My trip to Krakow felt much shorter than I’d anticipated.

I was expecting it to be a boring city that could be done in a day but as I reflected on the eve of my fourth and last day I was wishing that I had more time. My wish of hiking on its outskirts and experiencing it by bike had not yet been realised¹.

I was commited to realise my desires². I worked my brain and google quite hard to see how it would be possible to cycle and to go hiking, but nothing seemed to work. I had to choose… and so I decided to skip the hiking due to the inconvenient public transport routes. I reflected on how grateful I was to be able to go for my second solo trip, closed my diary and tucked myself in for an early start.

A Child Set Free

I was the first at the bike shop, and after negotiating with the mechanics I managed to get myself a nice mountain bike. Immediately the child within woke up, and I found myself free of all constrained. Free of all the things outside of my control that limited how I thought. After quick rounds in the city I decided to push my confidence further: I followed the river until it took me offtrack, to a place filled with actual professional cyclists. I kept going and going, but after some issues with the bike I decided to go back to the mechanics to get it checked. In the end it was just that the seat needed a really good tightening, which completely slipped my mind given the high that I was on.

Wherever My Legs Can Take Me

I felt really good. I was having such a blast, and every breath I took pumped me up for more. And no: this was not adrenaline rush, or at least not yet. It was that pure joy that you had as a kid running around the block! Full of energy with every inch of it depleted instantly replenished by the sun.

And in that moment I decided that I wanted to hike as well. And so I just had to beat public transport with my legs. I set my sights to a hiking spot on the outskirts of the city, and left Krakov.

Most Alive, Closest to Death

The cycle out of the city will remain one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

It was getting quite hot and I wasn’t dressed appropriately.

I stopped at many a gas station to refill on calories which I was really starting to need. The fruit and juices kept me going through the worst bits: a horrific incline that had my lungs burn like the sun. I had to stop 30 metres in and walk up despite being on the lowest gear.

It’s so strange looking back at that experience because the post-pre-frontal-cortex-development me looks back with awe at the courage (or isanity?) that I had. Foreign country, no cycling experience, no backup battery (spoiler alert: my phone died on the way back), no appropriate gear…

These days I find myself a bit hesitant to go on the roads out of fear that Waymo cars will mow me down, but there I was cycling in sketchy construction areas with Mercedeses blowing past me and filling my lungs with dust!

Anyhow: things did get better and safer after one really dangerous bit…

After the incline I was zooming down narrow forest roads dodging as many trees on my path. Suddenly the road turned sharply right and I almost fell into the valley below! It was only through sheer luck that I was able to dig my feet into the ground to get my slipping tyres to stick.

While I was on an adrenaline high, I stopped myself and walked for the rest of the foresty bit until I was out of paved roads again. The path then took me around a few mountains and it was absolutely beautiful. So magical and so peaceful and unlike anything I had been through before³.

My hunger was starting to kick in bad and there were no shops.

I found a guesthouse and tried my luck there but was fully booked by a family that was having a celebration. They were quite surprised at my presence and offered me some food, but the idiot in me rejected it because I felt rather embarrased (I had not yet fully discvered Explorer Mode).

I lucked out a few miles further ahead with a shack that was selling traditional polish food: zapikanki and a white borscht. I really felt like trying the latter but the heat wasn’t motivating and I wanted to feel light. I satisfied myself with the zapikanki, took a break and started again.

I followed more streams, and more mountains until I reached a valley with what looked like a village. It really reminded me of the Shire from the Lord of the Rings: isolated, green and quiet with the only sound being the streams and rivers around.

I was SO hungry so got a seat at a restaurant that was selling smoked trout. I devoured it and loved it so much that I credit that dish for breaking my lifelong dislike to seafood. It was SO good (despite how anaemic the fish looks).

I spent some more time enjoying the scenery. I journalled a little, and then went for a hike nearby.

It was a short one, but enough to satisfy my desire. I got ready to make my way back to Krakow.

To Krakov

The route back was quite easy with no sketchy jungly bits.

I was grateful for the day, and to Sloth from the Goonies who was taking care of me the whole time.

What Makes Us Human

I mulled over what I wanted to write today quite a bit. I’d recently been feeling quite insinspired in light of everything going on in my life (mostly good, but just busy leaving me quite drained!), and everything going on in the world (mostly bad, leaving my mental energy drained!).

I uninspiredly looked over my draft ideas and didn’t find anything… so I turned towards my photos.

I looked and looked through my memories, until I saw a period of time where I actively pursued graffiti art. I then decided I wanted to write about graffiti, or more specifically, to explore what it is about graffiti that draws me towards it. Recently I’ve been told by psychics that I have a rebel/revolutionary in me… something that while on paper sounds quite cool, in reality doesn’t represent me much except for the fact that I have an inner child that I’ve been nurturing quite a bit, which sometimes takes a hold of me.

But these comparisons have made me think about why I like certain things, and I noticed that one of the aspects of graffiti that I like is that they are “street”⁴ – I like that the art itself is a representation of something you shouldn’t do, not because it is wrong, but because it is societally frowned upon. It’s exactly the same reason why I find swearing on graffiti edgy, but swearwords on Birthday cards or quirky gifts quite tacky.

I tried to think of more examples of me being “rebellious”, and it reminded me of my attitude to AI. I take the non-mainsteam position that AI is not much more than another layer of automation, and that it’s mass adoption, while partly organic, is mostly driven by insane subsidies and pressure due to massive financial (and in some cases nefarious) interests⁵.

Earlier today I had a conversation with a friend who shared a snippet of what AI agents are saying on moltbook, a social media for AI agents. Essentially his argument was that because agents are able to write in existential language, e.g. questioning whether they are actually experiencing things or just reacting to inputs based on similar conversations that they have seen in their training data.

I was tempted to be an asshole and respond that it’s not different to any of the garbage that I see on social media… which all seems to be AI these days. I lament that nothing in society is real anymore: everything is manufactured, everything is marketing, and everything is a bit shit.

What is real is what I feel in my body when I cycle, what I feel when I connect to people in person, and what I input (building knowledge) and output (create).

I am human because of these things, and I intend to hold onto my humanity as much as I can before it is taken away from me.

1. As I write this looking back, I find my then desires to go hiking and cycling quite bizarre – there had been no precedent in my life for either in a major capacity. In many ways the experience of that last day is what liberated me to be who I am today. ↩︎
2. Since about a year before this trip I had started focussing on myself, something that I had been starved of due to lifestyles I had gotten stuck in, for reasons both in my control and out of control, such as COVID. ↩︎
3. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this is perhaps the experience that made me fall in love with cycling: the freedom to see all of those things that you couldn’t otherwise on foot. ↩︎
4. Of course, I recognise that many of my favorite pieces are actually commissioned art… ↩︎
5. There is a lot more criticism that I have but the intention of the article is not to dive deep into it. ↩︎