I sometimes think about the children I met in Patagonia. It was during the 1997 Patagonia expedition on horseback, one of those journeys where the landscape eventually stops being something you look at and becomes something you are inside with your whole body. We rode through the Andes on narrow horse trails, high, steep, barren and serious, and the horses walked where horses walk, with that mixture of certainty and stupidity that makes you both trust them and not trust them at all. It was not a place where anyone needed to invent drama. It was already there. Sometimes you looked down and almost regretted doing it, and then you looked forward again, because that was the only sensible thing to do. The horses knew the way better than we did. Sometimes that helps, but not always.

We came there as an expedition. With saddles, equipment, cameras, plans, risk assessments, and all those thoughts you carry when you come from our part of the world and do something that, back home, would be described as big, difficult, or maybe even dangerous. And then a group of children came riding towards us. At first I don’t think I even thought of them as children, because they came so naturally, as part of the landscape, not as something remarkable. The youngest were perhaps five or six years old, and they rode at the front. Without saddles, if I remember correctly. Behind them came older siblings, and at the back perhaps a boy of fourteen or fifteen. They were on their way down to where we had come from to buy food, and then they were going to ride back again. A week there and back. It was not an adventure for them. It was not an expedition. It was not something that needed to be explained, filmed, or defended. It was simply something that had to be done.

I have thought about that scene many times since. Not because I think Swedish children should ride bareback along cliffs in the Andes. That would be an idiotic way to understand it. Nor because I want to romanticize poverty, necessity, or a life where children have to take responsibility because life demands it. But there was something there I could not forget. A fourteen- or fifteen-year-old riding through the mountains with younger siblings to buy food. Here at home, almost the same age can sometimes be treated as if it cannot manage an evening alone. Somewhere between those two worlds there is a question I keep returning to. What do we actually believe children are capable of? And what do we take away from them when we protect them from everything that could make them capable?

That is probably where this text begins, although it began in many other places too. Beside a football pitch in Malmö. In conversations with friends. In my own dark periods. In all the times I have seen Eva and Dana afraid, tired, angry, irritated or exhausted out on a journey, and still move on. In the film we have made and in the film we are now preparing. I have been thinking more and more about why I take my daughters on these kinds of journeys. The simple answer is that we make films, that we travel together, that this is my life, that they have grown up with it, and that it is one way for us to be a family. But the simple answer is no longer enough. Not now that they are older. Eva will soon turn sixteen. Dana fourteen. They are not small children who simply follow their father. The next film has to be different. It has to be more about them taking over, carrying more of the expedition themselves, making more decisions, feeling more responsibility, not in order to become like me, but so they do not become helpless in the face of their own lives.

That may sound bigger than it is. In everyday life it is usually about simple things. Someone has to do the dishes. Someone has to do the laundry. Someone has to take out the rubbish. Someone has to help with the food. At home Eva does the dishes and the laundry, Dana takes out the rubbish, we clean together, and Dana can cook. If they are home alone for more than a week, the food gets worse and worse, I know that. Then there are more crisps and sweets than real food. But I would have done the same at their age. The important thing is not that everything becomes perfect. The important thing is that they can do it.

On an expedition this becomes even clearer. Out there you cannot simply opt out. If the tent has to go up, the tent has to go up. If the horses have to be taken care of, someone has to do it. If food has to be cooked, someone has to cook it. If someone in the group is not doing well, it affects everyone. At home there is always a room to disappear into, a phone to pick up, a screen that makes it possible to avoid whatever has become uncomfortable. On a journey it is harder. The girls still try, of course. They listen to music. I understand them. I do it myself. But batteries run out. Days are long. Horses walk slowly. A cycle road takes the time it takes. You cannot scroll away an uphill. You cannot swipe away a tired horse. You cannot press away hunger, rain, bad mood or someone in the group who feels wrongly treated. In the end there is only the body, the road, the other people and what has to be done.

I started selling myself early, when I was twenty-one and had to pitch journeys, and the expedition world is full of ego, my own included. But on a journey it is not enough to be interesting. You have to function. You have to put up the tent when you are tired. You have to listen when someone is sad even though you yourself think there are more urgent things to solve. You have to help even when you would rather be left alone.

In Kyrgyzstan this became clear. We had been through a hard time with the horses. Alina was sad, tired and worn out, and she felt she had been handled badly by me. She may have been right. I can become hard when I am stressed and when everything has to work. I do not always see people properly then. I see the tasks, the risks, the time, the animals, the logistics, but not always the human being in front of me. It is not a beautiful trait, but it is there. Then Dana stepped in and started a conversation about it. She did not do it to show how clever she was. She just saw that something was wrong and dealt with it. The conversation became good. That is the kind of thing that might not have happened in the same way at home, because life at home is not as hard. At home you can go into your room, postpone things, disappear into a screen. Out there, things remain hanging in the air until someone takes hold of them.

It was not a big scene if you saw it from the outside. No summit. No dramatic image. No beautiful sunset. But for me it was more important than many other things, because in that moment I saw something I want Dana to carry with her. That you can go into what hurts. That you can say something when someone else is not doing well. That you do not have to wait for the adult to do everything right, because the adult does not always do everything right. I do not think she thought of it that way herself. She just did it.

Eva works differently. She is not Dana and she should not be Dana. Eva often takes responsibility through conversation, through questioning, through not letting me get away too easily. She questions my decisions, what we are doing, why we are doing it, how we are doing it. Sometimes I get tired of it. Of course I do. I am her father and I often think I have thought things through, but she does not always stop where I want her to stop. She also almost always defends other people. If I say something negative about someone, she often comes in with the other side. She can listen to a long conversation and then suddenly summarize everything in one sentence that makes you understand what we have really been talking about. There is no big cinematic scene where I can point and say: there, Eva took responsibility. It is more about how she is. She sees people, or at least tries to see them, and she reminds me that there are more ways to understand a situation than mine.

That has been allowed to grow on the journeys, or at least it has space there in a way it does not always have at home. At home everything is divided up. School, training, food, laundry, phones, friends, times, everyday life. On a journey the conversations become different. You walk or ride or cycle for a long time. You get tired of each other. You say stupid things. You become unfair. You see someone from a side you perhaps did not want to see. Then you need people like Dana, who go into the conversation, and people like Eva, who say that there is also another way of seeing it. I need both. The group needs both. They probably need each other too, even if they would not always say it like that.

The journeys have given them confidence. They are more social out in the world than many people might think. They almost never complain. If one of them says something hurts, then I know it hurts like hell. Dana’s football coaches say the same thing. If Dana complains about pain, then it is serious. That does not mean I want them to suffer in silence or grit their teeth until they disappear. I truly do not. But I think they have learned the difference between discomfort and catastrophe. Life is full of discomfort. Most of it is not catastrophe.

I have had dark periods myself. Who has not? There have been days when the only thing that helped me was discipline. A plan for the day, training, a diary, doing what had to be done. Sometimes simply holding on until it passed. That is something I want Eva and Dana to understand. That they are allowed to feel bad. That they are allowed to be afraid. That they are allowed to be angry. That they are allowed to say something hurts. That fear does not always mean stop. That a dark period does not always mean life is wrong. And that you do not always have to manage everything alone, because that too is a lie strong people can easily begin to believe.

I have had to learn that the hard way myself. In Namibia I carried too much. I took too much weight on my bike, took too much responsibility, worked too hard and got sick with bronchitis. That was not heroism. It was stupidity, or perhaps old habit. I suppose I thought that if I just took more on myself, the group would function better. But a group does not become stronger because one person carries everything. It becomes weaker, because eventually that person breaks, and then everyone is left with the problem anyway. That must not happen again. Not for me and not for the girls. Everyone has to carry something. Everyone also has to be allowed to be carried sometimes.

That is one of the things I want the next film to be about, even though of course the film has to tell it with images and not with words like these. It should not just be a film where I take my children out into the world. It has to be about something shifting. I will still be there. I am still their father. I will worry, interfere, talk too much, try to control too much and almost certainly make mistakes. But they have to take more of the space, more of the responsibility, more of the direction. The expedition cannot just be something their father has come up with and they follow along on. It also has to become something they carry themselves.

I also think about how the journeys and life with people from different countries have shaped Eva and Dana. They do not have that reflex of blaming the others when something goes wrong. They have eaten with people, travelled with them, become irritated with them, laughed with them, depended on them. It becomes harder to simplify people then. Not impossible, because no human being is immune to prejudice, but harder. They have seen that people can live in other ways without becoming less human. They have seen that irritation and warmth can exist in the same person, that someone can be difficult and still good, that you yourself can have it wrong even when you are certain.

I grew up in another time, in Dala-Järna. It was not a better time in every way, one should be careful about saying such things, but there was more of associations, sport, teams, community and responsibility, things that meant you were not only your own little world. Football and all sport were enormously important for me. They taught me community and fighting for each other. You trained, played, won, lost, got angry, forgave, continued. I am glad Dana has football. Eva has her own way. She is not as team- or community-minded as Dana and I are, and she has to be allowed to be that way. Children are not projects to be evened out until they resemble your own idea of balance.

And yet it is not the dramatic moments I think about most when I ask myself why I continue. It is not the cliffs, the passes, the great views or those images that look good in a trailer. It is often the tables. Some simple kitchen. A simple camp. Some place where we sit together after a day when something has happened, something has been managed, someone has been tired, someone has been angry, someone has laughed at something stupid. Not around a fire, because fire is often more romantic in thought than in reality. There is not always wood, and often it is just another job. But there is a table, or something that works as a table. There is food. There is conversation. Nobody has to show it off. We are simply there together. Then I see a kind of contentment in them that I like very much. Not euphoria. Not stimulation. More like tiredness, calm, seriousness, togetherness. The feeling of having done something, managed something, been part of something.

I know this kind of thing can be misunderstood. Almost everything that has to do with children and risk can be misunderstood. Someone always thinks it is too much and someone else thinks it is too little, and perhaps that is why I have started thinking so much about it. Not because I really want to defend myself, but because I myself want to understand what I am doing. I do not believe in throwing children into danger. I do not believe children should have to prove anything to adults. But I also do not believe in protecting them from everything that is uncomfortable.

I do not want Eva and Dana to remember the journeys as something their father dragged them into because he needed another expedition. That would be a sad thought. I want them to remember the conversations around the tables, the horses that did not do what we wanted, the days that became too long, the people we met, the mistakes we made, and perhaps also that their father was not always right.

Because I am not. They already know that, and Eva often reminds me of it. Perhaps that is one of the best things about travelling with them. That I do not only teach them something, but that they also keep pulling me down from my own ideas about what I think I know. Dana does it in her way, by walking straight into the things that need to be said. Eva does it in hers, by questioning, defending others and sometimes summarizing an entire conversation in a sentence that stays much longer than she herself may understand.

Perhaps that is why the children on horseback in Patagonia stayed with me. They simply rode past. They were going to buy food. There was nothing more to it. But I saw them and thought, maybe only much later, that they knew something we are in the process of forgetting. Not because they had a better life. Not because their world was kinder or simpler. But because they were needed for real.

Reykjavik, 06:00

Hotel Leif Eriksson. Six in the morning. I’m sitting alone in the restaurant and Hallgrímskirkja is outside the window, filling the whole view like the island wants to remind me where I am. It’s raining. Not proper rain. Just enough to make everything feel damp. I’m sneezing for no reason. I feel rough. Not dramatic. Just that slightly bruised feeling you get when you’ve been concentrated for days and then suddenly stop. The body is tired in a clean way. A small hangover. A bit of ache in my shoulders, probably because I pulled too hard yesterday when I should have used the legs more. The arms still want to do what the legs used to do. Old habits.

On the table there is breakfast. In my head there is skyr.

We bought skyr in kilos for the course. Kilos. Because I assumed everyone likes skyr. Because we wanted to be the organised guys who eat the right food and don’t live on gas station junk. Turns out I was basically the only one eating it. Four kilos left in the room when we packed up. Four kilos of good intentions, sitting there like a stupid souvenir. Iceland always gives you one of those. Something small and ridiculous that tells you more about how life really works than all your careful planning.

Yesterday was six hours in the car. We dropped Richard at the airport. Family emergency. He had to fly home. That changed the end of the course completely. The last day was supposed to be the one where we camped on the glacier, weather permitting, and practiced everything on snow, then moved like a proper team, and ended with that tired, quiet satisfaction you get when you’ve done something hard and didn’t cheat. It didn’t happen. Weather didn’t play, life didn’t play, and Richard had to go. That’s always how it is. You can write any program you want. Something always moves.

Me and Norm went out for dinner in Reykjavik last night. Two people, one dinner, around 230 dollars if you want to make it hurt properly. It was good. Nothing special. The kind of meal you forget the next day. You pay because you’re here. You pay because this is an island and everything has to be hauled across water and then hauled again across black lava and then cooked by someone who also has to pay rent in Reykjavik. That’s Iceland. You don’t hate it. You just notice it.

In a few hours I fly home. Back to Malmö. Back to the girls. Back to being a football parent, back to dinner logistics, back to ordinary life that is not ordinary at all when you think about it.

The group

When you sign up for a course with ten people you never know what you’ll get. That little worry sits there in the background. But I remember thinking on the plane that anyone who goes to Iceland for glacier training is probably a certain kind of person. I was right. Great group. None of them Icelandic but living in Iceland because they’ve chosen it, aiming to become guides. Focused people. Strong people. Kind people. Amazing people.

Norm is Norm. The grit of Kensington Alpine Club, and one of the kindest humans you’ll ever meet.

Richard surprised me. My memory of him is Kilimanjaro, sick most of the time and still pushing through. Here he was sharp. His logic mind is beautiful. 2-1, 3-1, five-to-one, 6-1, he saw it and it was done. Fast, agile, almost twenty years younger than me, and it showed.

The guides

Nicco and Andrea. Two young Italians. Calm. Analytical. Patient. No macho, no stress, no rush. They gave everyone time to sort things out. At the same time they watched the details. Lock the carabiners. Dress the knots. Don’t do the quick version.

You could see Nicco sometimes get tired of the same questions, but he answered them anyway, clearly, without drama. Andrea was the same kind of calm. You couldn’t ask for better teachers.

Day one

I’ve taken mountaineering courses since the early nineties. Mount Cook, New Zealand, 1992. Five days. I loved it. We climbed Ball Point. Back then I was extremely fit. I remember being way ahead of everyone because I cycled and ran and had that young-body arrogance.

This week wasn’t that.

The first serious moment wasn’t dramatic. It was stepping onto the glacier tongue. Hard ice. Open glacier. Most of the snow gone down low. It felt a lot like the start of Greenland, that same hard surface that punishes you when you hit it. Hands, knees, pride. Then you look into the blue cracks and you understand what happens if you make one mistake.

Hanging from one screw

At some point you’re anchored to one ice screw. One point. One knot you tied yourself. You know it holds. You know the gear is built for it. Still your head has a moment. I’m hanging from one screw in ice.

And then you calm down enough to do the next step, because you have to.

We learned knots, systems, rescue anchors. I’ve done courses before where nothing really stuck. This time it did. I think it’s because the teaching was excellent. I think it’s also because I listened differently.

Clove hitch. Butterfly knot. Catastrophe knot. Prusik. I’ve started to love the prusik. Simple cord, friction, body weight, technique. One for the foot, one for moving up. You can use Micro Traxion and other tools, sure, but I liked understanding the basics.

And the near-mistakes were always the same kind of thing. Small. A screwgate not properly locked. A knot that looks fine until it isn’t. The kind of mistakes that don’t look like mistakes until they do.

Age and my father

I’m comfortable being 64, 65 now. Not as fast. Not as strong. But also not interested in applause. Not interested in pretending. I do things slower. I accept that. I also notice that I don’t care what people think in the way I used to.

The last day on the ice, the amicable Leo commented on my age, I thought about my father. He died around my age. 64, 65. I cannot picture him hanging in a glacier system and hauling himself up. I just can’t. He lived in another lifetime, where being 65 looked different. I don’t know what to do with that thought except let it land for a second.

Weather, Skaftafell, and the half day

Weather hung over the whole week. Not storms, just wetness in the air, low cloud, the threat of whiteout. We didn’t summit. Fine. The course was about glacier knowledge, not a peak photo.

We went into Skaftafell. Svartifoss. Sjónarnípa. That view over Skaftafellsjökull where you stop talking. We did half a day because higher up it turned into rain and snow and then nothing.

Food, money, skyr and back to Malmö

We tried to be smart with food. We weren’t smart with skyr.

Clif bars don’t work for me. Heartburn. Trail mix and wraps worked. Hot drinks mattered. A thermos matters in wind.

In a few hours I’m back with the girls. Back to football parent life and dinner logistics and ordinary chaos. It’s always a bigger jump than it should be. Like that story about Chief Seattle waiting for his soul to arrive after the train.

What I want to bring home is simple. Put yourself in something hard once in a while. Something that demands you. It cleans you out.

What I’ll lose immediately is sleep. Outdoors gave me seven, eight hours most nights. Back home, we’ll see.

Kyrgyzstan is next. Three weeks to make it happen. Money and time. That’s the private fear. Not the glacier.

I’m sitting here looking at Hallgrímskirkja, sneezing, thinking about an ice screw holding my weight, and four kilos of skyr in a hotel room.

Life is good.

If you have followed this series, you know where we were. The last book chapter I published here was Crossing El Darién on March 21. Since then I have published other Substack essays in between, but the book journey continues here, north through Central America.

One thing needs to be clear. Ed and I split. He stayed behind in Panama City. I left alone. I never saw him again on that trip.

Honduras, a border that wants a gift

At the border the man studies my passport like he is searching for a reason to make my day worse. He looks tired and bitter, the way people look when they have spent years collecting small power at a desk.

He returns the passport slowly. Then he stretches out an open hand.

A gift.

I tell him I have no lempiras. I crossed the border five seconds ago. I keep my voice neutral, almost friendly, because this is not a place where pride is useful.

He offers to exchange money for me at a rate slightly above official, the same trick dressed as help. I have heard it before. I have heard the rumours too. Five unofficial inspections ahead. Every inspection wants its share. This is how salaries become survival.

Inside the second control building a Canadian couple’s gear is spread across the floor. Two guards go through everything with the joy of people who know time belongs to them. The couple look defeated before they have even entered the country.

In one corner a man with a gigantic moustache watches me with a hard face. He takes my passport and I can feel the room tighten. On his desk is a photograph of the Honduran football team from the World Cup.

I point to the photo and say I like Betancour best. I tell him he was among the best in the World Cup.

A light goes on in his face. It is immediate and ridiculous and completely human. He interrupts his searching in the black book of unwanted people. He laughs. He puts a hand on my shoulder. He walks me past the long queue, hands my passport to the clerk at the window, tells me I will be finished in a moment, wishes me luck, and returns to his corner with happy steps.

I take the stamp and walk out quickly in case the mood changes again.

A soldier with an old rifle
In the forest the cicadas scream so loud I cannot hear the little river even though my dinner is cooked beside it. The ground is covered in pine needles and dry leaves that remind me of home. For a few minutes the world is quiet inside me.

Then a gunshot cracks the air.

A young man in military clothes stands there with an old rifle. Beside him is a boy holding a fishing rod. Both of them smile. The boy lifts two small fish as proof of good luck.

I hold up my pot of boiled potatoes and ask if they want dinner.

No thanks, the soldier says. We already ate.

I tell him that when I first saw him I thought he was a Contra soldier.

He shakes his head and points at a patch on his shoulder. Fifth Infantry Regiment, Honduran Armed Forces. He tells me he is a simple farmer from El Espino forced into this. He does not want to fight the Sandinistas. They are people like us, he says, defeated.

I ask if there is a war between Honduras and Nicaragua.

He looks at me like I arrived from the moon.

Our border camp up there is full of Americans and Contras, he says. We are treated like nothing. Even though it is our country. It is not smart.

He gets up slowly, makes a mocking salute, and walks back toward the road.

Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela
The closer I get to the capital, the worse the atmosphere becomes. People shout. Faces harden. The word gringo appears so often it stops being a word and becomes a stain.

When I reach Tegucigalpa and Comayagüela, the heat sits still between the walls. Smoke hangs low. A drain runs along the curb, black and slow. Dogs nose through rubbish bags that have split open in the sun. Flies rise in clouds when a cart rolls past.

I try to ride through, but the street keeps narrowing and filling. A man steps too close to my handlebars and does not move until I brake. Another spits near my front wheel. Sellers shout in cracked voices, and the shouting does not feel like commerce, it feels like desperation made loud.

A hotel sign appears and I grab it like a lifeline.

Hospedaje San Pedro.

It has rooms and it also has a courtyard full of women dressed in sexy outfits. Their eyes are deeply unhappy. I walk past them and feel something sink in me, fast and heavy.

The newer part of Tegucigalpa has hamburger bars, boutiques, office men in suits with briefcases, and the same clean surfaces you can find in any country that wants to look American. On the avenues, groups of young North American boys in white shirts and pressed blue trousers hand out flyers in Spanish. They preach that the world is in revolt and that the soul can only be saved if you follow the Mormon road.

Every step I take in Comayagüela is accompanied by insults.

I leave.

Howdy Cowboy

Outside the city an American soldier greets me with a loud Howdy Cowboy. He laughs and flashes a broad smile. He looks at my swollen cheek and asks what happened.

I tell him someone threw an apple at me as I passed through the slums early in the morning and everyone seemed convinced I was American.

People here are like animals, he says, and giggles.

Behind him a caravan of five jeeps is parked in a line, three soldiers in each. He talks about saving the world. He says they are ready for an invasion of the country down south any time. He tells me that without Americans, small people like us would be enslaved by communism.

I do not argue. I end it and leave before my ears fall off. He laughs as if I told the funniest story of his life.

That night my feet are covered in red bites from hundreds of piss ants that found a hole in my tent. I treat my feet with T spirit. The alcohol takes away the worst itch. I lie there in the dark and feel strength begin to return.

Patience, I realise, is a virtue.

Copán

For the third time in my life I experience something I can only call spiritual. The first was at Wat Phra Keo in Bangkok, surrounded by chanting Buddist monks. The second in Pagan in northwestern Burma.

Now it happens in Copán.

The ruin area is enclosed by singing rainforest and somewhere nearby I hear a powerful river. Green hills surround everything. A colourful macaw breaks the calm with its mocking laugh and then the American voices drown it out. Archaeologists shout as if they own the place. I feel anger rise.

I slip through a hole in the fence to be alone.

I climb to the top of the great jaguar temple. Sunset burns out and the full moon takes over. Even the howler monkeys seem to scream with respect for the atmosphere.

Then I see a rope hanging halfway down through a hole.

Someone is climbing.

A hand reaches up. I shine my torch into the hole and light up a Vietnamese face. She looks shocked.

She whispers that she thought she would be alone up here. I help her up. She smiles calmly. She says her man is down there, he did not dare to climb. She asks me to turn off the torch. She wants to talk.

I say I do not want to ruin a night like this by saying the wrong things.

She says I am right. She says she felt a spiritual force pulling her here, that she felt the answer was at the top. Her husband thought she was crazy, but he is much older than her. He understands her need for solitude. He has since they left Vietnam.

She asks if I have been there. I answer that I have not, but I have been to Thailand and Burma, and I do not continue.

We sit in silence looking out over the moonlit place, accompanied by the rainforest’s orchestra.

After a long time she asks if I am Buddhist.

I answer that I cannot say I live like a Buddhist, but I feel strongly for the philosophy of life. She tells me to remember that solitude is necessary if you want to grow as a human being. She says I have the strength, she feels it. Then she disappears back down through the hole. I never see her again. Was she real?

Guatemala, Tikal, and a birthday

The road north pulls me into Guatemala and toward Tikal. The days blur into heat, sweat, cheap rooms, and long stretches of green. Then, suddenly, the dream is in front of me.

In Tikal I run half sprinting through dense jungle along a well-trodden path and reach the next almost unreal dream. In my mind I had an image of it, a pyramid rising out of thick green.

Then I see the back of a gigantic temple and I feel something like winning a World Cup final.

Howler monkeys and macaws fight for my attention. They do not stand a chance. I rush into a newly cut grassy plaza. Temple 1 and Temple 4 dominate everything. The Great Plaza of Tikal. I feel thrown hundreds of years back in time.

I hurry up Temple 1. I do not look back until I reach the top. The view makes my chest tighten. The ceremonial buildings, the burial buildings, the gigantic ceiba trees, the temples rising like knives into the daytime sky. The experience is so strong it feels like I am about to leave earthly life.

Then an American voice breaks it.

“Margret, do you have hash with you?”

I turn and see a bearded man dressed in black with a star-decorated beret that reminds me of Che Guevara. He laughs, eyes glassy from drugs. His friend giggles.

I ask them if Americans can never shut up and respect other people’s needs. Then I run down the steep stairs to escape people I begin to lose all trust in. Halfway down I hear him ask why everyone hates them. He gets a giggle as answer.

After Tikal the road carries me back toward towns and buses and the ordinary world. Then, in a dusty place, a young blond woman waves desperately and shouts that she lives there. She is American. She speaks fast, like she is afraid the moment will disappear. It is her birthday, she says. She prayed all night for a sign from God. A sign or someone to celebrate the day with. And now I appear, dusty, on a bicycle, like an answer.

She introduces herself. Mary Beth. From Kansas. Peace Corps. She pulls me toward her house. She wants closeness more than conversation. She kisses and hugs me as if she has been starving. I stay until she decides it is best I leave so the villagers will not misunderstand. I go without sorrow in my heart.

The letter in the post

Guatemala City has plenty, and when I reach the capital after a record fast climb I feel fresh enough to believe my health has returned. I throw myself greedily into everything that has been forbidden since Panama City. The answer comes at night. My stomach revolts. The floor fills with vomit and my sleeping bag fills with shit. It takes half a day to clean the room from the foul smells. Nobody complains. It blends with the other smells of the place.

