I did a surprising discovery at 64. Every now and then, usually when I least expect it, I feel an extraordinary happiness and contentment. There is peace in it too, which I do not remember from before. It lasts a few seconds, sometimes several minutes, and for that short time I feel unbelievably privileged to be alive.

A feeling of nirvana is probably too big a word, but it is the closest I can find. Nothing remarkable has to be happening. I may be sitting around the kitchen table with my daughters, drinking coffee on a balcony or eating with friends after a long day on the road. Suddenly everything is enough.

I most likely experienced these moments when I was younger. My life has really contained lots of love, friendship and happiness for that not to be true. Perhaps I did not recognize them, or I was already occupied by whatever came next. For much of my life, when things felt too good, I worried that something bad would soon happen. That was how life seemed to work.

That knowledge, that a moment will end, is still there. Enjoy this as much as you can, I think. It will soon be gone. But there is no grief in that thought. When the moment has passed, I float on a cloud for the rest of the day.

Around the Kitchen Table

Two of these moments came during the same week in Malmö. The first began with an away football game far from home. Dana’s team drew 1–1, but to her it felt like a loss. She believed she should have stopped the other team’s goal. She had cramp in the backs of her legs and could not run properly, but afterwards that did not matter to her. She was furious with herself, screaming and yelling because she felt she had failed.

We drove home and sat down around the kitchen table with sushi. We went through the entire match, player by player, discussing what had been good and what had been bad. Dana was worried that Eva and I would be sad because she had been so upset, but we weren’t. Disappointment is part of life. Sometimes your body refuses to do what you ask of it.

Eva is at every game. Much of the time she looks happy simply being there, watching and listening. Once we begin analysing, she joins in. She corrects us and says, “No, it wasn’t like that. It happened like this.” Most of the time she is right.

Later that week, after football training, it happened again and even more strongly. Eva joined me on the bicycles when I went to collect Dana. It was a warm and pleasant Malmö evening, still light outside, and we started discussing the game as we cycled home. Eva did not say much on the way, but once we were home the conversation continued around the kitchen table. Football gradually led us into other things, and soon we were talking about life.

We sat there from nine until ten. I am normally careful about going to bed on time because I need my sleep, but I did not want the conversation to end. I looked at the girls and wondered how on earth I had got daughters like these.

Some friends in their thirties and forties tell me they look forward to their children leaving home so that they can finally have time of their own. I do not understand it. Why the hell would I want time away from these wonderful human beings?

The Best of the Best

Hanna picked me up in Montreal a few months after we met for the first time. Finding her was not easy. I had to take a bus from the airport to somewhere outside, and then she stepped out of the car. It was dark and around minus 30 degrees.

Inside the car it was warm. We held hands, kissed and drove to the place where we were going to stay. We were both so happy to be together. Hanna and I are no longer a couple, and of course I hope I will experience that kind of love again. You never know. But the warmth inside that car has stayed with me.

It also happens once or twice on almost every Defender X journey with Jeff. We have had a good day on the road and arrive somewhere where we want to sit down, have a drink, eat, laugh and talk. On our last journey, that place was Trabzon in Turkey. The drive, the company, the food and the friendship came together. We now have a sentence for it: “This is the best of the best.”

Trabzon, Turkey, during our latest Defender X journey. The best of the best moment.

Before Everyone Wakes

Several of these moments have come early in the morning. At the end of April or beginning of May, there is a first day when I can sit on my balcony in Malmö without freezing my ass off. I have finished my fifteen or twenty minutes of stretching, yoga and gymnastics and go outside with hot coffee and my diary. It may be two or three in the morning.

I live beside the canal. At that hour the city is quiet, but never completely still. Lights appear in windows as people prepare to go to work. At weekends, others are returning home from parties. There is always somebody going somewhere. I sit there writing and drinking my coffee, knowing that winter is ending and summer is coming.

The first morning warm enough to sit outside.

I took the same morning routine with me to Greece. We had anchored in a small bay among the islands, and the girls and Arnon were still sleeping. I sat on deck with my legs hanging over the railing and looked into the clear water. Fish swam beneath me while the boat gently rocked at anchor.

I wrote in my diary, drank my coffee, did my gymnastics and went for a swim. At 64, I had only recently begun learning to sail. That morning there was nothing I needed to learn and nowhere I needed to reach. Could it be better?

Early morning at anchor in Greece.

Then came my first morning in the completed house at Lima Basecamp in Dalarna. My mother grew up there, and the property had belonged to my aunt Dagmar. After almost forty years of expeditions, when home was often wherever I put up my tent, I suddenly had a house.

I had finished my gymnastics and was sitting on the balcony writing my diary. It was a little cold, and mist hung over the area. I could see the forest and the power lines. Moose walked there, and I could see their tracks on the ground. A little later, two young foxes appeared and began playing.

The silence was something we never have in the city. A light shone through the mist and warmed the house. I took a photograph and thought, is this really happening to me? Do I really have a new house?

My first morning in the completed house at Lima Basecamp.

Life Can Still Go Wrong

Life hasn’t suddenly become free of challenges. Eva will soon undergo an operation on her left eye. If it does not work, that eye may be lost. I am frightened, and nothing I write about happiness makes that fear smaller. The same Eva sat beside us at the kitchen table that week, listening to Dana and correcting our version of the game.

The Young Man in the Sahara

Crossing Africa, 1988–1990.

Right now, I am writing about the young man I was when I cycled through Africa and crossed the Sahara. I wonder how many moments like these he experienced. Perhaps he noticed them and I have forgotten. Perhaps it has taken me all these years to understand their value.

This is the third part of an English version of my second book, På cykel genom Afrika—Cycling Through Africa—first published in Sweden in 1991. The journey began at North Cape in September 1988 and ended at Cape Agulhas in 1990, after approximately 33,000 kilometres by bicycle.

I was twenty-six when I entered Africa. I have translated and edited the original Swedish, but I have kept the reactions, judgements and language of the young man who made the journey. Some of them are uncomfortable to read today. I have not rewritten him to make him appear wiser than he was.

The previous article ended in Tamanrasset. The passage below begins on the sixth morning after I left the town with the British cyclists Charlie and Mick and entered the Devil’s Garden.

“How does it feel, mate?”

I asked Mick on the sixth morning after our departure.

He lay on his back, staring blankly at the roof of the tent while we waited for somebody to give the order to get up and face the day.

“It feels hard. I’ve been trying to explain all along that I’m not motivated to push a bicycle through deep sand in fifty-degree heat when we haven’t the faintest idea where we are.”

He looked sadly at Charlie and me.

Charlie and I worried about him. He often cursed loudly into the emptiness, calling our existence in the Devil’s Garden a scorching and exhausting hell.

The work was brutal and the heat merciless. From time to time we also wondered where in God’s name we were. The vehicle tracks were often barely visible and gave no indication of either direction or the correct course.

For Charlie and me, the positive side still outweighed the hardship. The silence gave me a feeling of harmony with myself and everything around me. We were far beyond human civilisation, and for long periods I did not want to leave.

“What are you so worried about?” I asked Mick, slightly irritated. “What can possibly happen that would make our situation worse than it already is?”

“I don’t know. I have a feeling everything is going to hell. I dream that we won’t find any more water. We’ve been bloody lucky so far, but I have no motivation left. I feel ill and afraid. Something bad is coming.”

“There’s no reason to worry, Mick,” Charlie said quietly.

Charlie had behaved from the moment we left Tamanrasset as though crossing the Devil’s Garden were an ordinary part of his day.

We stepped out of the tent. A sudden gust tore my tent from the ground and threw it five metres away.

“What was that?” I whispered.

The sandstorm

Minutes later the storm struck so violently that it was almost impossible to see or hear. We had to scream to communicate. At a shouted command, all three of us threw ourselves into the tent, but the wind forced the poles flat against the ground and pressed us down beneath the fabric.

Sharp sand found its way into every fold and corner. Breathing became difficult.

We curled into the foetal position with our backs towards the storm. It worked.

Five hours later the storm eased.

We crawled out badly shaken. Almost all our equipment lay beneath sand. The vehicle tracks and footprints that had marked our route from Tamanrasset had nearly vanished. The morning coolness had gone. The heat was upon us.

We broke camp and managed to push the bicycles one kilometre before the storm returned.

Once more we threw ourselves into the tent. This time the air beneath the flattened canvas was unbearably hot. The heat drained the strength from us and made us think about water.

Our supply was already meagre. None of us dared drink.

Mick shouted above the wind.

“Where the hell are we going to find water now? If this doesn’t stop, we’ll die. You can’t see farther than the end of your nose. There’s sand everywhere.”

During the previous six days, we had managed each day to attract the attention of the few other desert travellers.

“How can anyone find us?” Mick continued. “This won’t end well. We’re going to die. I’m going to die. We might as well give up.”

He meant it. All desire to live seemed to have left him.

I looked at Charlie. He was deeply shocked, close to breaking down himself. His best friend wanted to give up.

Helplessness came over me. Then panic.

“Air!”

I shouted the word, tore open the tent and threw myself outside.

The sand lashed the exposed parts of my body. It hurt. Ten metres away stood one of the concrete pillars that were supposed to mark the route every five kilometres. This one told us that we were 270 kilometres from Tamanrasset.

We had seen only five such pillars since leaving the town.

I crawled towards it, sat with my back to the storm and raised the binoculars. Every hour we searched the emptiness around us for anything that might reveal where we were or which direction to take.

I had barely looked through them when I saw something.

“Mick! Mick!” I screamed, stumbling back towards the tent. “There’s a car out there. There’s somebody inside it. If we help him out of the sand, he’ll take you with him. It’s over, Mick. You’re going to live.”

Mick emerged carrying an empty water container. It was a Peugeot buried almost to its axles. The driver had not seen us. He sat staring into a sand dune with a blank and terrified expression. Perhaps he was waiting for death.

I knocked as hard as I could on the passenger window.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

The sound brought him to life. He turned, saw us and began to scream. For several long minutes he screamed from pure fear. He tried to open the door on the other side and flee into the Sahara, but the wind held it shut.

At last he lowered the window.

“What do you want? Who are you?” he shouted in French.

I held up the water container. He nodded fearfully.

He gave us water and bread. He also agreed to take Mick. He would need the extra pair of hands, because the back of the Peugeot carried two heavy engines and he would certainly become stuck again.

Charlie and I watched them disappear into the sandstorm.

No worries, no sweat

Charlie felt that he had deserted the best friend with whom he had agreed to stay for the entire journey from Morocco to Togo.

“When you think about the conditions we endure every day, you have to wonder whether we’ll ever meet again. Do you think it will work out, Mike?” he asked many times when we rested.

“We’ll make it, Charlie. No worries, no sweat, old friend,” I told him.

I was certain we would make it through. With each passing day I felt stronger.

There were moments when I thought some higher power guided my steps. Charles de Foucauld’s words about solitude, God and being no more than a drop in the sea were constantly present in my mind.

The following day the immense rock formations of Gara Eckar appeared in the distance like a hallucination.

After days of uncertainty, the rocks proved that we were still on the right course. Gara Eckar was marked on my map, and thousands of vehicle tracks converged upon it from every direction.

At the cliffs, a force filled all my senses. My lifelong doubts and constant anxieties disappeared. For the first time in a long while, we heard birds and flies.

The cliffs also carried obscenities scratched into the rock, excrement, beer cans and rubbish. The sight of it filled me with anger. What did these arrogant creatures, guilty of this destruction, have to do with Gara Eckar?

We climbed towards the highest of the sandstone formations. It should have been difficult without ropes, but after what seemed only a few minutes, we stood on a ledge barely two body-lengths wide, five hundred metres above the surrounding desert.

In every direction lay a seemingly endless ocean of sand.

It felt as though we were standing in a vast cathedral at the absolute centre of the Earth.

Four days later, after more deep sand, sharp stones, heat and water-bright mirages, we reached In Guezzam on the Algerian side of the border.

Across the border at Assamaka, travellers told us that the remaining 250 kilometres to Arlit would be easier. An oil drum or metal post marked the direction every five kilometres, but beyond the sulphur-smelling border post the desert became infinitely flat and the sand deeper.

The nights saved us

“Oh, dear God, it’s finally over,” Charlie sighed every evening.

The agonising day gave way to the night.

South of Assamaka, cycling became almost impossible. We pushed the heavy bicycles through deep sand in fifty-degree heat. Before the border, we had at least been able to ride for part of the day in our lowest gears. The desert had contained dunes and hills that gave some indication of direction.

Now it was endlessly flat. The only shapes were lake-like mirages.

At midday we stretched part of a tent between the bicycles and lay beneath it for five hours. The burning fabric hung one centimetre above our noses. We lay there in an anxious state of dark thoughts until it was time to return to the heat for one final effort.

At night the stubborn flies disappeared. Charlie came partly out of the apathy that held him during the day.

Charlie’s thoughts often left the desert altogether. When I asked where they had gone, he said he was thinking about beer and proper food.

We ate macaroni in one form or another three times a day.

His normal curiosity had disappeared. He sometimes stood motionless, indifferent to everything around him, and I had to ask him to make him move and continue pushing south-east towards Arlit.

Once the sun went down, a huge moon lit our camp. Millions of stars filled the black sky. The harsh and confused words of the day were forgotten, and we spoke lyrically about the Sahara. We told each other what a privilege it was to travel through it by bicycle.

After three weeks in the Devil’s Garden, a death-white shape appeared on the horizon.

It was the uranium factory at Arlit.

Arlit

I felt joy that we had crossed this unknown stretch of desert and survived. Food, rest and an abundant supply of water waited beyond the factory. But I also worried about what waited there.

At Assamaka we had already heard rhythmic Black music instead of the plaintive Arab songs of the north. The border guards had been loud Black Africans with booming laughter and a great thirst for beer, utterly unlike the quiet Muslim Arabs across the border.

At the campsite Charlie and I found Mick. He had been seriously ill for almost two weeks. But when we arrived, he was in full vigour and happy to see us. He immediately took us into Black Africa: first to the bar, then to the great market.

“Love is for Mike,” a woman whispered in pidgin English as she massaged my erection with the toes of her left foot. Her Black face carried a seductive, brilliant white smile.

“Black women are tight and taste sweet between the legs compared with those bone-dry white sluts,” she continued as she tried to pull down my shorts and unzip her jeans.

“This isn’t the right place,” I hissed. I was slightly drunk and unsure of myself. “Love—or whatever your name is—even if I want to, it goes against my principles to pay for a woman. That isn’t real love. At least that is something I still believe in.”

Uncertain what I actually wanted, I looked towards the noisy bar and the dancing, embracing couples in Arlit’s only hotel. Mick and Charlie were caught in the same situation. Two Nigerien prostitutes tried by every available means to sell their bodies to the shocked Britons.

Like me, they poured down great quantities of beer. It arrived ice-cold in a place whose powerful atmosphere was shaped by rhythmic Black African music.

The strangest collection of people I had ever encountered seemed to have gathered beneath the turning ceiling fans: transvestites, French criminals, Nicaraguan pimps, West African prostitutes, Peugeot travellers and local fighters.

Bloody knife fights were common. So were furious customers who discovered that they had misunderstood what was in the package when they had gone to bed with one of the beautiful transvestites.

The beer, ceiling fans and music made us three cycling adventurers prefer the hotel to the campsite on the outskirts of town.

The market

The market was another world.

The first people to catch my attention were the large and jovial women selling everything from freshly slaughtered livestock hanging from wooden poles to dried fish from the River Niger. They wore the most fantastic, brilliantly coloured dresses I had ever seen. The colours almost hurt my eyes.

The reserved older men were equally magnificent in long robes and small embroidered caps, even when they sold ordinary Western trinkets such as digital watches and canned food. Like the women, they belonged to the Hausa people, traders by tradition since the seventh century.

The market overflowed with food, trinkets and members of many African peoples. Many men carried scars on their faces that identified their tribe. Others wore Hausa clothing. Then there were the Fulani warriors, the models of the market. Today they were mainly nomadic cattle herders, but they walked through the stalls with the bearing of warriors. The men and women were tall, muscular and graceful, and the men’s elaborate hairstyles would have made a punk green with envy.

Despite all this, Mick first led us to a few huts made from corrugated iron where Arlit’s bicycle repairers worked.

There I saw one of the most advanced puncture repairs of my life.

An inner tube had two enormous holes. The repairer had no patch, rubber solution or tools, so he simply tied two hard knots, one on each side of the holes, and put the tube back inside the tyre.

The owner and repairer burst out laughing when I explained that it would never work.

The wheel wobbled wildly as the owner rode away through the deep sand of the main street, but it worked and he appeared satisfied.

It was a fantastic feeling to be back in so-called civilisation. Certainly we endured endless demands for money or cigarettes, and after every pedal stroke speculators offered a ridiculous price for the bicycle. Even so, we left Arlit with expectant and open minds, left the Sahara and Arabia behind, and pedalled into the Sahel on a paved road with a powerful tailwind behind us.

Long live civilisation!

“Inshallah.”
God willing. The Algerian answer to life’s questions and to those peculiarities that lie beyond human understanding.

Inshallah

Ever since I first saw a picture of the Sahara in a Tintin book as a boy, I had wondered what it would look like when I finally saw it with my own eyes.

I felt a certain anxiety as I approached the ridge. Since touching the outskirts of the Sahara in Morocco, I had built up a picture of the Grand Erg Occidental which I was sure exceeded anything possible. There are few things more destructive in an adventurer’s life than a dream collapsing when it meets reality.

On the other side waited a sea of golden dunes.

I stopped and drew a deep, respectful breath. At the foot of the dunes lay the brown village of Taghit, so small that it appeared in danger of being swallowed by the undulating hills of sand stretching 450 kilometres towards the east.

Only then did I understand that I had entered the world’s largest desert and one of the driest places on Earth.

The Sahara stretches five thousand kilometres from west to east. For centuries it formed an almost impenetrable barrier. Travellers either sailed around it or followed a small number of caravan routes through its interior. Even with motor vehicles, it remained difficult country with few dependable roads.

The Sahara still belonged to camels and fatalists, to the Tuareg and Bedouin who understood its moods and accepted its meagre gifts.

It had also drawn thinkers and prophets into its silence.

During my days in Taghit, I walked alone among the dunes. Within minutes, I could no longer see the oasis. Without my own footprints to follow, I might still be out there.

Yet it was among those rolling hills that my troubled mind finally became quiet.

It was the silence.

It was so complete that I imagined I could extend my index finger, draw a line through the emptiness in front of me and hear it happen. My remaining worries about the Sahara disappeared. Everything would work out. Perhaps somewhere in that great emptiness I might even find answers to the questions about life and death which had driven me from Nordkapp.

That feeling lasted until the morning I prepared to leave Taghit and ride the fifteen hundred kilometres south.

The rim of my rear wheel was full of cracks.

I was a very long way from help.

The Wheel That Could End the Journey

The discovery pleased Carl enormously.

I had met Carl and his girlfriend Mandy in the no-man’s-land between Morocco and Algeria. When I first saw him, he was standing behind a palm tree stuffing French francs into his seat tube in an attempt to smuggle black-market currency into Algeria.

They were cyclists too.

Carl was a tall Englishman with a narrow, unshaven face and a prominent nose. After two weeks alone on Morocco’s High Plateau, I was delighted to have somebody to speak with again.

I soon learnt that this was his second bicycle journey through the Sahara. The previous year, he and another Englishman had cycled across the flat, stony Ténéré Desert. According to Carl, they were the first people in history to do it.

It had been a journey of hunger, thirst, anxiety, sandstorms, illness and endless arguments. Carl spoke frequently about the achievement and even more frequently about how much he disliked the man with whom he had made it.

By the time we reached Taghit, I had decided that Carl talked too much. I told him I wanted to be alone.

He did not take it well.

Now he crouched beside my rear wheel, examined the cracks and smiled.

“That cannot be repaired,” he said. “You’ll have to go home to Sweden and get a new one.”

I wanted to tell the hawk-nosed little bastard not to worry because my sponsors would send me a wheel within a week.

But I said nothing.

For half an hour, I cried.

I had left paradise and entered the country of hopelessness. The loneliness which had followed me through Morocco returned. Once again, I wondered whether there was any reason for Mikael Strandberg to exist on this planet.

Algeria did little to improve my mood.

During my time in Morocco, I had complained about the limited selection of food. I had dreamt about the endless shelves of provisions which I imagined would be waiting in socialist Algeria.

I must have suffered a moment of total confusion. Had I forgotten what I had seen in Cuba, Romania, East Germany and the Soviet Union? I had visited Nicaragua and found exactly the same thing.

The first Algerian town gave me a shock. There was almost nothing to buy. The empty shelves offered tins of sardines, tomato purée, rice, couscous, salt and large quantities of powdered milk. Everything cost three times as much as it had in Morocco unless one possessed Western currency and knew how to use the black market.

The towns disappointed me even more. Morocco’s bazaars, with their smells of myrrh, herbs, leather and food, had been replaced by grey concrete.

The damaged wheel forced me to turn north. I had to reach Laghouat, northeast of the Grand Erg Occidental, and from there hitchhike to Algiers to collect a replacement.

The journey to Laghouat was merciless.

Once again, I climbed onto the icy plateau of the Saharan Atlas. The road was steep, patched and uneven. Bush desert and mountains covered by a decimetre of snow surrounded me. An icy headwind blew constantly while the sky opened for hail, freezing rain and snowstorms.

Whenever the weather briefly relented, I carried the bicycle and luggage through boulder fields normally dry for most of the year but now buried beneath a hard crust of ice.

The cold was so severe that I dared not stop for lunch. I was afraid I would freeze.

One thought dominated everything:

What am I doing?

I often felt ready to give up. The conditions had been brutal since Nordkapp. There had been headwinds, cold and cycling which felt like one long struggle to move forward.

Then I remembered the silence, the space and the happiness I felt each evening when I stopped pedalling, put up the tent and crawled into my warm sleeping bag. I knew what a privilege it was to move by my own strength through places most people would never reach and to experience greatness, silence, the whisper of the night wind and almost every human emotion within such short, intense periods.

I knew I was growing as a human being.

That was what kept me moving when I doubted most.

Six Cars in One Week

I saw six cars during that entire week.

The first stopped in a snowstorm. The driver brought me inside and prepared three small cups of sweet, strong coffee while I sat in the warmth.

The second driver gave me one hundred dinars, a bag of dates and several oranges.

The third gave me ten loaves of bread.

The remaining three all gave me something useful to eat.

During a hailstorm, I reached a village consisting of five houses and a long well built from mud. The inhabitants stared at me suspiciously but allowed me to replenish my meagre supply of water.

I was starving.

When I asked whether there was any food to buy, they silently shook their heads. I left disappointed.

An hour later, I heard a moped approaching from behind. I stopped and recognised one of the suspicious villagers.

He pulled alongside me, opened his coat and handed me three freshly baked loaves of bread and a plastic container filled with hot soup.

I tried to pay him.

He smiled, waved away the money and rode back towards the village through the hailstorm.

Belkacem, Redha and Salah

Laghouat appeared a grim place in which to spend a week waiting for a new wheel.

I noticed Belkacem immediately among the crowds of unemployed young men moving sadly through the streets. He was built like a bear. A great black beard covered his face, a baseball cap sat on his enormous head, and his round body was wrapped in a gigantic camouflage jacket decorated with hundreds of cloth badges.

When he noticed me, his face opened in a tremendous grin.

I discovered that he worked nights as a guard at the hotel where I had landed. It was a grey, freezing and depressing place which reminded me of a prison without windows.

I closed the door to my room and wondered how long I would be trapped there.

After one dreary hour, somebody knocked.

Belkacem entered with his friend Redha. Between them they carried a heater, tea, sandwiches and Arab sweets. Redha was dark-haired, well dressed and spoke English, which greatly reduced my dependence on frantic gestures.

For the next week, wherever I went, one of them accompanied me.

If I bought stamps, telephoned Sweden, stocked up for the desert or visited a hammam to wash and sit in the steam, Belkacem, Redha or their closest friend Salah insisted upon paying.

Every day, they served me three enormous meals in their homes. They bought presents for my mother and brother and assured me that I was never alone. If none of them could entertain me, they drove me to another friend’s house, where tea and food immediately appeared.

When it was time for me to leave, they paid my hotel bill.

They also gave me a shesh, an eight-metre length of cloth which could be wrapped around my head and face against the sun, wind and sand.

