Episode: 3958
Title: HPR3958: Bikepacking in 1993 without technology
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3958/hpr3958.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:58:59

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3958 for Wednesday the 4th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, by packing in 1993, without technology.
It is hosted by nightwise, and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, nightwise looks back at his very first bike packing adventure and its absence of technology.
On the edge of real and cyber space, there's one place you can go and you've found it.
Welcome to the nightwise.com podcast.
And I got to say, after quite a few years of doing this, this might just be a premiere
where you're not in the car or on a walk, but actually on the bike with me.
The wine you hear is the sound of my electrical powered hybrid bike that allows me to fly around the country
while I'm enjoying the scenery, getting some good air and for the first time recording a podcast.
So it's a mini episode and today I don't want to talk about technology, but the absence of it.
And to do that, I need to take you back.
And I need to take you back in time 30 years, which for some of you might be more than your lifetime.
But I want to take you back to a very, very young nightwise, that before nightwise was even nightwise,
because that didn't happen until 95.
I went on my first adventure.
It was, let me guess, 1993.
And my girlfriend at the time had to do a book report for school.
She didn't like the read I did.
So she gave me a book that she had to read called Summer 17.
And it's about a boy who has a difficult home situation and decides to buy a race bike, pack his tent,
and drive to Santiago de Compostela from Belgium all the way to the south.
The book is a youth book, not a children's book, but young adult book.
And it talks about the adventures that he has.
And I read it, and I immediately fell in love with it.
I finished it, I read up a book report, and I told my parents that for my holiday, I was going to go on an adventure.
So I did.
I got a mountain bike from my brother, who just purchased one.
I got some cycling bags, some saddle bags from my girlfriend's brother, and I got a map.
Where was I going to go?
I had no idea.
I didn't know if I could bike that well.
I didn't know how far I could bike.
I didn't know what to bring.
I didn't know anything.
And these were the days without the internet, where you could not research stuff.
The book, you needed a map, and you needed a library.
But what I did figure out is that it was not about the destination.
It was all about the journey.
I wanted to travel.
I wanted to experience what it would be like to go on a bike ride, on an adventure, on my own.
So I calculated that I needed about 80 kilometers a day, and started looking at the map.
And pretty soon, I got interested by the coastline.
The Belgian coastline is about 60 kilometers long.
It's tiny, tiny, up against the North Sea.
And when you follow it down, you come into the North of France.
Dunkirk, Calais, La Havre, and all the way down to the Omaha and the famous D-Day beaches.
It was perhaps a little bit out of my action range, but I thought,
you know what, if I can do about 100 K a day and I got about a week,
I might be able to pedal up all the way from Ostend to La Havre.
And that's what I did.
The only thing I had was a map, and I went over to the local youth hostel to get a membership card.
I got a list with all the different youth hostels that were out there.
I circled them on my map, and using a crude, just a ruler as kind of a crude action radius finder,
I plotted a map from youth hostel to youth hostel.
And it was adventurous to start that journey.
The preparation was all the fun.
I started going for bike rides every single night to work on my condition.
And pretty soon I would do 40K an evening without breaking a sweat.
Then I started thinking about packing.
What did I need to take?
Camera, a walkman, clothes, what kind of clothes did I need?
I didn't know that I needed a good rain jacket, a good rain pants,
and overshoes for my shoes when it would be raining.
Because when you're out on your bike trekking and it starts to rain,
well it starts to rain and you got to go, you got to go on.
So the day of the big adventure came.
Everything had been packed and repacked and repacked and repacked and repacked for about a thousand times.
And this little 5,000 Belgian Frank, which is dirt cheap, mountain bike with these hand-me-down saddlebags was packed with my clothes,
my gear, and even a tent.
Because I was afraid that, oh my god, should I strand somewhere, I needed a tent.
Am I sleeping back?
And I set off on my big adventure.
I rode to the train station and took the train towards a stand.
And even that first day was fantastic.
Because you got to think about how adventurous it is to go out and cycle on your own,
with only a map, because I didn't have a cell phone.
