Ben Welsher | Writings

Day 6 - Rangoon My bucket list isn't well defined but Burma has long been on it. A combination of its long isolation under military control, which to me promised that elusive 'authentic experience ', and a evocation of an imperial past stoked my interest. I don't know if I much like either of those reasons for wanting to visit if I think about it but sometimes I need a break from being a liberal, lefty, guardian reader feeling guilty about absolutely everything. Speaking of guilt the British are second only to the Dutch in Europe in their positive feelings towards their former empire. 32% of Britons think that the empire is more a source of pride than shame. That is a more nuanced and layered question than the question of whether ex-colonies are better off for having been part of the empire. 33% of people believe that in the UK and it is, quite frankly, ludicrous bollocks. A globe-spanning empire like Britain's can only be built off the back of immense exploitation ...

Day 5 - Siem Reap With the water festival finished we has one more place to visit in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is an indisputable wonder of the world and the largest religious monument ever constructed. It sits within a temple complex covering 400km², the scale of which is impossible to adequately describe. Its towers seem to rise organically from the ground, the stone flowering from the earth into wonderfully symmetric form. Only modern capitalism and totalitarian hubris seem to inspire similar architectural endeavour as the gods did in the past. I don't necessarily agree with any of those ideologies and their human cost but religion's diminished power permits me a less coloured appreciation of its monuments. In the stone of Angkor Wat you see reflected the same desire for, and defiant belief in, permanence that runs through our species. I see it in the chiselled signage above the entrance to long dead banks and businesses in the City of London. The owners thought the gilded lobb...

Day 4 - Phnom Penh We'd waited a day longer in Phnom Penh than we would have otherwise chosen to. The Bon Om Touk water festival's climactic day caused this. As I've said people travel to the capital from the countryside to support their local team of rowers. Forty or fifty men fill a long, narrow boat painted in a single primary colour. The rower's shirts match the colour so that when they are racing it all forms one machine of many parts heaving down the river towards a finish line that will decide whether they return to their villages and towns as heroes or failures. Two boats at a time race, starting at a point on the river I could only barely see through the haze of the day. They pull their oars rhythmically through the brown water and are kept in time by the cox standing on the prow, standing so stable and sure that he could be on top of a million year old mountain. The crowd sits on a concrete incline that reaches from the promenade above down to the muddy water...

Day 2 - Phnom Penh A great many awful things have been done by a great many people to a great many people over the centuries. The reasons why are rarely novel and we are a species with a barely quenched enthusiasm for killing one another. Yet the further back some atrocity happens the easier it becomes to attribute it to some aspect of the human psyche that is primitive and now banished. But only two years before I was born the Cambodians were killing each other in quantities not seen since the holocaust. One quarter of the population died in four years during a psychopathic attempt to return the country to an idyllic rural existence no more realistic than the picture on a tin of biscuits at Christmas. Near Phnom Penh city centre, hemmed in on all sides by low-rise concrete accommodation blocks lies a prison with the innocuous designation 'S21'. It was a school until 1975 when the Khmer Rouge seized power. Soon after it became a detention centre for enemies of the new regime, ...

Day 1 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia Seven years later and Southeast Asia is still a land of gold, barely scratched on my wall map of the world. Two weeks stewing in Bangkok was no great second act to my South American odyssey. Part of me ever longs for those days though, when time was so elastic and impeded nothing. It was a trick of the mind to think time was waiting. It wasn't but its steady progression has brought some wondrous things, experiences and experience, friends and love. The future is more real now than it was then, in some bad ways but in good ways too. It isn't so much the sights that I saw that make me miss those travels, those natural wonders, the charming towns and bustling cities but rather the in-between places. Those hours spent looking out of bus windows or out of train windows or simply outwards, just thinking and feeling as I cut straight through life and its innumerable hues. The long journey to Phnom Penh began, as is custom, with pre-flight beers. They wer...