During my stay, I rarely saw anybody middle-aged in the streets of Laghouat. I saw almost no women. Most of the people outside were young men and children walking to or from school.

Salah explained why.

“We lost at least a million people and one and a half generations of men during our eight-year guerrilla war against France,” he said. “Now two-thirds of our population is under twenty-five.”

Unemployment was everywhere. None of my three friends saw much of a future. Salah had travelled in Europe and wanted to study in Canada. He believed Algeria was doomed to fail unless something changed.

“You can see what it is like,” he told me. “There is hardly any food and no advanced technology from Europe or America. What will happen when all those under twenty have finished school? How will we give them work and food? Nobody can live in the Sahara. But the worst thing in Algeria is the sadness. There is absolutely nothing to do. We only stare at television.”

After their generosity, what I remember most is the weariness among the young men.

It was with sadness that I left Laghouat.

I did not travel far.

Ten kilometres outside the town, I fell from the bicycle and vomited bile in forty-degree heat. I was sick as hell.

Belkacem had warned me during the magnificent farewell dinner the previous evening.

“Eat only a little of each dish,” he said. “There are more coming.”

I ignored him.

I ate every plate as if it were the final meal of a condemned man. Ten rich courses arrived.

The merciless Sahara had begun.

The Cities Beneath the Road

I was riding through a flat, sandy and deafeningly silent desert towards the holy cities of the M’Zab when I noticed a strange smell.

Then I heard isolated words drifting through the emptiness.

I stopped and looked around.

Nothing.

According to my bicycle computer, the cities should have been there, but the horizon remained empty. I moved forward a few metres. The smells strengthened and the voices became louder.

Then, as if somebody had thrown a switch, an enormous crack opened in the ground before me.

Thousands of sounds and smells rose from below.

I jumped from the bicycle and sat on the edge.

Inside the immense fissure lay one of the holy cities of the Chebka du M’Zab. Ghardaïa stretched as far as I could see. The Mozabites had created a remarkable civilisation in the desert. Houses painted blue, yellow or white climbed around hills crowned by mosques. Narrow, dark alleys wound between them and brought to mind the mysterious Arabia of my childhood.

At one of the valley’s campsites, I encountered two kinds of motorised Sahara traveller.

The first wanted to cross the desert in a few days, boast about it afterwards, sell their Peugeot or Mercedes in West Africa and make a profit.

The second travelled in expensive four-wheel-drive vehicles carrying names such as EXPEDITION OPTIMAL: PARIS–ABIDJAN across their doors. They usually stopped when they saw me. After filming and photographing the unexpected cyclist, they gave me water and stared in amazement.

Their own grand expeditions appeared slightly less heroic when they discovered a man riding alone through the Sahara without anything written across the side of his bicycle.

Before long, they all began the same conversation.

“Are you out of your mind?”

It did not matter whether they spoke French, Spanish or English. The warning that followed was almost identical.

“Have you never heard of the Devil’s Garden? It is at least eight hundred kilometres between Tamanrasset and Arlit. There are no oases and no life. Where will you find water? Where will you find shade from the fifty-degree sun? Haven’t you heard about all the people who have disappeared there? Thousands! And they travelled by car. Turn back while you still have time, you madman.”

They continued until they believed they had convinced me.

I had heard of the Devil’s Garden and felt a certain anxiety about what waited there. But first I had to reach Tamanrasset.

Even Belkacem had possessed his own terrifying story.

Whenever the subject of the Sahara arose in Laghouat, he placed both hands on his enormous head and trembled theatrically.

“The Plateau du Tademaït is terrible! The sand-filled winds are violent, and the cold crawls inside you and paralyses you. It is deadly. That is your greatest obstacle on the way to Tamanrasset.”

He would then recount, with great passion, his journey across it in a lorry.

Twenty-Two Litres

I crossed the Plateau du Tademaït under the brutal, sand-bearing northeasterly wind called the Harmattan.

By extraordinary good fortune, it struck me in the back.

I almost flew.

The plateau was a lifeless hammada, an immense stone desert swept by cold winds. It took me a day and a half to cross its three hundred kilometres on a route which changed constantly between broken asphalt, gravel and deep sand.

Football-sized stones blocked the road. Usually I could weave between them; occasionally I had to stop and roll one aside.

Other vehicles travelled along the kilometre-wide pistes beside the broken road. For long periods, the only evidence of traffic was a distant column of dust rising to the east or west.

There were said to be scattered wells every twenty kilometres until Tamanrasset.

I required neither water nor company.

When I left Laghouat and entered the desert, the last of the painful loneliness disappeared. The vast surroundings filled me with calm and allowed me to think clearly about what lay ahead—particularly the Devil’s Garden.

My bicycle could carry twenty-two litres of water.

In normal circumstances, twelve litres would last one day once the heat approached fifty degrees. The Devil’s Garden was likely to require a week. Every day on the road towards Tamanrasset, I reduced my consumption by half a litre until I reached six litres per day.

That would give me one extra day.

I was almost disappointed when the Plateau du Tademaït ended. The miserable road dropped steeply into country resembling the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful, but I would have preferred more time alone on the plateau.

At its edge waited the oasis of Aïn Salah.

The Harmattan deserted me there.

In its place, I received a violent headwind.

Worse still, Aïn Salah contained Adam.

“Hello! My name is Adam. What are you doing?”

He stood steaming in the heat.

“I’m trying to tempt that large beetle out of the sand. You may have seen its tracks outside your tent this morning.”

I continued tapping the sand rhythmically with my index finger. We stood among the enormous dunes surrounding the red oasis.

“A beetle? No, you idiot. That is a small lizard.”

Adam crouched and drew a copy of the tracks with his finger.

I stared at him. He must have sunstroke.

Then the sand collapsed into a small hole and a black beetle, half a decimetre long, burst out.

My index finger had successfully imitated the female’s sexual invitation.

“You are a strange fellow,” Adam said. “I suppose you are the one planning to kill himself by bicycle in the desert. Is that your machine at the campsite?”

I nodded and wondered what a man like him was doing in the Sahara.

Adam intended to cross it on a Puch moped.

He was thickset and balding, with a round, bearded face, bitter eyes and the air of a man permanently offended by life. He claimed that he had been a famous chemist in Austria until his employer stole a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery and destroyed his career. South Africa had refused him entry for lacking a visa. He then attempted the journey in a Land Rover, which broke down outside Ghardaïa and was stripped to its shell while he searched for help.

Now he was trying again on a moped.

Adam did not have one kind word for anybody. Even after I fed him, he criticised the way I lived and described it as irresponsible.

The Algerians had taught me that in the desert one had to stay together, even with an enemy. But I remained an ordinary human being. Before I had rested properly, Adam drove me from the oasis and back into the heat.

Unfortunately, it was not long before I found him again.

Near the entrance to the Gorge d’Arak, he sat inside his tent, sheltering from the burning sun. He was wearing a suit and tie. His sunburnt face looked bitter, his lips were split and his rear tyre was punctured.

“Nothing but bad luck!” he shouted when he saw me. “The solution I found in Aïn Salah will not hold. It keeps coming loose. Hell! And where did you go? I have searched for you. I must have passed you last night. Do you have water? Can you give me some solution? These damned people are too stupid to manufacture anything properly.”

“You can have water. That is all. I need everything else myself.”

“You have nothing to eat?”

He sounded like a fledgling calling for its mother.

I shook my head and gave him half my water.

“I do not understand what you are doing in the desert. You have no idea how to survive. Look at that—you are carrying a three-litre container. Madness! Try learning something from the local people you hate so much.”

I left him to his fate.

During my short time in the Sahara, the Algerians had willingly shared their knowledge with me. I wore the shesh Belkacem had given me and covered every part of my skin to keep away the wind, sand and sun.

Every hour, I stopped beside the wretched road, brewed mint tea and ate dates for energy.

I needed them.

Since leaving Aïn Salah, the route had deteriorated. I either travelled across hard corrugations packed with stone barriers or pushed my heavily loaded bicycle through decimetre-deep sand. A violent headwind drained what remained of my strength. I struggled forward in my lowest gear for twelve hours a day through country which became hotter and more lifeless with every kilometre.

The wind finally relented when I left Adam behind and entered the Gorge d’Arak.

After two weeks in country almost entirely without life, entering the gorge felt like leaving hell and arriving in paradise.

The vast, eroded mountain walls echoed with birdsong, buzzing flies and the movement of creatures hidden among acacia trees, bushes and great stands of the plant known as the Sodom apple.

There were scorpions as large as dinner plates.

It was a garden without water or brightly coloured flowers. Yet it showed how the Sahara’s animals and plants survived on almost no moisture. Antelopes obtained water from plants. Trees and bushes extended deep root systems beneath the earth. Seeds lay dormant for years inside hard shells, then completed an entire life cycle within days when rain finally came.

Then the gorge ended.

The hard battle against the headwind began again and remained with me all the way to Tamanrasset.

I arrived exhausted.

Tamanrasset was the final outpost for travellers continuing south, whether by camel, bicycle or motor vehicle. It was our last chance for rest, proper food and supplies before the Devil’s Garden.

After two weeks living on macaroni, sardines, dry bread, dates and tea, my immediate ambitions were modest.

I wanted to eat until I was full.

Then I wanted to sleep.

Tamanrasset

The town was a modern centre for ancient caravan routes.

Its narrow streets were crowded with proud Tuareg, Black Africans, puritanical Muslims, fashionably dressed tourists from Paris, ordinary travellers and adventurers of every description. All had been drawn to this final settlement at the foot of the Hoggar Mountains.

In the market, the usual stalls selling bread, vegetables, fruit and tinned food stood beside merchants surrounded by enormous lumps of salt transported from the legendary mines farther southeast.

At one time, a kilogram of salt had been worth a kilogram of gold.

I was putting up my tent at the government campsite on the sandy outskirts when a Land Rover drove in bearing the words TRANSAFRICA/AUSTRALIA.

“Simon! Surely you have not been waiting all this time just for me? Very kind of you, old friend!”

The astonished Englishman looked less pleased to see me.

“Mikael! Go to hell! Do you know what happened? The engine died thirty kilometres outside Tamanrasset, and I have been waiting two months for a new one. What a bloody hell. I’m going mad. And on top of that, they have taken the idiot James on as my partner. Can it get any worse?”

I had first met Simon and his companions in the Moroccan Sahara, where they had supplied me with food and water. When we parted, Simon joked that it was a pity I could not keep up with them.

“Do you remember what you said in Morocco?” I asked. “A shame I couldn’t maintain your pace. Did you honestly believe you could outrun a Viking on a bicycle?”

Simon now travelled with James, although they could barely tolerate one another. Simon treated James as a servant. James endured it because returning home would mean admitting another failure to a wealthy family which expected better from him.

Once we had finished exchanging insults, Simon pointed towards three men brewing tea under one of the campsite’s few shady trees.

“You are not the only one mad enough to cycle. Those three are British cyclists.”

They looked weather-beaten, strong and completely at ease.

For a moment, I felt that somebody had intruded upon my territory. Then happiness took over. Perhaps I would have company in the Devil’s Garden—if we could tolerate one another.

I walked over and sat beside their fire.

“Hello. Are you cycling?”

“Yes,” they answered without looking up.

“I am cycling too.”

All three raised their heads.

“Who are you?”

I knew that Algerian drivers had passed rumours about a cyclist somewhere ahead of them.

“I am the Swede.”

They stared at one another.

“Are you the Swede we keep hearing about? The man cycling five hundred kilometres every day? More than two metres tall, blond, built like Arnold Schwarzenegger—and riding a bicycle with a triangular rear wheel?”

“Good God,” I said. “I know where most of that nonsense came from. But who decided I was two metres tall? I’m not even one centimetre above 1.70.”

The story of the triangular wheel probably began with an Algerian driver who gave me two loaves of bread. In gratitude, I showed him the finer details of my bicycle, particularly the oval chainrings. He suddenly began stroking my thighs and kissing my hand.

He must have become so excited that he thought the wheel was oval too.

Their names were Mick, Charlie and Jeremy.

Mick was short and powerfully built, with a cheerful smile and a direct but friendly manner. He travelled with Charlie, a tall, slender young man with a dark, bearded face.

Jeremy rode alone. Thin, sunburnt and almost entirely without muscle, he gave the impression that his journey to Tamanrasset had been one long ordeal. Unlike the sociable Mick and Charlie, he preferred his own company and spent hours beneath a tree with his thoughts somewhere else.

Before I had time to know him, Jeremy secured a lift with Simon through the Devil’s Garden. They disappeared so quickly that I barely had time to say goodbye.

Mick and Charlie were less fortunate.

Nobody wanted to carry two men, two bicycles and their heavy equipment through the eight hundred kilometres to Arlit. The danger of becoming trapped in the dunes was too great.

A terrible piece of news had frightened everybody at the campsite.

Two families—four adults and six children—had been found dead inside their four-wheel-drive vehicles only a short distance from Tamanrasset. Both vehicles had suffered engine failure after becoming stuck in a dune.

Nobody wanted to take the same risk.

Charlie appeared less worried than the others. He was calm, philosophical and increasingly interested in accompanying me through the Devil’s Garden.

Eventually I convinced him.

One of history’s greatest adventures waited there, I explained, and such surroundings would allow him to grow as a human being and perhaps attain unsuspected spiritual heights.

I suspect Charlie had wanted to enter that emptiness from the moment he first heard its name. He possessed a highly analytical mind and wanted to discover what such a place might do to it.

Mick held him back.

He was afraid of dying, which surprised me because he was a brave and forceful man. I believed his fear came from the woman waiting for him in Britain. He loved her and was unwilling to lose her by entering something he might not be capable of surviving.

In the end, Mick had no choice. Nobody had room for him. Whether he wanted to or not, he would have to enter the Devil’s Garden.

Truthfully, I may also have been exceeding my abilities.

At least 750 kilometres of flat sand and stone lay ahead. There was almost no water, food, life or marked route. Rumour spoke of thousands of tracks crossing one another without offering the slightest indication of location or direction.

Unlike the two Englishmen, I had used the entire journey from Nordkapp to prepare and motivate myself for the Devil’s Garden. I believed that this extreme desert might answer my existential questions and place me under enough mental strain to confront the deepest part of myself.

While Charlie and Mick considered their decision, I travelled into the Hoggar Mountains.

A Drop in the Ocean

At 2,500 metres, the Catholic brotherhood of the Little Brothers of Jesus maintained a simple stone hermitage.

Rarely had I visited a place which raised me to such a spiritual height. The clear, thin air carried an immediate harmony. The religious atmosphere created by the hermit brothers made me understand why the life and ideas of Charles de Foucauld had inspired them.

Foucauld believed that prayer and hard work were the paths to God and salvation.

I could not imagine coming closer to God than one did there.

The country surrounding the hermitage seemed almost extraterrestrial. Volcanic basalt formations and strange rock pillars rose from the earth to heights above 3,300 metres.

Inside, I found a book in which Charles de Foucauld had described the place:

“The beauty of this region defies description and even the imagination. Nothing can give a person an idea of the forest of needle-shaped rock formations stretching before us. It is magnificent. One cannot see it without one’s thoughts turning to God.

“I find it difficult to take my eyes from this imposing view, whose beauty and attraction towards the infinite draw everything closer to the Creator.

“At the same time, the solitude and its wild appearance show how alone one is with Him—and that one is no more than a drop in the ocean.”

This is the beginning of a new Substack series.

In 1986–87, I cycled 27,500 kilometres from Chile to Alaska, including an attempt to cross the Darién Gap. It was my first major bicycle journey and became my first book, På cykel från Chile till Alaska.

When I returned to Sweden, things moved quickly. For around eight months, I travelled around the country giving lectures almost every day. I also appeared on Packat och klart, then Sweden’s best-known television programme about travel.

But I was already thinking about another journey.

In September 1988, I left North Cape in northern Norway. This time I had a professional bicycle and some of the best expedition equipment available. A proper tent, sleeping mattress and clothing.

The plan was to cycle from North Cape to Cape Agulhas, the southern tip of Africa. The journey would eventually cover approximately 33,000 kilometres and take me through the Sahara, Central Africa, the equatorial rainforest, East Africa and southern Africa.

It became my second book, På cykel genom Afrika, first published in Swedish by Dalaförlaget in 1991.

The first 6,660 kilometres through Europe were cold, wet and almost entirely free of other cyclists. When I landed at the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Morocco became my entrance to Africa.

It was not an easy beginning.

This English version is translated and lightly adapted from the original Swedish book. I have kept the events, thoughts and judgements of the young man I was at the time. Some of them are harsh. I have not rewritten that younger version of myself to make him sound wiser or more experienced than he was.

“A person may hate Africa or love Africa, but can never remain indifferent to that enormous continent.”

My friend Abraham’s truth about the continent and its many faces.

“Do Not Cross the Bridge!”

I am not exaggerating when I say that every poorly dressed and dirty villager who stopped me as I made my way up through the desert-like mountain landscape said the same four words after first asking me for cigarettes:

“Do not cross the bridge!”

At first, I thought this was another attempt to mess with me and cheat me, like so much of what had happened since the day I landed at Ceuta after cycling 6,660 cold and rapid kilometres from North Cape.

In fact, my troubled relationship with Morocco was one reason I had climbed into the desolate High Atlas. The main reason, however, was that I was determined to climb North Africa’s highest mountain, Jebel Toubkal.

I soon realised that the villagers were serious.

There really was a sacred bridge farther up the valley, and only Muslims were permitted to cross it. They said that the entire area on the other side was holy and guarded by a witch doctor who lived in the mountains throughout the year.

They warned me sharply about the unpleasant consequences that would follow if I ignored their advice.

Do I need to explain that this made me extremely curious?

I was excited, expectant and also slightly worried when, after many hours of walking alone, I finally reached the sacred bridge. During much of the climb, I had imagined meeting a witch doctor wearing a mask with a demonic face. I had convinced myself that this divine place and perhaps the witch doctor himself might help dispel the problems that had troubled me recently.

But, like so much else during my first weeks in Morocco, the discovery of the bridge was an anticlimax.

I do not know what I had expected, but I had certainly not imagined that the sacred bridge would be a simple construction of stones placed carelessly across an idyllic, murmuring stream.

The holy area on the other side was no more impressive. There were a few stone houses and a strangely whitewashed building from which numerous prayer flags fluttered in the freezing wind. But I saw no witch doctor and felt none of the magical atmosphere I had imagined.

For some reason, my disappointment was so great that I ignored every warning about death and torment of the soul.

Out of pure defiance, I crossed the bridge.

The Invisible Button

Only minutes later, it was as if someone above had pressed an invisible button.

Within half an hour, the beautiful surroundings disappeared. For several days, there had been a clear blue sky and strong sunlight. The snow-covered summits of the Atlas Mountains had glittered like diamonds.

Now everything vanished into thick fog and a violent snowstorm. I could not see farther than the end of my nose.

A person in full possession of his senses would have understood his mistake. He would not have challenged fate again. He would have descended to one of the villages in the valley below, villages that seemed to hang impossibly between two mountain walls.

But I was not in full possession of my senses.

Throughout my time in Morocco, I had been dominated by a feeling of loneliness whose origins I could not properly identify. It had drawn me into a negative way of thinking and brought me into constant conflict with the people of the country.

There was much about Morocco that had enchanted me from my first day on the continent.

I was fascinated by the exotic life in the old quarters of the Moroccan cities, the medinas. Their narrow, dark alleys offered smells, sounds and colours that overwhelmed the senses of an inexperienced Swede.

The country’s natural beauty was undeniable: the mysterious Rif Mountains covered in coniferous forest, the equally beautiful snow-covered Atlas Mountains, and the small groves of cedar and oak that occasionally appeared in an otherwise barren landscape.

The quiet villages I passed were inhabited mostly by peaceful and generous people.

Yet wherever I went, whether in villages, towns or out in the countryside, there also seemed to be people whose only purpose in life was to cheat, threaten, chase, insult or throw stones at foreigners.

My encounters with those individuals came to dominate my experience to such a degree that I became blind to almost everything positive.

I am not saying that they did not sometimes have reasons for behaving as they did. But after only two weeks in the country, someone had cheated me out of thousands of Swedish kronor in a carpet deal. Dogs and men armed with sticks had attacked my camp at night. One of my friends had been raped and deliberately beaten unconscious. I had been spat in the face twice. My mother had been called a whore countless times, and my dead father had been accused of homosexuality. Men had threatened to kill me with knives and slingshots when I refused to buy their hashish or supposedly genuine leather bags.

Most of those tormenting me were twelve-year-old boys or extremely persistent and aggressive salesmen. I assumed that the endless flow of tourists, and the money they brought, was the main reason for their behaviour.

But that damned, indefinable loneliness was wearing down my patience and my ability to accept things as they were. Instead of laughing at the insults, I answered them in kind.

A Private War

All the way along the beautifully surfaced road from Tétouan to Marrakech, I conducted what was almost a private war against any Moroccan I believed had threatened or insulted me.

I am not proud to admit that I knocked down several salesmen whom I felt had insulted me in the cruellest way imaginable. But I had entered the greatest crisis of my life.

I had not come to Morocco and Africa to dislike countries and their people.

Quite the opposite.

I had come to the continent to learn how people here lived and thought, and to grow as a human being. Since I was young, I had convinced myself that Africa, more than any other continent, might provide answers to my questions about life and death.

I had come to Morocco to experience the enchanting and fantastic side of a country that, in my imagination, represented the world of One Thousand and One Nights.

The problem was the loneliness. It stood in the way of what I believed would become the greatest bicycle adventure of all time.

When I reached Marrakech, I headed for the Atlas Mountains as quickly as possible. Mountains had always given me answers during my earlier journeys.

That was why I did not turn back when fog and snow darkened the world after I crossed the forbidden bridge. Instead, I took out my compass and set a course for the base camp.

I was convinced that the answer to my problems was waiting at the summit of Jebel Toubkal.

Seventeen Hours Through the Snow

After seventeen hours of struggling through waist-deep snow, I finally came upon the chimney of the base-camp hut in the darkness.

I was so exhausted that I cried. I had long since lost all feeling in my feet and nose.

Using the last of my strength, I dug a three-metre tunnel through the snow to the door of the stone hut. Shivering uncontrollably, I crawled into my sleeping bag and immediately sank into an eighteen-hour sleep.

The snow and cold had intensified when I opened my eyes again.

Snow had forced its way through the building’s cracked windows and covered a large part of the fifteen-square-metre floor. Panic-stricken, I kicked off my life-saving sleeping bag, packed my equipment and dug my way out of the building.

I crawled across the roof until I reached the snow-covered mound on its northeastern side.

According to the topographical map I carried, cliffs surrounded me to both the west and east. Between them was a valley leading towards the foot of the 4,185-metre summit.

But outside the hut, I could not even take out the map. The wind was so powerful that I had to walk leaning forwards to prevent myself from being thrown backwards into the metre-deep snow.

With my face turned north according to the compass, I gambled everything and stepped into the blinding storm.

I had convinced myself that the entire meaning of my journey—perhaps even the question of whether it should continue—depended on reaching the summit.

I was prepared to risk my life.

The Avalanche

An hour later, I had climbed approximately fifty metres up an almost vertical wall that I believed led towards the summit that would resolve all my existential problems.

Then I saw the crack racing towards me.

I had only enough time to think:

“Oh, no!”

The vertical wall of snow collapsed.

I fell around thirty metres and landed headfirst in the deep snow. Large masses of snow piled on top of me, locking my body in a vice-like grip.

Suddenly, I could hardly breathe.

With all the strength I had left, I fought to free myself before I suffocated. Then I realised that I could move my right arm. I pushed it upwards and unexpectedly felt the biting wind seize my hand.

I could breathe again.

Slowly and carefully, I dug out one part of my body after another, trying not to move too violently in case I triggered another avalanche.

When I finally stood again, my entire body was shaking with fear. I felt the warmth of excrement inside my trousers.

The smell of fear followed me all the way back to the base camp.

The snowstorm continued for another three days before I could descend to the village of Asni and take a bus back to Marrakech.

I arrived in that legendary city devastated and without any hope of finding a solution to my problems.

Abraham

Instead, I found the answer in Marrakech’s ancient and most famous square, Djemaa el-Fna—also known as the Square of the Entertainers.

The answer came in the shape of Abraham, a master thief.

Perhaps it was because, when I passed the sacred bridge on my way down from the base camp, I stood on the side of the stream reserved for non-believers, turned towards the higher powers and shouted:

“Forgive me! It will not happen again!”

