I wrote Part 1 of this article about three years ago. I’d just crossed the south-eastern border of Bulgaria. Landscape and society was shaded with new colours, and the whole panorama of history looked increasingly unfamiliar: Byzantines and Arabs battled in place of Normans and Anglo-Saxons; exotic Assyrians ousted the quaint familiarity of the Celts. Islam began with the coming of Mohammed, seven hundred years after we had settled on the birth-date of Christ, so in my next destination, Iran, the year was 1386.

Coming back to this once-familiar continent has been a shock. Not in the sense that leaving was, because everything new for me now was once normal, so it’s more of a punch in the belly than a slap in the face. Two weeks in Italy has dredged the depths of my memories, and floating to the surface are the deeply-sunk taken-for-granteds, the ingrained attitudes and the styles of living I’d been perfectly used to in what now feels like a distant and quite childish dream.

Well, it was always going to be like this. On previous, fleeting visits such as when I hitched home and back to Armenia last summer, I was on a mission. I didn’t spend too much time dwelling on what I saw. Yes, everything looked cleaner, shinier, richer, of course, as it flashed past the window of the car or truck or train.

But fully immersed in a slow bike trip, it’s hard not to linger on the differences. Europe feels less like a deserving home for me and the fellow inhabitants than it did before. Instead it feels like an enclave, a fenced playground; on one side, the rest of the world, those with nothing, Europe and the tiny lofty West coming to them — one-way, daily — through television news and subtitled Hollywood. On the other side of the bureaucratic barrier — that’s the 1,792 border control points, the infra-red cameras, the razor-wire fences and the men with guns protecting the European Union from the ungrateful hordes of asylum-seekers whose companions have died in deserts and at sea in the hope of living in a chipboard box attached to an abandoned building in an Italian port — people seem to wander around, half-asleep, distracted by iPhones and Facebook and owning a small car and where to buy the cheapest tomatoes.

Why are we, here in paradise, unaware of the opulence surrounding us and simultaneously fostering unmeasurable, planet-wide resentment? Why is every square inch of land sliced into little designations for every conceivable human use, except for freedom? Why does each of these little parcels of ground come with a big, obvious list of common-sense things that are forbidden, as if society was composed of anarchists and zombies? Why has no-one heard of a Schengen visa and the paperwork and criteria to be fulfilled in order to obtain one? Why can’t I find anywhere to put my bloody tent for the night?!?

Goodness me, this is going to be tougher than I thought. In between margherita pizzas and cappucinos (of which there have been many — call me a wimp, I’ve earned them), these questions and more fester and, even though the answers are at the same time blindingly obvious and non-existent, I can’t drop them. I’m still not old enough or wise enough for that.

It’s ironic, thinking of those butterflies in my stomach as I camped stealthily in a field just over the Turkish border, wondering if anyone would boot me off their land, seeing as I’d had to spend 4 months seeking out likely-looking souls in rural areas of Europe — usually younger, dressed a little alternatively if possible, looking like they might occasionally pack a bag and sit round a fire in the woods with some mates on a nice summer’s evening — who might latch on when I offered them the opportunity to help a traveller looking for a square of grass on which to spend the night, to ensure that I would be undisturbed and not causing anyone offence.

Ironic, because I quickly learned and never again questioned, while I was crossing the Middle East and Africa and west Asia, that I could ask pretty much anyone in the countryside and camp there and then. Often, delightfully, I would be invited enthusiastically in for a spot of tea and miming as well. I was indignant to ask a couple of old ladies, sitting on little wicker chairs outside a villa in an expansive olive grove such as is common here in Puglia, if I might put my tent under a tree; to be met with frowns, tutting, a very firm shaking of heads and the kind of narrow glare from behind a pair of spectacles that brings home instantly the fact that you have committed an unacceptable breach of etiquette; that you have dared to suggest inviting yourself onto sovereign land, the sole and private enjoyment of which somebody has worked endless years in order to acquire and to defend. To put it bluntly, I felt like a piece of shit.

More questions as we cycled on through endless olive fields and vineyards. Why are those who have the most so unflinching when it comes to denying anyone else access to their riches? Why in this post-Enlightenment cornucopia can’t we enjoy the proven life-enhancing experiences of sharing and connecting with each other, unconditionally, such as our traditional religious guiding principles or otherwise atheistic morals would tell us to do? Who wants to be called a scrooge, a miser, a miserable old fart; to say openly that they would deny help to a person in need? Would I myself act in the same way, if put on the spot, because the society I grew up in dictated that this was the right way to behave?

Again, the answers are both obvious and non-existent. And I’m sure that it will take me a long time to untangle this mess of thoughts and emotions. It’s my reflex reaction, my culture shock, and really everyone here is just going about their life, as in the rest of the world, and really I just need to express these frustrations. Because travelling independently in Europe is, contrary to popular belief, relatively difficult. Unless you conform to the standard recipe of suitcase / train / hotel / repeat, it really takes some getting used to, to know how to wiggle through the system in a different way.

To take an obvious example, “camping” does not mean sleeping outside out of necessity as part of a journey. In fact it doesn’t seem to involve sleeping outside at all, nor giving up electricity or anything else to which you might have access in a more-or-less comfortable home. I can count the number of tents here today on the fingers of one hand. Goliath mobile-homes (or camper-vans, or RVs), on the other hand, consume the view in every direction, complete with sun-loungers, 4-burner stoves, electric lighting (indoor and out), and wide-screen televisions.

A single camp-site on the Adriatic coast has a range of facilities outstripping entire nations.

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I think having my wife alongside me for this, the final leg of my three-year bike journey through three continents and down one aisle, is going to be a really good thing.

As a guy on your own, it seems you very quickly slip into a target-oriented kind of stupor. Sure, this equals large distances covered and formidable challenges overcome. Man’s indomitable spirit, and all that. But this time – for this last, enviable stretch of footloose freedom between here and the finish line – I’m determined to slow it all down as much as possible.

Many times I’ve often found myself daydreaming about what it would be like to ride home through Europe. Now Tenny and I find ourselves at the port of Bari in southern Italy, Europe’s giant open-air museum.

I must admit I was surprised to find that summer is still very much in full swing here – so much so that many of the residents are escaping the heat and humidity in other parts of Italy or abroad. Today’s a sticky 36-degree day, and the narrow streets are hot and quiet, shutters drawn, parking spaces empty.

Tenny’s not used to the random, intense kind of experience that travel can become. She’s still a bit wobbly on the bike. She would honestly rather wander, eat and appreciate life’s simple pleasures than spend all day in the saddle. Conversely I often take things too seriously, over-plan and try to squeeze every last drop of worth out of the place and occasion. I need to be reminded to not let the actual enjoyment be muffled by the pursuit of progress. And my years away from home have made me somewhat complacent in new cultures.

So this combination of minds, I’m hoping, should result in a style of travel that is spontaneous, fun and relaxed, whilst at the same time moving, educational and varied, and without the kind of desperate penny-pinching that resulted in the four-Euro-per-day average expenditure on my first jaunt through Europe in 2007. We worked hard and endured much stress to save money over the last winter, and there is really no need to be constantly whining about costs as long as they remain reasonable.

Our host here in Bari has plied us with plenty of pizza and ice-cream and suggestions of worthwhile places to string together on our way southwards. Because it looks like that’s the way we’re headed; to explore the heel of Italy’s boot. Then, for the next two months, it’s truly a blank slate.

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• Thoughts From The Far End Of Europe (Part 2)
• Thoughts From the Far End of Europe
• Home For Christmas

Flickr is a fantastic photo archiving solution, especially for the traveller. But the real benefit of Flickr is the community that’s shaped the network over the years since it was launched. Now, a whole Flickr culture exists, with thriving sub-communities for any subject you might imagine. Participation is encouraged, and the best shots tend to ‘bubble up’ and are promoted accordingly throughout the site.

I’ve been able to share and develop my interest in photography using Flickr in a way I would never have been able to do otherwise. Looking critically at what people are drawn to, from my photostream as well as in the site-wide ‘Explore’ section, really helps me to develop ideas about how to create an attractive, engaging image. The $30 annual subscription for unlimited storage and use of all of Flickr’s services is a steal — provided you use it, of course.

Here are the ten most ‘interesting’ photos on my Flickr account to date, as chosen by the community. My photos get relatively few views, so more would be nice! Guess I need to keep at it…

1365 views / 26 people count this as a favorite / 17 comments

The most popular shot by a country mile is this dusk image from deep in the Sahara. It seems to prove that, as with many things, simplicity is best. But getting into this situation in the first place required quite a bit of effort!

670 views / 11 people count this as a favorite / 10 comments

This would be an unusual situation for many people, and it takes a while to register what’s happening, which is perhaps what made it popular. I used HDR techniques to allow me to show what was happening on deck as well as preserving the sunrise, and to give the image a slightly surreal feeling which reflects the circumstances.

