I was born and raised in New York,
so people sometimes ask me if I’ve ever met anyone famous. I always
disappoint them; I never really have. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that many of
my friends have met and even hung out with famous
people. A good friend of mine once had a leisurely
stroll and chat with Paul Simon in Central Park. Another
friend once partied with John Cusack and Mike D. of
the Beastie Boys on separate occasions. My brushes
with celebrity can be summarized briefly:
1-I once got drunk with Eddie Mush (who played the “jinx” in the movie “A
Bronx Tale”)
at a dingy bar near Fordham University in the Bronx.
Apart from a few memorable snippets, I can’t
really remember what we talked about.
2-While quickly turning a corner somewhere in midtown Manhattan,
I nearly trampled Jackie Mason, who is about two heads
shorter than I am (I’m 5’11”). Our conversation was brief; we
both said “Oh!” at the same time.
3-I once had a few beers with Mike Torrez, who pitched for my
beloved Yankees during their championship 1977 season.
He was a good pitcher, not a standout--in fact, he
is most remembered by Yankee fans for one pitch he
threw in 1978. Torrez had been traded to the Boston
Red Sox, where he gave up the game-winning home run
to Bucky Dent (of the Yankees) the final game of the
1978 American League Championship Series. We had a
nice chat--he even let me try on his World Series
ring--but we stayed off certain topics.
4-I once sat directly in front of Richard Nixon at a N.Y. Giants
game. We didn’t
talk because there was a two-inch-thick wall of plexiglass
between us. I thought about flashing him his trademark
double-V sign, but I couldn’t get up the nerve and ended up just
staring at him until he waved. I waved back.
5-A few weeks ago, on an island in Thailand called Koh Chang,
I met Bob the Bike.
WHO IS BOB THE BIKE?
Robert “Bob the Bike” Winstanley is a 65-year-old retired
housepainter from Birmingham, England. Back in England,
he was an avid cyclist, and he organized weekend clubs
that toured all over the United Kingdom. When his
wife died of cancer six years ago, Bob hit the road
to pursue hs lifelong dream of long-distance cycling,
thus starting a journey that has taken him 38,000
kilometers through Europe, North and South America,
and Asia.
I met Bob in Koh Chang, where he
was taking a short break from his Hanoi to Birmingham
trip. I caught him at a good time; he had been on
the road for a while and was quite keen to speak English.
He has retained his Birmingham accent and that wonderful
Northern habitof addressing strangers as “Love”, as in, (to the waitress) “Could we have another beer, love?”
After ordering a cold bottle of Singha
beer, one of the first things Bob did was show me
his scrapbook. In several of the countries he has
travelled, local newspapers and TV news crews have
done stories about him. He carries with him about
two dozen clippings from newspapers around the world. “It’s become a kind of passport,”
he says, “an
easy way to explain to people what I’m doing when I turn up in these middle-of-nowhere
towns.”
The scrapbook also tends to confer
upon him a kind of celebrity status in the places
he passes through. He has met members of Parliament,
chiefs of police, district presidents, and once was
granted a letter of introduction to the president
of Paraguay. He has also received countless dinner
invitations and marriage proposals.
Kids love Bob too. Wanting to repay
some of the kindness shown to him by people throughout
the world, Bob has hit upon a brilliant solution to
the problem of gift giving, which is constrained by
the necessity of travelling light. Rather than carry
a load of knick-knacks, which would weigh him down,
Bob carries a bag of balloons. Says Bob, “I stayed up one night and taught myself how to make
balloon animals. I make dogs and giraffes for the
kids and hearts for the ladies. People love it.”
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing though.
Bob was once dragged out of his tent by four men in
Malaysia in the middle of the night and robbed. His
bike was stolen in Peru. He was robbed at syringe-point
in Vietnam, nearly stabbed in Thailand, and nearly
beaten in Mexico when he was mistaken for an American. “These guys locked up the bar and
were going to thrash me. I dug around in my bag and
found my little Union Jack and started waving it around.
They backed off and bought me a beer. I drank it very
quickly, said thank you, and left.”
Despite these experiences, Bob still
says he believes there are more good people in the
world than bad. And he says that trouble with people
is not so bad because he can usually manage to control
the situation. What does scare Bob--what he has no
power to control--is foul weather and nasty animals.
