The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘Freedom is only the insistence of a soul to be left in peace to enjoy the sunrise’
Julian Sayarer’s latest book sees revelations and revolutions in Israel and Palestine, says Michael Kerr
At the 2017 Edinburgh Festival, Julian Sayarer told an Israeli writer that travelling by bike allowed you to cut through to something deeper in places, to tell the truth about them. In that case, she said, he should go to Israel and Palestine. The result is Fifty Miles Wide, in which he weaves from the ancient hills of Galilee, along the walled-in Gaza Strip and down to the Bedouin villages of the Naqab desert.
He talks to Palestinian cyclists and hip-hop artists; to Israeli soldiers training for war and to a lawyer who took a leading role in peace talks. His book took courage on the road and is adventurous on the page. It conveys powerfully what life is like for people on both sides of “the world’s most entrenched impasse”. At the same time, it’s full of free spirits and the joys of freewheeling. In the extract below, Sayarer heads for the first time into the hills of Palestine. packed into a sand-coloured jeep, wearing shades, the beat of the V8 engine leaping from under them as the boys have a whale of a time.
For a split-second I see them before the jeep passes by, each smiling face like a boy scout with hardware, kids sent to earn that “battle-tested” badge for which Israeli military products – having already been tested on Palestinians – command a price premium.
There were times, riding through the West Bank, when I would consider how the Arabs of Palestine, for all that they had it bad, at least were lucky in that they didn’t have to worry about being invaded by the United States. And then I’d pass a military jeep with its smiling teenage soldiers in their sunglasses, and I’d realise that they perhaps felt they already had been.
As I ride, a frustration weighs me down, pulls me backwards, for often it feels like the occupation is designed in such a way that it will kill all hope.
With the guns in the jeep, the military eyeball lurking above the olive trees and watching everything, the totalitarian presence leaves me, more than once, asking what use there is in even writing any of it. And then I pedal forward, that motion by definition optimistic, and again I realise that there is nothing for it but to keep on trying.
Left I bank, down into the next turn, around the terraced hillside and into wan sunshine. And I see the chain turn over again, reminding me quietly that I know no other way than this.
Up and over the crests of hills I rise on the air currents and then blow back down, carefree for a while, and every child
WH Auden in
1962 shouts “hello!” and each old man calls out “welcome!”.
Sweat runs in my eyes, vision blurring, sun and mist pour down over a countryside where recent rains evaporate towards the sky.
Far into the distance, I see the land like a milky white sea, the backs of many hills rising at the surface just barely, as if whales are lifting out above and then slouching back beneath the waves.
That was a sight to behold, that late afternoon, where one after another and endlessly repeated, I saw for the first time the magic of those hills of Palestine. Immersed in them, I rode upon their rising and falling heartbeat, until it was not a landscape that I rode through but a cardiogram, where up and down my emotions they sank and soared.
That afternoon, I think I understood how it could be that those Palestinians I met, none of whom had ever lived in their own independent country, could still feel with such strength the freedom that was in their spirit.
Because to sense freedom is like seeing a person you love out of the corner of your eye and for only a moment in a crowded room. You still recognise them.
Riding through and along the hillsides, I passed a babbling spring near the village of Nabi Saleh.
I passed an open window to a kitchen that let out the smell of sautéing onions, evoking impossibly strongly the sense of home. In another small town came the sound of notes practised on a recorder or flute in a room above, dropping down to the street below. Such things were evidence – no matter
A Portable Paradise
the official status that an occupying force claims for itself – that somewhere in this world there is a great beauty, and that a part of it belongs to us all.
That is how freedom forms, I realised it there in Palestine, and pure as my wheels turning under me, the idea only grew in me as I rode. It was all part of the same immutable law.
Anyone who ever saw such sunlight at an afternoon’s end, the long rays of light refracting in red earth to illuminate the gently burning sky, will know innately and forever what freedom is because, at root, freedom is only the insistence of a soul to be left in peace to enjoy the sunset.
Hours up and hours down I laboured, coming slowly to realise that there is no holy site in Jerusalem or anywhere else that could hold a candle to those hills of Palestine, for they were the most precious of all sights.
Among them that afternoon, eventually I found a moment of peace, my legs turning regular circles that
of The Line Becomes a River), for the latest Virginia Quarterly Review (tinyurl.com/y99pkaf5).
From The Daily Telegraph archive: Paul Mansfield follows the trail of the bluesman Robert Johnson, pictured above, through the Mississippi Delta (tinyurl.com/ yb25xbhf ).
accelerated even as the landscape slowed and, finally, speed returned to my wheels as I shot fast out of the frame and into the next.
© Julian Sayarer 2020. Extracted from
(Arcadia Books, £9.99). Julian Sayarer wrote his first book,
after breaking the 18,000mile world record for a circumnavigation by bike. He won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year award for and its depiction of a less-seen United States. His most recent journeys and writing have been prompted by the refugee and financial crises in the eastern Mediterranean region.