As it turns out, cycling six continents is a particularly savage way to prove the quality of gear. Things have been fraying and snapping and dissolving, and once, actually exploding. I’ve been busily tossing kit confetti-like into the world’s various dustbins. There’s not much left. Three things actually – My bicycle, a Craghoppers base t-shirt which I have developed a kind of profound friendship with and will sew and patch up and coddle like a comfort blankey until England, and a ‘sleeping bag’ - in bold inverted commas because sometimes I wake up to a scene that evokes a (victorious) fight with a vigorous flock of passing geese.

First off – a caveat. Please don’t feel you need any of this stuff. People who sew together their own panniers and sleep under tarps make me smile. Why delay a bike tour because you can’t afford top kit? That said, if you can afford cool clothes from Endura and the like, then go for it, and if you’re off on an exceptionally long bike tour then investment in extra strong and more pricy kit becomes more worthwhile.

Some general advice

• Beware of super lightweight stuff: tempting it may be, but often you’ll regret it. On the plus side, it’s nice to have tent pegs that can double as tooth picks.
• Think multi-functionality, but don’t be obsessed by it. Notice how much more frustrating it is to work with a multitool than lovely solid set of separable allan keys?
• Think compatibility. Wherever you plan to tour, think about what is available locally. When things break you don’t want to have to get replacements shipped from home. For instance tubes with Presta valves are not available in many countries outside the western world. Widen the hole in your rims before you leave and stick to Schroeder valve tubes.Odd sized wheels and unusual components might be tough to replace.
• Think of what gear will leave you completely stuck if it breaks, and plan for that – in remote places a busted bike pump, stove or cracked rim may mean you can’t keep riding, other bits of kit can break but not threaten your ability to pedal to the next big town.
• You can of course skimp on everything and still go touring, but I think there is a rough hierarchy to the kit it's important not to skimp on. Recognise where you can easily save money (I offer: cycle computer, bike chain, clothing, ? bicycle) and when you may well regret going cheap (back tyre, tent, rims, racks).
• Weight should always be considered in relation to how often something is used, not just in its own right. Some bikers carry foldable chairs - relatively heavy perhaps, but if used every day they are usually touted as indispensable by those who carry them (I don't).

The best of the best

The following annual run down of killer kit has some old favourites and some young upstarts. The affiliate links I've provided are to products offered by popular cycle touring retailers, including the extremely competitively priced Cyclocamping.com - an expert retailer run by expert round-the-world cycle tourers. And if you click on a link and make a purchase, a small bit of money comes my way which helps to keep me pedalling across six continents.

 And so, in no particular order...

Tubus racks – the Front Novo Low-Rider and The Rear Cargo Evo

Well the Indian monsoon did eventually coax rust into the crevices of these exceptionally strong steel racks, but they have lasted so long that they sit proudly on the list once again. They remain a favourite amongst cycle tourers the world over, and their weight to durability ratio is hard to beat.

Ortlieb Panniers

Another old favourite. Though the competition might be hotting up in regards to panniers, I still haven’t seen a competitor that offers the same favourable combination of supreme toughness, low weight and reasonable price tag. Do yourself a favour...

Ortlieb Front Roller Classic
Ortlieb Back Roller Classic


Buff

There are a bunch of alternative multifuctional headwear bits out there, but none have cooler patterns, the in-house design to production, or the tendency not to fray or fade than Buff. There is a headspinning range of items now available, and an equally exciting number of ways to wear them. Peep the video.

Sawyer water filter

There are a range of options if you want clean water and to avoid a ghastly gastro-intestinal Armageddon in your tent on the side of an Indian road. This one is my favouite – it uses nano technology to rid the water of bacteria. Very light, simple to use, no moving parts to break, and no chemicals.

Schwalbe tyres

Another obvious choice. If you’re hitting a combination of rough and paved roads, my advice is to go with the unfoldable classic Marathon Tour Plus which are joyfully puncture resistant. The Supremes are the best choice if you're sticking mainly to paved roads, but the Mondials can fail at the side wall – have they shaved off a little too much weight? Either way, Schwalbe tyres still come recommended by most riders I run into, and I've clocked up more than 15,000 km on one Marathon Tour Plus in the past.

Keen sandals

In hot places sandals clearly win out over cycling shoes, and Keen have a sturdy reputation. I’m using a new pair of Keen Newport Mens sandals so I can’t yet comment on durability, but they look and feel great, so I’ll keep you posted.

Hilleberg Staika Tent

Hilleberg are the Don Corleone of tent manufacturers and the question is not whether you want one, but whether you can afford one. Hillberg use vastly stronger material than the rest, the tents are fast to put up and after two years of use (pitching my tent on the majority of nights) rain has been kept at bay, even amid the torrential downpours of the Asian monsoon. When winds rushed over the Mongolian steppe at over 70 km/hour I waited for the fateful snap of a sheared tent pole but was treated to only the howl of the wind. The Staika is three-poled, and free-standing (a feature I would suggest is essential in selecting a tent for cycle touring so you can do the cool stuff pictured, as well as pitching in gas station forecourts and the like), and if you buy the Staika Mesh Inner Tent you can pitch just the inner, which is a good idea if it’s very hot and dry. It has two doors and plenty of porch room. A great choice for two people, though at 4 kg it’s a bit on the heavy side for one.

I camped on the frozen surface of lake Khovsgol in Mongolia in a Hilleberg Staika

Petzl MYO RXP headtorch

This is the best head torch I’ve seen – you can vary the brightness and the spread of light with the bulb cap. The off-on button is hidden away by a raised plastic bit that means it won’t turn on accidentally in your head bag and run out the battery. And its dazzling enough at full beam and battery to double as a bike light.

Altura Orkney headbag

Mine has been going for two and a half years now and shows no sign of needing a replacement. The Klickfix clip is the best way to secure a headbag to handlebars I’ve seen. There’s lots of space inside the rigid bag, and a decent front pocket. The map case will probably come off fairly quickly, but otherwise it’s a great choice.

iPod

(A real dark horse). 160 GB of music, podcasts and audiobooks do me nicely. Use fleetingly and judiciously, but when you’ve been tangled up in your own boring thoughts for too long, it’s a great escape route.

Brooks B17 saddle

I have nothing to compare it to, but my Brooks B17 is doing a great job. One saddle didn’t make it all the way home, but I’m confident number two will hold out. Again this is another brand tourers fiercely stick to, with good reason.

A Rainbow Lorikeet munching on an Illawarra Flame Tree, Queensland

Summer days in Queensland are whacked by a hail of meteoric commotions that arrive without warning and linger for as long as traveling bullets. It doesn't drizzle here, the build up to a downpour takes seconds. A drop or two bedew our panniers, and then it pelts down with the gusto of a power shower. The patter from falling sheets of rain quickly overtakes our voices, and minutes later dies a sudden death as spears of sunlight sear into our rain coats. There’s more: territorial magpies swoop and cockroaches the size of hamsters smash into our head-torches so that nights resound with our yelps which mingle with the screeches and beating wings of fruit bats as prodigious as any of Tolkien's creations. There’s a cacophony of cicadas too and the simian guffaw of kookaburras which explodes without warning from the forest into which the sun abruptly plummets, within minutes blackness consumes the day. Australia has us on tenterhooks, we’re always wondering where the next drama will spring from.

A surprise in the plug socket

I’ve cycled in hotter, wetter, more defeating places, but amid the unrelenting fever of Colombian jungles or Ethiopian deserts concerned citizens didn’t stop to exhort me to abandon my journey and fly home immediately, in Australia scores of passers by do so, indirectly, each day. Partly this might be because Claire exudes a rosy hue - more from exercise than from the sun - but which inspires people to take action. The manner in which we are warned about the perils of a bike ride through Queensland in the summer is akin to the response sensible parents might offer the six year old who demands a Black Mamba for Christmas. The assumptions are clear - you have no idea what you’re doing, say their cautious pauses between probing questions, their sympathetic head tilt. You haven’t done even the most cursory research, have you? They list the tribulations to highlight our folly – always the heat, the rain, the insects, sometimes the dengue fever; they compare Queensland in December to a swamp, and inevitably they finish with the daily lesson : ‘It’s not the heat that’ll get you, it’s the humidity’. Occasionally they dive in with bare faced sarcasm: ‘Picked a nice cool time of year to go biking!’. I return their smirk but with the added sliver of a look which I hope conveys a message of ‘Go away'and perhaps'I want to hurt you.’

These very Australian ‘One-Line Wonders’ as we’ve starting calling them, can be as welcome as they can be unwanted. A chirpy ‘You doing it the hard way then!’ or ‘good on yers!’ can herald an invitation to camp nearby, and we enjoy having a laugh with those who judge us brave over stupid, suspecting we're probably a little of both.

‘Uhhh! Stephen, I’m broken! I feel like trifle! I feel like a dropped trifle and the dogs licking at it on the floor!’ We’re getting to know each other and I know by now that this is a bad sign. When Claire’s feeling particularly defeated she talks in culinary metaphors, feeling like custard or warm yogurt can be the antecedent to a crumpled heap of human by the road, she’s never reached the trifle stage before and I’m worried, it sounds like it might be worse than custard. But there are ways and means to cope with the ever present heat. Soon afterwards Claire strolls into a gas station, on first glance she appears to be perusing the cold drink selection, but there is something unusual in her adopted posture, arching her back, her midriff protrudes into the fridge, brushing up against a row of Pepsi cans. I join her, feigning indecision in event the staff are watching, gradually extending my thigh to meet the 7UP and catching wafts of icy air up my shorts. Eventually, as I'm busy estimating how much of my ass I could squeeze beside the ginger ale, a staff member is sent on patrol, probably tasked with finding out why two people are behaving so strangely, so we re-enter the furnace.

In the coastal town of Mackay we garnered information about quiet back roads from Peter and Jackie, touring cyclists and our affable hosts. Soon we were riding among flush, sun-dashed fields of sugarcane, massive in scope, which melded with the horizon. The leaves shivered in an idle breeze. Gradually hillocks of forest spotted the crops and were decorated by scrims of cloud. The cane fields were soon overtaken by more forest as we skimmed the outskirts of Eugella National Park. Gum trees were riven by shrubs of pastel pink flowers and raptors circled high above us. We reached Boulder Creek with a couple of hours until the sun began it’s impatient plunge beneath the tropical horizon. Tangled vines and creepers sought ownership of the river, invading the corridor above it, and we plunged into the water to discover shrimps and turtles and then set up camp on the banks. Crocodile free swimming holes are a luxury here.

Tully is the wettest town in Australia – one year almost eight metres of falling water splashed onto it’s streets and shops and residents, twelve times the annual average of London. As we cycled through the town the air was so muggy it weighed upon us like gravity. We stopped under trees, cowering in their nets of shade, wiping off old, hot sweat that refused to join the sodden, cloying air, and swiping away the harassing marsh flies - harbingers of rain. It’s a predictable pattern : the wind quickens from a murky horizon and the fuzzy hills, a drop or two splash us though overhead the sky is a broad, unbroken desert of blue - the drops have been wrenched by gusts from the maw of a traveling storm, still kilometres away. We make eyes at each other now. The sky is soon mussed, building clouds are scattered among leaden fractures which in turn wrestle with half a rainbow and become lost in a clump of pale and distant cumulus. Then it’s on us, and the rain falls in sheets. The patter eclipses the rustle of the sugarcane, and the dulcet wafts of cut cane and fetid stink of fallen mangoes are drowned out too. Sometimes there’s a bus stop or a gas station where we can huddle inside, where someone will saunter by, pausing just briefly to tilt their heads, narrow their eyes and remind us: ‘Not a good day for a ride, is it?’. 

