“Ah, it was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and talk and spit and be heaven going. This we did” – Jack Kerouac

A common question in my talks is “what do you think of Mark Beaumont’s ride?” Last night, to my surprise, I came up with a brief answer that pleased me rather than the usual mental meanderings I come out with in Q&A’s.

Mark, as you will know, cycled round the world a couple of year ago, breaking a world record for the fastest bike ride round the world. On the back of his trip Mark featured on an Orange ad, broadcast a TV series and wrote a really successful book. He’s just back from another televised ride for the BBC.

Mark’s journey was very different to my own ride round the world. He rode 18,000 miles in 194 days. I rode 46,000 in about 1600. Him fast, me slow. But neither one of them is “better” or “worse” than the other. Neither Mark nor I set out to compete with anyone else. But Mark’s trip has spawned a bit of a competitive craze for cycling 18,000 miles really fast. Every couple of months someone pops up who has done it quicker than the last person. Two more were in the news just last week.

It is perhaps inevitable that I get asked about these journeys. After all, we all went ’round the world by bike’. But, apart from that, I always answer that I don’t see anything else in common between us. Theirs are impressive physical, athletic feats. Mine was an ambling journey: I was on the road for longer than all of the new batch of speedy guys put together which shows how amazingly quick they are! Separate but equal, perhaps.

And so to my answer last night:

“it is like comparing Chris Hoy with Jack Kerouac.”

By that I meant that it’s just not really an appropriate or relevant comparison.

Was I right or wrong with this? Do these speed rides fit in the categories of “Adventures” or “Journeys” or “Expeditions”? Or are they “Races” or “Challenges”? Or both? And does it really matter? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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Fortunately the Yukon is an easy place to get hold of things like 16ft canoes.
We loaded our bikes into the canoe and set to paddling with gusto.
For the next 10 days we would be far from road or rescue with no phone to call for help. It felt very liberating.
After the canoeing we climbed back on the bikes and rode up into the Arctic Circle. From the northern shore of North America I headed alone for Anchorage and an Indian cargo ship bound for Asia.
***
After a staggeringly brutal and exhausting three months cycling through an ice-clad Siberian winter, with temperatures of -40°F, Japan was an intriguing contrast and a welcome, warm relief. In China I chose to follow the Great Wall for its entire length until it fizzles out in the Taklamakan desert. I was really heading homewards now, chasing the sunset westwards across Asia, back to Europe and – ultimately – back to England. Not only was I following the Wall, this was also the fabled Silk Road whose landscape had changed little in centuries. Once upon a time traders, leading long caravans of camels laden with valuables, relied on caravanserais where they could rest and resupply during their long journeys. It was exciting to be tangibly connected with so much history along that road. I was making tangible progress around the Earth. I slept without a tent and it felt exciting and unreal to be lying there on my own, watching a massive orange moon ease up through the trees – in China, on the Silk Road, where so many others before me must have lain on the earth in the same way, resting on their own journeys. I fell asleep; whenever I woke during the night I could estimate how long I had been sleeping by the position of the moon above me. It would be a full moon all over the world and I thought of the people I missed and wondered whether they too had noticed the splendour of the skies that night.
In Uzbekistan the road signs I passed were a list of awesome-sounding places, each one of which I would have loved to cycle to: Samarkand, Dushanbe, Kabul, Tehran, Aktau and Baku. They were a reminder for me of the powerful magic of the road, of the charms and delights and new places that all roads hold if only you keep riding long enough. I had dreamed for years of visiting Samarkand, which sounded to me like the most remote, exciting place on Earth. It lay between gigantic mountains and inhospitable deserts at the end of civilization, yet for centuries had been wealthy, cultured and powerful, the very centre of the world. To crest a hill and see the town before me was a genuine thrill. The fabled blue domes of the mosques and madrassas were delicious even beyond my imaginings, with a white stripe of sunshine seared down the flanks of each dome like curved scimitars. I’d ridden 40,000 miles to get to Samarkand. I’d earned it and I was here at last.
***
During hard times on my journey I had often dreamed of cycling in France as some sort of ideal: to ride from village to village and sit in street cafés drinking coffee and basking in warm sunshine. Within 100m of entering France I was sitting in a café making the dream come true, celebrating. I was almost home.
France was a green and pleasant land, and the view from my tent each morning of dew-drenched green fields and hedges and steaming cows was so similar to my England. It was almost over. I didn’t want all this to end. I wanted to turn round and ride for ever, sleeping in forests and filling my bottles at village fountains. I wanted to remain free and feel the world moving slowly beneath my tyres, having time to watch the heavens move slowly above me. I hoped that the sadness I felt and my reluctance to end the amazing, precious experience actually stemmed from a lazy desire to take the easy option, rather than because I honestly felt nothing could ever be so good again. Going back home, back to England and to the new beginnings I would have to choose, was actually a far tougher path than continuing with this life I knew so well. My mind raced with memories and I had to try to tell myself that the end of the ride did not mean the end of my life. I relished the road, the speed, my fitness, the wind in my face. I sucked up the memories and I was so happy. I felt, in the true sense of the word, fulfilled: filled full with life.
***
The final leg of my journey was a long day’s ride: up through the Peak District and Sheffield and across Yorkshire towards my home. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by familiar, beautiful scenery once again; to not need a map any more, to know where I was going, to be going home. It was a beautiful final morning, frosty and blue-skied. I loved the green hills, the grazing sheep, the fabulous dry stone walls. The drivers were safe and courteous, there were occasional bike lanes and the road signs were plentiful and accurate. It was good to be home!
***
My journey round the world will stay with me all my life: the spectacle of a completely empty horizon at sea, a horizon that has not altered in millions of years; the thrill of cresting a difficult pass and seeing a whole new span of planet open up before me, inviting me onwards; the slow-release satisfaction of reaching a far-off horizon. And the extraordinary experience that ended it all: the realisation that, if you keep curiously and steadfastly and patiently crossing sufficient new horizons, then you will – one day – see the very first view with which you began your journey once again appearing in front of your eyes. 


