Ride Earth - Tom's World Bicycle Travel Blog

Moving Forward From Vanilla Cycle Touring

Tom — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:19:54 +0000

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.

Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

Extrawheel Voyager Single-Wheel Trailer

Tom — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:48:23 +0000

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.

How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 4)

Risk and Uncertainty in Life and Travel

Tom — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:33:27 +0000

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.

Four Spectacular Moments From Mongolia

Tom — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:22:55 +0000

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.

The Long Road Back To Yerevan

Tom — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:02:25 +0000

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.

Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

Tom — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:00:01 +0000

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.)

plunge deep inside the most sparsely populated independent country in the world

Off The Map In Northern Mongolia – Another Photo Essay

Tom — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:51:55 +0000

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!

Off The Map In Central Mongolia – A Photo Essay

Tom — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 14:24:52 +0000

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!

Back In The Saddle From Ulaanbaatar To Bulgan

Tom — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 14:40:36 +0000

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.

On The Rails – Sochi to Ulaanbaatar

Tom — Sun, 23 May 2010 14:29:04 +0000

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.

Rain, Train and Pain – Yerevan to Sochi

Tom — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:51:30 +0000

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.

Get A Postcard From Outer Mongolia

Tom — Fri, 07 May 2010 13:14:35 +0000

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.

The Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook

Tom — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:36:38 +0000

One of the most valuable resources I had when preparing to make the leap and begin cycle touring was the Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook.

In fact, I’d say that it’s responsible for my ideas becoming anything more than just ideas. It was summer 2006 and I was living in Edinburgh during the festival season, working as a technician for a variety of venues and productions, and doing some DJing.

I had two days off during those 5 weeks of voluntary sleep-deprivation. On the first, I got up at 5am and went for an epic mountain-bike ride in the foggy Pentland hills. On the second, I wandered into Blackwells’ bookshop, bought the Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook and spend the afternoon reading it on the grass in the Meadows

It was the first time I’d heard of people travelling across entire countries – continents even! – by bicycle. Until that day, I’d thought that my idea to cycle to Croatia to visit a mate was seriously far-out!

Europe... it was so lovely

The book is the first of its kind, dealing with the practicalities of ‘adventure’ cycling – away from the cycle paths and long distance route networks of the developed world. It is a primer for a journey of any length in any imaginable region of the planet, from a few days to several years.

The best thing is that it doesn’t tell you what to do. It’s a handbook, not a guidebook. It leaves the route and the way you approach it entirely up to you, and gives you just enough information to make it happen.

The second edition, again compiled by Stephen Lord, has just been released and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on it – not least to see how the photos I contributed came out! You can get it on Amazon. Visit the book’s site for more information.

No related posts.

Mountain Biking Across Outer Mongolia

Tom — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:11:03 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I went to watch Armenia play ice hockey. The match was part of the 2010 International Ice Hockey Federation World Championships. Being a 3rd division group match, it featured countries not usually associated with winter sports – South Africa, North Korea, and on this occasion, Mongolia, who were promptly thrashed 15-0 by Armenia.

I’ve dreamt of biking across Mongolia for many years. Back in 2006, when I was preparing to start a new life on the road, I made vague plans to include the country in my route. I never expected it would be this long before I went there. But such dreams aren’t easily forgotten. Right now, I’m journeying across Siberia by train, heading for a distant city called Ulaan Bataar.

What attracts me to this place? Many of the reasons are lost in a rose-tinted world of romantic notion – vast mountain-flanked steppe, nomadic yurt-dwelling horsemen, the descendants of an ancient empire living now as they have for thousands of years. There aren’t many places left that have resisted modernity for as long as Mongolia has.

At the same time, I know that the reality will be exactly that – reality. I’ll leave Mongolia with those romantic notions blown clean away. That kind of experience doesn’t come from anything but a thorough, ground-level exploration of a place and people.

nomad dusk on Flickr by chrisdebruyn

It’s also the challenge. It’s pretty normal for adventurous folk to hanker after something bigger, better, harder, more exhilirating than what came before. Riding across the Sahara, Afar and Arabia was challenge enough, but I needed to do something different, something scary. I thought a couple of thousand kilometres of dirt tracks through the most sparsely-populated country on Earth might do it.