But it’s over soon and we’re off again, the sliding air shedding rainwater from our clothes as we pedal, warm water splashing up between my toes. Trucks surge past trailing comet tails of spray. Two shaggy and sodden emus amble through the scrub. A troop of grey kangaroos just watch us, ears pricked. The trials of summer biking here are assuaged by these wild spectators, by the familiar tailwinds that rush at our backs and rear panniers like tiny hands propelling us through the puddles, and by the exotic fruit on offer – the mangoes, passion fruit, melon and lychees - from roadside vendors. Just as suddenly as the rain comes and the sun departs and some wild creature bays, croaks or trills comes a realisation just as acute and just as intense - that biking in Queensland at any time of year is fantastic.

With our arrival in the tropics road signs forewarn our new enemies – cyclones, crocodiles, dengue. Australia can’t hide from its disaster-ravaged history – we passed logs wedged high in trees and sprawling riverside debris from the unprecedented floods near Gayndah, past the scorched forests of NSW and the flattened ones near Cardwell in the wake of the category five Cyclone Yasi three years ago. It all helps bring a feeling of unease, of being hunted, augmented by the locals who warn us about gimpi gimpi (or the less imaginatively titled ‘stinging tree’ which invites a circuitous conversation 'What's it called?''The stinging tree'. 'Yeah, whats it called?''The Stinging Tree') an innocuous looking shrub which injects pain inducing neurotoxins into anyone who brushes past it. There are crocs too, so we cast our eyes down to the turbid waters of creeks as we ride over bridges, hunting for those lambent eyes, and lest we forget the centimeter sized jellyfish called Irukandji which lurk off coast and boast venom 100 times more potent than that of a cobra. On one occasion we left a tourist information centre trembling with cyclone preparation kits in hand and advice to camp in somewhere called Alligator Nest Picnic Area. It would be funny, if it wasn’t all so terrifying.

Townsville meant that Cairns, our last stop in Australia and the end of a 4000 km ride from Melbourne, was in spitting distance. Having paid for accommodation only once in three months of traveling Australia (a campsite) we decided one night in a cheap hostel was in order, a very minor splurge so we could physically and mentally reboot. Cycle touring breeds a deep appreciation of what you might otherwise take for granted. Showers, beds and roofs are now all a little unfamiliar and indulgent. We set off the following day towards Big Crystal Creek - a swimming hole we plunged into, greedy for relief from the heat.

Insects rule the tropics. There are ants, lots of them. We camp on them, sit on them, and find them milling about our food which is enclosed in impenetrable ant-proof panniers and boxes. There’s a cadence to the trolling thrum of cicadas that waxes and wanes as we ride through pockets of them and I will never forget Claire’s manic dance around the road with Lycra around her ankles - it was the day I learnt that going for a pee can be complicated by a centipede in your pants. Nights are spent sweating more than sleeping – lying motionless on our backs, adhered to our sleeping mats, wincing as we listen to the shrill buzz of a solitary mosquito intruder. We are in a world of sweat rash, of smelly feet, of misty sunglasses, of moldy food. And it's times like this, hard times, when I wonder whether the joy of cycle touring is actually just imagined, or relative, that it’s just a sequence of discomforts chased by a more memorable recovery which feels good only because the unpleasant thing has stopped - like taking off a tight pair of shoes – not really enjoyable, just relief. But the hard times never last and soon I’m optimistic enough to realize I was just being grumpy.

The region west of Cairns is known as the Atherton Tablelands and seemed an enticing adventure before unhealthy amounts Christmas pudding rendered me immobile on someone's couch. We climbed up in shadows cast by Cedar and Walnut, beside us a dense and titillatingly mysterious under-story of orchids, cycads and shrubs which could hide all sorts of extraordinary beasts. We dodged Wait-a-wile, a barbed vine which droops down to the road and threatened to snag and then wrench us off our bikes. I like too it's other colloquial name : Lawyer Vine. Once this thorny plant becomes attached it will not let you go (until it has drawn blood).



We took a day off to relax in a campsite and mosey through the patches of rain forest near Malanda, primed to catch glimpses of platypus, pythons and tree kangaroos but instead just finding scores of brush turkey. Then a night of gabbing away to Neil and Claire and their family over wine and a Sunday roast before pedaling through rolling hills, and I pondered the misleading analogy of the region to a table. I wonder if coming round for dinner at the home of whoever came up with the epithet would be an adventure – passing the salt might be more complicated if you have to negotiate peaks and crevasses of mahogany.

The road to Cairns was a fun-filled slalom as we negotiated the 263 descendant turns of the Gillies Highway. We rolled into Cairns just before Christmas, Claire as fit as Cadel Evans and often leaving me behind straining for oxygen, to Ian and Sarah and their two year old champion swimmer and future Wallabies scrum half William. Ian and I worked together in Whiston Hospital as first year docs many moons ago and shared a flat, he now works for the flying doctors but has begun the process of Australianation by freaking out visitors to the country, in my case with tales of kangaroos that disembowel people and other on the surface unlikely, yet in the context of Australia, immediately believable calamities. This was my forth Christmas away from home and my first traditional Christmas feast complete with Roast potatoes and Yorkshire Puddings. I'm still recovering.

I usually offer up a polite but firm 'no thank you' when I meet people on days off my bicycle who invite me out for a bike ride, relishing the prospect as much as a bath of Irukandji, but when Ian, a connoisseur of the world class mountain bike trails that twist and bound through the nearby mountains, offered to take me and Claire out on bikes without panniers, with suspension and that weighed about as much as my tent, we jumped at the chance. Despite some teething troubles which involved skidding around preternaturally tight corners emitting squeals which carried equal measures of prayer and blasphemy, I surpassed my primary ambition of mere survival and bloody loved it.

Australian drivers still fill me with rage as they shout ‘Get off the bloody road!’ or ‘You should pay rego!’ (the Aussie version of a road tax – these people are too dim and inbred to understand the concept of rego not to mention the unquantifiable health, social and environmental effects of fuel guzzling vehicles). It must be that tailgating and side-swiping pedestrians and bikers has been incorporated into the Australian driving test, I think, after another truck belts past, a hair’s breadth between us, sucking me helplessly towards the wheels. I muse too about the driving habits of serial killers and wife beating misogynists. It’s not bad driving that’s the problem, I decide, or a brief lapse in judgment, it runs deeper than that. These people are devoid of empathy, their bolshy over taking maneuvers speak volumes about exactly how much they give a shit about fellow humans. There is good news on the horizon though – a new law in Queensland will soon penalize drivers for getting within 1 or 1.5 metres of a cyclist and when it comes into force I hope all cycle tourers in this part of Australia set the Go Pros rolling and deliver SD cards to local police stations.

Our plans have been in flux of late but one has finally come together: I’ll spend the next three weeks walking solo the length of the pacific island of New Caledonia with a bare minimum of kit in search of a story and magazine feature. Claire will be traveling to Tasmania where she will be riding around the island. We will meet back in Cairns towards the end of January, fly to Darwin and then to Dili in East Timor before hopping to Java and Sumatra and Borneo.

Finally my good friend Oli who you may remember from this guest blog post, needs your help. He's made it to the semi-final of the lastminute.com Spontaneity Champion competition which slammed into his life and left a trail of destruction in its wake. Now an entire family's Christmas is in danger of being obliterated by this hideous phenomenon. Oliver, a once 'normal' individual, has been reduced to a grotesque state by his obsession with an online voting process. He remains constantly glued to the screen of his laptop and smart phone and is consuming paracetamol packets at a time, in a futile attempt to stave off the crippling headaches brought on by excessive screen time. His mind is fragmenting under the strain of this process and his family feel helpless. Christmas is descending into mania for the Davy family - but you have the power to help. Follow this link and click on the pink button to give Oliver Davy some respite. Enjoy your New Year in the knowledge that you have contributed to the rescue of someone else's.

Thank yous this month – Mad Props go to Ian, Sarah and William (for an awful lot, but especially the his and hers boxer shorts emblazoned with cartoon santas), Neil, Claire and family, Peter and Jackie, and of course Australia - you have been a joy-filled playground, a worthy adversary and a cuddly, endearing, slightly pissed and eccentric friend. Cheers mate.

A Christmas present from Claire

What is that?

Long, thin, oblique; the island was a lone speech mark amid the wordless Pacific Ocean. I zoomed in until Googlemaps gave up it's identity - 'New Caledonia'. The name didn't ring any bells but since Wikipaedia didn't mention genocide, cannibalism or ebola, I booked a flight. Its anonymity to me just seemed like a good reason to do so.

The almost ticked out clock of my Aussie VISA meant I needed a border run, but this too was an excuse for an adventure - the spontaneous, half-baked kind. I had in mind an island, and the south Pacific bares 7500 to choose from. I scribbled 'no bicycle, pack light, travel by foot' into my journal and then canvassed the bespeckled ocean on googlemaps for inspiration.

New Caledonia is an archipelago and autonomous French overseas territory, and the main island, uninspiringly entitled Grand Terre, is 1200 km from Australian shores, or about half way to Figi. It lies like a giant frozen throwing knife launched from New Zealand and aimed at Papua New Guinea, and after those two, Grand Terre is the third largest island in the Pacific.

Hiking is not how the mainstream wile away hours on a palm-fringed Pacific islands, but I wasn’t planning on indulging in contented comas on surf-soaked white sand beaches, diving amongst coral reefs, or retiring to a resort to wash down the day's hedonism with lobster and kava. I was going just to walk, hoping later to emerge blister-footed, laden with stories and contentedly beat.

A windshield was just a slant of glass until East Timor.

Deep, aching regret chased my decision to add myself to the human-stuffing inside this microlet - the local bus - whipping through the clamorous streets of Dili, the country's capital. I had bagged a front row view along with three other men whose buttocks also vied for a share of the two front seats. Despite the unyielding terror my perspective endowed, I was fascinated. I snatched a glimpse of a motorbike as it disappeared behind a two foot long yellow caterpillar. An ambulance, plowing so fast through traffic it was surely going to maim more people than it could ever save, flickered in and out of view amid plastic yellow birds and a limp Manchester United jersey. Where I expected sky, there was only yellow fur.

Almost every inch of glass was covered with cutesy toy animals and football paraphernalia, suckered on, through which the teenaged driver peered. His head jerked left and right to counter the motion of the dangling zoo. His red tinged Mohawk jerked too. And it went on like this – lurching past invisible vehicles, Daffy Duck consuming a gaggle of pedestrians, fleeting thoughts of my family and early life, a vision of a crumpled bus and a blood-stained Winnie the Pooh. Was it my audible whimpering that invited the driver to wink at me and offer a double thumbs-up? Maybe, but considering a Darwin Award was on the cards it seemed a perverse way to offer reassurance, all I could do was fake a smile and will those thumbs back to the only place thumbs of visually impaired drivers should be - on the steering wheel.

