For years I have been wanting to put some first-hand experience to the second-hand whisperings I’ve heard surrounding Portland. The first came from a young American, Simon, a fellow bicycle traveller who I met in Istanbul while passing through on my way east towards an exciting and uncertain future. When not on the road he spent much of his time between Portland and Vancouver as a sometime squat dweller, connoisseur of vintage Italian track bike frames, cycling advocate, and political activist.

That exciting and uncertain future led, five years later and entirely incidentally, to the very town he’d talked of, and Nick, Ben and I rolled into the outskirts late one night after a gruelling 72-mile afternoon. Erin, who had hitched into town that morning with a sore knee, greeted us in a layby with pizza, and I can tell you now that never before did a takeaway taste so flamin’ good.

A couple of hours later, Nick and Erin had gone to their hosts’ house, and Ben and I were warmer, cleaner and better fed than we’d been since the journey began. Thus began the ‘couple of days’ off that led to a stay of many more. And I will remember Portland not for her bike lanes and boutiques and bubble tea (do watch this for a fantastic, hilarious intro to Portland), but for the people amongst whom I’ve spent this precious time.

Firstly there are our hosts, Tomik and Carlo Thomasian and their son Tony (and two dogs and parakeet). Tomik is my father-in-law’s cousin, who I last saw at my wedding in Armenia two-and-a-half years ago. Ben had been there too. “We’re going to cycle down the west coast of America some day”, we’d half-joked with him. “Well, you’ve gotta visit us in Portland!” he’d returned.

Well — here we are! Ben and I are now a part of the household, and having to leave this, our adoptive second home in Oregon, will be utterly awful. Being typically Middle Eastern, my relations’ hospitality has surpassed all reasonable expectations by several orders of magnitude, and being family, their welcome has been the warmest that one could hope for outside one’s own home.

My gratitude is surpassed only by my regret that Tenny couldn’t be here too. Very few people in this world have the freedom to travel so freely as a British citizen, and — thanks to successive government tightenings of immigration laws — it’ll be some years yet before my wife is eligible even for permanent residency in the UK, let alone citizenship or a useful passport to travel on.

Secondly are the people I’ve had the fortune to bump into during this short week of city life. Americans in general, while visibly more suspicious towards strangers than I believe used to be the case, still prove eager to open up once introduced, and in Portland, a city that manages to be both provincial and liberal, relatively non-commercial yet clearly thriving regardless, there has been no shortage of characters to bump into.

(Last two photos intentionally left ironic)

I know that leaving here will bring with it one of the perennial dilemmas of travel. Yes, you’re continuously arriving at new places, having fresh experiences, meeting new friends and being exposed to new perspectives. All of this is broadening, mellowing and enriching to life. Travel needs no further excuse or justification.

On the flip side, you’re constantly leaving those same new places, and you’ll unavoidably have grown into some of them more than others. The fresh experiences, coming thick and fast, will fade from the memory, diaries and photos a poor attempt at capturing so many fleeting moments. New friends will go their own ways, and it’s simple maths to show that the vast majority of people you meet will never cross your path again, whether or not you’ve added them on Facebook — and besides, how meaningful would such meetings be? And new perspectives do indeed open the mind, but sometimes so much that your brain falls out.

I have enjoyed my time amongst Portland people so, so much. But, with leaving growing imminent, there seems to be an element of tragedy to the traveller’s lifestyle which is difficult to avoid.

Or maybe it’s just me…

What do you think?

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they’ve supplied.

I wouldn't agree to test anything that didn't fit my criteria on paper first. The Sutra did indeed fit my criteria on paper for this, primarily a road tour of a developed-world nation. It's been a pleasant surprise to ride and has exceeded my expectations.

The Kona Sutra has been aimed at the mid-range touring/expedition bike market, and has been in production for a long time now, changing little in design over the last few years. Rather than take a road bike, beef it up and add some racks, Kona's designers started from the ground up, and it's easy to see the results.

Put next to my steel Honky Tonk road bike, the tubing is far beefier, particularly the weight-carrying rear triangle; the wheelbase is longer and the bottom bracket lower, the top-tube sloping off towards the seat tube in a style recognisable from Kona's mountain-bike range - all in all, a very different geometry. The centre of gravity is therefore nice and low, and that results in a pleasingly stable ride, whether loaded up or not, with the steel frame and fork eating up bumps and uneven road surfaces. It's an extremely confidence-inspiring and comfortable bicycle to ride.