645 views / 8 people count this as a favorite / 11 comments

The dark and moody desert contrasts with the pylons in the background. Civilization is not far away but my campsite is out of sight amongst the rocks and sand. Again I used HDR techniques to bring out the foreground detail.

553 views / 8 people count this as a favorite / 4 comments

The view over Yerevan with Mount Ararat in the background is probably the most over-photographed view in the country. I tried to do something different, shifting the focus away from the symbolic mountain but leaving it looming in the distance. Yerevan’s perpetual state of construction is highlighted by the foreground cranes.

562 views / 9 people count this as a favorite / 2 comments

I’m not sure why this photo has become popular, but maybe it’s to do with what is left unsaid, rather than what is actually contained within the frame.

385 views / 5 people count this as a favorite / 7 comments

This is another classic view over Yerevan, treated to a dose of moodiness rather than the usual utopian approach that patriotic photographers take towards their shots of the city.

525 views / 7 people count this as a favorite / 5 comments

This shot found its way into Flickr’s ‘Explore’ section, proof that composition and technique aren’t always important — sometimes a simple, spontaneous snap of an intriguing subject can win people over.

144 views / 7 people count this as a favorite / 7 comments

There’s nothing particularly special about the subject here, but the colours captured during those few fleeting minutes of magical light seem to have done the trick.

857 views / 3 people count this as a favorite / 2 comments

The foreground draws the eye to the curious rock formations to create a textbook image. It’s a shame that the remoteness of the location is not more obvious — it’s a rather predictable photo without it.

216 views / 3 people count this as a favorite / 12 comments

I got up early to capture the pre-dawn light by the Egyptian Nile. The result is a classic lights-over-water image with an interesting foreground element. The red light provides a focal point — overall a safe, rule-following image.

I’ve got a long way to go with photography and I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to study the art more seriously in the future. In the meantime, I’m going to have plenty of opportunities to keep snapping during my travels in Europe on my way back to the UK this autumn.

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I’ve been experimenting again…

But the small version doesn’t do it justice. Have a look at a slightly bigger size.

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I’ve been reading through some of the older posts I made while on the road in the Middle East and Africa. Let’s face it, they’re far more interesting than the practical advice I’ve been trying to dish out recently — you can’t beat a bit of vicarious adventure! And this was one of the most fascinating and challenging periods of my life.

Take a look at the most popular reads from this time last year, which I’ve just updated with plenty of photographs:

1. Along The Egyptian Nile To Luxor
   How tough it is to fully escape Egypt’s tourist trail, and the rewards of doing so
2. Biking The Nubian Desert
   Trying to find adventure in an intensely remote, spiritual and unforgiving part of the Sahara
3. Ethiopia — No Pain, No Gain
   A truly mind-boggling ride through one of the most idiosyncratic places on earth
4. Trying To Ride Through Yemen And Failing
   Security scares in a troubled nation result in me and a truckful of soldiers blasting through the desert at 150kmph
5. A Final Push To Dubai
   Braving the outrageous midsummer heat of the southern Arabian deserts

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When planning an extended cycle tour, many people go in search of corporate sponsorship. Some come back empty-handed. Some are successful. But let’s be realistic: In the world of expeditions and corporate sponsorship, bike trips are small fry. Let’s approach the topic on this premise.

Andy and I managed to procure product sponsorship for most of our major pieces of equipment, and this article will explain how we went about it, and what worked and what didn’t. I hope that it will save you some time and increase your chances of success.

But before deciding whether or not to pursue sponsorship for your trip, you need to decide whether your time would be better spent working in a full-time job to earn the equivalent amount of money. Seeking sponsorship is an intensely time-consuming, frustrating and regularly disappointing process, for which you will need skin like old boot leather, the persistence of black shower mould and absolutely no hobbies or significant others to attend to.

So, without further ado — the Key Ingredients:

1. You need at least one Unique Selling Point.
2. Show that the sponsoring company is going to benefit from their involvement.
3. Prove that you can follow through with your plan, or at least be very convincing.
4. Choose who you approach very, very carefully.
5. Cheek and luck + persistence and enthusiasm = success.

Let’s have a look at these points in a little more detail.

1. The Unique Selling Point (USP)

This is taken directly from Marketing 101. If you are planning to simply cycle round the world for the sake of it, no matter how noble an idea that is, you would be lucky to find someone willing to help you. You are just another round-the-world bicycle ride, of which there have been hundreds — why would people take special notice of you? What’s the hook?

If you are motivated towards a charity fund-raising effort and have got yourself some media coverage, things are getting a little more interesting. But what really sets apart the successful, high-profile expeditions is a unique objective or twist to the tale. An Aussie cyclist wanted to bike solo across the three great uninhabited deserts of Australia. Englishman Craig Hughes cycled through Northern Europe visiting towns whose names began with each letter of the alphabet. Scotsman Marc Beaumont decided to break the world record. And so on.

We had one unique objective to our expedition — to make a feature film about a long-distance, multi-year bicycle journey. A real travellers’ tale, not a sports documentary. No such thing had yet been published. (The closest thing I’ve seen since is Rob Lilwall’s cool mini-series.)

This, however, is where the strings start attaching themselves. If you’re selling your project on a high concept, the investment of your sponsors makes the commitment to the cause far greater than one of pride alone. If what you want is flexibility, the ability to change plans on a whim and travel on your own terms, you’re probably best off funding yourself, or finding some very, very laid-back supporters.

2. The Sponsors’ Benefits

This is the primary thing that a potential sponsor will assess, generosity and goodwill aside. How will the company benefit from involvement with your trip? With us, the answer was obvious — the sponsored product would appear in the film, which was likely to reach a wider audience than the website alone. This wasn’t a fail-safe card to play, though — many companies were unable to see the long-term benefits of this, or had too little faith that it would actually come to fruition. Every company takes this kind of risk when they enter into sponsorship.

We demonstrated our commitment to publicising our expedition well in advance of the trip. We spent a lot of time researching and writing press releases, making media contacts and getting our plans published in as many places as possible — local newspapers, radio interviews, the BBC website, Adventure Cycling magazine, and many more local and national outlets. Our crowning achievement was a 5-minute slot at the end of the regional BBC 6 o’clock news bulletin a few days before we left for the UK!

We also built a comprehensive website, and the effectiveness of this can’t be understated at the time of proposal. Since then, our sponsors have benefitted from having their products feature throughout our story, and having been reviewed (in most cases positively) on our popular equipment pages which draw a great deal of search-engine traffic.

What else can a company gain from your project, other than brand association through media outlets? Well, you can give them something to use themselves. We proposed to all our sponsors that we would send them expedition updates by email, including the story so far, links to photo resources and information about publicity that we’d had on the way. Many of them use this material in their own publicity — it’s great reading material for potential customers, as it’s essentially a compelling human story amidst a lot of shiny bits of metal.

Some companies will also be interested in you from a product-development perspective. If you are happy to test prototypes to destruction and provide feedback, as we’ve done with fringe bike-trailer makers Extrawheel, you become part of an R&D effort as well as a brand ambassador. It’s been rewarding to see the progression of Extrawheel’s trailer design and the effect our input has had.

3. Proving Yourself

We had no history of daredevil expeditions to show to potential sponsors. For this reason, early attempts were met with doubt. We had to rely on enthusiasm and well-informed dialogue to get the ball-rolling. Our months of research into every aspect of cycle-touring came in very useful, as we were able to show that we knew what we were in for, and that we knew what we wanted.

If you have successfully completed such projects in the past, then you have a nice head-start. But approaching a company with such a plan, with no previous experience, will sound ludicrous. It’s essential that if you reach the second stage and receive an interested response, you know what you’re talking about. You need to know exactly what you want from the company.

When we were talking with Kona, they were impressed and reassured that, for example, we asked for 8-speed cassettes rather than 9-speed, steel frames, and 26-inch wheels, and explained why in each case. We also elaborated on our route ideas. In reality, we had no idea what we were in for! But the important thing was confidence and preparation.

Small details like this are important to convince your potential sponsor that you know what you’re doing, and that you’re going to follow through with your plans. Again, having some good media exposure at this stage will also help, because the more people know about your plans, the less space you’ll have to suddenly change them (although it can be done, as we hopefully demonstrated and justified).

A well-designed website helped us a lot; this was a regular focus for positive comments. It was often the first port-of-call for marketing managers reading our emails, and displaying already-secured sponsors’ logos consolidated our legitimacy no end.

There a certain inertia to the process — once one established name is on board, others will follow. We approached Wheels4Life and The Wilderness Foundation with our plans, and set up a stall at One Life Live, a ‘new beginnings’ exhibition in Earls’ Court, London. That’s when things really started happening.

4. Choosing Sponsors

Some companies care about cycling, or outdoor expeditions, or whatever their field of business is; and community-fostering and social involvement. Others care more about profit margins. You will quickly learn which category a company falls into. Generally, the bigger the company, the more the swing towards the latter will be. Use this knowledge to your advantage.