At first glance, it was impossible to believe that Abraham was English.

Like most Moroccans who took pride in their religion and identity, he wore a simple kaftan and a small embroidered cap. His features looked Arabic, although his eyes slanted in an East Asian manner, and he spoke fluent Arabic.

At first, I thought he belonged to one of the performing groups that filled Djemaa el-Fna during the daytime.

Then I heard his voice.

I sat down beside him on a bench belonging to food stall number 25 and ordered the most expensive thing I could find in an attempt to feel happy again after the failure on Jebel Toubkal.

“Want some pastilla, mate? Celebrating something, mate? Though you look worn out and finished,” he said in a challenging Cockney accent.

That was my first encounter with Abraham: an Englishman fleeing the long arm of the law.

Hidden beneath his loose clothing was a money belt containing British pounds and gold coins worth half a million Swedish kronor. Bank fraud, he told me one evening as he led me through the darkest and narrowest alleys of the city and showed me the belt.

Abraham was certainly a large-scale criminal and fitted perfectly into the Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves atmosphere that I imagined governed the country.

But, like me, he had left on a long journey to find all the answers to existence.

He believed he had found God. He had converted to Islam so that he could make a pilgrimage by camel to the promised land of Yemen.

More importantly, Abraham identified my problem.

Africa Is Waiting

We met at food stall 25 for six consecutive evenings. Its dishes produced an exotic aroma that far surpassed those of the hundred surrounding stalls.

On the sixth evening, Abraham turned towards me.

“Mike, you and I have been sitting here talking for days without reaching the heart of the worry I can see tormenting you. You think Morocco is the problem or that breaking the taboo at the bridge caused everything, don’t you?

“But do you know what it really is? I recognise that look, and I understand what you are thinking because I feel exactly the same thing.

“It is fear, Mike. You, like me, are frightened deep inside by what is waiting beyond those mountains.”

He pointed into the darkness towards the Atlas Mountains, at whose feet Marrakech lay.

“Frightened? What should I be frightened of?” I answered, surprised and slightly offended.

“As I said, you are frightened of what is waiting on the other side of the mountains. Admit that you have felt miserable ever since the day you first saw the African continent on a world map. Admit that, deep down, you have never been motivated by Morocco because you have constantly been thinking about what is waiting on the other side. Admit it!

“Morocco is not Africa. The real Africa is waiting on the other side. You will never feel a moment’s peace until you leave Marrakech and cross those mountains. Get moving as quickly as you can. I know what will happen on the other side. You will fall in love with Africa. I have a feeling that Africa will place its hand upon you, and afterwards you will never forget its touch. I know because I lived in the real Africa for many years. So hurry and get away from this Morocco that is wearing you down before it is too late. Africa is waiting!”

Abraham shouted so loudly and passionately that the other customers at the food stall looked at us suspiciously.

“I have to admit that you are right,” I answered. “But if it is so urgent, why don’t you climb onto your camels and leave for Yemen tomorrow?”

“Don’t you understand, Mike? Before a person can create solid ground for a better life, he must accomplish three important things. First and foremost, he must conquer his own fear, which is the main problem for both you and me. Then—and I have achieved this, but you have not, he must master the painful loneliness that comes when a man has neither a God nor a woman.”

The Other Side of the Atlas Mountains

When night gave way to dawn, I shifted quickly into my highest gear and pedalled towards the Atlas Mountains with everything I had.

I had spent the night trying to motivate myself because everything Abraham said was true. I understood that I had to reach the other side.

An icy wind, steep climbs, frozen roads, a snowstorm and metre-deep snow could not stop me. In record time, I reached the concrete monument marking the Col de Tichka pass at 2,200 metres above sea level.

I could hardly have left that bewildering world behind me in a more dramatic way.

I crossed the Col de Tichka in the middle of a snowstorm. Only minutes later, I emerged into a sunlit landscape of reddish mountains, endless stone and almost no vegetation.

Europe was behind me.

To the east, the Sahara stretched uninterrupted for five thousand kilometres. Ahead waited enormous distances through what Abraham had called the real Africa.

Now, if ever, I would have the chance to conquer my fear.

We left the western side of Aegina at around nine in the evening. We were going south around the island and then up the eastern side towards Agia Marina. It would take about two hours. There was not enough wind, so we travelled under engine. I stood at the wheel. Arnon was there, always aware and doing other things, but he trusted me. I handled the departure, the steering and half a metre behind us, Eva and Dana were lying on the deck having what looked like a girls’ night. They watched films, played games, ate crisps and chocolate and seemed almost unaware that we were moving around an island in the dark. They had no idea what was happening inside me. They were simply enjoying themselves, and that made me happy.

There was a full moon. We could see the coastline, lights from the towns and the occasional fishing boat. Onfe has no AIS, so we identified other vessels mainly by sight. I held the iPhone with the Boating app in my hand, which is not the best way to navigate, while also watching the depth, the compass, the engine revolutions, the shoreline and everything moving around us. The depth shown on the app and the depth shown on the boat did not always agree, and the bottom can rise quickly. There were rocks somewhere out there, fishing boats without much light and always the possibility that I had misunderstood the shoreline or missed something smaller in the darkness. I could not relax completely, but somehow I felt peaceful.

That feeling started almost from the moment we got everything ready to leave and stayed with me until we dropped the anchor outside Agia Marina. I was taking a boat somewhere. There was no road, no path and no visible track beneath us. There was only a course, the water, the instruments, the lights along the coast and something beyond the horizon. Behind me my daughters were happy and safe, and beside me was a man who trusted me. Everything else in my life disappeared.

What Exploration Does to You

Science have explanations for this feeling. Flow, curiosity, responsibility, the pleasure of learning something difficult. They are probably right, but explanations have never been the same as the feeling itself. At the wheel there was no room for money, work, age, future plans or any of the other things which usually fill my head. I had to know where we were, what the boat was doing, what was beneath us and what might be coming towards us. The focus itself became a kind of freedom.

This is part of what exploration has always done to me. It narrows life down to what matters at that exact moment. You have a direction, a job and people who depend on you. You are tired, curious, worried and happy at the same time. But exploration also exhausts you. It is not relaxation. My longest stretch at the wheel during these three weeks was around six hours, and afterwards I felt completely empty.

Sailing on an old boat like Onfe, a 56-foot Ta Chiao built in 1982, is harder than it looks from the shore. There are always things to check, ropes to handle, decisions to make, heat to deal with and very little space where you can be alone. We had strong sun almost every day. Salt was everywhere, in our mouths, on our clothes and in our beds. The strong wind was often the only thing which cooled us down. Yet the cramped living was never a problem for me or the girls. A boat is not so different from a tent. In fact, it is much more luxurious. You even have a shower, although perhaps not a super-duper one.

I had read sailing books before. Joshua Slocum sailing alone around the world, Tristan Jones and Tim Severin’s The Brendan Voyage. But I always jumped over the technical parts about what type of boat they had, how the sails were rigged and what equipment they used. I wanted the experience. What happened to the people? What did they feel? How did they deal with loneliness, fear and uncertainty?

I never thought sailing might become part of my own life. It was not even a possibility in my mind. I have explored on bicycles, horses, camels, skis and on foot. I have crossed deserts, mountains, frozen rivers and icecaps. The sea was something other explorers did. I knew what boats had meant in the history of exploration, how they opened routes between worlds and changed how people understood the planet, but after forty years of exploration I had never understood the physical feeling of leaving land behind and pointing a boat towards another place. During these weeks I discovered a form of exploration I had somehow missed.

Then Arnon Arrived

At the beginning, I was not sure it would work. The first week was an eye-opener. The atmosphere aboard became so difficult that I began to wonder whether sailing was for me at all. It was not the boat or the sea which caused the problem. It was people. At one point Eva asked why I was allowing people to treat me that way. She had seen what was happening even when I was still trying to accept it and keep the journey going. By the end of that first week, we were heading towards disaster.

Then Arnon Singer arrived, and the change was immediate. Arnon is one of those people who gives more than he takes. He works all the time, tells stories, notices what needs to be done and trusts people enough to let them become useful. He did not teach by standing over us or reminding us that he knew more. He showed us, explained things and then allowed us to do them. The atmosphere changed so dramatically that it felt like a different journey. He did not only teach us more about sailing. He saved our joy for it.

Dana responded to that trust immediately. She became good at reading the charts and saw hazards quickly. She learned anchoring and took part in almost every practical job aboard. The more responsibility she was given, the happier she became. This is something I have seen in her many times before. She wants to be needed for real. She does not want a pretend job made for a child. Give her something which matters and she grows into it.

Eva is different. Because of her eyesight and her personality, she cannot always take part in the same way as Dana. Arnon understood that without making a big thing of it. He played backgammon with her. They talked and read poetry. Slowly she became more talkative, smiled more and looked genuinely happy with where she was.

By the final days, all three of us saw Arnon as a great friend. We were tired, and he was tired too, because sailing like this demands a lot from everyone, but we were very satisfied. The girls did not really want to go home. They had enjoyed the islands, the swimming, the ice cream, the boat and being together. Home meant school again and, for Dana, football. She wants to return to football, but she is worried that three weeks away has made her lose all her skills. I do not think three weeks can remove what she has built over years, but I understand the worry.

The Turtle

A few days before the night sail, we were anchored in a cove at Skintos Bay on Dokos. The weather was expected to become worse and there were several other boats around us. We needed to know that our anchor was properly set in sand, not lying uselessly in seagrass. We also needed to make sure that we had not dropped it across another boat’s anchor chain. If another boat leaves and pulls your anchor up with its own, the consequences can be serious.

I put on my mask and snorkel and swam out. I was not diving deep, just swimming on the surface with my head and body beneath the water, looking for the chain and trying to see where the anchor had landed. Then a turtle came almost directly underneath me. My first thought was simply: Wow, this is beautiful.

It moved faster than I could, but it appeared slow because it was so calm. It looked peaceful, almost like a Buddhist monk in some other state of focus which I would like to have. It seemed completely satisfied with life. More than that, it looked as though it knew exactly where it was going. It passed beneath me and continued away at an angle towards the other side of the cove. For a moment I wanted to follow it, but I did not. I had a job to do. I needed to check the anchor.

I have thought about that turtle many times since. I do not want to turn it into a complicated symbol or claim that it delivered some great message. It was a turtle swimming through a Greek cove. But it possessed something I still seem to be looking for. Direction and peace at the same time. I am not sure I have ever known where I was going with the certainty that turtle appeared to have.

I do not know what it means. Perhaps nothing. I only know that for those two hours at the wheel around Aegina, I thought about little else. I did not know where sailing would lead me in the coming years, but I knew what required my attention. The course, the depth, the engine, the coastline, the fishing boats, the girls behind me and Arnon beside me.

When we reached Agia Marina, we dropped the anchor in darkness. We could not see whether it landed in sand or grass. It caught immediately and held perfectly until morning. The engine stopped, the job was done, and I felt fulfilled and exhausted at the same time.

He Was Right

This journey would never have happened without Jeff Willner. When we crossed the English Channel with Defender X, he saw that I was not comfortable with the sea. He is also worried that mountaineering may eventually kill me and wanted to turn some of my attention towards sailing. He believed it could also become useful during the upcoming Defender X expedition from Singapore to Australia.

Jeff has more extraordinary visions than any other person I know. I did not resist this one. He was right. I fell in love with sailing.

Going Home

I am writing this at the airport. We are travelling home through Istanbul because I asked Eva to find inexpensive tickets and she did exactly that. It will be a long journey, but she solved the problem. We are tired, sunburned and still have the taste of salt in our mouths.

I do not know exactly where sailing will take us next. Boats are expensive. I am still a beginner, and three good weeks do not make anybody a sailor. But I can imagine owning a boat. I can imagine continuing to learn with the girls until we can handle one properly ourselves. I can imagine expeditions and polar passages. For the first time, these no longer feel like other people’s stories.

I am not as certain as the turtle appeared to be, but I would like to follow.

If you had asked me after the first week whether sailing was really for me, I honestly would not have known what to answer. I had enjoyed parts of it, but I was also tired, and there was too much happening at once, too many new things to understand, too many ropes with names I could not remember, and more than once I found myself thinking that perhaps sailing simply was not my thing, that at sixty-four I had finally found the one craft that was not going to open up to me the way horses had, or skis, or a bicycle loaded with panniers.

Then Arnon arrived.

I have met people like him before, over forty years of expeditions. When we first got to the boat it was a mess, somebody's kit still in our beds, things scattered everywhere, and within a day of Arnon taking over everything was clean, every rope had a place. He is a father himself, and it shows in how he runs a boat. He puts everyone else ahead of himself, works harder than anyone aboard, and he is the kind of person you would trust in any weather.

His way of teaching was never to tell you what to do. It was to show you, and to trust that you could do it, and to explain the why behind the smallest things along the way. Put the pot on the stove before you light the gas, not after, because it saves fuel. Turn the pipe away from you, just in case. Small habits, learned over years, passed on without ever making them feel like lessons.

Suddenly nobody worried about making mistakes. Questions became easier to ask. We laughed more. The boat became a happier place to be, and I did not notice exactly when it happened, but hours behind the wheel stopped feeling like practice and started feeling like something I looked forward to. I watched the wind, felt the boat answer the smallest movement of the helm, looked ahead towards another island while the rest of the crew quietly got on with their jobs.

Dana, My Navigator

The biggest surprise, though, sat beside me. Dana.

Without either of us ever talking about it, she became my navigator. She reads a chart the way she reads a map on her phone, tracing the route with her finger, checking everything ahead of time, so that all I need to do is turn the wheel when she tells me to. Coming into another anchorage she would say, quietly, "Keep a few hundred metres to the left before you turn into port." I did exactly that.

Somewhere during that second week she stopped being my daughter helping me sail and became somebody I genuinely relied on. I do not think I need to explain why that mattered to me. Any parent who has watched their child become competent at something real, in real time, in front of them, will know exactly what I mean.

Eva, Who Watches

Eva has taken a completely different path. She has little interest in ropes or navigation, and her eyesight has never made that side of things easy for her anyway. She sees little to the sides, and lately she refuses to wear the glasses that would help, which is its own small battle. But she watches people the way Dana watches charts. She is the family's intellectual, the one who often looks at the rest of us as if our questions are almost too simple to bother answering. She says very little, but when she does, I listen.

Dana solved practical problems. Eva understood people.

Watching her work this way reminded me of something that happened almost forty years ago, in Delhi, when my sister and I met a young couple near Connaught Circus who told us they had been robbed. No passports, no money, no way home, and could we help them get to the embassy. We believed them. We gave them what we could afford.

A couple of months later we met exactly the same couple again. Same story. Same expressions. Same performance. They worked in pairs, and they were good at it, and it was years before I understood that this was simply how some people survive.

Fortunately, people like that have been rare. Far more often, in forty years of this life, I have met people like Arnon.

Why I Came

Part of why I wanted to learn to sail is not complicated. A good friend, Jeff, has thought for a while that it would do me good to be less afraid of the sea, and he was probably right. But there is a bigger reason too, and it has been sitting in the back of my mind for years. If you want to understand exploration, really understand it, at some point you have to understand the sea. Long before anyone crossed a desert on a camel or a mountain range on foot, the biggest unknown on this planet was the water in between everything, and the people who first tried to answer that question changed how the rest of us think about the world. I have spent forty years exploring on land. It felt, finally, like time to understand the part I had always left out.

What I Actually Learned

I came aboard expecting to learn how life works on a small vessel. How to sail with a motor, with the wind, how to anchor. In many ways it is not so different from expedition life, the planning of fuel and food and gear, working out what you actually need and what you do not.

What I did not expect was the rollercoaster of personalities that would turn up along the way.

Standing at the helm is where the rest of it made sense to me. The concentration. The horizon. The silence. The responsibility. It reminded me of leading an expedition, except here I was still very much the beginner, and there is something in that I am still turning over. I have spent most of my adult life being the one who knows the route. On this boat, for two weeks, I mostly did not, and I liked it more than I expected to.

I still cannot call myself a sailor. I could not take this boat out on my own. I would manage for a while and then run into something I did not know how to handle. I am scratching the surface. But I am in love with the idea of it now, and I already know I want to do a real expedition under sail one day, with Eva and Dana beside me, using whatever I have learned here for something bigger than this trip.

Left Before Port

When I leave Greece, I will take many things home with me. The smell of salt on the deck before sunrise. The quiet concentration at the helm. A skipper I am certain I will keep calling a friend.

But most of all I will remember one particular afternoon, approaching a small anchorage somewhere in the Cyclades. Dana looking down at her phone. Me watching the water ahead.

"Keep a few hundred metres to the left before you turn into port," she said.

I did exactly that.

Steve sent me a photograph a few days ago. Sophie had taken it while I was standing at the helm somewhere between the islands here in the Cyclades. The sails were full, the sea was deep blue and, judging by the picture, I looked as though I knew exactly what I was doing.

“Captain Mike living the dream,” he wrote.

I looked at the photograph for a while before replying.

“Living the dream. It’s exhausting.”

He laughed.

I understand why.

The photograph certainly doesn’t look exhausting. It looks like one of those pictures people imagine when they think about freedom. Warm wind, blue water, white sails and another Greek island somewhere ahead.

The photograph tells the truth.

It just doesn’t tell all of it.

Arriving Already Tired

The sailing isn’t what exhausted me. By the time we arrived in Greece I was already tired. The girls and I had just come from Lima after spending weeks trying to finish the house before the first guests arrived. Builders appeared when they weren’t expected. Others didn’t appear when they said they would. Deliveries turned up incomplete, invoices needed checking, beds had to be assembled, smoke alarms installed and every hour seemed to bring another decision that couldn’t wait until tomorrow.

At the same time there was Kyrgyzstan.

Or perhaps there wasn’t.

I’d trained for that expedition, planned it, thought about it and mentally left long before we should have boarded the plane. Then it disappeared. I’ve noticed that cancelled expeditions don’t return the energy you’ve invested in them. The body seems to prepare anyway.

From Lima we had half a day in Malmö before flying south.

So yes.

I really am living the dream.

I’m also tired.

Becoming a Beginner Again

Five days ago I’d never sailed.

That still sounds odd.

I’ve spent most of my adult life travelling through places where weather decides almost everything, yet somehow I’d reached sixty-four without ever learning how a sailboat actually works. I still don’t know the names of half the ropes on this old Australian boat, but I’m learning. The boat usually tells me when I’ve made a mistake. If she doesn’t, Yaniv does.

He’s exactly the sort of captain I’d hoped to learn from. Calm, patient and generous with his knowledge. He also has an impressive collection of stories about what happens when people ignore small mistakes.

Familiar Water

What has surprised me isn’t how different sailing feels.

It’s how familiar it feels.

The first longer period I spent at the helm I suddenly found myself thinking about Greenland. That’s exactly what you do on the ice cap. You choose a point on the horizon and stay with it. The wind speaks there too. Only in another language. On Greenland it speaks through snow and sastrugi. Here it speaks through the sails, the waves and the movement of the boat beneath your feet.

The similarities keep appearing. Waiting for weather feels familiar. Carrying your home with you feels familiar. Repairing things because something always breaks feels familiar. I found myself thinking about my friend Lonnie Dupre, who’s in Greenland right now. Over the years he’s travelled there by dogsled, kayak and now by sailboat. Fridtjof Nansen moved naturally between skis and ships more than a century ago. None of them seemed particularly surprised by changing from one to the other.

The Old Australian Girl

The biggest surprise has been the boat herself.

I hadn’t expected to become so fond of this old Australian girl after only a few days. She creaks when you walk across the floor. The doors have their own voices. The wood moves. You hear the sea through the hull and feel every change in the wind before anyone says a word. Around us are beautiful modern yachts with every imaginable comfort. They’re impressive and I’m sure they do many things better than this one.

I’d still rather be here.

Learning the Helm

Steering has become my favourite part of the day. Every now and then everything comes together. The sails are trimmed properly, the wind settles, the boat suddenly feels lighter and quieter, and for a few minutes she seems to move almost effortlessly. Then I make a mistake, the speed drops, Yaniv quietly points out what I’ve missed and we begin again. I don’t mind that at all. Learning something completely new at sixty-four is far more enjoyable than I expected.

Waiting for the Wind

The Meltemi has kept us in harbour for the last couple of days. Nobody argues with thirty knots of wind. You wait. You drink coffee. You study forecasts that haven’t changed since the last time you looked at them. Waiting has always been part of travelling. I’ve waited for weather on glaciers, rivers, deserts and mountain passes. This doesn’t feel any different.

Three Beginners

The nicest surprise of the week has probably been sharing all this with Eva and Dana. We’re all beginners. Usually I’m expected to know what comes next. Out here we’re all learning together. We all make mistakes. We all ask the same questions.

Looking Towards the Horizon

Another thing has caught me by surprise. Whenever we’re sailing I rarely find myself looking towards the next harbour. My eyes keep drifting towards the horizon instead. I don’t know exactly why. Perhaps because I’ve never been particularly interested in arriving somewhere. The interesting part has always been the stretch in between, where plans begin to change and you have to pay attention. Marinas don’t attract me very much. Too many boats, too many people and too much noise. Out on the water it’s different. Sometimes there’s nothing except the sound of the hull moving through the sea, the wind in the sails and the girls somewhere nearby.

Mind you, this is only day five.

Ask me again next weekend.

Photocopyright Sofie Rørdam

The Night in the Teepee

Years ago, when I lived in Särna, I tried a version of this without really knowing it was a version of this. I took executive groups out into the mountains and let them sleep in a kåta, a reindeer herder’s tent. We had a local chef who came out and cooked proper food from the area, really good food, the sort of food that makes sense in that landscape, and then night came, smoke, cold, darkness, snow maybe, and suddenly all the titles and money and business language were not much help. They had brought the wrong gear, of course. Too thin sleeping bags, wrong clothes, no real understanding of what cold does during a long night. So they froze their butts off.

For me it was as usual. I have slept more than five thousand nights in a tent. I know the sounds, the small discomforts, the way cold finds its way in at four in the morning, the way you wait for light. But for them it was something else. In the morning some of them looked as if they had been away for a week, not one night. More than one said it had changed something. Not because suffering is noble, because most of the time it is just suffering, but because one night outside their ordinary lives had given them a different view of those lives. That interested me. I liked hosting them. I liked taking people out and showing them that another way of living exists, even if only for a night. Then that stopped. Divorce. Life does that.

Forty Years of Leaving

I have spent most of my adult life going away. That is what people know me for. I disappear somewhere, sometimes for months, and if things go well I come back with a film, a lecture, a story, maybe a book, often tired eyes, sometimes frostbite, always new friends and another country sitting somewhere inside me. Siberia, Yemen, Patagonia, Greenland, the Kolyma, the icecap, deserts, rivers, villages, tents, borders, mistakes. I have spent forty years trying to show people the world by leaving home.

Lima Basecamp is a strange reversal of that. I am still travelling, I am writing this while on the road toward Greece, and I have no intention of stopping. This is not a final chapter. I hate that idea. But it is different. Instead of always asking people to follow a story out into the world, I am building a place where they can come into mine.

Not Lima in Peru

Lima is not random. Not Lima in Peru, but Lima in Dalarna, along Västerdalälven, where my mother grew up. The house belonged to my aunt. When she was in care, I started coming back there with the girls, and we skied, walked, spent time there in winter and summer, and slowly I realised the place had begun to matter again. My brother asked if I wanted to take it over, and by then I already knew the answer. My mother came from there. My aunt lived there. My daughters had started making their own memories there. It was not just a house anymore.

DALARNA

Every time I pass Västerdalälven, something happens. I grew up along that river, and I suppose people who have grown up along a river understand this without needing a long explanation. Once, on the way up, I sent a photo of Västerdalälven to Johan, a friend of mine, former professional footballer and now Dana’s trainer. He answered in capital letters: DALARNA. That was it. That was the whole explanation.

Three Nights, At Least

So now I am building Lima Basecamp. I still do not fully know how to run it, and I will need someone good to manage it when I am away, because I am away a lot. The girls have school. Life is complicated, money is complicated, old houses are complicated. But I know what I do not want. I do not want a one-night stopover because everything closer to Sälen was full. I do not want people arriving late, sleeping, leaving early and never noticing where they were. I think three nights is the minimum. Otherwise you have not arrived.