Given the circumstances, it was hard to imagine adding another dynamic more crippling to the driver’s ability to concentrate, bar a passenger launching a bucket of ice and another of fire ants onto his lap. For starters the Indonesian pop music that blasted from speakers was jet plane loud and each bass note sent tinny rattles through the chassis, bounced the vast array of juxtaposed cuddly animals and inspired violent head bopping from the front row, me excluded, though I was often jolted involuntarily roof-ward when we smashed into Dili’s cavernous potholes. A weave of scents – petrol fumes, cooking meat, and rank vegetables – gushed through the open windows. Between songs the noise of the streets clawed back, caged roosters crowed, the tangle of careering motorbikes revved and backfired.

I recognised my hostel (superimposed by Tigger) and tapped a coin on the roof to signal my stop. Disgorged now, a jumble of insouciant school children in the back of the bus stared out at me on the pavement. Perhaps only a front seat had offered full appreciation of our breathless foreplay with providence. The driver winked at me once again, yelled ‘See you next time meeester!’ and as he jerked the vehicle back from kerb to chaos I could only stand, watch and ruefully mouth those parting words - Next time meester. Next time. If we did meet again I might be on a bicycle, and on the less survivable side of the windshield.


It seems unforgivable to label anywhere in the world’s largest continent as quintessentially Asian but on the streets of Dili the clichés added up. Meandering roosters, pots of bubbling broth and dumplings, careering motorbikes adding to the heavy fug of hanging smog. These streets belonged to the people, they worked them and they lived them. For almost a year I have pedalled through sanitised, au fait, developed nations. My eyes are wider now, I’m leaning forward, senses piqued, and content because we have a new border to our back and a torrential rain of differences, drenching me with questions. We went in search of some history to help bring to life the newest country of the millennium, one of the poorest in Asia and a land without tourist information, a British consulate, or even a purchasable road map.

Rubble was one of those unanswered questions. In Dili piles of it spot the city, it’s a playground for children, and casts refuges of shade in the late afternoon for the city’s many stray, mangy dogs. It tells a story too - of a wretched history, branded by war and rebellion. The former Portuguese colony was heading for full independence in 1975 when Indonesia invaded with backing from the US who at the time were making warmongering something of a hobby themselves having just ravaged Vietnam. Indonesia was the most important non-communist state in SE Asia and the US wanted them on side. One inconsequential point I should mention: the Timor sea has massive oil reserves, though I’m sure American military strategists and politicians never once gathered around a map of East Timor, rubbed their hands and gawked with glee. That would be wholly unprecedented.

Australia were complicit in the invasion too, and their actions since East Timor’s independence have marked them out as guilty of coveting Timor’s black gold. They have acted in the classic bully boy style rich countries deal with poor ones, at best protectionist and deeply cynical, at worst corrupt and in violation of international law. It’s notable that Australia, in the the midst of a lucrative mining boom, enjoyed negotiating with East Timor only when the fledgling country was particularly desperate, at its lowest ebb, and would take whatever was on offer. More recently East Timor has accused the Aussie government of spying. It is all quite complicated, but there is anger on the streets of Dili, and the walls of the Australian embassy speak of the outrage...

The crocodile is the national animal of East Timor

After East Timor we’d cross into Indonesia and every emerging fact about the nation left me further incredulous. With 250 million people the population of Indonesia is larger than that of Brazil, 3.5% of the world’s people are Indonesian. The 19,000 islands (you heard right) have a land area about on par with Mexico. With 60 days on our Indonesian VISA the plan was an island hop, seven in all: Timor (where we’d cross into Indonesia), Flores, Sumbawa, Lombok, Bali, train through most of Java (to bypass the busiest Indonesian streets and a particularly cantankerous volcano) to Jakarta, Sumatra and finally exiting the nation via a boat to Singapore. 60 days was double what we might have been granted, though I like to think our letter in Indonesian to the attaché helped in that regard (Dear Sir, we are so excited about visiting your beautiful country, which whilst we have never been there, we are certain it will be the most beautiful in the world…)

We rode the coast road first which passed by thatched huts clumped in small villages, scented with wood smoke and teeming with shambling goats and tribes of popeyed children who chased at our wheels yelling ‘Bon Dia!’– a Portuguese welcome that lives on. Our welcome rippled through villages and the smiles seemed to leap out at us, full-faced, awe-inscribed, made with great red-stained lips from chewing the Betel Nut and which made their owners look maniacal, like the Joker from Batman.



I hate to make naff comparisons between countries but there was something of Ethiopia in this part Indonesia, specifically the attention we were gifted, or as was often the case, stabbed with. The polite ‘Bon Dia’ was replaced in busier West Timor by a verbal orgy dominated by screams of ‘MEEEESTER!’ (aimed at both myself and Claire) as in ‘I LOVE YOU MEESTER!' a favourite, or ‘I NEVER FORGET YOU MEESTER!’. Occasionally ‘I HATE YOU MEESTER!’ or ‘FUCK YOU MEESTER!’ and chased by a hysterical scattering of children. Often though it was just ‘HEY! HEEEEYYY! HEEEEYYYYYYYY!’ The ‘Hey’ is not the kind of ‘Hey, hows it going?’ kind, it’s the kind of ‘HEY!’ that ordinarily is only used in response to a stranger stealing a newborn baby, sprinting off down the street with it under their arm and shouting ‘Dave, go long!’. It’s a ‘Hey!’ that’s not meant to engage anyone or kindle conversation, it’s self-serving, in your face and imbued with unnecessary violence.‘HEYYYYYYY!’ is not screamed so much as vomited all over you.

The attention luckily isn’t always so affronting, and these islands are a hotbed of hospitality, actually after four years of bicycle travel around the world it’s hard to think of a country in which local people have hosted me as often. We camped outside churches and often in people’s homes where we chewed betel nut, played with kids and aired our flaky Indonesian. Every face threw smiles our way, they bounced off our own. Huts were upended to make space, food was cooked in our honour, children milled around us, adults crouched on their haunches, content just to watch and grin those sardonic scarlet smiles. One particularly benevolent man became so embarrassed after ants got into our panniers and his chicken ran amok and over our sleeping bodies in the night, that he refused our offer of money and we left with panniers choking with fruit from his meager garden. It was heartbreaking and our Indonesian couldn't communicate our gratitude, so we just smiled a lot until he understood.



In Timor motorbikes often pulled up beside us, their riders question-ready and beaming. One man sat beside me on the grass as we took a break, he’d been giving me the eye. ‘Oh Meeester Stephen, I so glad I meet you, you’re so handsome!’ he piped up, his head lolling coquettishly to one side. Every so often he giggled and chirped ‘Oh Meester Stephen!’ as if I’d told the funniest joke he’d heard in years. He referred to Claire as ‘Meester Stephen wife’ a moniker which, to her chagrin, has stuck - I use it every time I need her attention, enjoying the implied sense of ownership and theft of her individualism. There was talk before of the possibility of Claire getting harassed by leering romantics in some countries, so we decided to pretend we are married, we didn't foresee though my meteoric rise to gay icon-hood in Indonesia and I think Claire’s secretly a tinge jealous she hasn't been wolf whistled as much as I have.

Here’s how it works on Indonesian roads: A vehicle pulls level, perhaps a car, most likely a motorbike. Multiply the wheel number by two and you have roughly the number of occupants, unless it’s a bus, then square it seven times and add infinity. The driver will drill me with an undeviating gaze, oblivious does not begin to describe it, for him the known universe has just vanished. He is like a shark in a shoal of mackerel, scattering horn-sounding oncoming traffic to ditches and crash barriers. After a dragging infinitude, amid the screams of maimed motorists and police sirens, the driver will summon the courage to ask ‘Hello Meester. What is your hobby?’ Indonesian drivers are ambidextrous lane users who rarely resort to trifling things like binocular vision, still, they are genuinely better than Australians, which really does say something.



Ahhhh Indonesian food. Cheap and gratifyingly ambiguous if not always wholesome. Warungs are local haunts where the food is served, and it’s best not to think about the bound slavering dogs that can be seen on the back of Indonesian motorbikes en route to some local restaurant. Coffee comes with enough sugar not just to make diabetes completely unavoidable but to actually caramelise your circulating blood volume. We went economy class for the boat to island number two, Flores, and for our thriftiness we received a fish head and a sprinkle of rice for dinner. Cockroaches and chickens had the run of our shared living quarters and when we returned from sallies to the toilets we had tales of stomach churning adventure. We shared with about 70 men who were stretched out on black mattresses amid botanical garden humidity and hanging body odour. Because this is Indonesia our 70 cohabitants were also 70 rampant chain smokers puffing their way to emphysema by our next dock, some were almost certainly going to be photographed posthumously for government anti-smoking campaigns. Our floating dorm mates had other traits in common too – they all owned mobile phones with the capacity to play bass-less music and had strikingly bad musical sensibilities, evidenced by the frequency with which ‘you raise me up’ by Westlife drifted through the cabin like the unwelcome smells. They were also all very enthusiastic amateur photographers whose preferred subject matter was white people attempting sleep. They too were karaoke enthusiasts, hawkers, stand-up comedians, wide eyed voyeurs, incessant hecklers, greeny-hacking experts and English language students who would from time to time shake one of us awake and ask ‘Hello meester. What is your hobby?’ 

We arrived in Ende, the largest city on the mountain-crowded island of Flores, and after gleaning route advice from another intrepid long-term biker, the wise and dreadlocked Jonno of ‘Homeless But Not Hopeless’ renown, we decided to visit the venerated lakes at Kelimutu. We left our bikes in Ende for the detour and so on the way I was endowed with a wind-blasted panoramic view because I was about about two foot taller than the child who drove the Indonesian motorbike taxi. We dodged slumbering dogs, up, past the infinity pools of flooded rice paddies, up some more, into a world of tree ferns. We both later confided that our thoughts had at times veered towards craniotomies and neurological rehab. We jumped off the motorbikes and our drivers headed off, presumably for warm milk, cookies and bedtime stories, and we trekked up to the three lakes - one a bottle green, another black watered and red rimmed and the third a kind of turquoise that ordinarily belongs only to exotic butterflies viewed after a hit of LSD.



Leaving Ende we cycled past a statue of two extended fingers, the international symbol of peace or victory, or at least that’s what those who arrive to the town get, when you leave you get the more unwelcome reverse, perhaps whoever commissioned the statue hadn't thought of that, but I like to think they had. Rain fell, big, sopping drops of it, making the road ahead steam. Black beaches were laid out below us, and the coastal road was crumbling slowly into the surf. Villages were a jumble of palm thatched huts and heaps of coconut husks where raggedy children played and the balmy smell of humanity loitered. Dogs harangued us. Women collected blue-green stones on the beach and carried them on their heads. ‘MEESTER!’ - the chant ambushed us everywhere, firing in from the road’s mysterious margins like darts from blow pipes. Sudden cones of volcanoes appeared through billowing cloud. Tribes of children ran at our wheels, all eyes, giggling into their hands. Buses swept past, honking, arms flailing, music pounding, giddy screams. Indonesia never lost its heady pace.




