Some wise thoughts on the pros and cons of slow travel from the chaps at Revolution Cycle:

Modern travel is great at delivering a grand dose of dépaysement (literally translated it means “de-countrified”, the feeling of having the cultural rug pulled from under you, to be spat into a new milieu, and assaulted with unfamiliar visual, aural, oral and olfactory sensations), with metal tubes either airborne, mounted on rails, or following roads, sucking you up in one part of the world, holding you in a static environment where temperature and light and surfaces are constant, then spitting you out in a different place in no time at all. It can be a place with a different climate, landscape and culture. And the journey, with its sudden jarring from start place to end, with no gradation, does little to prepare for the change. Thus you are, until you adjust your thinking- until you tell your mind and body not to expect the sensations from the place where you came, and that the sensations of where you are now are normal- in a liminal place-less place- shocked from the new and strange, decountrified briefly.

Cycling with its gradual slow pace, and intimate contact with the between bits from start to end place doesn’t deliver such drastic shocks, nor serve up a shocking de-countrified experience. On the contrary, moving at the speed of life in constant contact with the worlds you pass through, the cyclist can often miss big changes, coming as they do in gradation.

So, here I find myself on a high speed train heading to central China from the coast. yesterday I was in Shanghai 2,000km South East, the day before Dublin. It took me ten months to cycle this far on bicycle. Two days by modern transport. When I arrived in Lanzhou the first time, I complained about the homogeneity of China of its unchanging, dull landscape. However, travelling by train at 150km an hour, I can see it changing rapidly outside my window. I notice the landscape morphology and its natural form change dramatically.

The tight texture of Shanghai, compact newly built grey apartments and factories, highways and power lines, gave way to dense humid pastoral lands, thickly foliaged with peach trees, and rice paddies. Then Night fell. In the morning I woke to steep, sharply walled granite river valleys with clear rushing streams and polished rocks. Then the plains around Xi’an rolled past, open and vast planted with corn an rice. Mountains then loomed, grass covered hills at first, then grass covered towering mountains ,then sandy terraces covering crumbling hillsides, with muddy wide rivers flowing slowly in at their bases.

It strikes me that I haven’t been paying attention, in my career as a cyclist I have not been following due diligence. Its not like I have much else to do, cycle and look around, in my working day. I didn’t notice things spreading out as distances between towns stretched and the country side became less populated. Well, its not that i didn’t notice, more that I wasn’t excited by it, it didn’t make me purr like it did originally or its doing now.

So, how does one travel slowly and still and retain the ability to be de-countrified? In today’s world of on demand and short attention span, is it possible to stay bewitched for long? Is it possible to retain the fascination with the strange and new, or am I culturally programmed to need constant spectical and stimulus to stay amused and interested?