I would bike 35 kilometers.

“Come! Eat with us,” says the family sitting in a circle in their front yard eating lunch as I bike past them. I am sweaty and out of breath. Eating is not what I want to do right now. If they had a cold beer, that may be a different story.

Up ahead, I glimpse the orange of my postmate’s backpack before he pedals around the next turn. The distance between us grew significantly on the last hill we climbed.

We are headed 35 kilometers north on the main road to visit another volunteer in Bante. The decision to bike can be accounted for by two things: wanting to save money on the taxi ride (him) and a lifetime of asking why would you ride there when you can bike there (me).

I spend a lot of my time in my village. And I feel like that is where I should be spending the majority of my time.

But there is something to be said about biking 35 km north to a city where no one knows you, where you can drink a beer without wondering if your students are going to see you, where you can speak English at the speed with which a native speaker talks without having to take slang into account and where you know you’ll be spending the afternoon with the six people who are fast becoming the six people in a foreign country who know you the best.

Also, we had plans to climb a mountain that afternoon.