There was no wireless internet, so I was really on my own.
Every day, before every evening, I had to call ahead to the next youth hostel to book a bed,
and I had to call home to tell them where I was and where I was going.
My uncle, bless him, had a copy of my route, and he knew every day where he was, where I was.
He was basically a geography nut, and he knew which roads I was going to take.
So if I didn't check in, they would know where to find the body.
They were very worried I'd never done that before, and I was oblivious to whatever was going to happen to me.
So I set off that first day leaving in Ostend, cycling along the Belgian coastline.
The sea on my right, the cars and the trams, and the people on my left.
First I rode the causeway, the boardwalk.
And then pretty soon, if I could, I even hit the beach,
plowing my little bike at an insane speed, about 30kph,
because once you get that bike rolling, it really rolls.
Along the surf.
It was hard to get back to the road, because I had to plow through the beach,
but those few kilometers on the surf with my tires through the water,
the sea literally lapping at my feet, it felt fantastic.
One of the reasons it felt so great was because I had prepared.
I wanted to make sure that I would have the best time of my life,
so I prepared some mixtapes for myself.
Some of them were with orchestral music, you know, movie soundtracks to really give it an atmosphere.
Some of the pop songs, some were like stuffed with vingelis and onion,
god knows what, different moods, different mixtapes.
And I would prepare them weeks out of head.
Mixed them down, make them ready, and I had six or seven tapes with me and my little walkman.
And I set off.
The first youth hostel, I wasn't very lucky.
The first ride was only 40 kilometers from Ostend to think it's Maria Kevke.
But once I got there, it was full.
I had apparently very enthusiastically walked around the back to ask if there was room,
and the owner didn't really like that.
I was supposed to ring the front door, which he didn't answer,
because he was in the shower.
I walked around the back.
And the lady thought I was going to stalk her.
It turned into a row. She got mad.
I didn't know what to do.
And she said, I don't have any room, go away.
So the only youth hostel that I could go to,
that about, I think it was seven pm,
was the one in Ostend, 40 kilometers, back again.
First night sleeping in Ostend.
The adventure had begun with already one major incident.
But I managed to pedal on, and it was a great adventure.
And I think that, as I'm cycling right now with this hyper-modern bike,
my smartphone, with a GPS, and God knows what,
literally sitting on my steering column,
I do start to think if the adventure,
today, doing the same thing today,
would be just as adventurous that it used to be.
Because there are many stories I can tell.
I can tell you about the first stay in Kelly.
Because these are stories that I can only tell you.
I have a couple of pictures snapped with my Kodak camera.
But I don't have any selfies.
I don't have any record of the events.
Only the book that I wrote, the diary that I wrote,
which is still somewhere.
And that's it.
Every moment counted, because, you know,
it was the only way to perceive reality,
not through your cell phone, not through your camera,
but just being there.
I can tell you a thousand stories about,
I don't know, the first people I met in the youth hostel in Kelly,
dining with an international group of strangers
who only met each other for one night,
because everybody was off to the next destination the next day.
So those few moments we had were really,
they were real, they were, they counted.
So I can tell you about the first climb that I did
in the pouring mist and rain up the Kaplani behind Kelly.
The suicidal dive down into the village of Escal,
which I only learned years later was an incredibly steep descent
that I did with an overloaded and poor brake centered bike.
I can tell you about the time that I looked for something
to eat in Boulogne,
and I came across this Vietnamese restaurant that looked
a little bit round down.
I sat down and I ordered something,
and the owner looked at me and the place was deserted,
and he asked me, who said this?
I said, yes.
And he became ecstatic because his father was saved
by a Belgian medic while he was a prisoner of war.
So out comes the dad and the entire family
because they had Belgian guests.
I dined nearly for free amidst a family of strangers
who took me in as their own.
I could tell you about the time that I got my first flat.
I was on my way from Boulogne to Le Tripor
when my rear tire gave out.
I was excited because I had a wrench with me,
and I was able to fix this.