Day 4 - Strasbourg to Munchausen Four parts nitrogen to one part oxygen and a pinch of carbon dioxide and argon. Injected straight into the inner tubes of a bicycle it works wonders for its speed. We left Strasbourg a good deal quicker than we entered it. Despite the speed we discovered that leaving a large city by bike is no pleasant experience. The cycle lane wove below, between and onto busy a-roads that may or may not have had speed limits. It prompted a constant awareness of our squishyness and I cannot say it was fun. The Germans do a good deal more for cyclists than we do at home though, lanes were completely segregated for large parts and relatively little time was spent under the protection of white lines. Eventually we escaped the city's tendrils and found our way back to the Rhine. It took us through small French villages which to describe as sleepy would be an exaggeration. The hot midday sun beat down onto empty streets and shuttered houses, l'apocalypse des zombi...

Day 3 - Rhinau to Strasbourg This was not the travelling life. Sandra had found it increasingly hard to coax any speed out of her bike in the last two days. We couldn't diagnose any obvious problem and I was now carrying most of the baggage but here we were riding through the suburbs of Strasbourg at an escargot's pace. The bike lanes were no longer solely ours as a multitude of other cyclists suddenly appeared and a cheery 'bonjour' was no longer appropriate. We eventually made it to Petit France, a particularly attractive area, in time for a late lunch. It soon became clear that we'd be going no further that day and as I sat with a cold beer overlooking the river I could think of worse hardships. Strasbourg really is a very beautiful city which is all the more remarkable given that it has changed hands 5 times between France and Germany. I would highly recommend a visit. Catalans had arrived enmass to complain about their elected representatives being unable to ...

Day 2 - Ottmarsheim to Rhinau The snap of lycra and a greasy smear all over my sensitive areas marked the start of our first full day in the saddle. I had again followed the internet's advice slavishly and decided the practical indignity of wearing cycling bib shorts could be mitigated by never looking at myself in a mirror while wearing them, I wasn't sure how Sandra would cope with the sight though. The greasy substance was described as chamois butter and aided with the inevitable chafing or so I was told. Our route took us inland from the winding river and we passed through great fields of what looked like corn crowned by arcing jets of water to irrigate them. The land was wonderfully flat and the conditions were perfect for cycling, we pootled among covering 15 kilometres each hour. As midday came we neared Neuf-Brisach, town constructed by the French in 1697 after the Germans nicked the original Breisach on the other side of the Rhine. The old town is built within star sh...

Day 1 - Basel to Ottmarsheim The fact that I was violently cursing a hunk of metal as I struggled to drag it onto a train had to go down as a major success. I'd found an suitable alternative model of bike and hit what few shops in Munich purported to sell it. And sell it they did, in the wrong size, or with the wrong brakes, or the right size with the right brakes...on the women's model. It was early afternoon by now and shops were starting to close, indeed the one we were in had only 30 minutes until closing. As I despaired at the options I spied from the corner of my eye a bike I had considered at the very start of my spreadsheet marathon. It was the older model and had seen enough test rides to make 'new' a debatable descriptor but it might just do. The price was luficrous, a fact the salesman also recognised by immediately dropping it by 200 euros. A bit more haggling and it had new wheels and security bolts for a final bill that was acceptable in my circumstances....

Day 0 - London to Munich A simple idea rarely retains its virginal simplicity when further thought upon. A simple plan sprouts like knotweed when developed. But then again I'm not sure why I ever thought that riding a bike from Germany to the UK would be a simple thing. The genesis of this trip was in Sandra's determination that flying her bicycle over from Munich (on a plane, it's just a normal bike) was too expensive and inconvenient so why don't we ride back instead? She'd left it there when moving to the UK. I liked the idea instantly. It combined adventure with time spent in nature and I would be able to boast in years to come of the great physical exertion of a thousand kilometre journey and pretend, to my audience, that I was a person that enjoyed great physical exertions. The trip would also allow me to spend inordinate hours researching and inadvisable amounts of money on a bike. For this is something I did not possess. And this is where the plan immediate...