I find myself deep adrift in another world. East Asia, South Korea. Miles from the outside, clear air drifting over deserts and arid grasslands of Mongolia. My eyes are fixed on that movement, the survival I face, alone and with Nomads, the horses, the sheep, the tough yaks and camels brought along by horsemen and further ahead on the track, I see goats scurrying and munching mountain sides in symmetrical rows and tracing patterns. The land is natural under my feet. There are no paved roads, lines, traffic lights or the fog of drivers and pollution here. It's still out of reach for civilization and much of the land is needed for the animals who roam and feed their Nomadic people. The Russians have left the country, the Chinese are over the borders. Solidarity and democracy and pastoralism where the roaming sheep and goats outnumber people. This is a good feature of Outer Mongolia. Unforgettable.
Today, I feel a vast emptiness bigger than deserts and I am home now in South Korea, while the North cajoles the idea of a nuclear war, I fall out of order losing touch with the westernized, commercialized South while we look out from stone wall apartment blocks and sliding glass windows at similar structures in rows of apartment columns, this could be the U.S.S.R. And in the back of my mind's eye, I can still see a golden sun and washboard roads, the rocky track and dust blowing behind a UAZ-452 people mover revving up over the mountain peak past the Ovoo, the spiritual cairn with horizons coming and going all the way from Lake Baikal in the North across the border in Siberia to the clutches of sand desert Gobi in the south.
Here again, it's South Korea and the air is dry carried over the Taebaek and Cheongoksan mountains nearby. Here we are "Yellow Dusted" all springtime with a hazy cloud of pollutants that recently choked airports to close in Beijing and cause serious respiratory hazards in the elderly and those prone to allergies, my children were sick for weeks from this foul air. Far away and unclear, East of China, East of Mongolia, East of the Gobi Desert - the Far East is where we live. All spring is "outdoor activity on hold, or exercise with caution" since air masses are mixed with sandy dust and toxins from Industrial two-face, China.
I've been in physiotherapy for 4 weeks, best time spent in my life of recovery. A doctor who cares and knows my injuries, he can feel them with his hands and works the muscles and tendon like kneading a loaf of bread before throwing it through the fires of the oven. Everyday I leave the clinic I can walk straighter, feel less pain, do more than I did since I spent the summer hunched over while scaffolding 40,000 meters across 2,500 kilometers of the Northern Steppe in Central Asia.
I hurt, I feel pain now like I never did before. Today, I don't ride bikes, I don't speak to sponsors and I drift further away from finding them with my own personal life rolling through turbulent storms, electric clouds, dark shadows and light casting nets over my happiness and drowning it in a wild river. While trapped within nature's grip, I feel peace slipping through my hands when the next CNN report sensationalizes and draws more world attention to their news, their advertisers. While over here, we are struggling to keep watch over our families, homes, jobs and security - this is life in a divided Korea, today a risk environment for future warfare. Now, I must report to work and get the classes done, professional, work and family life, money and debts paid - the fine art of balance on a thin red line.
I now live again behind concrete walls, the internet, the social scene is displayed on a computer monitor, thousands flock to see, hear and click "Like" and add a new page to follow. I do the same as the sheep following the social road through a digital whiteout, a blizzard of connectivity and temporal connections. I miss living from my tent in the deserts, the grasslands, the yelp of dogs and bleeping of sheep coming round from their pastures in the middle of the night when stars twinkle bright and you feel alright.
I miss the creative space of nature in wide open pastoral lands, where I could camp somewhere each night between 1,564,115 square kilometers of a single country, mostly open Steppe, arid grassland undeveloped, as were the tracks serving as national highways connecting life routes of trade and traveler. Small-bore 150cc Chinese motorcycles and the occasional 350cc single cylinder Russian motorcycle - a IZH Planeta 5s moving slowly, bobbing through holes and around overturned stones with a newborn baby wrapped in blankets between mother and husband, headscarf and sunglasses, jackets and heavy Mongolian overcoats, saving them from the cold nights, the harsh sunlight, and biting flies as they roll along.
It's tough living far from your cultural roots for so very long, the distances grow bigger each year and you always plan to go back, but you can't. And inside the Southern half of the Korean peninsula, the geographical space begins to shrink into one culture, one moment in time. You drift here, they don't see you, you work and serve the needs for hundreds, time ticks by, you drift by, nobody says goodbye. The wave of endless life, replaceable and timed out in the moments eventually lost in the sea of drifting memories. Mongolia was exceptional, I want to return.
What is the next expedition?
--Brian PerichAdventure Cyclist, Explorer, Father, University Lecturer
Skype: prof.brian.perich
Ph. 82.10.8075.5121 (South Korea)
Trail riding in Outer Mongolia 2014
Cross Mongolia (2500 kilometers) bikepacking in 2012
