Two-year journey took 30 years to tell
West Cork organic farmer, John Devoy, tells about the perils and pleasures of his epic, 33,000km solo cycle between 1985 and 1987, and why he has only written about it now.
When John Devoy set off from Cork to cycle 33,000km solo, from Ireland to Capetown, via the Arctic Circle and the Middle East, his first stop was in Lismore, to meet renowned, slow-journeying travel writer, Dervla Murphy.
“Go, and come back with a story,” she told him.
It was 1985 and John was in his twenties. He returned to Ireland in 1987, after two years on the road and many extraordinary encounters and near-death experiences. But he hasn’t told his story until now.
Now 60 and an organic vegetable farmer in Rosscarbery, John has just written his first travel book, recounting a section of his journey, from Cairo to Nairobi. But for 30 years after the cycle, John built a back-to-basics life in West Cork, with his wife and three children. John says there were reasons why the tale was a long time coming.
“I did try to write about it, a year or two after I came back,” he says, sipping coffee in one of the many West Cork cafés he supplies with vegetables.
“I tried, got frustrated, and gave up. I think that, unconsciously, I wasn’t ready to put on paper what’s in that book. This may sound a bit esoteric, but the John Devoy who did that journey had to dissolve away. My ego and persona and life were all bound up in it. I had to let that fade and leave many years pass.”
The resulting book, Quondam: Travels in a Once World, is quite the tale. John’s African journey was arduous: in the Sudan, he faced civil war and hundreds of kilometres of uncyclable sand, pushing his bike through the desert, much to the bemusement of locals.
In Rwanda, he passed the Virunga Mountains, unaware that primatologist Dian Fossey had been murdered months earlier. He fought parasites and fatigue and occasional, excessive hospitality.
This was not off-grid travel, but pre-grid travel. John says he’s grateful that he undertook his adventure before the advent of instant, digital communications.
“When most young people travel now, they go with their phone and satnav, but it’s a two-way street, because the people they meet along the way also have phones,” John says.
“At the flick of a button, everyone can know what everyone else is doing, which has fundamentally changed the game of travel.”
Cycling globe-trotters, or anyone engaged in ‘slow adventures’, like walking, kayaking or horse-trekking, are both more vulnerable and more tuned-in to their travel experience, John says, and that vulnerability is an important part of the journey.
He has no patience for the trend for record-setting, lycra-clad cyclists, who are more interested in improving on personal bests than slowing down their journey to encounter something genuinely transformative.
“When people heard I was writing a ‘cycling book,’ they sent me these books, normally by young guys, and I couldn’t read them,” he says.
“Every day, we’re vulnerable, really, but we defend ourselves with all sorts of things: with social media, the illusion of security, regimen, habit. But when you really travel, you shed your fears. It’s like a gestation. About nine months in, your cultural umbilical is cut. After that, you realise everyone is helping you. Everywhere I stopped, I met with hospitality and curiosity.”
Nevertheless, John’s near-death experiences included a hit-and-run in Egypt that damaged his bike and mercifully only left him bruised, as well as a bout of cerebral malaria, towards the end of his African leg. But he was lucky.
Other cyclists have set off to circumnavigate the globe and failed to come back: last July, four cyclists were mown down, and then stabbed, in an apparently ISIS-linked attack in Tajikistan. Amongst the dead were young US couple, Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin, who were on their third continent of a world bike tour.
Months earlier, in April, two round-the-world solo cyclists, German, Holger Hagenbusch, and Pole, Krzysztof Chmielewski, who teamed up for security while on the road in South America, were found dead in a ravine in Mexico.
Initially reported by investigators as a crash, it subsequently emerged that Krzysztof’s body had been decapitated and the incident is now being investigated as a robbery.
Dervla Murphy, whose first book recounted her solo cycle through Europe, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, in the 1960s, has said that journey would probably not be possible today, citing not only political upheaval, but also the rise in access to pornography, which, she believes, has changed attitudes and made many countries far more dangerous for solo female travellers.
John doesn’t necessarily agree:
“Every day, people die on the road. But I don’t think it’s because the world has suddenly become more dangerous. There are more travellers now: the more people that are out there on the road, the higher the chances that these things will happen.
"What are dangerous countries or safe countries? You might go through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and you’re probably fine. But you can still find someone who’s driving drunk or who pulls over because they don’t like the look of your hair, or whatever. And then you become a statistic, another traveller killed.”
But some of John’s best memories are of hospitality in countries that have since been torn asunder by war.
“Syria was the most incredible country, for the sense of sheer hospitality and welcome,” he says. “I’m devastated by what’s happening there. I remember back to the people I met and their families, people my age. God knows where they are now, scattered all over Europe, or maybe dead? And then, of course, there’s what happened to the Sudan. You just say, ‘why’?”
He sighs. Growing up in Whitegate, in east Cork, John says his curiosity was always piqued by the exotic appearance of the many oil refinery workers from the Middle East.
When he was ten, his father, like so many Irish engineers, put in a stint in Libya, sending back postcards that came with a heady whiff of adventure.
One of the most emotional episodes in John’s book is his arrival in Nairobi, still recovering from the cerebral malaria, to a telegram from home: his father had died and been buried, and John hadn’t known. With the support of his family, John continued his journey.
“My brother asked what I was going to go back for, to stand by his grave?” John recalls. “So I kept going, but in Madagascar I had a kind of emotional breakdown, on a beach where the whole thing kind of spiralled in on me.
“In some ways, I felt I carried more of him with me after Nairobi than when I had set off from Cork.”
However much John had prepared for the hardships of his journey, nothing prepared him for how hard it was to come home. He resumed his old job, as a lab technician in CUH, but his world had been turned upside-down.
“No-one warns you,” he says. “No-one says, ‘sure buddy, go and enjoy, but you better have a long hard think about who you’re going to be when you get back.’ You constantly change for two years and you have thousands of experiences, and you just don’t fit into the box anymore.”
He stuck out the nine-to-five for a few years, but eventually, having met and married his wife, Sara, and, with their first-born, Oisín, in tow, the young family set off on a new adventure: John packed in the day-job and set up an organic farm in West Cork.
“I had no farming experience, but you need to throw yourself into a project big enough that it fits the world in your head, because the world in your head has gotten very big. You see the game that’s going on. On a personal scale, I drew a ring around six acres of Rosscarbery and said, ‘that’s my world, I’m going to take responsibility for that’. I pour my energy into planting trees and producing food for the locality.”
Nowadays, with acres of blueberries, kale, and courgettes, an orchard and 870 hens, not to mention WOOFers and two employees, as well as a commitment to write two more instalments of what will become a travel trilogy, John can only find the time for the occasional family holiday with Sara and his teenage children, most recently to Greece.
But that doesn’t bother him. “If you’ve travelled long enough and hard enough, you’ve done it and you don’t need to do it again,” he says, with a shrug.
“The travel experience is more internal than external. We’re so easily externalised now, with everyone Googling away on our phones, that we don’t give that enough importance. But travel is a two-way street: you’re seeing the place, but you’re also seeing yourself in a new way,” John says.
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