Magadan
EWAN: On the last day, I walked down to the harbour. Having slept late, I had breakfast on my own and went for a wander. I wanted to get to the ocean; I needed to see the Pacific. Not knowing the right way, I stumbled down the hill, through rows and rows of tenements, nodding, smiling and waving at the people I passed, eventually arriving at the waterfront. I turned around, lifted my camera to my eye and took a photograph. There it was: Magadan, Siberia. The place that had been in my dreams and thoughts for two years, like a mythical city forever beyond my reach. I wanted to capture it, somehow hold on to it and take a part of it with me when we began the long journey home.
I walked on. The path led to the beach. Although it was the last day of June, it was the first day the sun had shone in Magadan that year. Three weeks earlier, it had snowed. But that day, the air was warm and soft, the sky a cloudless blue. Women wore bikinis and small children were running naked across the sands. Families were eating picnics or cooking on barbecues. I walked past them all, along the entire length of the beach, until I came to the harbour. I climbed up on to a quayside and sat on a mushroom shaped bollard. An Alsatian came over and sat next to me. I scratched its head for a while, gazed out at the ocean and thought back to the day when Charley and I had sat in a little workshop in west London, surrounded by motorbikes, with dreams of the open road in our heads. All we knew then was that we wanted to get from London to Magadan. With the maps laid out in front of us, we drew a route, arbitrarily assigning mileage to each day, not knowing anything about the state of the roads. We guessed our way from west to east, across two continents, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as far as it was possible to ride a motorbike in a straightish line. Time and again we were told by experienced travellers that our plans were wildly optimistic and that we didn’t know what we were letting ourselves in for. I’d never ridden off-road and Charley had never properly camped. The chances of failure were high, they said. Yet here we were in Magadan, as far around the globe from home as it was possible to go, and we’d arrived one day ahead of our schedule.
I thought back to the day a month or so earlier when we had been in Mongolia. It was mid-afternoon and we were riding through a beautiful valley. I pulled over and got off my bike. Charley, ahead of me, stopped too. He swung his bike around and rode back towards me. Before he even arrived, I could feel it coming off him: why are we stopping? We’re not getting petrol, we’re not stopping to eat: why are we stopping?
I walked away from Charley. I didn’t want to tell him that I had stopped because we’d passed the place. The place that had been in my dreams. The place we’d fantasised about months before we’d even set off from London. A place with a river of cool, white water and a field nearby to pitch our tents. The place we were going to stop at in the middle of an afternoon so that we could cool our sweaty feet in the river while catching fish that we’d cook that evening on an open fire under a star-speckled sky.
I’d seen that river half an hour earlier. There was no question at all that it was the place. A beautiful big white river and nobody for hundreds of miles. And we had ridden straight past it.
I sat down for five minutes, just needing to look at the countryside around us. The countryside that we often didn’t have time to take in because we were always so intent on keeping to our schedule.
Then we got back on our bikes and moved on. A few weeks later, we arrived at the first big river in Siberia. It was too wide, too fast and too deep to cross on a motorbike. There was a bridge, but it had collapsed. I thought Charley would be itching to get ahead, impatient with the hold-up. But he was in his element. He knew that someone or something would be along to help. The delays were the journey. We’d get across it when we got across it.
I understood now that it didn’t really matter that we hadn’t stopped beside that cool, fast-flowing Mongolian river. The imperfections in our journey were what made it perfect. And maybe we wouldn’t be in Magadan now if we’d not had that burning desire to keep going. After all, the river would always be there. Now that I knew what was out there, I could always return.