Indonesians love music, they love it marginally more than sugar, football and hair-gel and less than unfettered noise masquerading as music, which is the national obsession. Indonesian buses, or bemos, zipped past on our way into West Timor’s main city, Kupang, hecklers hanging out of the bass rattling doors, their rear windows decorated with an image of a local hero – sometimes pop sensation Avril Lavigne, sometimes Harry Potter, sometimes Jesus Christ. I wonder if these celebs ever share other territory here, Harry Potter on stained glass perhaps, sexy miniatures of Avril Lavigne next to Buddha and Ganesha at roadside shrines.

On the roads motorbikes back fired and smoke billowed from burning litter, both added a flavor of ‘war zone’ to our surroundings. Occasionally a great cavalcade of big polished cars sped past us, led by siren sounding police cars. The occupants I imagined to be some important visiting foreign dignitary, perhaps the third uncle of the former vice attaché to Mali.

One night we stayed in a convent and visited the nearby school, led by Sister Selfie and Father Fluffy, and I promise those names are genuine. Last year a section of the sea front school collapsed into the lapping waves. Most of the kids we were told are just lucky to be in high school, they won’t go on to university or city jobs, most likely they’ll be stone pickers like the bent and languid old people we saw as we arrived. It was a sobering thought, and whilst the ecomony is growing fast here, so is the population, and many Indonesians have the kind of obstacles I never did. I never opened textbooks to find starfish and hermit crabs. The blackboard was never obscured by driftwood. History class never got cancelled because of high tide.

Claire and Oscar looking out of the cobweb rice paddies near Ruteng

As we travelled across the island I sunk into a black mood, mainly because I couldn’t fix my brakes, the hills kept rolling in and the attention we garnered was exhausting. I could say ‘hello’ and mean it the first 679 times, but by 680, which in Flores is around 2pm, it got hard to keep smiling. Also, I had a rubber chicken on my handlebars called Herb, and it’s impossible not to look like a giant douchebag if you’re miserable and have a rubber chicken on your handlebars. I hated myself for being so grumpy, especially after children galloped out of their homes, yelping exuberantly, joy written in their eyes, only in place of the fun and fascinating foreigner they expected they found a mopey, stone faced let-down. For those Indonesian children it must be the same as coming down stairs on Christmas morning to find Santa drunk, puking on his santa boots, sexually assaulting his reindeer and then removing his beard to reveal that he is in fact Bob, your dad’s drinking buddy from the Red Lion.

Herb the chicken is the newest member of team Cycling The Six

People often ask me whether wild camping is dangerous. I’ve never been robbed in my tent, though I’ve met scores of travelers who have been stripped of their money and gear and almost always the story is set on a bus or in a hotel. Unfortunately in Ruteng our own story unfurled…

After four nights rough camping or sleeping in villages we choose a cheap hostel to spend the night. The next day we left our room to have breakfast which was served on the same floor, about ten metres away, and so we didn’t think to lock the room, and yes, that does make us giant shamefaced douchebags. After about twenty minutes we realised someone had been in our room, rummaged through our bags and snatched a couple of million rupees (about 150 dollars). The usual emotions ploughed in – anger, disappointment in humankind, and a not insignificant amount of self-blame. We called on the hotel manager who had a single agenda, and it wasn’t sleuthing or sympathy. He wanted just to communicate how far from responsible his hotel was for our problem. Light years, apparently. I set off for the police station.

I explained the situation to gathered officers and spent the next half an hour repeating bits of the statement and agreeing with them when they reminded me that doors have locks and that locks stop bad people stealing your shit and that I’m a bit of a twat for letting this happen. Whilst I waited for something else to occur, perhaps a police report, though the prospect looked remote, one officer staring glumly at a ream of papers said to me ‘Ohhh, it’s terrible. It really is. Do people die like this in your country?’ He handed me a real life crime scene photo of a very dead, mutilated man, his face barely recognizable as a face. Before I could laugh insanely or puke, it may have been either, six armed police men tore through the station, jumped into a van and set out for our hostel.

Meanwhile back in Hotel Rima Claire was busy penning a letter for the insurance company whilst the hotel owner peered over her shoulder and cajoled her into changing the story: ‘Can’t you just say you lost the money on a plane?’ Then the agitated squadron and heavy artillery arrived to photograph the crime scene. Claire was ferried to the police station where together we gave a statement. On recording our details Claire was awarded an extra decade in age. They asked all kinds of pertinent questions like ‘religion?’ and ‘how many children do you have?’ to which we answered ‘none’. There was a brief silence followed by muttering. I filled it by asking Claire what she was planning for her 40th next May. The silence deepened. Claire asked the officer what was happening now. ‘Well, we are just wondering why you have no children’ he replied. ‘And no religion’ confirmed another. We left wondering if the report would get added to a dusty pile labelled ‘atheists’.

The dregs of Flores were starkly beautiful with rice paddies and vibrant green corn fields in every direction. Children sometimes ran behind pushing us up the hills but they soon got tired and ended up hanging on, wobbling the bikes and making it harder. Three times in Flores the road spiraled down to sea level and rose to over a vertical kilometer, the last day though – Lembor to Labuan Bajo – had some of the most protracted and brutal grades I had encountered for months, 30% on some turns. Every bend in the road revealed another tortured future of leg pain, wheezing and a torrent of sweat. I promised Claire the road would soon stop its incessant reach for the sky, but it didn’t, and we brooded. After hours of agony and small conquered targets we topped a pass and I joked a bit about Claire’s thundering promises of capitulation she’d made two hours ago. We laughed, but my jokes were premature, the road dipped and once again we were battling slopes Olympic tobogganists would wince at. Once we arrived in Labuan Bajo (which in our parlance had morphed into ‘Larry The Badger’) we were elated and swiftly laid waste to the hostel buffet as the sky purpled in the wake of a sunken sun and the silhouettes of bobbing boats scattered the harbor. The view would always have been a pearler, but we knew it was our grit and those lung-crunching twists of road behind us that made it extra special.


Thank yous – Oscar, Dave and Karen, Dave and Mary, Nahad and family, and scores of anonymous Indonesians in villages thoughout Timor and Flores who took care of us, hopefully the pleasure was reciprocal. Next up: Komodo, Lombok, Bali and Java, and a blog post from Jakarta.

Claire has recently interviewed several local artists and musicians in East Timor – part of her project to explore world music and its creators – here’s her piece.

A three part story this time: Komodo, Lombok and Bali.

Photo courtesy of Zoe Danielski, a future professional.

High Times in Jakarta

Sitting next to one of Jakarta’s most eminent food critics, at one of the city’s finest restaurants, I dredge up a memory from the week gone. Just days ago we made a go of slumber on the earthy floor of a tumbledown plywood hut, layered with fire ants, where a panicked chicken had the run of our recumbent, rigid bodies. I pop another morsel of Javanese cuisine into my mouth and think of how, that night, our bellies churned with hunger after another snack-dinner of MSG and salt under the guise of ‘noodles’. I rub my bites from the fire ants, still fresh. It fascinates me - the violence of the contrast, forged by fate. A travelling life is glutted with swings and dives like this, and tomorrow is always a mystery worth turning up for.

Java is home to 115 million people, all jammed together in a land the size of England. There are temples and volcanoes to gawk at, but mind-boggling population density brings smog, gridlock and the quintessentially Indonesian shout-a-thon we’re beleaguered by. Instead then we flew straight to Jakarta from Bali, and our departure airport was heaving with the bedraggled human remnants of the island’s famed hedonistic side, one we’d ducked. A train of oddballs shuffled past our airport seats, bedecked in enormous sunglasses, leather singlets, backward caps, dishevelled in their now-inapt party garbs, broken insomniacs nursing rum hangovers.

My bike box might have been the rattiest, most unwieldy thing in Bali airport, punched by holes and flailing tape. The magnitude of its shabbiness was matched by that of its weight, and we had easily maxed out on our baggage allowance. Hoisting it onto the scales at check-in, I clocked the 33 kg flashing on the electronic screen before the clerk did, and surreptitiously planted my foot beneath the box slashing the record of its real weight by 8 kg. My half-taunt calf muscle though sent the scale wavering madly between 23 and 30 kg so I leaned an elbow on Claire’s shoulder to steady myself, feigned nonchalance, rolled off pithy answers to the clerk’s questions and hoped she didn’t notice the band of Indonesian business men behind us who had discovered our ploy and were all pointing at my foot and hooting with laughter. Finally she penned '27 kg' on the box side - we were off to the capital.

A man emerged from a swirl of ambling travellers at Jakarta’s airport, hand outstretched, smiling broadly. Months before an email had arrived from Simon offering us a bed and shower when we got this far, things had snowballed since then though and the well-connected CEO of an insurance broker, and one-time mountain adventurer himself, had instrumented media interviews, fancy meals out, presentations at the British Chamber of Commerce and the British International School, and accommodation with his friends. A five day tornado of action twisted into life.

Our kind hosts were a family living in Jakarta - Anne, Phillip and Zoe, and they took us out on our first foray into the city by bicycle. Every Sunday Jakartans wend to the central business district where the roads are closed to traffic. The smog cast dim hulks of the city’s superstructures, music boomed from roadside speakers and kids ripped through the milky light on all manner of wheeled contraptions.

During our five days in Jakarta I might have eaten better and more than anywhere – all-you-can-plunder buffets, sushi, barbecue, local cuisine and more. Interviews and presentations broke up the feasting, and Jakarta’s legacy became new friends, money in the coffer and some extra blubber that the coming miles on Asian roads will slowly rob me of.

The girl and the mattress 

Courtesy of Zoe Danielski

Sumatran students who wanted to know if we had permission from our parents to travel

Dengue fever doesn't feature in the advertising campaigns of Thailand’s ministry of tourism. They don’t produce brochures scattered with photos of pallid, sweaty westerners with handlebar-ribs and bleeding gums and the words ‘Come to Thailand – land of smiles, white-sand beaches, and devastating tropical disease.’ And whilst malaria is on the down worldwide, dengue has blossomed. A graph of dengue over time has the look of a ski jump. Since my own bout everyone I meet seems to have had it, or knows someone who has. Nobody, as far as I know, was lured to the experience by a brochure.

I left Ao Nang after ten days that brimmed with frustration and lassitude.With dengue, you don’t really feel like eating, and for bicycle travel that’s kind of a requisite. On day one, those anorexic days showed in every laboured mile, but the next day I woke feeling a world better, my cadence returned, and I clocked up 140 km by nightfall. On a rural back road three South Africans on bikes pulled over. Cycle touring for them had been a spur-of-the-moment call, spelt out in their makeshift racks, tacked on to local mountain bike frames. They’d fudged what they needed using string and tape. A kickstand was a piece of wood. Things flapped and jutted. I was inspired by their invention: They were a visual statement of the fact that there are no obstacles to ambition.

