the times | Monday August 3 2020 1GT 7
life
The roughest welcome came when
he camped beside what appeared to be
a derelict building in the Peruvian
Andes. At 3am he awoke to the sound
of a crunch on the ground. Unzipping
his tent, he was confronted by a man
holding a gun in a shaky hand. “Get
into my house,” the stranger said.
Once inside Fabes tried to explain
that he was a tourist. The man looked
at him thoughtfully, then asked:
“Quieres sopa?” Would he like soup?
Fabes thought he would. “Pollo o
tomate?” He went with the tomato,
and as they tucked in learnt that his
host was an illegal gold miner, which
explained his anxiety. This was not
the last time that a seemingly hostile
encounter would end in friendship.
In cities he often slept rough at the
“edgelands”: under bridges, beside
railways, inside the dark corners of car
parks. He relished the “primal sense of
dread” of being an outsider. “I won’t
say the roadside toilets were thrilling,
but there’s something exciting about
the sun setting and needing to find a
home for the evening,” he says.
After years on the road he began to
look the part. In India a man asked
him for a selfie and when Fabes looked
at the picture, he writes, he saw “the
kind of man who might present at
4am to an emergency department
with something embarrassing in his
rectum, perhaps a root vegetable”.
In El Salvador he slept on the grass
by petrol stations protected by armedguards. This sense of security was
somewhat undermined one night
when the police began shooting at a
driver who pulled away without paying.
His hairiest moment came north of
San Francisco in woods where police
happened to be searching for a murder
suspect. While making his dinner
Fabes was disturbed by a siren and
told: “Get out of the tent.” Emerging
into flashing lights, he faced two police
officers. “Sir, what’s in your hand?”
“Spaghetti.” “Put down the spaghetti.”
The exchange would have been
funnier if they hadn’t had their hands
on their holsters. “What’s that?” one
of them yelled, pointing at his feet.
“Broccoli. I was going to make a
cheese sauce.” Eventually, the officers
left him in peace.
Fabes describes the “rapture” he
felt at being alone in remote places.
“That was quite luxurious, it was
liberating.” It could also be very
difficult, “especially in places
like Mongolia, where you
really can go weeks
without a conversation”.
He made transient
friendships, and his
mother and friends flew out to
join him for holidays. Claire, an
old flame from when he was
at medical school in
Liverpool, flew out to
Australia and they
rekindled their
relationship as theyAbove: Stephen Fabes
cycling in the Northern
Cape, South Africa.
Left: Fabes in the
Cordillera Blanca
mountain range, PeruSigns of Life: To the
Ends of the Earth With
a Doctor by Stephen
Fabes is published by
Pursuit on Thursday,
£18.cycled north, then worked their way
through much of Asia. By the time
they reached Singapore, however, the
romance had run its course and she
booked a one-way ticket to Japan.
Years on the road had made him
more taciturn and self-dependent than
was healthy for a relationship. “But it
was much more fun cycling with
someone else. We had a really good
time together and left on good terms.”
He caught dengue fever in Malaysia
and was a martyr to stomach upsets.
A piece of cartilage in his knee came
loose in Greece and when he reached
Istanbul he hitchhiked back to Britain
for an operation. He flew back three
months later to pick up the trail.
Often he had to plough along busy
routes and had a collision with a
motorbike and some other close
shaves, but in six years he didn’t
have any serious accidents.
By the time he reached Asia, Fabes
felt he was on the edge of burn-out.
Dissatisfied with only experiencing
places fleetingly, he decided to explore
communities by stopping to volunteer
with medical teams, including a
floating clinic in Cambodia and
a hospital for patients affected by
leprosy in Nepal.
“We’re obsessed with the
otherness of a place. I found
that actually what I was more
interested in was this sense
of what was the same.
What were the parallels
between an A&E
department in
London and a clinic
in Mongolia? That gave
me a sense of purpose.
Medicine emphasises
our similarities —
we all have very
similar bodies.”
Two things linger
most. First, theand Lycra: the biking doctor
astonishing landscapes, including the
salmon, cream and peach high passes
of the Andes where Argentina and
Chile meet, or the hillside where he
watched a fireball meteor procession
cross a dark Uzbek sky.
Then there was the warm hospitality
he received, whether it was from
Syrians before civil war engulfed
their country or a waitress in San
Diego who smiled as if she were on
morphine and invited him to stay at
her apartment. “It was so common to
be invited into people’s homes. That
just floored me. Sometimes there was
no shared language and we had to get
through the evening using mime.
“There is something about the
bicycle that inspires kindness. It’s
more humble than other modes of
travel that foreigners might use.”
He learnt that soldiers at border
crossings seemed to have a common
checklist wherever they were in
the world: “Detain, interrogate,search, threaten with deadly force,
feed, bid cheerful goodbye.”
In 2016 he returned to Britain at the
end of his journey to find the country
divided by Brexit. A terror attack on
Westminster Bridge took place ten
minutes after he had walked across it.
The main lesson he had taken from
his journey was that humans are
generally rather good at getting along,
whether laughing with a husband and
wife in a Mongolian ger (yurt) on the
frigid steppe after she has let slip an
accidental fart, or bonding over Ricky
Gervais. “In Afghanistan I was cycling
along, really slightly concerned, in the
middle of the desert, and this car pulls
up beside me and a guy shouts out his
window, ‘Welcome to my country. I’m
from Slough.’ And he starts talking
about The Office and David Brent.
That was a beautiful moment.”
Back in Britain, running became
his “surrogate obsession”. He now
fancies a running trip, but it would be
measured in months rather than years.
Working during the pandemic
has given him a renewed sense of
purpose. “Although it was stressful
and frightening, it was great to be
able to help. It was a real privilege
to be working in the NHS.”
Fabes, 39, has some concerns
that the government’s new drive to
improve health through cycling may
be “a blinkered, overly simplistic”
approach. “I hope that we use this
moment not just to reduce rates of
obesity head-on... but to create
conditions where people have more
control over their lives. And while I’m
all for more riding of bikes, prescribing
them seems to me to be medicalising a
normal and enjoyable lifestyle choice.”
He cycles to work sometimes, but
not on the bike that accompanied
him around the world. “I wouldn’t
want it locked up in London. I’d just
be worried it would get stolen.”Therouh t l
L
C
mA car drove up
in the desert and
the guy shouted,
‘I’m from Slough’