I want people to come in and feel warmth first. Then the view. The kitchen. The balcony. The windows open. The stone island. The wood. The sauna. The beds. The sense that somebody has thought about how it feels to come back after a day outside. It should be comfortable, even a bit luxurious, but not in a silly way. You should be able to hang wet clothes, cook properly, sleep well, sit down, breathe out, wake up and want to go outside again.

Not a Museum

There will be traces of my life there, of course. Yemen, Patagonia, Siberia, Greenland. A room, a photograph, a detail, maybe a map, something from the places that shaped me. But not a museum. I do not want guests walking around as if they have entered a shrine to my expeditions. That would be awful. I want them to feel they have entered a good house made by someone who has been cold, tired, hungry, amazed, lost, helped and happy in many parts of the world.

The guests I imagine are not only one kind of people. Couples, yes. A love nest, why not. Small families. People who want to ski, downhill or cross-country. People training for Vasaloppet. People who want to walk, cycle, sit by the river, write, film, think, or disappear from their ordinary routines for a while. Creative people. Tired people. People who have enough money to choose a place because they actually want to be there, not because it was the cheapest bed left. People who want comfort, but not emptiness. People who want a house with a bit of soul.

Taking People Out

And for some of them, the house can be the beginning. I can take people out. That is the part I understand best. A forest walk around Lima. Bullberget for the view. A winter day on the mountain. Cross-country skiing. Downhill skiing nearby. Dog sledding if it can be arranged. Snowmobile tours for those who want that. Or something longer, three, four, five, six days of expedition training toward the mountains, summer or winter. Not as a fake adventure package. Not as me standing there playing the great explorer. Just going out, letting the weather and the place decide some of it, telling stories when they belong, sharing what I know when it is useful.

I have been to over 120 countries, I think, though I still need to sit down and count properly. Forty years of expeditions gives a person plenty of stories, but also plenty of mistakes. And mistakes are often more useful than success. I want people to feel more comfortable outside. In forest, snow, wind, on skis, in a tent, on a mountain.

For Eva and Dana

The house is also for Eva and Dana, whether they understand that fully now or not. Their grandmother grew up here. Their great-aunt lived here. They have skied here, laughed here, slept here, complained here, probably been bored here too, which is also part of it. Maybe they can learn something from the business. How to host. How to take responsibility. How money comes in and disappears again. How much work there is behind something that looks simple from the outside.

What If Nobody Cares?

Of course I am afraid. What if nobody cares? What if I have run my course? What if people no longer want what I have to offer? What if the house stands there, beautiful and empty, while I am somewhere else pretending I am not worried? That is possible. It would be stupid to pretend otherwise.

But I would rather try to build something that means something than create another anonymous rental house with nice photos, white sheets, ten adjectives and no soul. Airbnb may be the platform. The house has to be something else. It has to be a house near Västerdalälven where people arrive and stay long enough to notice where they are.

A Canoe, Or a Boat

And as soon as possible I need to get a canoe. Or a boat. Because Västerdalälven is there.

It’s three o’clock in the morning.

You two are still asleep upstairs. At least I hope you are. I can hear the little stream below the house, the birds have already started their morning concert and I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee that’s gone cold because I forgot to drink it. I should really get up and do my morning exercises, but somehow this morning feels too good to interrupt.

It’s funny where your thoughts end up when nobody else is awake.

When I first started coming back to Lima after Dagmar had moved into the care home, I thought I was bringing you here so you could see where part of our family came from. The house wasn’t much to boast about back then. Sometimes there wasn’t even any water. Hot showers certainly weren’t part of the experience. I don’t think either of you came because the house was comfortable.

You came because we came.

Now I look around and almost have to laugh. The house have become a true paradise!

Dana, before anyone else has even opened their eyes you’ve reorganised the kitchen because, according to you, it makes more sense like this. You keep finding jobs that need doing. Cupboards. Shelves. Things that have annoyed me for days somehow stop being a problem because you’ve quietly sorted them out. I honestly have no idea where you learned that because it certainly wasn’t from me. Give me something practical and my first reaction is stress. Yours seems to be curiosity.

Eva, you’re different. Thank goodness for that. You disappear with a book for a while, then suddenly you’re back in the middle of everything again. You still tell me you’re shy and socially awkward, usually while smiling. After everything you’ve gone through with your eyes and your arthritis, I don’t think you even realise how tough you’ve become.

The lovely thing is that neither of you seems to think very much about any of this. You’re simply making this place yours. And I’ve been thinking about Dagmar while we’ve been here.

She spent almost her whole life on this property. First helping on the farm, later working at the elderly home. She could talk longer than anyone I’ve ever met. Sometimes we honestly wondered how she found time to breathe. And if you visited, you always got pork chops with brown gravy and potatoes, followed by apple pie with vanilla sauce. Every single time. Looking back, I suspect she simply thought:

“If this is the nicest meal I know how to cook, why would I serve my family anything else?”

I wish you’d known her as adults. You’d have loved her.

Every evening we’ve ended up in the sauna. Years ago you both hated saunas. Now we sit there talking until someone notices it’s getting late. About football. About school. About the sailing that’s waiting for us. About nothing in particular. Nobody reaches for a phone. Nobody seems to want the evening to end.

A few days ago someone told me that people have been driving past just to look at the house. I wasn’t quite sure what to think. If I’m honest, I expected a few sour comments. Instead people stop us in the supermarket or in Sälen just to say they’re happy for us. They ask about you. They remember old expeditions I’d almost forgotten myself.

That surprised me.

For most of my life I never thought much about roots. Home was wherever I happened to pitch my tent. Chile. Siberia. Yemen. Greenland. It never seemed to matter because I always knew I’d leave again.

Now I’m not so sure. Not because of this house. Because of the two of you.

One day you’ll probably come here without me. Maybe with your own families. Maybe alone. Maybe just because you need a few quiet days listening to the stream, sitting in the sauna or watching the forest from the balcony with a cup of coffee that’s gone cold.

I hope you do.

Sometimes, while you’re both asleep upstairs, I imagine Dagmar walking out onto this balcony. I don’t think she’d say very much at first. That alone would have been remarkable. She’d look around. Shake her head. Smile. Then she’d ask:

“Is this really true?”

“Yes,” I’d tell her.

“It is.”

“And don’t worry. We’re looking after your place.”

The last north

By the time I cross into Canada, the journey has already lasted long enough to stop feeling like something I am doing and start feeling like something that is doing me. I wake up, check the weather, check the water, check the bicycle, check the body, and then continue. That is the rhythm now. Not romantic, not heroic. Just necessary.

Behind me are Chile, the long deserts, the Andes, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, the Darién Gap, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States. What once sounded impossible has become a line of places already survived.

Now there is only the last north left.

Canada. Alaska.

It should feel simple. It doesn’t. The closer I come to the end, the more difficult the goal becomes to carry. Alaska is no longer just a word beyond the horizon. It is beginning to exist.

Indian reserves and the pea-green lake

The signs begin soon after I leave the tourist road from Squamish and turn north onto the rain-heavy gravel.

“Indian Reserve. Private land. You enter at your own risk.”

The signs are hostile, but the faces I meet are not. In every small village I am greeted by smiles from strong, red-coloured faces. Still, the villages unsettle me. The houses are often simple wooden structures. The surroundings are neglected. Outside too many homes stands an old wreck of a car, rusting in the mud.

I also notice my own disappointment, and it embarrasses me. Some childish European part of me had expected something out of books and films: moccasins, feather headdresses, wigwams. Instead I meet people in Western clothes, surrounded by the same broken modern objects as everywhere else, but with less protection around them.

A thick fog lies over the forest. Rain falls hard. The road slowly becomes grey-brown mud. After two easy weeks in Seattle and Vancouver, my body is not ready. Mile after mile I push the heavy bicycle up a brutal climb. I had not expected a climb like this in Canada. Mentally I am unprepared, and that is always when the body suffers most. I push, curse, stop, push again.

Then the rain breaks.

The fog gives way to sunlight. A hole opens in the cloud cover, and in that opening the mountains appear, green and enormous. Waterfalls drop from the heights with a roar, crashing down toward the pea-green surface of Duffy Lake. I follow them upward with my eyes and see them end near the beginning of snow-covered peaks, half hidden by rain-heavy clouds.

For a moment I forget my exhaustion.

Then something crashes in the forest beside me. A large black bear lands with a heavy thump only a few metres away on the muddy road. It rolls playfully in the puddles before it discovers me standing frozen with my bicycle. The bear looks at me. I look at the bear. Then panic takes both of us in different directions. It bolts into the forest, and I get away with more power than I thought I had left.

Fame on the road

In Williams Lake I try to disappear in front of the town hall. I am lying low, partly to rest, partly to avoid a group of drunk Indigenous men outside one of the big stores who have just accused me of being homosexual. The last thing I want that day is more attention.

But attention is starting to catch up with me anyway.

“Mike the Bike! You’re famous!”

It is because of Victor, the talkative Swiss cyclist who has moved south through the same road system like a travelling newspaper. Victor has told every cyclist he has met about me. According to him, I have become some kind of half-mad road hero, a man who flies up hills and cycles twice as fast as everyone else. The truth has been embroidered until it no longer needs me.

I look down at myself when I hear the name. Dirty clothes. Tired body. A bicycle and equipment held together by repair and stubbornness. If this is fame, then fame smells bad.

Victor has also tied a red cloth to his bicycle, partly as a warning flag and partly, I suspect, because he likes the drama of being seen. I try to explain that the Cassiar Highway is not a stage. It is a narrow, silent corridor through bear country. A bicycle dumped in the ditch does not look like a vehicle to a grizzly. It looks like something worth investigating.

High in a tree above me sits a bald eagle, the national bird of the country I have just left. With sharp eyes it follows the road, as if even the birds have decided to inspect my progress north.

A man with golden hair

Outside the village of Kitwancool, the whole scene turns absurd.

“Here comes our messenger! Hallelujah!”

A rasping voice shouts it before I understand that it is aimed at me. A crowd meets us at the edge of the village, excited and almost intoxicated. A wrinkled old man with a wild smile grabs my arm and holds on as if he has found something valuable. The others stare at me with the careful attention of people examining a horse before buying it.

Dave and Martha Reynolds, the Oregon couple I have met on the road, are ignored. So are the totem poles, which are the reason we came to the village in the first place. The only thing that seems to matter is my hair.

The old man announces that in the old stories from this village, a man with golden hair is supposed to appear on this very day. A saviour for them all.

I try to pull away from the centre of attention and sneak toward a group of Indigenous people standing at the edge of the spectacle. They are doing their best not to laugh. I try to explain that I am no saviour, no messenger, nothing of the kind, but I am not allowed to finish.

“Come in and share our table, my son,” the old man says, and pulls me toward a beautiful white church.

Inside, a long table is covered with food. Dave and Martha look at me with red faces after a day of cycling in the sun. They know enough of Victor’s stories to understand how this misunderstanding has grown legs. The first time they met Victor, he had entertained them with his version of my abilities. He claimed I cycled twice as fast as others and attacked hills like a lunatic. That story came from a hill where I had finally grown so tired of Victor’s endless warnings about cycling without a helmet that I rode full speed just to get away from his voice. Victor cracked on that same climb and had to rest for a long time. From that, a myth had been born.

Now I sit in a church, apparently sent by God.

I eat. That is the part of the situation I understand.

At one point I take an elk sausage during the serving, more than I should have. The old chief sees it, smiles, and does exactly the same. He winks with his good eye, as if to say: take what you can while it is there.

Later I ask Dave and Martha what finally made the believers stop believing I was sent from above.

Dave thinks for a while.

“Probably a combination of things,” he says. “But the decisive moment was when you took your sixth portion of salmon and elk sausage. And then your thank-you speech had a few too many swear words.”

They start laughing, and I laugh too.

It is good to be human again.

Majestic beauty

After Prince George the road turns west, and the mountains begin to dominate everything. Ranges with white-shimmering peaks stand in every direction. The road toward Stewart and Hyder, at Alaska’s southern tip, surpasses everything I have seen so far in Canada.

Grey-brown cliffs rise into the sky, their tops crowned by glaciers that glitter in the sun. At the base of the rock lies emerald-green forest. Waterfalls drop from high ice and end in small dark tarns at the foot of the mountains. Along one side of the road a river runs, bordered by purple flowers. On the other side grow white-yellow meadow flowers. In my nearest field of vision I can distinguish six separate glaciers.

On one side of the road a brown glacier lake spreads out. Small ice floes drift across it. At the far end, the blue tongue of Bear Glacier stretches down into the water. The tongue is made up of millions of blue cones, cut by deep cracks, crawling up the grey-brown mountain until it ends near the top. A peaceful cloud hangs above it.

I hear no angels singing, so I understand that the experience is real.

Getting Hyderized

On the outer door of the bar in Hyder, someone has painted the words:

“Get Hyderized.”

I look carefully inside. The walls are decorated with dollar bills, gold pans and shovels. Outside stand rough motorcycles, and Martha has already decided the place does not look like the friendliest bar on earth.

We step into a cloud of bad tobacco. Five of the seven tables are occupied by the motorcycle owners, some of the strongest men I have ever seen. They wear heavy boots and forest shirts. Their beards are untrimmed, and when they notice our cycling clothes they look at us with slow contempt. We clearly do not belong to Hyder’s normal population of five families, nor to the steady stream of visitors to the three bars that stay open all day and night.

Dave and Martha want to get Hyderized. This means swallowing a not especially small dose of 95-percent homemade grain alcohol without taking your mouth away from the glass.

Because I cannot drink, I walk over to the jukebox. It is full of country music. The only non-country song I can find is by the Swedish hard rock band Europe. I press the button and return to the bar.

Dave is just about to swallow his chance at becoming Hyderized when Europe starts playing. He stops, loses his rhythm, spills the liquor down through his beard and onto his shirt, and turns on me with real anger.

“Are you insane? Do you want to start a fight in here?”

The woodsmen stare at us with even more contempt. During our short stay they seem to suffer every time Europe’s song plays. I play it five times in a row.

Mighty Moe and Swede Johnson Creek

Mighty Moe is a small wrinkled old man with a glitter in his eye, as old as sin, according to himself. His cabin is crowded with postcards from every corner of the world, snowshoes, guns, knives and traps. A coffee pot wheezes loudly on an ancient wood stove.

“My father told me about Swedes,” he says. “Quiet, tough, good workers. But I must say, they seemed a little crazy.”

In winter he traps. In summer he fleeces dollar-heavy tourists, as he puts it, and that barely requires work at all. His place lies near the Cassiar Highway, which I have followed for days without seeing a single person. Now and then large mobile homes pass in comfort, but mostly the world is dry conifer forest, some of it black after fire.

Calling the Cassiar Highway only a road is wrong. It is a corridor through snow-covered mountains, volcanoes, rivers, lakes and forests that surpass much of what I have seen.

Every little creek has a name sign. One of them says Swede Johnson Creek.

Who was that? I ask Mighty Moe before he drifts into sleep in the corner.

“Probably some crazy Swede who found gold,” he mutters. “But that was then. You Swedes are not as wild and adventurous now.”

Then he falls asleep.

The A-team and harmony

At Dease Lake I can see the lake to the south and the Cassiar Mountains to the northwest. In front of my feet lie two Indigenous men almost naked, snoring heavily in a drunken sleep. I open a carton of milk and immediately smell old sourness. The date tells me it is eight days too old.

Inside the shop, owned by a young Indigenous woman, I try to explain politely that the milk cannot be drunk. I feel embarrassed because it seems I do nothing but complain. She smells the carton, looks unhappy, and puts it back into the fridge. When I protest, she tells me the men outside drink and eat anything, steal, lie, and that half the village is banned from the shop.

I go back into the sun. On a bench at the edge of the village the local A-team has taken its place. Their faces show years of alcohol abuse. Some faces are no longer faces, only swellings.

The contrast wounds me. Every day I meet porcupines, frightened black bears and enormous moose, all belonging naturally to the surrounding greatness. Then a village appears from a distance, often beautiful, until I reach its edges and centre and the bitterness fills my mouth. Whenever the gap between the landscape and human damage becomes too large, the road stops being beautiful.

It gives me shame for my white skin.

In Latin America, even under oppression, I had often felt cultural pride among Indigenous people. Here, in the villages along the road, I struggle to see it. Yet I also know this: I have rarely felt the same happiness among people from my own society as I have felt among many people closer to nature, less damaged by our version of civilisation.

It is not a clean thought. Nothing here is clean.

Two inhabitants digging for gold

The village sign is almost unreadable. One half has been shot away, the other is full of bullet holes. The place seems nearly collapsed. When I examine the sign more closely, I can make out the faded word “Population”. The number 85 has been crossed out. Beside it, someone has written the number 2.

The Swift River passes below the village, beautiful and clear, but I do not dare drink from it. After the Alaska Highway in the Yukon, every creek and watercourse is considered contaminated by Beaver Fever, and Beaver Fever has hit me. I vomit every day. Thirst is no longer simple.

I roll slowly downhill into the village, hoping its two inhabitants will be able to give me drinkable water. Only one cabin seems to have a whole window, so I turn toward it. On the door is a sign:

“We are out digging gold. Trespassers warned.”

Every other letter is red, every other black. The whole sign is surrounded by bullet holes.

I leave without water.

The man from Illinois

A home-built motorhome stands by the side of the road. Beside it stands the fattest man I have ever seen. His feet are pushed into boots, his face is burning red, and he looks as if he might have been born inside that vehicle and never really left it.

I am still shaken by a near crash and badly need to tell someone.

“Do you know what happened? I almost crashed…”

He cuts me off as if my story is the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard.

“I just visited my brother,” he says. “He’s a trapper up in northern Alaska. Haven’t seen him in forty-six years, understand?”

I try again.

“But don’t you understand what almost happened…”

He interrupts me again.

“I’m from Illinois. Forty-six years, kid. Can you imagine? My brother was as fat as me. Like an oil barrel.”

He pats his enormous stomach affectionately. Then, surprisingly fast for such a large man, he jumps into the car and tears off toward Illinois.

My near-death experience remains untold.

Dave and Martha help

In Haines Junction I meet Dave and Martha again. They bring light into my sick and tired existence.

Martha asks if solitude helped. If I managed to cure the sickness by being alone.

I had left them after Hyder because, as in Mexico, I wanted to cure myself with loneliness. I had carried this idea for a long time: that empty nature could burn sickness out of the body and confusion out of the mind.

Now I have to answer honestly.

No. Not a bit.

Right now it feels just as important to share the experience with someone as it does to prove my desert theory. The theory suddenly feels too proud. I want home. I want the sorrow-free Sweden I imagine from the road, even though I know that place does not really exist.

The closer I come to Alaska, the less heroic I feel. I am not being purified. I am still sick. I still need people.

Mike the Bike

In Alaska, the name catches up with me again.

A young cyclist asks if I am Mike the Bike. Without taking my eyes from the panorama to the south, I nod. The nickname was given to me by Torkel in Guatemala, and Victor unfortunately heard it when the three of us shared a roof in San Francisco. Since then, Victor’s lyrical reports about my journey have travelled faster than I have.

Every time I hear the name, I look at my miserable outfit, my battered body, my worn equipment, and answer irritably that yes, I am Mike the Bike.

When the questions finally end, I return to silence on the bank of the Delta River. To the south, the Alaska Range shines. Its icy points stand in the sky like precious stones, and the sunlight gilds them more every minute.

Inside me, a stubborn fight begins between sorrow and joy. Dave and Martha have gone home. I have reached what I came for. Then the question returns.

What do I do now?

It feels as if I have fulfilled a dream too early in life. Where do you steer your steps after that?

A glittering blue-white diamond

The plane turns north toward the North Pole and Sweden. Far below me, above the tundra, a glittering blue-white diamond rises into the sky. Mount McKinley appears, free from cloud.

Half the time in Alaska and northern Canada I have cycled in pouring rain and thick fog. The rest of the time I have hidden in the tent, trembling from cold, eating the contents of some rusty can and trying to keep my body together. But now the mountain is beneath me, visible and enormous.

Long ago in Chile, after I had climbed up onto the highlands, I could see Aconcagua below me, South America’s highest mountain. Now, near the end, I see Mount McKinley, North America’s highest.

Can that be a sign?

I don’t know.

I only know this is the last part of the Chile-to-Alaska journey that I am publishing in this Substack run. The line I had been following across the Americas has reached the place it was aimed at.

Below the plane, Mount McKinley shines over the tundra. I look down at it and wait for the triumph I had imagined as a younger man, but it does not arrive in that simple form.

A dream has been fulfilled.

Yesterday Morning

Yesterday morning I didn’t write diary. I didn’t do the back exercises either. No yoga, no McGill, no stretching, nothing. I sat there with the phone, jumping between messages from Kyrgyzstan, SVT, Alex, Alina, Ulan, the girls, tickets, horses, money and all the other shit that suddenly had nowhere to go. I almost never miss the diary unless I am actually leaving for a journey and the day has already passed by, but this was just a normal morning in Malmö, or it should have been. I felt guilty immediately, but more than that I felt bad in the body. The back started to ache, I didn’t rest properly during the day, I kept checking messages, moving between problems, opening the same things again and again as if they would have changed in the five minutes since I last looked. Chaos for me is rarely screaming or throwing things. It is the head jumping from one unfinished thing to another until there is no ground under anything.

I don’t think I have slept properly since I came back from Iceland. Almost a month now. The last three weeks it has been that old feeling again, the one before big journeys, the one I have never found a good name for. Travel anxiety maybe, but that sounds wrong, because I am not afraid of the travelling itself. I am not afraid of Kyrgyzstan. I love Kyrgyzstan. It is one of those places that has given me people, landscapes, trouble, warmth, mistakes, and a sense that life is still wide open. The anxiety is everything before. The tickets, equipment, horses, girls, film, visas, people, money, routes, packing, food, cameras, all of it. A trip like this does not start when you stand at the airport with a bag. It starts at three or four in the morning when the body still wants to sleep and the head is already in At-Bashy, Naryn, Bishkek, some village where we may or may not find bread, or in a message from a man with horses who has begun to prepare because you may come.

Before the Journey

That part of it I still love. Not the admin, not paperwork, not the endless modern bullshit with visas and funders and bank rules, but the real planning. Creating something from nothing. A place on a map, a thought, a line that first looks impossible, and then you begin to read, ask, listen, change, ask again, and the place gets people, prices, roads, animals, weather, risk, food, names. I planned interrail journeys like this when I was young. Which train, which city, where to sleep, what to see, how to make very little money last longer than it should. Later the maps became bigger and the consequences harder, but the pleasure was the same. Desert, ice, rivers, mountains, horses, bad roads, kitchens, misunderstandings, somebody’s cousin who knows somebody who might be able to help.

This time it was Kyrgyzstan again. We had started to pack. We had ordered things. The girls were part of it. Dana was ready, really ready, and now she is disappointed and irritated. Eva was more fifty-fifty, more open to Lima, and now I think she feels relief. That is also true. It is rarely clean with children, and it is not supposed to be. For me this was never only a film idea, which is where it gets complicated. SVT felt it came too close to the cycling film, and maybe it did. The cycling film has not even properly landed yet. It will be on SVT Play on the 27th of September and on Swedish television on the 1st of October, and before that story has even met the public we had already begun pushing the next father-daughter journey into the world. I can see the problem. I could probably see it before they said it. Still, when it came, it was fifty percent expected and fifty percent disappointment, which is often the most irritating kind, because you cannot even be properly shocked.

Alex the producer has another idea now. Based on what I have told him I saw as the main theme, it is now more about identity, and intellectually I can see something in it. I can sit at a table and understand why a producer would think there is a film there. But emotionally neither I nor the girls feel it is us right now. For them the point was the journey. I think it was for me too. Horses, movement, family adventure, drama that comes from doing something and not knowing exactly what will happen. The girls don’t see the point of going somewhere just to be around an idea. They are soon 14 and 16, not middle-aged filmmakers sitting around trying to understand themes. They wanted to live it.

What Disappeared

What disappeared was not really Kyrgyzstan as a country. I have been there. We had a fantastic trip there last year, and even with the money I will lose now, it was worth it. What disappeared was the time with Eva and Dana in that simple expedition life, the part where we are away from school, phones, football, shopping, the normal patterns, and something else happens to them. Eva questions me differently out there. She is more alive in the situation, more involved, and when she challenges me it is not just teenage resistance, it is often because she has seen something I have missed. She can sit through a whole conversation and then say one sentence that makes the adult discussion look overcomplicated and sometimes a little stupid. Dana changes in another way. In Kyrgyzstan last year, after the difficult horse situation with Alina, when people were tired and hurt and felt unseen, Dana was the one who tried to make people talk properly again. She becomes a bridge between people out there. At home she is also kind, of course, but home is football, school, food, routines. On expedition there is more at stake and less noise to hide behind.

