Bikepacking Roma to Naples 🚲



Ciao Bella! 

📍from the windy beach below the rocky cone shaped mountains of Formia, Italy. 

Every single day has felt like a grand adventure filled with characters, fear, elation and a new place to lay my head each night, but T oday is a much needed rest day. What was supposed to be a few days in Rome and a three day bike trip from Rome to Naples, turned into a week in Rome and what will  probably end up taking me about five days to the arrive to the stradones of Naples. 

Mostly due to bike mechanical issues but I am also nursing my cocktail of my friend Taylor‘s parting gift of a seasonal cold mixed with heavy dose of jet leg. 

The jet leg made being in Rome feel like being in a waking dream. Rome is a crazy city. Everything is so compounded and there’s so much to look at I almost didn’t know what to look at. So much from the Romans just scattered throughout the city. 

They say that New York is a city that doesn’t sleep but show me a city that does sleep?  Rome naps, and right when it was waking up would be when my head would be deliriously hitting the pillow.  

Sometimes I think that maybe I’m just not a city person, I get easily overwhelmed and people don’t seem very happy but I have to try to remind myself to break it down, peel back the city, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. My favourite neighbourhood was the one of Centocelle (meaning 100 jail cells from the Roman times i was told) and every time I’ve told an Italian tthat’s the where I stayed in Rome, they pinch their figures together while laughing and asking me why! Why? Because it felt so friendly, like the man who owned a bookstore and told me to bring in my fully loaded bike and read as long as I like during a downpour. Or when I was tired and buying groceries and told the Cashier I had been working on a farm and he told me he worked in the supermarket for nine years to learn their secrets and asked me if on Thursday if I would like to come along with him to buy the peaches for his store. 

The day that I left Rome was probably my favourite day in Rome. I had to bike from one end of the city to the other out to the sea, and I just kept going through so many crazy neighbourhoods digressing from the last and landmarks like a Roman chariot racing stadium that I wasn’t expecting, until I got very, very lost and like a mirage in that moment, a couple on a self built tandem bicycle showed up and showed me the way, unfortunately that way involved thousands of cactus spikes littered across the ground that left them behind with two flat tires and my tubeless tires survived…until a few days later when the needles came back to haunt my bike riding dreams.  

I’ve been using an app called warm showers. It’s basically like couch surfing but for bike riders and that’s how I ended up staying in Centocelle and I also stayed with my now friend Danilo last night in a town called Saubadia. I don’t speak any Italian and he barely speaks in English, but you always know when you find a kindred soul and we laughed till we cried trying to string sentences together.

The next morning he invited me to go for a cappuccino and croissant and to meet a family who had biked from Nice, France to Saubadia with their 17 month year-old daughter, Barbara and their four-year-old son Santiago. Santiago had his own little bike and Barbara was in a chariot that was carried behind her mother‘s bike. The four of us spoke in a mix of Italian French, Spanish, and English, while the mother is explaining their life to me with Barbara feeding and  Santiago ripping open sugar packages and downing them getting ready for his big ride that day. 

We go to our bikes, ready to go on our separate journeys, and I find that my back tire is completely flat. Santiago starts meticulously, pulling out the needles one by one, and at that very moment a group of road cyclist show up and within minutes have my back tire off, are pouring new sealant in, pumping it up, fixing my problem completely and asking me if I am single or married. 

After that, Danillo and I cycle to my favourite town yet, Terracina, where along the way I get two more flat tires. We stop for pizza underneath a cliff that overhangs the town and he pumps up my tire again and tells me “You can make it to the next town. It’s only 37k’s.” He wishes me luck and we part ways in the pouring rain. 

The roads so far have been very gentle and welcoming. Yesterday was my first day of starting to do more hills, as well as also going through narrow tunnels through mountains that were pitch black. I didn’t have my lights on my bike and I’m definitely the last thing a truck expects to be inside of a tunnel, so I biked as fast as I could saying out loud  “Pease don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me. Please don’t hit me.” I stopped afterward to catch my breath, my chest heaving and then 10 minutes later, after slowing inching my way up another hill that  overlooked the ocean listening to Enya, I cried at the epic-ness thinking this is it, this feeling was what I was dreaming of the last few years every time I thought of this trip.

I did make it. I ended up last night at a windsurfing shop from Warmshowers that I did not sleep very well at because of an evening storm that caused the sails sales from boats to rattle, the wind to howl, garbage move across the ground like long fingers scratching, and a few people who just kind of walked right beside my tent off the beach and into town. Today I woke up feeling a little achy, well actually a lot achy emotional fragile, so after getting my tires fixed, the shop told me I was ready to go but I found a hotel for $15 Eros and decided to stay. 

I met someone before I left Canada who had spent two years biking around Europe and said that he was pretty lonely. I’ve been gearing up to be lonely, but so far I am actually still been craving alone time because of all the wonderful, friendly and kind people ive been meeting every day (Especially in moments when I need it most.)  

One man stopped me on the road yesterday and asked me if I was Danish. “I had to stop you and ask… you look just like her!” I told him no and we biked together a little while. Lots of waves from other cyclist too. These little interaction are fuel for the soul. Awhile back i read that COVID-19 was really hard on people for that reason as we didn’t get those little daily interactions that actually mean a lot more to our spirit than we give credit.

 As beautiful as it is, I always feel compelled to capture the full picture, I ’ve also been seeing a lot of prostitutes, always women of colour, sitting in chairs in fishnet stockings along random backroads beside farmers fields.  The juxtaposition of flying down a hill and feeling so free in that moment and locking eyes wirh a woman who is so obviously not free made my heart ache. 

I’ve also been seeing a lot of garbage. Like a lot. Self made garbage dumps W verywhere, in and around thr sea, on the roads.  I guess I am quite shocked to see it. Italy so far has been streets filled with activist street art and woke calls for action. A woman on Saltspring told me Italy taught her everything she needs to know about protesting. Somebody here told me having towns so close together helps organize the masses. Perhaps you stay radical when fasciasm in your country wasn’t too far off. But when it comes to garbage, am I out to lunch, does Canada do this too? 

As the jet leg wears off and the reality settles in, I feel abundant and grateful to be here and completely open to the journey in a way I have dreamed of being for a long time! 

Tomorrow I will try to do my biggest day yet of 100’ks to Naples. My friend and I had a discussion lately about what makes a story. I said maybe it can be broken down to the factors we always know it to contain such as characters, setting, details, but maybe it’s the fact of wanting sometning, if we don’t want sometning whats driving us? Tomorrow I want Naples, but maybe the journey has a different idea for me. I am humbled and in awe of the infinite possibilities of life at any given second, and travelling always has a way of making me feel closer to feeling that. 

Please send me sometning back! An update of your life, what you’re seeing and feeling, maybe a song, a playlist, some art! Literally anything!!! 

Ciao for now xx Hannie 

(Doing the best I can writting via iPhone^)