Die die must try
Week 52 - One full year on the road, the 21st country of their journey, and an unexpected taste of home: it was a big week for the intrepid bicyclers.
We have been cycling around the world for almost one year.
A whole year. It’s quite difficult to get our heads around that.
It feels shorter, but also strangely and simultaneously longer. The days have flown by, but we’ve fit so much into each one that thinking back to the start of this journey, on a cold and wet promenade by the sea in Tramore, feels like a lifetime ago.
As we were stopped for food at a roadside shack near Siak in Eastern Sumatra earlier this week, the enormity of what we’re doing caught up with us. Sometimes it does. Ellie shed a tear.
There has been blood, sweat and some tears shed over the last 52 weeks, but mostly there has been laughter. The laughter doesn’t just come from us; it follows us everywhere we go.
We have long ago accepted that some people are laughing at us. We’re okay with that. We’re more than okay with it: we embrace it.
We had hundreds of people shouting hellos at us on any given day as we cycled along the roads of Sumatra this week. That is not an exaggeration.
Motorcycles crawled alongside us to do it. Cars crept past with their windows down to lash it out. Labourers leaned on their shovels to yell at us. School kids followed us down the road. All of them were waving, shouting, smiling and laughing their heads off.
In Thailand, one young lad laughed at us so much that he collapsed onto the road, slapping the ground with the palm of his hand as he roared uncontrollably with laughter. His school buddy was doing a very good job making fun of us.
“Laughter is preferable to tears”
It’s understandable. As a cycling pair, we cut unusual figures. When we catch someone’s eye, they respond. Laughter is the best response we could hope for. One Muslim lady screamed and dropped her shopping when she saw us recently, but she quickly regained her composure, and then she laughed too.
There’s wonderful archive footage of avant garde composer John Cage being interviewed on American TV game show I’ve Got A Secret, in 1960.
The presenter warns Cage that many of the audience will likely laugh at him while he performs his unusual piece of music. Cage’s face lights up, and he replies “laughter is preferable to tears.”
When you are predominantly greeted by people who are happy to see you, even if some of their happiness is derived from making fun of you, that makes for a very pleasant day. For the last year we have been greeted time and time again by smiling faces and laughter. That’s a savage way to spend 12 months, and it’s something we hadn’t expected.
If the only thing that we accomplish by cycling around the world is making people laugh as we very briefly cross the path of their lives, that will be time well spent.
We’ve managed to learn an incredible amount over the last year. The last two weeks have been spent in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. Seeing how people live there, talking and laughing with them, and experiencing their day to day lives has challenged the preconceptions and narratives that we brought with us from home about Islamic culture. Indonesia is yet another country we have vowed to return to on our bicycles.
That old cliché that every day is a school day has never been truer than it’s been over the last year. An embarrassing example of this is reaching Singapore, a place we did not even realise was a country until relatively recently. Somehow we both thought Singapore was a Malaysian city!? Apologies to all Singaporeans. We missed visiting one country on our list when we couldn’t get into Cambodia, but we’ve clocked up an extra country this week through our own ignorance.
Something that I worry about is how much of this journey we will forget. We’ve been checking in with each another regularly to see if we can remember things like the currency of Laos, or how to say thank you in Uzbek.
Often we have forgotten some things completely. Is it possible that a bit like the SD cards in our cameras, our brains only have a finite memory capacity? Will we have to lose some memories to accommodate others? Surely we don’t have the capacity for retaining everything from a lifetime’s worth of information and experiences?
We passed a dilapidated concrete bus shelter in a remote Indonesian village, and seated inside it was an emaciated old man, wearing nothing but worn and faded shorts. He didn’t notice us pass. He was engrossed in mending his straw hat. From the corner of the roof of the bus shelter a large ornate double sided chessboard hung from a string attached to one corner of the chessboard. The chessboard spun slowly in the breeze. The whole scene was like a tableau from a bright and tropical Beckett play directed by David Lynch.
There is no video, post or photo that I can share with you that will do that scene justice.
I worry that over time, that particular memory, and thousands more like it, will become less vivid. I don’t want them to fade.