The north of Thailand and Laos are inviting places to ride, awash with great scenery, food and things to stop and see. But I was a little uninspired by the thought of months in the more visited realms of SE Asia, the breezy bits, so I formulated a new plan. I wanted to instill some sense of purpose into my journey again, and I yearned for more of an adventure. To those ends I set up visits to medical clinics, one for refugees on the Burmese border and another set in an isolated part of Cambodia. And I changed my route. Anachronistic Burma fits the adventure mandate, despite the growing taste for tourism, so this comes next. Then I'll be following in the track marks of a few intrepid bikers who have recently crossed into the Indian province of Nagaland via the tightly controlled border with Burma, one that requires permits. More permits will be required for the adventurous terrain of Arunachal Pradesh. I’ve even set my sights on Bhutan, though the VISA remains a long shot. The Indian and Nepalese Himalayas come next (perhaps even riding the Annapurna circuit), then through Pakistan, over the Khunjerab pass before it closes for the winter. Central Asia will be a bitter challenge in mid-winter with temperatures dropping to perhaps to minus 30 or minus 40, but a challenge is what I need so I’ll get kitted out in Kathmandu. Spring in the Caucuses, chased by summer in Europe, will be the prize. Home, very tentatively, planned for September 2015.

I pedalled hard up the west of Thailand pulling long days, chowing down Pad Thai in my short breaks and hammering through until dusk. Wooden shacks selling pineapple and mango and papaya were arrayed on the roadsides, in their shadows cable-thin kids stewed in hammocks, stirring only to the whistle of a customer. The heat was stifling, the air curdled. Afternoons were a fuzzy-headed fight against heat that dared me to stop and rest every half hour. Snakes of searing green lay dead on the road, like scattered twine. Old women kept alive that old Thai cliché, ‘the Land of Smiles’, through their sudden, brown-toothed grins. Here and there I rolled past the hum and jostle of local markets, cooks and sellers perched behind stalls hoping to lasso me with offers I couldn’t understand. The air was perfumed with barbecued meat, a drifting promise of the weight I’d lost to dengue fever.

Cambodia and The Lake Clinic

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, can I have your attention please? We have reached the office where we will all get our VISAs to Cambodia’

‘Scam!’ crooned someone from the front seats on the bus bound for Siem Reap, Cambodia.

‘It's not a scam!’ the man beseeched us. ‘Scam! Scam! Scam!’ The shouts ricocheted around the bus, each one a whip crack to our disparaged guide. With a final hangdog sigh, he sat down and our bus moved off, gangway untrammeled.

Our ‘guide’ was not savy enough to know that scores of forums, books and blogs all take pains to explain the routine: a representative of the bus company will try to get the passengers to pay for an unneeded, expensive VISA well before the actual border. It’s a bare-faced pretense that helped the epithet ‘Scambodia’ do the rounds, and we were all hip to the jive.

I left my bike in Bangkok for this fleeting side trip to Cambodia. From Siem Reap my plan was to visit a floating medical clinic on the Tonle Sap Lake and the temples at Ankor Wat before hightailing it back into Thailand and riding into Burma, chasing the clock as my Indian VISA marches on, and assailed by monsoon rains.

At the border I looked out from the vantage point of my bus seat to the bumpy terrain of tops of heads cut by trains of rickshaws and hand-pedalled carts with raggedy kids gripped to the sides, and chickens under free arms; a TV camera crew filmed the melee. An estimated 200,000 illegal workers from Cambodia were fleeing the country in the wake of the Thai military coup, fearing arrest.

Siem Reap, the launching point for tours of the world’s largest temple complex at Ankor Wat, is a vast muddle of tourists, haranguing tuk tuk drivers (slash drug dealers) and well-primped transexual masseuses, a pair of which grabbed me by the arms. ‘Massage! Massage!’ I slipped the grip of one, ducked, side stepped, tugged my arm away from the other but her grip was more determined than I imagined and the effect was to drag her brutally down the street which made a cluster of backpackers giggle wickedly.

There are several sureties that come with visiting any of the world’s most popular tourist attractions and Ankor Wat was no different to the Pyramids, Petra or Machu Picchu. Someone will usually try to convince you that a more authentic experience means arriving on the back of a large mammal. The British will get miffed because for those of other nations, forming an orderly queue is not such a venerable pastime. There are always people too skinflint to pay for their own tour guide who glide around the margins of tour groups, their deceit half-cloaked by the unfurled maps and newspapers they feign to study. And someone will perform an indecent act with one of the religious statues to the glee of their friends - this may include high fiving Buddha, picking an imaginary bugga from the trunk of Ganesha, or riding bareback on the Virgin Mary.
I sprawled my map over the bed – Burma looked up at me, daringly. The border crossing I would use had been open only seven months, and crossing the country into India had been the mission of only a half dozen or so intrepid bikers since the rules were relaxed. Rarely had the prospect of a new frontier felt so thrilling.

I rolled under the golden arch which declared ‘The Republic of the Union of Myanmar’ thinking about how debatable those terms are: Republic, Union, and even Myanmar.

I rode on, the inside of every passing truck was thick with bodies, their eyes ablaze amid the shadows of their neighbours, full of astonishment as they peeked at me. Bare-chested men, red-mouthed from chewing betel net, wearing lungis riding up to their naval, and with dragon tattoos from shoulder blade to small of back, nodded hello from the shade of teak leaf-roofed huts. I didn’t mind the steep hills, the mashed up tarmac, the tails of stench that trailed from trucks chocker with chickens. The scenery, the smiles, the exoticism - all more than a fair trade.

That night I found a hostel in a town of dust and nervous dogs. The plywood paneled room was only just big enough for the bed, and I lay down, watching mosquitoes dance on the ceiling, listening to the sounds of this new land.

Burma proved not to be as behind the times as I had expected, ATMs and Internet exist outside the capital despite what Lonely Planet says; change is afoot, and guidebooks are out of date as they are published. I stopped for food - the girl who served me instructed her friend to ready her camera phone and then she jumped into the frame with me, hand draped over my shoulder. A few minutes after fiddling with the device, she showed me her handiwork – on the screen the image of us was now surrounded by a pink, heart shaped frame, like a wedding photo.

A motorbike raged past, it’s driver had swiveled 180 degrees to assure himself the best possible gawk at me whilst his un-chauffeured machine rallied off on a tangent to the direction of the road, eventually satisfied he turned back to the road to find himself almost upon the forest, and he jerked to the left, turned to me again, grinned insanely, wordlessly saying ‘hey, check that out!’ and disappeared.

A mum and her son. Burmese put Thanaka on their faces - a cosmetic paste made from ground bark

Part one: Tajikistan

The Tajik border patrols usually came in trotting formations of boyish men in camouflage gear but this troop were in the black get-up of special ops. My new friend James and I pedaled past, and soon after a shot rang out from a rifle, aimed not at us, the bullets sent somewhere into Afghanistan. I tucked in beside James anyway, keeping myself near the cliff face.

‘What are you doing?!’ he asked, somewhat hysterically. ‘I’m not a human shield!’

‘Jesus, calm down’ I said, as I took some rough measurements, shuffled further into his shadow and ducked.

James was, on first meeting, a soft outline that bloomed from the darkness of Khorog’s campsite. He arrived late on a loaded bicycle, smoking a cigarette which he immediately dropped, and then turned to the other bikers and announced, in a British accent: ‘Right make a grid everyone, let’s get to it. I have to find this fag before it burns a hole in a pannier!’ I liked James straight away; we decided to pedal on together for a week to Dushanbe.

Near Rushan the valley opened up, fields were dimmed by a thin mist which captured the evening, infusing a light the colour of olive oil over the valley floor. Cockrels sounded out over the pleasant-sounding gabble of children playing games. The hospitality of the Pamiri people continued as we were ushered into homes and plied with curds and tea and apricots and those reminders: ‘You’re a guest in Badakhshan! My house is your house!’ There’s nothing dutiful about the hospitality of the Pamiri people, they give naturally, as if it’s their own privilege.

Humpy rock formations loomed from our left, divided up by pie slices of scree. Outside a solitary house a man holding a newborn in a slightly reckless looking scrum-half style, beckoned us over for a chat. He was a 28 year old new father, but we didn’t discover much more because as we talked a great explosion sounded close by, echoed, and the air above the river pooled with dust. James and I turned wild-eyed to each other and then to the man who shouted ‘Afghanistan! Afghanistan!’ in what I now know was an attempt to reassure us, but which of course achieved the opposite. But as I looked across the river from a half-crouched position, I could see what he meant: thirty metres off, across the water, they were carving a new road through the cliff, using dynamite to break trail.

There were a few police check points as I edged north where the officers would order me to a halt and demand to know how much a ticket costs to watch Manchester United, or to examine an old Indian visa in my passport and ask ‘How is the Maharaja?’ At the bazaar in the village of Sayrab I was enclosed by a band of wispy beards ancients who draped arms over my shoulder and cackled benevolently. Conversations flowed towards an inevitable question:

‘How old are you?’

‘35’

‘Where is your wife and children?’

‘I don’t have any’

Much muttering, a gasp, wide eyes, ‘Get on with it!’, ‘What do you live for?!’

Kazbegi

Georgia is a country of curves. It greets the Black Sea in an arcing coastline; a probing tongue composes the border with Azerbaijan. The Georgian script is fantastically looping, as are the roads that circulate packs of mountains, succeeding in switchbacks and as restive as the rivers they chaperon. But before my friend Oli and I take on these roads by bicycle, I encounter another sinuosity: that of the Georgian toast.

The toastmaster is Tim, a dark-browed, silver- topped Georgian rugby coach who claims us as friends in a cozy eating house of Tbilisi. He raises his tipple, a mind-bending moonshine known as cha-cha, we do the same as he casts off on yet another tortuous spiel invoking God, romantic love, his homeland and cha-cha itself. He has already made a lengthy toast to world peace and a succession of British prime ministers. ‘To Benjamin Disraeli!’ he’d proclaimed, before adding, dolefully, ‘the very best British prime minister.’ Oli made a ‘why not?’ face and slung the stuff down. I had decided not to drink, as I had a presentation to give to some university students, though I had a feeling this wasn’t an excuse that would sway Tim from cajoling me into his determined Glug-a-thon. Oli could see my dilemma and tried to help:’Erm… he can’t… He has to drive to his AA meeting.’ ‘No problem!’ cried Tim, of course that excuse would only work if the wheedling booze-hound is neither an alcoholic nor a drink driver. Tim was probably both. It seemed we were destined to return to our hostel in a stumble made of curves.

Two weeks ago Sarah Outen returned from nearly half a decade of cycling and rowing around the world, half a decade of vigorously roughing it in a manner that puts my similarly spanned escapade to shame. Roughing it, properly: heart-plunging, soul-shivering stuff on the open ocean, replete with crashing personal crises, soaking self-doubt and premonitions of death. It’s safe to say that facing down Pacific swells that would breach tall buildings is distantly orbiting the comfort zone of most of us.

And you’d think that when Sarah crafted a piece for the Guardian on her return, an optimistic if predictable love letter to the art of adventure and pushing personal boundaries, sprinkled with highlights and lowlights, honestly told and not overly preachy, it would be greeted in the comments section with nothing but congratulation and wistful back-pats.