As well as this, before you carpet-bomb the corporate world with proposals, think very hard about each company you contact. If you’re sending out emails, then you have one chance alone to make an impact. You might as well expend this energy contacting a smaller number of companies that you would truly like to see involved with your expedition, and who really have the product that you desire, rather than sending carbon copies to thousands of companies who might fall under some industry related to your trip. The frenzy of ‘free stuff’ can initially be difficult to ignore, but do you really want a glow-in-the-dark saddle that you’re never going to use?

There is an ethical dilemma here as well. I was loathe to be associated with some of the companies that we considered contacting. So we didn’t contact them. Even if Halfords, the likes of whom have put countless local bike shops out of business, had wanted to sponsor us, I would rather be promoting a smaller, more focused company who invested real human passion in their work, like the wheelbuilders at the family-run Leisure Lakes Bikes. We also focused on companies who showed their commitment to good ethics and social activism, such as Kona with the Kona Bike Town and AfricaBike schemes.

There is a balance to strike here between this ideal and the reality — all companies need to make money somehow. You’re going to help them do this.

The essential thing is building relationships on a personal level.  This means making contacts and approaching real people, rather than ‘info-at’ email addresses. Just talking to people about our ideas led to pretty much all of our sponsorship, directly or indirectly. In contrast, the endless hours — days — of sending emails were pretty fruitless. It is far more rewarding to be personally in contact with a company director, and it leads to far more reciprocal benefits on both sides.

5. Serendipity

It’s often said that there are forces beyond our understanding that drive the world. The truth is not supernatural — it’s a fact that human beings are innately altruistic towards those with whom they empathise, and that people are now connected by far fewer links than we would normally suppose. Word gets around faster than you imagine.

With that in mind, consider meeting a) someone who was trying desperately hard to get as much free equipment as possible, or b) someone whose life’s dream was to cycle round the world, and who wasn’t afraid to enthuse about making this dream happen. Who would you rather help?

Example 1: By the end of 2006 I had dedicated my existence to making my dream reality, telling everyone I met about my plans and showing uninhibited how enthused and excited I was. Quite unexpected things began to happen.

Whilst working in the French Alps that December, I met a man who held a top role at the WWF conservation NGO, and his family. He was so impressed by my plan that he invited me to visit the WWF HQ near Geneva, Switzerland, to talk about the expedition.

Just before I went there, he called me to tell me that he’d been on the plane recently and had got chatting about my plans to the guy next to him, who happened to be the boss of the European branch of Kona Bikes, and did I want to meet him? (Yes!)

In Switzerland, we sat in the sun and chatted for the afternoon about it all. I returned to England with the promise of anything I needed from the current Kona range, and a variety of film-related ideas with konaworld.tv as well.

All because I talked to a stranger about my ideas. You never know who’s listening.

Talk to everyone, no matter what you think will happen. Show them that you have a dream. When you do this, “the world conspires to help you”.

Example 2: Andy went on MySpace in search of other young environmentalists, found out about the One Life Live exhibition in March 2007, sent a message to the organiser and was freely given a 40-square-foot patch of floor space in one of London’s biggest exhibition halls.

We spent 3 days there surrounded by a variety of bikes and equipment we’d quickly cobbled together. We slept in the boot of my parents’ car (never again!) and took showers in the local leisure centre. We told visitors that we weren’t selling anything and that we just wanted to tell people about our ideas. We arranged to meet Hans Rey, founder of Wheels4Life, and a representative from The Wilderness Foundation. We also met two like-minded young entrepreneurs and went for a drink with them.

A few weeks later, I got a call from a strange man who said he was from a production company and did we want to meet them in London to talk about possibly filming the journey? He’d heard about us from a guy he’d met at a networking session who had heard about us from one of the two people we’d gone for a drink with after the exhibition, and thought it sounded like a good project to get his production company up and running. We met them and are now filming the first feature-length documentary of a long-term cycle tour. All because Andy went on MySpace.

Things will happen by themselves, once you surround yourself by people with similar focus. Don’t sit in front of your email account. Take every opportunity you can to get out into the world.

Example 3: We spend hours, and hours, and hours, and hours (you get the idea) sending near-identical emails to every bike shop, bike maker, accessory manufacturer, mail-order company, etc we could find — thousands — asking if they would help by sponsoring us in some way. We received practically nothing in return.

Emails can be (and usually are) ignored or deleted. Nobody knows who you are until you meet them.

Now go and ride.

Do you have any experience with expedition sponsorship? Is it worth the effort and commitment? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Related posts:

• The Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook
• How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 1)
• How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 4)

So, Tenny, what are you doing today, and why are you doing it?

Today? Well now I’m drinking my coffee before I start sorting things out, packing, cleaning the flat, cooking… yeah.

And why are you packing and sorting things out and cleaning the flat?

Well I’m packing and sorting things out because we’re leaving in one week… to have a journey by land which we are going to start from here, Yerevan, and trying to get to Italy by land. Hope it will take maximum 5 days… no… 3 days, maybe, yeah. Well, hopefully — anything can happen! We are taking our bikes and we will try to cycle in Italy and maybe in Spain — we’re not sure yet.

Why are we going cycling in Italy and Spain?

Because I want to see Italy and Spain, those are two of my favourite countries. Well, I’ve never been to Spain before, and I’ve been in Italy maximum 2 days, and we are hoping that the weather is going to be still warm, because now it’s August and we don’t want to be late and be there in winter. So we are going to Italy by land, which will be quick, and then cycle.

Why cycling?

(Laughs) Well I’m cycling because my husband is cycling! And I can not tell if I am going to enjoy it 100% yet. I can tell when I’m there and I’m doing it.

You are definitely not going to enjoy 100% of it!

Well I know that there will be moments when I will enjoy 100% but… well, to be honest, the thing for me is like… this journey and the difficulties is for reaching something… which is the destination, which will be England, where my husband’s family lives…

Call me Tom.

Well, you’re Tom. I’m talking about my husband…

…very funny…

…and we’re going to have a very good and enjoyable time there. Yeah. And we will enjoy it better because of the way in which we’re going to get there.

So what are you most afraid of about this whole journey from Yerevan to England?

When I want to go to the toilet and I don’t have the facilities! That’s the most scary part.

Seriously

Yeah.

That’s pretty good — going to the toilet is not difficult. So the rest of it should be very easy.

Well, thinking about my cycling experience before, which was about 400km between Yerevan and Tabriz, the cycling itself was difficult for me because it was my first experience — I hadn’t been on a bike much since I was a child. It was also the communication between us and the people, and I found it difficult being a tourist in two countries where I had lived for 24 years and 6 years. I think this time, when I will really be a tourist and foreigner, I will find it much easier. Mentally it will be easier. Physically I hope it will be easier — I am fitter than before. I hope it’s not going to be very hilly…

Armenia is one of the most difficult countries in which I’ve cycled in terms of the hills — the gradients, the duration of the climbs — so it can’t be more difficult than that. Does that make you feel better about what we’re going to do?

Yes of course it does. And also, as I said, I’m going to see new places, new sights, new scenery, new people — everything new, which I didn’t have in my previous cycling experience. The only new part was the cycling, the action itself. And of course I met new people but there was nothing new about that for me because they were Armenians or Iranians and I could speak the language. And also I was the translator which made it a bit difficult.

You think it’s a good idea to do this short trip in Europe as your first proper cycling experience?

Definitely.

Do you think you will do any more travelling after this?

I don’t know. Well, I will definitely want to do more travelling, but I am not sure if I would like to continue by bike again. Maybe not soon afterwards.

Where else in the world are you attracted to?

I think South America would be interesting. And I would like to go to China, but in that part of the world going by bike makes me a bit scared… I don’t know…

What are you looking forward to most about the next couple of months?

Arriving to a nice city, town, village, I don’t know… and have the opportunity to have a shower, wear clean clothes, and go out walking see places without bike!

So basically everything apart from the cycling?

Well, as I said, cycling is the way by which I can do what I like. So for going to see beautiful places, the bike will be my way of transport. I can’t say that I’m not looking forward to that! It makes things easier when you think, OK, I will cycle this 100km in order to be in a very nice place and be in a normal situation.

How about camping for a few days in a row?

I like camping. To be honest if we have water and food I really like camping… especially because this time we are going to have a bigger tent for 2 people, I am really looking forward to it. I mean, I sleep much better when I camp rather than stay in people’s houses. Well of course that’s going to happen and it’s good to meet nice people, but I don’t mind about camping as long as I camp in a place where I’m not disturbing anyone and nobody is disturbing me.

Do you have any ideas or images of what Italy or Spain might be like?

Well I am not sure if I can say in words, but of course, everyone has images about everything. So I have an image about Spain which is that it’s yellow, it’s red, it’s hot, hot-blooded people, hot food, beautiful women, dance… yeah. Just very colourful and nice. And Italy… black-haired men, again hot-blooded, not stupidly modern. I mean when I watch Italian movies, I enjoy everything — houses, the way people decorate their flat — it’s not posh, it’s not modern, it’s… I don’t know… oh and beautiful shoes. And lots of good artwork, which I hope I will have the chance to see.