He says his most frightening experience was when he
nearly drowned in a river in Louisiana when he was
caught out in a hurricane. He’s ridden through blinding sandstorms, hailstorms
that drew “pinpricks
of blood”,
and a thick swarm of bees that chased him down the
road and stung him 27 times.
Listening to these stories, I wondered
what kept Bob going. “I’ve set myself a task and I never give up. I gave
up a good job to start a housepainting business, which
was successful, and I built a house.” 38,000 kilometers is an impressive distance for
a man half his age, but Bob says, “There’s no distance you can’t travel if you’ve
got the time and the determinaztion, and I have.”
“And,” Bob said, “I think “What’s my alternative? What else would
I do to make my life interesting?””
“Is there anything that would make
you stop?” I asked him.
He answered without hesitation, “Maybe if I meet a woman. I really miss living with
a woman.”
*
For Bob, the only way to travel is
on a bike. He goes where he wants, when he wants to,
and if he likes a place, he stops. He has an intimate
connection to the places he rides through. He is silent
on the bike, so he encounters more animals and hears
the sounds of nature instead of the roar of engines
or the clacking of trains on the rails. “I do the travelling that Michael Palin thinks he
does,”
said Bob (referring to the TV series “Around the World with Michael Palin”). “Sometimes I see “Michael
Palin was here”
signs and I think “Not
on a bloody bike he wasn’t.””
When Bob arrives in a new town, people
find it hard to believe he’s gotten there on a bike. “They
think I’m
mad,”
he says, “I
can’t
tell you how many times I’ve asked people for directions and they’ve
sent me to the bus station.”
Here Bob was reminded of a story: “I had a lovely time in America. The people were so
generous, but everybody drives everywhere. Nobody
walks. It’s terrible,” he said. Once he saw some people
walking by the side of the road somewhere in Texas,
so he stopped and asked them if he could take their
photo.
“Why do you want to take our photo?” they asked him.
“Because you’re the first people I’ve
seen walking anywhere,” said Bob.
“Oh, we’re not walking,”
they said, “we’re collecting bottles.
*
It would be easy for a man with Bob’s experiences to become some kind of travel snob.
Though he told wonderful stories about adventures
I thought to be amazing, his tales always sprang organically
from our conversation--something reminded him of an
incident somewhere--so he never seemed pretentious.
And he told them with the humility and wonder of a
man who can’t believe his own good fortune.
(In the same bar where I met Bob,
I overheard a conversation at the next table. Some
guy was going on, “Well,
in Egypt, it’s
like this...and let me tell you about Brazil, Zimbabwe,
Nepal, etc.” He was talking his listener’s head into the ground, dropping names and places
in an obvious effort to impress--exactly the kind
of pretentious bullshit that makes me want to puke.)
Bob says he’s not a religious man, yet he never
seemed to be a man without religion, however homespun.
If religion is a set of precepts (even though they
be implicit) which guides our relations with others
and with nature, Bob must have religion. Maybe Bobism.
Or Bikism. Or something akin to Buddhism. He doesn’t plan his journeys; when he wakes
up, he doesn’t know where he’ll be at the end of the day--a true
practitioner of living in the moment. He is profoundly
grateful for the kindness shown him and repays it
whenever possible, and always to people he knows he
will never see again.
When drinking beer with Bob, I often
felt I was in the presence of a self-made sage, with
all the requisite qualities, especially humility and
wisdom. He didn’t preach, but simply spoke with sincerity
and passion about his experiences (leaving his beliefs
mostly implicit), again and again affirming the beauty
of the world. And he’s
never lost his Birmingham housepainter persona--an
ordinary guy, quick to laugh and swap funny stories
over a few beers. I felt I was in the presence of
a great man, so much the greater because he never
made me feel small.
*
My conversations with Bob made me
want to run out and buy a good expedition bike. I
may do that, though I’d have to give up some of my bad habits, beginning
with chain smoking. But however I travel in the future,
I’ll take with me some of the lessons
I learned from Bob.
There are many beautiful places in
the world--temples, beaches, mountains, skyscrapers--and
we can enjoy their beauty for its own sake. But if
travel has value as a vehicle for personal growth,
it seems to me that this comes mainly from the people
we meet, the stories they tell us, the times we share
together. When I recollect my recent trip, I’m sure I’ll remember the food, the beaches and landscapes,
but one of the highlights will be drinking beer with
Bob the Bike.
Bob and me in Oodie's Bar, Ko Chang.
Bob's the one with the big beer.
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