Heavy reggae music echoes around the clock from every corner of the hotel. So does the smell of hash and marijuana from the sixties leftovers who occupy every corner of the hostel. Most of the time they are silent and smoke peacefully. Then suddenly one of them is hit by a mad outbreak and screams in panic. Those episodes always happen in the dark hours and wake everyone sleeping.

I leave.

A Guatemalan bus ride

I feel like a mummified corpse. There is no space for my feet on the floor. They are locked by my packing. But I would rather sit fourteen hours on a Guatemalan bus than lie alone sick in a dark room in a big city.

The bus lifts again and again from the ancient road through the Petén jungle. The shaking loosens something in my head. The Indian beside me seems to hate the reggae noise. He has stuffed two cigarettes into his ears to escape the sound. My tiredness pushes me into sleep and I cannot even show apathy toward the soldiers who at constant stops search the bus.

Wildflower

Above Lake Atitlán the light shifts and the lake changes colour from sky blue to a more azure shade. Purple volcanoes flank the water. A thick cloud cover hangs between peaks and the lake and the wind slowly pushes it south. Far below lies Panajachel, also called Gringotenango because of its many western visitors.

I have had a dream day on the bicycle. Hard road, steep, stony, often above the clouds. Again and again villages appeared, mountain Indians dressed in cloth showing every possible colour and pattern, different in each village around the lake. Their faces are kind and proud. Their material poverty carries an inner strength I almost never see in my own culture.

In Quezaltenango, 2,335 metres above sea level, the Austrian woman Wildflower confronts me. You are always so stressed, she says. You never relax. Or do you avoid me. I shiver in the cold and answer with the truth. To tell the truth, I despise your lifestyle. She steps closer, furious. How can you say that. You are like everybody else. Nothing but a life full of prejudices.

I have met thousands of hippies in Asia. My disgust grew there. I tell her I think they are cultural parasites. They occupy beautiful places and live off local people, pretending global love while feeding their egos. I shout. I am exhausted after a long heavy day.

Wildflower slaps me. She screams that I am completely wrong and runs away into the rain.

Mirrors

For three days I lie on my back in Hospedaje San Marcos in the Indian community with the same name. The room has four big mirrors and every time I painfully rise from the straw mattress I see my physical state reflected back at me.

When I am on the bike I feel strong. Life becomes almost unbelievable. The roads in Guatemala give daily altitude differences of several thousand metres. The magnificent nature, the villages, the boiling Indian culture, and the presence of people who keep their traditions and pride, all of it outweighs the hard moments.

It is when it is time to rest that the dream turns into long hours of bodily sickness and mental conflict. I have felt like a half human being in Central America, plagued by jaundice. Now I stare at the ceiling and think about the Vietnamese woman in Copán. Her words follow me.

Solitude is necessary if you want to grow.

And still I ride.

The floor

I am sitting on the floor in Malmö packing for Iceland after three days at a football tournament with the girls. The apartment looks as if two different lives have crashed into each other. Football bags, wet towels, dirty clothes from the tournament, charging cables, medicine, thermal underwear, harness, ice screws, carabiners, crampons and my new mountain boots standing there waiting to be used properly. I should probably sleep, because I have not had much of that lately, but that is often how it is before leaving. The body is tired, the head has already started moving, and suddenly all the small things become important. Socks. Batteries. Gloves. The right jacket. The right charger. The thing you know you will forget because you put it somewhere clever two weeks ago and now cannot remember where clever was.

Eva and I spent those football days standing next to pitches together, watching games and discussing them like everybody else around us. My daughter has become my football partner during these tournaments. After enough matches every parent slowly becomes an expert. We all stand there with coffee in our hands and know exactly who should have started, who should have been substituted, who looked tired, who lost confidence after the first mistake, who needed more support, who should have pressed higher and why the midfield disappeared. It is ridiculous and lovely at the same time. FC Rosengård did well, and the girls carried so much emotion around in them. You could see it before matches. Young teenagers trying to look calm while the whole world, at least their whole world at that moment, moved inside their faces.

I love those tournaments, even with the lack of sleep, the drama, the tension, the endless talk afterwards, the parents, the girls, the disappointment, the joy, the feeling that a whole life can suddenly depend on one goal, one mistake, one missed run, one referee decision. And then it is over, and less than a day later I am sitting here packing ice axes and glacier gear. It is a strange life, but it is my life, and I still love this part of it. The preparation. The checking. The mild panic. The feeling that something is waiting. I started doing this in 1986 and I still get the same feeling before leaving. That surprises me. After all these years, all these journeys, all these films, all these mistakes, I still sit on the floor before departure and feel that life is moving.

When leaving was leaving

While packing I keep thinking about how different adventure feels today compared to when I first started. I do not mean that everything was better before, because that is too easy and mostly not true. There was ego then too. There was money then too. There was sponsorship then too. There were people pretending to be tougher and wiser than they were then too. I have no interest in pretending the old world was clean and the new one is dirty. Human beings have always been human beings. But something has changed, and I feel it more clearly now when I am older, when I have daughters, when I make films, when I try to write, when I try to understand where exploration is going and where I still belong in it.

When I first started travelling, leaving meant leaving. That was the whole thing. When I cycled from Chile to Alaska, I moved between post offices. Big towns mattered because letters could arrive there. Sometimes months passed before I knew if everything was all right back home. Sometimes months passed before anyone knew if I was all right. You stood in phone booths and fed coins into machines and hoped the line would hold long enough to hear a familiar voice for a few minutes. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it was just crackling, delay, half sentences and then silence again. Letters were the same. You sent one and then the answer belonged to the future. You could not force it. You could not refresh anything. You could not check.

That did something to the mind. I did not understand it then, because it was just how life worked, but I understand it more now. When you left, your brain eventually had to stay where your body was. Home did not disappear because you stopped caring, it disappeared because there was nothing you could do. The road became the whole world. The people you met became the whole world. The weather, the hunger, the bicycle, the next town, the next border, the next problem, the next conversation, all of that became reality in a much stronger way than I think is possible when you are always reachable.

Now I can stand on a mountain and call my daughters. I can send a message from almost anywhere. I can upload film material, back up photos, check the weather, answer emails, read comments, follow what happens at home, worry about school, worry about money, worry about a film, worry about something that has absolutely nothing to do with where I actually am. As a father, a lot of this is wonderful. I do not want to go back to a world where my daughters cannot reach me. I do not want to romanticize fear and silence just because they shaped me. But I also know something was lost when leaving stopped meaning leaving.

The split

Maybe this is what I am really thinking about while packing for Iceland. Not modern adventure as an industry, not content, not influencers, not even documentary film, although all those things are part of it. I am thinking about concentration. I am thinking about how difficult it has become to be completely inside one thing. I see it in myself every day. I pick up the phone for one reason and ten minutes later I am somewhere else in the brain, full of impressions I did not ask for and cannot remember. Short clips. Noise. Opinions. People talking. People selling. People showing themselves. People trying to exist. And I am there too. I cannot pretend I am outside it, because I am not.

This is also happening in documentary film. Everything is faster now, shorter, louder, more immediate. Everybody is terrified people will lose concentration. Often the people making these decisions are middle-aged themselves, but they still talk about young audiences as if young people were a separate species that can only understand life if it comes in small explosions. Maybe they are right in some practical sense. Maybe the world really has trained all of us to need faster stimulation. I notice it in my own work. A short clip where I talk into the camera about something simple often gets far more attention than a long text I have worked on for days and which may actually contain something useful. That is not a complaint as much as a fact I do not know what to do with.

Adventure has moved the same way. More people than ever want to be adventurers, explorers, documentary filmmakers, storytellers. In one way that is good. More women, more voices, more people who were not invited before. That part is important. But at the same time, there is less money, more competition, more pressure to be visible, and somehow the visible part of the journey has started to move closer and closer to the centre. It is not enough to go. You have to be seen going. You have to explain the journey before it has happened. You have to look right while doing it. You have to keep feeding the machine, even when the whole point of leaving, at least for me, used to be to get away from the machine for a while.

And I need it too. That is the annoying part. I need social media. I need people to care. I need audiences for films, talks, Substack, expeditions. I need to show something back to the people who help make things possible. I have been very lucky with sponsors in my life, like Kensington Tours, where I am one of a few Explorer-In-Residence folks, because they have supported me without trying to shape me into something else, and that is rare. So this is not about sponsorship being bad. Sponsorship has always been part of exploration. Scott, Amundsen, all of them needed support in one way or another. The problem is not that people need help to go. The problem is maybe that we are all slowly becoming unable to separate the experience from the presentation of the experience.

Iceland

I think that is why I look forward to Iceland so much right now. Not because Iceland is some magic answer to anything, but because mountains, ice, ropes and cold still demand a kind of attention that cannot be faked for very long. You can make a nice picture afterwards, you can write a good caption, you can tell the story, but in the actual moment you still have to be there. You have to listen. You have to watch where you put your feet. You have to understand the rope, the ice, the weather, the people around you. If you lose concentration, reality becomes very close very quickly.

I like that. I have always liked that. It is probably one reason I still go. Expeditions simplify life for a while, even when they are complicated. You are hungry, tired, cold, excited, worried, happy. You deal with the next thing. You meet people. You solve problems. You discover again that the world is mostly full of decent people, which is maybe the greatest gift travel has given me. I often come home from expeditions with more hope than I had before leaving, because out there, away from the noise, people are usually better than the world looks on a screen.

Tomorrow I leave with Norm Crooks and Richard Elbach. The Kensington Alpine Club group changed, as groups do. People dropped out, others came in, plans moved, things became unclear and then clear enough. That part has not changed either. There is always some chaos before departure. There is always something missing, something forgotten, something that should have been solved earlier. Maybe that is why I like packing so much. It is control before the uncontrollable begins. It is the last little attempt to organize life before life becomes weather, people, ice, fatigue and whatever happens next.

Still leaving

I do not know where adventure is going. I do not know if long storytelling will survive in a world that seems to want everything shorter. I do not know if my daughters’ generation will find ways to concentrate deeply again or if we have given them a world where the mind is always being pulled in ten directions. I do not know if I am part of the solution or part of the problem. Most likely both. I use the tools I worry about. I criticize the speed and still check the numbers. I want silence and still pick up the phone. I miss disappearing and still want people to read what I write when I come back.

That is probably the honest place to leave it. I am not wiser than the world I live in. I am just old enough to remember when leaving meant leaving, and still young enough in the head, or foolish enough, to keep packing bags and believing that going away can still do something good to a human being. Maybe that is what I am looking for in Iceland now. Not a big answer. Just a few moments where the head becomes quiet enough to be where the body is. A few moments where the old feeling returns. Boots on. Rope ready. Cold air. No performance. Just attention. And maybe that is enough.

The walk

“I wish I was as disciplined as you.”

A friend said it when we were out walking. She was tired after work. Most people are. Work takes its part of the day and then there is not much left. She does not train regularly, and she said she wished she was as disciplined as me. I knew what she meant. I had probably talked too much, as I often do, about Iceland, training, weight, food, sleep, work, all the small storms that build up in my head before a trip. From the outside it must look like discipline. I get up early. I work. I train. I prepare. I make lists. I have done expeditions most of my adult life. I am a solo parent. I try to be there when the girls come home from school. I cook. I shop. I deal with the invoices, the emails, the school things, the gym bag, the potatoes, the film plans, the text that refuses to become good. Some days the whole heroic life of an explorer seems to consist mostly of dishwasher, boiled food and looking for a receipt.

And yes, I felt proud when she said it. I like when people think I am disciplined. It sounds better than saying I am a man who needs mountains, deadlines and mild panic to behave properly. But discipline is there too. I do not want to pretend otherwise. Without discipline I would not have done the journeys I have done. I would not have crossed the places I have crossed. I would not have kept working the way I have worked. I would not have been able to be a father and still keep the films, writing, planning, training and everything else moving. So there is truth in what she said. But it is not the whole truth. People see the part that works. They rarely see what it costs, or what happens when the goal is gone.

The monk

I am not disciplined in the way calm people are disciplined. I am not one of those quiet human beings who seem to have been born with control. Somewhere in me there has always been a dream of being like a Buddhist monk. A man who eats what he should, thinks what he should, breathes correctly, never overeats, never sends the wrong message, never needs chocolate on a Thursday, never says yes to the third plate of food just because it is there and tastes good. I admire that kind of discipline. A lot. Maybe because it is so far from how I am built.

I need something in front of me. A mountain. A film. A deadline. A route. An expedition. A reason. When I have that, I can sharpen myself. Then I can get up early, train tired, eat boiled chicken, sit with tax papers and texts until the head becomes porridge, and still do what has to be done. Without a goal I become less useful. More floating. More likely to negotiate badly with myself in the kitchen. I need small goals all the time and bigger ones every few months. It sounds tiring, and maybe it is, but it is also how I have kept myself moving for most of my life.

Greenland

The strange thing is that this kind of training discipline came late. I trained before the old expeditions, of course. You do not go into Siberia or the Kolyma winter without preparing. But I do not remember training then like I trained later. It became stronger after I started ultrarunning in 2018. Then came the pandemic, and then the Greenland preparations, especially the last one. Getting up early in the morning and doing jumping jacks and push-ups no matter how tired I was. Going out hauling hour after hour. Week after week. Month after month. At times it was around twenty hours a week. Pulling, sweating, being tired, doing it anyway because Greenland was there ahead of me.

That part I am proud of. I could do it, and I did it. But there was always a bargain in it too. When you train that much, you can eat. And food has always mattered to me. Not just because I like food. I love food. I love a proper meal. I love the good life. I love sitting down and feeling, for a moment, that life is not only work, sacrifice, invoices, training and preparation. Food is comfort. Food is reward. Food can be a small festival in an otherwise ordinary day. It can also be the place where things go wrong. The same obsessiveness that makes me train for Greenland can make me eat too much afterwards. People see the useful part and call it discipline. They do not always see the same engine going in the other direction.

Work

Work has always been easier. I have the job I dreamed about when I was young. Writing, filming, expeditions, planning, pitching, trying to make a living from a life that probably should not be possible. I like getting things done. I like when an idea becomes a text, a film, a trip, a project. I have never really understood people who have the chance to do their dream work and then do not work. For me the problem has usually been the other way around.

But even there, age has started to introduce itself like an irritating administrator with a clipboard. I used to be able to force myself through almost anything. Work more. Think more. Push harder. Stay with the problem until it gave up. Now the head has a limit. Especially with texts, accounts, papers, pitches, all the thinking work. At some point it is finished. If I continue after that, everything becomes bad. I feel sick in the head from tiredness. Then I sleep badly. Then I get hungrier. Then I become a worse version of myself and still think another hour of work will save me. It rarely does. I train almost every day partly because I have too much energy in the body, but the head is another thing. The head cannot be bullied in the same way anymore. I still try sometimes, naturally. I am not claiming wisdom here.

The girls

A lot of the discipline I do have comes from the girls. I want to last. I want to be there when they come home from school. I want to make food. I want to show up when they need me. I want to stay healthy enough to help them until they can fully take care of themselves. That is the main goal in life. It is not always dramatic. Often it is just being there in the kitchen, making something to eat, listening to a report from school or football or whatever has happened that day, while I am also thinking about some film problem, some unpaid invoice, some expedition plan, some email I should have answered three days ago.

And if I want to do the job I do, I have to be in shape. Expeditions, films, mountains, vehicles, horses, long days, bad sleep, cold, heat, and all the rest do not work very well if the body gives up. I know training helps. I know sleep helps. I know being lighter helps. I know vegetables are better than eating butter as if it is a separate food group. Knowing all this has never meant I live perfectly. It only means I know what I should do, which is a very different thing.

After

People see the expedition when it is happening. The mountains. The horses. The cold. The vehicle. The road. The pictures. They do not always understand what happens before and after. Before an expedition there is control. Training, logistics, money, gear, family, tickets, sponsors, film plans, fear, excitement, all the small things that have to be in place before you even start. During the expedition there is another kind of control. People may think it is freedom, but it is not really freedom. You are always calculating. Food, sleep, water, batteries, weather, danger, people, animals, route, film, moods, problems, the girls if they are with me, the team if there is a team.

And after the expedition, when people think it is over, the body starts shouting for bread, butter, sugar, sweets, big portions. After Ecuador, the craving was butter. It almost sounds stupid now, but that was what I wanted. Butter. Huge amounts of butter. After Kilimanjaro, I came back and ended up with all this great food at the Kensington half-year review. I ate and ate and ate. Then I came home and continued. Bread, bread, bread. Butter, butter, butter. Big portions. Kilimanjaro was not even that hard compared to many other things. I had prepared well. I was in good shape. But I was still exhausted afterwards. Not always in a way people can see. More in the body. In the mind. In the need to stop controlling everything for a while. Some of the overeating is hunger. Some is exhaustion. Some is reward. Some is rebellion after being strict. A lot of it is simply the tired body and the tired mind saying, enough now, give me something nice.

The fat reserve

I also come from an older expedition world where extra fat was not only seen as a problem. Before the Siberian Kolyma journey, I put on eighteen kilos because that was the idea then. You put on weight to handle winter, cold, hunger and hard work. And on that trip it disappeared quickly because the work was hard and the food was limited. Somewhere inside me that logic is still there. Before a hard expedition, a few extra kilos can feel like protection. A reserve. Something useful. The problem is when the expedition turns out differently and the reserve is still there, travelling around with you like unwanted luggage.

That happened in Kyrgyzstan last summer. I was heavier than I wanted to be. I had eaten for a harder expedition than it became. That is true, but also a convenient little excuse. I was not happy with myself. I did not like how I looked. At the same time, I enjoyed the meals. This is the annoying part of being honest. I cannot pretend I suffered through every bite. I love the meals. I love food. I love a drink. I love a cigar. I love sitting down properly and eating well. I love the feeling that life is not only work, training, sacrifice and discipline.

Chocolate Thursday

For a long time I had a system that worked. Most of the week I was careful. Then Thursday came, and Thursday was chocolate. I looked forward to it enormously. It was a break in the discipline. Often there was a bigger meal too. Something to look forward to. Something that made the rest of the week easier. Then Saturday came, and Saturday meant tacos with the girls.

That is one of the most important things in my life. It is not just food. It is us together. The sofa. Hugging. Warmth. Family. The feeling that whatever else is happening in the world, we have this. Good food helps that feeling. People can talk all they want about fuel and calories and protein, but a taco Saturday with your children is not a spreadsheet. It is life. Those small rewards made the discipline possible. They gave the week shape. I did not have to be perfect every day. I only had to be careful most of the time.

Before Iceland

Before Iceland, I have taken away almost all of that. No bread. No sugar. No butter. Much less fat. Protein, potatoes, vegetables. Chicken. Simple food. Boiled food. It works. I feel better. I have lost weight. The body works better. Even the simple food is starting to taste good, which is either a good sign or proof that the brain gives up eventually. But it does not taste like a good meal. And when you remove chocolate, you do not only remove calories. You remove a small happiness.

I know it is good for me right now. I know it works. I also know I do not know what happens when the goal is gone. Maybe I will find a good middle way this time. Maybe I will go back to Thursday chocolate and Saturday tacos and be careful the rest of the week. Maybe I will eat bread and butter like a man rescued from a desert. I hope not. But I know myself well enough not to make heroic promises in writing.

The photos

On a recent expedition with Defender X I saw myself in photographs and did not like what I saw. I looked heavy. The belly was there. I had let it go more than I wanted to admit. Then came the kind of comments on social media that belongs to the time we live in. That looking fat was not good for the brand. That some people should be shown in the photos and others should not. I did not like those photos either. I did not like seeing that I had let the good life become that visible. At the same time, I do not want to live in a world where every human body has to be polished before it is allowed into a picture.

The brand

The brand.

I am tired of that word. I am tired of this world where everything has to look right from the outside. Even expeditions. Even old bodies. Even tired people who are still out there doing the thing. Life has been hard on people. People put on weight. People age. People look tired. People look like they have lived. Why should that be bad for the brand?

For most of my career, if I have had an audience, it has been because I have been who I am. I have not built everything around looking a certain way. I have gone up and down in weight. I have looked tired. I have looked strong. I have looked worn. I have looked exactly like the life I was living at the time. That should be the brand. This is how it looks to be a human being and still keep going. And still I am losing weight partly because of it. Not only for health. Also because I want to look better. Because I did not like the photos. Because the comments hit the right spot. Because I live in the same world as everybody else and I am not immune to it. I do not like admitting that, but a man sitting on a balcony in shorts to prepare for Iceland should probably not pretend to be completely normal anyway.

The outside

There is a difference between looking strong and being strong, but the outside does not always lie. When I am not doing well, it often shows. If I am too heavy, it shows. If I am exhausted, it shows. If life has been hard, it shows somewhere in the face, the body, the eyes. On expeditions, looking strong can also be useful. It changes how people meet you. It can protect you. It can make people less likely to see you as weak. I have always wanted some extra layers of muscle because I know it helps. On route. In meetings with people. In how you carry yourself.

Last autumn was hard. I lost a love, got it back, and then still had to understand that it did not work. Some of that was about demands, from both sides, about how one should be, how one should look, what one should become. I was not innocent in that. I had demands too. I wanted things too. So I cannot write about appearance as if I am above it. I am in it. I hate it, and I still take part in it.

The balcony

Today I sat on the balcony in Malmö. Six or seven degrees. Shorts. Thin clothes on the upper body. I was cold. I sat there anyway because I am preparing for Iceland. The trip has started before it starts. The body has to be reminded that comfort is not always in charge. The head has to understand what is coming. I also notice that now, after eating less fat, I get colder. There is less protection. The body is different.

So there I sat. Freezing on a balcony because a course in Iceland is coming. Slightly mad, yes. But I know this version of myself. The preparing version. The focused one. The one who can take away bread, sugar, butter and chocolate. The one who can train. The one who can make lists. The one who can sharpen himself because something is waiting. I know the other version too. The one who comes home and wants food. The one who says recovery and means bread. The one who says he needs energy and means butter. The one who wants the sofa, the tacos, the girls, the warmth, the good life.

I have lost most of the weight I wanted to lose before Iceland. The body feels better. Training feels better. I sleep better when I do not overeat, at least most nights. I can see in the mirror that this is a better weight for me. I can see it in photos too. I would be lying if I said that did not matter. But I do not want every meal to become fuel. I do not want every day to become preparation. I do not want to sit with my daughters on a Saturday and feel that tacos are a failure.

I do not have this solved. Iceland is coming, so for now I have something to aim at. Today that means boiled food, training, trying to sleep, and sitting on the balcony in Malmö freezing in shorts because some part of me thinks that will help.

Below is the new pitch trailer for Kyrgyzstan.

After Training

It was after Dana’s training session. We were standing outside by the bikes. Nothing remarkable, really. One of those ordinary moments after football, when everyone is trying to get home, someone has lost a water bottle, a coach needs to say something, a parent is standing there waiting. Dana is going to Gothenburg for a football tournament, and they will be sharing rooms, three girls to a room. One of the coaches asked me who Dana wanted to share with.

Then she began to explain.

Not dramatically. Not as a problem. Just matter-of-factly, warmly, attentively. She had understood from a previous tournament that Dana needs certain things. She needs peace and quiet. She needs to prepare herself. She needs time on her own. She does not need a room where people are running in and out all the time, joking around, making a mess, talking, throwing bags down, going back and forth. She needs a calm room.

I stood there listening, and at first I only thought how fantastic it was that the coach had really seen her. Not just seen Dana as a football player, how she runs, passes, fights, tackles, or whatever she does on the pitch. But seen her as a human being. Seen what she needs in order to feel well. Seen that she cannot simply be thrown into any room and be expected to function. It moved me.

Then it hit me. That is me.

That is exactly how I have been my whole life. I need peace and quiet. I need time alone. I need to prepare myself. I do not want people running in and out of the place where I live. I want to know where my things are. I want the home to be harmonious. I want my routines. I want time to adjust before the world comes in.

And then came the next thought. That comes from Mum. From Hedvig.

I never thought I would become like Mum.

The Chain

Not in that way. Not so clearly. Not this late in life, when you believe you have long since become yourself. Because that is what we like to think. That we have built something of our own. That we have travelled, broken free, taken our own paths, gone on our own expeditions, lived our lives, made our mistakes, chosen our own habits.

And then you find yourself standing outside a football training session in Malmö while a coach asks who your daughter wants to share a room with.

Suddenly you see the whole chain. Hedvig. Me. Dana. Perhaps Eva too, in her own way.

It is strange what travels with us. Not only the words. Not only the big things we think we remember. But the mornings. The coffee. The walks. The food. The rest. The silence. The way of getting yourself ready before the day is allowed to begin. The need for harmony. The need for the home not to be a place where other people’s unrest blows through the rooms.

Morning Discipline

Mum got up early. The first thing she did was make coffee. She smoked too, but that part, thankfully, I have not taken with me. The coffee, though, I understand. That first cup in the morning. That small passage between night and day, before everything else begins. Then she did her morning gymnastics.

It was early. Not only the hour of the day, though it was early in that sense too, but early in the time she lived in. This was not an age when everyone talked about training, health, mobility, and diet the way we do now. It was the late 1960s, the early 1970s, and onwards. Many people probably thought she was a little unusual. At least that is how she herself told it. I never heard anyone say she was odd, but that was the picture she carried. That she did things other people did not quite understand. But she did them anyway.

Then she made breakfast for me. I ate and went to school. And she went out walking. One hour. Two hours. Sometimes three. The walks were part of her life. As self-evident as eating, sleeping, and getting dressed. It was not something she did to show anything off. She did it because that was how she held herself together.

I have taken that with me. Completely.