Anything else you wish to say before committing yourself?!

Er, no, nothing to add. I just hope that my family will encourage me this time. Hope everything will go normally and I am not going to get stressed. Thank you very much!

Thanks and good luck!

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Last year Andy organised a donation of bicycles in India through the charity Wheels4Life. You can read about this story on his blog.

If you haven’t heard of Wheels4Life, it’s a simple idea to provide bicycles to communities in extreme poverty whose members have no other form of transport — between homes, schools, markets, healthcare facilities, and other fundamentals of life today. The bikes are locally-sourced so that they can be kept on the road long after the point of donation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=41TyWy4SGRo

Wheels4Life was started by all-round mountain-biking legend and complete nutter Hans “No Way” Rey. You’ll see what I mean about the ‘complete nutter’ part in the above trailer for the new Wheels4Life film. It follows one of the charity’s projects in Tanzania over a period of 14 months.

I like Hans’ attitude towards cycling for utility. It’s the most sustainable and practical form of transport in the developing world, with no running costs and the ability to go practically anywhere, regardless of road conditions (or existence!). I also can’t deny how successfully he’s used the West’s celebrity-/brand-chasing culture to raise enthusiasm and funding for these projects. Good work!

• Go and look at the Wheels4Life website
• Find out more about the film
• Help!

No related posts.

Five years ago, I invented cycle-touring. After rejecting backpacking out-of-hand as a fulfilling post-university form of escapism, I eventually hit upon the idea to ride a bicycle — a bicycle! — from England, all the way to Croatia. The loose motivation for this was to visit a friend, but having a cool adventure in exotic, faraway Europe was the key.

I thought I’d single-handedly hit upon a brilliant and novel way to travel that ticked all the boxes — the great outdoors, sleeping rough, the physical challenge, and using my own initiative to get to my destination.

In short, I was embarrassingly naive.

I soon came to realise that, on the whole, all good ideas have already been thought of. My ever-growing travel plans and long hours scrutinizing world maps were entirely insignificant. Thomas Stevens cycled round the world more than 120 years ago. Thousands more have done so since. Hundreds of books had been published, online communities created. My trip was a drop in the ocean.

I never cycled to Croatia. I decided I was going to cycle round the world, and started, but I go through with that either. What I have done since then is try to follow my heart and mind, balancing their quibbles as best I can. Often this has been difficult. More than once I’ve determined to jack in the whole shebang, call it quits, hang up my handlebars and settle for an easier, more comfortable life. The deeply personal path I’ve followed has conflicted, and continues to conflict, on many occasions with those of the people I hold most dear. So far, at least, it’s been worth every trial and tribulation.

But things change when you’re on the road. Not just the short-term mood-swings that hit you when you’re alone and vulnerable, but in the long term as well, if you’ve been away for long enough to put past concepts of ‘home’ firmly behind you. The folly of following a huge, pre-planned route round the globe hit me early on. Why was I using a bicycle to conduct a one-dimensional race across the continents? I’d never travelled before. Everything was new and exciting. The freedom afforded by the bike was second to none. But I felt walled in by obligations of distance and destination, which I realised I simply did not want to be bound by. Loss of pride was nothing.

Since those early days I’ve seen a staggering array of landscapes and cultures, and put myself deliberately through highly arduous experiences. I overcame a huge fear — travelling alone in Africa — and emerged stronger from doing so. But as time has gone by, the experience has become less and less fulfilling. Why? What alternative is there, after all this?

One day in northern Mongolia, Andy and I sat around the campfire to thrash out the intricacies of it all. His experiences, alone and as one of a pair, were comparable to mine. It seemed, from talking to him and to other long-term bikers, that my feelings were not unusual. One thing that emerged was that constant movement was better tempered by periods of stability. It is difficult for the mind to digest its experiences when it’s concentrating on riding and on the day-to-day practicalities of touring, in contrast with backpacking where actual travel is an inconvenient aside to multiple city breaks. This is why urban hosts are surprised when I arrive and want to do nothing other than crash on the sofa and watch movies for a few days.

Related to that was the feeling of being part of something bigger. No matter how many blogs I write, or how many photos I take, I usually feel that I’m shooting my creative output into the vacuum of cyberspace, failing to connect with anything in the real world. Occasionally I get an email thanking me for the encouragement and inspiration someone has taken from my modest offerings. But to be part of a society is a desire that more and more often raises its voice.

Solo travel, while undoubtedly offering unrivalled opportunities for personal challenge, also proved itself problematic. Mostly these problems were self-inflicted. Being alone for six months in the toughest parts of the world I can imagine cycling had a profound effect on my behaviour. I became single-minded in my determination to get through the tough bits, at the expense of the fun bits. I forgot how to think multi-dimensionally. I became fixated on whatever target I had set myself and lost the ability to think laterally and to recognise potentially-more-rewarding options. It became a grind.

It need not have been like that. Sometimes I think that I didn’t give it enough of a chance, and that a mere half-year wasn’t long enough to let my brain settle into what should have been an enviable level of freedom, alone and unconstrained by finances, ease of access to the world, transport or accommodation. Or maybe it was simply that the girl was more important than the trip.

I also realised I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the superficiality of cultural encounters. There are only so many varieties of hot beverage you can be offered, so many shapes of family dwelling, so many languages in which you can understand the questions “where are you going?” and “are you married?” before you realise that in all reality people’s lives aren’t so different. Food, family and laughter are the simplest and most common preoccupations, unaffected by linguistics or longitude. That’s not to say I haven’t relished the process of getting to this point; it’s been the greatest adventure of my life, and there would have been no substitute for doing it.

But increasingly I want to get deeper into society, to understand attitudes, histories and politics, and not just from educated English-speaking urbanites. It all points to one thing: Language.

What options does this present? Either I must learn a language in enough detail to communicate abstractions (difficult), or I must travel in places where English is a main language. The anglophone world is substantial, so that’s a good start. Armenian isn’t particularly useful outside the country itself, with the notable exception of Los Angeles, where it is said that one can get by without learning English at all. (I often ask myself why I didn’t learn Russian while living in Armenia, but the answer is simply that my wife’s family don’t speak it.)

Farsi would be handy in Tajikistan, parts of Uzbekistan and let’s not forget Afghanistan, though I’m told that now is not a particularly ideal time to cycle there. My French could improve quickly if I was in the francophone world, which includes large swathes of Africa. Spanish may prove easier with one Romance language studied in the past. So I have a few options. Most of them would require real dedication to studying, which I am afraid will be difficult, given my track record of foreign-language-learning failures.

Finally, as my time in Mongolia beautifully demonstrated, I am beginning to tire of formulaic cycle-touring. It’s Western doctrine to crave variety — we’re brought up to believe that anything is possible (usually with the convenient assistance of consumer products) and that the ‘daily grind’ alone as a lifestyle is somehow below us. This has led to generations of the permanently unfulfilled, which I pray I don’t end up joining.

For this reason, I’ve started to look into ways to introduce variety into the act of movement. Fossil-fuelled travel is not an option. The appearance of navigable rivers on my journeys never fails to set off a craving to somehow float off downstream for a few days, and while the romantic notion of lashing a few logs together and launching Huckleberry-Finn-style into the unknown holds great appeal for the big kid within, there are a few more practical and exciting options available.

I’m yet to know where all of this is leading, but the next ‘standard-issue’ leg of this elusive beast of a bike trip is likely to be my last. In a couple of weeks, if all goes to plan, I’ll be on my way to Italy — overland, as usual — to begin a late-summer/autumn ride through Southern Europe, final destination Middle England, with the hope of arriving back at the very point I began from more than three years ago, just in time for Christmas.

After that… well, I’ll just have to wait and see.

Related posts:

• Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring
• Confessions of a Novice Cycle Tourist
• A Quick Look Back At The First Year Abroad

Mongolia was the first serious outing for the Extrawheel Voyager trailer, which I’ve been taking on rides with me for the last year or so. Five weeks in such challenging off-road conditions really pushed the trailer to its design limits.

I’ve collected my thoughts on the trailer, which Andy and I helped to develop through prototype-testing and improvement suggestions. The new design features numerous significant improvements — these aren’t just token tweaks, but a thorough overhaul of the entire luggage-carrying system, as well as small touches that make the Voyager a real game-changer in the (admittedly small) world of single-wheel trailers.

Read the full review here.

Related posts:

• How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 4)

Andy has written an excellent and thought-provoking article on the value of risk-taking. He’s returned to live in the UK now and it’s interesting to see how he is applying the lessons learnt from travel to a post-Ride-Earth life:

Often there seems to be a lot of emphasis put on being ‘certain’. We are used to having access to so much information that can make us feel surer about our decisions. However, we can’t know fully the accuracy of the information if it is from secondary sources. There has to be space for using our intuitive skills and allowing serendipity into the equation. Perhaps the problem with the web, incredibly popular iPhones and other such gadgets is that they are too focused on giving us access to the information and cut out the process of getting to the information. Does it take away our ability to search out the information we need through other means other than using google maps or looking on wikipedia? Does it make us shun doing things that we are not 100% sure about? Does it make us worse at working out the information we really need?

