Words & Photos By Masanori Nishikawa
This week brings Vol.2 of "Tabi no Oto," the new series by Masanori Nishikawa of Mountain Bike Journey.
If this is your first time here, be sure to read Vol.1 as well.
Every day, just riding, trying to get even a little farther.
Somehow finding food, finding a place to sleep, and surviving the day.
Yet looking back now, those days were unmistakably the beginning of my life of travel.
Last time, I wrote about setting out from Shanghai, China, toward Europe, aiming to cross the Eurasian continent.
I didn't understand the language.
The culture and the common sense were different.
And of course, I didn't know a single person.
At the start of that journey, my heart was full of anxiety about what would happen next, fear of not understanding anything, and the desperate feeling that I had no choice but to somehow make it work.
But what was waiting for me.
was the curiosity and the smiles of the people who lived there.
"Where did you come from?"
"How far are you going?"
"Are you alone?"
"What's your name?"
"Don't you get lonely?"
"Aren't you hungry?"
Even I, who had started the trip so timidly, began to understand what I was being asked in Chinese, since every day in the towns and villages where I stopped to rest, people would surround me and fire the same questions at me.
I'd guess what they were probably asking, write my answer in kanji in my notebook, and show them. Then everyone would look and go "Ohh!"
Some helpful uncle would teach me how to answer in Chinese, like a "Repeat after me!" from junior high English class.
When I copied him and said it, everyone would be delighted.
That's how I learned everyday conversation.
And by the end of the day, when I wrote in my diary, somehow, I couldn't quite explain it, I'd find myself writing out "my exchanges with the people I met that day" with ease. And I'd think, huh?
At the start of the trip I had been so anxious, so scared, so on edge. Before I knew it, there I was, eating my fill every day, somehow communicating with the locals even in broken phrases, taking photos together, waving goodbye with a smile, "See you!", and pedaling forward again. There I was, smiling.
The photos I took around that time are shot really close up.
Right in on people's faces. I think I must have been really, really happy.
Happy that, at the start of the trip, when I was so scared, people found me interesting and welcomed me, laughed with me, fed me, and put me up for the night, saying "Rather than pitching a tent in a place like that, come sleep at our house!"
And then: ah, it's okay to trust.
This land.
And its people.
I think it wasn't about "the country I was traveling through," but about this "world" and "people" themselves.
I had no dream to aim for in the future, nothing I could boast about to anyone, and I kept wondering, "What am I, anyway?" For someone like me,
the smiles and kindness of the people who welcomed me under the open sky of the road showed me, without a doubt, that I am who I am.
That I am someone. I feel that's what they taught me.
Continued in Vol.3.