My days are built on such things too. Routines. Food. Training. Walks. Rest. Preparation. Trying to keep the body and the mind in some sort of order. And the lunchtime rest was extremely important to Mum. She had to sleep at lunch. It is the same for me. My whole life has been built on those lunchtime rests. I have got up in the night for most of my adult life. Written, trained, travelled, filmed, planned, lived in a rhythm that perhaps has not always been wise, but has been mine. And then rest in the middle of the day is not laziness. It is a necessity.

So much of what I thought was me turns out to be her.

It is not unpleasant. It is, rather, fascinating.

The Late Child

Hedvig was born in 1922. She was forty when I was born. She had my sister when she was twenty-two and my brother when she was twenty-eight. Then I came twelve years after my brother. That did something to the family. I grew up with siblings who were already much older. In many ways I was almost like an only child in a home that had already lived a completely different family life before me. My sister was eighteen years older than I was. My brother was twelve years older. They had had another mother than I had, in a way. Not another person. But another phase of the same person.

When my sister was born, Mum was young. And who is mature enough to be a parent then? Perhaps we think we are supposed to be, just because the child is there. But it does not always work that way. Parenthood is also something you grow into. You fail. You learn. You become better. You understand more. And when I arrived, Mum had become complete in a different way. She was forty. She had lived. She had lost. She had fought. She had shaped herself.

I received a great deal of the love that perhaps should have been distributed more evenly between all three of us.

I do not say that to accuse her. I do not think she meant to do anything wrong. But I think that is what happened. It was to my advantage. Of course it was. It gave me something enormously strong. But I also think it complicated the relationship between her and my older siblings. It hurts to see such things afterwards. How love can be true and still unevenly distributed. How a parent can be wonderful for one child and at the same time have missed something in another.

That is one of the things I think about a great deal as a father.

Not repeating it.

Not favouring one child. Not allowing one child to take up all the space simply because that child’s life, at that moment, demands so much of me.

And right now there has been a lot of Dana. Football. Training sessions. Matches. Tournaments. Team gatherings. Driving. Food. Rest. Preparation. Joy. Disappointment. New matches. New training sessions.

And I love it.

We all love it. It is a wonderful time, being allowed to follow this wonderful girl’s development in football. To stand by the pitch and watch her grow. To see how she becomes stronger, more secure, faster, braver. To see her concentration. To see how much it means.

But I must not forget Eva.

Seeing Eva Too

It happens so easily. Not because you love less. But because life sometimes pulls in one direction. A football season can swallow a family. One child’s interest can take up so much space that the quieter needs of the other child risk ending up in the shadows.

That must not happen.

Eva has had her eye problems. That is no secret. Football was no longer possible in the same way, and she did not want to continue either. She is fifteen. A teenager. She has to be allowed to find her own thing.

So last week we began something else. We went to a rock club.

Medley in Malmö. The kind of club that belongs in the 1970s. Many in the audience were my age. Hell, many of those on stage were too. It was Sator from Borlänge. They played songs I recognised. I’d Rather Drink Than Talk and that whole world.

And there stood Eva. So much younger than everyone else.

But she thought the songs were good. She likes live music. Music is extremely important to her. And I saw how much she appreciated us doing it together. It was beautiful. Perhaps not big on the outside. Not an expedition. Not a journey to the other side of the world. Not a mountain, a desert, a bike ride, a film. Just an evening at a rock club in Malmö with my daughter.

But sometimes that is where the most important things happen.

You are together. You show. I see you too.

What Children Inherit

There is research on this, but really you do not need the research to understand it. Children do not only do as we say. They do as we do. They see our mornings. They see how we handle worry. They see what we do when we are tired. They see whether we go out walking, whether we train, whether we eat in a certain way, whether we keep things in order, whether we run away, whether we stay, whether we become hard, whether we apologise, whether we show love.

They see everything.

Also the things we think they do not see.

Of course I already knew this, on some level. But knowing it is one thing. Standing outside a football training session and understanding that your daughter carries the same needs you have carried your whole life, and that you yourself received them from your mother, is something else. Then it is not theory. Then it is Dana in Gothenburg. Then it is Hedvig at the kitchen table with coffee. Then it is me needing silence in the morning.

And that is when the memory begins to move backwards. From Dana’s need for a quiet room, to my own need for order, and from there to Hedvig — not only as my mother, but as a girl, a young woman, a person shaped by a place long before I existed.

Back to Lima

Mum grew up in Lima, in Dalarna. Not exactly in the house I am now rebuilding, but in that area. There is something strange in that. That I am now building a house on the land, in the community, in the world where she was shaped. A fantastic house, I hope. A house for the future. For my children. For guests. For life.

But also, in some way, a house that reaches backwards.

To her.

She said she was bullied at school. She played a lot on her own, in her own worlds of imagination. I remember how she could tell those stories. She had a good way of telling things. It was never only facts. It became images. Atmospheres. She could turn a walk into something larger than a walk.

I remember some march in the Lima or Limedsforsen area. I cannot remember what it was called. Something with “march” in the name. Perhaps between summer pasture farms. Perhaps ten kilometres. It was probably not far by today’s standards. For me now, with all the training, all the expeditions, and all the miles in my body, ten kilometres is nothing remarkable. But for her it became an expedition.

And that is interesting.

Because perhaps that is where much of it began. Not in the great journeys. Not in the extreme projects. But in her way of charging an ordinary walk with meaning. She walked. She told stories. She made it into something. A march through forest and community could become an adventure.

She travelled too. She and her sister Dagmar. I remember England. I remember Lake Garda. Trips like that. Not like my later journeys, perhaps, but journeys all the same. Movement. Curiosity. The sense that the world existed out there. And she came to visit me on my bike journeys. Thailand. Other places. That meant something. That she did not simply stand at home and say no. That she did not make the world smaller for me. She was part of it. I think my travelling comes from there too. Not only from restlessness. Not only from the desire for adventure. But from a mother who showed that it was possible to move, to be curious, to let life be larger than the nearest yard.

Dignity

At the same time, she was very much Lima. And the community. Decency. Dignity. Morals. Respect. Not boasting. Keeping going. It was not only her. It was the whole area. Such things lived in people. You were supposed to behave. You were not supposed to think you were special. You were supposed to do right by others. You were supposed to hold together. You were not supposed to complain unnecessarily.

That has followed me too. Sometimes it has helped me. Sometimes it has probably made me hard on myself. But there is something beautiful in it as well.

Dignity.

Mum had dignity. She preferred to live without a man. And I understand her. After all the trouble with Dad, who would want someone else in the home? I am glad she never brought some other bastard home. The one time there was some slight threat of it, it came to very little. Men were not what you wanted indoors. Not like that. Not in that home. Not in our peace.

It makes me think of my own children. What do they think about the women I have brought home after the breakup with their mother? It would be interesting to know. I know they at least liked one of them. But these are the things you think about as you get older. What did I bring into their home? What feeling did I give them? Was the home calm? Was it safe? Or did I carry my own unrest into it?

What We Bring Home

That is perhaps the hardest part of parenthood.

Not the love. That is simple. I love Eva and Dana above everything else.

The difficult part is everything else. What you pass on without understanding it. What tone you give the home. What worry settles into the walls. Which habits become theirs. Which shortcomings they will one day discover in themselves and think, I got that from Dad.

I know what I want them to carry with them. That I loved them above everything else. That I was a good parent. That is the most important thing. Not that I succeeded in everything. Not that I was always calm. Not that I was always enough. No one is. But that they should know, deep in their bodies, that they were loved. That I saw them. That I tried. That I put them before everything else.

And I know what I do not want them to carry on. My eternal worry that I am not enough. That I am not good enough. I do not want to give them that. I do not want them to inherit it.

The Gift She Gave Me

Mum gave me something else. She gave me the feeling that I was special. It began almost before I could remember anything myself. I was born prematurely, in a taxi. I survived. I lay in an incubator. And Mum told me I had shown so much life even there. She built that story inside me. Not in a boastful way, I think. Not as if I were better than others. But as if I had strength. Life. Something particular. She made me feel unique. And that did something to me. I grew up with a sense that nothing was impossible.

That almost sounds naïve today. But it was another time as well. Sweden felt positive. Inequalities were shrinking. Everyone was supposed to have equal value. The future did not lie ahead like a threat, but like an opening. I stepped out into existence with the feeling that it was possible. That you could. That the world was there.

It was an enormous gift. And it came from her. From Hedvig. From her love. From her discipline. From her way of living.

The Buckwheat Jar

She also had her own struggle with the body. She watched her weight all her life. I remember the sound of the scales early in the morning. How she stepped onto them. How weight was something she followed. She read weekly magazines. I probably did not understand then how important they were to her. That was where she learned about diet, health, food, the body.

I remember her porridge. Or whatever one should call it. Buckwheat. Prunes. A lot of other things. She put it all into a large jar overnight and ate it cold in the morning. Slimy, I thought then. But probably very healthy. Now I can almost smile at it. She was ahead of her time there too. Today someone would have posted the same jar on Instagram, called it overnight buckwheat breakfast, and received thousands of likes. Mum just ate it. Because she believed in it.

She also smoked, and perhaps believed it helped her keep her figure. It did not. We know that now. But human beings are not consistent. Not even the disciplined ones. I recognise that. I am very careful with food and still I can overeat, especially after expeditions, when the body screams for recovery.

But there too she remains in me. Not as a perfect role model, but as a reminder that we try to hold ourselves together with the tools we have.

It is almost comical. You think you have travelled far. And then you end up back at the kitchen table of your childhood.

What Travels On

I became Mum.

And now I see how my children are becoming me.

Not in every way. Nor should they. They are their own people. Eva is Eva. Dana is Dana. They have their time, their screens, their languages, their friends, their dreams, their problems. They are not growing up in Hedvig’s Lima. They are not growing up in my 1970s. They are growing up now. In a much stranger, faster, harder, more connected world.

But certain things still move through the generations.

The need for time alone. The need for calm. The worlds of imagination. The music. The football. The food. The training. The walks. The rest. The worry. The love.

And that is where parenthood becomes so terribly vast. You think it is about what you say. Do your homework. Eat properly. Be kind. Keep fighting. Believe in yourself. But that is only a small part. What matters is what you show. How you live when no one thinks it matters. How you get up in the morning. How you treat other people. How you talk about yourself. How you take care of your body. How you handle fear. How you love. How you fail. How you come back.

It was not a lecture from Mum that shaped me. It was her life.

The coffee in the morning. The gymnastics. The walks. The food. The weight. The rest. The dignity. The love.

And now, when I stand outside a football training session and a coach tells me that Dana needs peace and quiet, I suddenly see how far that life has travelled.

From Hedvig in Lima. To me. To my children.

I do not know whether it makes me happy or afraid. Perhaps both. Because it is a responsibility to understand how much you leave behind. Not only money, houses, things, photographs, stories. But behaviours. Tones of voice. Mornings. Ways of loving. Ways of worrying. Ways of holding yourself together.

I hope Eva and Dana one day remember that I loved them above everything else. I hope they remember that I tried to be a good father. I hope they take with them the discipline, the curiosity, the travelling, the music, the football, the food, the walks, the rest, the belief that the world is possible. I hope they do not take my worry with them. Not too much of it, at least.

And I hope that one day, when they themselves are standing somewhere in life and suddenly hear themselves say something or see themselves do something, they might think: that was Dad.

Just as I now think. That was Mum. Hedvig.

I never thought I would become her. But perhaps that is not the worst thing that can happen. Perhaps, on the contrary, it is one of the finest things about life. That someone who loved us continues to live in the way we make coffee, go out walking, place a hand on our children’s shoulder, and say without big words:

I see you. I know what you need. I am here.

This is what came next, still on the same journey in 1986 to 87. Translated and tightened for Substack, but told as it happened.

Panama City
We roll into Panama City on the bicycles.

The city hits like a wall. Exhaust, dirt, stress. Faces from everywhere. Towers trying to look modern. The air feels used up before you even breathe it.

I am already sick when we arrive. Not tired, sick. The kind of sickness that turns your body into weight and your head into fog. It makes you short-tempered. It makes you mean. It makes you ashamed.

Ed leads us through narrow alleys toward a hotel opposite a cathedral by Plaza Central. It must once have been exclusive. You can still feel the old pride in the height of the ceiling and the size of the entrance. Now the wallpaper is peeling and the place looks tired.

Ed demands a room. The men behind the desk stare at us with open contempt. Ed does not back down. He pushes, insists, refuses to be dismissed. In the end we get a key.

The elevator does not work. Four floors. Eighty dollars a night.

We haul bicycles and bags up the stairs, step by step, one load at a time. When everything is finally inside the room, I collapse onto the bed.

For a week I hardly move.

A doctor tells me what I do not want to hear. No fat. No alcohol. I live on boiled tomatoes, cucumber, rice. Ed eats what he wants.

Then Ed collapses.

He screams and holds his lower back. He begs me to help him up. I drag him upright and he folds and hits the floor. For a moment he lies still enough that I think he has died there. I shout his name. I slap him until he complains and returns.

A doctor arrives, dark-eyed and indifferent. The kidneys, he says. Ed needs rest.

This is where our road together ends. Panama City is the last place we share the same room. After that we leave separately, and I never see him again on the journey north. It is strange how quickly a person can vanish from your daily life when the road decides so.

Out of the City
When I finally get moving again, the world opens up the moment I leave Panama City behind.

One evening by the sea I watch a pelican dive like a spear and rise with a fish. My own dinner boils between stones around a small fire. A light breeze cools my face. I am still weak, still sick, but the air is air again.

Roadblock
The road blocks.

Hundreds of people with signs. A woman pushes a placard close to my face about Noriega and freedom. Someone says it is a general strike and it may go on for days.

An old man stands behind a cart full of bananas. If you get stuck, he tells me, there is one salvation.

His bananas.

He raises his knotted hand toward the sky and says God eats my bananas. He says it like it settles everything. It is so absurd I laugh.

Costa Rica
At night in the tent a scream rips through the darkness. It comes again, closer. My heart hammers so hard it hurts my ribs. Sweat pours. I cannot find the matches.

It must be a jaguar, I think.

In the end I force myself out because I have to urinate. I jump out ready for the worst and meet a face full of teeth.

A small howler monkey.

I stand there shaking with anger and relief and feel stupid in the way you feel stupid when you are still alive.

Cerro de la Muerte
The climb comes. The Mountain of Death.

At one point a thought arrives sharp enough to be dangerous. If I cannot handle this, I will hitch a lift into San José, buy a ticket, and go home. El Darién taught me something I did not know before. You can give up without losing your self-respect.

A filthy truck stops. A man steps out, disgusting in a way only a stranger can be when you are exhausted. He spits, drives off, then returns and walks toward me with bananas on his shoulder.

Only twenty kilometres left to the top, he says. He congratulates me and presses the bananas into my hands.

I blush with shame. Will I never learn.

At the top fog makes it impossible to see anything far. Light rain. Wind. For the first time in a long time I freeze. But it does not matter. I am up there. I do not have to quit.

Santa Rosa
In Santa Rosa National Park the jungle becomes theatre.

Wild pigs come to a muddy waterhole and glare up at me when I scramble onto a stone. After them come monkeys, screaming, acrobatic, cruelly happy.

Then I see bandit faces and long tails between the trees. Coatimundis. A whole group scatters when I shout without meaning to.

For a few days my body slowly comes back. The fever loosens its grip. The mind becomes clearer. The road becomes possible again.

La Cruz and the Border
At La Cruz, near the Nicaragua border, I see the first serious cluster of uniformed Costa Ricans. Until now Costa Rica has felt almost empty of police and military. Only here do I understand how much that mattered.

People look at me and ask if I am Japanese. The sickness has painted me yellow enough that they cannot place me. A hotel owner asks if I can teach karate.

I smile and keep moving.

Cordobas
At the border the currency becomes theatre.

A man offers five thousand cordobas for one dollar. He wears a cap that says Viva Los Contras. He carries a big bag of Nicaraguan cordobas.

I lie awake with doubt. Is it a moral mistake to use the black market here. But I need money I can use. I need to eat. I need to move.

I exchange twelve dollars.

Soon I am riding with a bag full of cordobas into Nicaragua.

Nicaragua
It feels like stepping a hundred years back in time.

Houses of thin wooden boards and dried clay. Stamped earth floors. Animals inside the same space as families. And still, friendly, humorous eyes.

A farmer shouts Viva la vida americano. I answer Viva la vida ruso and ride on, even keeping to the left side of the road because the surface feels better there and the traffic is so sparse it does not matter.

Two red tractors pass with Cyrillic letters on the side. The drivers stare straight ahead as if the world is fixed.

I see my first real car, an old Buick held together by wire and hope. A plate reads The Free Nicaragua. A Coca-Cola sign hangs like a promise.

Everything is finished, the shopkeeper says before I can speak. Try further down the street.

In a dark bar a soldier sits cleaning a modern automatic rifle. He does not look up. Men stare at me like I am an object.

A woman offers homemade liquor. Otherwise nothing.

Then she offers chicken with rice and a warm Coca-Cola.

It costs five thousand cordobas.

She tells me why. This week they only got sugar. No rice. No meat. Only sugar.

When I pay from my bag full of cordobas, the men whistle quietly. The room watches me.

Lake Nicaragua
Wind tears at my tent by Lake Nicaragua. Waves crash close.

Above me a huge billboard shows the captured American helicopter pilot Hasenfus being dragged forward by soldiers.

Behind me a small hut. A father sits outside with a loaded rifle, warning about bandits and gangsters.

After dinner I lean back and feel it clearly.

This is what I know.

Managua and El Chepito
Managua is the strangest city I have met. No one knows the street names I ask for. No one seems to know where the centre is. The city feels scattered. People everywhere. Red and black everywhere.

I search for El Chepito, the legendary place for travellers.

When I finally find it, it boils with life. Youths on cement floors, discussing everything, in shifting languages. The air is thick with conviction.

Then I hear Swedish.

Homesickness hits like a punch. I am too tired, too dirty, too thin to introduce myself. I lie down and fall asleep.

Intercontinental
In the luxurious dining room of the Hotel Intercontinental, some of the most fanatical residents from El Chepito eat pâté. They stare at me with contempt in my worn clothes. A meal here is paid with black-market dollars.

Someone talks about guilt, about beans and rice outside, about the right way to live.

I look around the room and notice something that bothers me more than the food.

There are no Nicaraguan women in there.

The Village
I stay in a village and try to get close to the people, the finest and most humble I have met.

Doña Sabina is the hostess. Don Estevan is the village leader. He tells me life is simple, shoes and clothes are a problem, but nobody lacks food or a roof. He says the difference now is literacy, even the old can learn to read and write.

A young woman tells me quietly that for young women it is still hard. After compulsory school, they are pushed back into kitchens and households.

When I pack to leave, Doña Sabina rises on her toes and whispers a warning into my ear.

Watch out for the Contras. They kill the country’s sons.

Estelí
I roll into Estelí at dusk.

Every wall is marked with red and black graffiti and bullet holes. The town is dark. No streetlights. No water. No electricity.

A small newspaper seller explains it. The Contras blew up a transformer station outside town.

The only hotel that will take me is expensive and locked behind a high fence and a huge padlock. The owner stares at me like I am a problem.

He calls me a volunteer for the regime.

Then he explodes when he sees the bicycle.

Russian, he screams, kicks it over, drives away the children, and punches me hard in the back as he storms past.

No water. No shower. No light. Dirty and now beaten too.

Then the next scene is even stranger.

A boy poses for my camera dressed like Rambo with a rifle almost as long as his body.

He tells me he is twelve and asks for cigarettes.

Then he drops the mask for a second and warns me to hide the camera.

In that warning you can hear it. A child who has learned to perform war, and still knows when it is time to be afraid.

A red military truck with Russian markings roars past carrying soldiers toward the front. They wave and smile.

I wave back.

And I keep rolling north, toward Honduras.

Istanbul again

I had looked forward to this leg of Defender X more than I had admitted to myself.

Not because of the cars. Not because of the route. Not even because we are heading for Sydney in the long run and that still carries a charge after all these years. No, this time it was more personal than that.

A few days before leaving, a relationship I had been in for three years came to an end. In a good way, I think. Or as good as such things can be. No shouting. No bitterness. No drama. But endings are endings. Even when both know it is right, it still leaves a bruise.

So to get on a plane almost immediately afterwards and meet up with this strange, loyal, funny, exhausting, generous road family in Istanbul felt like exactly the right thing to do.

This journey goes back a long way for me and Jeff. Long before it became Defender X, before the convoy, the filming, the branding, all of that, there was simply an idea between the two of us that we should travel together by car. It was never really only about the cars. It was about movement. Companionship. And the old belief that the road still has something to teach you.

Since then it has grown into something much bigger, more complicated and in many ways more unlikely. But the heart of it is still there.

When I arrived in Istanbul, a bit swollen from stress and too much food, worn down from weeks of nonstop film work, and not exactly sharp mentally either, I knew why I needed to be there.

The first evening was exactly what it had to be. A magnificent hotel by the Bosphorus. A Michelin restaurant. Endless small plates. Wine. More wine. Whisky and cigars after that. Excessive, yes. But that was not the point. The point was the group. The feeling. Everyone was happy to see each other. Everyone looked forward to what was coming. And everyone also knew, whether we said it or not, that these trips take something out of you. Moods change. Bodies get tired. Age is no longer something abstract. It is in the room with us now. Health too.

But there we were again. Starting another chapter.

What the road does

For me there was another reason I needed the road. When you sit in a car hour after hour, you cannot escape yourself. At home, even in my own flat, I always feel I should be producing something. Writing. Editing. Answering. Planning. Worrying. Everything turns into work.

But in a car you are stuck. You cannot jump up and fix your life. You cannot pretend to be efficient. You just sit there, look out, talk for a while, and when the talk runs out, as it always does, your thoughts start doing their work. I have come to realise how healthy that is for me. The road forces me to sit still.

The first drive to Ankara was easy enough. Five or six hours. A good way to begin. Nobody gets too tired. You get into the rhythm. I also recognised parts of the Anatolian landscape from when I cycled through there with the girls. Not exactly those roads, we were further south then, but close enough that memory kicked in. That happens more and more now. The older I get, the more every new road seems to contain older ones too.

Then came the long push to Trabzon. Ten hours, but easy in its own way because Jeff and Steve are extraordinary drivers. They love driving for its own sake. They do not need a monument, a viewpoint or a detour to justify a day. They are happy just going from A to B and doing it well.

I am not really like that. I always want to stop, walk, talk to someone, get off the main road. But even I had to admit that this stretch was spectacular. We crossed the mountains, dropped towards the Black Sea and then followed the coast east. With good weather, that stretch was spectacular.

And yet it was impossible for me to look out over the Black Sea without thinking of war. Beyond that calm water, way up north, Ukraine burns. A brutal war, and one that will shape the history of the world whether we like it or not. I spend a lot of time back home thinking about the state of things, about what kind of world my daughters are going to inherit, and I did not want this trip to become only that. But it was there. In the background all the time. Like distant weather.

Into the Caucasus

Crossing from Turkey into Georgia changed the mood immediately.

Turkey on this leg had felt polished, orderly, almost fully European. Immaculate roads, smooth movement, everything working. Then at the border the Caucasus arrived. Babushkas. Goods piled high. A proper border post. Noise, trade, disorder, people carrying things in and out. It felt like stepping through a curtain.

I had only been in Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh before, not really Georgia, but the Caucasus has fascinated me for years. Partly because it is post-Soviet, and anything post-Soviet catches my eye. After so much time in Russia and especially Siberia, I recognise things in places like Georgia even when I have never been there before. Not everything, of course, but enough. Enough that something in me relaxes. I know the rhythm. I know the buildings. I know the roads once you leave the best ones behind and start seeing village life.

Batumi struck me as half Dubai, half Soviet, and the two halves had clearly not agreed on anything. The new city was full of cafes, polished surfaces and well-dressed people. Steve said it was like Paris. That is overdoing it. For me, as usual, it was the old town that mattered much more. Less polished. Fewer nice clothes. More texture. More of what survives when the slogans of modernity lose interest.

One of the strongest images I carry from Batumi is exactly that mix. The modern Marriott there, and in front of it this older, almost absurd piece of Soviet visual culture. The whole place felt like that. New money, old ghosts.

Stalin country

Then Gori. Or rather near Gori. Stalin country.

That mattered to me even if it did not really matter to the others. I am the one in this group with the real affinity for the Soviet world. I know the history reasonably well, and I would have loved to visit the Stalin museum there, but it did not happen this time.

Instead we stopped at a modern road station nearby and ate huge shawarmas. I was hungry. Tired too. And all the while aware that one of history’s great killers came from just there, from those green hills and those ordinary provincial streets.

There was something unreal about that. No grand memorial moment. No historical ceremony. Just shawarma, traffic and a Saturday afternoon.

Maybe that made it stronger. History sitting there in plain sight without announcing itself.

Evelina in Tbilisi

By the time we got to Tbilisi, I needed time on my own. That is one of the strange things with trips like this. I love the group. Truly. But after enough hours in the car, enough meals together, enough talk, I need to get out and walk alone.

So I did.

And that changed everything, as it often does. In a convoy you travel in a bubble. In a city alone you become open again. You meet people. You hear things. You notice more.

On my way up towards the Mother of Georgia statue I saw a young woman sitting outside a cafe. Her job was to get people to stop and come in for tea. I noticed her from a distance because she looked vulnerable and strong at the same time. We spoke briefly and I told her I might stop on the way back.

I did.

Her name was Evelina. We started talking almost immediately about deep emotions, the kind of conversation that begins without any small talk at all. Later she said she wanted to talk more, so we met again that evening for a drink at the hotel bar. She was young, an artist, and full of deep thoughts about life. One of those people you meet for a very short time and still remember.

Walking back later I thought, yes, this is still why I travel. Not to get somewhere. But because a person you had never heard of two hours earlier can suddenly make a place feel real.