Read the full article on his blog.

Related posts:

• Perception Versus Reality In Travel
• 10 Strange Things Bicycle Travel Has Done To Me

These composite shots are from moments during my time in Mongolia when I made a special effort to capture the essence of the landscape and the atmosphere.

You can be the judge of how successful I was!

We pitched our tents under a clear blue sky. By the time we’d washed in the river and cooked dinner, storm clouds were rolling in…

The wind picked up and we were suddenly pelted with rain and hail. This unsettled weather was apparently the norm during the spring, but it took us by surprise repeatedly.

Khovsgol lake, still mostly frozen over, provided us with some of the most spectacular wild camping we’ve ever had, anywhere in the world, as well as providing clean drinking water and seriously refreshing swims!

One evening, high on a remote hilltop, we were treated to a stunning, drawn-out sunset over the distant peaks.

Related posts:

• Off The Map In Northern Mongolia — Another Photo Essay
• Off The Map In Central Mongolia — A Photo Essay
• Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

Coming home meant two things: a very long journey by public transport, and lugging an unwieldy collection of funny-shaped bags and bits of metal through a variety of cities in the summer heat.

One of the ferries from Trabzon to Sochi

Choosing to travel exclusively by land meant that the excursion was really much more than just a bike ride in Mongolia. It was also an opportunity to spend a few days watching the world go by, and to experience one of the world’s great train journeys — the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Ulaan Baatar (and back). There was also the logistical challenge of it all — anyone who’s been to the Caucasus will know that the borders are in something of a pickle.

Having no need to visit any Siberian cities on our return leg, we took a coupé (a 4-berth compartment) on the direct train to Moscow from the Mongolian capital. As luck would have it, nobody else was booked in the same compartment, so we had no issues with our luggage — a bike box, 3 drybags, a pannier, two bar-bags and six wheels were all safely stowed away with room to sleep.

Not long into the 96-hour journey I began to crave company. Most Russian trains have a 3rd-class option, which is the equivalent in train terms of a youth-hostel: Each wagon has 60 or so bunks in an open-plan design. There’s no privacy and it’s a lot more fun for it. This train unfortunately didn’t have the option, so the journey passed with little social contact. Two months had passed and Siberia had transformed from a bleak, grey wilderness to one bursting with life, with trees and grasses desperate to surge skywards in that short, hot summer before winter’s grip began to tighten again.

Bike-packing in Moscow

In Moscow I said goodbye (and good luck) to Andy who had no onward tickets and was going to try his luck at the bus station. As a parting present I gave him some roasted chicken wings, a tub of fresh coleslaw and several pieces of fruit. After four days of instant noodles, I think he would agree that there was no better gift!

The train to Sochi was the familiar platzkart affair, full of bare flesh and flip-flops heading for the Russian Riviera. Sochi’s sea-side sprawl is a whopping 145km long, and at the heart of it is Russia’s prime Black Sea holiday resort, with prices to match. I arrived early in the morning, bought a ticket for the evening sailing to Trabzon, and spent the day pedalling around the clean, leafy backstreets, eating cheap and tasty Chicken Cordon-Bleus from street-sellers and stumbling over yet more facets of Sochi’s Armenian community, who seemed to pop up literally everywhere.

On the ferry I met a Hungarian cycle-tourist and, as tends to happen, conversation turned to previous trips and the ins and outs of bicycle travel. I was astonished to hear that — in complete contrast to my own experiences — he’d never been invited to stay with anyone in over 50,000km of riding in several long trips all over the world. This made more sense when he mentioned that his daily average distance was somewhere around 170km, and often up to 200km! To me, this represented an insane amount of pedalling. He’d covered the entire distance from Budapest to Sochi — somewhere over 2,000km — in less than two weeks.

I would see him a few days later in Yerevan, and hear how he’d been invited to stay with people in villages in Turkey and Georgia, and what a memorable experience it had been, and I was happy to hear that. For my own part, I rode the 210km from Trabzon to Batumi in one particularly wet afternoon and a slightly drier morning before my legs gave up the ghost, and I filed this little experiment in the ‘failed bike travel philosophies’ section (next to the entry about cycling in pitch darkness without a head-torch). However, I had done what I had been looking forward to doing for several days; namely to ride the Turkish section of my return journey purely in order to stuff my face with gorgeous Turkish food at every opportunity.

I rode this way in winter ’07. Here we go again…

…and again… (the rain hadn’t stopped)

…and again. Tea power.

It was just before sunrise, ten days and about ten thousand kilometres distant from Mongolia, that I rode through the slumbering suburbs of Yerevan, up the familiar boulevard past Victory Park, off into the maze of alleys and towards a nameless little yard where a tailor was unlocking his workshop and a familiar face was standing in a bedroom window, waiting for my return.

Related posts:

• Rain, Train and Pain — Yerevan to Sochi
• On The Rails — Sochi to Ulaanbaatar
• Off-Road In The Caucasus Mountains Of Georgia

In 2006, Andy and I took our mountain-bikes up to Inverness and spent a week riding an off-road route to Fort William, which we had put together from detailed Ordinance Survey maps. We made a lot of mistakes — carrying all of our kit in heavy backpacks, relying for a good night’s sleep on a £10 tent from Lidl, and being rather optimistic about our daily distances cycling on hiking trails.

This, my first ever bike trip, was about trial-and-error, climbing the steep learning curve of our inexperience. It was the most fun I’d ever had on a bike, or ever have since.

Until, that is, I took my bike to Mongolia.

The last few weeks of riding have fulfilled the desire that inspired the very conception of Ride Earth — to ‘take mountain-biking to it’s logical conclusion’, as we originally put it. One of the intrinsic attractions of bicycle-travel is the feeling of liberty, to go at your own pace, under your own steam, on a route of your choosing, but in practice you are generally limited to roads or tracks, be they paved or unpaved. Out on the vast steppes of North-East Asia, it is possible to take a bearing to the next settlement and then to quite literally follow the compass.

This rugged, unfenced swathe of mountains and steppe is currently being crossed by the expeditioner Ripley Davenport, who has chosen Mongolia as the venue for “the longest solo and unassisted walk ever completed”. Davenport’s website talks up his mission in terms of “plung[ing] deep inside the most sparsely populated independent country in the world” and spending 3 months crossing its “ruthless landscape”, together with a list of extreme adjectives describing the conditions he’ll face. He’s got a lot of sponsors and media to keep happy, something that only the most dramatic prose can do.

But from my experience in central and northern Mongolia — lesser in scope and duration than Davenport’s — there can’t be many places in the world more accessible to the adventure-seeking biker. Yes, I did experience dust-storms, tornadoes, freezing nights, scorching sun, terrible tracks, howling wolves, hail, snow, rain, unrideable swamp, massive climbs and descents, and all that kind of thing. But isn’t that the fun of it?

These words might sound extreme. That’s what they are — the extremities, the noteworthy moments. Vast swathes of time also passed for which there are no adjectives worth using. When nature sends something interesting your way, you sit out the storm, put on another fleece, don a sunhat, tighten your bolts, keep your waterproofs handy, get off and push, sweat a bit harder; you lap it up, smiling through gritted teeth at the life-affirming exposure to the elements, reminded sharply of the contrast between the mundane and the extraordinary and how the combination of the two constitutes life’s seasoning.

Davenport’s decision to attempt his walk ‘unassisted’ — i.e. taking his entire stockpile of supplies with him — seems to me a little odd, as others have noted. Sparse the population may be, with less than 3 million people inhabiting the 19th-largest country in the world, but what is less often said is that the population is very, very well dispersed. On the steppe, it was a rare occasion indeed that we found ourselves unable to see a ger (yurt) or herd of livestock from wherever we happened to be stood.

Even during the most remote parts of the journey, when we made a conscious effort to leave even the faintest tracks and spent 10 days in the wilderness without seeing any settlements, we spotted at least one vehicle or horseman a day. Davenport could be accused of creating something out of nothing. But then the same accusation could be made of any number of expeditions whose funding hinges on an easily-marketable concept. He will undoubtedly have achieved a great feat of human endurance if he succeeds, so all power to him — but he’s not hauling 90 days of food out of necessity, and to portray the whole of Mongolia in those terms is misleading.

In practical terms, help is always close at hand. If in need, the inhabitants of every ger will help out of tradition. Unconditional hospitality amongst nomads was a survival mechanism, and such cultural artifacts die hard. On the few occasions we needed directions or water, we were always accepted without question, and often there would be a cup of tea (with milk!) offered, or maybe a spot of solar-powered satellite TV. Fantasy land of wandering shepherds this most certainly is not.

