Sahir Permall’s Reverse Migration - Community Spotlight!

In Spring 2024, Sahir Permall embarked on a solo bikepacking trip from Glasgow to Istanbul; the first leg of her journey cycling from her home in Glasgow to the village in Pakistan where her grandfather emigrated from to the UK. We caught up with Sahir to learn more about what it was like to cycle across the continent of Europe and how this has altered her own sense of belonging.

With plans to set out on the second leg of this journey this summer, Sahir reflected on the things she’d be doing differently this time and shared her inspiration for embarking on this journey.

Sahir’s Reverse Migration.

Reading Dervla Murphy's book ‘Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle’ in my 20s, first planted the idea of cycling across a continent in my mind. I knew that one day I would love to do something similar and thought that Dervla’s trip was the most badass thing I’d ever heard of a woman doing on her own. At that time, she carried a gun and cigarettes but not a tent!

It felt important to start from home; setting off from where I live so I could see how the landscape and the culture changes over long distances. It made sense to cycle to Istanbul, with that city being one way of defining the eastern edge of Europe and the start of Asia. 

Dervla Murphy happened to cycle to India just one year before my grandfather emigrated from Pakistan to the UK. They both undertook these massive journeys within a year of each other and after I had set the initial goal of wanting to cycle across Europe, I really began to reflect on my Grandfather's journey and what it meant for him, but also for the generations of his family that followed growing up in the UK with a Pakistani heritage.

Once you give yourself permission to achieve one of your biggest goals in life, you also give yourself permission to dream even bigger about what else could be possible for you. I had my sights set initially on cycling from Glasgow to Istanbul in 2024 and thought to myself, what could I do if I didn't stop?

It occurred to me that I could keep going over a series of future journeys all the way to where my Grandfather initially emigrated from, a village in the Punjab in Pakistan. I planning to complete this journey in stages, as I have two young children and so can’t just take off for a whole year. It took me 2 months to cycle from Glasgow to Istanbul and I will do the rest in stages over the coming years.

How Things Changed Along The Way.

Beyond completing the physical journey, my goal was to explore how culture, landscape, identity and feelings of belonging change when distance is travelled, mile after mile overland, in real time.

My grandfather flew on a plane from Pakistan to London in the 1960s and landed in a completely alien environment, which must have been a real shock to the system. He transported with him his culture, religion, and way of life, which he passed onto his children and then his grandchildren. In reality, there is a whole world in between Pakistan and the UK, but he never really saw this, or got to experience how things change slowly between distant places in a way that is manageable. The abruptness of the change for him - and I think for many other migrants - caused him to hold onto what he was used to. He wasn’t necessarily able to fully integrate into where he arrived, or understand how one place changes into another and the nuances of that.

 As I cycled from the western edge of Europe to Asia, I found it fascinating to observe how things changed slowly. The temperature gradually increased and the language slowly changed from English to French, then the Germanic languages, then into the Cyrillic alphabet. The food started to change. You go from yoghurt being something sweet that you have as a dessert with a spoon, to something salty and thin that is drunk alongside a meal. Churches changed shape too from having tall spires to round green domes (shapes you would typically associate with mosques) as you got into the lands of the old Ottoman empire. Then I entered Turkey and started to see mosques, but they looked very similar to what I saw in the churches of Austria. So it was absolutely fascinating to see how things change and how you adjust to it when you are on the ground travelling in real time overland. There are far fewer shocks to the systems!

What Does It Really Mean To Belong?

One of my goals was to explore my own identity and what it means to be a third-generation immigrant; what it means to belong and where I would best belong. Do I belong in the culture of the country that I have grown up in my whole life and where I was born? Or would I feel a different sense of belonging in the Muslim world and in Asia, which is the culture I was brought up in living in my Grandparents’ house as a child. There have been lots of different changes to my life which have caused me to move away from how I was brought up. I moved away from home for University, I married outside of my culture and my connection to my mother tongue of Urdu frayed as I stopped speaking it on a daily basis at home. My own children don’t speak Urdu, but I feel a pull back towards my roots, a sense that I’ve lost something, that I wanted to explore through this journey.

The biggest learning from the journey is that life on the road has a rich meaning of its own, quite separate from the meaning we create in ‘normal’ sedentary life. When you are living on the road, you are constantly moving, you are outside all the time and rarely sleep in one place for more than one night. You have to be self-sufficient, no matter what you are like at home. This in itself creates a strong sense of belonging. Your identity becomes that of a traveller. It kind of doesn’t matter who you are outside of that. I was travelling as a brown woman in my mid- 30s on my own and on a bicycle, but I was first and foremost a traveller, that was my identity and people received me in that way.

People I met on the way were incredibly generous and I have read and heard that this is a common experience as people who do these kinds of journeys are often overwhelmed by the generosity and kindness they receive when travelling. I think the reason for such generosity is that they are responding to my identity as a traveller. Somebody on the road might need help - and I got tons of it! It was a fantastic feeling and it just meant that it didn't matter who I was, how I looked or what my background was. You feel a sense of belonging in the world and you feel received and welcomed. You get to experience the generosity and spirit of so many people, whether or not you share a language or anything else.