Off-the-peg touring bikes often come with sub-standard racks, and cyclists often fit aftermarket racks such as those from Tubus. The Sutra's rear rack, on the other hand, is a stocky-looking thing, rated to 30kg and rigid as can be - and so far, so good.

Drive components are sensible and durable choices; Shimano XT rear mech and gearing with a Sora road triple chainring up front, heavy-duty 700c rims with 36 spokes on Shimano cup & cone hubs. Stock tyres are Continental Contacts; no Marathon XRs, but they don't make them any more. (I'm using Marathon Supremes for this trip, with Ben on the stock tyres, so it'll be interesting to compare the two side by side.)

Braking comes from Avid's BB7 Road cable disc brakes, whose performance is almost indistinguishable from the hydraulics I've previously used. This choice of brake will undoubtedly offend a proportion of veteran tourers who insist that only V-brakes are reparable enough in the field to be worth considering. I've never used V-brakes on a tour, so I can't comment on the validity of this. But I can say that I'd choose the stopping power of a disc brake over the inconvenience of having to repair a broken one. When hauling a heavy load for several hours a day, control and stopping power are pretty important things. Kona have designed the frame's rear dropout section to accept a disc brake caliper in a position that won't interfere with a rear rack's mounting - a nice touch.

Cockpit adjustment is never more important than on a touring bike. The default handlebar placement is somewhere between an aggressive road stance and the laid-back upright off-road position - a compromise between riding efficiency and long-term comfort. Kona have stacked the steerer tube high with spacers and added a reversible stem. These oversize components are easy to swap out with alternatives from the diverse mountain-bike market to extend or reduce reach or rise even further. The brake levers have adjustable reach.

The dropped handlebars offer a good range of hand positions and are suitably rigid for swinging front panniers and bar-bags around. Bar-end shifters keep the mechanical parts of braking and shifting separate in the case of accident and repair or replacement; bosses for down-tube shifters are present if that's your preference. These are thoughtful touches. It's thoughtful touches that have been the pleasant surprise with the Sutra.

Dispensing with a quick-release front skewer and seatpost clamp in favour of hex bolts is thoughtful - no worries about a well-worn Brooks saddle going missing, or a front wheel not locked to the frame.

A third bottle-cage mount on the underside of the down tube is thoughtful - carry more water on the frame, or substitute a fuel bottle to avoid messy leaks inside panniers. Multiple fork mountings for a front rack is thoughtful - rough roads may well need more ground clearance; panniers vary in their design and effective mounted position. Full-length brake and gear hoses, minimising muck and rust on the cable inners, are thoughtful. Front-fork V-brake bosses, for the fussy and for last-resort replacements, are thoughtful.

What would I change about this bike? It's early days yet, but there are a few things, as I can be a fussy bugger. I'd like lower gearing - a smaller granny ring and/or a larger top sprocket on the cassette - to help with the steeper hills. I'd like a longer fender at the back - tourers often come in pairs, and I'd prefer not to have my leading partner's road spray in my face. The third bottle-cage mounts could be a little further back - no issues on Ben's 59cm frame, but on my 56cm frame the front fender catches the bottle's mouth when steering. Very long-term tourers might question the durability of the headset and the modern Shimano crankset, but it needs pointing out that few (if any) bikes will get round the world in one piece, no matter what setup you choose.

There are a few things that would make the bike more inclined towards developing-world journeys. Schrader valves and valve holes over flimsy Prestas. A 26-inch wheel option might be an idea. As Kona's workshop guys tell me, wheelsets are so reliable these days that broken rims are less and less of an issue, but that doesn't solve 700c tyre availability. Square-taper bottom brackets are far easier to find, replace and maintain, accept a wide variety of cranks and need no proprietary tools to be carried. 9-speed kit still isn't commonly found outside the developed world, although availability is increasing.

But these are small points, and overall the Kona Sutra is clearly a serious contender in the mid-range touring bike line-up. It's a thoughtful bike, stable, comfortable, capable, and with durability a priority. I'm just surprised I haven't seen more of them.

Full specifications and a dealer locator are on the Kona Bikes website.