In fact, such is the accepting, uncomplicated attitude of Mongolians to out-of-the-way travellers, bike or otherwise, that I initially mistook it for rudeness, as herders on horseback (or more often on Chinese motorbikes) would often seem to completely ignore our presence on their land. But it wasn’t long before I realised that it was the opposite — far from being unfriendly or suspicious, it was a sign that we had been accepted and that there was no need for small-talk. If we needed anything, we soon realised, it was supposed that we would simply come over to the ger and ask. In the end, we never felt more at home.

(Incidentally, I found a tattered guidebook in a hostel when I returned to Ulaan Baatar and made the mistake of flicking through it. The authors had come to the conclusion that it was perfectly OK to knock on a ger door and accept the inevitable invitation to stay as if it were some kind of consumable tourist attraction on offer to anyone who fancied it, and that simply handing over some cash was sufficient justification for doing so. They had even coined the phrase “Ger-to-ger touring”. I have an issue with this attitude — while I did knock on the doors of a few gers during the trip, I never did so without an express need for assistance — mainly directions, sometimes water, but never food or a place to sleep. These are things on which you should be self-reliant.)

Route-finding is easy in Mongolia. You begin with the assumption that you can go anywhere. Absolutely anywhere. Then you use common sense. On the steppe, each valley has a variety of tracks traversing it. When one set of ruts gets too deep, the drivers will drive alongside it, thus creating a new track. The result after a few seasons is ten or more sets of tracks going in the same direction, with passing vehicles taking the faintest, shallowest, outermost route. Similar tracks lead from one valley to the next. Sick of these, you turn left or right and ride directly cross-country to your heart’s content!

Paper maps of Mongolia are accurate when it comes to settlements (the roads and tracks can be completely ignored, however), so all you need is a bearing, a compass, a good judgement of distance and a bit of common sense (and/or a GPS receiver). Contrary to popular misconception, there are hundreds of small towns all over the country, and each one has a handful of shops selling a variety of local and imported produce (including instant noodles), at least one place serving hot food at mealtimes, electricity, and mobile phone reception, including a GPRS connection so you can check your email or update your Twitter status if that’s your thing. When we stuck to the routes, we passed a town like this every one or two days.

All of this comes together to make Mongolia an adventure cyclist’s paradise. Safe in the knowledge that the ‘uninhabited wilderness’ is for the most part an illusion, it’s possible to explore the stunning landscapes in a huge amount of depth and with unparalleled freedom of movement. With practically no paved roads, you need a strong bike and an affinity for off-road riding, and the willingness to put daily distance aside. (For the record, our longest day was 76km, and our shortest was 12km, with the average hovering between 40 and 50.)

It was with sadness and a few tears that the trip came to an end. A surprise invitation to a family gathering in the middle of a maze of plains and lakes, a short ride to the next town, and it was over. We crammed the bikes and bags into the back of a four-wheel-drive minibus and spent the next two days being thrown around inside it on our way back to Ulaan Baatar. Once there, we secured our train tickets to Moscow and began the important process of digesting the weeks of intense, memorable adventures we’d had in this very special place — a place of huge spaces, skies, silences and hearts.

(Some photos by Andy.)

Related posts:

• Off The Map In Central Mongolia — A Photo Essay
• Four Spectacular Moments From Mongolia
• Moving Forward From Vanilla Cycle Touring

After I’d recovered from a sudden illness, we hit the road again with fresh enthusiasm. We set out from Hatgal at the southern tip of Lake Khovsgol, knowing nothing about the state of the route other than that two Finns and an Aussie told us on returning from a mountain-biking trip that it wouldn’t be possible to get through the first 25km with luggage on the bike. That sounded like an excellent way to keep things interesting.

It was 10 days before we reached the next settlement. During that time, we rode swooping forest singletrack and dragged our bikes up impossibly-steep scree slopes. We pushed through axle-deep swampland and camped by the most pristine lakeside I’ve ever set eyes on. We found Mongolians on horseback and others who had driven huge ancient Russian off-road trucks cross-country, carrying numerous families to a natural hot spring for a few days’ camping. We spent two full days hiking along a valley floor of dry gravel and wading across channels of meltwater from the mountains above. My feet started to disintegrate from several days spent in permanently wet boots. We got completely lost and finally found our way out onto the vast, pock-marked, marshy plain to the west of the Khovsgol basin. This had been some of the most interesting and challenging adventuring of my life.

We planned to visit another settlement at the far end of the plain, but instead we spent two days lost amongst the hillocks and small lakes, unable to find a way through the tangle of rivers and sand pits and marshes in this rapidly-changing landscape in which nothing corresponded to anything we’d seen on a map. Faint tracks disappeared over newly-eroded riverbanks and into spontaneously-appearing patches of desert. We trudged through the worst of it and otherwise ground the gears between gers and timber-built dwellings, asking in quiet desperation for the way out of the labyrinth and accepting invitations to drink milky tea (without salt in this region) and eat bread and freshly-churned butter.

We spent the evening attending a family gathering quite literally in the middle of nowhere, where vodka combined with a cyclist’s metabolism and a severe lack of resistance to the effects of alcohol to produce a variety of interesting effects. This dip into Mongolian society, sparse as it is, was for me the final piece of the picture of Mongolia that I had been looking for in order to go home satisfied with the experience I’d had here.

Since the last photo essay proved so popular, here’s another! I’ll be writing the trip up in more detail over the next few weeks.

We left our guesthouse in Moron and headed north for Khovsgol. Tourist season hadn’t started and things were still very quiet. And cold.

Horses are losing favour to motorbikes as a form of cross-country private transport in Mongolia, but horsemen are still a fairly common sight.

The reach of the Soviet Union’s building projects spans an unimaginably large swathe of Eurasia. Relics like this can be found from the Bering Straits to Eastern Europe.

In all my days of wild camping I can’t think of a more idyllic campsite than this. We stayed two nights — why not?

It was a dramatic time to be at Khovsgol. The fractured ice was ever-shifting and creaking noisily as it slowly disintegrated. The water was rather chilly but incredibly refreshing. Post-ride swims became the norm for several days.

No caption required here.

Riding was always fun, sometimes difficult, occasionally impossible. Adventure cycling doesn’t get much better than this.

Khovsgol isn’t immune to overzealous construction projects for the annual sprinkling of summer tourists.

On a scale of bad to good, this track was about average.

No track existed at this point so we just headed downriver. We didn’t know we’d be doing so for the next two days.

The landscape here was spectacular and pristine, compared to much of the country which was covered with horse poo and smashed vodka bottles. It’s all relative.

The valley floor was extremely wide and we meandered as much as the channels of water ever did.

This, believe it or not, is a route substantial enough to be marked on a 1:2,000,000 sheet map of Mongolia.

Coming out of the river valley, our difficulties hadn’t quite finished.

Epic, trackless and endlessly carved through with dry channels, this was our route for another two days.

The last major river crossing? we hoped. But we were wrong.

The day ended in stumbling across a family gathering, to which we were enthusiastically invited.

Vodka was dished out in all directions for the duration of the afternoon. There were about 30 people at the party. We never did work out what it was for.

This chap’s day ended prematurely. The sun was still out at 9:30pm and rose again at 5am.

Understandably, my memory of the day grew more and more blurred as time went on.

If you’ve enjoyed this, please make a small donation to help me raise £1000 for The Wilderness Foundation!

Related posts:

• Off The Map In Central Mongolia — A Photo Essay
• Four Spectacular Moments From Mongolia
• Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

Mongolia is a far more accessible place for a mountain-biking expedition than I’d imagined. Navigation has been a mixture of old techniques and new technology. Our GPS unit didn’t help us to choose a route through the maze of tangled tyre tracks, but it did provide a bearing and an approximate distance to the next small provincial town — which would always provide supplies, electricity, a meal and a mobile phone connection. In terms of facilities, everything we’ve needed has rarely been more than a day or two away.

After Bulgan we headed for the back-country. Riding the main route, though relatively easy going, quickly became a monotonous undertaking. Away from this, our sheet-map of the country provided us with the name of the next settlement, and armed with this knowledge we proceeded through the silent vastness of the countryside, pedalling along the streak of bare earth that best corresponded to the gestures of passing motorcyclists and horsemen, out herding for the day, and our combined common sense and experience.

We found ourselves covering more distance than we’d expected — our plan was to average somewhere around 35km per day, but 55km has been more common. The conditions have been challenging, but not overpoweringly so. It really helps to have benchmarks like Sudan and Ethiopia when tackling unpaved routes like this!

We’ve spent several days off in Moron, a relatively large regional capital in north-central Mongolia, in order to rest and to let an unexpected cold/cough to work its way through my system before continuing. There’s plenty more to say, but just for a change I’ll let the pictures do the talking. It’s been a fantastic ride so far.

Sometimes the tracks were barely visible. In many countries this would be a cause for alarm, but in Mongolia it’s possible to ride directly across the step, and following a valley or heading for a water source is guaranteed to bring you in contact with at least one herding family and their ger in order to check directions. Once we got used to this kind of geographical freedom, we started to push further and further off the well-worn paths.

