KEVIN MACHTELINCKX

No matter how many times I have done it, no matter how easy the route looks on paper, no matter how much thought and effort went into planning, there is always a brief moment of hesitation when I’m confronted with the first step of a new endeavour. Doubt penetrates the mind when the body remains stagnant. Where will I sleep? Who will I encounter? What suprises do the hillsides have in store for me? In the woods outside of Liège, Belgium, I stare down an old rail line that will lead me east. It only takes a few pedal strokes to leave doubt rooted to the ground and be reunited with the comfort of movement.

Belgium is not generally known for harsh climates, but the Hautes Fagnes may be the exception. Located near the German border, the marshy plateau includes the highest point in the country, the Signal de Botrange, at “nearly” 700 meters above sea level.

My research showed several trails leading across the open lands of the Hautes Fagnes. I choose one that follows a creekbed and soon find myself shin-deep in mud with the bike on my back… true “bikepacking”. I opt to backtrack to a wooded area where I had encountered a trail junction. I’ve lost an hour but gained insight. I choose a new path, this one heading straight out across a green expanse and toward a group of trees that stick out like a lost island in a grassy sea.

Juxtapositions abound in these open spaces. Stands of dead trees anchor themselves to the ground while clouds race across overhead. Not a soul in sight, yet I find a network of boardwalks and trails. I admire the stark landscape, letting it sweep through my mind. At the same time, I try my best to reconcile the inevitabilty of murky water seeping into my shoes.

By early evening I’ve escaped the clutches of the swamps and replace labored hike-a-bike for a swift and flowing descent along the Warche river and into Malmedy.

Traveling through a country’s backcountry is like exploring the depths of an attic. Sometimes the reminders of days gone by are blunt and obvious…

… and sometimes reminders are tucked away in the seldomly-explored fringes.

Days prior to my trip, the entire Ardennes region was hit by deluges of rain, causing flooding in many areas. One common trait amongst bikepackers is their ability to dig deep and persevere through such obstacles. Usually though, the prospect of beer at the end of the day is motivation enough.

My evening routine involves stopping in a small town to replenish calories and stock up on supplies for the next day before wandering off into a forest or field to pitch my tent out of sight. In Houffalize, I walk into a small, trendy café, craving a mousse au chocolat. The owner looks me up and down, my shins a medley of bruises and scrapes. She turns to the bike, plastered in mud and duct tape fixes. She plants the mousse in front of me and, after exchanging a couple light-hearted jokes, waves away my attempt at payment. Pity has never tasted so good.

Not far from Houffalize, I find a large, well-kept shelter in the middle of the woods. Three horses chew peacefully in a clearing nearby, under the rays of a setting sun. A Dutch man is building a fire in the middle of the shelter. He tells me he is on holiday, hiking a trail from Luxembourg to Holland. We trade stories from our various life experiences and it becomes apparent we have nothing in common except for a shared compulsion to break the rhythm of our routines. To speak candidly to another human being with whom you hold no ties is refreshing. After the coals have died down, we go separate ways into the forest, looking for a place to sleep.

Summer in Belgium means a sun that sets late. By 11 pm, as I’m setting up camp amongst the leaf litter, it gets dark enough that the birds have begun to go quiet. The forest is eerily silent. Occasionally, a breeze nudges the towering beech trees enough that they emit deep groans of protest. My mind begins to wander as I lay in my sleeping bag staring up through the mesh of the tent. I am overcome by the humbling sensation that I am sleeping on hallowed ground. Just as this journey brought me to lay upon the soil beneath me, so too did the journey of countless others long before me. I ponder the thought as I gaze into the night. Suddenly, a small light shines out of the darkness, tracing an arbitrary path through the still air above me, moving from my head to my feet. As discretely as it appeared, the light vanishes, its bearer seemingly extinguished from existence. My eyelids grow heavy.

In the morning, I take inventory of my surroundings. Laying forgotten in a small grove of young trees, 50 meters from my camp, I find a bowl-shaped hole in the earth three meters across and a meter deep. An impact crater from artillery.

One cannot cross the Ardennes by simply following the crest of a single ridgeline or keeping to the depths of one valley. Rather, the landscape undulates incessantly, forcing me to constantly adapt my cadence and rhythm to the lay of the land. Each climb is calculated, each hilltop is earned and beyond each summit lays a new scene. A herd of muscular Belgian Blues striding across a field, an old woman in an apron tending to her flowers, a baker making the rounds of his small village with the daily bread, a narrow valley engulfed in the smell of hops and malt from the brewery tucked away at the bottom. It’s early morning as I come down off a heinous singletrack section and ride past the Brasserie d’Achouffe. It’s closed. I am disappointed and grateful at the same time. Disappointed that I won’t get to enjoy a sweet, yet potent La Chouffe golden ale straight from the source, but grateful that I won’t have to negotiate a river-hugging forest track while inebriated.