This extended piece first appeared in a Lonely Planet book

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‘Land ahoy!’ At long last South America edged above the horizon and into view.
Excitement rippled among us, all craning for a better view on the starboard side of the boat.
My first thought was, ‘wow, it’s hilly!’ as I switched seamlessly back into cyclist mentality once again. I was excited to see folds of rock and vertical lines once again after weeks on a horizontal flat blue disc. After so much blue, green seemed an extraordinary, lurid colour to be the dominant colour on land. I have had the same thought when emerging from monochrome deserts. We saw white buildings in the trees and heard the sounds of traffic. We were not the only human beings left on Earth, after all.
After the anchor was dropped and after the handshakes, hugs and congratulations, we sat on deck together to savour the unusual stillness of being stationary. It was so exciting to have arrived on the other side of an ocean, under sail. I could not wait to set foot on this new world. Celebratory cigar smoke and laughter wafted in the night air. The gentle rolling motion of the anchored boat felt odd after the nuances of the movement of sailing that we had grown so used to. Amid the joviality I sat alone, perched on the boom and hugging my knees. I was nervous. We had crossed the Atlantic but now I had a new continent to ride. From southern Patagonia I planned to ride north, for about a year and a half, up to the Arctic Ocean in Alaska.
***
During my attempt to cycle around the planet it became apparent that, in many ways, ours is a very small world. The internet, global music and western popular culture followed me wherever I went. From the seat of a bicycle, though, the world also seemed massive. The differences in lifestyles and opportunities that people had were immense. Being still less than halfway through my journey was a daunting prospect, yet the further I rode, the more I felt at home. After years of reading glossy travel magazines and watching TV travel shows, I had begun the project with my eyes shut, dreaming of adventure and exotic locations. What I had not considered was the 5000 miles between London and the pyramids, the 7500 miles between Cairo and Cape Town or the 5000 miles from Ushuaia to Machu Picchu. I had not imagined the months of slog and the demoralisingly improbable distance, in both time and space, to the next destination. Since then, I had learned that the real travelling is all the stuff in between. The destinations merely added direction to the journey, acting as the frame upon which I could weave the colourful fabric of my experiences. Slowly the journey had come to be the reward. The thousands of miles among the ordinariness of the thousands of people I encountered, in all the villages and towns I rode through, blended into one giant, rolling memory. Extraordinary sights like the pyramids and Machu Picchu are marvellous, but these wonders do not represent the reality of the normal life of the people I wanted to learn about when travelling. This is perhaps the biggest difference between cycling and other forms of transport. For many people who travel, the destinations are what their experiences are primarily about as they move swiftly, isolated in machines, from one place to another. By bike, travel is so slow that it becomes the dominant aspect of the journey.
I had passed through deserts and mountains, mad Arabian melees, Latin fiestas and African funeral parades. I witnessed strange and extravagant sights and sounds and unfathomable animated conversations on street corners and market stalls. Yet I was always just looking into other people’s ordinary days. The reverse effect also applied. I, a normal, middle-of-the-road English guy on a bike, gradually became an exotic, extraordinary spectacle, merely by riding a long way from my own natural habitat. My journey round the world was actually a study of the magic of humankind’s normality.
***
Over the Andes the rutted dirt road became so awful that I chose instead to follow the route of an old railway line cross-country across the dry spiky grass, cropped short and prickly by llamas and alpacas. Barefoot, I waded through broad, shallow rivers that were phenomenally cold.
I asked one man how far it was to a town that I knew was at least 40km away. He assured me that it was only 3km. People’s lives were so localised that there was no point in telling anyone that I had ridden to Bolivia from Patagonia: mentioning the name of a town a day or two’s ride away would provoke sufficient surprise and disbelief. Anywhere much further away that that was beyond their imagination. A little girl I met was excited to hear that I had actually been in an aeroplane. She had only ever seen them, tiny and slow, high in the blue sky above her. She was struggling to visualise them. I explained to her that the planes she saw were actually about as long as five buses put end to end, and that the wings would stretch from where we were standing to those men talking by the liquor store over the street. ‘Do the animals still go arriba, on top?’ she asked, assuming, naturally, that nobody ever goes on a long journey without taking a heavy bag of irate chickens or a trussed and miserable piglet along with them.
Many months later I reached northern Canada. Smoke tickled my nostrils and haze hung in the sky. My onward progress was in jeopardy. Forest fires were raging to the north and west, utterly beyond the power of humans to extinguish. All that the fire services could do was to try to manage the blaze. They had closed the only road towards Dawson City, the very road that I had hoped to ride. But in that part of the world roads were new things, new-fangled intruders; long before any road reached the north, the rivers had been the roads. I wondered then whether perhaps it would be possible to take to the water to continue the journey. My friend David agreed that it sounded like a fine adventure. We would canoe past the fires and then get back on the bikes again.

This article first appeared in a Lonely Planet book

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Now I have teamed up with three really interesting people who have ridden thousands and thousands of miles themselves. Together we are now launching the Bicycle Travel Network. The BTN is an organization dedicated to helping young travellers get out and explore the world by bike. We are going to be working hard at inspiring, educating, funding, promoting, and consulting with individuals and organizations who are interested in changing the way people travel by bike.

We aim to become the hub of relevant knowledge in our niche. As well as encouraging, inspiring, advising and mentoring riders we are also developing a scholarship programme which will help provide financial assistance to the most worthwhile expeditions. Why not apply today?

Please do visit our new website, let us know what you think about it, and get involved!

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