This will be the first time I’ve hooked up with my old mate Andy for an adventure since we parted company in the Caucasus more than two years ago. I’m looking forward to being part of a two-man team again, after the long and lonely road I rode last year.

As always, huge thanks to our sponsors for sticking with us through this unpredictable voyage – Kona, Magura, Leisure Lakes and Chain Reaction Cycles for their bike kit; Extrawheel and Carradice for their luggage-carrying solutions, and other bits and pieces from Buff, MSR, Schwalbe, SKF and ODI. I wouldn’t have these guys on board if their kit wasn’t up to the job.

I am aiming to raise £1000 for the very appropriate cause of The Wilderness Foundation UK through this challenge. So I need your help to get there! If you can spare a fiver, please visit my fundraising page now and drop a donation in the pot. The ability to give something back will make that distant paved road feel so much sweeter when I get there.

Blogging from the road will be unavoidably sporadic, but expect a thorough account of the trip to be published – one way or another – on this site for your reading pleasure.

Ta-ta for now!

The Marco Polo of the Middle East

Tom — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 13:46:26 +0000

While I was travelling through Europe, people would sometimes smile and jokingly pass reference to Marco Polo, the medieval Italian merchant who brought home epic tales of Asia, now immortalised as one of history’s great adventurers, and whose experiences neither I nor anyone else stand the slightest chance of recreating in today’s world.

While I was travelling through the Middle East, people would sometimes smile and jokingly pass reference to another man, named Ibn Battuta. I’d never heard of Ibn Battuta. Some of my readers will have, but nothing like as many as who will have heard of Marco Polo.

There is – realistically – nothing left to explore on this planet, and society is drawing ever closer to complete, branded homogenisation. The fantasy images of far-off lands are just fantasies, and can only be reinforced by signing up for guided tours that have been designed to do exactly that.

But I was intrigued by this character, so I found out more. Like Marco Polo, he journeyed for more than twenty years, but far more extensively than Polo ever did. He is as celebrated in the Middle East as Polo is in the West, judging by the number of times he came up in conversation. Why had I never heard of him?

There’s even, believe it or not, a mall in Dubai that was built in his honour. It has six themed zones, decorated in the traditional style of the regions through which Battuta travelled, and an indoor taxi service to take you from one end to the other, so you can relive Battuta’s three-decade odyssey in just five minutes while you’re out shopping.

So much for Dubai. I’ve put Ibn Battuta’s 700-year-old story on my reading list; one of the last true ways to see an unexplored, undiscovered world through the eyes of a brave, solitary wanderer.

Cycling The Middle East And North Africa – A Photography Exhibition in Yerevan

How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 4)

Tom — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:03:30 +0000

(If you just got here, you might want to start at Part 1.)

If you’ve been following this series, you’ll now have a strong, capable expedition bike, but nowhere to put your tent, camera, food, clothes, or anything else you might need on a long cycle tour/bikepacking trip.

There’s a myth that you need to have a touring bike with loads of brazed-on mounting points for attaching racks and things in order to carry your stuff. This is false.

There’s also a myth that you need to have two panniers at the front and two at the back before you’re a cycle tourist. Again – false.

If I could, I’d take nothing but an Extrawheel Voyager with its two roomy panniers for my camping kit, clothes, tools and food, and keep my daily items – camera, wallet, compass, diary, Buff, knife – in a waterproof bar-bag like the Ortlieb Ultimate 5 (although it’s a bit small).

High in the Georgian mountains. Pic by Andy Welch

My ride would tackle off-road like a mountain bike, with a bit more effort on the climbs; I’d have easy access to my important stuff, and have everything I needed for overnight behind me; I’d suffer few or none of the mechanical problems related to carrying all my kit on the frame; and I’d be able to detach it all in a few seconds in order to spend a day unladen on the trails. This was my exact setup for last year’s short off-road trip into the Georgian mountains, and it worked a treat. I enjoy the physical act of riding off-road; it’s where my interest in cycling originated.

Racks/Carriers

But for longer trips, such as last year’s Turkey to Iran via Djibouti trip, or my first England to Armenia trip, I needed a few more things. At times I was carrying 10 litres of water and 3 days’ worth of food (read 6 days for the average person!). I had lots of extra clothes and a big sleeping bag in the winter, and in general I wanted to have the ability to take more if I needed to.