While Belgium is not exactly known for its hiking or outdoor activities due to its lack of truly untouched land, credit must be given to the country for maximizing the use of shared spaces. Trail networks criss-cross the country thanks to planning that has allowed areas between large plots of private lands to remain open to the public. Trails shooting off from rural roads can be found everywhere, often leading the user into bucolic landscapes that would otherwise be inaccessible and underappreciated.

When I reach La Roche-en-Ardenne, I lock my bike outside a store and head inside to resupply and escape the stifling midday heat. At the end of one of the store aisles an older man wearing a beret stands with a lazy grin on his face and one hand in his pocket. With the other hand he contentedly sips free coffee out of a paper cup as he watches people go about their shopping. He puts the drink to his lips, tilts his head back, and downs the contents. As his hand comes back down, he stares dejectedly into the emptiness of the cup and lets out a sigh, as if burdened by the thought of his now coffee-less near future. “How’s the coffee?” I ask. The man looks up to me, then at his cup, then back to me again. “Hmm… I better find out,” he says with a smirk. He refills his cup with the steaming black liquid, gives me a wink, and happily resumes his nonchalant, coffee-sipping vigil.

Outside, I briefly take in the life happening around me before heading toward the outskirts of the village and disappearing, once again, into the forests, intent on refilling the contents of my own cup.

In St. Hubert, I stop at a small friterie not far from the town’s towering cathedral. While sitting at an outside table with a heap of frites, a man comes up to me and asks me about my bike. Hearing about my trip, he excitedly dives into a story about his own travels in his VW Westfalia. Piotr, as he introduces himself, jumps giddily from one anecdote to another, his world clearly consumed by the Westfalia culture. Talking to me like I’m a long-lost friend, it takes him 20 minutes of non-stop story-telling before he saunters off, satisfied with his lecture. Before he gets too far, he turns around and yells, “Oh hey…. welcome to St. Hubert!” A woman walking past glances at me, “… et bon appetit!” she says, smiling.

“Passerby: Whether in pain or in joy, you are free. You have the good fortune of admiring this beautiful land. Remember this. Here, on September 9th, 1944, unarmed Belgians were assassinated by retreating SS troops.”

Occasionally, a sustained dirt track through thick timber forests offers the perfect balance between length, grade, riding surface, and ambiance. Along one of these sections outside of Ferrières, I startle a roe deer as I come around a sharp bend. The deer darts off into the forest, but chooses to parallel the track as it leaps effortlessly over downed logs. I maintain my speed, the cadence of my pedal strokes matching the sweeping strides of the deer mere meters away from me. For seconds that feel like eons, we move in unison through static armies of towering firs. Each subtle change in velocity made by one animal spurs a delicate adjustment of balance and power in the other. Hot breaths rhythmically leave our lungs, dotting our wakes with misty nebulas of spent air, lingering briefly as attestations of our efforts before dissipating into the cold morning atmosphere. A shallow creek bed veering away from the track tempts the deer into making a sudden, angular cut to the right and out of sight. I silently thank the creature for the moments of shared momentum and continue on my path.

The ’central governor’ concept is a theory proposed by a number of scientists that describes a hypothetical brain process that regulates our limits of fatigue in order to preserve the heart and other vital functions from catastrophic failure. Essentially, it is the pain in your muscles that tells your brain to stop and rest. Endurance athletes will look for these pain signals and have developed various techniques to push past them, sometimes with dangerous consequences, such as kidney failure. As I push my bike up a short section of unrideable trail, I think back to some of the hardest days in Spain and Morocco and wonder if I’ve unwittingly pushed past these limits. The thought carries dead weight and suddenly my legs feel twice as heavy. I shake my head and snap back to the present. This is not only the last day on my loop through the Ardennes, but also of my journey that started three months prior in Marrakesh. Dead weight is no use to me so close to the end.

I pop out of the forest onto the banks of the Ourthe river, 15 kilometers south of Liège. A paved cycle path, the RV7, follows the meandering river into the heart of the city where the best gaufres on the planet can be found.

I pick up speed and begin eating away at the distance, shifting up in my gears methodically, barely noticing the striking silhouette of a chateau presiding over the treetops. A comforting hum emanates from my knobby tires gripping the asphalt surface as I click into the highest gear. My hands are tucked into the crook of the dropbars with elbows slightly bent and head down. My breaths are deep and gratifying, bringing oxygen to the muscles that have been tuned for this exact purpose. The hum from my tires is now a constant wail, the soundtrack to my re-entry into civilization. One by one, I feel my systems escaping their stases. Oxygen delivery, blood circulation, muscle processes, power transmission, pedal stroke, and body position all harmonizing to liberate the ultimate component of my being: my mind. For several kilometers, I achieve the coveted state of flow whereby the totality of my essence is consumed by the uninterrupted firing of systems operating with the singular purpose of manifesting my will. The journey is closing and I enter Liège fulfilled by its finality.