Take the 20 euro cruise ferry back to Sweden. The lunch buffet on-board is sold by its weight – 2 euro per hg. Expensive for a cyclist. I eat the left overs of a Russian loaf – deliciously sour.

The green in the Stockholm archipelago is so dark – almost black. Nearly threatening, but I rather celebrate it as a force of nature. In Sweden, the force of nature is shown by its colors. In the desert, by the heat and the wind. In the Pamir mountains, through the bitter cold and the barren landscape; paradoxically in the absence of color.

Stay with Lukas in Åbo (Turku).

Stay with Hospitalityclub member Khattiya from Thailand and her inmate Nui in Helsinki satellite town Espoo. Make a fabulous sushi-dinner together!

Leave my friends in Kannusjärvi and head back towards Helsinki past Hamina (Fredrikshamn). I take a quick look at the castle in the city center, and the streets like circles around it, following the path where once a defense wall stood. It is one of the easternmost cities of Sweden during it’s geographical heydays during the 17th century, but it wasn’t kept for long before the Russians took it.

Continue west to Porvoo where Hospitalityclub member Kattja lends me her balcony for the night.

Stay with Sonja and Arnold in a house outside Kannusjärvi, 25 kilometers north of main town Hamina. They’ve lived here for just a few months – it’s Sonja’s grandfather’s house – and there is neither running water nor electricity. Quiet and calm like few other places. Late evening swim in a lake nearby. Wonderful people.

I cycle the last 140 or so kilometers from St Petersburg to Finland. It’s a dead boring road – lots of trucks – but worth it for the feeling of actually having cycled home again. As I close in on the border, I begin to think romantic stuff about Sweden and Finland. Brothers and sisters. I’m soon disappointed.

I hadn’t thought about really how common it had been before, and only realized it when it was so completely absent in Finland. ”Wow! Where have you cycled from?” had been the standing questions through-out my journey – from Turkey to China – but now, it was suddenly gone. Peoples’ curiosity; interest in one another. Not a curiosity specifically about my cycling, but more a handy excuse for starting a conversation. An icebreaker. Finish – as well as Swedish people – prefer to let the ice stay.

I wonder at what might have occupied the border guards’ mind. I was the only one passing by – it was midnight – and there were at least three guards there. None asked me anything. What were they thinking of instead? What made him avoid that perfect chance to meet someone new? Maybe he thought of to buy or not to buy new RAM memory for his desktop computer? Or if he remembered to turn off the stove when he left home that morning? Or how to ask his boss for a raise – although he knows that he’ll never have the courage to actually ask, regardless of how brilliant a way to do so that he can come up with during his daydreaming.

To suddenly remember how socially handicapped people here are made me depressed – not because I’d have to spend another five or so days here, but because I knew how it mirrored the way Swedish people are. It took me less than five minutes in Finland, to remember why I left Sweden in the first place in June last year. And to regret that I didn’t spend at least one final night in Russia. Or to put it as did a Finnish guy near the border, when I asked for a recommendation on a good place to camp at: ”Camping? No, that’s only in Russia!” A Russian would have replied: ”Camping? No, I have an extra bedroom!”
This is the society where the question is always mirrored:
– Hello!
– Hello.
– How are you?
– Fine and you?
– Thanks!
– Thanks.

I buy ticket for the train to Moscow. 2,370 Yuan + 130 Yuan for the bicycle, which will be transported in the cargo wagon at the very back of the train.

The train is surprisingly empty; I get just one cabin neighbor despite there being four beds. Ankun Pang is 22-23 years old and is heading for studies by the Black Sea. He is constantly nervous regarding the 5,000 USD cash he’s carrying for payment of his education – the legal amount to bring into Russia this way is much less. Anyway, he survives. When he hops off a few stations before Moscow, he leaves me some left-over food: three vacuum-packaged chicken claws, one package ‘needle fungus in savory sauce’ and two packages of chicken legs.

I spend most of the time with the four foreigners in the next compartment: Kevin from Florida, Jörg from Northwest Germany and Ivana from the Czech Republic.

Once in Moscow, I take another train to St petersburg, so that I can manage the cycling to the Finish border on my ten-day visa. I meet two Frenchmen from Grenoble – Nicloas and Mickaël – 22-23 years old. History students, they’ve backpacked around Russia for the past couple of weeks. I’m thankful for the help in stuffing my bicycle inside the compartment.

During my two months in China, the sunflowers have gone from new to ‘Van Gogh’. The Yuan has dropped 10% – now 1 to 1 with the Swedish Krona.

On the national TV (CCTV), words like great, growth, good, agree, faster, biggest, largest, newest, future, bright, easy, facilitate, announce, partnership and more are frequent. “But critics say”, is yet to be heard.

Tomorrow, I’ll cycle the final 50 kilometers of this trip and reach Beijing – some 20,000+ kilometers (in fact, if previous trip to Cape Town would be added, equal to a circle around the Earth) and 405 days since leaving Stockholm. The journey has been much different from last one – from the obvious that I went single, to that that the countries and regions which I now passed through had much more of history, religion and a place in current world events than any of those which I’d previously visited.

From where Lucy was found at the foot of the Ethiopian highlands, to the Peking Man. The latter has since long been dismissed as any evidence of a human cradle, but is nonetheless pretty old at 250,000 years and an important reminder of how short our recent history is.

From northern Iran to mid-China, the ancient (if now tarmac) Silk Road with towns such as Bukhara, Samarkand and Aksu still showing off relics from their hey-days.

As for my travels in China, I enjoyed it more the further East I came – partly because I finally left behind the last of the at least half a dozen deserts that I’d passed this trip, but also as I found people more communicative; more interested in social interaction. I visited a couple of more ‘sights’, but the neon lights lining the entire outer wall of the 14th century fort at Jiayuguan took the price.

Instead what amazed the most was cycling along the Great Wall for several days – its lesser known mud-version exposed to the elements; beautifully crumbling. Taking a midday nap in its shadow, my bicycle looking surprisingly small against that massive backdrop of mud, I thought to myself that, would I ever think that I had achieved something, then that very shadow would be sufficient to change my mind.

For China, I’ll late forget the enormous team spirit which seems to inhabit most of Chinese people. China as a nation sometimes feels as intertwined as an Arab family.

I’ll think of that mix of pride for their own culture and heritage, and that longing eye towards the West: commercials on TV for domestic wines with names such as ‘Chateau Sun God’, in which old, white-bearded European men declare it their new favorite wine; that Chinese war movie in which a scene from ‘The Platoon’ had been copied entirely – the haunting music (Adagio for Strings) of Samuel Barber mixed with one of the characters as narrator, and pictures of bodies being carried away; the frequent TV advertisements for creams which make ones skin lighter; the V sign which kept appearing ever so often when I asked to take a photo of people. Though regarding the copy-past of today’s China, I guess the West can’t complain too much. After all, what would we be without having copied writing, the compass and the gunpowder from the Chinese many centuries ago?

I’ll remember the peoples’ unrestrained smiles – revealing every single teeth, even when facing a camera lens.

As I’ve made it closer to home, I’ve also started to feel anxiety. Anxiety over once more allowing myself to be swept up by the currents of career, living for the pleasure or acceptance of others; the somehow race for an ever-distant perfectness which has gotten the upper hand of our modern lives. A current so difficult to ignore. I wish I could.

My plan now is to stay in Beijing for a few days with Spanish friend Edu, before taking the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow, from where I’ll continue to Stockholm by bicycle.