Not so.

Let me start by stating the obvious: the most rambling and snarky remarks in comments sections of newspapers (even when it’s the Guardian) are from time-rich nitwits typing away in dirty underwear whilst their cohabiting Mother screams up to them in the attic for spending too much time on their train simulator.

So maybe what ensued is not wholly surprising. But whilst most commentators were affirmative and pithy, the moans formed a parade with recurring themes. King among them a general annoyance that Sarah had inferred, however obliquely, that she was part of an elite with the courage to push boundaries further and with greater gusto than most, that it’s both simple and desirable to follow in her gloriously hewn path. I’m not sure that is what she thinks at all, but there’s the accusation.

Self-styled ‘adventurers’ like me (With me again? Wiped up the vomit? good) will label this as sour grapes, it’s easier on our egos to do so. Ignore the haters, call it trolling, and get on. And if you’re a raggedy-pants commentator, if your life is sagging under the weight of misjudgments and missed opportunities, then it’s easier to turn the gun away from your own head and shoot down someone else, someone who’s perceived to leave off the inverted commas from their own ‘success’.

The problem with words

I think Sarah’s achievement was kick-ass, she deserves plentiful kudos and our generous congratulation. Conversely I can’t help feeling the doomsayers have a point, albeit a minor, tangential one.

In the piece a friend of Sarah’s, a Chinese man she inspires en route and who rather heart-rendingly appears with a shiny bicycle ready to join her to cycle a section of the journey, is quoted as saying ‘If you want to do something, just do it. Don’t worry about anything, just do it.’ An innocent enough remark, and explicitly touted as a stirring message for everyone. But is it?

The question that plagues me is this: Why does the world of outdoor pursuit and adventure get so vexingly tangled up in life-hacking? Sarah I should say is not a life-hack but, however inadvertently, has borrowed the vernacular, or at least her friend has. ‘Crushingly insubstantial’ a journalist friend of mine recently described this thickening miasma of stock guidance murking the Internet. And though cynicism is a lazy man’s game, unlike rowing oceans, I have to admit, he has a point.

Age and experience should bring a revelation of how astonishingly more complicated things actually are than at first glance, but for myopia or comfort we abridge and compact. When I read life-advice scripted by adventurers coaxing you into following their dreams, and if I choose to blind myself to the bunglesome matter of some people having responsibilities preventative to long and wild escapes, like family and dependents, then I arrive at question one:

Isn’t this all a bit reductive?

And yet the listicles offering easy options proliferate.

Recognise any of these?

‘Just begin’

‘Do what you love’

‘The hardest part is the start’

‘Never look back’

‘Just do it’

‘Just’: such a vapourous luxury. For me it brings an urge to slap a life-hack around the face. Ironically. With a Nike trainer. In the real world it’s rarely just ‘just’. For those fathoming expeditions as long as Sarah’s or mine though you are swapping one set of opportunities, relationships, goals and proficiencies for another. It’s risky, and it should never just be an easy decision. On the other hand that we can physically depart on less risk-fraught, more fleeting getaways is barndoor, do we need someone telling us we can?

The most grating assumption of the adventuring life-hack, often thickly disguised, is that those conspicuously not pushing personal boundaries are, largely-speaking, slovenly belly-scratchers with a penchant for pasties and afternoons on the sofa. Again, reductive, and presumptuous, and pessimistic. For many of those without much of a rudder or fleshed out, glimmering goals, one of many obstacles seems, to me at least, to be one of choice, and the paralyzing effect of too much. It’s the tendency to dither and ask ‘but what if?’ at every turn in the road, an urge to doubt which is a hurdle, and also a sign of intelligence, not lassitude. This is not an easy obstacle to round, solvable by turning up to a lecture by some bright young thing who has unicycled through magma and survived smiling. There are wonderful TED talks on the paradox of choice by psychologists, not life hacks (and no, ‘just choose’ doesn’t, apparently, cut the mustard).

The second assumption is that you’d be happy doing what they’re doing, choosing as they do - a life of adventure is glamourized and marketed not as the only but perhaps as the supremest way to validate yourself as a human being. That you’d want to pogo stick off Niagara if you could only grow the cajones, muster the determination. It assumes, in short, one size fits all. Desk jobs are interminably mocked as soul-destroying. Come on you somnambulant drones! YOLO!

To be fair some of the singers of adventurous lifestyles will claim they aren’t stationing themselves as specific ‘come and do what I do’ people, but that they are aiming to help everyone to more general goals; of achieving a life with a greater sense of purpose and self-affirming pursuit. Unfortunately though we hear about other genres of ‘success’ stories much less, teaching wayward youths on a daily basis just isn’t as sexy as free diving to the Marianas Trench with a Go Pro strapped to your heaving scrotum.

A final assumption: my brave decision to live a life of adventure makes me happier than I would otherwise have been. The fact is: you don’t know that, though it is greatly comforting to consider all your past decisions to have been the right ones. Go you.

In defence of adventurers

This piece was designed not as an attack on modern day adventurers, who I admire and arguably fall in with, but on the evolving vernacular and over-reach.

What can be learned in wild regions of the planet when you are at your most physically and mentally stretched, needful and decimated, can be profound. Capabilities crystalise, way beyond where you’d pegged them. This is reportage of the internal variety, and it’s fascinating. There’s always a cost to an expedition, always self-doubt, always fierce gains to be won and losses to dodge. Telling your story afterwards, especially to young people, encourages ambition and the calculated taking of risks. All good stuff. And having moaned about over-simplification, over-complicating things doesn’t help either. I’ve cycled over 50,000 miles now since I left the UK in 2010, some of them quite unpleasant, and it’s not through fretting about how hard it would be. Journeys form step by step, pedal by pedal, stroke by stroke, and repeat.

Adventurers are doubtless in a bind: one half of the population seems to crave life lessons (what did you learn? How have you changed? How do you begin? Hark the masses after every presentation) The other half bristles if you broach it. Equally as frustrating as making adventuring the exemplar of a wildly fruitful lifestyle is that of it being little more than splashy solipsism, serial jaunts of no real meaning or value. The argument has marginally more credence if you keep your experience to yourself, but if you share, and if you share well (pick your medium: words, stills, documentary film making, in person, often all of the above) a process that can be as tempestuous as any ocean, that obliges skill, and can be brutal on mind and nerves, then surely you’re a valid contributor to the global good? My journey around the world by bicycle, whilst not inspired in concept by other adventurers, is certainly longer-lived because of them, and thus far more peppered with highs and lows, far more impactful. In fact if the likes of Alistair Humpreys ever showed up round my Mum’s house, he would have a lot to answer for.

The British are supposed to be terribly humble, or at least faux-modest, never arrogant and broadcasting. But where some see harping on about expeditions as boastful self-love, I see sharing an adventure as offering inspiration (cf motivation, and whether we can carve a sure boundary between the two is a debate I’d like to see). If we all quietly achieved and didn’t tell the world for fear of being judged an egotist, where would the next generation of summiteers and Sarah Outen’s come from? Certainly there’d be fewer of them, and we’d all be worse off for it. Perhaps the question is not why do adventurers trumpet their triumphs so publicly and relentlessly, but why others do not? Personally I for one could have done with a few more shining examples of ‘success’ in the more untraditional, less flashy fields at school. Isn’t it inherent on us to try and inspire others, or at least share hard-won skills? Wouldn’t it be a better world if we did?

Some of the negativity in the comments is readily explicable: commentators raged against a perceived class-gifted privilege Sarah may or may not possess (one delusionist suggested she might have done it to land a Tory seat). The explorers and adventurers of today are seldom pipe-toting, whiskered and double-barrelled; may not gallivant around the edges of colonies and make first forays any more, but let’s face it, adventuring is still as middle class as someone busking with a harp outside Waitrose, or feeding quinoa to a Golden Retriever. Adventurers today are all just as fiendish for publicity, as motivated by ego, but there are a slew of other rosier motivations too and wonderful side-effects to greeting extremes of endurance and geography. Frankly the gripes about class are boring. True, but boring. And true as well for a whole bunch of other professions: I know, I went to medical school, and full of Good Will Huntings it was not.

Other negative comments can be explained in a more damning way. Sarah is a woman, and like every woman who voices an opinion, writes a memoir, goes on an adventure, she’ll be immediately gunned down for being self-absorbed in a way men are immune to. This is the world we live in. Ranulph Fiennes doesn’t get the same level of critique, nor Felix Baumgartner. ‘Oh but Ranulph..’. No. It’s festering, veiled misogyny, stop it.

Here’s where I become a hypocrite. Whilst I’m generally speaking loath to offer life-path advice to any adult, part of me pines to shake a minority of people out of their stupor, even if I know I have no right to do so, that I am nowhere near having it all sussed out, that success and achievement are entirely subjective and my demons are not anyone else’s. This is because some seemingly unfulfilled people have the scrawniest excuses for not striking out on a different path. No time? Really? Do you live in an entirely different extra-planetary space-time continuum where clocks run faster? What you mean is that you have different priorities (which is allowed, by the way), or perhaps that you don’t have the courage to shift them around, and make sacrifices (which is a bit shit, but only a bit, and you should just acknowledge so instead of pouring envious scorn on those who do). No money? Equally ridiculous when there is (frankly gratuitous) proof of the possibility of achieving all kinds of things, including adventures in wild places on a budget. Again the problem, which isn’t really a problem, is priority.

Going back to Sarah’s comments section: there was the tragic claim that ‘Nobody made the woman do it’ (notice: the woman) ‘all difficulties encountered are entirely of her own making’- but isn’t that the point? She tried something much harder than was necessary. By choice. Whilst thousands strive for the opposite. To me that’s worth applauding, if only for the paradox, the against-the-grain-ness of it. So we approve grit and resolve if someone’s forced into it, but not otherwise? Is there a difference?

I’m returning home in three months after six years of cycling around the world. Will I give media interviews, punch the air, write a book? Of course I fucking will. It’s been a testing six years! To try to inspire others would be a privilege. But to try to motivate would be a conceit.

I doubt very much Sarah paid much attention to the negative comments, undoubtedly she’d had them before, perhaps when she drew a line across the Pacific and made plans to row it, perhaps after she was evacuated in a tremendous storm and had to fundraise for a boat. And if they’d got her down then, she wouldn’t have rowed across the finish line to my, and many others, honest admiration.

I hope adventurers will continue to push boundaries, give talks, make films, write books (about adventures only please, not ‘how to win at life’), but just chill out on the prosaicisms and buzzwords, leave out the fluff and life-quackery, the ‘you can do it too’ warblings. Because then well-meaning adventurers will alienate, when the aim, if it pleases, should be to communicate passion, and to share, share, share.

Home is an exciting, alarming, and chilly two months away. The homecoming is set, come down if you're free: Friday 19th February at lunch time. Warning - there may be any or all of the following: gratuitous fist pumping, tears, mute confusion, complete psychological dissolution. Or I might just ponder the amassed friends and family from the perspective of Westminster Bridge and do an about-turn. I've never been to Chad.