So I also fitted a rear rack. This gives a bike the ability to have two panniers mounted and an almost-unlimited amount of stuff strapped to the top with bungee cords – guitars, woks, wheels, that kind of thing. My frame, Kona’s Explosif, has no rack-mounts on the seatstays, like many modern non-touring-specific frames. So I’d chosen the expensive but very highly rated steel Tubus Logo rear rack. Tubus not only make a mounting kit for seatstays, but also for dropouts that don’t have any mountings. This theoretically means that the rack can be mounted on any hardtail frame, except for some very small frames where the low seat-stay angle might cause issues.

Why not a front rack? On a normal bike, you steer with the front wheel. Having several kilogrammes attached to each side of this wheel affects the dynamics dramatically. It’s maybe not how you’d expect – a fully loaded bike is much more stable than an unloaded one because of the lower centre of gravity – it’s the physical act of turning the handlebars that’s affected. A twitch requires much more effort and has much more momentum when you’ve got front panniers attached, so it’s consequently more difficult to make the kind of fine adjustments you’d want to make on uneven terrain. You end up ploughing along rather than picking your line.

There are other considerations – you can’t see where your wheel interfaces with the ground, there are clearance issues with lowrider racks, suspension won’t work as it’s designed to, and stories abound of front rack breakages. Having said all that, if I did need the extra capacity, I’d go for something like the Old Man Mountain Sherpa, which allows panniers to be mounted quite a bit higher on suspension forks. It attaches to the axle and the V-brake mounts.

In the Sahara with the Tubus Logo and Extrawheel

Trailers

I’ve already mentioned the Extrawheel Voyager trailer. For a long time I used the original Extrawheel – now referred to as the Classic and no longer in production – and found it to be a fantastic piece of innovation on many fronts and capable of carrying a lot of stuff in its big nets, but lacking in the long-term durability and maintenance department due to it’s rather unorthodox construction. If the Classic was the only choice, I’d be hesitant to recommend it for long trips.

But Extrawheel gave me a prototype Voyager back in 2007, and from my feedback they made numerous improvements which go a long way to remedying the previous model’s shortcomings. It’s now so simple – little more than a piece of tubular steel, a wheel and a pair of panniers – almost like an external rear rack. It’s the lightest trailer on the market and you get a spare wheel into the bargain.

If you’ve looked into using a trailer, you’ve probably heard of the BOB. It’s by far the most well-known single-wheel trailer. My friend Mark used the suspension-equipped version in Europe, and Fearghal and Simon both towed a standard BOB Yak when they arrived at my place last Christmas.

Why not the BOB, then? Aside from the whopping price, I can’t speak from any more experience than trying out the aforementioned riders’ bikes, but I noticed immediately the BOB has a far greater effect on the handling. You need an extra set of spares for the tiny wheel, and there are durability issues with the fork bearings. You also have to keep everything in one huge bag, there’s far more weight placed on the bike’s rear axle, and the trailer itself is a great target for flying children.

Fearghal told me that the issues they’d had with their BOBs were concerning enough to cause them to change their planned off-road route across Mongolia and blast through inland China instead, which was a great shame. Like the original Extrawheel, it seems that the BOB is fine for shorter trips, less appropriate over tens of thousands of kilometres.

There are other options, of course – Monoporter, Kool Stop, Burley Nomad, or the DIY option – and I’ll bring you a full report on the Extrawheel Voyager’s off-road performance in the near future, once it’s had the acid test…

Staying Afloat Away From Home

Tom — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:35:55 +0000

I wrote recently about funding a long-term bicycle expedition, and I mentioned that it’s possible to find work pretty much anywhere if you have suitable skills.

I graduated in 2005 with a degree in Computer Science, which morphed upon graduation into occasional bedroom-bound work developing websites for friends of friends. I didn’t make any money doing this. But in the last six months, freelance web work, sitting in my Yerevan flat in front of a borrowed computer, has put enough money in the bank for at least another year of travel! Woohoo!

In case anybody is interested, these are some of the websites I’ve developed in the last six or seven months – a brief departure from the travel theme of my blog, but we’ve all got to pay for it somehow:

1. Project Exposure

project-exposure.com

Most of my winter was spent developing Project:Exposure and the Tourism Development Bank, which is a new project of WHL Group aiming to give small accommodation providers the opportunity to exchange excess room-nights for professional marketing services.