A sudden change of weather is never far away. The speed at which storms blow in is incredible, given the vastness of the landscapes. Usually they threaten rain but deliver only a stiff breeze that makes pitching camp somewhat arduous.

This was the only roadsign I saw for a week. It doesn’t point to a settlement, either — this reads ‘Hanuy Tour’. Hanuy is the name of a small river and of a natural spring which we couldn’t find.

It was a great change of scenery when forests started becoming more commonplace. Trees are harvested for timber and firewood, but there is no evidence of large-scale deforestation thus far. The trees grow quickly during the short summer in order to survive the bitter winter.

A shrine such as the one Andy is photographing here is an essential piece of furniture at the top of each pass, no matter how remote. We’d been following a very faint pair of tyre tracks all day and were surprised to come across a shrine of this size at the top of the final climb.

We crossed the Hanuy river with the intention of taking a cross-country shortcut to the next town, but eventually crossed back to the other side when it became clear that the hills and cliffs were going to be very difficult to cross.

Sometimes the laws of physics take over and hike-and-bike is the only option!

Approaching the small town of Bayan-Agt. Despite the remoteness and lack of transport infrastructure, these small towns are well-stocked with provisions and facilities for the traveller. A packet of Korean instant noodles is never far away.

High up a long climb in a remote valley, we came across a set of goalposts and a basketball net. The nearest ger was several kilometres down the valley.

Off-road travel in Mongolia generally seems to involve repeated traversals of vast valleys twenty or thirty kilometres wide. A long climb precedes an adrenalin-filled descent, followed by a monotonous grind across a windy valley floor. The process is repeated. Luckily, each valley often seems to have its own micro-climate and its own distinctive character, which keeps things interesting in the long run.

Horses play a large part in the rural lifestyle. Sometimes they are herded in large groups, like other domestic livestock, and sometimes they roam in small units or alone.

One morning we were treated to a hidden gem of a descent through a cool forest, a few hours ride away from the town of Rashaant.

Another pass, another shrine. This one marked our rejoining of the main route to Moron. Another benign storm loomed across the valley but ultimately failed to deliver.

This is me, looking grime-stained and sun-tanned and I guess not particularly smiley!

If you haven’t already done so, please consider a small donation to help me raise £1000 for The Wilderness Foundation UK. At the time of writing I’ve raised 15% of that target — I really appreciate your support so far!

Related posts:

• Off The Map In Northern Mongolia — Another Photo Essay
• Four Spectacular Moments From Mongolia
• Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

The life of a cycle tourist is often dictated by the forces of nature. This was never more true than for the first week’s journeying from the Mongolian capital out into the depths of the steppes. Rain, snow, hail, headwinds, tailwinds, sidewinds, dust-storms, baking sun, freezing cold, cloud tapestries and clear blue skies all made an appearance, often within a couple of hours of each other. This was going to be no place for whingeing about the weather.

Heading west out of Ulaanbaatar on the new asphalt road

I felt pretty low as we left the city behind us. It was something to do with the wind and the monotony of the empty asphalt combined with the humbling vastness of the landscape. I remembered just what a slog bike travel could sometimes be. I was unfit. A few hours in and I was already bored of grinding the pedals and feeling like I was going nowhere.

Then I stopped and gave myself a kick up the backside to remind myself that there were always times like this, and that they always balanced out in the long term with the unpredictable joys of independent, unplanned bicycle travel. Moan over, get going.

But something had definitely changed. My enthusiasm for bike expeditions had always been matched by my tenacity when undertaking them. But now I was beginning to realise something, with a certain feeling of gladness: There is life beyond bike trips. I don’t have to spend my time off the bike wishing I was still on it. This realisation came with happiness; it meant that I was getting ready to move on, and to concentrate on things in my life which had become more important — and to take these responsibilities with the experience of the world I’d been so lucky to have.

In the meantime, however, I was in Mongolia, for the first and probably the last time, doing what I suppose Andy and I had always felt was the epitome of our original idea: a long and challenging off-road mountain-bike expedition. We headed north-west, and I found myself pedalling into the sunset every day instead of away from it. The asphalt petered out and I followed dirt tracks through rugged, treeless pastureland; land so smooth and bare that we could spontaneously lurch off the route and go spinning across the open country, drinking in the exhilaration of such absolute freedom; the symbiosis of perfectly engineered machine and re-awakened, long-conditioned leg muscle.

Andy ascending a pass on a Mongolian dirt road

Distances in Mongolia are vast, and at any given moment we could see twenty, thirty kilometres in every direction, nameless hilltops fringing our particular valley, each capped with a little pile of stones and trinkets, evolving and unplanned monuments to nothing in particular except humans’ obsession with reaching the highest, furthest, hardest point. Sometimes more distant ridges were visible, with no pollution to soil the atmosphere; we could pick out cloudscapes and mountain ranges a hundred or more kilometres distant.

The spectacle would often change in a matter of minutes. We’d be riding under a clear blue sky, avoiding washboard tracks and patches of loose sand, stopping for a bit of ger-spotting, trying to guess how many hundred sheep or horses there were in a distant herd, avoiding the broken glass of a discarded vodka bottle — then a shawl of grey would begin to drag itself over the horizon, the wind would pick up; half and hour later we’d be churning heads-down into a fierce gale or cowering behind a crude bike-and-poncho shelter. Once a huge dust-cloud appeared ahead of us with all the malign intent of a Hollywood monster, we dropped our bikes and charged across the plain in an attempt to outflank it before we were engulfed. We returned to our bikes to find every exposed surface covered with a thin film of fine brown dust.

Camping wild in Mongolia near Orhan under stormy skies

After several nights pitching our tents on windswept hillsides or behind piles of rocks, we found something resembling the dream campsite — a few hundred paces from a flowing river, in the shelter of the hills on the far bank, far from the track we’d followed. The sun was shining and we had a bag of dill-flavoured instant mash and a can of spicy beef stew waiting to be cooked for dinner.

Just as we were sharing out that delicious meal, a horseman came over to check us out. We’d seen him rounding up his horses in the distance. His name was Bolta and he asked us — as everyone did — The Questions: Where are you going, where are you from, where did you start, how many days? He took a seat on the ground and contemplated our merry little camp. Wolves might come and eat us in the night, he chuckled. He wore a pair of long leather riding boots and a long overcoat that extended to his fingertips. On his head was a faded baseball cap with an indecipherable graffiti-style logo. Life moved slowly for Bolta. There was no rush; plenty of time for comfortable silences. His horse tossed her head. Andy and I were thinking about our mashed potato going cold.

Bolta, head of one of Mongolia’s many modern nomadic herding families

Suddenly he pointed to the sky and I looked round to see a dramatic assemblage of rainclouds depositing their load on the hills a few kilometres away. We’d been in Mongolia for long enough to assume we were next in the firing line. Bolta got up and invited us for breakfast in his ger the following morning and departed on his little Mongolian pony, just as the first raindrops spattered off our tents. We dived for cover as the rain turned out to be golf-ball-sized lumps of semi-frozen slush. I threw my dinner into the tent and followed after it, fumbling with the strap that held my tent door open and getting it tangled — the sleet was now coming down in sheets, accompanied by tremendous gusts of wind — finally freeing the strap and zipping the awning closed. My lower half was already drenched. I sat halfway inside the tent with my feet sticking out, laughing at nature’s whim from beneath the waterproof shell, and began to eat my mashed potato.

See more of my photos on Flickr. Andy’s are probably funnier.

Related posts:

• Four Spectacular Moments From Mongolia
• On The Rails — Sochi to Ulaanbaatar
• Off The Map In Central Mongolia — A Photo Essay

As I write, it’s 5:30am in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Through the window of my host’s flat I can see the pale orange of the morning sun picking out the shapes of the new industrial complexes and apartment blocks that are sprouting at great speed. After a couple of years they will be crumbling, plaster falling from the walls; victims of overzealous development combined with corner-cutting for profit maximization in the name of the free market.

Behind the city skyline, a range of low mountains is silhouetted against the sky. They will be my target for the day. Tonight I’ll be sleeping under the stars — an invigorating prospect. I’ve spent about 5% of my life camping and I never tire of it.

It was a 15-day overland journey just to get here. It’s funny to think that for many, 15 days would be a year’s worth of foreign holidays. On the ferry from Trabzon to Sochi, I tried to work out how Russia fitted into my concept of the world. I’d never been before, but I’d spend the best part of two years living amongst the fallout of the Russian century, with all its faded grandeur, reminiscing of the days of denial and plenty, and the folly of post-Soviet opportunism.

But my first impressions of Sochi were far from what I was trying to avoid expecting. I immediately felt that I was in a place where the system appeared to benefit more than just the ultra-rich. People looked healthy, middle-class, distracted by whimsy and were far from struggling to eke out a living.