I'm in Belgrade now and delighted to be back in Europe again - though there is much to lament about leaving Asia, I'm relishing the quiet roads and the voluptuous curves motorists make around me. It is a strange, unfamiliar world, without the constant threat of death.

I'm not publishing my usual update because this month has involved very little cycling - I've been busy instead visiting projects associated with the health of marginalised people in the Caucasus. I usually don't blog about these topics - the aim is to write a book with the running theme of 'edges' which will combine a travelogue (crossing Asia by bicycle) with reporting on marginalised people and their helpers that I met along the way - remote, physically marginalized communities, and the figurative edges of the human world too, those isolated for social, economic or cultural reasons. I wondered if illuminating the marginalised people of a society might shine some light on the politics, priorities and historical context of the powerful core and mainstream. Examining the fringe is to delve into both the very worst and best of human nature: prejudice meets its equal and opposite in empathy and compassion, fear in understanding.

So far I have visited fourteen projects around the subject of marginalised people in Asia - the focus has ranged from patients with communicable disease (TB, HIV, Hepatitis), deforming disease such as leprosy, mental illness, children with disability, economic migrants, the homeless, sex workers, victims of domestic violence, terrorist attacks and natural disasters, refugees, nomadic tribes, drug users, remote communities, slum dwellers, ex-prisoners and members of the LGBT community.

With home virtually around the corner, my thoughts have veered to plans for The New Life. In the short term I will be starting a new blog with practical advice and articles relevant to cycle touring, and I will be rejoining my profession (part-time). I'll also get cracking on that book, though realistically it's about three years from publication.

A hard question was how much of myself to insert into the narrative: do I back off like a journalist might, or jump in headfirst like the typical adventurer? Perhaps I'll choose a bit of both. Cycling for six years owes something in the way of explanation, but a focus on human stories, for me by far the most interesting aspect of my travels (far more than any internal battles that raged within me), requires at least some aloofness. The concept of Slow Journalism is an interesting one, though perhaps just a rebranding of what's been performed for decades, and the bicycle with its unprotected view proved a great way to immerse myself in the landscape and context of people's lives. “You can't write about people unless you know what's on their mantlepiece.” Journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace said recently on Radio Four. Over the last six years I've slept in the homes of people in more than fifty countries, as well as countless churches, mosques, hospitals, schools, police stations and army barracks. I have shared the fusty air and mosquitoes of a barn with a snortsome, cheesed-off buffalo. Along the way I didn't see many mantelpieces, but I do see Marjorie's point.

This is a piece from Afghanistan, a country and people arguably marginalised in their entirety.

The human cost of conflict, northern Afghanistan

The frail, garbled song of a city waking up drifts through my hotel window. As the emerging sun restores colour to the domes of the Blue Mosque in the Afghan city of Mazar-e-sharif, a man splays a piece of cardboard onto the pavement below, a makeshift mat, and begins to pray. Next to him a tough gang of street kids fight over the fruits of begging, and a scattering of women wander about on early errands, most draped in blue burqas; rippled and shaped by the desert wind.

It’s the trucks though which hold my gaze, as they drag their long shadows up and down the square of road that encloses the Blue Mosque. Gangs of men sit in the open-topped backs, slung with silvery-worn assault rifles, legs draped casually over the side, their shemaghs wrapped around their heads and faces, leaving just a slit for the eyes. One of these wraith-like men per car attends to a mounted machine gun that makes my heart race. Some may be police, and some paid militias loyal to the provincial governor, at least I hope so. When the Taliban attack, they have done so in a similar disguise.

Mazar-e-sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, has long been considered a place of relative safety, attested by 14 years of calm following the driving out of the Taliban by the Northern Alliance in 2001, but this summer two attacks rocked such confidences, and darkened headlines. There was the murder of nine workers from a Czech NGO in their beds on the outskirts of the city, and the attack in April on the Secretary General’s office in daylight leaving scores dead, though the numbers are disputed. Witness accounts of fatalities are often at odds with numbers revealed on Afghan news, the government keen to promote a picture of stability in a country struggling to prevent Taliban inroads in the North, now that international military support has largely pulled out.

The population of Mazar-e-sharif is on the up as those affected by the spreading violence are drawn from villages to these safer streets controlled by a famously wealthy, ethnically-Tajik governor, Atta Muhammad Nur, known as ‘the teacher’, a former commander in the Mujahidin, a man skilled in the art of war. Though he has the monopoly on violence, he is widely respected for keeping order, and the Taliban at bay.

Sitting in an eating house scoffing the city’s famous ice cream, fluffy-moustached students practice their English with me; assuming that I’m a soldier. I exchange facebook pages with one who goes on a liking frenzy of my posts on his smartphone. Above us a TV set hums and throws out images from battlegrounds in some distant or perhaps not-so-faraway province.

I seek out the regional hospital, part funded by Germany, Sweden and Japan, which hides behind a tumult of fruit vendors. There is the usual collection of labs and wards, with the addition of a centre for the treatment of opium addicts, signal of yet another problem lumbering beneath Afghanistan’s turbid surface. Burqa-clad women sit in clumps on the steps by the entrance, be-turbaned men stand apart by the doors. Mazar-e-sharif homes a great variety of peoples, and the city’s roots are inscribed in the multiplicity of hats, skin tones and faces, in the emerald and café-au-lait and blackish eyes.

Dr Rallimullah is a bushy-browed kind-eyed orthopaedic surgeon, Indian and Afghan-trained, who I meet in one of the hospital’s offices.

‘Medical schools here can be a joke’ he says, mirthlessly. ‘Doctors come out with virtually no clinical experience, under-skilled, trained inadequately in one specialty by teachers of another. The difference between a teacher and a student is one night's reading, I’m serious! Information is passed on like water is passed between hands, and after enough hands, there’s no water left.’

Dr Rallimullah believes the healthcare system is not much better than it was 50 years ago, when he boasts of how specialists indulged in open heart and even brain surgery. These days, he says, a so-called Chest Surgeon is someone who can insert a chest tube, which most junior doctors can manage in the West. In today’s Afghanistan, the doctors themselves are often the blood donors.

Dr Rullimullah has been invited for training in the UK, in Newcastle and Belfast, but even with references, his medical license and referral letters in abundance, a UK visa is far from a given when you hold an Afghan passport, and he seems reticent about discussing his chances. Go online here, I’m told, and the Afghan IP address will trigger a barrage of advertisements from the Australian government instructing Afghans not to make the journey, with the phrase ‘No Way. Do not make Australia home’. Who then, I wonder, will train the next generation of doctors if in-country education is scant and Afghans are ordered against venturing abroad to learn?

I push open a door stickered with a no guns sign and join the swinging tail of a ward round which sweeps volubly through the orthopaedic department. On any given day around 70% of the patients here are victims of road traffic accidents, but the peril of the region’s hectic highways is old news. It’s the 20% here by actions of an insurgent Taliban which is the fraction growing the fastest. But it’s not just targeted attacks I’m told: violence is infectious. Family feuds can be settled using guns, and Dr Rallimullah recounts stories of wedding party massacres, insisting this was never the case before, even five years ago.

We stop by the bed of an 11 year old boy. As we crowd round his face distorts into a mask of unchildlike fear; his mother, a small lady in a white veil, reaches for his hand. I sense some deep psychological trauma, and wait to hear a story I’m already guessing at.

Marjan had been at the bazaar in the northern town of Maimana with his mother to buy new sandals when a woman in a burqa detonated a bomb in a pressure cooker. The blast wave threw him into a nearby canal, where he was found with a head injury and broken femur. He was rushed to a private clinic with no expert orthopedic surgeon, but where external fixators were poorly applied in order to adjoin the ends of fractured bone. Dr Rallimullah holds up an x-ray film for me to examine ‘totally unnecessary’ he grumbles, pointing to the misaligned pins. When the bones failed to unite he was taken by his mother to a mullah who proclaimed the boy to be cursed, and responsible for his own pain and disability. Months later Marjan arrived in Mazar-e-sharif, via the Red Crescent, where he awaits further surgery and psychiatric evaluation. At night he wakes, screaming and tearing at his bedclothes.

I offer his mother a seat, but she refuses, opting instead to crouch on her hams on the floor, gazing up at me past the vacant seat and speaking through a white veil drawn half over her face. Before the bomb blast, she says, her husband had become addicted to opium and left her to look after their six children alone. Now, after her son’s injury, her other children go to school for only half the time, the other half they are forced to work, stitching together clothes to raise two dollars a day for food. I see then the ripple effect of violence, of how in time, deprived of education, these ripples may create ripples of their own.

But for now, her main concern is her son. ‘He’s not normal’ she tells me, in hushed tones, sending her words to the hospital floor. ‘He screams and talks to himself. I pray his leg will heal, but I worry most about his mind.’

On the way out Dr Rallimullah turns to a female doctor in the corridor: ‘Be orange!’ he says to her in passing, and she smiles back. I ask him why. ‘Last week two of our specialists argued about whose responsibility a patient should be.’ He says. I nod, thinking of how often a similar debate plays out in hospitals across the UK. He goes on: ‘I said to them: it is the patient that matters, do not let the patient get stuck in the middle of your arguments. If one of us is white and the other is red, then we must both become orange’ adding wistfully ‘I hope for this attitude too, for the people of Afghanistan’.

Six years ago, when I set out from London to cycle around the world, it was also winter in western Europe: the coldest for thirty years.

Serial satellite images from the day I left home, if I’d bothered to look at them, revealed a clutch of blue talons reaching in callous steadiness over Europe. The following day over 250 schools across Kent called parents and delighted their children with the news that school was off; there was simply too much snow for anyone to cope. My first days on the road were spent negotiating up to two feet of the stuff and gangs of children rampaging with snowballs. I was slow and preposterous-looking; the ultimate prize.

The most cherished moment in a child’s life, I have discovered, is this: you are playing in the snow. Your mum shouts ‘Hey Benny, school’s cancelled, too much snow! Come inside for ice cream!’ ‘I’m coming Mum!’ you shout, but as you put the finishing touches to the densest, roundest snow ball of your young life, a huffing, unbalanced looking creature on a weighty bicycle teeters into view. He’s entombed in Lycra, unmuscled, weaving regretfully as if at the back end of seven consecutive Ironman contests. Your best friends gather about you, in a kind of platoon; he sees you all, pleads with his eyes, and develops a look that suggests the slightest distraction might send him painfully crashing to the icy ground. He begs a little in a string of whimpering ‘no’s’, but it’s too late for him, and he knows it. A silence falls as you take aim. Never will childhood be this joyous again.

The attacks lasted for two days. In my memory there was something military-like about these encounters: the kids were organised. For over a hundred miles they fired at will as I rode through Kent, flanking bridges and opening assaults from overhead walkways. I heard call signs, ‘Enemy three o’clock!’ and near Ashford a sure voice commanded: ‘Let’s get him in the face!’ What? No! I thought. Let’s not… But I could only wince as subordinates began chanting with Lord-of-the-Flies zeal: ‘In the face! In the face! Yeah in the face! Get him in his stupid face!’

But that was six years ago… I’m loving it here now.