And they are almost 14 and 16. In a few years Eva will have her own life, and Dana already has football pulling hard at her. She has trained four times a week for almost a year, with matches on top of that, sometimes two, and she is still only 13. She needed a break. With Kyrgyzstan gone, that still has to happen somehow. Three weeks is probably what is normally accepted in football, but we will take four if we can, because I can see she needs it. I wanted to give them weeks with horses, walking, people, tired evenings, food, conversations and all the strange things that happen when a family has to work together outside normal life. I don’t have endless summers left with them like this.

The Stupid Practical Part

Then came the stupid practical part. Yesterday I wrote to people to say we were not coming. One answer was sad, another angry, another had that feeling of having been overlooked. A few people are now asking for money because they had spent time and money preparing. Ulan had held horses for us and fed them so they would be strong if we came. That is not nothing. He has his horses, his costs, his work, his pride. I don’t blame him for being angry. Alina had also put herself into this, not just as DOP, but as someone who knows the place, the language, the people and all the moods around a project like this. By then it was no longer only my idea. And now I sit in Malmö trying to explain why we are not coming, while also trying to understand how to compensate people fairly when even sending money to Kyrgyzstan can become another problem because banks don’t like it. This is also expedition life, but nobody wants to photograph it.

A relationship has also ended. I don’t want to make this into that story, because it is not, but endings take space whether one wants them to or not. I don’t believe everything has to be processed by stopping life and sitting in a chair until wisdom arrives. Work continues. Children need food. Films need finishing. Horses need answers. But the body keeps count, and maybe the body has been counting for a while now. Iceland, bad sleep, Kyrgyzstan, SVT, money, Lima, Aconcagua, Defender X, Dana’s football, Eva’s school, the film, all of it moving at once. I don’t feel physically tired. It is not that. I feel mentally run over.

I overate too, if overeating skyr counts as a collapse, which it does for me because I know exactly what it means. Half a kilo before bed. It was not a disaster, but it was the same old pattern. Bad sleep, anxiety, no direction for a few hours, and then food gives a short relief. It helps for a moment and then it doesn’t. I had probably eaten a bit more lately because some part of me believed I would soon be working hard with horses and walking in the mountains. Before Greenland I once put on far too much weight because the body and head thought they were preparing for survival. This time it is one or two kilos, not eighteen, and I am still on top of it.

The Old Collapses

When I was younger, a thing like this could have destroyed me. Losing money felt like disaster. Losing a project felt like the end of everything. Now it is different. I have had bigger collapses. Greenland, when I fell, got a concussion, lost equipment and lost professional credibility, that was hard. It took maybe two years to come back from that properly. I got it back when I crossed the ice, but it hurt. Another time I had planned to travel by camel from Oman to Mauritania. A huge idea. It fell apart during a chaotic time in my life when everything was more survival than it is today. But that collapse became Yemen. And Yemen gave me the mother of my daughters.

At 64 I don’t feel I have much left to prove. Less than ever. I just want to continue this life because I love it, because I know no other life and because I don’t want another life. I like that a journey gives me a reason to write to a man with horses in At-Bashy, to sit in Malmö and worry about bread in a village I have not reached yet, to wonder if fuel can be found in Naryn, to have friends in places where most Swedes have never been and probably will never go. I like that Yemen, Siberia, Greenland, Patagonia and Kyrgyzstan are not just names to me, but faces, kitchens, bad roads, misunderstandings, generosity, shame, laughter, cold rooms, warm tea, people who have fed me when I had no right to expect it. I have more trips now than ever, which is odd at my age, but there it is. Defender X, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Kilimanjaro, Iceland, Aconcagua ahead, Lima ahead, another Defender X. Too much sometimes, obviously. My sleep says so.

The Next Map

So I did what I always do. I started planning again. I went to the gym, and between sets I began building the next map. Aconcagua in January. Defender X. Lima. Training. Food. The summer. It sounds ridiculous, but it helped immediately. The danger for me is not failure. It is no direction. Give me a table, a route, a plan, something to work toward, and I begin to breathe better. I don’t know if that is discipline or just a way to survive myself.

The oddest part is Lima. If someone had told the 25-year-old me that one day I would be happy to spend a summer building a house instead of disappearing into some wilderness, I would have seen it as failure. I would have thought I had become old, finished, domesticated, whatever stupid word I would have used then. But now Lima feels like a real adventure. A basecamp. A place for the girls, maybe for their future, maybe for me later, maybe not. I don’t know. I am not closing anything. I am still open for everything. But the idea of building something with my hands, working hard, cycling, running, being with the girls, making a place out of nothing, gives me the same feeling as planning a journey. Not the same landscape, but the same work inside.

So now it is Lima. Tables, food plans, training, house work, cycling, running, Aconcagua somewhere ahead. Yesterday Kyrgyzstan was still alive in my head. Today it is sawdust, bikes, invoices, food shopping, some kind of training plan and the same old attempt to get a life into order before it changes again.

Before Mexico

If you’ve followed this series from the beginning on Substack, you already know the rule of the road. It never stays the same for long. Chile taught me long distances and the first real loneliness. Peru and Ecuador taught me heat and altitude and that strange feeling of being too young to be this tired. Colombia gave me people, danger, and obsession. Panama and the Darién Gap smashed the romantic idea of adventure into mud, fear, disease, and the kind of exhaustion where a bicycle stops being a bicycle and becomes weight.

Then came the road north again: Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala. Bribes, borders, strange encounters, and a body constantly failing and then recovering just enough to keep moving. And now the map says the same thing it has said from the beginning: Mexico, then the United States, then Canada, then Alaska. On paper it looks clean. On the road it never is.

This is where Mexico begins.

Cascabel

There is a sound in the night that keeps returning, a dry rasple from the cactus-ringed darkness, and it hooks into my nerves. I blow out the candle flame, try to sleep, fail, and end up lying there listening, dragged backwards in my mind to Chile’s desert, to that familiar tension between beauty and threat. The night feels alive in a way cities never do. Not safer. Just more honest.

In the morning I can’t let it go. I call it out, half joking, half proud that I’ve caught it. A fisherman sits outside my tent with his family and listens the way you listen to a child describing something important.

“Giant ants, right?” I ask, confidently.

He studies me, then his family. Then the wide toothless grin arrives.

“Cascabel, señor.”

I go back into my open tent and dig out my dictionary like it’s going to save me. I find the word, and for a second I’m still smiling until I understand what it actually means, and something cold runs through me.

Rattlesnake.

I look up at the family. They smile like people do when they’ve seen this before, the foreigner who thinks he is clever right up until nature reminds him he isn’t.

The fisherman says, almost casually, that it might be best if I close the tent. I close it fast. The smile is gone.

El Campeón

Mexico doesn’t begin with a soft landing. It begins with speed, noise, and a road that feels made for everything except a cyclist. Tapachula’s approach is double-lane chaos, heavy American cars, engines competing like animals. When the light turns red, it doesn’t slow anything down, it turns the street into a race. The lane is too narrow, so I keep getting forced up onto the sidewalk to avoid a confrontation I cannot win.

And then, when I need attention the most, the kind of attention you only ever get as a long-distance cyclist, the brief crown you wear because you’re strange and visible and suffering, it comes.

A green park appears with trees and plants floating in a sea of vehicles. People sit everywhere. The closer I get, the more faces turn toward me. At first it is curiosity. Then surprise. Then applause, spontaneous, rising, followed by chanting.

“El Campeón! El Campeón!”

For a moment the pain and sickness and the cough and the kidneys and the liver all evaporate. Pride fills the body like a drug. I swing in toward an alley that suggests my chosen hotel is close. A group of lightly dressed women whistle and hand me smiles like gifts. I don’t see the pothole in time.

The bicycle stops dead. I fly over the handlebars.

I stand up to humiliating laughter, face burning, hero-glory gone in one second. That is how the road teaches. It gives you a crown and then it pushes you into the gutter to see if you can still stand up.

Playa Congrejo and Rosa’s Mirror

Not long after, the road offers the opposite of Tapachula. A village, shade, and a rhythm that feels like recovery. In Playa Congrejo the men are out fishing. What’s left in the village is women, children, dogs, and me. For three days I live inside a calm routine, as if the whole world has narrowed to one job, eat and drink enough to become human again.

I sit under a bamboo roof in the shade and look out over the sea. When hunger comes, it comes cleanly, not the sick hunger of fever, but the honest hunger of work. I begin to watch my urine like a scientist, waiting for the moment it turns clear, like a sign from the body. You can move again.

Someone tells me I should not be proud of looking the way I look. Rosa brings a small mirror, and I refuse at first because I don’t want to see it. Then I see it anyway. Cheeks torn up, lips cracked, blood in six places, eyes red from sun and fatigue. A face shaped by illness, carved by heat.

“More food would help,” I say, holding out my empty plate like a prayer.

Rosa takes it and disappears into the kitchen, the way she has been doing since I arrived, as if she has adopted me as a task. The oldest fisherman looks at me and delivers the final insult with a straight face.

“You look like me,” he says, “and I’m fifty-five years older than you.”

I am twenty-six. I feel dead.

And still, in that village, under that roof, with water and bread and fish, something in me becomes stubborn again.

A Mexican Cowboy on a Bicycle

A few hills outside Acapulco, in the desert heat, a short round man appears beside me like a joke from the road. He wears cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a cowboy suit, and rides a simple gearless bicycle with the same energy I’m riding with, as if he has decided we are brothers.

“Hello, life-enjoyer!” he shouts.

He talks nonstop, nudges me, almost pushes me off balance, laughs at his own lines, and then declares the day is hot like in a cow’s ass and roars with laughter. He thinks it’s hilarious. I don’t. I’m empty of humor. I increase the pace until it hurts. He hangs on anyway, for a while.

Then, as suddenly as he arrived, he fires off his goodbye, shoots forward, and disappears down the long straight road, swallowed by heat and dust and thorny bushes.

Later I see him again, broken by the roadside beside his rusty bicycle, drained by his attempt to impress the unfriendly gringo. He looks up at me with sad eyes. I throw his own line back at him, because now it feels true, and because it is the only language we share.

Yes. Today was hot like in a cow’s ass.

He takes off his hat and smiles, wide.

Acapulco: Rich and Poor

Acapulco shows me something I’m not prepared for. The richest hotels, the most expensive faces, the kind of polished luxury that almost feels unreal, and then, outside the walls, the normal Mexican life. Farmers, donkeys, fruit carts, filth. The rich suburbs collapse into poor housing as if someone turned a switch. It feels like cycling through a garbage station.

The smell reminds me of Lima in Peru. Urine, feces, exhaust, homemade liquor. The people look apathetic, emptied out, their eyes blank as they watch me grind up the hard hills around the metropolis. I’ve seen poverty before, everywhere on this route. But I have never seen a gap like this, not like this.

Sniffers, Fighting Spirit, and Solitude

By now punctures are not accidents, they are a daily language. On the ninth puncture of the day, I lose it. I scream into the heat, into the bushes, into myself. I grab the empty rear tire and throw it into a ravine with all the anger I have left.

Down there, black vultures have been following me like patients. They hope I will leave something behind, maybe the corpse of a horse, maybe my own. The ravine smells of death. I sit beside a dead horse and talk out loud to myself like a madman.

What is happening to me?

Then I answer myself, also out loud, because on this road you become two people. The one who breaks and the one who drags him forward.

Pull yourself together.

Night comes, and the map stops being stress. I look for water, for a place to sleep, and I slowly become one with darkness and stars and the light sea breeze. I remember the words of the mysterious woman in Tikal, the idea that solitude is necessary if you want to grow, and I hate that she might be right.

Baja California: Cactus, Cold, and Old Memories

In Baja the evenings turn surprisingly cold. My skin is goosebumped. The wind hits the tent hard and drowns out the frightened howling of an oasis guard dog. The night has the same sharp edge as the Atacama, and it pulls old memories up like bones.

After La Paz the rolling hills begin, Atacama-style, and the wind does its best to stop me. The difference is the landscape: here it is cactus everywhere, a thick swarm of them, and a long narrow tongue of land surrounded by sea. The danger is not only in people. It is also in the silence, in the dark, in all the things that move outside the tent without showing themselves.

Now the rattlesnake warning from earlier follows me differently. I close the tent properly at night. I listen more carefully. I am still tired enough to be stupid, but not stupid enough to invite a Culebra de Cascabel inside.

Hatred and Love

Somewhere up north in Baja, a man answers my polite request to camp and access water with pure hostility. Private land. Get out. It isn’t the first unfriendly answer I’ve gotten lately. The closer I get to the U.S. border, the stranger the atmosphere becomes. Mexicans, and thousands of Americans with summer houses, collide in a daily friction. It feels like a kind of hate-love between two nations.

Shops have two price systems: one for Americans and one for Mexicans. I quickly learn to declare my nationality, because no one has heard of Sweden anyway, and people assume I’m poor because I’m travelling by bicycle. Often young Mexicans sit with me and practice English and ask about the United States. Their disappointment is visible when they learn I’m Swedish. For them, the U.S. is the dreamland.

For me it has been a distant idea on the map, and now it is getting close enough to smell.

Tijuana: The World’s Dump

Tijuana hits like a slap. The shouting sellers compete with the roaring V8 engines. Everything is for sale. Everything can be bought. The city becomes my mental image of the United States and its cities. Skyscrapers, foul smells, hunted faces, impersonal humans, crime and violence, dirt everywhere.

I pay eight dollars for a room, and before I can even settle into the air of defeat, a prostituted, worn-out woman knocks on the door to offer her services. In that moment, with that smell, with that noise, I decide: this must be the world’s biggest garbage station.

It is hard not to feel disgust, not at her, but at the system that makes this feel normal.

The United States: Fear, Then Fascination

Crossing the border does not give me relief. It gives me panic. A kind of sickness, a reversal, an urge to flee back across the line to return to the simple and quiet Baja California. I did not expect to feel that.

But slowly fascination begins to creep in. Department stores overflowing with food. Houses and buildings that look like they come from another world. And then nature again, the Pacific, Highway 1, beauty so constant it becomes almost painful.

In the evenings, at the special campsites for cyclists, Americans appear like a parade, armed with the latest equipment. Among them are types who seem to have assigned themselves roles. Mr. Wiseguy who knows everything because his sister lives in Mongolia, and Mr. Weakling who, in honor of the day, has been allowed by his dominating wife to ride the least dangerous parts of Highway 1.

I watch them with a mix of irritation and reluctant amusement. In all this beauty, they still manage to bring noise.

San Francisco: A Shock and a Friend

San Francisco is a conglomerate of the United States I’ve experienced so far, bright, powerful, impressive, and full of cultures stacked on top of each other. There is a shimmer of greatness over the city, but also people who make me shake my head. I meet Stockholm’s Torkel Insulander again, someone I’ve spent time with in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Los Angeles, one of the dirtiest cities I’ve ever seen.

Torkel reminds me of a cactus. Hard on the outside, soft inside. He makes me laugh. He makes me understand why someone could feel drawn to a place like San Francisco even though it is a city.

Then the city delivers one more lesson in its own language. A man touches my ear, compliments my earring, and I react badly, shocked, irritated, wanting to be left alone. He answers with a grin: this is San Francisco. Relax.

I tell him I have nothing against homosexuality. I just want peace.

He laughs again. San Francisco, buddy.

And somehow that does explain a lot.

Chuck, The Seagull and Victor

Later, around a campfire on the Oregon coast, I sit with three people who carry their own roads inside them. Chuck, a Vietnam veteran who twists his prosthesis with his good hand; The Seagull, a woman in her fifties who has walked across the American continent; and Victor, a Swiss man who appears like so many travellers do, one evening, one fire, a few hours of talk that feel bigger than the time.

Chuck says he has seen society’s falseness during the years he’s been walking. He always returns to nature, because that is where he finds knowledge and strength. The longer north Highway 1 carries me, the closer I come to understanding Americans. Under the ignorance and the loudness, there can be an ordinary, decent human being. The trick is finding them in the crowd.

Victor suddenly breaks in and declares, in Swedish, that “Mike knows everything and knows most things.” I don’t know why he says it. I don’t know if it’s praise or provocation. Maybe both. Maybe that is also the road: people invent you as they go, and you have to carry their invention for a while.

Chief Red Bear and Frozen Fingers

In Oregon the cold is different from the south’s heat. Frost covers the ground like a thin veil. Fog moves toward the warmth. I freeze lightly, something I get used to after the abnormal heat further south, and I tell myself the sun will warm me at midday.

Then a voice roars in my ear.

“I’m Chief Red Bear!”

The voice belongs to a man dressed like an active-year woodsman, covered in silver coins and beads that hang down nearly to his nose. He declares the land around us as his. He insists on an Indian greeting. I reach out with the wrong hand, and he explodes, grabs my arm, shakes it violently, and storms into a shop.

He returns with three thick sandwiches and a glass of water and shouts “Here you go, knob-nose!” I can only nod thanks, too surprised to do anything else.

“Ungrateful bastard! Now I’m getting the gun!” he yells, and disappears again.

Before he returns, I pedal away.

In this country, there are so many confused people. So many sudden angels.

Tom’s Cottage and Mount Rainier

Tom’s small cottage is hidden behind rows of beautiful house façades. He has papers, seventy years old, that say he can live there. Outside the expensive houses sits Tom’s rusty Chevy from the sixties like a joke told by reality. Not a single window in the street is broken, neither on cars nor on houses.

Inside the house, there is a smell that isn’t rotten, just strange, personal. The rooms are piled with furniture and things, and to move from one room to another you have to shift objects aside. But if you have the strength to climb up to the roof, you understand why Tom stays. His cottage sits on a small hill, and you can see over the other houses.

And there, rising like a giant platform in a blue infinity, Mount Rainier stands, the volcano towering above everything, sparkling like a gemstone. From Tom’s roof it looks like a dream.

For a moment I forget the whole road behind me.

North, and what’s left

Mexico brought me back to adventure and back to nature, and also back to anger, sickness, and the thin line between pride and humiliation. The United States did not become what I expected. It frightened me first, then pulled me in with beauty, then confused me with its people, then fed me when I didn’t ask for it.

This is still the same journey we started in Chile: a bicycle, a body, and a mind that keeps changing shape as the continent changes shape.

Canada is ahead. Alaska is still the magnetic goal pulling me north. The mornings have started to taste colder, and for a long-distance cyclist that is a promise.

And I keep pedalling.

I sometimes think about the children I met in Patagonia. It was during the 1997 Patagonia expedition on horseback, one of those journeys where the landscape eventually stops being something you look at and becomes something you are inside with your whole body. We rode through the Andes on narrow horse trails, high, steep, barren and serious, and the horses walked where horses walk, with that mixture of certainty and stupidity that makes you both trust them and not trust them at all. It was not a place where anyone needed to invent drama. It was already there. Sometimes you looked down and almost regretted doing it, and then you looked forward again, because that was the only sensible thing to do. The horses knew the way better than we did. Sometimes that helps, but not always.

We came there as an expedition. With saddles, equipment, cameras, plans, risk assessments, and all those thoughts you carry when you come from our part of the world and do something that, back home, would be described as big, difficult, or maybe even dangerous. And then a group of children came riding towards us. At first I don’t think I even thought of them as children, because they came so naturally, as part of the landscape, not as something remarkable. The youngest were perhaps five or six years old, and they rode at the front. Without saddles, if I remember correctly. Behind them came older siblings, and at the back perhaps a boy of fourteen or fifteen. They were on their way down to where we had come from to buy food, and then they were going to ride back again. A week there and back. It was not an adventure for them. It was not an expedition. It was not something that needed to be explained, filmed, or defended. It was simply something that had to be done.

I have thought about that scene many times since. Not because I think Swedish children should ride bareback along cliffs in the Andes. That would be an idiotic way to understand it. Nor because I want to romanticize poverty, necessity, or a life where children have to take responsibility because life demands it. But there was something there I could not forget. A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old riding through the mountains with younger siblings to buy food. Here at home, almost the same age can sometimes be treated as if it cannot manage an evening alone. Somewhere between those two worlds there is a question I keep returning to. What do we actually believe children are capable of? And what do we take away from them when we protect them from everything that could make them capable?

That is probably where this text begins, although it began in many other places too. Beside a football pitch in Malmö. In conversations with friends. In my own dark periods. In all the times I have seen Eva and Dana afraid, tired, angry, irritated or exhausted out on a journey, and still move on. In the film we have made and in the film we are now preparing. I have been thinking more and more about why I take my daughters on these kinds of journeys. The simple answer is that we make films, that we travel together, that this is my life, that they have grown up with it, and that it is one way for us to be a family. But the simple answer is no longer enough. Not now that they are older. Eva will soon turn sixteen. Dana fourteen. They are not small children who simply follow their father. The next film has to be different. It has to be more about them taking over, carrying more of the expedition themselves, making more decisions, feeling more responsibility, not in order to become like me, but so they do not become helpless in the face of their own lives.

That may sound bigger than it is. In everyday life it is usually about simple things. Someone has to do the dishes. Someone has to do the laundry. Someone has to take out the rubbish. Someone has to help with the food. At home Eva does the dishes and the laundry, Dana takes out the rubbish, we clean together, and Dana can cook. If they are home alone for more than a week, the food gets worse and worse, I know that. Then there are more crisps and sweets than real food. But I would have done the same at their age. The important thing is not that everything becomes perfect. The important thing is that they can do it.

On an expedition this becomes even clearer. Out there you cannot simply opt out. If the tent has to go up, the tent has to go up. If the horses have to be taken care of, someone has to do it. If food has to be cooked, someone has to cook it. If someone in the group is not doing well, it affects everyone. At home there is always a room to disappear into, a phone to pick up, a screen that makes it possible to avoid whatever has become uncomfortable. On a journey it is harder. The girls still try, of course. They listen to music. I understand them. I do it myself. But batteries run out. Days are long. Horses walk slowly. A cycle road takes the time it takes. You cannot scroll away an uphill. You cannot swipe away a tired horse. You cannot press away hunger, rain, bad mood or someone in the group who feels wrongly treated. In the end there is only the body, the road, the other people and what has to be done.

I started selling myself early, when I was twenty-one and had to pitch journeys, and the expedition world is full of ego, my own included. But on a journey it is not enough to be interesting. You have to function. You have to put up the tent when you are tired. You have to listen when someone is sad even though you yourself think there are more urgent things to solve. You have to help even when you would rather be left alone.

In Kyrgyzstan this became clear. We had been through a hard time with the horses. Alina was sad, tired and worn out, and she felt she had been handled badly by me. She may have been right. I can become hard when I am stressed and when everything has to work. I do not always see people properly then. I see the tasks, the risks, the time, the animals, the logistics, but not always the human being in front of me. It is not a beautiful trait, but it is there. Then Dana stepped in and started a conversation about it. She did not do it to show how clever she was. She just saw that something was wrong and dealt with it. The conversation became good. That is the kind of thing that might not have happened in the same way at home, because life at home is not as hard. At home you can go into your room, postpone things, disappear into a screen. Out there, things remain hanging in the air until someone takes hold of them.

It was not a big scene if you saw it from the outside. No summit. No dramatic image. No beautiful sunset. But for me it was more important than many other things, because in that moment I saw something I want Dana to carry with her. That you can go into what hurts. That you can say something when someone else is not doing well. That you do not have to wait for the adult to do everything right, because the adult does not always do everything right. I do not think she thought of it that way herself. She just did it.

Eva works differently. She is not Dana and she should not be Dana. Eva often takes responsibility through conversation, through questioning, through not letting me get away too easily. She questions my decisions, what we are doing, why we are doing it, how we are doing it. Sometimes I get tired of it. Of course I do. I am her father and I often think I have thought things through, but she does not always stop where I want her to stop. She also almost always defends other people. If I say something negative about someone, she often comes in with the other side. She can listen to a long conversation and then suddenly summarize everything in one sentence that makes you understand what we have really been talking about. There is no big cinematic scene where I can point and say: there, Eva took responsibility. It is more about how she is. She sees people, or at least tries to see them, and she reminds me that there are more ways to understand a situation than mine.

