Traveling with all five senses

SEEING:  Have you ever tried looking at the sky directly above your head when you´re in a car.  Why would you?  On a bike, looking up and seeing the immensity of the sky is an incredible feeling.  You geat a real sense of your place in the world, how big you are, and also how small you are.  The space around you is both all yours, and at the same time it totally swallows you up.

 

HEARING: In a car, you mostly hear whatever is on the stereo, with a faint background white noise of traffic rushing by (unless you were in my Volvo during its last days, when the background noise was not so faint because of a bad window seal).  On bike, you hear the unmuffled sound of cars, which makes you aware of just how nasty big, congested roads are.  You hear the sound of factories as you pass them by, and you hear the sound of dogs barking at you as they protect their turf.  You hear the wind rustling, and you sometimes even hear silence, total and absolute, like nothing you´ve ever not heard before.

 

SMELLING: This is perhaps the best advantage of traveling by bike.  Sure, sometimes you have to put up with roadkill, the unpleasant stench of a rotting carcass on the side of the road is not something to take lightly.  But more often than not, the smells are varied, and they invade you, like the olive fields in Andalucia, or the smell of the sea whenever you approach it.  It makes me wish that, just like cameras capture sight and audio recorder capture sound, there were some way to capture the smell of a place.

 

TOUCHING: One of the more refined senses, yet also one of the harder ones to describe.  I am going to extend this to "feeling" a landscape and a place.  On bike, you really are in touch with the profile of a landscape, the force of the wind, the coolness that a breeze brings, and the oppressive heat of the sun directly overhead.  When you stop, your sense of touch is waiting to be fed.  What does a 2000 year old stone column feel like?  Did Columbus´s feet walk this same road?  Where does the marble that makes up this temple come from?

 

TASTE:  Whatever the method of transportation, when you travel perhaps the most intimate exchange with another culture is eating local food.  I am glad I didn´t bring a camping stove, because I would miss out on lots of local dishes.  The nice thing about biking, though, is that you build up such an appetite, that all the food tastes a lot better.  Your body craves all food, regardless, and something hot for dinner really brings a smile to your face, in stark contrast of the bread and fruit that usually power me through my day.