This also gave Tenny the chance to earn a half-decent wage for her design skills, her previous job’s fixed salary having been less than $200 a month.

2. Cosworth Formula One

cosworthformula1.com

British engineers Cosworth build Formula One engines for Williams and Virgin Racing amongst other manufacturers. This is their 2010 season website, full of photos of big shiny pieces of precision-machined metal.

3. Philex

philex.com

Not the most exciting project – a catalogue site for a company who produce and sell consumer electronics in the UK.

4. Long Clawson Dairy

clawson.co.uk

Since Stilton is my favourite type of cheese, it was quite exciting to be offered the job of developing this site, a cheese-making co-operative situated a few miles from my home village.

And last but certainly not least…

5. Alastair Humphreys

alastairhumphreys.com

Everyone’s favourite round-the-world cyclist Alastair Humphreys asked me & Tenny to help make his excellent blog look a bit more ‘professional’ – hopefully we managed that!

* * *

If all goes to plan, there’ll be no more screens to stare at for the rest of the year. And in the long run, I’m looking for something to do that doesn’t involve computers at all. I’m no longer content to sit indoors all day.

Last week I sold a license to a design studio to use one of my photographs in a client’s Annual Report. I work hard on my photography but I’ve never considered myself much good – so this offer came as a great surprise. People occasionally ask to use my shots in various publications, but this was the first time someone actually offered to pay cold hard cash for it.

I’m starting to think more seriously about photography and videography if people really do like my stuff enough to pay real money for it. My overall aim is to earn enough to live the life I choose, preferably by living the life I choose.

It’s a daunting prospect – turning heel and heading off in a completely different direction from something you’ve invested years in. But I suppose I already did it once. Maybe I’ll do it again.

How To Build The Perfect Expedition Bike (Part 3)

Tom — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 13:48:42 +0000

(Please check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already done so!)

In Part 2 I looked at expedition bicycle drivetrain components, a.k.a. the bits that move when you pedal. In Part 3 I’m going to look at brakes, wheels and ‘finishing kit’ – the bits you need to finish the bike off.

Wheels

Wheel problems are amongst the most annoying and difficult to fix on a tour, especially when spokes and rims are involved. A cracked rim can really ruin your day, as Andy discovered in Bulgaria in 2007 – we rode the next 700km on Gaffa Tape. The quality of the assembled wheel components plays a huge factor in how much punishment your bike will withstand on an expedition, so it’s really worth investing in a strong pair of wheels, above almost all other considerations.

You don't want this to happen

Almost all rims are aluminium these days – that’s fine. Look for a double-walled rim, and stay clear of wide-profile downhill rims that are built for fat, low-pressure tyres (see why). Stick with a tried and tested rim like the Sun Rhyno or Rhynolite, the latter being what I chose. These are designed for dirt-jumping and are quite heavy but well respected amongst expedition cyclists. Even if you are using disc brakes, it’s a good idea to choose a rim with a braking surface in case you need to switch in the future.

With hubs there’s a lot of choice, and two main camps to choose from: One which goes by the simplicity is best mantra and suggests cup-and-cone hubs with loose bearings, such as Shimano’s mountain-bike range, and the other which says that cartridge bearings are just fine, thank you, and a cracked bearing won’t ruin the entire hub. Long-term reports from cartridge-bearing users are harder to come by, however.

In my experience, well-sealed cup-and-cone hubs such as the XT models are ideal, as long as you service them every few thousand kilometres and pay attention to any play or clunking noises – bearings can and do crack and wear, and some manufacturers are not particularly generous with grease. Again, ease of maintenance in the developing world is a plus point. Having to carry cone-spanners, however, is inconvenient. In general, I’m yet to come across the perfect solution.

Have your wheels built by hand, or do it yourself if you’re confident. Wheel-building is an art, apparently, and a machine just can’t produce the same attention to detail.

The tyre of choice for the expeditioner has always been Schwalbe’s Marathon XR which regularly exceeds 20,000km of use and comes in widths up to 2.25-inch, but they thoughtfully discontinued it last year. The jury’s still out about the best replacement – lucky I stocked up already!

Bottom line: Invest in strong rims. Spoke count is a small point, but if in doubt, use more. Cup-and-cone hubs are simple to repair. Don’t forget the tools.

