Vale, vagabonds.
One year ago, terror struck on a Tajik motorway.
Americans Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin, as well as Europeans Markus Hummel and Rene Wokke, were cycling northwest, near Kulob District.
They’d been travelling on the Pamir Highway – a crumbling road the passes by 7000 meter snow-capped peaks, hot springs, verdant valleys and traditional villages.
Before they could reach Dushanbe – the capital - an old Daewoo deliberately crashed into the riders. Its occupants exited the vehicle and murdered them with knives.
These terrorists – ‘ISIS inspired’ – were subsequently tracked down and killed by Tajik authorities. One survived, and is now the subject of a New York Times investigation.
Like thousands of other long-distance cyclists that ride that road every summer, Jay, Lauren, Markus and Rene were aware of the risks.
But their tragic deaths in a largely peaceful land was a terrible aberration.
It shattered four families.
It rattled a nation already burdened by stereotypes.
And it broke the hearts of a global community of over-landing wayfarers, a group I was part of for 242 days during 2018.
But the tragedy didn’t end there, ignobly by the roadside.
Social-media condemnation followed - not of the villains, but of the victims.
“Just a reminder to all you ungrateful socialist liberals”, one commenter said. “You have no idea how good you have it in America”.
As parents arranged the repatriation of dead sons and daughters, over 100 of Lauren and Jay’s fellow Americans posted unashamedly under one of the cyclists’ old Facebook posts: “Liberalism is a mental illness”, one said. “Her family would be ashamed of her”, claimed another.
I did not know Jay, Lauren, Markus or Rene. But I met many people like them.
On my 27th birthday, about six months before the murders, I left Australia to travel overland to the UK, 23,000 kilometers from home. I travelled the same route as the cyclists in Tajikistan a few weeks before they were killed.
I admired the long-haul cyclists I met on the road more than anyone, even if they often chided me for taking the ‘easy way out’ by using public transport.
If you’re ever looking for an antidote to cynicism, you’ll find it in them.
There are lots of misguided social perceptions of round-the-world adventurers. That they’re just young Into the Wild types, characterised primarily by careless and ignorant abandon.
Since their deaths, armchair-critics have so dismissed the four cyclists.
They see them as entitled millennials, endangered by a naïve optimism that clouded their judgement; as kids who were ungrateful of their western lifestyle; as travellers whose murder was the logical conclusion of their naivety.
But the cyclists – Jay and Lauren in particular - had left with eyes wide open.
They were prepared and purposeful, beginning their preparations more than six months before catching a plane to Africa.
They were aware of the risks, but not reckless.
Something had been missing in their former lives in America, yes. But they still appreciated what they had - homes, jobs, families. Each other.
Jay and Lauren were archetypical worldwide cycle tourists: cautious, caring, curious and well-received on the road. I’m sure they chose to ride with Markus and Rene because they too shared these virtues.
Their rosy world-view wasn’t formed by cherry-picking information to validate their beliefs - it was one informed by a lived experience.
That’s what inspired me most about the cycle-tourists I met - the ones who laughed at me for catching the bus: that their optimism is the by-product of what they have seen and felt, not just what they think.
They don’t just believe the world is filled with friendly and helpful people - they’ve found proof, often sharing detailed field-notes that validate their suspicions about the goodness in people, including in places unfairly caricatured as backwards and dangerous, like Tajikistan.
That itself is worth celebrating. But the lives of these riders offers something more.
Jay Austin wasn’t so hubristic to think there was some grand purpose to his journey.
“Spartan as it may be”, he wrote, the trip still feels “a tad selfish, self-absorbed, and self-indulgent”.
His family should be proud of his modesty. But on this one point, Jay was wrong.
On those roads in Tajikistan, and in the world’s remote places, often the cycle-tourists represent the best of us.
They willingly sacrifice the inconspicuousness in which lesser travellers like myself find comfort.
Their foreign faces are as exposed to their environments as their bodies are to the elements.
Mile after mile, they serve as goodwill ambassadors, rolling into villages that rarely see foreigners, their presence spreading a gospel much more appealing than beliefs that inspire fear and bloodshed.
With every pedal, they make a statement: I’m not afraid of you, and you shouldn’t be of me.
That’s something no act of malice, and no keyboard-contrarian, can quash.
July, 2019,