That has been allowed to grow on the journeys, or at least it has space there in a way it does not always have at home. At home everything is divided up. School, training, food, laundry, phones, friends, times, everyday life. On a journey the conversations become different. You walk or ride or cycle for a long time. You get tired of each other. You say stupid things. You become unfair. You see someone from a side you perhaps did not want to see. Then you need people like Dana, who go into the conversation, and people like Eva, who say that there is also another way of seeing it. I need both. The group needs both. They probably need each other too, even if they would not always say it like that.

The journeys have given them confidence. They are more social out in the world than many people might think. They almost never complain. If one of them says something hurts, then I know it hurts like hell. Dana’s football coaches say the same thing. If Dana complains about pain, then it is serious. That does not mean I want them to suffer in silence or grit their teeth until they disappear. I truly do not. But I think they have learned the difference between discomfort and catastrophe. Life is full of discomfort. Most of it is not catastrophe.

I have had dark periods myself. Who has not? There have been days when the only thing that helped me was discipline. A plan for the day, training, a diary, doing what had to be done. Sometimes simply holding on until it passed. That is something I want Eva and Dana to understand. That they are allowed to feel bad. That they are allowed to be afraid. That they are allowed to be angry. That they are allowed to say something hurts. That fear does not always mean stop. That a dark period does not always mean life is wrong. And that you do not always have to manage everything alone, because that too is a lie strong people can easily begin to believe.

I have had to learn that the hard way myself. In Namibia I carried too much. I took too much weight on my bike, took too much responsibility, worked too hard and got sick with bronchitis. That was not heroism. It was stupidity, or perhaps old habit. I suppose I thought that if I just took more on myself, the group would function better. But a group does not become stronger because one person carries everything. It becomes weaker, because eventually that person breaks, and then everyone is left with the problem anyway. That must not happen again. Not for me and not for the girls. Everyone has to carry something. Everyone also has to be allowed to be carried sometimes.

That is one of the things I want the next film to be about, even though of course the film has to tell it with images and not with words like these. It should not just be a film where I take my children out into the world. It has to be about something shifting. I will still be there. I am still their father. I will worry, interfere, talk too much, try to control too much and almost certainly make mistakes. But they have to take more of the space, more of the responsibility, more of the direction. The expedition cannot just be something their father has come up with and they follow along on. It also has to become something they carry themselves.

I also think about how the journeys and life with people from different countries have shaped Eva and Dana. They do not have that reflex of blaming the others when something goes wrong. They have eaten with people, travelled with them, become irritated with them, laughed with them, depended on them. It becomes harder to simplify people then. Not impossible, because no human being is immune to prejudice, but harder. They have seen that people can live in other ways without becoming less human. They have seen that irritation and warmth can exist in the same person, that someone can be difficult and still good, that you yourself can have it wrong even when you are certain.

I grew up in another time, in Dala-Järna. It was not a better time in every way, one should be careful about saying such things, but there was more of associations, sport, teams, community and responsibility, things that meant you were not only your own little world. Football and all sport were enormously important for me. They taught me community and fighting for each other. You trained, played, won, lost, got angry, forgave, continued. I am glad Dana has football. Eva has her own way. She is not as team- or community-minded as Dana and I are, and she has to be allowed to be that way. Children are not projects to be evened out until they resemble your own idea of balance.

And yet it is not the dramatic moments I think about most when I ask myself why I continue. It is not the cliffs, the passes, the great views or those images that look good in a trailer. It is often the tables. Some simple kitchen. A simple camp. Some place where we sit together after a day when something has happened, something has been managed, someone has been tired, someone has been angry, someone has laughed at something stupid. Not around a fire, because fire is often more romantic in thought than in reality. There is not always wood, and often it is just another job. But there is a table, or something that works as a table. There is food. There is conversation. Nobody has to show it off. We are simply there together. Then I see a kind of contentment in them that I like very much. Not euphoria. Not stimulation. More like tiredness, calm, seriousness, togetherness. The feeling of having done something, managed something, been part of something.

I know this kind of thing can be misunderstood. Almost everything that has to do with children and risk can be misunderstood. Someone always thinks it is too much and someone else thinks it is too little, and perhaps that is why I have started thinking so much about it. Not because I really want to defend myself, but because I myself want to understand what I am doing. I do not believe in throwing children into danger. I do not believe children should have to prove anything to adults. But I also do not believe in protecting them from everything that is uncomfortable.

I do not want Eva and Dana to remember the journeys as something their father dragged them into because he needed another expedition. That would be a sad thought. I want them to remember the conversations around the tables, the horses that did not do what we wanted, the days that became too long, the people we met, the mistakes we made, and perhaps also that their father was not always right.

Because I am not. They already know that, and Eva often reminds me of it. Perhaps that is one of the best things about travelling with them. That I do not only teach them something, but that they also keep pulling me down from my own ideas about what I think I know. Dana does it in her way, by walking straight into the things that need to be said. Eva does it in hers, by questioning, defending others and sometimes summarizing an entire conversation in a sentence that stays much longer than she herself may understand.

Perhaps that is why the children on horseback in Patagonia stayed with me. They simply rode past. They were going to buy food. There was nothing more to it. But I saw them and thought, maybe only much later, that they knew something we are in the process of forgetting. Not because they had a better life. Not because their world was kinder or simpler. But because they were needed for real.

Reykjavik, 06:00

Hotel Leif Eriksson. Six in the morning. I’m sitting alone in the restaurant and Hallgrímskirkja is outside the window, filling the whole view like the island wants to remind me where I am. It’s raining. Not proper rain. Just enough to make everything feel damp. I’m sneezing for no reason. I feel rough. Not dramatic. Just that slightly bruised feeling you get when you’ve been concentrated for days and then suddenly stop. The body is tired in a clean way. A small hangover. A bit of ache in my shoulders, probably because I pulled too hard yesterday when I should have used the legs more. The arms still want to do what the legs used to do. Old habits.

On the table there is breakfast. In my head there is skyr.

We bought skyr in kilos for the course. Kilos. Because I assumed everyone likes skyr. Because we wanted to be the organised guys who eat the right food and don’t live on gas station junk. Turns out I was basically the only one eating it. Four kilos left in the room when we packed up. Four kilos of good intentions, sitting there like a stupid souvenir. Iceland always gives you one of those. Something small and ridiculous that tells you more about how life really works than all your careful planning.

Yesterday was six hours in the car. We dropped Richard at the airport. Family emergency. He had to fly home. That changed the end of the course completely. The last day was supposed to be the one where we camped on the glacier, weather permitting, and practiced everything on snow, then moved like a proper team, and ended with that tired, quiet satisfaction you get when you’ve done something hard and didn’t cheat. It didn’t happen. Weather didn’t play, life didn’t play, and Richard had to go. That’s always how it is. You can write any program you want. Something always moves.

Me and Norm went out for dinner in Reykjavik last night. Two people, one dinner, around 230 dollars if you want to make it hurt properly. It was good. Nothing special. The kind of meal you forget the next day. You pay because you’re here. You pay because this is an island and everything has to be hauled across water and then hauled again across black lava and then cooked by someone who also has to pay rent in Reykjavik. That’s Iceland. You don’t hate it. You just notice it.

In a few hours I fly home. Back to Malmö. Back to the girls. Back to being a football parent, back to dinner logistics, back to ordinary life that is not ordinary at all when you think about it.

The group

When you sign up for a course with ten people you never know what you’ll get. That little worry sits there in the background. But I remember thinking on the plane that anyone who goes to Iceland for glacier training is probably a certain kind of person. I was right. Great group. None of them Icelandic but living in Iceland because they’ve chosen it, aiming to become guides. Focused people. Strong people. Kind people. Amazing people.

Norm is Norm. The grit of Kensington Alpine Club, and one of the kindest humans you’ll ever meet.

Richard surprised me. My memory of him is Kilimanjaro, sick most of the time and still pushing through. Here he was sharp. His logic mind is beautiful. 2-1, 3-1, five-to-one, 6-1, he saw it and it was done. Fast, agile, almost twenty years younger than me, and it showed.

The guides

Nicco and Andrea. Two young Italians. Calm. Analytical. Patient. No macho, no stress, no rush. They gave everyone time to sort things out. At the same time they watched the details. Lock the carabiners. Dress the knots. Don’t do the quick version.

You could see Nicco sometimes get tired of the same questions, but he answered them anyway, clearly, without drama. Andrea was the same kind of calm. You couldn’t ask for better teachers.

Day one

I’ve taken mountaineering courses since the early nineties. Mount Cook, New Zealand, 1992. Five days. I loved it. We climbed Ball Point. Back then I was extremely fit. I remember being way ahead of everyone because I cycled and ran and had that young-body arrogance.

This week wasn’t that.

The first serious moment wasn’t dramatic. It was stepping onto the glacier tongue. Hard ice. Open glacier. Most of the snow gone down low. It felt a lot like the start of Greenland, that same hard surface that punishes you when you hit it. Hands, knees, pride. Then you look into the blue cracks and you understand what happens if you make one mistake.

Hanging from one screw

At some point you’re anchored to one ice screw. One point. One knot you tied yourself. You know it holds. You know the gear is built for it. Still your head has a moment. I’m hanging from one screw in ice.

And then you calm down enough to do the next step, because you have to.

We learned knots, systems, rescue anchors. I’ve done courses before where nothing really stuck. This time it did. I think it’s because the teaching was excellent. I think it’s also because I listened differently.

Clove hitch. Butterfly knot. Catastrophe knot. Prusik. I’ve started to love the prusik. Simple cord, friction, body weight, technique. One for the foot, one for moving up. You can use Micro Traxion and other tools, sure, but I liked understanding the basics.

And the near-mistakes were always the same kind of thing. Small. A screwgate not properly locked. A knot that looks fine until it isn’t. The kind of mistakes that don’t look like mistakes until they do.

Age and my father

I’m comfortable being 64, 65 now. Not as fast. Not as strong. But also not interested in applause. Not interested in pretending. I do things slower. I accept that. I also notice that I don’t care what people think in the way I used to.

The last day on the ice, the amicable Leo commented on my age, I thought about my father. He died around my age. 64, 65. I cannot picture him hanging in a glacier system and hauling himself up. I just can’t. He lived in another lifetime, where being 65 looked different. I don’t know what to do with that thought except let it land for a second.

Weather, Skaftafell, and the half day

Weather hung over the whole week. Not storms, just wetness in the air, low cloud, the threat of whiteout. We didn’t summit. Fine. The course was about glacier knowledge, not a peak photo.

We went into Skaftafell. Svartifoss. Sjónarnípa. That view over Skaftafellsjökull where you stop talking. We did half a day because higher up it turned into rain and snow and then nothing.

Food, money, skyr and back to Malmö

We tried to be smart with food. We weren’t smart with skyr.

Clif bars don’t work for me. Heartburn. Trail mix and wraps worked. Hot drinks mattered. A thermos matters in wind.

In a few hours I’m back with the girls. Back to football parent life and dinner logistics and ordinary chaos. It’s always a bigger jump than it should be. Like that story about Chief Seattle waiting for his soul to arrive after the train.

What I want to bring home is simple. Put yourself in something hard once in a while. Something that demands you. It cleans you out.

What I’ll lose immediately is sleep. Outdoors gave me seven, eight hours most nights. Back home, we’ll see.

Kyrgyzstan is next. Three weeks to make it happen. Money and time. That’s the private fear. Not the glacier.

I’m sitting here looking at Hallgrímskirkja, sneezing, thinking about an ice screw holding my weight, and four kilos of skyr in a hotel room.

Life is good.

If you have followed this series, you know where we were. The last book chapter I published here was Crossing El Darién on March 21. Since then I have published other Substack essays in between, but the book journey continues here, north through Central America.

One thing needs to be clear. Ed and I split. He stayed behind in Panama City. I left alone. I never saw him again on that trip.

Honduras, a border that wants a gift

At the border the man studies my passport like he is searching for a reason to make my day worse. He looks tired and bitter, the way people look when they have spent years collecting small power at a desk.

He returns the passport slowly. Then he stretches out an open hand.

A gift.

I tell him I have no lempiras. I crossed the border five seconds ago. I keep my voice neutral, almost friendly, because this is not a place where pride is useful.

He offers to exchange money for me at a rate slightly above official, the same trick dressed as help. I have heard it before. I have heard the rumours too. Five unofficial inspections ahead. Every inspection wants its share. This is how salaries become survival.

Inside the second control building a Canadian couple’s gear is spread across the floor. Two guards go through everything with the joy of people who know time belongs to them. The couple look defeated before they have even entered the country.

In one corner a man with a gigantic moustache watches me with a hard face. He takes my passport and I can feel the room tighten. On his desk is a photograph of the Honduran football team from the World Cup.

I point to the photo and say I like Betancour best. I tell him he was among the best in the World Cup.

A light goes on in his face. It is immediate and ridiculous and completely human. He interrupts his searching in the black book of unwanted people. He laughs. He puts a hand on my shoulder. He walks me past the long queue, hands my passport to the clerk at the window, tells me I will be finished in a moment, wishes me luck, and returns to his corner with happy steps.

I take the stamp and walk out quickly in case the mood changes again.

A soldier with an old rifle
In the forest the cicadas scream so loud I cannot hear the little river even though my dinner is cooked beside it. The ground is covered in pine needles and dry leaves that remind me of home. For a few minutes the world is quiet inside me.

Then a gunshot cracks the air.

A young man in military clothes stands there with an old rifle. Beside him is a boy holding a fishing rod. Both of them smile. The boy lifts two small fish as proof of good luck.

I hold up my pot of boiled potatoes and ask if they want dinner.

No thanks, the soldier says. We already ate.

I tell him that when I first saw him I thought he was a Contra soldier.

He shakes his head and points at a patch on his shoulder. Fifth Infantry Regiment, Honduran Armed Forces. He tells me he is a simple farmer from El Espino forced into this. He does not want to fight the Sandinistas. They are people like us, he says, defeated.

I ask if there is a war between Honduras and Nicaragua.

He looks at me like I arrived from the moon.

Our border camp up there is full of Americans and Contras, he says. We are treated like nothing. Even though it is our country. It is not smart.

He gets up slowly, makes a mocking salute, and walks back toward the road.

Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela
The closer I get to the capital, the worse the atmosphere becomes. People shout. Faces harden. The word gringo appears so often it stops being a word and becomes a stain.

When I reach Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela, the heat sits still between the walls. Smoke hangs low. A drain runs along the curb, black and slow. Dogs nose through rubbish bags that have split open in the sun. Flies rise in clouds when a cart rolls past.

I try to ride through, but the street keeps narrowing and filling. A man steps too close to my handlebars and does not move until I brake. Another spits near my front wheel. Sellers shout in cracked voices, and the shouting does not feel like commerce, it feels like desperation made loud.

A hotel sign appears and I grab it like a lifeline.

Hospedaje San Pedro.

It has rooms and it also has a courtyard full of women dressed in sexy outfits. Their eyes are deeply unhappy. I walk past them and feel something sink in me, fast and heavy.

The newer part of Tegucigalpa has hamburger bars, boutiques, office men in suits with briefcases, and the same clean surfaces you can find in any country that wants to look American. On the avenues, groups of young North American boys in white shirts and pressed blue trousers hand out flyers in Spanish. They preach that the world is in revolt and that the soul can only be saved if you follow the Mormon road.

Every step I take in Comayagüela is accompanied by insults.

I leave.

Howdy Cowboy

Outside the city an American soldier greets me with a loud Howdy Cowboy. He laughs and flashes a broad smile. He looks at my swollen cheek and asks what happened.

I tell him someone threw an apple at me as I passed through the slums early in the morning and everyone seemed convinced I was American.

People here are like animals, he says, and giggles.

Behind him a caravan of five jeeps is parked in a line, three soldiers in each. He talks about saving the world. He says they are ready for an invasion of the country down south any time. He tells me that without Americans, small people like us would be enslaved by communism.

I do not argue. I end it and leave before my ears fall off. He laughs as if I told the funniest story of his life.

That night my feet are covered in red bites from hundreds of piss ants that found a hole in my tent. I treat my feet with T spirit. The alcohol takes away the worst itch. I lie there in the dark and feel strength begin to return.

Patience, I realise, is a virtue.

Copán

For the third time in my life I experience something I can only call spiritual. The first was at Wat Phra Keo in Bangkok, surrounded by chanting Buddist monks. The second in Pagan in northwestern Burma.

Now it happens in Copán.

The ruin area is enclosed by singing rainforest and somewhere nearby I hear a powerful river. Green hills surround everything. A colourful macaw breaks the calm with its mocking laugh and then the American voices drown it out. Archaeologists shout as if they own the place. I feel anger rise.

I slip through a hole in the fence to be alone.

I climb to the top of the great jaguar temple. Sunset burns out and the full moon takes over. Even the howler monkeys seem to scream with respect for the atmosphere.

Then I see a rope hanging halfway down through a hole.

Someone is climbing.

A hand reaches up. I shine my torch into the hole and light up a Vietnamese face. She looks shocked.

She whispers that she thought she would be alone up here. I help her up. She smiles calmly. She says her man is down there, he did not dare to climb. She asks me to turn off the torch. She wants to talk.

I say I do not want to ruin a night like this by saying the wrong things.

She says I am right. She says she felt a spiritual force pulling her here, that she felt the answer was at the top. Her husband thought she was crazy, but he is much older than her. He understands her need for solitude. He has since they left Vietnam.

She asks if I have been there. I answer that I have not, but I have been to Thailand and Burma, and I do not continue.

We sit in silence looking out over the moonlit place, accompanied by the rainforest’s orchestra.

After a long time she asks if I am Buddhist.

I answer that I cannot say I live like a Buddhist, but I feel strongly for the philosophy of life. She tells me to remember that solitude is necessary if you want to grow as a human being. She says I have the strength, she feels it. Then she disappears back down through the hole. I never see her again. Was she real?

Guatemala, Tikal, and a birthday

The road north pulls me into Guatemala and toward Tikal. The days blur into heat, sweat, cheap rooms, and long stretches of green. Then, suddenly, the dream is in front of me.

In Tikal I run half sprinting through dense jungle along a well-trodden path and reach the next almost unreal dream. In my mind I had an image of it, a pyramid rising out of thick green.

Then I see the back of a gigantic temple and I feel something like winning a World Cup final.

Howler monkeys and macaws fight for my attention. They do not stand a chance. I rush into a newly cut grassy plaza. Temple 1 and Temple 4 dominate everything. The Great Plaza of Tikal. I feel thrown hundreds of years back in time.

I hurry up Temple 1. I do not look back until I reach the top. The view makes my chest tighten. The ceremonial buildings, the burial buildings, the gigantic ceiba trees, the temples rising like knives into the daytime sky. The experience is so strong it feels like I am about to leave earthly life.

Then an American voice breaks it.

“Margret, do you have hash with you?”

I turn and see a bearded man dressed in black with a star-decorated beret that reminds me of Che Guevara. He laughs, eyes glassy from drugs. His friend giggles.

I ask them if Americans can never shut up and respect other people’s needs. Then I run down the steep stairs to escape people I begin to lose all trust in. Halfway down I hear him ask why everyone hates them. He gets a giggle as answer.

After Tikal the road carries me back toward towns and buses and the ordinary world. Then, in a dusty place, a young blond woman waves desperately and shouts that she lives there. She is American. She speaks fast, like she is afraid the moment will disappear. It is her birthday, she says. She prayed all night for a sign from God. A sign or someone to celebrate the day with. And now I appear, dusty, on a bicycle, like an answer.

She introduces herself. Mary Beth. From Kansas. Peace Corps. She pulls me toward her house. She wants closeness more than conversation. She kisses and hugs me as if she has been starving. I stay until she decides it is best I leave so the villagers will not misunderstand. I go without sorrow in my heart.

The letter in the post

Guatemala City has plenty, and when I reach the capital after a record fast climb I feel fresh enough to believe my health has returned. I throw myself greedily into everything that has been forbidden since Panama City. The answer comes at night. My stomach revolts. The floor fills with vomit and my sleeping bag fills with shit. It takes half a day to clean the room from the foul smells. Nobody complains. It blends with the other smells of the place.

Heavy reggae music echoes around the clock from every corner of the hotel. So does the smell of hash and marijuana from the sixties leftovers who occupy every corner of the hostel. Most of the time they are silent and smoke peacefully. Then suddenly one of them is hit by a mad outbreak and screams in panic. Those episodes always happen in the dark hours and wake everyone sleeping.

I leave.

A Guatemalan bus ride

I feel like a mummified corpse. There is no space for my feet on the floor. They are locked by my packing. But I would rather sit fourteen hours on a Guatemalan bus than lie alone sick in a dark room in a big city.

The bus lifts again and again from the ancient road through the Petén jungle. The shaking loosens something in my head. The Indian beside me seems to hate the reggae noise. He has stuffed two cigarettes into his ears to escape the sound. My tiredness pushes me into sleep and I cannot even show apathy toward the soldiers who at constant stops search the bus.

Wildflower

Above Lake Atitlán the light shifts and the lake changes colour from sky blue to a more azure shade. Purple volcanoes flank the water. A thick cloud cover hangs between peaks and the lake and the wind slowly pushes it south. Far below lies Panajachel, also called Gringotenango because of its many western visitors.

I have had a dream day on the bicycle. Hard road, steep, stony, often above the clouds. Again and again villages appeared, mountain Indians dressed in cloth showing every possible colour and pattern, different in each village around the lake. Their faces are kind and proud. Their material poverty carries an inner strength I almost never see in my own culture.

In Quezaltenango, 2,335 metres above sea level, the Austrian woman Wildflower confronts me. You are always so stressed, she says. You never relax. Or do you avoid me. I shiver in the cold and answer with the truth. To tell the truth, I despise your lifestyle. She steps closer, furious. How can you say that. You are like everybody else. Nothing but a life full of prejudices.

I have met thousands of hippies in Asia. My disgust grew there. I tell her I think they are cultural parasites. They occupy beautiful places and live off local people, pretending global love while feeding their egos. I shout. I am exhausted after a long heavy day.

Wildflower slaps me. She screams that I am completely wrong and runs away into the rain.

Mirrors

For three days I lie on my back in Hospedaje San Marcos in the Indian community with the same name. The room has four big mirrors and every time I painfully rise from the straw mattress I see my physical state reflected back at me.

When I am on the bike I feel strong. Life becomes almost unbelievable. The roads in Guatemala give daily altitude differences of several thousand metres. The magnificent nature, the villages, the boiling Indian culture, and the presence of people who keep their traditions and pride, all of it outweighs the hard moments.

It is when it is time to rest that the dream turns into long hours of bodily sickness and mental conflict. I have felt like a half human being in Central America, plagued by jaundice. Now I stare at the ceiling and think about the Vietnamese woman in Copán. Her words follow me.

Solitude is necessary if you want to grow.

And still I ride.

The floor

I am sitting on the floor in Malmö packing for Iceland after three days at a football tournament with the girls. The apartment looks as if two different lives have crashed into each other. Football bags, wet towels, dirty clothes from the tournament, charging cables, medicine, thermal underwear, harness, ice screws, carabiners, crampons and my new mountain boots standing there waiting to be used properly. I should probably sleep, because I have not had much of that lately, but that is often how it is before leaving. The body is tired, the head has already started moving, and suddenly all the small things become important. Socks. Batteries. Gloves. The right jacket. The right charger. The thing you know you will forget because you put it somewhere clever two weeks ago and now cannot remember where clever was.

Eva and I spent those football days standing next to pitches together, watching games and discussing them like everybody else around us. My daughter has become my football partner during these tournaments. After enough matches every parent slowly becomes an expert. We all stand there with coffee in our hands and know exactly who should have started, who should have been substituted, who looked tired, who lost confidence after the first mistake, who needed more support, who should have pressed higher and why the midfield disappeared. It is ridiculous and lovely at the same time. FC Rosengård did well, and the girls carried so much emotion around in them. You could see it before matches. Young teenagers trying to look calm while the whole world, at least their whole world at that moment, moved inside their faces.

I love those tournaments, even with the lack of sleep, the drama, the tension, the endless talk afterwards, the parents, the girls, the disappointment, the joy, the feeling that a whole life can suddenly depend on one goal, one mistake, one missed run, one referee decision. And then it is over, and less than a day later I am sitting here packing ice axes and glacier gear. It is a strange life, but it is my life, and I still love this part of it. The preparation. The checking. The mild panic. The feeling that something is waiting. I started doing this in 1986 and I still get the same feeling before leaving. That surprises me. After all these years, all these journeys, all these films, all these mistakes, I still sit on the floor before departure and feel that life is moving.