Baku without the cars

We knew from the beginning that the cars would not continue into Azerbaijan this time. That was simply part of this leg. I am not a driver, so for me it was easier to accept than it probably was for Jeff and Steve. Jeff’s journey is the spine of the whole thing, and I was just very happy to be part of it.

Still, arriving in Baku without the convoy felt strange. As if part of the journey was missing.

Baku is stunning if you want it to be. Immaculate. Controlled. Enormous buildings. Lights along the waterfront. Steve was extremely impressed and I understood why. He likes this kind of modernity.

But I had been there before with Sophie, and both of us know enough about Azerbaijan to understand what sits behind the surface. A place where control is everywhere has a texture of its own. This time what made it physical were the cameras. They were everywhere. On every street corner. Looking down on you all the time. Everything shines, but you know exactly how little room there is to get anything wrong.

Still, I enjoyed parts of it enormously. Me and Doug had a late evening walk through the old town after cigars and good drink, and it was wonderful. Warm, beautiful, easy. But even then I kept thinking that this is a country where the wrong sentence in the wrong place can cost people everything.

What it still gives

So what does this leg say to me?

Maybe simply this.

The world is more closed than it used to be. We are older than we used to be. And none of that has made the road matter less.

Borders are tighter. Countries more watchful. Some of us had health concerns. All of us carry more history in our bodies now than we once did. Age is part of the story. Health is part of the story. Time is definitely part of the story.

But friendship still pulls us onto the road. Curiosity still does. And coming back to a group of people who understand you, even for seven days, is not a small thing. It might be everything.

When the talk runs out and you are staring at a Black Sea horizon thinking about a war you cannot stop, about daughters growing up in a world getting harder to read, about a relationship that ended quietly back home in Malmö, the road does not give you answers.

It gives you motion. It gives you perspective. It gives you life moving again. And sometimes that is enough.

Other essays from Defender X:

I’m writing this now for a simple reason.

Theo has made a very good film.

Portraits of Karlag is finished. 1 hour and 40 minutes. And in some way it feels like the circle is closing.

It didn’t really start in 2015. It started a year earlier, when I was in Karaganda together with the girls and their mum. We ended up there because of Pam’s studies, and I found the village of Dolinka. Without really understanding how important that place would become for me later on.

In 2015 I went back with a fantastic team and an Explorers Club flag. I had met Theo online and he had told me about his dad. And we said, let’s make a documentary! And we returned, with a clear goal, to make a documentary, to try to understand Karlag, to listen and to document. It became a journey that changed me fundamentally. And now, many years later, all that time, all those encounters, all those tears at kitchen tables and out on the steppe, have become a film through Theo’s hands and eyes.

This is my text about that journey, about Karlag, and about why life never became the same again.

PORTRAITS OF KARLAG — THE EVIL IS STILL STUCK IN THE WALLS

When I got off the Aeroflot plane at Kastrup and jumped onto that packed train across Öresund back to Malmö, a thought hit me like a punch.

Life will never ever be the same again.

It’s not a poetic phrase. It’s what happens when you’ve walked around KARLAG for weeks – and then come back to a society where people hiss at a mother with a stroller instead of helping her. When you’ve seen real suffering, real evil and at the same time something almost unimaginable: forgiveness.

I stood there in the carriage and watched people. No one looked at anyone. No one smiled. Everything was me, me, me. And I remember thinking, with absolutely no finesse:

Welcome back to fucking Scandinavia.

THE PLACE WHERE HISTORY DOESN’T DIE

KARLAG. Karaganda Corrective Labor Camp. The biggest penal colony of them all, smeared out over the steppe.

If you want the “clean” explanation, it’s in books, definitions and acronyms. Gulag. “Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps.” Bureaucratic language for human destruction.

But none of that prepares you for the feeling of standing in Dolinka, outside the old administrative building – today the Museum of Memory of the Victims of Repression – and hearing a woman say she knew this building from her childhood, when it stood abandoned and empty, because nobody dared talk about it.

That’s Nurshat Jumadilova. Professor. Host. And one of the bravest, most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

Nurshat is not a professional guide. She has both the professional knowledge – archives, research, testimonies – and the personal weight of a family marked by the system. She talks about it with a clarity that makes you uncomfortable, because you realise you’ve lived in comfortable ignorance and thought you understood history.

And then you go down into the cellar.

The year before the expedition I visited the museum and had to stop halfway up the stairs after the cellar. I felt sick. I was close to crying. The museum recreates torture, interrogations, solitary confinement. There is sound. There are wax figures. There is fear. There is no proof that particular cellar was used that way, but when you stand there you don’t need proof to feel bad.

It’s not a normal museum feeling. It’s a physical reaction.

THE TEAM – AND WHY THIS MATTERS

You don’t do something like this alone. And you don’t do it with tourists.

We were a team. Theo. My partner on this journey and the filmmaker who made the documentary. Ken. Analytical, funny, always with a notebook. Yuliya. The interpreter, strong, hard-working, the key to everything. Valera. The driver, a character beyond the ordinary. And Nurshat. The backbone.

There’s a photo of us in front of the building with the Explorers Club flag, and I remember thinking, the symbolism is ridiculous compared to the reality behind that wall. But also: if you carry a flag, then you damn well make sure you come home with something that means something.

And even before we left I already believed this would be the most important journey I’d ever done. Despite that bloody last week before departure – too much to sort out, too many details, the same mistakes again – I knew this is not just another adventure.

DOLINKA IS NOT A POSTCARD. IT’S A POST-SOVIET VILLAGE BUILT BY PRISONERS.

Dolinka could be anywhere in Siberia.

Rutted dirt roads. Single-storey houses. Wooden fences. Everything run down. Hard people. Barking dogs. The smell of coal. Rusty Volgas and UAZs. The odd new Land Cruiser. Traces of the past everywhere – leftover barbed wire, dilapidated buildings, the hammer and sickle popping up like a bad memory.

I’ve always been fascinated by villages like that. Mostly because I’ve met some of the most generous people I know in places that look completely forgotten.

And Dolinka was no exception.

It was built from the ground up by the prisoners in KARLAG.

The administrative building is today a museum. One of the few places that actually shows the really dark side of Stalin’s camps.

Before we even started, we had a naïve but honest hope that we would find someone from the other side. A guard. An employee. Someone who had been part of the machinery. We quickly understood how difficult that would be – and just as quickly what we did not want to do.

No hidden microphones. No tricks. Not our style.

And then life does what life always does on expeditions. We needed somewhere to stay, and we were invited in.

We stayed with Natasha. And she had her own story. A story that begins like a nightmare and then just becomes her normal life.

Found as a baby. In an old cemetery. A calf carrying a bundle in its mouth. A cry. An ambulance driver stopping. Adoption. A stepfather who had worked in Karlag as an officer. And then the sentence that kills you because it’s so simple:

“We live a simple life… we are simple people.”

THEN SHE SAYS THE LINE YOU NEVER FORGET.

Have you walked around the museum? Have you seen the barrels?

“It’s a nightmare… in the winter they couldn’t transport the dead, so they stored the bodies in barrels and salted them like mackerel. Just imagine… nightmare!”

People like to talk about history as if it were clean. It isn’t.

Sometimes history is a barrel. Salt. Bodies you can’t move because winter has taken over the world.

And then she says something else that is almost harder to hear. Part of her misses the Soviet Union. It was simpler. People respected each other. Her father was a convinced communist.

That’s the mess. That’s reality. People can carry trauma and still miss the system that created it. People are complicated. Systems are poison. Both things can be true in the same room.

KARABAS – NUMBERS INSTEAD OF NAMES

One of the moments I can’t shake is Karabas.

We’re standing out on the flat steppe, the sun is shining, it’s warm, the kind of landscape that looks so calm you almost start doubting yourself. And then Nurshat points at a rusty sign with a number and says:

“These are graves for the prisoners… marked with numbers… no first name, no surname.”

Numbers linked to files. Clothes marked with numbers. The archives pushed away. A system that erased identity even after death.

And she explains the practical side of hell. They didn’t bury people with dignity. They dug trenches. Ten to fifteen bodies at a time in the same hole. One marker.

Ken lost it, because even the most controlled person can crack, and hissed:

“They didn’t even have the dignity to bury them properly!”

You can read history books about mass death and think you understand. Then you stand in a field with a rusty number sign, and suddenly nothing is abstract anymore.

It’s just grief. And anger.

THE DEAD CANNOT PROTECT THEMSELVES.

After Karabas, it stopped being a documentary project and became something else. Something like responsibility.

Nurshat said it clearly. Preserve the memory. Remember those who tell. Because no one visits those graves. No one lays flowers there.

“Who is going to protect them? The dead cannot protect themselves.”

That line is a knife.

THE MEN – SURVIVAL IS NOT HEROIC, IT’S ANIMAL

And then you meet the men.

Not heroes. Not symbols. Just men who survived something that shouldn’t be survivable.

We met Tetsuro Ahiko.

Before the interview we had read that the interviews make him feel awful afterwards. Mentally. Physically. Karlag does not end just because you’ve left the camp.

He talks about standing for hours. Not being allowed to go to the toilet. Doing his needs in a barrel. The stench. Criminals sitting on the bunks and eyeing your clothes, waiting to take them.

He talks about freezing, almost naked, in a short heavy coat, with felt boots that nobody else wanted. About coal dust, accidents, bare feet in snow, trousers wrapped around his feet to survive.

And then the system behind it all. Article 58. The law that deliberately broke people, scattering them so they couldn’t even talk to each other.

Adventure is voluntary.

This was the opposite.

KENGIR – WHEN HUMILIATION BECOMES UPRISING

And then there is Kengir.

Not romance. Not hero stories. Humiliation.

Dogs. Beatings. Arbitrary shootings. Waiting. Silence. Wet bodies holding each other, waiting for death.

“The cause of the uprising was humiliation.”

That is how history feels in a body.

THE CHECHENS – AN ENTIRE NATION DEPORTED

The camps were not only about individuals.

They were about whole peoples.

We looked for the Dokayev family, Chechens, in old Karaganda. Bad roads. A theatre that stood out.

And then the date: 23 February 1944. The day Stalin deported the entire Chechen and Ingush peoples.

Dictatorships do not punish crimes. They move populations and call it politics.

THE WOMEN – MAYA / MAYKEN AND THE SHOCK OF GOODNESS

And then you meet people who would have every right in the world to hate. But don’t.

Maya. Mayken Serkebaeva.

Instead of only talking about the evil, she talks about goodness. About people who gave her food, who sewed clothes for her out of old sheets, who shared the little they had.

Nurshat says that when her mother tells these stories, everyone starts crying. She loves all Russians, she says, because they gave her food.

Maya talks about patience. Humanity. Kindness. About lending money to neighbours. About hugging everyone who walks into the home.

I wrote it then, and I write it now:

I never thought I would get to meet a real saint.

But we did.

COMING HOME WITH KARLAG INSIDE YOU

The interviews made us cry. But strangely, they also left us with something else.

After everything they had gone through, many of these people chose forgiveness.

That insight alone is almost impossible to carry.

And then you go home.

Back on the train to Malmö, when I saw people turning their gaze away from each other, I understood one thing.

Once you have walked through Karlag you can no longer pretend you don’t know what we are capable of. Both the worst and the best.

NOW THE FILM EXISTS

All of this – Dolinka, the museum cellar, Karabas, the numbers, the barrels, the men, the women, the uprisings, the deportations, the saints – now exists in a finished documentary film.

Portraits of Karlag
Length: 1 hour and 40 minutes

The film stays close. Close to faces. Close to voices. Close to things you can’t avoid seeing.

Trailer:
https://www.theogoble.com/portraits-of-karlag

CREDITS

a THEO MAXIMILIAN GOBLE film

Translator
YULIYA PERTNIKOVA

Karlag Expert
PROF. NURSHAT JUMADILOVA

Camera
MIKAEL STRANDBERG
THEO MAXIMILIAN GOBLE BFE

Local Fixer
DANA VOTKE

Archive
CRITICAL PAST

With support from
BOLASHAK UNIVERSITY
DOLINKA MUSEUM
ALZHIR MUSEUM

Film Editor
THEO MAXIMILIAN GOBLE BFE

READ MORE

For anyone who wants to go deeper into Karlag and all the stories we encountered there, all my texts are collected here:

https://www.mikaelstrandberg.com/?s=karlag

I sleep worse now.

Not because anything in my own life has suddenly gone wrong, but because the world keeps pushing its way into it. I wake after five hours, pick up my phone, and start reading the news. I know I should not, but I do it anyway. Trump. Putin. Ukraine. Gaza. Threats. Rockets. Collapse. Yet another version of us and them.

It does something to me.

Not only because the news is dark, but because the tone of the world has changed. It has become harder, harsher, more dangerous. As if more and more people are getting used to the idea that other human beings can be turned into problems, enemies, something less than fully human.

What I think about is my children. What sort of world is waiting for them?

I believe the old order is beginning to crack. Russia’s war against Ukraine suddenly brought war close to us in Europe, close in a way many people here have not had to feel for generations. But this is not only about Ukraine. It is about something bigger. A world in which power once again speaks louder than responsibility. A world in which leaders build their position on division. A world in which us and them has once again become a political language.

And I recognise the tone.

That is what frightens me most.

Because I do not read any of this as theory. I have been close to war. I have seen how it moves into people’s daily lives. How it changes the sounds of a city. How it changes people’s movements, their expressions, their expectations. How it makes fear feel normal. And how, at the same time, it can draw something strangely beautiful out of ordinary people.

It was in Yemen that I learnt that.

I have been there three times. Each time I came closer to war. But the strange thing is that those encounters did not make me more cynical about people. Quite the opposite. My faith in ordinary people became stronger there than it sometimes feels here at home, when I wake to yet another morning of news, fear, division, and leaders who make the world smaller, colder, and harder.

That may be why I am writing this now.

Not because I think my fear is unique, but because I think too many people still do not understand what war really is until it is too late. They see the headlines. The maps. The statements. But not what happens to people. Not how quickly something that feels far away can become close. Not how easily a society can grow used to language, leaders, and ideas that ought to leave all of us cold with fear.

I have seen it up close.

And yet it is not mainly the darkness I carry with me from Yemen.

It is the people.

The First Time. Night, Checkpoints, Bombed Houses

The first time I arrived in Yemen, I landed in Sana’a in the middle of the night.

I had gone there to learn Arabic. Even saying that now sounds almost absurd, as if the world could still be approached through curiosity, as if there were still time for such things. I was met by a man from the language school, the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, or whatever its exact name was. I could not speak Arabic. Not a single word that was of any use to me there and then. And in Sana’a they spoke their own dialect, so even if I had known more, it might not have helped much. I did not understand what the man who met me was saying. I did not understand much of what was said at passport control either. Hardly anyone spoke English.

The first thing I felt was not fear. Not exactly. It was confusion. And fascination.

Then came the checkpoints.

They were everywhere. Heavily armed men. Hard faces. Weapons that did not belong to my world, but clearly belonged to theirs. I had never seen so many armed men in an ordinary civilian landscape. And in the middle of the night we drove through a city where some neighbourhoods already carried war in their walls. Houses that looked bombed. Streets that no longer felt like streets, but like film sets. Except it was not a film.

I remember thinking: here, you could simply disappear.

No one really knows where I am. No one knows who I am sitting in the car with. No one knows what is waiting beyond the next checkpoint. That feeling was strong. I did not have children then. I had not yet met the woman who would later become the mother of my children. But I remember that naked sense of exposure. How thin you become when you do not understand the language, do not know the codes, do not know who is in charge, and have no one to call who can come for you.

And yet the fascination was there too. I had seen photographs of Old Sana’a, of the houses, the markets, the light. All that beauty was there as well. Yemen was not only armed men and bombed houses. Far from it. It was an extraordinarily beautiful country. A country that drew you towards it with a force that was difficult to explain.

The next day I heard warplanes taking off to the north. Saleh’s war against the Houthis was under way. You could hear it, but you could not immediately see it in the part of everyday life where I was. The war lay over the city like background noise, something constantly present but not always visible. It may have been the first time I understood that war does not always look the way it does on television. Often it looks like an ordinary city continuing to function while violence sits just beneath the surface.

It was also in Sana’a that I met Pamela. I went there to learn Arabic and came away with something far greater: love, family, children, another life. Perhaps that is also why Yemen stayed with me so strongly. It never became just a place. It became part of my own life.

The Second Time. Eva, the Playground, and the Shells

When I returned the next time, everything was different.

By then we had Eva.

She was tiny, small enough to sit in a pram. I remember her in that pram in Sana’a as if it were a photograph from someone else’s life. A small child in a city being torn apart between Ali Abdullah Saleh, Ali Mohsen, and the al-Ahmar side. In practice the city was divided. War was no longer only background noise. It was in the checkpoints, the sounds, the atmosphere, the whole rhythm of day and night.

We were living simply, in connection with the school. A flat where you could sleep, cook a little, and try to live something resembling an ordinary life. And that is what we did. That is one of the strange things about war. Even there, people try to keep daily life going. Someone cooks. Someone goes to work. Someone takes their child to the playground.

I remember one day when I was playing with Eva in a playground not far from where we were staying. Perhaps that scene has stayed with me so strongly because it contains everything at once. A child. Everyday life. Innocence. And then violence.

When the first shell landed, everything changed in a second.

I had never heard anything like it before. It is not just a sound. It goes straight into your body. The ground, the air, your legs, your chest. I picked Eva up and ran. I ran like a madman back towards the school. A few hundred metres perhaps. Distances change when you are frightened. Everything moved in slow motion and yet faster than anything else. I heard the explosions, felt the area shaking, saw people to my left and right. I remember the young men especially, who seemed to be drawn towards the sound rather than away from it, as if adrenaline and curiosity were pulling them in. I ran in the other direction. Not like a hero. Not like an explorer. Simply like a father with his child in his arms.

I will never forget that.

I remember getting back to the building. The thunder in the air. The desperate need to get inside, inside something that felt like shelter. I hid with Eva in a corner. I was terrified. And I remember, too, the feeling that others thought I was overreacting. As if my fear were a sign of weakness. As if I were ridiculous for reacting so strongly.

Yes, I was afraid.

Of course I was afraid.

Not for myself, but for Eva.

That may have been the moment I understood something I have seen many times since. People who live close to war sometimes have to normalise it in order to survive. They get used to it. They have to. The sound that went straight into my bones was, for others, simply another day in a life that had already been broken for a long time. But I could not get used to it. And I did not want to. There is something healthy about being afraid when shells are landing near a playground where your child has just been playing.

The Wrong Area, the Wrong Men, the Right Sort of People

Another time I went out with Rashad Zaid, a teacher and a friend, and we ended up in the wrong area.

That alone could be enough in a Sana’a divided between different centres of power. You were supposed to stay on the right side, in the right district, among the right men with the right loyalties. But we got it wrong. We tried to get out in a taxi, but we were stopped and pulled out.

That memory is not in slow motion. What I remember there is the panic of realising that this was real. That we could be kept there. That we could be imprisoned, disappear, be kidnapped. I remember sandbags, shattered walls, armed men, a city torn into zones.

But I also remember what happened next.

Rashad talked. Explained. Calmed things down. I tried to do the same. We showed respect. We talked about Yemen. We talked about football. We ate together. The situation dissolved.

It could have gone badly.

It could have become another story about a foreigner who disappeared.

But instead we found ourselves there, in the middle of a threatening situation, sharing food and conversation. It is hard to explain to anyone who has not been there how quickly a human connection can sometimes change a situation. Not always. But sometimes. And sometimes that is enough.

The Road Out, Amin, and the People on the Bus

Another time Amin and I left the city at night to prepare for my first camel journey. The trick was to get out the right way, avoid the worst checkpoints, and take detours through the city. We were stopped again and again. I remember, in particular, areas where people wanted to drag us out of the car. Amin bribed. Talked. Fixed things. He held the whole situation together.

There too, you could simply have disappeared.

Later, when I was travelling back by night bus after visiting Rashad in his village, I was stopped again. A soldier wanted to drag me off the bus. I remember the aggression. The suspicion. The feeling that this could turn very bad, very quickly.

And then the thing happened that happened so many times in Yemen.

Ordinary people stepped in.

People on the bus took my side. They objected. Leave him alone. And I got out of it.

I have never forgotten that.

The threat often came from above: weapons, uniforms, factions, men who wanted control. The help almost always came from ordinary people.

It did something to me.

My faith in humanity did not grow weaker because of Yemen. It grew stronger.

The Third Time: the Bomb, the Café, and al-Qaeda

The third time I was in Yemen, the country had grown darker again.

By then al-Qaeda was a constant source of anxiety in the background. AQAP was the name hanging over the conversations, the warnings, the fear, the whole sense of threat. I was there with Tanya Holm to prepare for a camel journey. I remember a café in Sana’a. A popular place. No electricity, so people sat there anyway. Then the blast came.

A suicide bomber had struck soldiers rehearsing for a parade only a short distance away.

It was heard across the city.

Sirens. Shouting. Shock.

But what I remember most strongly may not be the sound itself, but what happened immediately afterwards. How people nevertheless stayed where they were. How service continued. How life refused to collapse just because yet another bomb had torn human beings apart. It was not indifference. It was something else. Perhaps habit. Perhaps survival instinct. Perhaps the understanding that if you stop completely every time something explodes in a collapsing country, there will be no life left at all.

During the camel journey al-Qaeda was a constant source of anxiety. On the roads. In the conversations. In other people’s warnings. But once we were out among the Bedouin, the picture changed. There were other loyalties there, other realities, other human rules. That too is what makes countries at war so difficult to understand from the outside. The headlines almost never tell the whole truth. A country is not, all the time, the very worst thing written about it. A country still consists of people. Of daily life. Of humour. Of generosity. Of children playing. Of men joking. Of women holding together the lives men destroy.

What Stayed With Me

There is one scene I often return to when I think of Yemen.

I was at a tribal court. A thousand, perhaps two thousand people. Armed men everywhere. Bakil on one side, Hashid on the other. It looked as though it could all end in blood. But instead there were kisses on the cheeks, handshakes, embraces, negotiations, and forgiveness. In the middle of a world of Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers there was also conversation, mercy, and the will to avoid the worst.

Not perfect. Not romantic. But human.

That has stayed with me.

War does something terrible to people, to cities, to societies. That ought to be obvious. And yet I think many people do not understand it until they are standing there themselves. Until they hear the blast. Until they run with their child in their arms. Until they sit in a car stopped by armed men. Until they realise how thin a thread ordinary life hangs by.

But war taught me something else as well.

That ordinary people are often the only thing holding the darkness back.

Every time something threatening happened, people appeared and helped. Almost without exception. Someone stepped forward. Someone talked. Someone shared food. Someone joked the tension away. Someone said it would be all right. Someone made sure it was.

Of course I saw other things too. Hardness. Fanaticism. Men who loved their weapons too much. Men who enjoyed control too much. Men who dreamed of dividing the world. But they are not what I carried away most strongly. It was the others.

Why the Present Frightens Me

That is why I cannot read the news today as if it were just news.

I read it and I recognise the tone. I recognise the men who want to divide the world into us and them. I recognise the contempt for weakness. I recognise the temptation to make everything simple, hard, and brutal. And I think: it never ends well. Never.

My fear today is not only about wars far away. It is about how we, too, are changed by what is happening. The way we begin to speak. The way we begin to think. The way we begin to accept things that ought never to be accepted. The way leaders such as Putin and Trump, in different ways and with different tools, help to make the world colder, harsher, and more dangerous. Not because they alone embody evil, but because they legitimise it. They make division respectable. They make brutality intelligible. They make lies useful. They strengthen the idea that some people can simply be sacrificed.

And at the same time I know this:

It is not leaders who save us.

It is people.

The people on the bus who said leave him alone. The teacher who talked us out of a dangerous situation. The driver who bribed the right person at the right checkpoint. The people who shared food when we could have been trapped. The ones who smiled, greeted us, welcomed us, and protected us.

That is what I carry with me from Yemen.

Not only the fear. Not only the bombs.

But also this: that in the middle of everything broken there was a humanity that refused to give up.

Perhaps that is why I grow so tired of all this talk of us and them now.

Because I know the world is not like that. I know that most people are simply trying to live, protect their children, keep daily life going, and be seen as human beings. I know that generosity exists where you least expect it. I know that those who speak loudest about enemies usually understand least about how ordinary people actually live.

So yes, I am afraid.

I am afraid of the world my children will grow up in. I am afraid that hardness is gaining ground. I am afraid that history, in one sense or another, is back, and that too many people do not even seem to understand it. I am afraid that we, in our safety, are beginning to lose something that people in war are often forced to hold on to: our dependence on one another.

But I have not lost faith in people.

That may be the only hope I truly trust any longer.

Not the systems. Not the grand words. Not the men who want to be remembered.

But people.

Ordinary people.

The ones who turn up when things are burning. The ones who help. The ones who carry. The ones who say: leave him alone. Come here. Sit down. Eat. We will sort it out.

It was not leaders who taught me that.

It was Yemen.

I get up at three every morning.

Not because anyone told me to. Not because there is some perfect plan. But because that is when I can get a head start on life.

It is quiet. Malmö is asleep.

I put the coffee on. It sounds loud in an otherwise completely still kitchen. I sit down and start working straight away. Emails first. Always. A producer. Someone who wants something. Someone who has not replied. I plan. I write a little if I have the energy.

It is the only time that is mine.

The rest of the day belongs to them.

Breakfast and bike rides

At six, the girls wake up.

Breakfast is already out on the table. That matters. It is something I got from my mother. There was always food at home with her. Always. No matter what life looked like otherwise.

I try to do the same.

Dana gets up first. Eats quickly. Then lies down again for a while. Eva comes later. Calmer. More in her own rhythm.

At eight, Dana and I cycle to school.

Forty-five minutes there and back. Often a little late. Always moving fast.

Sometimes we talk. Sometimes not at all.

But it is our time.

