Dream journey crushed on a mountain road
Bicyclists looked for good in trip but found evil
Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.
“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.
They were often proved right.
On Day 319 of their journey, a Kazakh man stopped his truck, said hello and handed them ice cream bars. In a meadow where they had pitched their tent on Day 342, a family showed up with stringed instruments and treated them to an openair concert. And on Day 359, two pigtailed girls met them at the top of a pass in Kyrgyzstan with a bouquet of flowers.
Killing ‘disbelievers’
There were hardships, too, including punctured tires, snarling dogs, freezing hail and illness. But for Austin and Geoghegan, both 29, these were far outweighed by moments of human connection.
Then, just over a week ago, came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group spotted them.
A grainy cellphone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: The men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp Uturn. It doubles back and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Austin, Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers.”
It was a worldview as diametrically opposed as imaginable to the one Austin and Geoghegan were trying to live by. Throughout their travels, the couple wrote a blog together and shared Instagram posts about the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.
“You get a feeling of wanting to give back, not just to this person who has welcomed a stranger into their home, but to the wider world,” Austin wrote. “You become someone who wants to welcome others into em>your/em> home. You become a merchant in the gift economy.”
Back in Washington, where the pair met, Austin lived in a tiny house, an experiment in the principles that eventually led him to his journey around the world.
After earning a master’s degree from Georgetown University, he began working at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Convinced that many of the belongings people accrue are unnecessary, he began adopting a minimalist lifestyle, said his childhood friend Ashley Ozery.
If one of his goals was to pare down his life to the bare essentials, another was to enlarge his world. Because he had no mortgage weighing him down, his miniature house meant that he could take unpaid leave from his government job and travel the globe.
“At HUD at the end of each year, you could ask for a higher salary or more vacation,” said Ozery. “He always chose more vacation.”
Kindness and cruelty
In 2012, he met Lauren Anne Geoghegan, a native of Southern California, who like him had graduated from Georgetown and was now working in the college’s admissions office.
His values began to rub off on her, say her friends. She bought a bike-share day-pass, which turned into an annual membership. Soon she purchased her own bike.
Austin was a vegan. Geoghegan became a vegetarian, said her close friend Amanda Kerrigan.
It was in 2016 that Geoghegan told Kerrigan that she was planning to quit her job and bike around the world.
Their journey was a series of tedious, and occasionally grueling, physical tests, punctuated by human kindness.
But in the course of their travels, their blog posts also noted flashes of cruelty.
On one mountain pass, a group of men blocked their path and tried to shove the couple off their bikes.
Still, by the time they reached that bend in the road in Tajikistan just over a week ago, they had embraced the notion that the world was overwhelmingly good, the dozens of annotated photographs and the thousands of words they left behind show.
“You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” Austin wrote. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.
In the video released by the Islamic State group after the couple’s death, the men pledging allegiance to the group can be seen sitting on a stone slab, an aquamarine lake partially visible over their left shoulders. It is the kind of panorama that the young couple might have stopped to capture and post on their blog.
But in the clip, when these men point to the scenery around them, they vow to slaughter the “disbelievers” who have overrun their land.