Only to find that the wrench that I needed to disconnect my tire
was not amongst the gear that I brought with me.
So 10 kilometers of pushing my bike towards the nearest town
only to find the bike shop closed.
I insisted,
permanently, please, fix my bike,
I need to get to Boulogne before the evening.
I need to get to Le Tripor before the evening's over.
So I had dinner at a local small restaurant,
got talking with the owner and the patrons that were there
because it was half restaurant, half bar.
And Madame France, as she was called,
served me royally.
I wasn't allowed to pay for my drinks
because I was on an adventure, she said,
if I could only send her a card once I got to my destination.
I promised to do so,
and did when I got to La Javra.
I can talk to you about meeting Vicki.
Vicki was a Canadian girl, 21 years old,
who was doing that bike through Europe thing on her own
for a year.
She was packed like a professional and taught me a lot
about the maps that I needed to use
and what I needed to bring with me.
Suffice to say, I was packed like a tourist
which for a trekking traveler is a grave insult.
I had too much gear and my bike was a disaster waiting to happen.
We, I followed her to Eiffto to a youth hostel
where I was not allowed to sleep inside
because there were three girls already sleeping inside.
Two girls from Yugoslavia had booked a bed
in the communal sleeping hall.
The Canadian girl had booked a bed
and I had arrived unannounced.
So I was more than welcome to pitch my tent
in front of the youth hostel
while the old proprietor explicitly told me,
he did not want me intermixing with the girls during the night.
As the evening fell and everything got quiet,
I heard a soft tap on my tent.
One of the Yugoslavia girls told me to get inside,
take a bunk and we all slept together until the morning,
each in their separate bunks
because you know, I was an innocent guy.
There are so many stories I can tell you about that first adventure
but it was one because I was so disconnected.
I was disconnected from home
and I had no way to call or alert somebody when something was wrong,
which was exciting,
but which was also extremely liberating
because the only people you could talk to were the people
that were really, really around you.
And that made for beautiful, warm and honest conversations.
I would love, I had a little flask with water of course
and you'd go through quite a bit of water
if you're cycling 15 or 30 pounds of luggage on your bike in the sun.
And whenever I would run out,
I would just stop at the side of the road and knock on the door
and ask if I could refill my water bottle.
I always, you struck up a conversation with people
and I've met many, many interesting people
who had each stories to tell.
And those were the memories that I needed
to store, which brings me to my second thing that I mentioned earlier.
I needed to pay attention.
There was no looking on my smart phone.
No, no, no, the world was there.
I had to seize it and if I wanted to really experience something
I had to pay attention.
Paying attention to the landscape, to the road, to the traffic
but also to the people that I met.
I really enjoyed that.
And of course, there was the music.
A fair selection of six, nineteen minutes tapes
that accompanied me through my voyages.
Each playing over and over on my headphones
as batteries slowly ran out.
And each, because I heard them in so many places,
giving a soundtrack to some beautiful memories.
I cannot hear Curier by Mr. Mr.
or forever young by Alphaville
without thinking of a thousand beautiful views,
hundreds of places that I passed.
People that I saw, Visage's scenery memories
that had been accustomed, that had been tied to those,
I don't know, 150 songs that I had with me.
Maybe nostalgia makes us look more favorably upon the past
and it might be the coming of age.
But on the other hand, there is something to be said
about disconnecting and reconnecting with reality.
And maybe as I get older, I start to notice that more and more
than in order to really connect with people,
we need to disconnect from the digital world around us.
To, I don't know, maybe experience reality more,
make memories last in our heads, not on our camera roll,
to really taste reality.
And use cyberspace as a way to enhance it but not replace it.
Maybe it's just a one-drinks-of-an-old guy
thinking back on his glory days when he was innocent and young
and maybe extremely, yeah, probably extremely foolish.
But the absence of technology doesn't mean that there is an absence of experience,
that there is an absence of the things that you can remember
or see or hear or talk or connect or whatever.
One helps the other but doesn't need to replace it.
So, let that technology work for you instead the other way around.
Bye.
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