Tuk-Tuk to the Road. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
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caravanning holiday nine years earlier. I put down the phone with a smile and went to bed that night dreaming of the open road and exotic places with unpronounceable names. Over the next few weeks, however, I was gripped by uncertainty and nagging doubts about the wisdom of my decision. If I gave up my job at ITV to go gallivanting around the world on three wheels, where would it leave me? Would I be throwing away all that I had achieved on a flighty whim? Was I striving for excitement when really I should just be sensible and get a bit of stability in my life? Put simply, I was afraid—afraid of stepping outside the box and doing something a bit different and afraid of losing my place on that overcrowded TV ladder. After weeks of sleepless nights and dreams of never being able to find a job again, I rang Jo in late October and told her that I had changed my mind, apologising profusely and feeling incredibly guilty about letting her down. She was far too magnanimous to point out that by pulling out I was probably putting an end to her dream, but I knew that was the case. It was far too big and dangerous an undertaking for Jo to do solo.
A few weeks after that, on 16 November, I was filming at the Eden Project in Cornwall when my mobile rang. It was my friend Rose’s brother, Humphrey.‘She’s done it,’ he said.‘Rose killed herself yesterday morning.’ My beautiful, sweet, vivacious friend Rose. Gone. Just like that. I knew she had been extremely depressed and when we had gone to the cinema a few weeks earlier she had confided in me that she had contemplated suicide. But there is a vast gulf between contemplation and action, and the fact that she had actually done it left me numb with incomprehension. That night I went for a moonlit walk and thought about Rose, the fragility of life and how you never know what’s round the next corner. Her sudden death made me realise more than ever that you only live once and that opportunities like this trip should be grasped with both hands, not recoiled from. A few days later I called Jo and told her I had changed my mind—I wanted to do the trip with her after all. And this time I was sure.
So at the beginning of January, having waved goodbye to ITV, Jo and I found ourselves sitting at her parents’ house in Surrey, crisp new notebooks in hand, wondering where on earth to begin. Since Jo was due to start medical school in September, we had only eight months to organise and complete the journey. It was going to be a huge challenge. Neither of us had ever driven a tuk tuk before, knew where to get one, or had any idea about how to plan such a massive project. We’d both done a lot of independent travel, but organising a backpacking trip round India and planning a 12,500-mile, two-continent tukathon are quite different matters. If we were going to be back by September and avoid the Asian monsoons, we would have to leave in April, May at the latest, which gave us four months to do everything. Not that we had any idea what ‘everything’ entailed at that point.
With four months until Lift Off, the only things we were sure of were our intended route and the fact that we were going to do the journey in aid of Mind, the mental health charity. Jo’s four years of studying maps and trawling the Internet had made her determined to tackle ‘the northern route’ via China, Central Asia and Russia. Not only was this ‘the road less travelled’ but also it meant that we would be overland all the way, our wheels leaving terra firma only to hop across the Channel on the Eurotunnel. The alternative was to take the old hippy trail through India, Iran, Pakistan and Turkey, but the major drawback here was having to ship our vehicle across the Indian Ocean from Singapore to India. Not only would this dilute the overland experience but also, in the current political climate, the idea of travelling through Iran wasn’t overly appealing. Labelled as ‘the axis of evil’ by George W. Bush in 2002, Iran’s leaders’ nuclear ambitions and threats against Israel had led to further threats of ballistic missile attacks from the Pentagon if Tehran didn’t toe the line. Dodging US missiles was something we would rather avoid.
Our first major obstacle was China, country number three on our intended route. While flicking through the Rough Guide in January, Jo was horrified to read that it is illegal for foreigners to drive in China. If this was the case, then we would be forced to divert to the southern route, or take option number three—ship the tuk tuk to Japan and from there to Vladivostok on Russia’s far eastern seaboard. It would be a toss-up between facing the dangers of Iran or taking on roads that had nearly spelt the end of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman’s The Long Way Round expedition two years previously. Fortunately, neither situation ever arose, as, after extensive research, Jo discovered that it wasn’t in fact illegal, just extremely complicated and expensive to arrange. First we would have to find a specialist Chinese travel agent to arrange our passage through the Dragon’s Den. This agent would have to obtain special permission from the army, the police and the government, and we would have to follow a set itinerary and be chaperoned at all times by a Chinese guide. Plus we would have to get special Chinese driving licences, and our tuk tuk would have to be fitted with Chinese plates at the border. All this for the bargain price of £6530. It was going to be a huge chunk out of our budget, but Jo was determined. China it was, then.
With the Chinese issue under control, it was down to the organisational nitty-gritty. How and where were we going to find a tuk tuk? What visas and documentation did we need? What equipment should we take? How were we going to find financial sponsors for the trip? Which roads were too dangerous or too mountainous to tuk? Then in early February Jo dropped a bombshell: since a tuk tuk classifies as a motorbike on the International Driving Permit (IDP), we were going to have to get full motorbike licences. Quickly. The Chinese agent needed our IDPs within a month in order to process all our permits in time, so there was no room for error.
I’d barely even sat on a motorbike before, let alone attempted hill starts, U-turns or straddling a throbbing 500-cc bike dressed in full leathers. And Norfolk in February was not the ideal place to start. The next month saw me glued, freezing, to the back of a bike, exhaustively practising all the manoeuvres in the back streets of Norwich. My instructor, Paul, a grizzled 40-something with a broad Norfolk accent, encouragingly told me one day that I wasn’t ‘the most natural biker’. On more than one occasion, having broken yet another indicator and failed another U-turn, I wondered whether we’d ever make it out of the country, let alone back here. Test day came on 9 March and, quaking with fear despite having downed a bottle of Rescue Remedy, I mounted the bike. By some amazing stroke of luck, I passed, with only three minor faults. Much to her chagrin, Jo passed second time around, a week later.
With China and our motorbike tests under our belts, our mission was now in full swing. It was now that the countdown really begun.
It is very difficult to put into words what it feels like to suffer from depression. I think that to truly understand you have to have suffered it yourself, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. I think an apt description would be cancer of the soul or malignant sadness. When you are depressed, the world is a very dark place, totally devoid of anything positive. Sometimes when I was really down, I would just hide in bed and cry and feel absolutely terrified. Other times I couldn’t cry and just felt like a corpse with a pulse. I remember feeling really scared because I knew that I loved my family and friends, but I couldn’t feel love for them. I felt imprisoned in my own mind and I had no idea how to escape.
I don’t know what caused me to become mentally ill. My upbringing was loving and secure, and there seemed to be no trigger for my depression. A possible contribution might have been genetic: I am adopted, and my natural mother suffered many mental health problems throughout her adult life, eventually succumbing to her demons and committing suicide.
Ants and I first met when we were 12 at Wycombe Abbey. We quickly became best friends. We had a close-knit group of friends at school and, whether we were playing sport, rolling down hills or going for sneaky cigarettes in the woods, it was a good experience. At Wycombe we may have been thought of as a bit rebellious, but the worst we ever did was smoke and occasionally sneak into High Wycombe to go shopping—hardly deviant behaviour. In such an academic pressure cooker, it was important to conform and it was sometimes fun to act the clown and do the opposite of what was expected. I recall a £3 dare to wear my nightie to classes on a Saturday morning. I probably could have passed it off as an ethnic trend, but unfortunately the nightie was totally see-through and Ants’ housemistress posed the question ‘Why is Jo Huxster wearing her nightie?’