What wears me down is not the work

I train. I work. I try to make everything fit together.

I rarely sleep more than five hours a night.

But that is not what wears me down the most.

It is the worry.

Eva’s eyes.

Unclear news. “We’ll see how it looks.” Those are the worst words.

And then Dana, her football. It means a lot. To her. To us. It is a fantastic time. But it is also responsibility, rhythm, discipline.

Food is everything

At quarter past three, Dana comes home.

By then the food has to be ready.

There is no room there.

And that thing with food, it is not a small thing for me.

It is everything.

My mother always made sure there was food. And that did something to life as a whole. It created calm.

When I do not manage to get the food ready in time, I feel it immediately. As if I am missing something fundamental.

It is easier now.

Dana cooks. Proper food. She has learned.

Eva eats more simply. Peanut butter and jelly in the morning. And that is fine.

What matters is not perfection.

What matters is that it works.

We are not a dinner family

We do not eat together every day.

That is just how it is.

We live in different schedules. I train. Dana trains. Eva eats when she is hungry.

But we are close anyway.

When I was growing up, it was the same. My mother and I often sat quietly at the table. She with her crossword. Me with a book.

It was calm.

It was good.

When I leave

I feel guilty every time I leave.

Every time.

But once I am away, I am there.

And when I come home, I am calmer. More satisfied.

Maybe a better father.

I want the girls to see that it is possible to live a life you believe in. That you do not have to fit into some system just because it is there.

They manage

They are 14 and 16.

Since February, they manage on their own.

When I was away on the Defender X journey, they had to handle money, food, everyday life. The first days that week they got it wrong. Sweets instead of proper food. Cheap instead of good.

But they learned.

Now it works.

Saturdays

Taco night.

Always.

They do the shopping. I cook the meat. Dana prepares the rest. Eva lies on the sofa choosing a film.

Then we eat.

Hungry.

And it tastes so damn good every time.

Then we end up on the sofa.

In a pile.

Me in the middle. One on each side.

Film. Sweets. Four hours sometimes.

And there, right in the middle of all that, I notice it.

That the hugs are becoming fewer.

That they are growing up.

My father and my mother

My father was never there.

He was an alcoholic.

As simple as that.

My mother, on the other hand, did everything.

And I have tried to carry the most important thing from her with me.

To be there.

Responsibility

Eva does the dishes every day.

Laundry every Sunday.

She goes to the doctor on her own now.

It is her life.

Dana takes initiative.

Fixes things.

Cooks.

They are different.

And that is good.

The hardest part

The hardest part is that I cannot give them a female role model every day.

Their mother is there. But far away.

We do the best we can.

The truth

People ask how I manage.

The truth is this.

I do not always.

But we do it together.

And in the middle of all this,

this is the best time of my life.

PS. Many ask me about their mum. She lives in the US and has only two weeks of holiday a year. They talk almost everyday with their mum and their relation is very good. So is mine with their mum. DS

The place felt like a warning.

In a newly printed guidebook to South America I had read a line that stayed with me: a rough, wild and lawless society. Tourists are advised to avoid Turbo.

The guidebook was not exaggerating.

The streets were flattened dirt. Horse carts rolled past under impossible mountains of bananas. Vendors selling sugar-cane liquor and juice fought for space with everything else that moved. Heavily armed police patrolled in pairs, rifles ready, while women in bright dresses moved through it all with a grace that made the imbalance seem almost normal.

By night, the town changed character.

The main street filled with wandering women walking in pairs. Shops sold smuggled goods beside hotels that were barely disguised brothels. Restaurants seemed to offer the same meal everywhere: a slab of beef, fried bananas, and sugar-cane liquor or beer.

Almost every man carried a machete.

Long metal sheaths hung from their belts, ready to be drawn in an instant. In the darkness, the only visible law was nervous men guarding banks and pharmacies.

Turbo was a port city. That meant sailors. It also meant smugglers and killers.

From every open doorway came loud, rhythmic music pouring into the warm night air. Elegantly dressed women paused in the street, swaying for a moment to the beat before continuing through the chaos.

And then the shouting began.

Hide. Los Bandidos are attacking.

Inside our camouflage-colored hotel, panic spread at once. Doors slammed. Men ran through the corridors. Someone grabbed us and pulled us inside with the rest of the terrified crowd.

A Japanese cyclist named Keizo, who had also arrived in town, stood beside us looking strangely calm.

Am I a mono? he asked dryly.

In this part of the world, all white people were called monos (monkeys in Spanish).

The woman shouting about the bandits ignored him and kept yelling for help while people barricaded doors and windows with heavy iron bars.

Outside, chaos.

Inside, fear.

Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.

It’s guerrillas, the owner of the hotel explained later. They attack looking for weapons and food.

Just another night in Turbo.

Help arrives

Our hope came from an unexpected source.

Dilver Pintor, head of the Colombian National Parks authority, INDERENA.

He sat behind his desk with his feet on the table, studying us while sweat rolled down our bodies in the suffocating humidity.

Did you know the humidity in El Darién is around ninety-five percent? he asked calmly.

It felt less like information than a warning.

Dilver was about my age, sharp-eyed and thoughtful, the kind of man who understood what we were about to attempt.

The first stretch is the worst, he said. You have to reach the Indian village of Paya on the Panamanian side. From Cristales there is a path to a village called Bijao. There you can hire guides. You will never carry all your equipment yourselves.

Then he added something unexpected.

I’ll arrange transport across the Gulf of Urabá to Cristales. Free.

Without him, the expedition might have ended right there.

Selling our winter

The heat in Turbo was brutal.

Thirty-three degrees. Humidity among the highest on earth. And yet our equipment still included winter clothing from earlier parts of the expedition.

So we tried to sell it.

For five dollars you can have the finest hand-knitted sweater you’ve ever seen, I told an old man sitting in the hotel courtyard.

He studied the thick wool sweater with care.

I have no use for something so warm, he said politely.

Of course he didn’t.

No one needed winter clothing in a place where the air itself felt like boiling water.

But we needed money.

We were forced to strip down our equipment, improvising backpacks out of flour sacks and bicycle tubes. They were crude and uncomfortable, but they would have to do.

Ahead of us waited eight hundred kilometres miles of jungle.

And not just any jungle.

El Darién.

A nightmare begins

The crossing started across the Gulf of Urabá.

The small motorboat slammed against the waves until my head felt like it would split apart. I was already weak from illness.

That night I dreamed I was being taken to a sacrificial altar, where I would have to offer my life to appease the gods. When I woke, the dream clung to me.

Ahead lay the unknown.

No reliable maps.
Almost no information.
Very little money.

But after a week in a foul-smelling brothel hotel in Turbo, we could not wait any longer.

The Darién Gap, the great jungle barrier between North and South America, was calling.

Into the jungle

Our guides were Omar and Cariño Santos.

The forest swallowed us at once.

One man walked ahead hacking through vines with a machete. The river beside us narrowed and turned deep green as we moved further in. Massive mangrove roots threatened to destroy the boat’s engine.

Above us, the canopy closed.

Everything felt alive.

Monkeys screamed in the trees. A toucan burst into flight as our motor canoe disturbed its perch. Omar watched it all silently.

Why stay here? I asked him later.

Every morning I wake surrounded by the smells of the jungle, he said quietly. That gives me freedom. Far from corruption, violence, and hateful people

.

The price of survival

But the peace did not last.

Cariño Santos stopped suddenly.

I want fifty dollars.

He was the black chief of Bijao, a village descended from Africans brought here centuries earlier through the slave trade.

His voice hardened.

You pay forty dollars now. Or we stop here.

We did not have the money.

Cariño laughed.

Gringos without money. What a joke.

Then he added, coldly, I am the only one who knows the path to Paya.

We had no choice.

We offered him Ed’s Walkman and a knife as part payment.

He accepted.

Hell in the jungle

Ed exploded.

What the hell have you dragged me into?

He was furious.

The trail became mud. One moment he slipped and sank waist-deep into a swamp.

These damned shoes, he shouted. Can’t they make proper shoes in this country?

The jungle tore at us.

Branches slapped our faces, releasing swarms of black insects that crawled over our skin. Bloodsuckers clung to our legs. Every step sank into mud.

Six streams to cross before nightfall.

The guides moved calmly while Ed and I struggled behind them, hacking at vines with machetes and dragging the bicycles over impossible ground.

There was no cycling here.

Only survival.

The jungle breaks us

Day after day we fought the forest.

Swamps.
Rivers.
Insects.
Mud.

My shoulders burned from carrying the bicycle. Our clothes hung heavy with sweat and swamp water. Cuts opened across our hands from the knife-sharp vegetation.

At night I tried to repair punctured tubes in the dark.

The jungle’s thorns had pierced both tires again.

Then something cold and sticky crawled up my leg inside my trousers.

An enormous worm.

I ripped off my clothes and jumped into the water.

No one laughed.

Everything collapses

The atmosphere between us and the guides worsened by the day.

Insults.
Threats.
Arguments about money.

Cariño and Dilson began calling us cowards.

At one point they disappeared into the jungle.

Where are you, idiots? we shouted.

Dilson returned laughing.

Looking for monkeys.

I was exhausted. Sick. At one point everything went black.

Then I saw it.

My urine.

Bright orange.

Jaundice, I whispered.

Cariño looked worried.

That is contagious, isn’t it?

Then he said something worse.

We refuse to continue.

A terrible silence followed.

Will you leave us here to die? I asked.

The border

Then the jungle opened.

Light poured through the trees. In front of us lay a metal plate in the ground.

Colombia.

We had reached Palo de las Letras, the border between Colombia and Panama.

Only a few hours remained to the Cuna village of Paya.

For the first time in days, we embraced each other with relief.

Perhaps I would survive after all.

The golden people

The Cuna chief examined my swollen leg carefully.

Snake? he asked.

I don’t know, I answered.

He studied the wound and smiled.

No snake bite. Probably a scorpion or a soldier ant.

I would survive.

The village was beautiful. Clean. Orderly. Calm.

Women wore colorful traditional clothing called mola. Gold rings in their noses showed they were married. Necklaces made of animal teeth hung around their necks.

The chief brought leaves and red clay.

This will help your pain.

The calm wisdom of the Cuna fascinated me.

Leaving the jungle

Back at the military camp, the commander solved the crisis with our guides.

He forced them to accept forty dollars, a Walkman, and a knife as payment, and threatened to arrest them if they returned to Colombia.

But by then I was gravely ill.

Jaundice.
Dysentery.

I could not eat. I could not drink. I had lost so much weight that my fingers could almost wrap completely around my upper arm.

For two days I lay half-conscious in a tent.

The dream of crossing El Darién overland was over.

After three weeks we had covered barely a hundred kilometres.

700 still remained.

Impossible.

The river out

Instead, we left by canoe.

A young Cuna paddled us downriver toward Boca de Cupe. As the canoe drifted through the dense jungle, I watched the forest carefully, trying to memorize every detail.

Under other circumstances, I would have loved to learn its secrets.

But now I was simply grateful to be leaving alive.

On the river we met the Chocó, another people still living according to ancient traditions.

They greeted us with warm smiles.

Slowly, the jungle released us.

Back to the world

In Boca de Cupe we finally returned to something that looked like civilization.

Coca-Cola.
Concrete streets.
Radios and music.

A man showed me his arm, where two large ants had been used as natural sutures to close a wound.

Old knowledge in a modern world.

We exchanged our traveler’s checks and arranged transport upriver to Yaviza, where the Pan-American Highway begins again.

Ahead of us, once again, lay the road to Alaska.

Christmas Eve

It was Christmas Eve.

We lay in a hot room under a spinning ceiling fan, staring at the ceiling.

Our Christmas dinner had been a can of tuna in a dry hot-dog bun and a beer.

For the first time since the journey began, I felt a deep longing for home.

Then someone knocked on the door.

Maybe Santa Claus, I joked.

Instead, it was the hotel owner.

Would you like some Christmas food?

Moments later we followed him upstairs.

The table was overflowing with food: turkey, fish, ham, sausages, bananas, whiskey, and Coca-Cola.

There was even a small plastic Christmas tree.

Suddenly the world felt full of people again.

And I wanted to hug every one of them.

El Darién then and now

When Ed and I crossed El Darién in the mid-1980s, it was still one of the last true blank spaces on the map between continents. There were no mass migrant crossings, no permanent global headlines, no daily images shared across the world. The jungle was simply what it had always been: a brutal, lawless barrier between Colombia and Panama.

Today El Darién is in the news for very different reasons. Hundreds of thousands of people have crossed the same region in recent years, trying to reach North America. The jungle itself has not changed. It is still heat, rivers, swamps, disease, exhaustion, and fear. What has changed is who enters it, and why.

We crossed chasing a dream of cycling between continents.

Many who enter it today are chasing survival.

The morning I left

This is me in the apartment in Dala Järna in 1986.

I am 24 years old, waiting for my brother to drive me to Arlanda. In a few hours I will be flying to Chile. That is where the life I later came to live began, even if I did not fully understand it then. Or maybe I did, just not in my head. In my body, I knew. My body had already decided.

I woke up that morning, turned on the television, and went into shock. Olof Palme had been murdered. Sweden’s prime minister was dead. The country I was about to leave a few hours later was no longer the same country I had gone to sleep in the night before. It was a strange beginning to a journey that, in many ways, would be about leaving the familiar behind. I remember the light from the TV. The shock. The silence in my body. That feeling when something huge and unreal has happened, and yet everything continues anyway. Breakfast still has to be made. The bags still have to be packed. The car to the airport will be here soon.

My mother’s apartment

At that time I was living at home with my mother. It was a beautiful period. Maybe the finest we ever had together. I helped with the finances, paid half of everything, and saved the rest for the journey. She had her routines and I had mine. She got up early, did her morning exercises, went out for a walk, made breakfast. In the mornings it smelled of coffee. It always smelled of coffee. In the mornings, cigarette smoke too. And cleanliness. The apartment was so clean you could almost lick the floor. That was her way of living. Order. Rhythm. Dignity. She did not have much, but what she had, she took care of.

When I look at that photo today, what I feel above all is pride, joy, tenderness, and warmth. There is no darkness in it for me. Not first and foremost. I see a young man who was ready. Who had prepared himself. Who had earned money, trained his body, planned, read, dreamed, and made up his mind. I like him. Not because he was extraordinary, but because he was so wholehearted. There was something pure in that determination. Something unprotected too. A naivety I can smile at today, but also miss.

The naivety and the gift

The most naive thing about him was that he believed the best about everyone. It never even crossed my mind that someone might be negative about what I was doing. That probably says something about who I was. Not stupid, not blind, just open. I moved through life with a natural feeling that if you yourself wanted something with all your heart, others would understand. That is why it came as such a shock when my friend Gösta Tysk’s wife, at the library, asked if I really thought I would be able to do this. I had never even asked myself that question. The idea that someone could doubt me had not occurred to me.

And the finest thing about him was probably exactly that too. The curiosity. That naive, untouched curiosity. It is still with me today, thank God, but it looked different back then. It was cleaner. Less guarded. Not filtered through experience, disappointments, betrayal, or loss. I was simply deeply curious about life. That is probably the simplest truth about why I left. I wanted out. I wanted to discover. I wanted to see what existed beyond what I already knew. People. Countries. Roads. Faces. Mountains. Oceans. I wanted to feel that the world was bigger than what I had around me.

The factory in Vansbro

At the same time, life at home was not bad. That matters. I was not escaping misery. I was not unhappy. I worked at Westlings saw blade factory in Vansbro, a town 10 kms away from home, on rotating shifts, sharpening large and small saw blades in a machine called Lumsden. It was heavy and dirty work. Noisy. Demanding. The kind of work that settles into your body. Oil, steel, dust, noise. But I had good workmates and I was paid by piece rate. I worked hard, as hard as I could, because I had a goal. I needed the money.

I had calculated that I needed 30,000 Swedish kronor, roughly US$4,200 at the time, to make the journey possible. I planned to live on about 50 kronor a day, around US$7 a day, and everything was calculated around that. Everything in my life was directed toward leaving.

It was my brother who had made sure I stayed at the factory for two full years. I had been there before, but I had left too early for another trip, and that had not been appreciated. So this time the demand was that they should get some use out of me before I disappeared again. It may sound hard, but it was probably right. I needed the discipline. I needed the time to prepare. And I needed the money.

Training, planning, and becoming someone else

What I really did back then was work, train, and plan. Bodybuilding had become big and we had a gym at the swimming hall in Vansbro. I trained there a lot, often with Mikael Englund, who was a very good friend. I had become convinced that the body mattered. That if there were threats along the road, it was better to look strong. To look as if you could defend yourself. I read that kind of thing at the library, drew my conclusions, and trained accordingly. It later turned out that I was not entirely wrong. The body mattered. Not only as protection, but as a tool. I was going to live through it, day after day, mile after mile.

All my free time went into planning. The library in Järna became a kind of second home. I sat there with books, maps, encyclopedias, notes. I read everything I could get my hands on. I wanted to understand the world before I went out into it, even if I probably also knew that real knowledge would only come once I was actually there.

I did not just want to travel. I wanted to tell stories.

That had become clear a few years earlier when I travelled in Asia. I had gone there with the idea of becoming a Buddhist monk, which in hindsight sounds both ridiculous and serious at the same time. But the journey took another direction. I met people who inspired me. Among them was an Irishman who had cycled from Ireland to Nepal. When I heard about that and saw that it was actually possible, something opened inside me.

Then I found the Guinness Book of World Records and read about the Pan-American Highway, the longest road in the world, from Chile to Alaska. That was enough. There it was. The road. The task. The dream. That was how I functioned back then. I needed something big, something concrete, something I could direct my whole life toward. From that moment on, everything revolved around that journey.

What I wanted to do with my life

I did not want to help people in the way I might say today. That idea was not developed yet. But I did want to tell people about the world, because I believed, and still believe, that the more people know about the world outside their own, the less hatred there will be, the less opposition, the less of that endless us and them. I wanted to build bridges by telling stories. And I wanted to inspire others to travel. To dare to leave the familiar behind. To discover that the people you are taught to fear usually turn out to be something completely different once you actually meet them.

There was something else in it too. Something more selfish. I liked telling stories. I liked being in the center. My sister lived in England and we travelled there every second or third summer. That alone was enormous to me as a child. To arrive in England. To see something different. Then to come back home to school in Järna and get to talk about it. I liked that feeling. To have seen something others had not seen. To be able to pass it on. I also read everything I could get hold of, and Rolf Blomberg meant a great deal to me. So maybe the explorer was there from the beginning. Or at least the storyteller. Maybe he was not born on the road at all, but much earlier, in a boy who understood that the world was bigger than the village and that it was possible to narrate yourself out of smallness.

Revenge, football, and direction

When I look back today, I can also see the urge for revenge in it all. I had invested in football and believed I might become a professional. That did not happen. I still remember how, at seventeen or eighteen, I was dropped before the last match before the summer break. The coach from Bäsna had something against me. I can understand that today. I probably had too much attitude. But I also remember deciding then and there: to hell with this. I will put everything into something else. So there was revenge in it too. A need to prove that I was someone. That I could do something. That if football was not going to be my road, I would find another one.

My mother crying, and letting me go

My mother supported me completely. That morning in Järna she cried and at the same time was happy for me. It is one of those memories that grows stronger with the years. Back then I probably saw it only as emotion around my departure. Today I see more. I see her love. Her pride. Her worry. And I know things now that I did not know then. That life later became less interesting for her after I left. That the time when I still lived at home and we shared our routines together was in fact one of the best periods of her life. It hurts to think about that today. She was my best friend then. I miss her terribly. I could not have had a better mother.

And then I left.

Piura, Peru

When I look at the second photo, from Piura in Peru, it is as if the dream had already found its first shadow. We had only been there a few days. Lena Berglund took the photo. I liked her a great deal then and probably hoped we would become a couple, but that did not happen. She was still an important friend, also during the time before I left home. In the photo we are sitting somewhere drinking beer, but that is not what I think about most when I see it. I think about the boredom. The loneliness. The waiting.

By then I had been out for about four months. I had cycled north from Isla de Chiloé and had already been hardened by the road. Shortly before Piura I had lost my camera. It disappeared somewhere during bus rides, on truck beds, and in all the moving around after a trek around Alpamayo. It was a hard blow. Not because the camera was expensive, but because the pictures meant everything. The storytelling meant everything. I called home to my mother. She ordered a new camera by mail order and sent it to me. So in Piura I did almost nothing except walk back and forth to the post office twice a day asking if it had arrived.

The first shadow

It was not a dramatic place. Not a city that lifted me. Quite the opposite. I was just trying to make time pass. It was hard to meet people. I felt lonely. Bored. Trapped inside waiting. Lena came there for a few days and that made a big difference. But otherwise Piura was mostly an interruption. One of those interruptions that shows that adventure is not always high passes, great encounters, and epic landscapes. Sometimes it is only a post office, sweat, dust, bad feelings inside, and a growing sense that you have to move on.

When the camera finally arrived, I left almost immediately. Two hours later I was back on the road. What I remember most strongly is the relief. Such fucking relief. Not triumph. Not joy. Just relief. As if the body could finally begin living again. And that is probably true about me, both then and now. I can endure a lot, but not being stuck. Not standing still waiting for life to begin again.

When I understood

So when did I understand that that first journey had become decisive for the rest of my life?

Not in Dala Järna. Not in Piura either.

I understood it when I came home.

I was invited onto Swedish television. I appeared on the travel program Packat och Klart. Back then, that was enough for people to start listening. Suddenly I got a huge number of speaking engagements. Schools, village halls, associations. I could do seven or eight talks a day. I was home for eight months before I left for Africa. I got sponsors. Kronan Monark in Vansbro, who had given me the bicycle for the trip, later created a museum display about the bicycle and my journey. And that was when I understood that I had been right.

This was exactly what I had hoped for.

I wanted to tell stories. And now people were listening.

What those two photos show me now

Maybe that is where the truth lies in those two photos. The first does not show a young man running away from something. It shows a young man gathering himself for a life he wanted. The second shows what that life also contained. Loneliness. Waiting. Small defeats. Boredom. And still, or maybe because of that, a will to continue.

When I look at those photos today, I do not see heroism. I do not see myth. I see a very young human being driven by curiosity, by the urge to tell stories, and by an unreasonable faith in both the world and himself.

Without that faith, nothing would have happened.

And maybe that is exactly what I feel most when I look at him there in Järna. Not sorrow. Not shame. But warmth. Pride. And gratitude that he actually left.

This is another excerpt from my book, written in Swedish from the road during my bicycle journey north through the Americas in 1986–87. I’m publishing these chapters as they were lived, one border at a time, one mistake at a time. My writing style at that time.

A BLACK BUNDLE AND A WOMAN IN BLACK
When I curse at my worst, I grab a stone the size of a fist. With explosive force I throw it into the overgrown rainforest and roar the insect concert into silence.

Then I hear it, thin twigs snapping under a sudden weight. Out of the jungle and up onto the road comes a small black bundle with thick fur. Its dark face has eyes surrounded by white, as if it is wearing glasses. The animal catches sight of me and bolts in panic back into the vegetation on the far side of the road.

As if struck by lightning I sink down onto the roadside slope when I understand what it was. One of the rare spectacled bears.

And here I am, complaining about small, petty problems, when I have been allowed to see something like that. A spectacled bear. An hour later I run into an old friend.

“Welcome, stranger,” a woman says in a dry voice.

She is wrapped in black clothing and her face carries the weight of every wrinkle, and there are many. Her life has not been light. But her eyes hold a strong inner peace.

Ed is waiting for me on a bench in the shade of a palm. He chose the spot because the woman’s home has a Coca-Cola sign above the entrance to her mud hut.

She is dressed in black. Wrinkles map her face, and there are many. But her eyes hold a strange calm. Ed is waiting on a bench in the shade. The hut has a Coca-Cola sign above the entrance, like so many places in Latin America, a flag planted where nothing else is official.

The simpler people live, the more generous they seem to be. Out here, on the Colombian countryside, I do not hear cruelty. The woman looks sad when we leave, the way my mother looked when I left home.

Ed and I look at each other without speaking. What people there are in this world. Others think differently.

“Avoid Colombia if you want to keep your belongings and your life,” an Otavalo man tells us, at the next break we have, as if he is doing us a favour.

He says he was robbed between Cali and Bogotá. It is an old story, repeated by travellers from everywhere.

Ed and I have already decided something after Peru. If you enter a country with preloaded fear, you ruin your own chances. So we try to let the warning slide off.

But the body doesn’t forget what it hears.

In Ipiales the streets are dominated by riot police and women who move like amazons, burning eyes, half-smiles. I feel watched in a way that makes my skin tighten, as if the gaze itself is a hand.

Then Las Lajas.

A sanctuary built like a dream in a valley with water below and steep walls around. It quiets something in me. It is too beautiful to argue with. People offer incense and murmur prayers and for a moment my thoughts drift to chanting monks in the Himalaya.

THE ROAD CALLS DOWN GOD’S JUDGMENTS
“This is ridiculous,” I shout, crushed, to anyone who might listen. Only Ed listens.

I spin around to prove it. Right-angled terraced slopes rise in every direction. The road writhes upward like a worm, as far as the eye can reach. The heat is unbearable. My red shirt turns white from dried salt.

Ed smiles at my outrage. The road is perfect for him. It leaves no time to think. All strength is concentrated on one thing, forward.

For me, the same road turns into a fight with God.

On a steep downhill a stone comes loose and shoots out from the slope at high speed. It misses my head by centimetres, hits my left arm like a springboard, then disappears over the edge.

I barely keep balance. I stop just outside a village squeezed in between the road and a mountain wall. My arm swells immediately, to the size of a handball. I hold it in a stream that is supposed to be water, but human waste competes for space in it. Ed finds cloth and ice and starts bandaging.