Roadside fitting instructions: Put half of your spokes in alternate flange holes from outside of hub, facing backwards. Insert other ends into matching rim holes, add nipples, tighten until thread disappears. Put other half of spokes in from the inside, facing forwards, crossing two backwards-facing spokes and wrapping behind a third and into rim. Tighten nipples equally until wheel is round. Adjust until rim is centred. Tighten until pinging of spokes sounds same as other wheel. Use your noggin. Add rim tape, tube and tyre. Ride. True every day until noises stop.

Brakes

Brakes are another point of contention. I use hydraulic disc brakes and have been told off for doing so. But I’ve had single-digit braking on a fully-loaded bike since day one, without any maintenance other than changing the brake pads (twice so far), and I can stop faster and with more control than I could on my old, unloaded, V-brake-equipped mountain bike. I use what works, which is not necessarily what everyone else uses – that’s why my bike looks a bit weird to some. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the perfect expedition bike.

Magura Louise brakes - super reliable and powerful

The fact is that superbly-reliable hydraulic brakes are now available and affordable, whereas ten years ago they were not. I could bang on about how V-brakes wear out rims, how my brake repair/maintenance kit is lighter than the V-brake equivalent, how I can replace a snapped hose in 10 minutes, how motorcyclists have used hydraulic brakes on long trips for decades… you get the idea. If you want to read more, have a look at my review of Magura’s Louise disc brakes – I can’t speak for other brands, but I’m sure they’re working hard to compete.

Bottom line: If you’re paranoid or skint, want to wear out your rims, enjoy having reduced stopping power and like carrying heavy spares, use V-brakes. Otherwise, discs. Practice re-filling before you leave.

Finishing Kit

For most finishing kit, it’s a matter of preference and common sense – get what feels right. These are often the bits with which your body interfaces, so they’re more important than you might first think.

One thing I wouldn’t change is the Brooks Flyer saddle. This is the sprung version of the popular B17, and since the break-in period elapsed it’s been the most comfortable perch I could have imagined. Brooks is something you love or hate – there are other, lighter options too. Just choose wisely, as you’re going to be sitting on it for a very long time.

Brooks Flyer - leather saddle, made in England

Stem and handlebars depend on your preferred riding position, and it might take some chopping and changing to get this right. I use an adjustable stem and a pair of no-brand riser bars with bar-ends, but some prefer to use ‘butterfly’ bars with a variety of hand positions, and there is definitely something to be said for this. I did find that neither position was quite right for me with these, and I had some issues with the amount of flex they exhibited, so I chose a single, comfortable position rather than two less-comfortable ones. My advice here is to try a variety and take the bike for a good ride before making the final decision.

Pedals are a common point of failure as the tiny bearings get a lot of heavy punishment. Your choice will depend on whether or not you’re going to use a ‘clipless’ system. I found that my knees had issues with the reduced lateral movement that clipless pedals confer, so I switched to cheap flat pedals with cup-and-cone bearings and since then have been happily pedalling in any kind of footwear. If you’re using SPDs, Shimano’s DX pedals are pricey will take any punishment you might wish to dish out, or their one-sided option could be more practical, if a little flimsy for long trips.

Seatposts are seatposts – make sure you don’t exceed the minimum insertion point. Get an easily adjustable one. Spacers are spacers – don’t use more than 40mm. Skewers, top-caps, bottle-cages, seatpost-clamps – I haven’t wasted any time dithering over these – they either work or they don’t. For my grips I chose the lovely and comfortable ODI Yeti Hardcore lock-on model, the advantage of lock-on grips being that you can remove them in seconds to get at the controls, rather than messing around with water and soap and screwdrivers. They do take up slightly more width on the bars, however.

Bottom line: Use what feels right.

The complete bike

Disclaimer: I’m not the world’s expert on bike building! This starting-point series is an abbreviated attempt to share everything I’ve read, learnt, heard and experienced about bikes over the last 4 years of planning and conducting long bike trips. There will be disagreements, which I welcome in the comments.

In the next and final part I will take a look at fitting luggage carriers to the bike – stay tuned, or subscribe to the RSS feed and never miss an article again.

10 Strange Things Bicycle Travel Has Done To Me

Tom — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:57:11 +0000

It’s difficult to notice the subtle changes that come over you during a journey of duration and difficulty, but certain situations have alerted me to them very strongly.