I’d made friends with an Armenian woman on the boat. She lived in Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s so-called ‘father of crime’, and was heading for the railway station. I shared a taxi with her and she sorted out my train ticket for Moscow — a great help, as my Russian extended to “Good day, I don’t understand Russian, thank you, goodbye”. While I was waiting I got chatting to one of the station policemen. He also turned out to be Armenian. The train’s guard was Armenian, the baggage porter was Armenian and refused to believe that I spoke his native language, and I walked past another passenger who was on his mobile phone, speaking Armenian (“…and it was five thousand dollars! Can you believe it?!?”). Between Yerevan and Moscow, travelling through four countries, I spoke more Armenian than any other language.

Andy came to meet me in Moscow. He’d travelled by bus from London via Dortmund and Riga and had arrived the previous day. We booked tickets on the weekend train to Ulan-Ude, 5,600km away in Buryatia, Siberia. The four-day journey in 3rd class cost just 45 pounds — about the same as London to Leicester — and included a bed, free hot water and the entertainment of an assortment of enigmatic local characters. Chores over, we met up with some local Muscovites, wandered randomly through the streets of the gigantic capital, got repeatedly lost on the metro and stocked up on the cheapest instant noodles we could find.

The Trans-Siberian train is a bit of a misnomer. There are loads of trains plying all or part of the classic route to Vladivostok, including variants heading for Mongolia and China and other Russian destinations. It is very difficult for an islander such as myself to grasp the concept of a country which spans no less than nine timezones and has swallowed countless independent states over time along with their inhabitants, customs and languages. Russians have almost as much difficulty travelling in Russia as foreigners do. Imagine you lived in London and decided to go to Edinburgh, for example, but discovered that you weren’t allowed to stay for more than 30 days outside London without special permission, and that you had to register your presence in any town or city outside London in which you spent more than 3 days at a time!

My train journey passed in a blur of flat, unchanging swamp, steppe and woodland. The Trans-Siberian railway is itself an intensely monotonous thing. The only variety came on the second morning, when the climate had undergone a drastic change overnight. When we’d left Moscow it had been 28 degrees and we’d slept with the window open. In the dim grey light of that morning, stepping off the train to stretch our legs, we were surprised to find that it was ever-so-lightly snowing.

Being the only foreigners amongst the 3rd class wagons we attracted a fair amount of attention, and were kept occupied by a variety of elaborately mimed conversations. All was going well until the final night, during which I was unable to sleep. Our stop was scheduled at 3:47am, and it arrived on the dot, being as it was a Russian train, the stalwart mode of transport for cross-country journeys, highly punctual and reliable.

Ulan-Ude was another chore-stop, this time for Mongolian visas which were luckily quick and easy to obtain. It would have been nice to have spent some more time in Russia, but I decided that it would be better to do so when I had an Armenian passport and didn’t have to worry about a visa. Before long we were on the little Taiwan-made bus, bouncing along the pot-holed road towards the Mongolian border and — finally — the start of the ride itself.

Related posts:

• Rain, Train and Pain — Yerevan to Sochi
• The Long Road Back To Yerevan
• Back In The Saddle From Ulaanbaatar To Bulgan

Her familiar, tearful, smiling face was framed by the tinted window, then a silhouette, receding; finally she joined the flecked shapes swaying within the departing bus as it began its 24-hour journey to Tehran. I put my hands in my pockets and trudged towards the subway. For the next few days I would put loneliness aside through the process of packing, tying up loose ends on website projects, and readying the flat for several months’ vacancy.

For what seemed like an eternity, Tenny and I had been looking forward to the day when we could turn the key one last time and pedal off together towards new lands. Circumstances had not been kind, and Tenny had gone to Iran to seek out a sports injury specialist to diagnose her knee pain, which had been persisting since the New Year. Free of work and alone for several weeks, I’d decided to use this window of opportunity to do something I’d been dreaming of doing for years — exploring Mongolia on my bike.

May arrived and with it the Russian business visa I’d been fretting over for several weeks. I dragged my luggage down to the railway station — one bike box, a 60-litre drybag, two panniers, three bike wheels and a handlebar-bag — and booked a seat on the overnight train to Tbilisi. The shabby old wagons creaked out of Yerevan’s grandoise, deserted station, named after the Armenian hero David of Sassoun. Our stewardess looked as much in need of renovation as the carriage, collecting tickets and sprinkling cigarette ash down the aisle as she casually whinged at the occupants about nothing in particular. The dim, orange bulbs flickered above. An ancient old woman muttered in my direction as the last lights of Yerevan slid into the distance. I rolled out my lumpy mattress to get some sleep before the rigmarole of the border crossing.

In Tbilisi I met up with Erik, a Swede who had cycled to Georgia and decided to take up residence there, and his flatmate Marija. She also had a history of long distance cycling, riding from her home country of Slovenia to China and back. (You can hear an interview with Marija on TravellingTwo.com.) Unable to carry my gear more than a few hundred metres at a time, I left it all at the left luggage office of Tbilisi station for the day, and went to drink tea with friends until the night train to Batumi.

A long time ago I decided to quit flying. This was for purely ideological reasons, and I was aware of the high probability that it would have no effect on society’s addiction to air travel whatsoever. But I couldn’t really bring myself to replicate the hypocrisy of those who jet about the world, expounding green-ness and sustainability between one airport and the next. So the prospect of cycling across Mongolia involved much more than actually cycling across Mongolia. I would also have to somehow get myself and all of my kit there by crawling across the surface of the world. I wedged my various bags and boxes into all available crevices of the Batumi night-train cabin. It would be the second of four train journeys totalling almost 8,000km in distance.

In motion, with the weight of imminent departure behind me, I started to find my feet again. It always took a few days to make the transition back to the traveller’s state of mind, one which accepts the fluidity and unpredictability of things, and refuses to let unforeseen setbacks cloud progress. I found myself sharing a cabin with three Georgians. The train pulled silently away and, after a perfectly timed comic pause, the middle-aged man opposite glanced at me and the two young women, reached under his seat and, with a wry grin, produced a five-litre bottle of home-made red wine. The rest of the journey passed rather quickly.

I stayed a night in Batumi. It was Sunday and the port was closed. “Come back tomorrow”, I was told on enquiring about the ferry to Sochi, Russia’s premier Black Sea resort and the future host of the 2014 Winter Olympics. The following morning it was raining. Batumi seemed to be perpetually under renovation. Puddles and flooded pot-holes made entire streets impassable without a small canoe or a pair of waders. I felt as if in Venice.

At the port I blocked the ticket office window to avoid being shoved to the back of a growing crowd of Georgians. At 11am on the dot I handed my passport through the window to buy a ticket for the next sailing. The manager smiled broadly. “England passport!!!” I returned his smile. “England! Very good! I am very sorry!” Still smiling. “England passport Georgian soldier no problem. England passport Russian soldier” — dramatic pause — “BIG problem. Very bad. I am very sorry.”

I said I had a Russian visa and that it had cost me a total of $504 US dollars to procure and that I really really needed to get to Russia on a boat. “I am very sorry. Only Georgia Armenia Russia Azerbaijan passport. Soviet passport you know? England Germany France Italy Albania passport — no.” A small amount of blood drained from my face. He looked sorrowful. “Trabzon OK. 150 kilometre. Car autobus no problem. I am very sorry.”

So I marched arbitrarily though Batumi in the pouring rain until I found a travel agent selling bus tickets to Trabzon, then went to my musty little back-alley hotel, attached all of my bags to myself and spent half an hour in intense pain shuffling the 500 metres or so to the bus stop, thanks to my stubborn refusal to pay for a taxi. 3 hours later, in Turkey, the moody mini-bus driver failed to keep up his moody act as he dropped me off outside the port of Trabzon and I hobbled off with a smile and thank-you-very-much in Turkish, Georgian, Russian and English. I crossed the road to the little row of turizm offices and bought a ticket on the next ferry to Sochi, which was boarding at 5pm. I looked at my phone. It was 4:55pm.

Related posts:

• The Long Road Back To Yerevan
• On The Rails — Sochi to Ulaanbaatar
• White Peaks and Red Tape

When was the last time you got a postcard from Outer Mongolia? Probably a fair while ago, I’ll warrant.

So here’s the deal. I’m trying to raise £1,000 for The Wilderness Foundation UK by — appropriately — mountain-biking just over 1,000 miles off-road across a big wilderness area of Mongolia.

I’ll send a postcard from Mongolia to anyone who helps me achieve this target. All you have to do is visit the fundraising page and leave a donation of any amount, then come back to this post and put your mailing address in the comments. (Or, if you’re not comfortable doing that, send me a private message.)

Thank you for your support! Please follow me on Twitter to receive very sporadic updates — I’m going low-tech, no live-tweeting — or, better, follow the expedition journal via the RSS feed. The perfect chance to grab a cup o’ tea and have a good read!

I’d also appreciate it if you could help spread the word about this fundraising target on Twitter by clicking on that green ‘retweet’ button.

Related posts:

• Mountain Biking Across Outer Mongolia
• Off The Map In Northern Mongolia — Another Photo Essay
• Off The Map In Central Mongolia — A Photo Essay