Maybe in that is part of the reason that the last year has been so enjoyable. Day to day we haven’t worried about holding on to the memories of things we are experiencing, as each day has brought something new and enthralling. The difference now is we have passed the halfway point and are heading for home, and these memories are becoming more precious.
As the magnitude of our journey caught up with us this week, we also got to grips with the realisation that doing this thing isn’t as difficult as some people make these types of journeys out to be. When you average our 18,500kms cycled over a whole year, it adds to just over 50kms a day. That’s not a lot, in part because it factors in all the time we have spent off the bikes, including six weeks volunteering in Tuy Hóa, a holiday with family in Turkey, a week for Christmas, plus regular rest days and a couple of sick days.
But when you subtract all of the days we didn’t cycle for, our average is something more like 74km per day.
There are other people cycling a lot further and for a lot longer.
We’re not great at cycling around the world. We’re just persistent, and even at that, we’re only fairly persistent.
Freedom
The real luxury of the last 12 months on the road has been freedom. I remember summer school holidays growing up in Tramore as a young kid. We’d go to the Guillamene, a swimming cove built into the cliffs, in the late morning. We’d stay there all day swimming in the sea, only going home when we needed food. No work, no phones, no appointments, no commitments. It stands out as the freest I’ve ever felt in my life.
That is, until this year on the road.
That freedom of time is a luxury that not many of us get to experience as adults. We feel very lucky, privileged, and indebted to our families and friends for affording us the opportunity to create that freedom for ourselves. It’s quite a thing.
Knowing that we are now on the road home is tempering that sense of freedom, but only somewhat.
Home came to meet us this week as we arrived in Singapore.
Our Singrish Guardian Angels
John and Mona, an Irish/Singaporean couple, invited us to stay with them during our time here. Their home is incredibly beautiful, with traces of Ireland mixed through eastern decor in the house that they have designed, built, and decorated. They call their unique fusion of styles “Singrish,” in homage to both their roots.
In their guest bedroom they thoughtfully laid out two bags of Tayto for us. Thoughtlessly, I ate both: Ellie didn’t get a look in. John also showed us where he keeps the Barry’s Tea and Kerrygold butter. I was moved.
John even cycled out to meet us off the ferry that brought us from the Indonesian island of Batam to Singapore. He gave us an amazing guided cycling tour of the city as we made our way to the house. We were a little bit awestruck by the scale, design, architecture, modernity and green spaces that Singapore is renowned for.
As we cycled, gawping upwards, through the edifices of the financial district, the penny dropped. “This is where all the money goes!” I said to Ellie. I reworked the lyrics of an old John Prine song I’d been singing to myself on repeat a few weeks ago: “There’s place in Singapore where all the money goes. It’s nice to see our bank charges count for something, I suppose.”
When we reached the home of John, Mona, and Lazarus the dog, we were gobsmacked further still by the kindness of the welcome and hospitality they extended to us, a pair of bedraggled strangers. The doormat at the front of their home has “fáilte” emblazoned on it, and they’ve embodied that.
We haven’t felt so welcome and at home anywhere in a very very long time.
Mona taught us some words of Singlish, a mix of Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English; a unique form of shorthand slang words and phrases that Singaporeans use day to day. A “chope” is a packet of tissues that you can use to reserve a table at a bar or food court while you go to get served. “Don’t play play” means stop taking the piss, more or less. “Catch no ball” means I don’t understand, and “die die must try” is one of my favourites, which means that you most definitely have to give something a whirl. I can’t help but feel we’ve been embodying that.
We met a very friendly elderly couple on a bus as we were making our way around the city. Thanks to Mona and John, we were able to impress the bus folk with our newly learned Singlish phrases. The elderly couple taught us a few more that felt like an important insight into Singaporean life.
The couple told us about the three fears, kiasu, kiasi, and kia bolui. They translate as a fear of losing out, a fear of death, and a fear of a lack of money.
With a twinkle in his eye, the elderly gent told us you can change the pronunciation of kia bolui slightly to make it kia boh, which translates as a fear of your wife. His wife made a face of approval and nodded seriously as if listening to an attentive student recite a valuable lesson.