We have been snapping at each other lately. My need for solitude against his speed and talk. But the real enemy is the outer circumstance. The road, the heat, the constant pressure.

POPAYÁN
Popayán still carries the earthquake of 1983. On the outskirts there is a slum that hits like a punch. Faces burn with suspicion.

In the centre the city becomes colonial and calm, narrow alleys, history, atmosphere. Beautiful women look at us boldly. For me they all resemble Geoconda and suddenly longing rises in my throat.

“This is too much for me, Mike,” Ed says. “Did you see how they avoided us in the slum, as if we were infected.”

The mirror tells the truth. We look ruined. A torn shirt hangs on my body. My trousers are split. We are not impressive travellers. We are a warning.

VALUABLE MOMENTS
I film Ed as he rides straight into one of the deep holes in the road. The puddle swallows luggage. Dirty water rises up to his chest. He tumbles in.

He hauls himself out, laughing, and shouts, “Was the photo good?”

We laugh so hard it hurts. And somehow we both feel that these are the valuable moments, the ones you don’t get in comfort.

We leave Popayán after three days, longing for the hard, honest life on the road again.

TIBETAN WORDS, AND THE SMELL OF SULPHUR
The road up toward Puracé is grotesque. Rain. Fog. Vultures perched like judges. A road so broken you can drown in a puddle.

Then the cloud cover breaks and the world lights up. Birds sing. A fertile valley appears. Snow-covered volcano tops cut the horizon.

Despite the misery I feel an inner alignment. A pleasant silence rules between us. The few times we stop it becomes shared admiration, or long conversations about ethics and how to live.

“The greatest knowledge a human can have is to be one with nature.” Words from a Tibetan monk I once met in the Himalaya.

The smell of sulphur thickens. Wind and rain lash my face. Fog makes it impossible to see more than a metre. The ground is covered in new snow.

We are on top of Puracé, 4,700 metres. We cannot see into the smoking crater, but we clap each other on the back anyway.

“It will take a lot to ruin this feeling,” I tell Ed.

REAR HUB PROBLEMS
My rear hub squeals like a terrified pig every time the road forces sudden braking.

A mechanic opens his workshop at eleven at night, breaking away from his new wife to help.

He shows a circular metal piece, missing a notch that should be there.

“Can it be fixed?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Nobody can fix it. You need a new spare part.”

I walk back to the hotel crushed. The fear is simple. My budget is weak. If the bicycle dies, the whole journey dies with it.

SAN AGUSTÍN, EMERALDS, AND STILLNESS
After two weeks of grey cloud, sun breaks through. The sky turns deep blue. The mood softens.

We find lodging high up in a tall house. Two wide windows open to a panorama of green hills and thick vegetation. People smile at us like we belong here.

For the first days I lie on my back with books. If I’m not reading, I listen to birds. The only time I stand up is when hunger forces me ten metres across the dusty road to a restaurant.

Street sellers sell and explain emeralds. Ed is hungry for a profit. He buys the greenest small stones, convinced he will make money sending them to England.

I warn him. San Agustín is a tourist place, endless shops, endless so called authentic things, endless lies.

He smiles anyway. He believes in luck when it suits him.

LILLIAN
A small woman named Lillian comes to my room when Ed is out. She is Indigenous, from the Amazon, here to study medicine. Shy, sharp, lonely.

She says she hates Colombian men because they hit and dominate women. She begs me to take her away, to let her come with me to Bogotá.

I try to be kind, but I tell her there is another woman in my heart.

Hurt, she runs out.

That night turns to morning.

BUS TO BOGOTÁ, EMERALDS IN MY JACKET
The bus toward Bogotá shakes forward on a road that feels close to impassable.

A well-dressed man in glasses sleeps beside me. I cannot sleep at all.

I worry about the spare parts I asked the factory to send to the embassy.

And I worry about the emeralds Ed has made me carry, hidden in a package sewn into the lining of my leather jacket. He didn´t want tocome and rode on by himself. I have heard rumours of roadblocks and searches. Police hunting for illegal goods. What luck for them if they find a foreigner with contraband.

The emeralds feel burning hot against my skin.

BOGOTÁ, GRINGO, AND A PISTOL TO MY FOREHEAD
The well-dressed man tells me Bogotá is as dangerous as its reputation. He warns me to avoid the neighbourhood I mention.

“This is where you get off, if you really want to challenge fate,” he says, and tells the driver to stop.

I step into the dark.

The streets feel like a newly bombed city. Garbage sacks. Fires. Men watching. The word gringo starts following me again and again. The air hurts my eyes. People say one hour in Bogotá is like smoking twenty cigarettes.

Prostitutes move in and out of dark gates whenever patrols appear. Buildings look ruined.

I bang on a hotel door and slide inside.

Not a brothel again, I think, but the joke lands too close to the truth.

That night my door flies open and two policemen storm in with pistols drawn. One barks about drugs. I tell them to go to hell. The older policeman presses the barrel of his pistol against my forehead and tells me to be very careful.

They search. Find nothing. Then they wave and say see you tomorrow, like it was a friendly visit.

The hotel owner whispers the truth. They wanted a bribe.

When they leave I run to the toilet and sit there a long time, trying to clean my clothes and my dignity.

JERRY, AND WAITING FOR A PACKAGE
The days become a loop. Call the Swedish embassy. Same answer. No package. Kill time. Repeat.

I meet Jerry McKinley from Canada. Short, round-bellied, glasses, quick tongue, indestructible confidence. He talks about peace marches, philosophy, women, money.

We play billiards in smoky halls. Drink beer. Talk. Dance. For a moment Bogotá feels almost survivable.

Then morning returns. Head pounding, air toxic, anxiety back. The embassy still says no.

ED RETURNS, SKIN FLAYED
Ed suddenly appears again at the hotel gate. One side of his body is scraped raw and blood-red. His bicycle is wrecked.

He collided with a bus, he says, and laughs like it is simply another chapter. He says he thought he heard angel music while he lay in the ditch.

He is alive. That becomes enough.

THE PACKAGE ARRIVES
After a month the embassy finally says it.

“The package has arrived.”

I rush there and see a gigantic parcel on the floor. The staff laugh. It came as diplomatic post because of the address.

They have sent a whole new rear wheel.

I laugh so hard it scares people. Two hours later I am back on the bike.

THE HUB OVERHEATS, I GET SICK
On a long downhill I smell something burnt. I look down and see grease spitting and the hub glowing red. I brake hard. The heat burns my hand. Schoolchildren laugh.

Later I vomit outside a hotel. My shirt is stained red from a nosebleed. The thermometer shows 37°C even late at night. I turn on a fan, lie down, and wonder if I am seriously ill.

At night I push the bike off the highway and pitch the tent in dry scrub, too tired to care if anyone sees. During dinner I fall asleep and wake when I hit the tent wall. I force myself to eat because the road does not accept weakness. I barely manage to make it to Medellín, where I meet up with Ed.

NENA, REST, AND THE DARÍEN QUESTION
Ed pulls me out of the collapse and exhaustion with a new plan. A bullfighter named Nena has invited him to her mansion outside Medellín. We go.

The house is big, colonial, full of books. For days I sit in a corner and read and rest like a man relearning how to breathe.

Later, in Santa Fé de Antioquia, we sit in the shade under a parasol. Ed finally admits what has been grinding him down.

“El Darién,” he says. “Honestly, Mike. What chance do we really have?”

I answer, too quickly, too brightly.

“It always works out.”

The lie tastes bad.

CHIGORODÓ, TURBO, AND BANDITS
The heat becomes unbearable again. Insects attack constantly. People gather around us and stare. Ed loses patience and snaps at them, and it worries me because it is not him.

A guidebook says Turbo is tough, wild, lawless. Tourists should avoid it.

The main street swarms day and night. Horse carts loaded with bananas. Sugarcane liquor. Police with weapons. Women moving through the street like they own it.

At night the avenue becomes brothels, smuggled goods, machetes on hips, fear in faces.

A woman screams. Bandits.

People drag us inside. Bars slam shut. Iron grates lock.

“They kill monos or kidnap them,” someone cries. White apes. Foreigners.

Then it fades as quickly as it started. Guerrillas, someone says, hunting for food and weapons.

DILVER, AND GETTING READY TO LOSE THE ROAD
We meet Dilver Pintor, head of the national parks service. He sits under a fan looking untouched by humidity.

“Do you know it’s ninety-five percent humidity in El Darién,” he says.

He explains what matters. The first stretch is the hardest. There is Bijao. There is a barrack. You will need guides. You cannot carry everything yourselves.

He arranges free transport over the Gulf of Urabá to Cristales.

I start selling winter clothing because no one needs thick sweaters in 33°C and that humidity. We make two sacks from flour bags and bicycle tubes because we don’t have proper backpacks. They are bad, but maybe good enough.

NIGHTMARE AND REALITY
The engine boat lifts and slams over the waves as we cross the Gulf of Urabá, a place people talk about with pirates and smugglers.

My body is weak again from illness. During the night I had a nightmare, a sacrificial place, angry gods, my life demanded as payment.

Now, moving toward the unknown, I can’t stop thinking about nightmares as warnings.

My stomach feels like an open wound of anxiety.

We have no reliable maps. No real information. Not enough money. After the bandit attack the banks in Turbo were closed.

Ahead, El Darién waits like a wall made of green.

And we are already moving toward it.

Five hours sleep.

A little more than five, if I’m being generous. Same the night before. Same for most of the team I suspect. That’s just how Defender X rolls. Full speed, even when all you do is sit in a car and watch the world slide past the window.

And I know how that sounds.

People look at this and think it must be easy. Good roads. Beautiful hotels. Fantastic food. No tents. No storms. No altitude. No real suffering.

But here I am now, at the end of this short relocation leg, feeling punished in the body and tired in the head in a way that surprises even me. Or maybe not. It has been the same every leg.

That is the strange tiredness of Defender X.

Five hours sleep.

Istanbul

A spectacular landing, and a tired mind

We arrived in Istanbul and checked in at the Four Seasons on the Bosphorus, a place I’ve had the honor to stay before. It is spectacular. Right on the water. Istanbul doing what Istanbul does. Layers of history and movement in the same breath. You look out and you’re watching two continents share the same narrow strip of water like it’s nothing.

I haven’t seen much of the city yet. I’ve mostly seen the inside of Land Rovers, hotel corridors, and hard drives.

And I’m tired.

Not just tired in the normal way. I mean that deep, dull, brain-dead tired where the mind doesn’t bounce back even when you finally get a few hours of sleep.

I didn’t get a full six hours last night either.

Five hours sleep.

Relocation

Smooth roads do not mean recovery

Right now the mission is relocation. Getting the Defenders to Istanbul for the big trip, the real start. And so far it has been suspiciously smooth. No breakdowns. No major chaos.

If you know Defender X, you know that often means something is waiting further down the road.

But I’ll take smooth days when they come.

Because smooth roads do not mean recovery.

Five hours sleep.

Princess and the Mothership

Two cars, one moving world

The cars have names, of course.

Jeff’s Defender is Princess. Steve’s is the Mothership. It sounds ridiculous until you’re a few days in and you realise the vehicles are part of the team. They carry the stories, the gear, the tired bodies, the half-finished ideas, the laughter that comes out of nowhere late at night when everyone should have been asleep hours ago.

On this leg, those cars became a moving living room. A rolling think tank. A comedy club at 110 kilometres per hour.

And then long stretches of silence.

That silence is one of the strangest gifts of the whole thing. Back home I almost never sit still like this. Here you are forced to. You watch landscapes change. You think. Time disappears.

And then, late at night, the work begins again.

Five hours sleep.

London to Reims

The start of something

We left London, dropped under the English Channel, and kept going until Reims. Big cathedral. The kind of place that makes you quiet for a minute even if you’ve been talking for hours. The drive was six or seven hours, but it didn’t feel like a slog. It felt like the start of something.

The crew from Canada and the US were jet-lagged and still showed up with energy and kindness. That says a lot. The discussions were brilliant. Not just the loud ones, the deep ones too, the ones where nobody needs to fill the silence. Then suddenly someone says something simple and it lands like truth.

The mission was clear. Relocation now. Real journey later.

And so far it was almost too easy.

Five hours sleep.

Reims to Munich

Transit, then atmosphere

Then came one of those transit days that never turns into a story. Reims to Munich. Seven to eight hours of highway. Asphalt, trucks, gas stations. Pure movement with nothing to hold on to.

Then Munich fixed that in five minutes.

We stayed in the centre at Platzl Hotel. Around the corner we ended up at Hofbräuhaus am Platzl, huge steins and proper beer food and that old-world atmosphere that feels like it’s been there forever.

After that we went to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski München and their cigar lounge was exactly what the evening needed. I smoked my first cigar in many years.

I’m not supposed to do that.

And that is another truth about these trips.

You do everything you shouldn’t.

You eat too much. You drink wine you never drink at home. You end the night with cognac. You smoke a cigar even though you know you shouldn’t. Not because you don’t care, but because you’re tired and you’re in it, and the whole thing becomes a small rebellion against your own rules.

And strangely, it’s also a relief.

A relief that comes with a price.

Five hours sleep.

Munich also brought back an old memory. Last time I was here was the European Cup final, Nottingham Forest vs Malmö FF, played in Munich on 30 May 1979. Trevor Francis scored the only goal. I remember the city feeling big, bright, and slightly unreal, just like it does now.

The miles matter, sure, but the real fuel is the team. The conversations in the evenings. Life, love, pain, suffering, the weird stuff we all carry, and the way people with different lives still somehow speak the same language when you put them around the same table.

We are trying to make a film together, learning each other as we go.

And even when you sleep in luxury, this is not comfort travel.

Four people in a Land Rover for twelve hours a day, give it a try.

Five hours sleep.

Budapest

The city, and the thin edges

By day four we woke up in extraordinary Budapest, in an extraordinary hotel with a view over a magnificent city. I haven’t seen much of it, but what I’ve seen, wow.

And still, the tiredness was building.

Everybody was tired. And when people are tired, they get emotional. Small things become big things. A tone of voice can start a drama. A misunderstanding can grow legs. You’re living in each other’s pockets, and even the calmest people have edges when the sleep debt stacks up.

Anything can happen.

It’s not danger that wears you down on trips like this.

It’s company.

Twenty-four seven company, except sleep. And even sleep is thin.

Five hours sleep.

For me, it always hits on day three. I don’t know why it is so consistent, but it is. The first two days are overwhelming. New people, new rhythm, constant input. Then day three hits like a wave.

This time we also had heavy, sad, life-changing news at the beginning of the trip. I’m not going into it. But it dominated me, especially on that third day. Later, with more facts on the ground, it levelled out and feels much better now. Still, it was one of those moments where you realise you can be driving through Europe and still have your inner world punched in the stomach.

And still, you keep moving.

Five hours sleep.

The work nobody sees

Protecting the story

Budapest was also work that never shows up in photos.

Sofie and Olly film. Trying to get images we need to make a great film. And then there is the job that sounds simple but carries responsibility.

Backing up.

Transferring footage.

Moving all the material from Sophie and Olly and the others onto hard drives. Making sure nothing disappears. It sounds like admin. It isn’t. It is protecting the story.

And it’s hard because you have so little time. You do it late at night when your brain is shutting down, and you carry this low-level anxiety that you’ve made a mistake. That you’ve missed a folder. That you’ve lost a moment that can’t be repeated.

So far, so good.

But it is not relaxed.

Five hours sleep.

Bulgaria

The pull of the East

From Munich we went to Bucharest, and then Bucharest to Istanbul. Yesterday’s drive was the most beautiful and most interesting of the whole trip, and that was because Google Maps took us off the main route and into the Bulgarian landscape.

And I loved it.

I have always been drawn east. Always have been. I have spent so much of my professional life in Russia and the former Soviet world. I’m a big fan of the Balkans and its people. There is something there that feels familiar to me. Something honest. Something that has survived a lot.

We curved through Bulgaria and I felt that pull again. The countryside that hasn’t changed enormously in places. And then the Soviet layers in concrete and brick.

Stalinka. Khrushchyovka. Brezhnevka.

You can read decades just by looking at the buildings. Brutal, practical, sometimes strangely beautiful in their own way.

Bulgaria was my personal highlight. I will return. In a different way. For sure. It was that interesting.

Five hours sleep.

Driving

The real marathon

It was over twelve hours in the cars. The drivers were exhausted. And still they were magnificent. Steve and Jeff. I’m in awe.

To keep that concentration hour after hour, to drive as well as they do, is impressive beyond words. The back seat can feel like hard work when you’re filming and talking and always on, but the real marathon is the driving. The constant alertness.

Two cars, two moods. Steve’s car: more music, more discussion, more party energy. Jeff’s car: calmer, quieter, more silent, which suits me.

And what surprises me every time is that I can sit for hours like this and actually enjoy it.

Nobody complains.

And that’s what makes this group special.

No complainers.

Five hours sleep.

The people

What I’ve gained from this trip

One thing I’ve gained on this trip is perspective on the people.

Jeff is like a brother to me. I would honestly die for the guy if I needed to. That’s how much he means to me. And on every trip we get this extra time, just me and Jeff, where we can talk about the important things in life. Not the schedule, not the convoy, the real things. We had that time again now, and it matters more than I can say.

Steve and I, our relationship has developed over the years. I really love that guy. He’s happy right now, and that makes me happy too. April is a major part of that and she’s fitting in well. No complaints. Just steady.

Sophie has been there from the beginning. Tough as steel. And one thing we have in common is that we are both extremely sensitive human beings, even if we don’t show it all the time. She performs on every trip and does a great job. Always.

Olly has fitted in so well. Social, talkative, works hard. A really good guy. A great addition.

Doug is such a grounded, down-to-earth guy. You could see the strain on him when we said goodbye. That tells you something. This is a hard trip, even when it looks easy.

And Meg.

Meg keeps the expedition together in every way. She works tirelessly. She keeps the flow, the people, the details, the logistics, the human side, all moving in the right direction. And she does it without ego.

She is also a true explorer and outdoor person. Sensitive, strong, beautiful in the way she is present. And for me, she is becoming a very good friend. Someone I trust in a way that matters on a trip like this.

Five hours sleep.

The paradox

Why it hits harder than Greenland, headwise

Now, here comes the part that people don’t understand.

I know how I feel after a Greenland crossing. That fatigue is clean. Physical. Honest. You suffer, you move, you sleep, you repeat. The tiredness makes sense.

This tiredness is different.

This tiredness is input.

People. Logistics. Conversations. Interviews. Planning. Decisions. Responsibility. Constant proximity. No real off switch.

A moving film set. A small society sealed inside two cars, running on five hours of sleep and adrenaline.

And that is why I can feel more tired after this short expedition than after a Greenland crossing, headwise.

Five hours sleep.

18 months

What I’ve stacked, and what it does

To understand the weight of it, you also have to understand what I’ve stacked recently.

In the last year and a half I crossed Greenland first. Then Kilimanjaro with the Kensington Alpine Club. Then Kyrgyzstan with my girls. And then the Ecuador climbs, also with the Kensington Alpine Club.

That’s a lot of strain in eighteen months.

And now, after one week of mostly sitting, I feel punished. The mind fatigue is as bad as the body fatigue.

People think comfort equals recovery.

It doesn’t.

Five hours sleep.

The body keeps score

Food, digestion, warning lights

I’ve gained three kilos. That shows how much I’ve eaten and how little I’ve moved. And when I’m completely run down on all levels, emotionally and brain-wise, I eat like a monster. It’s not hunger. It’s a reflex. The body trying to compensate for stress, noise, and lack of recovery.

Then you pay for it at night. Digestive problems. A system that can’t settle. Food and drink that would feel like celebration on a normal day becomes a shock to the body.

And the Oura ring doesn’t lie.

On and off it screams. Severe warning lights. The kind of signals I normally only see after the big expeditions.

That’s how intense this is, even when it looks easy.

Five hours sleep.

I also know my baseline now. The days I don’t do yoga and McGill’s Big Three almost don’t exist. Yesterday I missed it. This morning I did it. I’m hanging on to those small routines because they remind the body and mind that there is still a centre somewhere.

Still, I honestly feel like I need a month to recover and get back to where I was.

A month.

From a week.

That should tell you everything.

Five hours sleep.

Luxury and strain

The last paradox

And here is the last paradox.

We are living in luxury. Fantastic hotels. Fantastic food most of the time. And still Defender X puts you through extraordinary challenges. Not physical suffering, but human suffering. The strain of constant proximity. The emotional swings under sleep debt. The tiny dramas. The bigger truths. The way people get shocked in body and mind by everything at once.

And yet, I feel incredibly honoured, incredibly privileged, to be part of it.

Because we get to see what we see.

We get to build something together.

And we get that rare thing in modern life.

Time.

Hours of road. Hours of thinking. Hours of forced stillness. Hours of silence that turn into perspective.

Five hours sleep.

PS. Drone and slow-mo edits Olly Pemberton, photo Sofie Rördam. DS

The Greenland Crossing film.

Tomorrow I fly to London.

It’s one of those sentences that should sound simple. Like it means meeting a few people, eating a half-dry sandwich at an airport café, searching for the right gate, and landing somewhere with tired eyes and a charger you’ve forgotten.

For me, that sentence means something else entirely.

It means stepping into a world where two cars have names, where friendship can sit in silence for hours without anyone getting scared, where one man can talk day and night and still be loved for it, and where I sometimes get asked why I’m doing this when I’ve done expeditions that actually hurt—properly.

It means, once again, climbing into a diesel vehicle and thinking that life is short and we have to make use of it, even when some culture critic—or someone online—thinks you should stay home and be ashamed.

This is Defender X, and a new journey is beginning.

How the idea began

It started with Jeff.

I see Jeff as a brother. One of my very best friends. We’ve known each other a long time—since 2011—and the strange thing about Jeff and me is that we don’t need to talk all the time. We can sit in silence for a long time and it doesn’t get awkward. It just becomes quiet.

Jeff wanted to do something together. Something big. So did I. That’s what happens when two people who’ve both walked a long way through life realize there’s an empty space between everyday routine and dreaming. You can fill that space with more meetings, more emails, more things you “should” do. Or you can fill it with something completely unnecessary, completely absurd, and therefore essential.

Jeff leads—and when Jeff leads, it’s cars.

He loves his vehicles. He loves driving. He’s driven around the world twice, I think, when he was younger, in a Land Rover. It’s in his body. For him, the steering wheel is meditation.

I don’t love driving in the same way. I love other things. I love people, stories, silence, the feeling of being far away and yet fully present. But I love Jeff. And I love what we become when we do something together.

At first we talked about Africa. The classic dream. Long distances, dust, heat, and a feeling that the world was still big.

But Jeff didn’t think it was as exciting anymore. The world has changed. There are paved roads almost everywhere, and even where there isn’t asphalt there’s a kind of modernity lying over everything like a thin film. Cell towers, plastic, rules, progress. Sometimes it feels like the volume of adventure is being turned down, as if someone is lowering the sound on life.

Then Jeff read somewhere about an old idea: driving from London to New York.

And that’s where it began.

Someone—I can’t remember if it was Jeff, me, or someone else—said that Steve Brooks had tried to cross the Bering Strait with some homemade machine. He had at least made it from Alaska to the Russian border. There was something about that which felt like the last big crack in the map. That open space where modern life still doesn’t have full control.

So we asked Steve if he wanted to join.

He did.

And suddenly there were three of us. Three men with different temperaments, different rhythms, but the same strange hunger: to do something we believed hadn’t been done. To find a line on the map that still fights back.

The idea was simple in its madness: London to New York. Not by shipping the vehicle and flying after it. But in the same vehicle, all the way. That meant two major obstacles: the English Channel and the Bering Strait.

The sea.

That was where everything became difficult. That was where it became interesting.

The team tested. Built. Modified. We talked. We broke things. We rebuilt again.

The idea also became to make a film.

I needed someone I could work with. That became Sofie Rørdam. I met her up in Tromsø at a pitch. She was also working on a Greenland film which is now finished and winning award after award. It’s called Walls.

Sofie is artistic, tough, a filmmaker who fits into any group. She can be soft and hard in the same second, and she has that ability real filmmakers have: seeing what others miss, and still having the stamina when it gets tiring, cold, and complicated.

And then we truly began.

What we’ve done

One day we left Steve’s farm and headed for Siberia.

It was an incredible journey through Europe and Russia. For me, the moment we entered Russia was the best part of everything.

Russia is a country that can make you feel small and enormous at the same time. The roads can be terrible, and yet the distances feel like a kind of truth. People can be hard, and yet there’s warmth under the surface like embers.

We made it to Chita.

Chita is known for the fact that Mikhail Khodorkovsky spent a long period in prison there. During Soviet times the area was closed. That alone gives the place a certain tone. You feel history sitting in the walls, in the air, in the faces.

That’s where the journey ended.

Then the war in Ukraine began, after Russia’s invasion. And that route was over—not by our choice, but because the world changed.

Somehow we managed to get both vehicles out of Russia and into Mongolia, with the help of Misha and Olga, who were with the cars from Chita to Ulaanbaatar. It was logistics, contacts, negotiations—one of those puzzles where, in the end, you don’t know if you’re an expedition man or a customs agent.

In Mongolia we tried to find ways to continue. But we couldn’t get through China from that direction. The world is big, but it’s also full of doors where someone else has the key.

In the end, the vehicles were shipped to Canada.

And then we flipped everything around. We drove the other way. Across Canada. Then down along the Yukon River.

I wasn’t on the Yukon. I was away in Kyrgyzstan with my daughters and missed that dream journey. But I understand it was huge. I’ve seen the glimpses. I’ve heard the tone in people’s voices.

The cars are called Princess and The Mothership.

Even that is a small novel. Two machines given names, and therefore turned into characters. Two steel bodies everyone projects their dreams onto.

In the beginning there was a lot of trouble with the vehicles. There always is. Machines have moods of their own.