I’ve only been travelling for a couple of years, but this must be where the curve is at its steepest. Here are a few, both good and bad, of the weird things that have surprised me recently:

I’m mortally afraid of moving faster than a bicycle. Travel has made me resistant to many of the common fears of my home society, especially regarding the so-called ‘unknown’. But put me in a taxi or minibus heading out of town, and I break out in a cold sweat! It seems like such a silly idea to bomb around in a tin box on wheels at such speeds!
I can’t sleep in beds. I’ve spent the months since I returned from Africa sleeping on the floor. Anything softer than a thin sleeping pad makes my body ache in strange places.
I can’t take hot showers. They put me to sleep, and all of a sudden seem extravagant. Mornings bring with them the need to embrace the day, not to remember how nice and cosy it is to stay at home in lethargy.
I can’t sleep after dawn. The first light wakes me up and I’m compelled to jump out of bed. The clock is irrelevant. A lie-in is an impossible dream, and staying out late requires great stamina or strong coffee. This is a far cry from university days of getting up in time to watch the sun set!
I don’t contemplate ‘what if’. The decision to do something big now leads in a straightforward manner towards doing it, rather than thinking about what might go wrong/what other people might think/what if I fail. But sometimes this means that I rush into something and find myself in a pickle, having not thought it out very well.
Everywhere is assessed for sleeping potential. I can’t help it! If I see a flat, dark, secluded place, I automatically start weighing up the likelihood of getting away with spending a night there. It doesn’t matter if it’s a city-centre building site, a field in the middle of nowhere, or your back garden.
The fight/flight reaction has changed its balance. In a confrontation, the sensible thing to do is to walk away. But in Ethiopia, confrontations (mostly non-violent) occurred several times a day from which I could not walk away. This affected me so strongly that it still rubs off on every day life – not good.
I read the news differently. I never really paid much attention to international affairs before. Or national affairs, for that matter. Now, events fit into a much bigger picture. And the spin and inaccuracy are almost as alarming as the misconceptions they generate in normal, decent people.
I’m more sensitive. I don’t mean this in a romantic way! But I’ve found my emotional responses are far stronger now. I empathise more powerfully with the circumstances of real and fictional characters. Recently I shed tears of happiness for the first time.
I know I don’t fit in. When younger, I struggled to find my place amongst society. Now I’ve come to the conclusion that I never will. To most people, I will always be a bit of a weirdo. So I’ve stopped caring about it.

I wonder if any of these things will ‘change back’ in the future?

Most cycle travellers I’ve met have felt their lives changed by their experiences. Many have involved an element of self-awakening, and a consequent struggle to accept what is revealed. It’s common to hear us extolling the virtues of bicycle journeys, and less common to hear of the problems it has caused us.

If you’ve been on a long bicycle journey, how has it affected you?

Why Backpacking Is Great (And Other Myths)

Tom — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:53:53 +0000

I wrote this horribly opinionated, elitist, provocational polemic last year, and have been wondering what to do with it ever since. There may be nuggets of truth in there somewhere, but please don’t take it too seriously!

Somewhere you've never been

From the outset – I don’t think I’m a particularly unconventional person. I just think it’s worth approaching the world with a skeptic’s eye, and I detest laziness, ignorance and complacency. This outlook tells me that conventions are there to be questioned.

Here is an assortment of travel-related myths that I’ve come across:

1. Travelling = Backpacking

“Let’s get straight to the heart of the matter. If we want to go travelling, we need “stuff”. Common sense requires that we immediately start thinking about our luggage. After all, it’s going to carry everything we need – laptop, mobile, cameras, etc. And so it follows that the solution to our kit-carrying dilemma should be a bloated sack of straps and strangely-shaped padding that attaches firmly to one’s back.

“I mean, what other options are there anyway?”

2. Travelling = Public Transport

“Now we need to move our stuff. Easy! There’s this great idea of public transport. It means you have to share, and you have to pay someone to do the actual work; and of course you can’t just go to any old place – you have to go wherever’s available, or at least somewhere on the route.

“But all of that is far better than the alternative, which is to do it all ourselves by some form of independent transportation.”

3. Travelling = Paying To Sleep

“We’ve got our stuff, and we’ve got a way to get it from A to B. But what happens when we get to B? We need somewhere to sleep, eat, drink, and be the social creatures that we were born to be. Luckily, most inhabited places will have some form of accommodation available for people just like us, and food as well, and all we have to do is pay the proprietor to sort it all out for us.

