Of my academic exchange trip to Vienna, my most profound discoveries were not schnitzels or Mozart-flavored croissants, but a second-hand, possibly stolen bicycle and the many joys and pains of camping wild. It was a bike that had possibly changed my entire outlook on my art of travel, and it was part coincidence and part my Asian stinginess.
I remember noting how cycle-friendly Vienna was and googled the closest bicycle shop, arriving within the hour and trying to haggle down a weekly bicycle rental and instead spotted instead a dusty, red German Delmont Steel bicycle outside in the rain. It looked shabby, and lonely like a dirty puppy, but I fell in love immediately. I consulted the owner on where I should go around Vienna and he told me to instead bike to Germany.
“Oh, you mean to take the bicycle on the train to Germany?”
“No”, he laughed as he handed me a map guide, “bike to Deutschland, along the Danube River, from Vienna to Passau.”
“What?”
The only thing I noticed about the map guide so far was that it was twelve Euros. Or a quarter of what the second-hand bicycle costs. I felt spontaneous, so I bought it, along with gloves, other maps, a helmet, a light (it was illegal to not have a light in Austria), spare tubes, and a jacket. I remember that day as the first day I had a different outlook on Vienna since I’ve arrived over a month ago. No longer was my memory of the city fragmented fleeting birds-eye moments obstructed by commuting workers and students while cramped in the metro or the bus. Instead, I flew across the city, from asphalt to brick, from the Donaupark to my home, Naubaugasse . On every single road in Vienna, bicycles get one lane, no matter what, shared with taxis and buses . I was able to get home in twenty minutes, surpassing hundreds of cars and the turned heads of commuters in buses as I dangerously hopped from sidewalk to street and back. Even though I was going as fast as one would in a car, my view had been completely unrestricted by the top or the windows of the car. I was free to smell, touch, and feel the rush of air.
That same night, I pondered my art of traveling. My first European experience had been with the dreaded city-hopping Contiki group, where being able to say “I’ve been to there” was more important than knowing anything about “there”. I remember nothing of what I saw, and the trip only left me wanting more. Flying became my transportation of choice the next time I went, upon discovery of Ryanair and how cheap inter-European flights were. I would always choose a windows seat even though my knees would complain. I never enjoyed my flights as I always spent my time with my nose glued to the window, admiring the slowness of the landscape which passed below. You never get a real sense of speed as you fly, because ironically, the faster you go, the higher you had to be and therefore the slower it seems. Landscapes and cloudscapes seem frozen, and always left an ache wishing that I had traveled by land instead. The slowness of the passing landscape is deceiving as it conceals the rich experience that you implicitly choose to ignore with your choice to fly. I never flew again, unless I had to.
It was in the trip from Berlin back to Vienna by the bullet train, that I had my next revelation. It was the first trip that I was entirely entranced by what I was seeing upon dawn that I decided that even the train was too limiting. I remember the oily marks I left on the window as I tried to see past the blur of trees that dotted along the railway. Glorious fields of green dotted with animals and chalets, little villages that always had a church in the middle of it. The speed of the bullet train caused trees too close to the train to be too nauseating to focus on, and thereby focused my sights on the chalets and church towers clouded in early mist. Trees by the rail became an intermittent blur, through which early flashes of the morning sun bathed my face. The Alps in the distance, frozen in motion with the bullet train near Salzburg soon casted a dramatic shadow on the fields. Its shadows engulfed towns emerging and disappearing behind the blur of trees. I longed to discover these towns by foot, no longer to sit idly in a train mid-journey, nose flat against the windows that separates me from something clearly more beautiful than my intended destination.
Spontaneity pushed me to decide that I would go on the trip. I woke up, packed whatever I thought I needed and left for the river. My well-intentioned Austrian roommates tried to stop me. “Are you crazy?! You don’t even speak German”. I just shrugged, “at least I know the numbers and how to order food” and smiled as I took my bike out the door.
For weeks straight, I rode on through the charming towns that I’ve set sight on in my train trip back. There is a very different set of movements that you notice while biking. On an airplane, you notice the very static landscape or the very fluid clouds as you emerge through the cloud layer. On a car or the bus, you notice constant indistinctness movement constrained through the frames of the window. On the bicycle, as you go slowly, your perception could be one like a strolling couple in a park, where everything becomes vividly clear. You notice movements of little creatures as they chase each other across the pavement and the shuffling of the leaves by the winds. As you go faster, everything becomes a blur except your own bicycle. As you look down, the asphalt below your feet becomes fluid, and soon you have to set your focus on farther objects. It is this set of movements that I appreciate in my travels that led me to in the end embrace cycling as my art of travel. No longer is the towns just picturesque postcard moments framed by your window of the car or the train, but living towns with actual people with beautifully textured facades. Every eyeful that I saw, bite that I take, breath of the fresh morning dew and even the mosquito flying in to my eye are multiplied in enjoy by the set of inherent movement that I choose to engage in by cycling. It was only through cycling that I began to appreciate the slowness in the movement that is lacking in so much travels abroad. It is these through movements one begins to appreciate the splendor of the rural. Although I have only covered a thousand miles from Vienna to Passau to Florence, something a train can cover in a night, I have seen more intricate movements than I remember, and have spent less than I would have daydreaming at my apartment.
When Robert Louis Stevenson said, “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go”, he was speaking of the myriad movements one would miss out to by a destination-minded traveler rather than a journey-oriented traveler.
Pink Martini @ Vancouver International Jazz Festival
Aurora and her ten day old baby beluga