And the biggest part—the one that still burns in me—still remains: the stretch from Chita all the way to, and over, the Bering Strait.

Whether it will happen, we don’t know. But I know everyone wants that chapter. It’s the great white space, the great question, the one that still doesn’t have an easy answer.

I hope it happens in winter. I want it to be winter. For me, that’s when it becomes real.

But in the meantime, we’re doing something else.

We’re getting ready to go from London to Sydney.

What we’re doing now

This is the new plan.

London to Sydney.

I say it slowly to myself and try to taste it. It tastes absurd. It tastes like fuel. It tastes like dream.

The big challenge is to get permission to pass through Central Asia into China, and then make our way from Southeast Asia over to Australia. How long it will take, I don’t know. It could go fast. It could go slow. There could be stops, setbacks, waiting, detours, and new plans.

But we begin now.

Tomorrow I fly to London together with Sofie. On Saturday we drive. A week to Istanbul, more or less, to relocate the vehicle, as Jeff says.

It sounds so business-like when Jeff says it. Relocate. As if we’re moving a printer from one office to another.

In reality it means squeezing four people into one vehicle and four into the other, and seeing what happens to human beings when they have to share air, time, silence, irritation, joy, and that strange kind of closeness that only appears when you’re on the move.

It will be tight. Four per car. I’m not even sure we’ve done it like that before.

It will be exciting.

The people inside it

Four of us have been the constants.

I’ve always been Jeff’s wingman. I’m his friend. His quiet support. We can sit for hours without talking. No music. Nothing. Just the road.

In the other vehicle is Steve.

Steve talks 24/7. Around the clock. And somehow it’s also a gift. He fills the air. He fills the silence before it even arrives. He can talk about almost anything, and he does. He’s financially secure, he’s done all kinds of adventures in his life, and he has a big personality you can hear and see.

Steve also competes in some kind of classic Formula 1 series. He loves driving. For Steve, the car is both identity and playground.

I met Steve for the first time through his ex-wife Jo. I received a medal at The Explorers Club. That’s how it began. Now he’s divorced and has met a new woman, April, from the Philippines, and she’s coming along.

That’s interesting, because it’s one of the first times we’ve had a close partner with us in the vehicle for a longer period. It might change everything. It might change the dynamics, the responsibility, the way people look at each other. It could get softer. It could get harder. It could get better. We don’t know yet.

Sofie has been there from the start. She’s mostly been in Steve’s vehicle. She handles the filming. She fits in everywhere, and she keeps things together when people start getting tired.

And now we’re four more.

Meg Hine has been with us since Canada. Meg is in more or less the same world as I am: TV, film, adventure. She’s a fantastic personality and coordinates a great deal. She has a way of making things happen without making a big show of it, and in projects like this that’s invaluable.

Doug Patteson is with us too, known as The Texas Spy, and he spent many years in the CIA. A wonderful man, roughly the same age as several of us. His social competence is obvious. He reads rooms. He reads people. In a group like this it’s like having an extra compass—not for the road, but for the mood.

And this time we also have Olly Pemberton as filmmaker. On almost every trip we’ve had different filmmakers with us. Not everyone fits. That’s the truth. Film is hard. Travel is hard. People are hard. And sometimes it goes wrong. But we believe in Olly. We hope he can be with us for the entire journey.

This is the real adventure for me.

The group dynamic.

The pace and the reality

When people hear the word expedition, many imagine walking, freezing, starving, sleeping in tents, boiling water on a stove, and proving something with the body.

This is different.

Jeff and Steve love driving. They love their vehicles. That means our reality often becomes a tight schedule and long hours behind the wheel. There isn’t much space for anything else.

We originally thought we’d make a film where we met lots of people along the way. That’s not how it turned out—mostly because Jeff moves at a high tempo and runs a big company that still has to be managed. He’s a visionary, but he’s also a man with a calendar.

So we drive long hours every day. Road. Fuel. Gas stations. Fast food. Arriving late. Sleeping. Waking up. Doing it again.

And for me—someone who in other contexts can be the tent guy, the cooking guy, the knot-fixer, the heavy-carrier, the one who freezes—here I often become more like social company.

A passenger.

Sofie films. Jeff and Steve drive. And I sit there.

And yet I’m happy.

That says something about friendship.

It says something about how little you actually need for life to feel big.

External questioning, and why I’m still in

Sometimes I get the question: you’ve done expeditions that are purely physical—why this now?

You drive. Diesel. Three middle-aged white men. Everything is politically incorrect. Everything is wrong. The climate. The symbolism. The world burning while we turn the key.

I’ve heard it.

And I have to say it plainly.

I don’t care whether it’s politically correct or not.

Not because I’m stupid. Not because I don’t care. But because you can’t live an entire life trying to fit inside the fear that has become the new custom: not daring to have an opinion, not daring to do anything, because you’re terrified of bothering someone, terrified of being judged, terrified of not looking right.

I want to live.

And I want to say something else.

Jeff is a philanthropist. He gives back—properly. To nature, climate, and biodiversity. More than most people who have opinions about our journey will ever do. It’s part of his life. He’s generous in a way that can still make me feel embarrassed.

And there’s another dimension.

This journey is also a kind of inventor’s journey.

Building the constructions. Modifying the vehicles. Going down the Thames. Reaching Paris. Crossing the English Channel. Driving the Yukon River. In a Land Rover.

That is unique.

That is adventure. That is expedition. It’s coming up with new ideas, and sometimes ideas themselves are a kind of resistance against a world that has become too smooth.

And then there’s the simplest truth of all.

I feel extremely good with this group. These are people who understand you best. People you can relax with and simply be who you are.

It will be exciting to add new personalities. It will be tight. Four per car.

And there’s one thing I never forget.

Everyone who has been on these trips—no matter how crazy and chaotic it has been—wants to come again.

That says something.

It might be the best review you can get.

So yes, I’m in—until the end.

I hope I contribute something. I hope I’m more than just a man staring out the window. But even if I’m only that—even if I’m only a passenger in a story driven forward by others—I’m grateful.

Because the moments I have with Jeff, whatever they look like, are rich and valuable to me.

And now we begin again.

Tomorrow: London. On Saturday, we roll. One week to Istanbul.

Then, if the world allows it, farther.

Central Asia. China. Southeast Asia. Australia.

And somewhere far away, like a dream in cold air, that line from Chita toward the Bering Strait is still waiting.

I want that chapter in winter.

I hope we get it.

But first we just have to get the vehicle to Istanbul.

As if that were simple.

I’m publishing the journey here as a series. Some chapters are short, some long, and I still don’t know how many parts it will take to cover the whole ride. The previous post ended at the border, with the smiling “helper” who wasn’t helping at all. So this is where Ecuador begins.

Huaquillas

Huaquillas hits like a wave. The border town is a living organism, narrow muddy streets, a crush of bodies, men with briefcases and polished shoes drifting through the chaos like sharks who’ve learned to smile.

Within minutes two boys attach themselves to my bicycle and offer to guard it. A well-dressed man steps straight into my path, black portfolio under his arm, and tells me he can make me rich.

One dollar and you get one hundred and ten sucres, he says, cheerful, as if he’s offering friendship.

One of the boys leans in so close I feel his breath.

He’s lying. You get one hundred and ninety, señor.

The man doesn’t blink. He just adjusts his offer like the lie never happened.

I change money anyway, because sometimes you pay to end a scene.

On my way out of town I meet a westerner heading back toward Peru. He asks what it’s like on the other side.

A lot of dishonest people at the crossing, I tell him.

Same in Ecuador, he says. But the rest of the country is great.

Then, almost casually, he adds that the money changers here are famous for taking more than they admit.

Maybe I’ve just financed someone’s dinner. My gratitude toward the two boys evaporates as fast as it arrived. The border has that effect. It stains your mood.

A Dream Comes True, and Jealousy

In a matter of kilometres the landscape transforms. The dry, harsh emptiness disappears behind me and becomes a land of endless banana plantations, green and orderly, pressed up against rainforest that feels alive in a different way. The air turns thick. I sweat harder than I did in the desert.

Along the road people carry heavy bunches of bananas on one shoulder. Many of the faces I pass are darker than any I’ve seen so far, and the greeting is often a machete raised high, not as a threat, more like a salute.

This is the environment I dreamed about when I was younger, the rainforest as the true stage for adventure. And when the scenery finally matches the dream, something ugly wakes up too, a childish possessiveness, as if the jungle is supposed to belong to my imagination, and reality is trespassing.

In Machala I run into Steve and Christine again. Steve opens the door to his room and finds me standing there.

You again, he says.

He looks almost annoyed that we’ve ended up in the same hotel, but back in Piura I saw a flicker of jealousy pass through him. He’s a decent man. It passes.

We spend two days together. On the weekend the main street fills with Ecuadorian couples dressed in their finest, strolling hand in hand like they’re presenting themselves to the neighbourhood.

Farewells are always hard. When Steve and Christine cycle away through the crowd and out of my life, that familiar tragic loneliness settles on my shoulders again.

Masses of Bananas and Kind Indians

Early in the morning I pass Pasaje and take a gravel road toward Cuenca, 2,600 metres above sea level. The village ahead is covered by a heavy grey blanket of cloud.

The rainforest accompanies my clumsy attempt to push the bicycle uphill through rain-soaked mud. Then, as if the jungle decides to show mercy, the sun breaks through and everything changes. Steam rises from the road. Green becomes brighter than green has any right to be.

The road follows the Jubones River up toward its source and passes through small villages scattered along the valley. Every time I roll into a place like that I become an event. People stream out of courtyards and doorways as if they’ve rehearsed it, following me to the one shop marked by a Coca-Cola sign. Chairs appear. Something to drink appears. Questions arrive from every direction.

Do you need help, extranjero, someone asks behind me.

Before I can answer, three men have taken positions behind the bicycle and are pushing it up the steepest section as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Bananas are everywhere. Every house seems to sell them for ridiculous prices, and often I don’t even have to ask. They press bananas into my hands as if feeding a traveller is a duty.

It isn’t just the hats that separate the indigenous people here from their Peruvian cousins. It’s the faces. Sunburnt, wrinkled, full of laugh lines. Smiles that look permanent.

No matter how bad the road is, my mood rises.

Cuenca

Cuenca shakes my bicycle worse than the worst gravel road as I rattle down its cobblestone streets. The town is surrounded by colonial buildings that look strangely well preserved, white walls, golden roof tiles. For a large Latin American city it feels calm, almost relaxed, until I pass a market and the noise rises like a wave.

Indigenous people in colourful clothes sell guinea pigs, clay pots, bananas, clothes, baskets.

When I appear, silence falls. Then surprised shouts, as if someone has just seen the president riding through on a bicycle.

This is where I meet Henrique, who insists I stay with his family.

At dinner the Trujillos talk politics and society as naturally as other families talk weather. Henrique is a musician, but while I’m in town he takes time off to show me his Ecuador.

Cordero is nothing but a puppet in the hands of the military, he tells me, as if stating a fact anyone with eyes should see.

Henrique and the Farmer from Chunchi

Later we hitch a ride in the back of a Japanese Datsun being used as local transport between the Inca ruins of Ingapirca and the main road.

A farmer climbs in with his daughter and a large pig led on a rope. He shakes my hand with such force I feel every bone in my fingers protest. When he hears I’m from Sweden, from Europe, he lights up.

I’m from Italy, he announces proudly. I moved here thirty years ago when I met a woman from Ingapirca.

His teeth are so white they look unreal.

Where in Italy did you live, I ask.

He studies me, serious, as if searching his memory.

Mmm. Los Angeles, he says, triumphant.

Henrique bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing. The farmer continues as if nothing strange has happened.

I speak all the languages of the world, he says. All dialects. Even cow language and pig language.

To prove it he oinks, loudly and for far too long.

The car stops. The farmer jumps out, grabs the pig and his daughter, turns back and raises a clenched fist like a revolutionary.

Now I sell the pig, leave the wife and kid, and go to Australia.

His daughter starts crying. The pig says nothing.

Snowstorm and a Trio of Volcanoes

The first hours out are burning heat. The road is the worst I’ve ridden in the entire journey. More than once I feel anger rise so hard it turns into a lump in my throat, anger at the floods and landslides that have chewed Ecuador’s roads into pieces, anger at engineers who never learned to build tunnels.

Then I realise the indignation has become an asset. Every time I explode, I pull myself together and find a gear I didn’t know I had.

Fog rolls in and settles over the mountains like a blanket. It gives shade. Then, as if someone flips a switch, the sky opens and snow begins to fall, thick flakes, absurd in this latitude, absurd in this world.

The wind increases. On a descent toward a village at 3,300 metres it brakes me so hard my hands go numb.

There is only one sensible decision. I pitch the tent immediately. I choose the mountain side of the road, because the other side drops away into darkness for hundreds of metres, and I don’t want to be there if the wind decides to become violent.

Twelve hours later I open the tent flap. The storm has calmed. It is night.

Down in the valley, the electric lamps of Alausí glow. It feels like Christmas Eve.

I ride hard toward Riobamba to reach it before dark, leaning forward as if I can slice time itself.

Then it happens. I crest a ridge and three volcanoes rise in front of me like something summoned.

The biggest, the most beautiful, is Chimborazo.

Full Moon Shows the Way

Back in bed in Dala-Järna I used to daydream about Chimborazo. Now it stands there in front of me with a calm, magnetic pull. It doesn’t look like a mountain. It looks like a promise.

Rudolf has paid for Enrique and me to help him reach the summit. Enrique is the guide, the mountain man, sun-coloured face, expressive eyes, strength that seems built into the bone. Rudolf is less experienced, so he is placed between us on the rope.

The climb begins romantically in the night and turns brutal as the hours pass.

I have never been this cold in my life. My clothing is a joke at this altitude. Three T-shirts, a sweatshirt, my mother’s knitted sweater, all of it useless against the wind. My legs are fine as long as I move. If I stop, the cold cuts through both pairs of trousers as if fabric is imaginary.

We pause with our axes buried deep in the ice, clipped to the rope, breathing hard, fast, like we’re trying to drink air.

With a few hundred metres left, dawn begins to bleed into the sky. I turn and see our rope team lit by a full moon that looks too perfect to be real. I’ve been so focused on surviving each step that I almost missed the world around me. When I look down, into the emptiness beneath our crampons, excitement and fear hit at the same time.

Ohoj, señor ciclista, forward, Enrique shouts, hoarse.

Pick up the pace before the sun warms the snow and causes trouble, he adds.

Rudolf is on all fours, trying to breathe. His exhaustion is frightening.

I drop into a sitting position on the nearest flat, trying to force air into my lungs. The summit is only a few hundred metres away, but the fatigue feels infinite. My throat is dry as the Atacama. The wind takes a little more of me every second.

The chocolate biscuits we brought are frozen solid, useless. Enrique sees my struggle and hands me dried meat and a small strawberry yoghurt as if he’s giving me oxygen itself.

He asks, almost teasing, whether we should turn back.

I decide to say yes, but my mouth says no.

My trousers have frozen stiff where they touched the ice. Standing takes two tries. But when I finally move again, something returns, stubbornness, pride, life.

Two poles with flags mark the summit, 6,310 metres. I grip them as if they can prove the moment is real. To the north, Cotopaxi rises above the clouds. I understand I’ve reached a limit in my body too, the far edge of what I can do.

Then the mountain reminds us of the oldest truth. The summit is only half the job.

On the glacier I spot it, a crevasse five metres wide, maybe twenty metres deep, a metre from my boots.

Rudolf is almost lifeless with exhaustion. Enrique hisses in my ear that Rudolf is too weak, that this will go badly.

I explode. Rudolf paid him. The job is to bring him down alive.

Rudolf hangs in the rope with terror in his eyes. When he reaches firmer snow he collapses and starts sliding toward a cliff edge where the mountain simply falls away.

The rope snaps tight at its limit. A brutal jerk.

But it holds, anchored in the axes Enrique and I drove into the ice.

Afterwards the silence is strange, as if the mountain itself is listening.

Rudolf survives the descent because he is clipped into two ropes. He falls often. But when darkness returns, we are back on flatter ground at base camp.

Road Profile and a Fatter Englishman

At the foot of the volcano Tungurahua lies Baños, picturesque, damp, wrapped in rainforest. I cycle into town in pouring rain, thinking I might attempt the cone.

I don’t even get to see the mountain. Tungurahua stays hidden behind thick clouds the entire time.

From Baños the road climbs brutally along the mountainside up to 3,600 metres, then drops just as violently toward Ambato. In Ecuador, altitude is not a number. It’s a personality.

I knew the road would be hard. I didn’t know it would be this miserable.

Later, back in Quito, I check into the Hotel Gran Casino. A half-naked, round-bellied man steps out of the shower and for a second I don’t recognise him.

Ed, I say.

We embrace, laughing, relieved. We haven’t seen each other since Arequipa. After weeks alone on the road, it feels unreal to stand together again in a capital city, preparing to face Colombia.

Ed suggests El Reventador, a dangerous volcano surrounded by dense jungle.

I have my own dream, older than the bicycle, older than reason.

The Auca.

The Mulatto, the Shadow, and the Napo River

With half a coconut we bail water from a rain-filled motor canoe. The storm over El Oriente is relentless. The little craft punches through choppy water and keeps going east, up the brown Napo River, heavy with legends of gold and aggression.

Beside me lies our guide, Sombra. Shadow. The name fits him in the dark jungle. He smokes constantly, which irritates Ed and me. We hired him in Misahuallí, on the western edge of the Amazon, because people claimed he had lived among the Huaorani and spoke their language.

Behind me sit the others, Ed, Martine from Belgium, and the two Swiss, Claude and Tasha. They have joined because the idea of the jungle sounds bigger than any other plan, and because group travel makes everything cheaper, even fear. But it doesn’t take long to understand we don’t all want the same thing.

When we step onto land, boots sink deep into mud. Nobody complains. If you want Indians and jungle, you accept the tests.

Rain thickens. The trail becomes harder and harder. Sombra leads, carrying food for a week, machete in hand, hacking vines that fight back.

The streams we crossed earlier without thinking have become rivers, deep and fast. At one crossing Sombra ties three long vines together, wraps them around his head, and swims into the current. On the far side he knots the vine around a tree.

One by one we enter the water, up to our necks, gripping the vine with cramped hands, dragged sideways by the force of the river until we reach calmer water and stagger into the green again.

The Hunter

Suddenly he is just there, in front of us.

Barefoot in mud, wearing only shorts, holding his weapons as naturally as a city man holds keys. He looks just as startled as we are, as if he didn’t expect to meet outsiders here either.

I see the stretched earlobes at once.

My chest tightens.

A living Huaorani.

Across his sinewy upper body hangs a quiver filled with curare-tipped darts, thin as matches. From his neck swings a club-shaped piece of hardwood. Sombra speaks to him softly, never taking his eyes off the hunter.

Then Sombra raises one bandaged finger in front of his mouth and signals silence.

Somewhere close, monkeys scream.

The hunter points to the muddy track. A footprint. He says something we don’t understand, then studies us for one last moment.

And then he disappears into the vegetation, blowpipes in his hands, swallowed by green.

For a few seconds I can’t move.

Claude nudges me forward, looking like a man who has waited his whole life for that single glimpse.

María

There is the village, Sombra says at last, pointing toward a spiky thatched roof on the far side of a filthy creek hidden by overgrowth. Two canoes are tied to a pole. Smoke rises in small puffs above the trees.

We wade across and follow a narrow path to huts raised on poles. An aggressive dog erupts at our arrival.

Sombra shouts something and, at the same moment, a strongly built woman steps down a staircase carved from a thick trunk.

We sleep here, Sombra says. The men are out hunting. They don’t come back until the hunt has been good. That can take days.

Three children stare at us from the corner, too shy to come closer. The woman, María, wears a bright yellow dress that looks wrong in this place, but her face is friendly. She avoids our eyes.

One child creeps forward and tugs my hair.

Adidas shorts.

For reasons I don’t like, disappointment prickles in me. They have been touched by our world.

Above the fire a hole in the roof lets smoke out. In the rafters hangs something that looks like a bat fetus until I realise it’s smoked monkeys.

Under the main building a small spider monkey is tied up. It screams whenever anyone approaches. The children throw themselves at it and yank its tail. Then they look at us, smiling, hoping for approval.

The sight makes my stomach twist. Do they think white people don’t feel?

It’s the first time we have seen white people in the village, María tells us, when we ask about her life. She speaks Spanish, which is lucky, because our local intermediary lies drunk inside the hut, useless.

My brother works for the oil company in Misahuallí, she says. He took me and my children there once, long ago. That’s where I saw other white people.

At first she answers cautiously. Then she grows curious, about who we are, where we come from. I notice she is most interested in what we own.

Would you like to live somewhere else, I ask, in Misahuallí for example?

Never, she says immediately. It’s noisy and dirty. And it smells bad. I could never live with that.

That night we sit in a ring around the fire after a meal of bananas and fried balls of flour and salt. The jungle becomes an invisible theatre. Fireflies blink. Insects sing in numbers that feel impossible. Somewhere, monkeys scream. The tied-up spider monkey answers with terrified cries.

And over everything, Sombra snores.

The Old Story

As the days pass, the mood in our group worsens.

I am irritated constantly by Sombra, who seems to believe we came here so he could lie in a hammock and be served food. He speaks about María as if she is his property, ordering her around while pretending it is tradition. He behaves like a petty dictator.

Eventually I snap. In pure childish spite I eat all the bananas on Sombra’s side of the bunch.

It makes him leap up, furious, and he begins to curse me, inventing new names as if language itself is a weapon.

Fine, he says. I take you piranha fishing.

We prepare for a long march.

Twenty-five metres from the house he pulls a thick slice of salami from his pack, hangs it on a hook, and throws it into the river as bait.

It is theatre.

That is the height of stupidity, I shout. Do you really think we’re that stupid? Piranhas are harmless unless there’s blood.

Sombra mutters, casts his line, then returns to his hammock and lies down again.

Now you manage on your own, he yells.

The rain finally stops, but the trails remain mud.

Hours pass. Sombra says nothing. Instead he increases the pace as if trying to break us. We half-run up and down steep little hills until smoke appears ahead and buildings rise out of the green, huts like María’s but larger, tin roofs, a settlement that looks like any medium-sized village.

When we stumble in, we see people dressed like in any small town in Ecuador.

For a moment I believe we have seen the journey’s only Huaorani hunter, a single flash of the dream and then nothing.

We are angry, all of us, and we agree we want to return to Misahuallí before the paid week is over.

Sombra points at me as if the failure is mine.

You are like a poison spider, he shouts. You spread poison and destroy life for the others.

People gather around us, curious. Sombra’s anger infects the air so quickly that those who come close step back again, faces hardening.

Then an old sick woman steps forward.

Her earlobes are stretched, long.

This is still a Huaorani village, I realise. Most people simply hide it under long hair.

The old woman begins to speak.

Sombra translates reluctantly.

Her story is mythic and brutal. It moves through time like a river, through loss and sickness, through contact and dependence. She coughs violently mid-sentence and spits thick clumps of mucus. Her nose runs and she wipes it with her dress as if dignity is a luxury.

The story ends where so many stories end. Poverty. Jealousy. Money. Young men leaving to work for the oil company. Traditions abandoned. Happiness and harmony dying quietly when the white man’s ideas entered the village.

When she finishes she begs for headache tablets.

Claude gives them to her.

Something in me hardens.

Later I turn on Ed, angry that he helped create one more thread of dependence.

He answers in his stammering English, sharp for once, that perhaps I have done worse, with my camera and my backpack.

He’s right.

While she spoke, I took a photograph from the hip without her noticing. The others tried too.

It feels wrong now. An intrusion.

I’m not mature as a traveller yet, I tell Ed.

He looks at me and says nothing, but his silence is agreement.

You can’t travel by walking through the world inside a dream. You have to live in the present, in reality. Otherwise travelling becomes a life of bitter discoveries and miscalculations.

On the way back down the Río Napo we are quiet. The river has lost its shimmer of adventure. It looks like any wide, dirty river.

I am most disappointed in myself, for behaving like an immature tourist, someone who wants “wild people” to exist for his private story.

The Smell of Diesel and a Longing

We are thrown back and forth in a cramped bus. Diesel fumes push in through cracked window frames along with fine sand that, in a few hours, seems to have invaded every corner of the rattling vehicle.

It’s the middle of the night. To stay awake the driver blasts cumbia at full volume. A few passengers join in, singing loudly, as if noise could keep fear away.

When I ask why the lights are kept on, the ticket seller shrugs. Guerrilla unrest, he says.

That answer comes with a consequence. We can’t take the direct road. We’re forced onto a detour.

Five hours disappear.

At the next stop, the ticket seller announces that prices have gone up. The bus answers him in one voice, anger and exhaustion boiling together. Nobody believes in “extra costs” in the middle of nowhere, not at this hour.

The road is so broken it feels as if the bus is lifted and dropped again and again.

At some point before dawn I crawl out of my sleeping bag, pull on damp clothes, and sit there dreaming of the bicycle, the simple honesty of movement earned by effort.

After sunrise the air finally warms my stiff body. At a roadside stop I boil something hot, force down a heavy breakfast, and listen to birds begin their clean chatter as if the night never happened.

Never more bus, I say.

Ed nods.

Fourteen hours later we reach Quito, having covered barely three hundred kms, a journey measured in misery, not distance.

Geoconda

Will you come back?

Tears run slowly down her cheeks. In one week with Geoconda life has been intense in a way that feels too private to explain. We stand in a bus terminal surrounded by voices and movement, waiting for the bus to Ambato.

A woman here is not respected if she is not married, she says. Miguel. Please. Come back when you’ve finished your mission. Love me, marry me, live with me.

She says it loudly enough that people nearby turn to listen.

Miguelito, you are the only one I have loved, and I will always love you.

