CONTENTS
Foreword by Tara Austen Weaver
A Conversation with Larry Savage by Tara Austen Weaver
FOREWORD
Some books are passed on like a secret, pressed into your hands by someone who knows you—here, read this; I think you’ll like it. When the book delivers, it feels like a treasure, something of value that you want to pass along to the next person who you think will appreciate it in the same way.
Miles from Nowhere is one of those books. My copy was given to me when I was in my late twenties by a friend who knew I had an adventurous streak. The paperback he passed along was already battered, the corners soft and bent from being shoved in tote bags and backpacks (maybe, also, bicycle panniers). The book had already been loved—by my friend, and perhaps by others before him.
My friend was right about this book. In these pages I found the sort of adventure story I craved—a journey that was not only athletic, but also emotional. The cycling was hard and physical—no one bikes the Alps, the Rockies, the Himalaya without great effort—but the book wasn’t just about feats of strength or daring, as many adventure stories tend to be. That story would have gotten old quick. This was a book about people and the world and experiencing both of those things in the most immediate way possible.
I was seven years old in 1978, when Barbara and Larry Savage set out on their around-the-world cycle adventure. Jimmy Carter was the US president, the first Star Wars film had just captivated the world, and Mount St. Helens had not yet erupted. That spring, the young married couple, in their late twenties, set out on a bike trip that would ultimately span twenty-three thousand miles and twenty-five countries over the next two years, from the desolate prairies of South Dakota and the deserts of Morocco to the mountains of Nepal and the teeming streets of Cairo, New Delhi, and Bangkok. It would change both of their lives.
Biking around the world hadn’t been their original plan. Barbara and Larry wanted to cycle across North America, then hop over to Europe and visit friends they had made while living in Barcelona. When they saw on the map how far they’d be, however, they decided to keep going. “At first we said we’d take the train through the really boring parts,” Larry Savage explains today. “But I really wanted to cycle, so Barb put up with that. It was a little bone of contention between us, but she put up with it.”
Considering what their journey became—an often joyful trip that also included dysentery, bike accidents, and a harrowing night in Nepal spent riding on a dirt road with a sheer drop-off to one side and dead batteries that prevented any illumination to guide the way—it seems as though both Larry and Barbara were fully committed to the adventure. This is not the story of a wife following her husband around the globe. If that had been the case, it wouldn’t have worked—they would have parted ways early on, as other cycling couples they met ultimately did.
Barbara’s love of cycling—newfound though it may have been—shines through in her words. “We moved slow enough to see and hear things that to passing motorists were only blurs of color and sound. We took in the textures and odors of the soil and the vegetation. And because bicycling is such a quiet mode of travel, wild animals weren’t frightened away when we came up the road toward them. . . . And, too, touring by bicycle made it easy for us to meet people. Whenever we stopped in a small town to pick up a snack or food supplies at the local country stores, people always hurried over to talk with us.” Larry may have been the cyclist initially, but Barbara soon took it on as her own.
This was one of the things about Miles from Nowhere that I responded to as a female reader. Here was a woman being just as adventurous as the man, holding her own through rough and rugged travel. Sure, she got sick—they both did, and so did Geoff, the New Zealand cyclist they teamed up with through parts of Asia. But Barbara always seemed game for adventure, strong; she didn’t scare easy. A photo of her in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, Egypt, surrounded by men in robes who tower over her small frame and bicycle, was such a striking one to me: Barbara went to places that were not expecting her, and she didn’t back down. It made me want to be more like that myself.
Barbara and Larry were not the first Western cyclists to explore the larger world and bring back their stories. Barbara wasn’t even the first woman to embark on a long-distance cycling trip and then write about it. The Irish cyclist and author Dervla Murphy published her book Full Tilt, about cycling from Ireland to India on her own, in 1965 (her packing list notably included a flask of whiskey and a pistol; both items proved useful).
What makes Miles from Nowhere stand out—both when it was written and still today—is the genuine good nature with which the Savages met the world. Over and over again, they were warned away—told the world was a scary and dangerous place. “You haven’t been robbed yet?” a bank clerk in Thailand asked when they went to cash travelers’ checks. “Oh, you will be.” India was described by a traveling businessman as “a bizarre and dangerous country.”