Canny kitten that hitched a lift to stardom
ONE day in December 2018, Dean Nicholson was riding his bike through a mountainous region of Bosnia. Not long turned 30, the Scotsman didn’t know it but his life was about to change.
He heard a faint, high-pitched noise behind him. Maybe it was coming from his rear wheel and he’d have to stop to apply some oil. Then he listened again and realised what the sound was.
It was meowing. ‘A scrawny, greyand-white kitten was scampering along the road, desperately trying to keep up with me.’
The kitten had clearly been abandoned. Dean couldn’t leave it to die. He placed it in the front pannier of his bike and rode on.
After a few hundred yards, the kitten crawled out, up Dean’s arm and wrapped itself around the back of his neck.
A bond had been created. As Dean writes in this charming account of the pair’s later travels, ‘It was fate’.
His first task was to smuggle the kitten i nto Montenegro. His second was to give his new companion a name. He chose Nala from a character in The Lion King, one of his f avourite childhood films.
As the pair rode on through Montenegro and into Albania, he began to realise that Nala was a ‘people magnet’.
They were an unusual sight. It wasn’t every day that you saw ‘a big, bearded, tattooed bloke on a bike, with a kitten sitting on his shoulder like Long John Silver’s parrot’. Travelling on into Greece, Nala’s pet passport now sorted, t hey c ontinued to at t r act attention. Dean was recording their travels on Instagram.
When a popular website posted a video of him and Nala, something astonishing happened. He awoke one morning to find that they were famous.
Overnight his Ins tag ram followers had multiplied fiftyfold, from 3,000 to 150,000. A few days later, the number was 300,000. The original video had been watched five million times.
Emails and private messages flooded in. Journalists contacted Dean. Nala began to receive presents from her worldwide fans. (Unfortunately, many arrived with tax still to pay. On one occasion, Dean forked out €50 for a parcel that contained a stick with a feather on the end.)
Dean also realised the power of their growing social media fame. Journeying on through Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan before returning to Europe, he raised thousands of pounds for a variety of good causes.
No doubt, he and his cat would be travelling still (he had plans to cycle through Russia and into China) if it had not been for Covid-19. We can only hope they will both be back on the bike before too long.
As travel writing, Nala’s World is unexceptional. Whether kayaking in Santorini, chancing upon a refugee camp in Greece, or even fleeing his tent stark naked to escape a prowling bear in Turkey, Dean’s experiences are not so remarkable they justify a fulllength book.
However, as a chronicle of an extraordinary friendship between man a nd a ni mal, a nd its unexpected consequences, it’s entirely delightful.