Rain poured down and mosquitos swarmed as Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly
strained to keep their bikes upright on the railway tracks. As a train
came into view they dove from the tracks, realising suddenly that maybe
the railway wasn’t such a good way to get through the swamp after
all.
It was 1999, and the twenty-year-olds were riding recumbent bycicles across Russia, Siberia and Mongolia, to Beijing. The 10,000 km journey would take them fourteen months.
The journey exposed them to many interesting situations, like recovering from frostbite as guests of a family in an isolated Russian village. Or being arrested in China for entering a town closed to foreigners—and straight after paying bail being taken on a tour of the town and asked to speak to school children about Australia.
The trip is the subject of a book, Off the Rails, which Tim co-authored with fellow traveller Chris. Despite the obvious passion he has for the topic, Tim speaks quietly and seriously about his experiences.
‘I like the simple routines of travel—getting water, lighting the fire, and eating. For me it is not so much the start and the finish, it is the journey in between, and finding out what kind of person you are at the end of it.’
Eating is one element the book covers in detail. Two meals in particular are memorable: in one an entire goat’s head is stewed in mare’s milk, and in another sheep’s brain and intestine are the main ingredients of a communal soup shared with a Mongolian family. They include all the gruesome detail of the recipes, including the removal of the sheep’s heart while it is still alive.
One of Tim’s most profound insights came as he squatted in a roadside trench with two road workers. They were sharing vodka and a tin of fatty chicken pieces.
‘As filthy and unhygienic as our party was, it occurred to me that it didn’t matter. It was one of those moments when you become so deeply involved with the experience you begin to blend in with the dirt’, he recalls.
Tim believes that it is important to ‘live the dream’ and ensure that no matter where you are in life there is nowhere else you’d rather be.
‘When you challenge the odds, they seem to fall in your favour’, he explains. ‘There is more grace in life than badness. I think that if you are following the path in your heart then things work out—and if they don’t I’ve found that the best way to deal with problems is to laugh at them.’
One
of the problems Tim laughs at is wading through waist-deep snow for three
days in Arctic Lapland before being found near a checkpoint. No wonder
he describes being beaten with twigs dipped in boiling water in a traditional
Russian sauna as a pleasant experience.
‘When you are travelling across such immense distances exhaustion becomes a part of life. It becomes a matter of breaking things down—the next puddle, the next corner, the next village—you don’t look too far ahead. But when you do, the overall goal helps put any problems into perspective’, Tim says.
Why does Tim do it? Perhaps he likes to challenge himself with the near-impossible in order to live out the ‘realness’ of his existence.
‘Out there one truth was clear and unavoidable: life was supposed to be difficult. I preferred to accept and struggle through that rather than distance myself through modern conveniences’, he writes.
One of the rewards of the journey is the relationship that Tim developed with the land he travelled through. He has a feel for rituals and unique moments, such as being awakened by herds of horses and camels crowding around the tent in the mornings, or a woman singing as she rides her horse past their tent at night. But, above all, Tim has a feel for silence.
‘When you are out there you feel like you are in touch with yourself and everything around you. There is a calmness, a heightened awareness of everything; I like to soak it all in. The further into the wilderness I go the more I find, or reflect, myself. Or, to put it another way, my sense of self is stronger out there than when I am in civilisation. I love the vividness of it.’
Tim’s travel experiences affect the way he lives his life.
‘The very heart of adventure can be applied to everyday life—you take small risks but in general you realise that things are pretty uncertain. This helps me to live in the moment and to keep my mind open to little opportunities that pop up. To me, life itself is a journey.
‘When I was still at school I strove to know what was beyond’, he explains. ‘Now I want to show younger people that there are other opportunities and things to achieve. It’s worth following your gut feeling or intuition and doing what you really enjoy rather than doing something half-heartedly.’
Tim’s next venture is to follow the footsteps of Ghengis Khan across Mongolia to Hungary—on horseback. He doesn’t know anything about horses, nor does he have major sponsors. At least, not yet ...
In 2002 the ABC aired a documentary about the trip, and Penguin published Off the Rails in April 2003.
See www.timcopejourneys.com for more information about Tim’s travels, including his row-boat expedition through Siberia to the Arctic Ocean.
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