of all, cities.  It is an adventure story, but most of the adventures are low key.  The Siberian winter and crossing the jungle in New Guinea are pretty dramatic, as is his passing through Afghanistan in war time.  But generally, the substance of the book is making steady progress toward a far off goal, keeping focused on the plan, conquering small challenges, enduring numerous hardships, and dealing with unexpected setbacks.  It is a story of conquest by small steps.  It is about self discipline and determination.  It is about physical endurance.  It is about making small, but vital, human connections.  There were only rare moments of self doubt, when he considered abandoning the project and just going home.  No one was forcing him to do this.  No one was paying him.  He had no deadlines other than the ones he set for himself.  The incentives and motivations were strictly internal.  This was one of the things I found intriguing about it.

He is not very clear about what the incentives and motives were.  This book is not a searching exploration of the inward heart.  He is not Hamlet or Underground Man.  He does introspect and he does reflect on himself and what he is doing, but I don't see him as a person of great insight or psychological acuity.  As a biker, you have to be constantly focused on the external challenges and hazards that confront you moment by moment.  This is his mentality and this is mostly what he writes for you to read about.  

Toward the very end, as he is approaching England and the impending end of the journey is looming before him, he reflects on the trip and the effect it has had on him.  His Epilogue discusses his subjective feelings and perspective on the whole project with more frankness and self revelation than anywhere else in the book.   

The day after, I went back to London and knew that I had to get on with the rest of my life.  I'd heard that some travelers had a sense of fulfillment and completion at the end of their journey, while others struggled with a feeling of anticlimax.  My experience was more the latter.  I did not feel any sense of achievement, but rather a strange emptiness.  Clearly, as Al said to me over a pizza a while later, such adventures "are not the answer to every man's midlife crisis."  For a while I thought that in my case the journey had actually provoked one in me.  Some days my confidence plummeted, my faith felt shaken, and on a couple of frightening occasions I felt despair might overwhelm me.  . . .

I had been cycling more than three years with the tangible goal of getting "home" on my bicycle.  Now that I was "home," I tried to remember the reason why I was trying to get here.  When I thought about it, I could hardly work out why I had set out on the journey in the first place.  (p. 389)

He is not a self knowing man.  He is a lucky man and an resourceful man.  He was in many situations throughout the trip that could have gone very badly or even fatally, but he always managed to somehow wing his way through and keep going.  I think this inward drive to keep going forward toward the goal in the face of mountainous hardship, this inflexible iron will to face down any deterrence, this ability to improvise and scramble and find a way no matter what, are the most salient features of his character that the trip elucidated, honed, and tested. 

Probably the best accomplishment and the most enduring legacy of the trip was that he found a good woman, Christine, in Hong Kong, whom he married after he returned to England.  But it is not fair to say that the trip was a search to find a woman or a mate, not at all.  He met Christine toward the end of the first year of  the trip, but he did not abandon the trip to pursue Christine and be with her.  No, he stuck to his original plan and made Christine wait roughly two years, which amazingly, she did. 

He talks throughout the book about his Christian faith and the role it plays in his life, but the trip is not a "spiritual quest," or an attempt to achieve any sort of "enlightenment."  He doesn't seem to be in any sort of crisis or conflict over his religious outlook.  He doesn't have a deep knowledge of the Bible or religious issues.  He is not a questioning sort.  He doesn't see religious faith as problematic, which I found a little disconcerting.  This guy is not a deep thinker, but there is a deep restlessness, a vague sense of dissatisfaction, an emptiness that demands filling, inside him.  He is not in touch with it directly.  He doesn't understand it.  But he experiences it as this need to focus his energy on some large goal, to set arduous tasks for himself and apply himself to conquering them.  This man is a conqueror, like the Brits of centuries ago, who went around the world colonizing it and subduing the indigenous peoples they came in contact with.  He gets some respite from his inner lethargy through applying himself to these challenges that are much larger than himself.  But achieving these mammoth tasks does not solve the problem.  Like Alexander, impelled to press ever onward, his monumental conquest brings him back to his starting place once again, but perhaps with the pieces of his inner self rearranged. 

He was an English teacher and he writes well, which makes this book readable and enjoyable.  He describes people, landscapes, sequences of events, incidents, with interest and illuminating detail.  This keeps the book moving and keeps the reader engaged.  He constantly meets new people throughout this trip and his descriptions of them and brief glimpses he offers into their lives is one of the more engaging aspects of the book.  My original intent was only to check the book out casually and hand it off to my nephew, but his skill in writing and describing the people and events and small incidents of his trip kept a hold of me and made me stay with it and finish it.  It is a very interesting, personal, human interest adventure story.  It made me want to get out there on my new bike and take some longer trips of my own.