Fifteen Miles an Hour Is a Terrible Speed for Seeing the World

Fifteen miles an hour is an awkward speed.

It is far too slow if the objective is simply to get somewhere. A car will cover the same distance with the air conditioning on, your luggage safely tucked away and plenty of time left for a drink before dinner.

But travel is not always about getting somewhere.

At fifteen miles an hour, things have an annoying habit of getting in the way.

A roadside market. Someone grilling lunch over charcoal. Rice drying beside the road. A school letting out for the afternoon. A small temple you would never have found in a guidebook and probably wouldn't have stopped for if you had been traveling twice as fast.

You smell things. You hear things. People notice you, and you notice them.

It is a terribly inefficient way to pass through a country.

Which is rather the point.

It also happens to be about the right speed for traveling by bicycle.

None of this requires being a cyclist.

Traveling by bicycle and cycling for sport are two rather different things. One tends to measure the day in miles ridden, pace or elevation gained. The other gives you an excuse to forget all three because somebody beside the road is grilling something that smells wonderful.

That may be one of the bicycle's greatest virtues as a way to travel. It is wonderfully easy to interrupt the day.

In a car, stopping requires a decision. Is there somewhere to pull over? Have we already passed it? Is it worth turning around? On a bus, the decision becomes more complicated still.

On a bicycle, curiosity requires little more than squeezing the brakes.

And curiosity is responsible for an awful lot of good travel.

Slow travel is often described as spending more time in a place rather than racing from one famous destination to another. But traveling slowly also leaves room for the unplanned, and that doesn't necessarily mean staying in one place.

A bicycle can carry you through a surprising amount of countryside in a day while still allowing that countryside to interrupt you. Villages give way to fields, fields to forest, hills to river valleys. You finish the afternoon somewhere genuinely different from where you ate breakfast, but everything in between hasn't disappeared.

At bicycle speed, the definition of scenery begins to change.

Scenery can be mountains reflected in flooded rice fields. But it can also be an old man repairing a fishing net in front of his house, chilies spread out to dry in the sun, monks collecting alms in the morning or a shopkeeper asleep in a hammock during the quiet part of the afternoon.

None would earn a mention in a guidebook, but put them together and they become the place you came to see.

There is nothing between you and that place.

You notice the temperature drop when the road enters the shade. You smell woodsmoke before you see where it is coming from. Somewhere ahead, garlic and chilies hit a hot wok and suddenly everyone starts wondering how far it is to lunch.

People wave. You hear activity in the fields. You smell bananas grilling beside the road and stop to find out what they taste like.

The bicycle puts you in the landscape rather than behind glass looking at it.

Some of the best moments in travel are not particularly important.

Nobody flew halfway around the world to buy a piece of sticky rice cooked in bamboo. Nobody chose their vacation because they hoped to encounter a village wedding, watch fishermen pull in a net or spend ten minutes trying to identify an unfamiliar fruit at a roadside stall.

These are not bucket-list experiences. They are just experiences.

Perhaps because nobody told you in advance that you were supposed to have them, they have a funny way of becoming the ones you remember.

There is a temptation in travel to concentrate on destinations. We go to Kyoto. Chiang Mai. Bhutan. Rajasthan. Hawai'i. We make lists of the things we want to see once we get there.

The bicycle changes the language of travel a little.

Suddenly the word "to" becomes as important as the destination that follows it. Cycling from Kyoto to the Sea isn't simply about what waits at the coast. Riding from Bangkok to Phuket isn't just a way of connecting two familiar names on the map. The villages, fields, markets, meals and unexpected stops in between become part of the reason for going.

The space between destinations stops being something to get through. It becomes part of the trip.

You begin the morning in one place and end somewhere else, but the day is not empty space connecting the two. It has a shape of its own. A village where everyone seemed to be outside at once. Lunch that lasted longer than planned. A roadside market that wasn't on the itinerary. Something strange hanging from a tree that nobody, including the guide, could satisfactorily explain.

Somewhere along the way, without particularly trying, you have traveled across a piece of a country rather than simply arrived in it.

After nearly forty years of traveling by bicycle, I can remember plenty of spectacular destinations. But I also remember an awful lot of places whose names I never knew.

A noodle shop beside a road. A farmer who stopped what he was doing to watch us go past. A tiny village somewhere between here and there. The smell of somebody's dinner cooking when we still had another hour to ride.

They were never destinations at all. We just happened to be traveling slowly enough to notice them.

Try being a traveler with a bicycle for a week and see what happens. Once you discover how much of the world you've been passing too quickly to see, fifteen miles an hour starts to feel like a pretty good speed after all. But be forewarned, traveling with a bicycle can be addictive.