The women around us sigh, as if they have heard this kind of drama before and still can’t help enjoying it.

I am touched by her declaration, but the last hours I have wanted one thing only, to return to dust and steep hills and the bicycle. Life becomes complicated the moment you step away from the bike. My emotions follow the same profile as Ecuador’s roads, steep up or steep down, very happy or very unhappy.

Ambato, Ambato, the ticket seller shouts.

No, no, now I will never see you again, Geoconda cries, theatrical, and everyone understands exactly what role they’re meant to play.

We embrace quickly, intensely.

She turns away, tears still running, and walks off on high heels that click rhythmically against the floor.

I’ll come back, I shout after her.

The people around us look satisfied.

But will I?

Cycling Joy

The sunset paints the sky red. On my stove a vegetable soup simmers. Far to the west dark mountains rise out of the glowing evening like cutouts against fire.

The air smells of flowers and rain that has just ended.

Ed and I camp on a plateau with a wide view over the Guayllabamba Valley far below. My body and mind feel more harmonious than they have in a long time.

The road out of Quito was brutal, long climbs carved into green cliffs. Sweat ran into my eyes. My clothes were soaked through. More than once I asked myself why I chose the bicycle over Geoconda.

Then a bus stopped unexpectedly ahead of us. Indians climbed out with arms full of oranges and placed them in our hands with quick smiles and questions, then climbed back onto the bus and continued with the windows open so they could wave encouragement.

With a sticky orange in my hand I understood something simple.

My choice was right.

Not one single joyless day in the saddle.

Mr Sismey Philosophizes in Tulcán

Isn’t it strange, Mike, Ed says, that the moment you step off the bicycle you’re faced with restlessness and a head full of negative thoughts?

The room we’re staying in is enormous. Once, Hotel Granada was one of Tulcán’s finest. Now it’s barely possible to close the door without it threatening to fall off its hinges.

Tulcán sits at 3,000 metres, a cold border town. We are forced to wait here for a package from England.

In Peru someone stole Ed’s suitcase with camera and money. The same happened again in Quito. Now Ed hits the first real crisis of the trip. He feels hunted by bad luck, lonely, abandoned.

One reason I left, he says, is that I never managed to find a woman to share my life with. I would give up this adventure without hesitation if the right woman appeared. When I saw you and Tina together in Quito, I felt like the loneliest man in the world.

In Quito we stayed in a house full of Danish tourists. Tina was one of them. In the beginning I enjoyed her company, until everything became complicated enough that I fled to the coast. That’s where I met Geoconda.

Ed talks as if he’s trying to explain himself into endurance.

I tell him that tomorrow we cross into Colombia. New country. New culture. Sometimes changing the map is the only medicine.

Ed nods.

And we sit there in Tulcán, at the edge of another border, waiting for a package, waiting for the road to begin again.

I found a photo of myself the other day.

I’m sitting on a stone wall at Machu Picchu. The terraces run down the mountain like green steps, and the house foundations look like a chessboard of grey stone. I’m wearing a green cap from my military service days and I’ve got a crooked smile, as if I’m used to sitting in places like this. In reality I’m completely worn out. The photo was taken just after I’d arrived from the Inca Trail. Four days, I think. My first hike ever. I was so exhausted I could barely look around. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen.

My gear is lying beside me. A big backpack and a sleeping pad strapped on as a roll. When I look at that roll today, I think that everything I was, everything I owned, and everything I thought I needed, is right there. A tent. A spirit stove. A few packets of soup and a lot of pasta. And a body that had no idea how to live out in the mountains.

I set out on the Inca Trail without really knowing anything. From home I’d brought old army clothes, a hat and a pair of trousers. My friend Mikael Tännström, two years older than me, and someone I’d grown up with in the small village of Dala-Järna, had come along. We’d bought these big, clunky Swiss hiking boots before leaving London. They caused a stir in the city. I remember people laughing, delighted, on the buses. We thought we looked like hikers. We weren’t. We were two boys looking for adventure, convinced the right shoes would take us far.

Food was the clearest proof of how little I knew. The first night on the trail I shoved as much pasta as I could into the pot and topped it off with a splash of water. I didn’t know how to cook. The result was a sticky lump you couldn’t really chew or swallow. I fell asleep hungry in the ridge tent Tännström had bought before we left, for 600 kronor.

The next night I decided I’d be smarter. I left the pasta to soak overnight, night two out of three on the trail. In the morning it was nothing but flour and sludge. I barely got any food into me during the whole trek, and that’s what caused the trouble. I was dizzy. I went the wrong way often. I panicked. I slid down some slope. Not because the trail was impossible, but because I was completely inexperienced. I didn’t come from a hiking culture. I’d never walked with a pack in the mountains. I hadn’t grown up with trails and that neat, organized Swedish outdoors life. It started here. With hunger, heavy missteps, and a spirit stove I thought I could handle.

And yet I was happy. I remember that. It was exciting. I was curious. I felt free in a way I didn’t have words for back then. And when I look at the photo now, it’s like I see two things at once. A young guy trying to look cool in a cap and a t-shirt, smiling at the camera. And another guy behind that look, completely drained, getting his first lesson in the fact that the world doesn’t care if you’re romantic and full of dreams. It demands that you learn how to boil pasta.

There’s something about the photo itself too. It’s worn. A little faded. There are scratches, and a scar up in the image. I like that. Memories aren’t supposed to be perfect. They’re supposed to be what they were. A bit scraped, a bit bruised at the edges, the way I was.

Before South America I’d already been out traveling in other ways. Two summers I did Interrail through Europe, fourteen and fifteen years old. I slept on trains, in parks, in cheap guesthouses, hung around stations, met people I never would have met at home. Then I went out into Europe again and hitchhiked, with a vague idea that I’d find work somewhere. I never did. It became three, four months of roads, waiting, new faces, small conversations, and that feeling that life really begins when you leave your home ground.

A big part of my longing came from the library. The library was the center of my life. I borrowed seven or eight books a week. I read and read and got inspired. That’s where the world opened up. That’s where the maps were. The travelogues. The novels set in places I couldn’t pronounce. The library was my internet before the internet existed. And it was slow, in a good way. You had to search. Wait. Ask. And you had time to think while you waited.

Mikael Tännström and I had decided we were going to leave Sweden and try to build a future abroad. The first idea was Australia. It made quite a splash in the local media that we were going. Curt Nilsson at the local daily ,Dala-Demokraten, newsroom in Vansbro was kind to me. I’d done my work placement with him, and now I was going to send reports home now and then. To me it felt like the beginning of a journalistic career. In reality, everything I sent was rewritten, so to speak. I wasn’t ready, but I got a sense that words could carry a journey. That you could be both the one who walks and the one who tells the story.

We ended up in Caracas, Venezuela. Tännström stayed a few days before he went back home. He missed his girlfriend Kerstin. He’d put her photo in his passport. When we sat at the travel agency sorting out tickets, his passport got passed around. Everyone looked at Kerstin, cheering. I had a photo of my girlfriend too, but it didn’t get the same attention, to my disappointment. That says something about the age. You’re old enough to cross oceans, but still young enough to care who gets the most looks in a travel agency.

I had just ended my first relationship before I left. She was six years older than me. An amazing girl. She wanted a steady life in Vansbro municipality, to stay, to settle. I had no interest in that. I wanted out. Not really to run from her, but because I couldn’t stand the thought of life being finished already. But I don’t remember fear. I remember curiosity. I don’t even remember my mother being worried. She let me go. And in hindsight it almost feels unreal.

When I look at my girls today, I often think of that kid in the photo. Would I let them, at seventeen, head off to South America with a tent, a spirit stove and a few packets of pasta, no phone, no insurance that covers everything, no constant contact home? I honestly don’t know. In some ways the world feels more dangerous now, even though it’s more controlled. They live in a time when everyone always sees what they do. When every choice can be compared to a thousand others on a screen. When they’re expected to know who they are before they’ve even had the chance to get lost.

It was a different time. There was no internet. No mobile phones. No blinking maps. No way to google what was waiting around the next bend. When you traveled, you really disappeared for a while. You called home sometimes from a phone booth if you found one. The rest of the time you existed only where you were. And maybe that did something to us. The world was bigger than our control. You had to ask people. Go the wrong way. Get hungry. Solve it.

Today the Inca Trail is something else entirely. Organized. Controlled. Regulated. Permits, bookings, groups, limits, guides. It makes sense in many ways. It protects this unique place. But it changes the feeling too. In my time it was rougher. More chance. More mistakes. I carried my own pack and my own faults. I went the wrong way because I didn’t know better. I learned by failing.

When I look at my girls and their generation, I think their journey is harder in a different way. They have access to everything, but they carry everything too. They live in a world where you’re constantly being seen. Compared. Measured. They somehow have to know who they are before they’ve even had the chance to get lost. And they carry a different kind of worry. The climate. The future. The pressure to perform. That feeling that you have to be right from the very beginning.

I wasn’t right. I was badly dressed, badly prepared, and I couldn’t even boil pasta. But I walked anyway. I kept going. And when I look at that photo, I think maybe that was my strength even then. Not bravery in some big heroic sense. Just curiosity so strong I didn’t have time to be afraid.

After that trip I started reading different kinds of books. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, things that pointed toward India. I wanted to go there. I went later. On that journey I met an Irishman who cycled from India to Nepal. And that’s where the ideas were born that later became my reality. Chile to Alaska by bicycle. All the journeys that followed. But it really begins here, with a young guy sitting on a stone wall in Machu Picchu with his backpack beside him and a sleeping pad strapped on as a roll, pleased on the surface and completely exhausted underneath.

And sometimes I think that’s what I want to pass on. Not that everything was better back then. It wasn’t. But that you can begin anyway. You don’t have to be finished. You don’t need a perfect plan. Sometimes it’s enough to walk. To learn along the way. To boil pasta wrong, to starve, to take the wrong turn, to panic, to get up, to keep going, and in the end to sit there and smile at the camera without understanding that smile will follow you for the rest of your life.

4 days. That’s what it took to claw my way off the Pacific and up into the Andes. About 125 kilometers that felt like a sentence being carried out. I left the Panamericana behind north of Lima and pointed the front wheel inland, straight into heat that had no mercy. The air was thick, the climbs never ended, and every village seemed to have a new reason to shout at the gringo on the loaded bike. By day three the road had turned into a long, punishing staircase of zigzags. By day four I was moving more by stubbornness than strength. When I finally reached the high point near Lago Conococha (about 4,080 meters), my mouth was dust, my legs were hollow, and the only thing keeping me upright was the thought that on the other side lay Huaraz and the long corridor of the Callejón de Huaylas.

At 4,100 meters the world changes its rules.

The air gets thin enough to feel like a personal insult, and the mind starts doing that strange accounting. Is this beauty worth the headache? Is this worth the nausea? Then the valley opens, clean, decorative, almost staged, like someone has arranged the landscape to make you stop complaining.

A lake sits off to the side like an afterthought. Small huts with reddish roofs dot the fields. Green and yellow squares of farmland frame the houses. And behind it all the mountains rise like guards that don’t blink.

Somewhere above, around 6,800 meters, Huascarán stands there. Silent, indifferent, wrapped in a pastoral cumulus cloud like a crown you’re not invited to touch. The kind of mountain that doesn’t need a story told about it. It is the story.

Everything it took to get here, the hours of swearing at the gradient, the suspicious stares, the constant gringo-noise, falls away for a moment. The mountains don’t argue. They don’t negotiate. They don’t care if you’re tired.

They just are.

And standing there, sick and small, I understand the worst possible thing.

I want more of this.

Alpamayo: a tongue of ice

The path turns nasty and I don’t mean challenging. I mean the kind of trail that makes you wonder whether you’ve mistaken stubbornness for a personality.

A kid appears, no older than ten, wearing torn clothes and a body that looks built from dust and altitude. He offers his services as my guide with the confidence of a man selling insurance.

“Watch out, gringo. The road is dangerous. I know the trail and the risks.”

He names his price: 500 soles (20 USD) and delivers it like it’s the deal of the century. I’m not sure if he’s trying to save me or rob me with extra steps.

He shouts warnings as I climb, his voice shrinking behind me as the trail rises.

“Watch out for dangerous animals, gringo! Pumas hang in the trees!”

A few steps later:

“The mountains are full of thieves and homosexuals, gringo!”

It is absurd. It is offensive. It is strangely hilarious in the thin air. And then his voice disappears completely, swallowed by the altitude.

I keep going.

My goal is a place with a name that feels like it was invented by someone who wanted to scare children. Quebrada de los Cedros.

A canyon at 4,500 meters, ringed by high peaks, a cold bowl of stone where the only way in is over a pass of 5,500 meters. The math is simple: once you’re in there, getting out won’t be easier.

That’s the point.

If you get real altitude sickness inside a canyon like that, you can’t rest your way out of it. You descend or you might even die if you get hit with altitude sickness. And descending means admitting defeat to a mountain that never even learned your name.

I arrive wrecked. Every muscle protests. My eyes ache with fatigue. And still, I can’t stop staring.

Because Alpamayo, one of the world’s most beautiful peaks, hangs its glacier out over the dark cliff like a long thirsty tongue. Below it, a green lake waits like a lie. I stand there until darkness eats the last light.

Up here silence has weight. It presses on the eardrums until you can hear your own breath as if it belongs to someone else. I imagine Buddhist monks chanting in my skull. The small pains in the body relax one by one. Even the sharp Andean grass stops tormenting my skin.

And then, with a kind of quiet violence, I understand something else.

This isn’t my death.

It’s a turn.

A week alone among powerful mountains resets the senses and the body. It scrapes clean the stupidity that daily life smears over you.

The hut, the fire, and the flayed guinea pigs

After a week I reach a village, Colcabamba and meet the first people in days.

They smile. I mirror it back. The transaction is simple, human, clean.

I stay with an Indigenous family in a clay hut. In the middle of the house: the gathering point, the altar, the heat and the fire.

Meat dries from the rafters.

On the floor, guinea pigs chase each other like children who don’t know what’s coming.

Because soon they will.

They’ll be flayed and hung up there too, and the house will smell of smoke and survival and routines older than any map I carry.

The woman of the house, María, speaks to me about life as an Indigenous person in Peru now, how their culture gets worn down day by day, how power tries to erase language, how violence is never far away.

And when she names Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, as the only ones fighting for their rights, she says it with a fear that sits under every word. Not sympathy. Not support. A warning. The kind you give when the walls have ears.

I eat what I’m served. I listen. I don’t pretend I understand more than I do.

Sometimes adventure is just being quiet in someone else’s reality.

Snowstorm, theft, and the first puncture

Back down on the road to Huaraz, Peru stops being sublime and starts being practical.

A truck is stuck in deep snow. Men are digging with shovels like their lives depend on it. I offer help, caballeros, and they answer yes in a single voice.

I throw my backpack up onto the truck bed so I can work freely. We wrestle the truck loose together. For a moment it’s teamwork, warmth, shared effort against weather.

Then I climb up to get my pack.

And it’s sitting among a cluster of people. One of them looking like he has been hit in the head by my own bag when I tossed it up.

A small thing. An accident. The kind of misunderstanding that becomes dangerous when you’re foreign and tired and everyone else is poor.

Later, in Huaraz, I discover the real cost, someone has stolen my camera. A camera with a film roll inside, containing exactly one miserable photograph.

A whole drama follows. Police, corruption, the oily feeling of being trapped inside someone else’s system. A clerk wants money to write the paperwork for my insurance. I fight it until I’m sick of my own voice.

My trust sinks low, down into the same place as my mood.

Then a checkpoint orders: “You are not allowed to photograph through Cañón del Pato.”

I answer honestly.

“I don’t have a camera.”

And the soldier, glad, satisfied, says: “Good.”

Peru. Where losing your camera becomes permission to pass.

Not long after, on a curve, I don’t see the road turn and I drive straight into the mountainside.

I end up on the ground listening to air hissing out of the rear tire.

My first puncture.

At 8800 kilometres.

As if the country has been waiting to give me a signature slap.

An angry, stupid gringo

I reach the Pan-American Highway. The desert. The long flat heat.

And then I get company. A young guy on a bicycle too big for him, pedaling like he’s chasing a dream.

“Gringo! Where are you from?” he calls out, bright and friendly.

I’m exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that makes friendliness feel like an attack.

I ignore him.

“Gringo! Why are you so angry?” he persists.

Something ugly rises in me. I turn and scream. The kind of rage that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with months of friction.

At one point I brake hard, let him pass, then chase him and collide into his back at speed so he flies off the road.

It’s insane. It’s shameful. It’s the moment where you realize you’re not a hero in your own story. You’re just a tired man who can become dangerous when pushed too long.

I pedal away fast, thirsty enough to risk stopping at an oasis I’ve been counting on.

Someone’s voice says: “Here, gringo. It’s an orange. Eat.”

I shove it in my mouth. It’s so dry and hard to swallow it feels like eating a golf ball.

Then the sun knocks me down. Literally. Darkness and light mix. I’m on the edge of passing out.

A truck stops. Strong voices tell me to drink mate de coca. Drink slowly.

When I look up, it’s two giant men who have pulled me out of the ditch of my own stupidity.

They shake their heads.

“Los gringos…” they say, like I’m a category of problem.

I check my watch. Twenty minutes have passed. It feels like hours.

I sit for a long time while the truck drivers give me water.

Then I climb back on and immediately meet a hill so long it feels personal.

At the top, I see two people waving by a woman’s house. Two bicycles leaning against the wall.

It’s Steve and Christine.

And for the first time in a long while, the world gets lighter.

Mental capacity

In Trujillo, Peru’s second-largest city, I get to know them. And I realize something I should’ve understood earlier:

The best adventures aren’t won by legs.

They’re won by mind.

Every day, if you want the best out of a journey like this, you have to manage your inner weather. Your mental status. Your self-talk. Your ability to take humiliation and heat and hunger and still be a decent human being.

Steve and Christine’s kindness doesn’t just help, it changes the math of the road. We spend a few days together, then we split up.

Later, on the edge of the Sechura Desert, a policeman sits in the shade by a barrier.

He asks: “Americano?”

I shake my head.

“Inglés?” he tries.

I shake again.

“I’m from Russia,” I say, dead serious.

For a second he looks confused, then he explodes into delight.

“A Russian! I can’t believe it! Not every day we see Russians cycling here! Come, this we must celebrate!”

He ignores my passport, ignores my protests, and produces bottles from a dark room like a magician who only knows one trick.

“Fiesta!” he shouts.

That night becomes a blur of cheap liquor and me improvising lies about the hard life in Russia to entertain drunk police officers in the desert.

It is ridiculous.

It is also useful.

Because sometimes the only way through a place is to let people have their story of you.

Even if you have to borrow an accent and a country to survive the evening.

Despair in Piura

In Piura, I wait for a package. A a new camera sent from home.

Waiting turns into punishment.

Days pass. The post office staff shake their heads as if I’ve asked them to deliver the moon. I go twice a day anyway, because hope is a kind of addiction.

I read three library books in English. I watch the only two films in the oasis cinema.

Two karate movies.

I wake each morning with crying stuck in my throat. Restlessness chews through my brain. I find myself furious at the world, at people, at the word gringo—as if any of that is new.

Then, finally, the package appears at the post office like a miracle someone got bored of delaying.

I celebrate too hard. I kiss the cashier. She blushes with joy.

One hour later I’m back on the bicycle.

Because relief is not rest.

It’s just fuel.

The last stone

If you pass a village, dogs chase you. If you stop, people come out to stare at the stupid gringo on the bicycle, and someone shouts gringo like it’s a sport.

Near Zorritos, close to the Ecuadorian border, a boy runs out and throws a stone that hits me in the chest.

I snap.

I grab a bigger stone and chase him.

He flees into a shop.

I throw the stone through a window with full force.

The sound is immediate and final.

Glass breaks. Fishermen pour out of the building. Angry, loud, moving like one organism.

But I’m already riding at top speed, escaping by instinct, ashamed and relieved at the same time.

At the border, customs officers are, like everywhere, surprisingly polite. They empty all my equipment onto the floor for inspection. No one raises a voice.

An hour later, I roll into Ecuador.

I turn back toward Peru and give it a goodbye gesture with my middle finger.

Not because I hate the country.

Because I hate what it dragged out of me.

Ecuador: black market angels

At the border town, the human crowd feels like India. Dense, loud, overflowing.

The muddy streets are full of men with portfolios under their arms, selling everything from bananas to televisions. Every face is watching, calculating.

A gentleman in a dark suit steps up, flashing money.

“My sir,” he says, “I will make you rich. For one dollar, you will get 110 sucres.”

One of my self-appointed guards leans close and whispers:

“He is fake like a dog. You get 190 sucres for one dollar, señor.”

This is how the world works at borders. Predators competing over the same meat.

And I stand there, sweaty, tired, still carrying Peru inside my ribs, trying to decide who is lying the least.

To My Daughters, Eva and Dana

Girls,

It’s two in the morning. One of those nights again. You know the ones, when I get up, make a strong coffee, walk around the house, and try to convince myself not to check the news. And then I do it anyway.

I’m in a kind of shock about the world right now. It feels like it happened fast. Too fast. As if we slid from it’ll be fine to this could turn dangerous for real without anyone managing to hit the brakes.

And I’m writing this because you are the most important thing in my life. Not because I think everything is doomed, but because I want you to understand how I’m thinking and what I hope you’ll carry with you.

What has changed. When rules stop holding

When Russia went into Ukraine, something broke. Not only a war, a rule.

After the Second World War, the world built a framework meant to make life less barbaric. In the UN Charter there’s a principle so simple it almost sounds naïve. You don’t threaten or use force against another country’s borders or independence. Small countries were supposed to have the same right as big ones. Borders should not be changed by violence.

That principle is being trampled now. And that’s why it feels different.

It’s also why what’s happening in the Arctic, and around Greenland, scares me in a new way. Ukraine is horrific, but it lives farther away in the body. The Arctic is close. It touches Denmark. Norway. Sweden. Our seas. Our weather. Our security.

Part of this fear is psychological, and completely human. When something moves closer, the distance disappears, and it stops being a headline. It becomes a feeling in the stomach.

And the Arctic isn’t just ice and polar bears. It’s resources. New sea routes. Strategy. Great powers moving pieces on a board while the ice melts. It’s a place where climate and geopolitics meet and that is not a good combination.

The world is becoming us and them again

You asked me at dinner why I’ve been so affected by all of this.

One answer is that I never believed we would so quickly return to a time where authoritarian leaders become normal again. That the United States, which for many people has been a symbol of openness and freedom, would harden in tone, become more authoritarian and drift toward cynicism. That Russia would continue down its path. That China would become more assertive toward the world.

Everything starts turning into us and them. More closed borders. More suspicion. More controls. As a traveler, I’ve never felt it as clearly as I have in recent years.

And there are forces behind this that are bigger than any one person. Fear after repeated crises, growing inequality, economic insecurity and a digital world where algorithms reward anger, conflict, and simplification.

It’s hard to build a society on that.

Climate. The quiet force that pushes in the same direction

The other thing keeping me awake is the climate.

Climate is not a separate issue sitting next to everything else. It’s an amplifier. It makes hard things harder, food, water, prices, conflict, migration, stability.

Globally we’re seeing more extremes. Heat waves, drought, downpours, floods, fires. Crops fail. Prices jump. People are forced to move.

And we feel it at home too. Not as apocalypse, but as change. Milder winters, rain on snow, shorter seasons. Places like Sälen and Lima in northern Sweden become symbols of it. Winter is less reliable, and that affects the people who depend on it.

I also think about our cabin in Lima. For me it isn’t just a house. It’s a place where you can breathe. Where you can live simply. Where you might cope better if the world becomes more unstable, whether it’s power outages, storms, or simply the need for calm.

Freedom then. Limits now

I recently listened to Martin Kragh,a Swedish security-policy and Russia/Eastern Europe analyst, in a Swedish radio interview. He said something that stayed with me. He could travel freely as a teenager, but his children will live in a more limited world.

I recognize that.

When I was 13–15, I moved around in a way that felt natural. There were risks, of course, but the world felt open. Today it’s different. Not only because of war and threats, but also because of climate, economics, surveillance, and the fact that everything gets documented, judged, compared.

The limitation isn’t only about where you’re allowed to go. It’s also a feeling. That the future is not endless, but conditional. That you have to weigh things, think longer, be more deliberate.

That can feel heavy. But it can also grow something good. Responsibility, maturity, care and a deeper kind of freedom, the kind that doesn’t depend on someone else paying the price.

What I think you already have

And here is the most important part.

I don’t think you are helpless. The opposite. I think you already carry things many people never learn.

You’ve lived outside. You’ve been cold and laughed and solved problems. You know you can manage with little. You know cooperation is not a slogan, it’s survival. You’ve seen the world with your own eyes, not only through a screen.

What we need to keep practicing is two kinds of courage. The quick courage. To speak up when something is wrong, even if it makes you unpopular. The long courage. To keep doing the right thing for years, even when it’s slow and nobody applauds.

And one more thing. Stay close to people who want good. They exist. They just don’t always dominate the news feed. But we meet them everywhere when we travel.

And still, we go on an expedition this summer

I’m not writing this to scare you. I’m writing it so you understand I take the world seriously.

But I also want you to feel what I felt when I grew up.

I was born in 1962 and raised in Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The Swedish welfare-state model wasn’t perfect, but there was an idea that we were building something together. That a bricklayer’s son could have the same chance as anyone else. Free education. Healthcare. Libraries. Sports clubs. Trust.

That’s a powerful memory to carry, societies can be built. Solidarity isn’t a slogan, it’s a system. And it can be chosen again, even if it has to look different now.

So! We go on an expedition this summer. No matter what.

Not to escape the world, but to practice living in it. Together.

Your dad

If you read this and recognize the feeling, what helps you stay steady in times like these? What do you try to teach your children, your students, or yourself? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.