When leaving was leaving

While packing I keep thinking about how different adventure feels today compared to when I first started. I do not mean that everything was better before, because that is too easy and mostly not true. There was ego then too. There was money then too. There was sponsorship then too. There were people pretending to be tougher and wiser than they were then too. I have no interest in pretending the old world was clean and the new one is dirty. Human beings have always been human beings. But something has changed, and I feel it more clearly now when I am older, when I have daughters, when I make films, when I try to write, when I try to understand where exploration is going and where I still belong in it.

When I first started travelling, leaving meant leaving. That was the whole thing. When I cycled from Chile to Alaska, I moved between post offices. Big towns mattered because letters could arrive there. Sometimes months passed before I knew if everything was all right back home. Sometimes months passed before anyone knew if I was all right. You stood in phone booths and fed coins into machines and hoped the line would hold long enough to hear a familiar voice for a few minutes. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it was just crackling, delay, half sentences and then silence again. Letters were the same. You sent one and then the answer belonged to the future. You could not force it. You could not refresh anything. You could not check.

That did something to the mind. I did not understand it then, because it was just how life worked, but I understand it more now. When you left, your brain eventually had to stay where your body was. Home did not disappear because you stopped caring, it disappeared because there was nothing you could do. The road became the whole world. The people you met became the whole world. The weather, the hunger, the bicycle, the next town, the next border, the next problem, the next conversation, all of that became reality in a much stronger way than I think is possible when you are always reachable.

Now I can stand on a mountain and call my daughters. I can send a message from almost anywhere. I can upload film material, back up photos, check the weather, answer emails, read comments, follow what happens at home, worry about school, worry about money, worry about a film, worry about something that has absolutely nothing to do with where I actually am. As a father, a lot of this is wonderful. I do not want to go back to a world where my daughters cannot reach me. I do not want to romanticize fear and silence just because they shaped me. But I also know something was lost when leaving stopped meaning leaving.

The split

Maybe this is what I am really thinking about while packing for Iceland. Not modern adventure as an industry, not content, not influencers, not even documentary film, although all those things are part of it. I am thinking about concentration. I am thinking about how difficult it has become to be completely inside one thing. I see it in myself every day. I pick up the phone for one reason and ten minutes later I am somewhere else in the brain, full of impressions I did not ask for and cannot remember. Short clips. Noise. Opinions. People talking. People selling. People showing themselves. People trying to exist. And I am there too. I cannot pretend I am outside it, because I am not.

This is also happening in documentary film. Everything is faster now, shorter, louder, more immediate. Everybody is terrified people will lose concentration. Often the people making these decisions are middle-aged themselves, but they still talk about young audiences as if young people were a separate species that can only understand life if it comes in small explosions. Maybe they are right in some practical sense. Maybe the world really has trained all of us to need faster stimulation. I notice it in my own work. A short clip where I talk into the camera about something simple often gets far more attention than a long text I have worked on for days and which may actually contain something useful. That is not a complaint as much as a fact I do not know what to do with.

Adventure has moved the same way. More people than ever want to be adventurers, explorers, documentary filmmakers, storytellers. In one way that is good. More women, more voices, more people who were not invited before. That part is important. But at the same time, there is less money, more competition, more pressure to be visible, and somehow the visible part of the journey has started to move closer and closer to the centre. It is not enough to go. You have to be seen going. You have to explain the journey before it has happened. You have to look right while doing it. You have to keep feeding the machine, even when the whole point of leaving, at least for me, used to be to get away from the machine for a while.

And I need it too. That is the annoying part. I need social media. I need people to care. I need audiences for films, talks, Substack, expeditions. I need to show something back to the people who help make things possible. I have been very lucky with sponsors in my life, like Kensington Tours, where I am one of a few Explorer-In-Residence folks, because they have supported me without trying to shape me into something else, and that is rare. So this is not about sponsorship being bad. Sponsorship has always been part of exploration. Scott, Amundsen, all of them needed support in one way or another. The problem is not that people need help to go. The problem is maybe that we are all slowly becoming unable to separate the experience from the presentation of the experience.

Iceland

I think that is why I look forward to Iceland so much right now. Not because Iceland is some magic answer to anything, but because mountains, ice, ropes and cold still demand a kind of attention that cannot be faked for very long. You can make a nice picture afterwards, you can write a good caption, you can tell the story, but in the actual moment you still have to be there. You have to listen. You have to watch where you put your feet. You have to understand the rope, the ice, the weather, the people around you. If you lose concentration, reality becomes very close very quickly.

I like that. I have always liked that. It is probably one reason I still go. Expeditions simplify life for a while, even when they are complicated. You are hungry, tired, cold, excited, worried, happy. You deal with the next thing. You meet people. You solve problems. You discover again that the world is mostly full of decent people, which is maybe the greatest gift travel has given me. I often come home from expeditions with more hope than I had before leaving, because out there, away from the noise, people are usually better than the world looks on a screen.

Tomorrow I leave with Norm Crooks and Richard Elbach. The Kensington Alpine Club group changed, as groups do. People dropped out, others came in, plans moved, things became unclear and then clear enough. That part has not changed either. There is always some chaos before departure. There is always something missing, something forgotten, something that should have been solved earlier. Maybe that is why I like packing so much. It is control before the uncontrollable begins. It is the last little attempt to organize life before life becomes weather, people, ice, fatigue and whatever happens next.

Still leaving

I do not know where adventure is going. I do not know if long storytelling will survive in a world that seems to want everything shorter. I do not know if my daughters’ generation will find ways to concentrate deeply again or if we have given them a world where the mind is always being pulled in ten directions. I do not know if I am part of the solution or part of the problem. Most likely both. I use the tools I worry about. I criticize the speed and still check the numbers. I want silence and still pick up the phone. I miss disappearing and still want people to read what I write when I come back.

That is probably the honest place to leave it. I am not wiser than the world I live in. I am just old enough to remember when leaving meant leaving, and still young enough in the head, or foolish enough, to keep packing bags and believing that going away can still do something good to a human being. Maybe that is what I am looking for in Iceland now. Not a big answer. Just a few moments where the head becomes quiet enough to be where the body is. A few moments where the old feeling returns. Boots on. Rope ready. Cold air. No performance. Just attention. And maybe that is enough.

The walk

“I wish I was as disciplined as you.”

A friend said it when we were out walking. She was tired after work. Most people are. Work takes its part of the day and then there is not much left. She does not train regularly, and she said she wished she was as disciplined as me. I knew what she meant. I had probably talked too much, as I often do, about Iceland, training, weight, food, sleep, work, all the small storms that build up in my head before a trip. From the outside it must look like discipline. I get up early. I work. I train. I prepare. I make lists. I have done expeditions most of my adult life. I am a solo parent. I try to be there when the girls come home from school. I cook. I shop. I deal with the invoices, the emails, the school things, the gym bag, the potatoes, the film plans, the text that refuses to become good. Some days the whole heroic life of an explorer seems to consist mostly of dishwasher, boiled food and looking for a receipt.

And yes, I felt proud when she said it. I like when people think I am disciplined. It sounds better than saying I am a man who needs mountains, deadlines and mild panic to behave properly. But discipline is there too. I do not want to pretend otherwise. Without discipline I would not have done the journeys I have done. I would not have crossed the places I have crossed. I would not have kept working the way I have worked. I would not have been able to be a father and still keep the films, writing, planning, training and everything else moving. So there is truth in what she said. But it is not the whole truth. People see the part that works. They rarely see what it costs, or what happens when the goal is gone.

The monk

I am not disciplined in the way calm people are disciplined. I am not one of those quiet human beings who seem to have been born with control. Somewhere in me there has always been a dream of being like a Buddhist monk. A man who eats what he should, thinks what he should, breathes correctly, never overeats, never sends the wrong message, never needs chocolate on a Thursday, never says yes to the third plate of food just because it is there and tastes good. I admire that kind of discipline. A lot. Maybe because it is so far from how I am built.

I need something in front of me. A mountain. A film. A deadline. A route. An expedition. A reason. When I have that, I can sharpen myself. Then I can get up early, train tired, eat boiled chicken, sit with tax papers and texts until the head becomes porridge, and still do what has to be done. Without a goal I become less useful. More floating. More likely to negotiate badly with myself in the kitchen. I need small goals all the time and bigger ones every few months. It sounds tiring, and maybe it is, but it is also how I have kept myself moving for most of my life.

Greenland

The strange thing is that this kind of training discipline came late. I trained before the old expeditions, of course. You do not go into Siberia or the Kolyma winter without preparing. But I do not remember training then like I trained later. It became stronger after I started ultrarunning in 2018. Then came the pandemic, and then the Greenland preparations, especially the last one. Getting up early in the morning and doing jumping jacks and push-ups no matter how tired I was. Going out hauling hour after hour. Week after week. Month after month. At times it was around twenty hours a week. Pulling, sweating, being tired, doing it anyway because Greenland was there ahead of me.

That part I am proud of. I could do it, and I did it. But there was always a bargain in it too. When you train that much, you can eat. And food has always mattered to me. Not just because I like food. I love food. I love a proper meal. I love the good life. I love sitting down and feeling, for a moment, that life is not only work, sacrifice, invoices, training and preparation. Food is comfort. Food is reward. Food can be a small festival in an otherwise ordinary day. It can also be the place where things go wrong. The same obsessiveness that makes me train for Greenland can make me eat too much afterwards. People see the useful part and call it discipline. They do not always see the same engine going in the other direction.

Work

Work has always been easier. I have the job I dreamed about when I was young. Writing, filming, expeditions, planning, pitching, trying to make a living from a life that probably should not be possible. I like getting things done. I like when an idea becomes a text, a film, a trip, a project. I have never really understood people who have the chance to do their dream work and then do not work. For me the problem has usually been the other way around.

But even there, age has started to introduce itself like an irritating administrator with a clipboard. I used to be able to force myself through almost anything. Work more. Think more. Push harder. Stay with the problem until it gave up. Now the head has a limit. Especially with texts, accounts, papers, pitches, all the thinking work. At some point it is finished. If I continue after that, everything becomes bad. I feel sick in the head from tiredness. Then I sleep badly. Then I get hungrier. Then I become a worse version of myself and still think another hour of work will save me. It rarely does. I train almost every day partly because I have too much energy in the body, but the head is another thing. The head cannot be bullied in the same way anymore. I still try sometimes, naturally. I am not claiming wisdom here.

The girls

A lot of the discipline I do have comes from the girls. I want to last. I want to be there when they come home from school. I want to make food. I want to show up when they need me. I want to stay healthy enough to help them until they can fully take care of themselves. That is the main goal in life. It is not always dramatic. Often it is just being there in the kitchen, making something to eat, listening to a report from school or football or whatever has happened that day, while I am also thinking about some film problem, some unpaid invoice, some expedition plan, some email I should have answered three days ago.

And if I want to do the job I do, I have to be in shape. Expeditions, films, mountains, vehicles, horses, long days, bad sleep, cold, heat, and all the rest do not work very well if the body gives up. I know training helps. I know sleep helps. I know being lighter helps. I know vegetables are better than eating butter as if it is a separate food group. Knowing all this has never meant I live perfectly. It only means I know what I should do, which is a very different thing.

After

People see the expedition when it is happening. The mountains. The horses. The cold. The vehicle. The road. The pictures. They do not always understand what happens before and after. Before an expedition there is control. Training, logistics, money, gear, family, tickets, sponsors, film plans, fear, excitement, all the small things that have to be in place before you even start. During the expedition there is another kind of control. People may think it is freedom, but it is not really freedom. You are always calculating. Food, sleep, water, batteries, weather, danger, people, animals, route, film, moods, problems, the girls if they are with me, the team if there is a team.

And after the expedition, when people think it is over, the body starts shouting for bread, butter, sugar, sweets, big portions. After Ecuador, the craving was butter. It almost sounds stupid now, but that was what I wanted. Butter. Huge amounts of butter. After Kilimanjaro, I came back and ended up with all this great food at the Kensington half-year review. I ate and ate and ate. Then I came home and continued. Bread, bread, bread. Butter, butter, butter. Big portions. Kilimanjaro was not even that hard compared to many other things. I had prepared well. I was in good shape. But I was still exhausted afterwards. Not always in a way people can see. More in the body. In the mind. In the need to stop controlling everything for a while. Some of the overeating is hunger. Some is exhaustion. Some is reward. Some is rebellion after being strict. A lot of it is simply the tired body and the tired mind saying, enough now, give me something nice.

The fat reserve

I also come from an older expedition world where extra fat was not only seen as a problem. Before the Siberian Kolyma journey, I put on eighteen kilos because that was the idea then. You put on weight to handle winter, cold, hunger and hard work. And on that trip it disappeared quickly because the work was hard and the food was limited. Somewhere inside me that logic is still there. Before a hard expedition, a few extra kilos can feel like protection. A reserve. Something useful. The problem is when the expedition turns out differently and the reserve is still there, travelling around with you like unwanted luggage.

That happened in Kyrgyzstan last summer. I was heavier than I wanted to be. I had eaten for a harder expedition than it became. That is true, but also a convenient little excuse. I was not happy with myself. I did not like how I looked. At the same time, I enjoyed the meals. This is the annoying part of being honest. I cannot pretend I suffered through every bite. I love the meals. I love food. I love a drink. I love a cigar. I love sitting down properly and eating well. I love the feeling that life is not only work, training, sacrifice and discipline.

Chocolate Thursday

For a long time I had a system that worked. Most of the week I was careful. Then Thursday came, and Thursday was chocolate. I looked forward to it enormously. It was a break in the discipline. Often there was a bigger meal too. Something to look forward to. Something that made the rest of the week easier. Then Saturday came, and Saturday meant tacos with the girls.

That is one of the most important things in my life. It is not just food. It is us together. The sofa. Hugging. Warmth. Family. The feeling that whatever else is happening in the world, we have this. Good food helps that feeling. People can talk all they want about fuel and calories and protein, but a taco Saturday with your children is not a spreadsheet. It is life. Those small rewards made the discipline possible. They gave the week shape. I did not have to be perfect every day. I only had to be careful most of the time.

Before Iceland

Before Iceland, I have taken away almost all of that. No bread. No sugar. No butter. Much less fat. Protein, potatoes, vegetables. Chicken. Simple food. Boiled food. It works. I feel better. I have lost weight. The body works better. Even the simple food is starting to taste good, which is either a good sign or proof that the brain gives up eventually. But it does not taste like a good meal. And when you remove chocolate, you do not only remove calories. You remove a small happiness.

I know it is good for me right now. I know it works. I also know I do not know what happens when the goal is gone. Maybe I will find a good middle way this time. Maybe I will go back to Thursday chocolate and Saturday tacos and be careful the rest of the week. Maybe I will eat bread and butter like a man rescued from a desert. I hope not. But I know myself well enough not to make heroic promises in writing.

The photos

On a recent expedition with Defender X I saw myself in photographs and did not like what I saw. I looked heavy. The belly was there. I had let it go more than I wanted to admit. Then came the kind of comments on social media that belongs to the time we live in. That looking fat was not good for the brand. That some people should be shown in the photos and others should not. I did not like those photos either. I did not like seeing that I had let the good life become that visible. At the same time, I do not want to live in a world where every human body has to be polished before it is allowed into a picture.

The brand

The brand.

I am tired of that word. I am tired of this world where everything has to look right from the outside. Even expeditions. Even old bodies. Even tired people who are still out there doing the thing. Life has been hard on people. People put on weight. People age. People look tired. People look like they have lived. Why should that be bad for the brand?

For most of my career, if I have had an audience, it has been because I have been who I am. I have not built everything around looking a certain way. I have gone up and down in weight. I have looked tired. I have looked strong. I have looked worn. I have looked exactly like the life I was living at the time. That should be the brand. This is how it looks to be a human being and still keep going. And still I am losing weight partly because of it. Not only for health. Also because I want to look better. Because I did not like the photos. Because the comments hit the right spot. Because I live in the same world as everybody else and I am not immune to it. I do not like admitting that, but a man sitting on a balcony in shorts to prepare for Iceland should probably not pretend to be completely normal anyway.

The outside

There is a difference between looking strong and being strong, but the outside does not always lie. When I am not doing well, it often shows. If I am too heavy, it shows. If I am exhausted, it shows. If life has been hard, it shows somewhere in the face, the body, the eyes. On expeditions, looking strong can also be useful. It changes how people meet you. It can protect you. It can make people less likely to see you as weak. I have always wanted some extra layers of muscle because I know it helps. On route. In meetings with people. In how you carry yourself.

Last autumn was hard. I lost a love, got it back, and then still had to understand that it did not work. Some of that was about demands, from both sides, about how one should be, how one should look, what one should become. I was not innocent in that. I had demands too. I wanted things too. So I cannot write about appearance as if I am above it. I am in it. I hate it, and I still take part in it.

The balcony

Today I sat on the balcony in Malmö. Six or seven degrees. Shorts. Thin clothes on the upper body. I was cold. I sat there anyway because I am preparing for Iceland. The trip has started before it starts. The body has to be reminded that comfort is not always in charge. The head has to understand what is coming. I also notice that now, after eating less fat, I get colder. There is less protection. The body is different.

So there I sat. Freezing on a balcony because a course in Iceland is coming. Slightly mad, yes. But I know this version of myself. The preparing version. The focused one. The one who can take away bread, sugar, butter and chocolate. The one who can train. The one who can make lists. The one who can sharpen himself because something is waiting. I know the other version too. The one who comes home and wants food. The one who says recovery and means bread. The one who says he needs energy and means butter. The one who wants the sofa, the tacos, the girls, the warmth, the good life.

I have lost most of the weight I wanted to lose before Iceland. The body feels better. Training feels better. I sleep better when I do not overeat, at least most nights. I can see in the mirror that this is a better weight for me. I can see it in photos too. I would be lying if I said that did not matter. But I do not want every meal to become fuel. I do not want every day to become preparation. I do not want to sit with my daughters on a Saturday and feel that tacos are a failure.

I do not have this solved. Iceland is coming, so for now I have something to aim at. Today that means boiled food, training, trying to sleep, and sitting on the balcony in Malmö freezing in shorts because some part of me thinks that will help.

Below is the new pitch trailer for Kyrgyzstan.

After Training

It was after Dana’s training session. We were standing outside by the bikes. Nothing remarkable, really. One of those ordinary moments after football, when everyone is trying to get home, someone has lost a water bottle, a coach needs to say something, a parent is standing there waiting. Dana is going to Gothenburg for a football tournament, and they will be sharing rooms, three girls to a room. One of the coaches asked me who Dana wanted to share with.

Then she began to explain.

Not dramatically. Not as a problem. Just matter-of-factly, warmly, attentively. She had understood from a previous tournament that Dana needs certain things. She needs peace and quiet. She needs to prepare herself. She needs time on her own. She does not need a room where people are running in and out all the time, joking around, making a mess, talking, throwing bags down, going back and forth. She needs a calm room.

I stood there listening, and at first I only thought how fantastic it was that the coach had really seen her. Not just seen Dana as a football player, how she runs, passes, fights, tackles, or whatever she does on the pitch. But seen her as a human being. Seen what she needs in order to feel well. Seen that she cannot simply be thrown into any room and be expected to function. It moved me.

Then it hit me. That is me.

That is exactly how I have been my whole life. I need peace and quiet. I need time alone. I need to prepare myself. I do not want people running in and out of the place where I live. I want to know where my things are. I want the home to be harmonious. I want my routines. I want time to adjust before the world comes in.

And then came the next thought. That comes from Mum. From Hedvig.

I never thought I would become like Mum.

The Chain

Not in that way. Not so clearly. Not this late in life, when you believe you have long since become yourself. Because that is what we like to think. That we have built something of our own. That we have travelled, broken free, taken our own paths, gone on our own expeditions, lived our lives, made our mistakes, chosen our own habits.

And then you find yourself standing outside a football training session in Malmö while a coach asks who your daughter wants to share a room with.

Suddenly you see the whole chain. Hedvig. Me. Dana. Perhaps Eva too, in her own way.

It is strange what travels with us. Not only the words. Not only the big things we think we remember. But the mornings. The coffee. The walks. The food. The rest. The silence. The way of getting yourself ready before the day is allowed to begin. The need for harmony. The need for the home not to be a place where other people’s unrest blows through the rooms.

Morning Discipline

Mum got up early. The first thing she did was make coffee. She smoked too, but that part, thankfully, I have not taken with me. The coffee, though, I understand. That first cup in the morning. That small passage between night and day, before everything else begins. Then she did her morning gymnastics.

It was early. Not only the hour of the day, though it was early in that sense too, but early in the time she lived in. This was not an age when everyone talked about training, health, mobility, and diet the way we do now. It was the late 1960s, the early 1970s, and onwards. Many people probably thought she was a little unusual. At least that is how she herself told it. I never heard anyone say she was odd, but that was the picture she carried. That she did things other people did not quite understand. But she did them anyway.

Then she made breakfast for me. I ate and went to school. And she went out walking. One hour. Two hours. Sometimes three. The walks were part of her life. As self-evident as eating, sleeping, and getting dressed. It was not something she did to show anything off. She did it because that was how she held herself together.

I have taken that with me. Completely.

My days are built on such things too. Routines. Food. Training. Walks. Rest. Preparation. Trying to keep the body and the mind in some sort of order. And the lunchtime rest was extremely important to Mum. She had to sleep at lunch. It is the same for me. My whole life has been built on those lunchtime rests. I have got up in the night for most of my adult life. Written, trained, travelled, filmed, planned, lived in a rhythm that perhaps has not always been wise, but has been mine. And then rest in the middle of the day is not laziness. It is a necessity.

So much of what I thought was me turns out to be her.

It is not unpleasant. It is, rather, fascinating.

The Late Child

Hedvig was born in 1922. She was forty when I was born. She had my sister when she was twenty-two and my brother when she was twenty-eight. Then I came twelve years after my brother. That did something to the family. I grew up with siblings who were already much older. In many ways I was almost like an only child in a home that had already lived a completely different family life before me. My sister was eighteen years older than I was. My brother was twelve years older. They had had another mother than I had, in a way. Not another person. But another phase of the same person.

When my sister was born, Mum was young. And who is mature enough to be a parent then? Perhaps we think we are supposed to be, just because the child is there. But it does not always work that way. Parenthood is also something you grow into. You fail. You learn. You become better. You understand more. And when I arrived, Mum had become complete in a different way. She was forty. She had lived. She had lost. She had fought. She had shaped herself.

I received a great deal of the love that perhaps should have been distributed more evenly between all three of us.

I do not say that to accuse her. I do not think she meant to do anything wrong. But I think that is what happened. It was to my advantage. Of course it was. It gave me something enormously strong. But I also think it complicated the relationship between her and my older siblings. It hurts to see such things afterwards. How love can be true and still unevenly distributed. How a parent can be wonderful for one child and at the same time have missed something in another.

That is one of the things I think about a great deal as a father.

Not repeating it.

Not favouring one child. Not allowing one child to take up all the space simply because that child’s life, at that moment, demands so much of me.

And right now there has been a lot of Dana. Football. Training sessions. Matches. Tournaments. Team gatherings. Driving. Food. Rest. Preparation. Joy. Disappointment. New matches. New training sessions.

And I love it.

We all love it. It is a wonderful time, being allowed to follow this wonderful girl’s development in football. To stand by the pitch and watch her grow. To see how she becomes stronger, more secure, faster, braver. To see her concentration. To see how much it means.

But I must not forget Eva.

Seeing Eva Too

It happens so easily. Not because you love less. But because life sometimes pulls in one direction. A football season can swallow a family. One child’s interest can take up so much space that the quieter needs of the other child risk ending up in the shadows.

That must not happen.

Eva has had her eye problems. That is no secret. Football was no longer possible in the same way, and she did not want to continue either. She is fifteen. A teenager. She has to be allowed to find her own thing.

So last week we began something else. We went to a rock club.

Medley in Malmö. The kind of club that belongs in the 1970s. Many in the audience were my age. Hell, many of those on stage were too. It was Sator from Borlänge. They played songs I recognised. I’d Rather Drink Than Talk and that whole world.

And there stood Eva. So much younger than everyone else.

But she thought the songs were good. She likes live music. Music is extremely important to her. And I saw how much she appreciated us doing it together. It was beautiful. Perhaps not big on the outside. Not an expedition. Not a journey to the other side of the world. Not a mountain, a desert, a bike ride, a film. Just an evening at a rock club in Malmö with my daughter.