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Free, you say?!? Well, Janapar still hasn't been publicly premiered, and we need to keep that status for the time being. So preview screenings must remain private, guest-listed and non-ticketed.

But 'private' means I won't be able to post an open invitation on my blog. Instead, I'll be sending the event details to my mailing list in a few days' time. The newsletter will be the only way to get the event details, so if you aren't already on the list, joining is as simple as filling out the subscribe form.

I'll be sending event details out in the next week or two. Places are going to be limited, and I don't know how quickly they're going to fill up, so please get your RSVP in as soon as possible to ensure your place. James and I will be doing a Q&A session afterwards (gulp - I hate public speaking), there'll be a chance to mingle and meet, and we've got a couple of extra bits and bobs planned too.

Here's the trailer once again for those who haven't yet had the chance to watch it:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The subscribe form link once again. Keeping this project under wraps for so long has been a real test of patience, so I really can't wait for this - it's going to be a lot of fun. Roll on June!

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But this is America, for gawd’s sake. How could I fail to have a generous handful of precopceptions? I grew up in Britain, a nation that founded the New World and continues to feed on its culture and ideology today.

The funny thing about preconceptions is that they are often not particularly strongly held, so you aren’t even aware that you have them. Then only become visible when you suddenly realise that something has surprised you — something that you did not expect to be a surprise, because you’d just assumed all along that it was self-evident.

Washington State was not a place in which I expected to be able to ride a full day without finding a grocery store.

Neither did I expect to ride for days through near-wilderness in a land almost entirely blanketed in the kind of evergreen forest that I’d expected to halt on the north side of the Canadian border; nor find myself stringing my food bags up trees to avoid bear and raccoon raids at night. In America.

And I’d never imagined that this ride would be so remote and rural! The West might have been won, but it remains a place of small-town life, a rugged fringe of crashing waves and winding roads, settlements grown out of missions still rubbing shoulders with Indian reserves. It’s not quite Mongolia, of course, but it’s a long way from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, and a long way from the high-brow politics of the federal government, even though it can always be found sneaking in through the cultural back-door of the ubiquitous television set.

But more than anything else, I hadn’t quite expected springtime in the Pacific North West to be quite so dismally wet. Erin had even elected to bring, instead of regular waterproofs, a kayaking drysuit to keep out the rain! Cold, too; the temperature has hovered around 10 degrees during the days, down to single figures at night.

Riding through prolonged periods of wet weather can easily eat away at riders’ morale. After all, it’s flying water. It could hardly be less tangible. Rain, over hours and days, seeps through all waterproofs, whether top-of-the-range or cheap and crappy like mine. Then you feel it seeping through your baselayers. It patters and pounds on your helmet and frosts your glasses. Your sleeves sag with the extra weight, and your quads, those pumping horizontal platforms that propel you, grow cold and clammy.

Your shoes accumulate road spray quickly and then — with a surprisingly sudden shock of cold — rainwater begins to trickle into the footbeds. Your padded cycling mitts can be wrung out like a dishcloth, the result just as murky. Eventually, when you realise that even the absorbent padding of your lycra shorts is dangling heavy and forlorn between your legs, you are completely saturated. Jumping into a river would make little difference.

You’re still OK, because you’ve been riding. You’ve upped the pace slightly to compensate for your body’s dissipating heat as it’s drawn away from your skin, and you’ve just about reached an equilibrium in which your wet clothes are at a tolerable temperature. But presently you realise that you have to stop. It’s getting dark. You have nowhere to stay. You must camp. It’s at about this point that the inexperieced wet-weather traveller begins to lose it.

You forget that the weather doesn’t care about emotions or discomfort. Self-pity begins to set in, followed immediately by immobility. You, a poor unfortunate cyclist, can’t figure out what you’ve done to deserve this!

Whilst standing about, raging at the unfairness of life, the universe, and everything, that last precious bit of body heat is evaporating. And by the time the you’ve realised that no amount of whingeing or ranting will make the slightest bit of difference, you have begun to shiver. This prompts yet more self-pity, immobility and raging, until eventually all remaining energy has been expended and the raging fizzles out into a quiet sobbing.