It’s not surprising that the continent of my birth and earliest wanderings is my favourite of the six I’ve pedaled through. I tell myself I’m not biased, that the history writ large, the gastronomic hedonism, the architectural feats all validate my leanings, but I can’t be sure of that: home will always find a pedestal. We all ‘know’ Europe is stocked high with sweet-scented food, beautiful people, lovers, artists and bike lanes. Bloody bike lanes! Statistically speaking, if my bicycle is to be stolen over the course of a round the world ride, most likely this would occur in Europe too. The bike lanes would probably expedite the pilferage.

The Danube bike path

Thoughts on returning home after six years around the world by bicycle

In 2008 I was working as a doctor in a hospital in central London and living in a boxy flat nearby. It was a ‘home’ that befitted the metaphor: comfortable, secure and familiar. Such places are cruelly convenient from which to plot travels to uncomfortable, unfamiliar ones.

My journey around the globe began fatefully: with a life-changing decision, taken in the pub.

Pint in hand, mini-atlas flipped open on the table, I sat in the beer garden of The George near London Bridge on some forgotten day in 2008, parading a new plan to a small circle of friends. Eagerly poised, a pen hovering above the tiny dot of London, I flashed a grin at my frowning audience and plunged in, sketching out my route around the globe and across six continents. All would be conveniently handled, I’d affirmed, by bicycle. ‘In six years, give or take.’

‘I’ll nail this bit first…’ - an airy slash of pen whisked me across Eurasia, where I swiftly trounced the Alps, the Pamirs and the Himalayas; ‘and then over here…’ as I deftly cleaved roadless hunks of Sahara, ‘and then through this bit…’ and I was pootling up through the Darien Gap. Someone muttered something about warlords and drug cartels, but I’d swiped at their concerns with my pint-hand, dripping lager on Mexico, and was soon merrily skidding about Alaskan tundra. In less than a minute I’d breezed back to London: venturesome beard, book deal.

The pessimists, they didn’t know how it would be. I was going to plunge down ragged trails, spreading wings of dust over the precipice. I would freewheel over ice, rock and savannah, the wind forever at my back; delicious freedom, and all in the vanity of solitude. I would consider the lonely sky. Probably I’d be back in The George in six years’ time, leaning back, exultant, my feet propped up on the table and holding forth: ‘And when I was in Turkmenistan…’ I would pronounce, ending hours later with a long sigh and something like ‘and then I had to hold the poor fella down and cut his arms off with my cone spanner’. Someone would buy me beer.

Straddling my new bicycle, encumbered with kit so useless I would end up junking much of it lavishly across Europe, I’d waved goodbye to clustered friends and family from outside St Thomas’ Hospital. It was January 5th 2010, the first day of a fresh life as glinting as my spokes, as revolutionary as my rims.

Boldly, I cycled away. Fifty metres later I turned left where I’d anticipated taking a right. I discovered myself cycling back to the pub.

Soaked by a tsunami of self-doubt, I’d managed only half a mile before I was back in the companionable womb of The George, a pint back in my sweaty palm. Friends and family meanwhile supposed I was pedalling towards France.

Hours passed. The world I’d pedalled into, sober and up-to-my-neck in it, was too big. I was unfit and under-prepared and feeling ungrateful for waltzing eagerly away from a profession I loved, interesting friends and a reality that was easy to be with. I had money. Several curry houses knew me by my first name. I enjoyed a frappe. What then was I doing here, my worldly possessions jiggling from a bicycle, having vowed to live on five quid a day, for years? I had only frail impressions now. They shouldn’t let drunk people near mini-atlases, or even into Stanfords, I’d decided. There should be a warning, like they have on cigarette packs. They could have an image of me printed on the back cover: sad-drunk, sweaty-browed, fugitive.

I picked up my phone and made some noises of self-pity down the line to friends. A bunch of them came for a beer; they were good friends and unanimously it was suggested that I fucked off. And quite quickly, cos it’s getting dark. Feeling a sort of grateful resentment, and uncomfortably curious about where I might sleep, I wobbled off into the twilight, unable to laugh yet at the unconvincing birth cries of a round-the-world bike ride.

I’d planned to leave when I was ready, which was roughly after I’d been to enough Expedition Planning Seminars (four) and experimented sufficiently with exciting brands of padded Lycra shorts. I was ‘ready’ in mid-winter. I am fairly sure that the 5th of January 2010 was the day on which Britain had never been so British. The streets I pedalled were a raillery thick with recollections, and a warning of the frills and familiarities I was leaving behind. London was the same city, with a different glaze, its towers bristled like admonishing fingers. A waft of fish ‘n chips coming from The Codfather made me wistful for all the other puns in chip shop names, my days as a student in Liverpool streamed back to me: ‘Abra-kebab-ra’, ‘A salt and battered’.

And then through the gloom of a London suburb three words mesmerised me from on high. They lived on the side of a two story brick house: ‘Never Give Up’. I stared. No advert, no Nike logo, no ostensible explanation, except the impossible one. The thought of some private message from an unrevealed, guiding power moved me to laugh into the gloom, but even this instant of glee was dashed. Around the building, snow had begun to speckle the night sky, slowly at first and then thickening to a salvo until the sky fuzzed like television static. My new life on the road didn’t yet have a wholly ironic level of misadventure. I was cycling into what even the most understated weather forecasters would identify as the coldest European winter for thirty years.

I owe the school children of Kent some gratitude. It was only because of their determination to hurl snow balls at me for around one hundred miles that I began to feel some relief from the pangs of homesickness. I began to pray children on the continent would be more forgiving.

At Dover the safety pin of home pricked one final time as I loitered behind the barrier, a big metal metaphorical thing that separated my wheels from the ferry, one life from another and my country from The World. ‘I’m sorry my dear’ said the woman, jabbing at a concealed button ‘this barrier’s a bit temperamental’. ‘Just like my wife!’ I swivelled to face a lorry driver leaning out of his cab window, all bad teeth and jowls, his face cracked by a supreme grin. The lady tried out a withering look but it slipped to a smile. I felt myself welling up. Oh Britain, I thought, how I’ll miss your green vales, puns, heart attack grub and casual misogyny.

The ferry began to churn easily away from the port. I stood on the deck watching destitutely as my home downsized, and departed in an iconic fade of chalk cliffs and floating gulls. The ship’s wake petered into an expanding rift of grey-blue water seasoned with foam and whitecaps. An awesome sense of unpredictability expanded too. I wasn’t certain if the worst or the best had happened, but I had begun.

All this took place six years ago now.

I used to take some pride in how long I’d been on the road; I thought years of bicycle travel bespoke determination, perseverance, but that was true only until I’d pedalled for three years or so. Now it’s a confession more than a boast. It’s a monomaniacal act. I have to admit that the dark, uninvited flip-side of resolve is obsession.

Perhaps it’s for this that people quiz me on my plans for returning home and seem more concerned about the moment than I am. ‘But what will you do?’ they ask, in a tone which assumes I’ll be scouting for tall buildings with life-ending landings. I’ll be OK, I want to tell them, this isn’t an addiction. I won’t disappear one day soon on the cycling commute to work to be discovered 340 miles away on some roadside, surrounded by empty packets of Supernoodles, trying to construct a makeshift shelter out of my work-shirt in a ditch.

This was, for all its nerve, a self-inflicted exile. Should I ever have been subsumed with loneliness the UK was only ever a few inflight movies away. Many of the refugees that have surged from two of the countries I’ve cycled through, Syria and Afghanistan, can’t risk a return; as blind and despairing of their personal futures as that of their home. It’s the difference between going on a diet and surviving a famine, and who am I to gripe on the hardships of abandonment. I’ve been rationing myself, which only makes home taste sweeter.

It was Germany that played host to the chilly, damp dregs of my journey around the world by bicycle. But I’d become distracted. In principle, this was still cycle touring, more pertinently I was on an extensive tour of German bakeries, an awesome bout of scattered binge-eating . Cycling had become somewhat incidental, a means to an end, and that end was strudel.

Recurrently I devastated the front row of doughnuts in bakeries across Bavaria, with more competitive vigour than I’d ever shown for riding a bike. I’d arrive into dozy, sunlit villages - baroque church, yeah whatever, where's the pastries at? The flat riverside miles, the breezy pedaling, all at odds with my mountainous appetite, and I began thinking that perhaps I wouldn’t be the sleek, toned champion I conjured when dreaming of my return to British soil.

Talk across Europe remained on the refugee crisis, thought to be the largest movement of people to the continent since the Second World War. In Munich PEGIDA were distributing flyers (The acronym, translated, stands for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West – doing the Heil Hitler whilst saying this is optional at present), my hosts across the continent had assisted at refugee camps or put up refugees themselves or felt driven to angst with each fear-mongering headline, each evoking tidal waves, rivers and other water-features of displaced people. In Nuremburg I watched a girl of Middle Eastern looks holding a solitary cabbage she’d bought from Aldi, I wondered about her as she teetered on the threshold of the escalator, unsure.

I left the Danube at Regensburg and pedaled north, following the weaving passage of other rivers whose names I forget. Northbound though, rather than straight west, because of a visit I wanted to pay to certain celebrity of the cycle touring community: Heinz Stucke. Whenever someone gets a little excited by my admission of being on a six year bike ride, Heinz’s story is the one I dust off. ‘Let me tell you about this guy…’

It’s almost impossible to hurdle the mere facts of his ride: 51 years on the road without returning to his home in Germany, roughly 650,000 km pedaled during that time, a distance of 16 times around the planet through 196 countries, all made even more incredible when you consider that nobody else is in the ballpark. I wanted to get behind the numbers and meet the man, and I knew Heinz, now 76 years old, had finally stopped pedaling and had returned to his home town in Germany a few years back - I was hoping to fish him out. I hope you’ll forgive me, but meeting Heinz is a tale I’m going to cordon off and save for the book because I can’t hope to do it justice in this blog.

I know what I said, alright. I know I made promises of a silky new blog, some quick and tidy tribute to the age of Wordpress, with an array of mind-flipping images and prose to inspire great belches of pleasure. The pixelated equivalent to a newborn’s smile.

I lied.

In truth I just didn’t realise how fucking busy I was going to be once I got home, all that time I had for cycling has been wrestled away from me by obligations imparted by The Real World. I need a job. I need socks. I need time to be wistful for the open road. I told you, I’m busy.

So for now you’ll have to make do with this rickety, bug-infested clunker of a blog. I will continue here until it’s unsafe to do so.

So, how does it feel, one month after completing a six year bike ride? Surprisingly fresh, actually. But in a precarious way, like when you leap into an icy lake and realise it’s not that bad, but wait, is that an anaconda rippling the surface? My anaconda moment hasn’t come yet, there’s a honeymoon quality to my days, but I’m fully prepared for an emotional nose-dive in a few months’ time. As for now, I’m enjoying the not being a guest part.

I’m back in the bedroom of my adolescent self, surrounded again by medical notes I haven’t had the front to open and consider just yet. A mind map appeared one day on my bedroom wall in pencil. I wrote ‘life after cycling’ in the centre and the small spawning clouds about it soon took over the entire wall, thoroughly answering the question of what will I do once I get home. Answer: A lot.