I suppose on my return I feel less like I don't belong anywhere and more like I belong everywhere! Not always and not fully, but I certainly feel closer to that due to the experience I had on the road. We are all travellers on our own journey of living our own lives (as cheesy as that sounds!). The experience has helped me to frame my life in that way. What does it even  mean if we say someone doesn't belong? We are all just made of atoms which are recycled again and again in the universe. The world is there for everyone; the road is there for everyone if they choose to take it!

And whilst that was my biggest learning, I have also learnt so much about myself and my ability to undertake these sorts of challenges, about my resilience and the universal generosity of people.

Sahir’s Biggest Achievement From the Journey.

My biggest achievement was just making it nearly 3000 miles to Istanbul!  Making it on my own, in one piece, and safely. I didn't get a single puncture and I didn’t get mugged. There were some difficult experiences and some challenges, not least of which were stray dogs chasing me all over the place or getting caught out cycling in the dark in the middle of a thunderstorm and being scared I was about to be struck by lightning in my tent.

When I set off, I didn't want to raise money for charity because I didn't want to make a commitment to others that I genuinely wasn't sure that I could keep! So simply achieving a long-held dream of cycling solo across a continent, inspired by Dervla Murphy many years before, is in itself a huge cause for celebration and I am just so delighted that I had the chance to do it  and that it will open doors for future adventures as well.

What Will You Be Doing Differently On Your Next Tour?

I really love this question!

 The next ride is going to be different as it’s far more remote. In Europe, you’re never very far from a cafe, or a restaurant or a hotel, etc. You don’t have to carry a lot of food or water for multiple days or worry that you’ll be stranded in the middle of a desert hundreds of miles from a bike shop with a puncture. . 

Next time, I’m going to be cycling across a desert in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and in some very remote places. It’s going to be much hotter than it was in spring in Europe, because I'm planning to go in the summer. Some things will change because of the requirements of the ride. I’ll need to be able to carry a lot more water, I'll need to take a water filter, have tyres that are suitable for gravel, perhaps think more about how to charge batteries on the road, and potentially bring a dynamo. So some things will be different in terms of these modifications on the bike itself.

 Planning to meet lots of people on the way, either through the Warmshowers website (a fab resource for cycle tourers) or friends, made a huge difference to my journey and so I will be reaching out more to try and meet up with people along the way again next time. I learnt loads from the people I met along the way, who were often really interesting people who had done similar things and I got to hear about their own adventures and their future plans. It was lovely riding with some of my Warmshowers hosts for half a day or so as they'd sometimes ride along with me the next day and then turn back towards home - I just absolutely loved that camaraderie in the cycling community.

 Other than that, I am planning to be better prepared than I was the first time. For example, I went not really knowing how to fix a puncture, and luckily I didn’t have any. But I do think with this being a much more remote ride,the chances of me being as lucky as I was the first time again are slim, so I need to attend some bike maintenance courses. I winged it the first time and got lucky, but I will be more prepared next time.

Don’t Put Your Dreams Off!

I really want to encourage people, women especially, but really everyone, to get out there and do the things that you want to do, now! You asked me earlier what my biggest learning was and it’s that it is not worth putting things off.

I went through a lot of changes in my personal life in the months before my big trip. In a short space of time, I went through a divorce and I left a senior job with a children's mental health charity. One of the things that inspired me to do the ride now was that I felt that it was time for change and for something big to happen to shake up my life, which was unrecognisable from what it had been a few short months beforehand. I wanted to reclaim my sense of self, my identity and pride in myself. I think we all have these moments in our lives, when things fall apart or we suffer a big loss, and it’s a good time to take back control by leaping into chasing your dreams.

Initially, I was going to wait to do this cycle when I was 50, as that would be the time my youngest daughter would turn 18. However, when all of the above happened in one go, I realised that I might not be able to do this when I'm 50. I might not be well, I might not be alive, I might not even have this ambition anymore. To me that’s almost the saddest thing, if I've dreamed about this for decades and then when it comes to it I don't really want to do it because the time has passed. So I thought I'm going to do this whilst I can and whilst I still want to.

I really want to encourage people to just make things happen, whether or not you believe you can do it, or whether or not you think it’s easy. Make your dreams happen while you can – no one else will do it for you.

Shout Outs!

I would like to draw some attention to two organisations. One is a charity based in Glasgow, Women on Wheels. The charity teaches women to ride bikes and to do all sorts of other cycling-related things such as touring, bike maintenance, cycling as a family and more. If there are any women in Glasgow reading this, they are welcome to come along and join our lovely community.

The second organisation is Adventure Queens, which is a UK-wide community that supports women to undertake all kinds of adventures, big and small. They supported me to do this adventure through a generous grant, and I’d encourage any women reading to look them up and join the supportive community online.

Also if there is anyone else planning to cycle the Silk road in Summer 2025 or has done it before, i would love to hear from you! I  would also love to connect, potentially ride together, exchange notes on planning, and just meet other people doing these kinds of things.

To find out more about Sahir and her journey, check out her blog and follow her on Instagram.

To find out more about Women on Wheels, check out their website.

To find out more about Adventure Queens, check out their website.