(Re)cycling home: Yes we can(s and bottles)!

You would think that putting a deposit on a can or bottle would lead people to hand them back in and retrieve their money, but at some point I started noticing that in Sweden, apart from a lot of forest, there is a lot of trash to be found next to the road. That a considerable part of this rubbish is made up of deposit carrying beverage containers, started making sense after a couchsurfer I met mentioned that he often asks for his team mates' cans. Slowly I began to understand the potential of this thing: picking up the cans I passed on my way could sponsor my daily lunch. The reality showed several practicalities too, like cans that have been going through the lawn mower are not accepted, nor are the tax-free beers that are brought in from other countries, but at some days where for instance the weather was so shit that I could use a bit of distraction, I was able to harvest over 40 SEK (€ 5,00) in tin and plastic, once even topping 100 SEK. Grabbing the optimism, I even thought up (and directly discarded) a new slogan: (Re)Cycling home? Yes, we can(s and bottles)! Heading south from Oslo, it seemed I was almost there.

A few days later, when the ferry is about to dock in Helsingor, and with view on Hamlet's castle, my phone buzzes. "Welcome in Denmark! Your tariffs are.." reads the message. I smile contently: I have officially arrived in Danish territory. With the demise of passport controls throughout Europe, the little booklet has lost it's function as tool for destination bragging when it comes to the trips closer to home, but the mobile phone has moved into the gap with a completely private initiative. But the result is the same, and thus I find myself casually drawing my cell and waving around the message of "Welcome to Liechtenstein" and "Welcome to Latvia" when demanding appreciation for my recent cycling bender. In the meantime my new and virginal passport sits brooding somewhere deep in my luggage, plotting his revenge on trips that include other continents and trigger happy stamp handlers.

Sometimes something happens and at the exact same moment the first thing that comes to mind is: "What a bugger, absolutely no-one is going to believe this!". Sometimes when you write down events as they exactly happened, you end up with fiction of such imaginative poverty that you wonder why it actually had to happen that way. Sometimes you wonder if your life is shaped according to the logic of some moralist tale, judged by the quirks of fate dropping in on your own narrative. But when I rolled my bike onto the boat that would take me from Scandinavia unto the continent after thousands of kilometres, and on the ship's ramp my chain snapped, those were exactly the thoughts that went through my head.

Not a heroic ending at the hands of a reckless motorized barbarian, nor over-exhaustion, dehydration or anything. No, making the boat in a frantic race against the clock, I lost my chain upon boarding. And without that mechanic 'thread of life', (and where can you find a bike shop in Germany that is open past Saturday afternoon?) a steel stallion like mine becomes as useful as a wheelbarrow or a step scooter. And what gives? A whole bunch of Dutch truck drivers just happen to return home empty and don't mind dropping me off on the way. So with that unconvincingly surprising finale, my bike trip ends on the edge of Scandinavia, right before docking in Luebeck, a town I passed on the way up. Yes, this story includes a sudden defeat, an early return, but at thesame time a full circle and a mission completed. So I apologize for all the cheesy and misplaced symbolism here, but sometimes my life just happens to read like bad fiction.