“The Sounds of Travel” / Masanori Nishikawa
Masanori Nishikawa is beginning a new series.
He is a man who has traveled the world by bicycle.
He has ridden through countless countries, slept in unfamiliar towns, and received help from people in places where he didn’t speak the language, and he has always wanted to pass on those experiences to someone.
In recent years, Circles and Shimworks have supported his ongoing Mountain Bike Journey. This is not simply because we support people who travel far.
It is because we believe that Nishikawa’s travels embody the very essence of what we have entrusted to bicycles in a deeply honest way.
A bicycle is not just for riding fast.
It is also a tool for heading somewhere, meeting someone, and plunging whole-body into a world you never knew.
The title of this new series is “The Sounds of Travel”.
The sound of tires rolling.
The sound of the wind. The sound of water.
The sounds of an unfamiliar town at night.
The sound that rings deep inside when you encounter someone’s kindness.
His writing does not make travel something belonging to someone far away.
It feels as though it has been quietly placed by your bedside or at your feet.
“The Sounds of Travel” begins now.
Please listen closely.
What It Means to Travel by Bicycle.
Words & Photos By Masanori Nishikawa
It means going to a place you have longed for.
Placing yourself in the midst of nature.
Meeting the people who live in that land.
Expanding your world.
But above all else, what I have come to hope to find on my travels
is to encounter myself.
When did I first begin to think this?
Longing for the world.
Wanting to face nature.
Wanting to meet people all over the world.
And wanting to expand my own world—
that is why I began traveling the world by bicycle.
I wanted to go on many travels, just as
if I had read it somewhere, heard it from someone,
or imagined it myself.
So I set out, just like you who are probably reading this.
At first, it was terrible.
This was due to my helpless personality rather than the “I’ll manage somehow if I just go” attitude that still defines me today, even though half my life has been spent traveling.
2007.
At age 23, I crossed into China by boat from Osaka with my bicycle.
I wanted to travel the world by bicycle to expand my own world until I was 25.
What could I do in just over two years?
At the time, I chose to cross Eurasia.
Well, my lighthearted assumption that I would manage somehow if I had English was shattered from the very first day.
Even when I asked for directions, I couldn’t understand them.
For some reason, no guesthouse would let me stay.
My anxiety grew larger and larger, and I was terrified even of interacting with people, yet I wondered how I could possibly survive in this land from now on.
Even though I had only just set out on my journey.
There was not a single word in it that suggested “travel.”
The only thing I could think about was how I would survive.
I had no choice but to keep riding.
The surroundings grew darker and darker.
I had a tent, but in such a densely populated part of China, there was nowhere I could pitch it without being seen.
I was at a loss, or rather,
I just wanted someone to help me.
With that feeling, I plunged into a gas station.
I don’t even remember what we talked about.
I only remember showing them my Japanese passport.
Then the man at the gas station started making a phone call.
The police who received the call arrived.
Just as I was on the verge of tears, wondering what would happen to me next, the gas station staff and the police officer gestured to me.
They were telling me,
“Sleep here today.”
I don’t remember whether I properly thanked them.
The gas station staff gave me a meal and told me to eat it. I remember collapsing into sleep. It was the staff breakroom, and although it was summer, it was very cool.
Looking back now, I believe that was undoubtedly the moment my life of travel began.
But at the time, I think I felt that I had no choice but to survive on my own in an unfamiliar land.
Think about your destination and decide on it.
Get a ticket and visa to the destination.
Choose a bicycle to use for your journey.
Choose the camping gear and clothes to take with you.
And then travel to that land.
For me now, and probably for all of you reading this, these are the steps toward travel that seem like a given.
But back then, when I first started traveling,
the word “travel” didn’t even come to mind.
I had no choice but to keep moving forward.
No choice but to survive.
Telling myself that,
I pedaled every day,
managed to buy things and eat,
and interacted with the local people with bated breath,
over and over again.
I think that was an act of stepping outside the world I knew in every sense.
Back then, the internet was not yet something you could connect to anywhere.
What was happening in the land I was visiting in real time?
How could I reach my destination in that land?
Could I accomplish what I wanted to do?
I had only myself.
Only what I carried inside me could come out.
But in that state, I had no choice but to somehow make my way through what was in front of me.
I think that was simply meeting a new self every day.
Everything was a first.
I had no choice but to accept and overcome everything.
But there was a self that became new every day.
I think of “traveling” in the same way as “living life.”
Not as the way of life I imagined, or the way I imagined reaching the end.
I wanted to live in the “now,”
a now I never would have imagined, something my past self could never have even conceived.
That is why I still place travel at the very center of my life.
Vol.2 continues.
“The Sounds of Travel” by Masanori Nishikawa
Vol.1 / Vol.2 / Vol.3 / Vol.4 / Vol.5 / Vol.6 / Vol.7 / Vol.8 / Vol.9 / Vol.10