But sometimes that is where the most important things happen.

You are together. You show. I see you too.

What Children Inherit

There is research on this, but really you do not need the research to understand it. Children do not only do as we say. They do as we do. They see our mornings. They see how we handle worry. They see what we do when we are tired. They see whether we go out walking, whether we train, whether we eat in a certain way, whether we keep things in order, whether we run away, whether we stay, whether we become hard, whether we apologise, whether we show love.

They see everything.

Also the things we think they do not see.

Of course I already knew this, on some level. But knowing it is one thing. Standing outside a football training session and understanding that your daughter carries the same needs you have carried your whole life, and that you yourself received them from your mother, is something else. Then it is not theory. Then it is Dana in Gothenburg. Then it is Hedvig at the kitchen table with coffee. Then it is me needing silence in the morning.

And that is when the memory begins to move backwards. From Dana’s need for a quiet room, to my own need for order, and from there to Hedvig — not only as my mother, but as a girl, a young woman, a person shaped by a place long before I existed.

Back to Lima

Mum grew up in Lima, in Dalarna. Not exactly in the house I am now rebuilding, but in that area. There is something strange in that. That I am now building a house on the land, in the community, in the world where she was shaped. A fantastic house, I hope. A house for the future. For my children. For guests. For life.

But also, in some way, a house that reaches backwards.

To her.

She said she was bullied at school. She played a lot on her own, in her own worlds of imagination. I remember how she could tell those stories. She had a good way of telling things. It was never only facts. It became images. Atmospheres. She could turn a walk into something larger than a walk.

I remember some march in the Lima or Limedsforsen area. I cannot remember what it was called. Something with “march” in the name. Perhaps between summer pasture farms. Perhaps ten kilometres. It was probably not far by today’s standards. For me now, with all the training, all the expeditions, and all the miles in my body, ten kilometres is nothing remarkable. But for her it became an expedition.

And that is interesting.

Because perhaps that is where much of it began. Not in the great journeys. Not in the extreme projects. But in her way of charging an ordinary walk with meaning. She walked. She told stories. She made it into something. A march through forest and community could become an adventure.

She travelled too. She and her sister Dagmar. I remember England. I remember Lake Garda. Trips like that. Not like my later journeys, perhaps, but journeys all the same. Movement. Curiosity. The sense that the world existed out there. And she came to visit me on my bike journeys. Thailand. Other places. That meant something. That she did not simply stand at home and say no. That she did not make the world smaller for me. She was part of it. I think my travelling comes from there too. Not only from restlessness. Not only from the desire for adventure. But from a mother who showed that it was possible to move, to be curious, to let life be larger than the nearest yard.

Dignity

At the same time, she was very much Lima. And the community. Decency. Dignity. Morals. Respect. Not boasting. Keeping going. It was not only her. It was the whole area. Such things lived in people. You were supposed to behave. You were not supposed to think you were special. You were supposed to do right by others. You were supposed to hold together. You were not supposed to complain unnecessarily.

That has followed me too. Sometimes it has helped me. Sometimes it has probably made me hard on myself. But there is something beautiful in it as well.

Dignity.

Mum had dignity. She preferred to live without a man. And I understand her. After all the trouble with Dad, who would want someone else in the home? I am glad she never brought some other bastard home. The one time there was some slight threat of it, it came to very little. Men were not what you wanted indoors. Not like that. Not in that home. Not in our peace.

It makes me think of my own children. What do they think about the women I have brought home after the breakup with their mother? It would be interesting to know. I know they at least liked one of them. But these are the things you think about as you get older. What did I bring into their home? What feeling did I give them? Was the home calm? Was it safe? Or did I carry my own unrest into it?

What We Bring Home

That is perhaps the hardest part of parenthood.

Not the love. That is simple. I love Eva and Dana above everything else.

The difficult part is everything else. What you pass on without understanding it. What tone you give the home. What worry settles into the walls. Which habits become theirs. Which shortcomings they will one day discover in themselves and think, I got that from Dad.

I know what I want them to carry with them. That I loved them above everything else. That I was a good parent. That is the most important thing. Not that I succeeded in everything. Not that I was always calm. Not that I was always enough. No one is. But that they should know, deep in their bodies, that they were loved. That I saw them. That I tried. That I put them before everything else.

And I know what I do not want them to carry on. My eternal worry that I am not enough. That I am not good enough. I do not want to give them that. I do not want them to inherit it.

The Gift She Gave Me

Mum gave me something else. She gave me the feeling that I was special. It began almost before I could remember anything myself. I was born prematurely, in a taxi. I survived. I lay in an incubator. And Mum told me I had shown so much life even there. She built that story inside me. Not in a boastful way, I think. Not as if I were better than others. But as if I had strength. Life. Something particular. She made me feel unique. And that did something to me. I grew up with a sense that nothing was impossible.

That almost sounds naïve today. But it was another time as well. Sweden felt positive. Inequalities were shrinking. Everyone was supposed to have equal value. The future did not lie ahead like a threat, but like an opening. I stepped out into existence with the feeling that it was possible. That you could. That the world was there.

It was an enormous gift. And it came from her. From Hedvig. From her love. From her discipline. From her way of living.

The Buckwheat Jar

She also had her own struggle with the body. She watched her weight all her life. I remember the sound of the scales early in the morning. How she stepped onto them. How weight was something she followed. She read weekly magazines. I probably did not understand then how important they were to her. That was where she learned about diet, health, food, the body.

I remember her porridge. Or whatever one should call it. Buckwheat. Prunes. A lot of other things. She put it all into a large jar overnight and ate it cold in the morning. Slimy, I thought then. But probably very healthy. Now I can almost smile at it. She was ahead of her time there too. Today someone would have posted the same jar on Instagram, called it overnight buckwheat breakfast, and received thousands of likes. Mum just ate it. Because she believed in it.

She also smoked, and perhaps believed it helped her keep her figure. It did not. We know that now. But human beings are not consistent. Not even the disciplined ones. I recognise that. I am very careful with food and still I can overeat, especially after expeditions, when the body screams for recovery.

But there too she remains in me. Not as a perfect role model, but as a reminder that we try to hold ourselves together with the tools we have.

It is almost comical. You think you have travelled far. And then you end up back at the kitchen table of your childhood.

What Travels On

I became Mum.

And now I see how my children are becoming me.

Not in every way. Nor should they. They are their own people. Eva is Eva. Dana is Dana. They have their time, their screens, their languages, their friends, their dreams, their problems. They are not growing up in Hedvig’s Lima. They are not growing up in my 1970s. They are growing up now. In a much stranger, faster, harder, more connected world.

But certain things still move through the generations.

The need for time alone. The need for calm. The worlds of imagination. The music. The football. The food. The training. The walks. The rest. The worry. The love.

And that is where parenthood becomes so terribly vast. You think it is about what you say. Do your homework. Eat properly. Be kind. Keep fighting. Believe in yourself. But that is only a small part. What matters is what you show. How you live when no one thinks it matters. How you get up in the morning. How you treat other people. How you talk about yourself. How you take care of your body. How you handle fear. How you love. How you fail. How you come back.

It was not a lecture from Mum that shaped me. It was her life.

The coffee in the morning. The gymnastics. The walks. The food. The weight. The rest. The dignity. The love.

And now, when I stand outside a football training session and a coach tells me that Dana needs peace and quiet, I suddenly see how far that life has travelled.

From Hedvig in Lima. To me. To my children.

I do not know whether it makes me happy or afraid. Perhaps both. Because it is a responsibility to understand how much you leave behind. Not only money, houses, things, photographs, stories. But behaviours. Tones of voice. Mornings. Ways of loving. Ways of worrying. Ways of holding yourself together.

I hope Eva and Dana one day remember that I loved them above everything else. I hope they remember that I tried to be a good father. I hope they take with them the discipline, the curiosity, the travelling, the music, the football, the food, the walks, the rest, the belief that the world is possible. I hope they do not take my worry with them. Not too much of it, at least.

And I hope that one day, when they themselves are standing somewhere in life and suddenly hear themselves say something or see themselves do something, they might think: that was Dad.

Just as I now think. That was Mum. Hedvig.

I never thought I would become her. But perhaps that is not the worst thing that can happen. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is one of the finest things about life. That someone who loved us continues to live in the way we make coffee, go out walking, place a hand on our children’s shoulder, and say without big words:

I see you. I know what you need. I am here.

This is what came next, still on the same journey in 1986 to 87. Translated and tightened for Substack, but told as it happened.

Panama City
We roll into Panama City on the bicycles.

The city hits like a wall. Exhaust, dirt, stress. Faces from everywhere. Towers trying to look modern. The air feels used up before you even breathe it.

I am already sick when we arrive. Not tired, sick. The kind of sickness that turns your body into weight and your head into fog. It makes you short-tempered. It makes you mean. It makes you ashamed.

Ed leads us through narrow alleys toward a hotel opposite a cathedral by Plaza Central. It must once have been exclusive. You can still feel the old pride in the height of the ceiling and the size of the entrance. Now the wallpaper is peeling and the place looks tired.

Ed demands a room. The men behind the desk stare at us with open contempt. Ed does not back down. He pushes, insists, refuses to be dismissed. In the end we get a key.

The elevator does not work. Four floors. Eighty dollars a night.

We haul bicycles and bags up the stairs, step by step, one load at a time. When everything is finally inside the room, I collapse onto the bed.

For a week I hardly move.

A doctor tells me what I do not want to hear. No fat. No alcohol. I live on boiled tomatoes, cucumber, rice. Ed eats what he wants.

Then Ed collapses.

He screams and holds his lower back. He begs me to help him up. I drag him upright and he folds and hits the floor. For a moment he lies still enough that I think he has died there. I shout his name. I slap him until he complains and returns.

A doctor arrives, dark-eyed and indifferent. The kidneys, he says. Ed needs rest.

This is where our road together ends. Panama City is the last place we share the same room. After that we leave separately, and I never see him again on the journey north. It is strange how quickly a person can vanish from your daily life when the road decides so.

Out of the City
When I finally get moving again, the world opens up the moment I leave Panama City behind.

One evening by the sea I watch a pelican dive like a spear and rise with a fish. My own dinner boils between stones around a small fire. A light breeze cools my face. I am still weak, still sick, but the air is air again.

Roadblock
The road blocks.

Hundreds of people with signs. A woman pushes a placard close to my face about Noriega and freedom. Someone says it is a general strike and it may go on for days.

An old man stands behind a cart full of bananas. If you get stuck, he tells me, there is one salvation.

His bananas.

He raises his knotted hand toward the sky and says God eats my bananas. He says it like it settles everything. It is so absurd I laugh.

Costa Rica
At night in the tent a scream rips through the darkness. It comes again, closer. My heart hammers so hard it hurts my ribs. Sweat pours. I cannot find the matches.

It must be a jaguar, I think.

In the end I force myself out because I have to urinate. I jump out ready for the worst and meet a face full of teeth.

A small howler monkey.

I stand there shaking with anger and relief and feel stupid in the way you feel stupid when you are still alive.

Cerro de la Muerte
The climb comes. The Mountain of Death.

At one point a thought arrives sharp enough to be dangerous. If I cannot handle this, I will hitch a lift into San José, buy a ticket, and go home. El Darién taught me something I did not know before. You can give up without losing your self-respect.

A filthy truck stops. A man steps out, disgusting in a way only a stranger can be when you are exhausted. He spits, drives off, then returns and walks toward me with bananas on his shoulder.

Only twenty kilometres left to the top, he says. He congratulates me and presses the bananas into my hands.

I blush with shame. Will I never learn.

At the top fog makes it impossible to see anything far. Light rain. Wind. For the first time in a long time I freeze. But it does not matter. I am up there. I do not have to quit.

Santa Rosa
In Santa Rosa National Park the jungle becomes theatre.

Wild pigs come to a muddy waterhole and glare up at me when I scramble onto a stone. After them come monkeys, screaming, acrobatic, cruelly happy.

Then I see bandit faces and long tails between the trees. Coatimundis. A whole group scatters when I shout without meaning to.

For a few days my body slowly comes back. The fever loosens its grip. The mind becomes clearer. The road becomes possible again.

La Cruz and the Border
At La Cruz, near the Nicaragua border, I see the first serious cluster of uniformed Costa Ricans. Until now Costa Rica has felt almost empty of police and military. Only here do I understand how much that mattered.

People look at me and ask if I am Japanese. The sickness has painted me yellow enough that they cannot place me. A hotel owner asks if I can teach karate.

I smile and keep moving.

Cordobas
At the border the currency becomes theatre.

A man offers five thousand cordobas for one dollar. He wears a cap that says Viva Los Contras. He carries a big bag of Nicaraguan cordobas.

I lie awake with doubt. Is it a moral mistake to use the black market here. But I need money I can use. I need to eat. I need to move.

I exchange twelve dollars.

Soon I am riding with a bag full of cordobas into Nicaragua.

Nicaragua
It feels like stepping a hundred years back in time.

Houses of thin wooden boards and dried clay. Stamped earth floors. Animals inside the same space as families. And still, friendly, humorous eyes.

A farmer shouts Viva la vida americano. I answer Viva la vida ruso and ride on, even keeping to the left side of the road because the surface feels better there and the traffic is so sparse it does not matter.

Two red tractors pass with Cyrillic letters on the side. The drivers stare straight ahead as if the world is fixed.

I see my first real car, an old Buick held together by wire and hope. A plate reads The Free Nicaragua. A Coca-Cola sign hangs like a promise.

Everything is finished, the shopkeeper says before I can speak. Try further down the street.

In a dark bar a soldier sits cleaning a modern automatic rifle. He does not look up. Men stare at me like I am an object.

A woman offers homemade liquor. Otherwise nothing.

Then she offers chicken with rice and a warm Coca-Cola.

It costs five thousand cordobas.

She tells me why. This week they only got sugar. No rice. No meat. Only sugar.

When I pay from my bag full of cordobas, the men whistle quietly. The room watches me.

Lake Nicaragua
Wind tears at my tent by Lake Nicaragua. Waves crash close.

Above me a huge billboard shows the captured American helicopter pilot Hasenfus being dragged forward by soldiers.

Behind me a small hut. A father sits outside with a loaded rifle, warning about bandits and gangsters.

After dinner I lean back and feel it clearly.

This is what I know.

Managua and El Chepito
Managua is the strangest city I have met. No one knows the street names I ask for. No one seems to know where the centre is. The city feels scattered. People everywhere. Red and black everywhere.

I search for El Chepito, the legendary place for travellers.

When I finally find it, it boils with life. Youths on cement floors, discussing everything, in shifting languages. The air is thick with conviction.

Then I hear Swedish.

Homesickness hits like a punch. I am too tired, too dirty, too thin to introduce myself. I lie down and fall asleep.

Intercontinental
In the luxurious dining room of the Hotel Intercontinental, some of the most fanatical residents from El Chepito eat pâté. They stare at me with contempt in my worn clothes. A meal here is paid with black-market dollars.

Someone talks about guilt, about beans and rice outside, about the right way to live.

I look around the room and notice something that bothers me more than the food.

There are no Nicaraguan women in there.

The Village
I stay in a village and try to get close to the people, the finest and most humble I have met.

Doña Sabina is the hostess. Don Estevan is the village leader. He tells me life is simple, shoes and clothes are a problem, but nobody lacks food or a roof. He says the difference now is literacy, even the old can learn to read and write.

A young woman tells me quietly that for young women it is still hard. After compulsory school, they are pushed back into kitchens and households.

When I pack to leave, Doña Sabina rises on her toes and whispers a warning into my ear.

Watch out for the Contras. They kill the country’s sons.

Estelí
I roll into Estelí at dusk.

Every wall is marked with red and black graffiti and bullet holes. The town is dark. No streetlights. No water. No electricity.

A small newspaper seller explains it. The Contras blew up a transformer station outside town.

The only hotel that will take me is expensive and locked behind a high fence and a huge padlock. The owner stares at me like I am a problem.

He calls me a volunteer for the regime.

Then he explodes when he sees the bicycle.

Russian, he screams, kicks it over, drives away the children, and punches me hard in the back as he storms past.

No water. No shower. No light. Dirty and now beaten too.

Then the next scene is even stranger.

A boy poses for my camera dressed like Rambo with a rifle almost as long as his body.

He tells me he is twelve and asks for cigarettes.

Then he drops the mask for a second and warns me to hide the camera.

In that warning you can hear it. A child who has learned to perform war, and still knows when it is time to be afraid.

A red military truck with Russian markings roars past carrying soldiers toward the front. They wave and smile.

I wave back.

And I keep rolling north, toward Honduras.

Istanbul again

I had looked forward to this leg of Defender X more than I had admitted to myself.

Not because of the cars. Not because of the route. Not even because we are heading for Sydney in the long run and that still carries a charge after all these years. No, this time it was more personal than that.

A few days before leaving, a relationship I had been in for three years came to an end. In a good way, I think. Or as good as such things can be. No shouting. No bitterness. No drama. But endings are endings. Even when both know it is right, it still leaves a bruise.

So to get on a plane almost immediately afterwards and meet up with this strange, loyal, funny, exhausting, generous road family in Istanbul felt like exactly the right thing to do.

This journey goes back a long way for me and Jeff. Long before it became Defender X, before the convoy, the filming, the branding, all of that, there was simply an idea between the two of us that we should travel together by car. It was never really only about the cars. It was about movement. Companionship. And the old belief that the road still has something to teach you.

Since then it has grown into something much bigger, more complicated and in many ways more unlikely. But the heart of it is still there.

When I arrived in Istanbul, a bit swollen from stress and too much food, worn down from weeks of nonstop film work, and not exactly sharp mentally either, I knew why I needed to be there.

The first evening was exactly what it had to be. A magnificent hotel by the Bosphorus. A Michelin restaurant. Endless small plates. Wine. More wine. Whisky and cigars after that. Excessive, yes. But that was not the point. The point was the group. The feeling. Everyone was happy to see each other. Everyone looked forward to what was coming. And everyone also knew, whether we said it or not, that these trips take something out of you. Moods change. Bodies get tired. Age is no longer something abstract. It is in the room with us now. Health too.

But there we were again. Starting another chapter.

What the road does

For me there was another reason I needed the road. When you sit in a car hour after hour, you cannot escape yourself. At home, even in my own flat, I always feel I should be producing something. Writing. Editing. Answering. Planning. Worrying. Everything turns into work.

But in a car you are stuck. You cannot jump up and fix your life. You cannot pretend to be efficient. You just sit there, look out, talk for a while, and when the talk runs out, as it always does, your thoughts start doing their work. I have come to realise how healthy that is for me. The road forces me to sit still.

The first drive to Ankara was easy enough. Five or six hours. A good way to begin. Nobody gets too tired. You get into the rhythm. I also recognised parts of the Anatolian landscape from when I cycled through there with the girls. Not exactly those roads, we were further south then, but close enough that memory kicked in. That happens more and more now. The older I get, the more every new road seems to contain older ones too.

Then came the long push to Trabzon. Ten hours, but easy in its own way because Jeff and Steve are extraordinary drivers. They love driving for its own sake. They do not need a monument, a viewpoint or a detour to justify a day. They are happy just going from A to B and doing it well.

I am not really like that. I always want to stop, walk, talk to someone, get off the main road. But even I had to admit that this stretch was spectacular. We crossed the mountains, dropped towards the Black Sea and then followed the coast east. With good weather, that stretch was spectacular.

And yet it was impossible for me to look out over the Black Sea without thinking of war. Beyond that calm water, way up north, Ukraine burns. A brutal war, and one that will shape the history of the world whether we like it or not. I spend a lot of time back home thinking about the state of things, about what kind of world my daughters are going to inherit, and I did not want this trip to become only that. But it was there. In the background all the time. Like distant weather.

Into the Caucasus

Crossing from Turkey into Georgia changed the mood immediately.

Turkey on this leg had felt polished, orderly, almost fully European. Immaculate roads, smooth movement, everything working. Then at the border the Caucasus arrived. Babushkas. Goods piled high. A proper border post. Noise, trade, disorder, people carrying things in and out. It felt like stepping through a curtain.

I had only been in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh before, not really Georgia, but the Caucasus has fascinated me for years. Partly because it is post-Soviet, and anything post-Soviet catches my eye. After so much time in Russia and especially Siberia, I recognise things in places like Georgia even when I have never been there before. Not everything, of course, but enough. Enough that something in me relaxes. I know the rhythm. I know the buildings. I know the roads once you leave the best ones behind and start seeing village life.

Batumi struck me as half Dubai, half Soviet, and the two halves had clearly not agreed on anything. The new city was full of cafes, polished surfaces and well-dressed people. Steve said it was like Paris. That is overdoing it. For me, as usual, it was the old town that mattered much more. Less polished. Fewer nice clothes. More texture. More of what survives when the slogans of modernity lose interest.

One of the strongest images I carry from Batumi is exactly that mix. The modern Marriott there, and in front of it this older, almost absurd piece of Soviet visual culture. The whole place felt like that. New money, old ghosts.

Stalin country

Then Gori. Or rather near Gori. Stalin country.

That mattered to me even if it did not really matter to the others. I am the one in this group with the real affinity for the Soviet world. I know the history reasonably well, and I would have loved to visit the Stalin museum there, but it did not happen this time.

Instead we stopped at a modern road station nearby and ate huge shawarmas. I was hungry. Tired too. And all the while aware that one of history’s great killers came from just there, from those green hills and those ordinary provincial streets.

There was something unreal about that. No grand memorial moment. No historical ceremony. Just shawarma, traffic and a Saturday afternoon.

Maybe that made it stronger. History sitting there in plain sight without announcing itself.

Evelina in Tbilisi

By the time we got to Tbilisi, I needed time on my own. That is one of the strange things with trips like this. I love the group. Truly. But after enough hours in the car, enough meals together, enough talk, I need to get out and walk alone.

So I did.

And that changed everything, as it often does. In a convoy you travel in a bubble. In a city alone you become open again. You meet people. You hear things. You notice more.

On my way up towards the Mother of Georgia statue I saw a young woman sitting outside a cafe. Her job was to get people to stop and come in for tea. I noticed her from a distance because she looked vulnerable and strong at the same time. We spoke briefly and I told her I might stop on the way back.

I did.

Her name was Evelina. We started talking almost immediately about deep emotions, the kind of conversation that begins without any small talk at all. Later she said she wanted to talk more, so we met again that evening for a drink at the hotel bar. She was young, an artist, and full of deep thoughts about life. One of those people you meet for a very short time and still remember.

Walking back later I thought, yes, this is still why I travel. Not to get somewhere. But because a person you had never heard of two hours earlier can suddenly make a place feel real.

Baku without the cars

We knew from the beginning that the cars would not continue into Azerbaijan this time. That was simply part of this leg. I am not a driver, so for me it was easier to accept than it probably was for Jeff and Steve. Jeff’s journey is the spine of the whole thing, and I was just very happy to be part of it.

Still, arriving in Baku without the convoy felt strange. As if part of the journey was missing.

Baku is stunning if you want it to be. Immaculate. Controlled. Enormous buildings. Lights along the waterfront. Steve was extremely impressed and I understood why. He likes this kind of modernity.

But I had been there before with Sophie, and both of us know enough about Azerbaijan to understand what sits behind the surface. A place where control is everywhere has a texture of its own. This time what made it physical were the cameras. They were everywhere. On every street corner. Looking down on you all the time. Everything shines, but you know exactly how little room there is to get anything wrong.

Still, I enjoyed parts of it enormously. Me and Doug had a late evening walk through the old town after cigars and good drink, and it was wonderful. Warm, beautiful, easy. But even then I kept thinking that this is a country where the wrong sentence in the wrong place can cost people everything.

What it still gives

So what does this leg say to me?

Maybe simply this.

The world is more closed than it used to be. We are older than we used to be. And none of that has made the road matter less.

Borders are tighter. Countries more watchful. Some of us had health concerns. All of us carry more history in our bodies now than we once did. Age is part of the story. Health is part of the story. Time is definitely part of the story.

But friendship still pulls us onto the road. Curiosity still does. And coming back to a group of people who understand you, even for seven days, is not a small thing. It might be everything.

When the talk runs out and you are staring at a Black Sea horizon thinking about a war you cannot stop, about daughters growing up in a world getting harder to read, about a relationship that ended quietly back home in Malmö, the road does not give you answers.

It gives you motion. It gives you perspective. It gives you life moving again. And sometimes that is enough.

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