Performing at Singapore Art Week
We’d made a burst for Singapore to keep a couple of important appointments. My cousin Paul is a performance artist whose work sees him jetting off around the world to interesting and far flung places. I’ve long been in awe of Paul, his work, and his travels.
Not only was he here from Ireland performing at Singapore Art Week, but he asked myself and Ellie if we’d like to be part of an improvised ritual action that he was putting together for the festival.
You know us by now dear reader; we’re all in for improvised ritual actions at Asian art festivals. Die die must try, as the old saying goes.
Paul told us that the action would involve a bag of Tayto and us holding a bar that he would swing from. He had me at Tayto.
St. Brigid’s Day 2026 is the one year anniversary of us starting our cycling odyssey around the world. We wanted to do something to mark the occasion.
The Embassy of Ireland to Singapore and Brunei has provided us with the perfect opportunity. We will visit the embassy here in Singapore on February 2nd to give a talk at a coffee morning they’ve arranged for us. We might stick a little candle in our scones.
It has been a memorable week. Before arriving in Singapore, we needed to cycle to the coast of Sumatra to catch the ferry that would bring us back across the Malacca Straits.
As we trundled along a byway on our second last day cycling in Sumatra, we slowed down to see what all the commotion was when we heard some music and hit an unusual amount of traffic at the edge of a small village. It was a wedding.
An aunty of the bride and groom insisted that we should come in to the wedding to have something to eat and to pose for a few selfies. Unfortunately for the beautifully attired bride and groom, we ended up in their wedding photos.
Cycling with an escort (thanks, Conor McGregor)
Before we made it back to our ferry in Dumai, one day, we inadvertently routed ourselves onto a private road that ran for about 15kms through a large palm oil plantation. When we hit a security hut, with ex-military guards, we were stopped.
Once somebody whose job it is to stop you using a road spots you approaching on a bicycle, that’s usually the end of that road. This guard asked us where we were going and where we were coming from. When I said Ireland, he perked up. “Conor McGregor!” he replied.
He opened the gate, hopped onto his moped and escorted us through the privately owned palm oil plantation. We haven’t been McGregored since before China, several months ago.
The plantation had something of a Wild West feel to it, with some of the labourers living in small enclaves of corrugated tin shacks that were huddled together among the trees. It looked like they eke out a meagre existence in there among the seemingly never-ending palms.
The palm trees continued for miles and miles in every direction. Long before the palms started to thin out as we neared the public road, we could see plumes of thick black smoke billowing into the clear blue sky from the processing plants that separate the palm oil from the clusters of nuts cut from the trees.
We eventually cycled through the smoke, past the lines of laden trucks and out onto the highway. We shook hands with our escort who had taken the time to lead us through yet another learning experience. That tour doesn’t feature on any Tripadvisor lists.
The mysteries of the universe
If eating a bag of Tayto in front of an audience on the other side of the world while dressed like a character from a Margaret Atwood novel has taught me anything this week, it’s that when you allow it to do its thing, the universe works in wondrous and mysterious ways.
It turns out this truism can be applied to our bicycles as much as it can to our journey. I’ve been reading about the difficulty physicists have in nailing down the unique set of forces that keep moving bicycles upright.
Folks have been analysing the physics of bicycles and cycling for decades, and yet there is still some mystery surrounding how the dynamics of a person pedalling a narrow object with many turning parts actually moves forward in a straight line without falling over.
In an article in New Statesman magazine, quantum physicist and bicycle enthusiast Michael Brooks commented on the subject by saying, “Forget mysterious dark matter and the inexplicable accelerating expansion of the universe; the bicycle represents a far more embarrassing hole in the accomplishments of physics.”
It might be wise for us not to question how our bicycles or the universe work too much, lest we fall off. We need to knock at least another 12 months out of both.
Hold her steady and keep it between the ditches!
Surely Dervla Murphy is mighty pleased with you, wherever she is now.
😂 wer not great at travelling around the world wer just persistent. LOL 😂