“This clearly beats the alternative, which is to make tedious preparations to – well, to sleep rough in any old place, or cook (hah!), which just wouldn’t do at all, and would be completely impractical and usually impossible anyway.”

4. Travelling = Cities

“Stuff – check. Transport – check. Accommodation – check. But where are we actually going? Well, city would have everything we needed in terms of food and accommodation, and doubtless much of the interesting stuff we have to see is going to be in places like museums, and all museums are in cities. Plus, people speak English, there’ll be free Wi-Fi, and public transport easily takes you from one to the next – perfect!

“Anyway, there’s nothing interesting to see out in the middle of nowhere, even if we could get there, which we can’t.”

5. Travelling = Lonely Planet

“But how on earth are we going to know what to see, how to find accommodation or transport, in these exotic lands with strange alphabets and languages? Surely the answer lies in a guidebook! A guidebook is full of useful information about interesting places that someone else has already found and compiled in order to enhance your travelling experience in exchange for money. A guidebook will tell us what is worth seeing and will even plan our itinerary for us, given the time we have in this place.

“Great!”

6. Travelling = Planning

“Thanks to our guidebook, we know exactly how long it will take to see the interesting places we’ve chosen to see. It logically follows that there is no point allowing extra time, because there won’t be anything else we want to do. We can plan the next long journey by public transport so that everything is already sorted. And we can book all our plane tickets ahead of time, because we already know where we’re going to be and exactly how long we’re going to stay in order to see the interesting stuff.

“This trip is starting to sound awesome!”

7. Travelling = Travellers

“The great thing about this guidebook and planning stuff is that the guidebooks tell us exactly what times of year to visit places, and the very best places to stay, and because they’re so popular we can be sure to meet other people doing exactly the same stuff.

“This is great, because we’ll easily find drinking buddies, and it will mean we can speak English, which is a clear improvement over having to learn other languages and even alphabets, or miming or that sort of thing.”

Travel bible (not mine)

OK, so maybe I’ve heard one story too many about extended binge-drinking holidays to Thailand/Goa/Australia/Mexico masquerading as ‘travel’. Cycling isn’t the be-all and end-all (walking, skiing, rafting, horse-riding or unicycling would be good too), but if you have a working pair of legs, there’s not much else which comes close.

Why Bicycle Travel Is Better Than Backpacking

Gone is the spine-bending monolith strapped to your back that labels you as yet another stinking rich Westerner. Your bike will carry everything you need, and won’t complain about it, because it’s the most efficient vehicle ever designed.

Gone is the reliance on other people as your means to get around. You’re the engine, and you’re holding the handlebars. Food is your fuel. If there’s a road, it’s yours. If there isn’t, it doesn’t necessarily stop you either.

Gone is the nagging little voice that spends the whole day reminding you to find a bed. You’ll start thinking about it about an hour before sunset, ask a farmer or find a good spot yourself, and be all set for the night.

Gone are the cities you’re unceremoniously dumped in every time you get off the plane, train or bus. You’ll live your life at ground level, sharing with rural folk the elements, the seasons, and often a drink, a meal or a night indoors at their invitation.

Gone is the way that the joy and beauty of the world has been reduced to a bundle of pages on the shelf of a bookstore. You’ll experience the process of organic, unguided discovery, rather than the strange obligation to appreciate what somebody else discovered and then sold you instructions on how to replicate.

Gone are the pre-planned itineraries. Travelling free means shunning the attempted packaging of organic, imperfect reality into “sights”, “activities” and “places” that strips the soul out of the continuous experience of life. You’ll travel at your own pace, appreciating what touches you personally, rich beyond measure in the luxury of time .

Gone are the self-perpetuating pockets of Western isolation. You’ll always be a foreigner in someone else’s ordinary world. You’ll go for months without using your mother tongue. And if that sounds difficult and scary, it’s actually fulfilling and refreshing.

And that’s without mentioning the extreme level of fitness that comes with taking 6-8 hours of exercise a day, or the 5,000 calories you will eat in the same duration without worrying about your waistline.

In Conclusion

Actually – STOP! Forget all that. Please, keep your backpack! Don’t travel how I and others have chosen to travel. We’re still the lucky minority. And we want to keep it that way.