Then, under the last dregs of greyish twilight and with the relentless rain still driving into the ground, you reluctantly confront the inevitable. And you stumble over to the bike and drag the tent from its sack, trying in vain to get the bloody thing up before the floor gets soaked, fingers throbbing with cold and teeth chattering feverishly, and eventually you crawl inside, dumping wet clothes in a sorry heap in the awning. With the cooking of dinner an unthinkable torment, you munch on a few peanuts, regret it immediately when the salty nutty remains lodge themselves immovably in the crevices of the back teeth, and finally shiver and sob yourself into a troubled and restless state of sleep.

Every seasoned cycle traveller has been here, and will right now be remembering the moment when, having awoken but still lying inside a warm sleeping bag in the morning, the realisation dawns that you must now leave that cocoon of warmth and comfort and, still cold from sleep, put on those same drenched and frigid clothes that have been lying outside all night, pack everything away and embark — as wet and cold as you’d been the previous night, if not more — into yet another day of rain on this trip that you’d expected to be so much fun, so carefree and easy…

So much for preconceptions. I’d assumed that this would be for the most part a fair-weather ride. Luckily I’ve dealt with a fair bit of bad weather in my time, so a little rain wasn’t going to be an issue. Poor Ben, out on his first cycle tour.

At least he wasn’t alone. Because there’s another way to deal with the rain; one that doesn’t involve hitching to the next hotel. While riding, ignore the rain. It won’t stop, and you’ll still be getting wet, but at least you won’t be thinking about it, so you might not notice so much. And when you stop for the night, accept that the work isn’t over yet. Find a sheltered spot in the woods. String up a tarp or two. Tramp around and collect wood. Vertical moss-covered boughs are likely to be drier. Split the thinner lengths into kindling with a good knife. Use some petrol from your stove to get a blaze going under cover (it’s only cheating if you want it to be). Dry larger logs over the smaller fire as it grows.

It might take a couple of hours, but then you’ll have a rather nice shelter. You’ll have heat. Lots of heat. You’ll be able to take off the wet clothes and, instead of dumping them on the ground, dry them on a makeshift clothesline. Dry clothes!

You’ll be able to sit in comfort, warm and dry, cook a three-course meal, take it easy, and wonder at how a bit of levelheadedness and hard graft can turn a seemingly irretrievable situation into one of the most memorable nights of your life.

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they’ve supplied.

Erin and Nick instantly reminded me of my younger self and Andy; two good friends, fresh-faced and idealistic, intoxicated with the new-found freedom of life on the road in a wealthy and developed corner of the world. The summer of 2007 and that timeless four-month adventure across Europe remains one of the most enjoyable, chaotic and memorable times of my life.

I spotted their bikes on the sidewalk as soon as I pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store on the edge of Raymond (or, today, Graymond). It made sense to join forces, as a change of scene with new company could hardly fail to be worth having (plus it’d let me practice my American) and we pedalled through yet more drizzle for a dozen or so miles of damp late-afternoon murk until we found what we were looking for: a primitive state-run campground, still closed for the winter season. It would be the third such establishment we would use for a safe and easy (and hopefully this time bear-free) overnight.

We hopped the barrier. Locked facilities, but plenty of clear and level pitches… and then rejoicement! For down a rough track there appeared a big timber-built gathering area, with a watertight roof and two huge wooden benches, and more than enough space for four cyclists to dump bikes and empty panniers, quickly filling the giant tabletop with cooking gear, food bags, mini-speakers and music players, and a fire was soon burning in a metal grate as we swung from the big wooden rafters.

I honestly wouldn’t bother mentioning this, the latest of a countless train of makeshift camps, if it weren’t for Nick and Erin’s much-needed reminder of the great freedom the traveller has to let loose and experiment.

Over time and miles I had become fairly regimented in my approach to the routine aspects of bicycle travel. I saw camping as nothing but a means of getting a night’s sleep, and I rarely hung around when I could be on the move, shooting video or meeting people. Food was for functional purposes only, and the bike a simple transport tool.

But the contents of their giant drybags (the likely cause of two broken spokes in two weeks) revealed that even on the road Erin & Nick were pursuing their passions of cuisine, cookery and campcraft in a typically American fashion. By this, I don’t mean they carried a deep-fryer and cooked fast food. No: I refer to the way in which no stop is ever left un-pulled-out in America. Because if you’re gonna do something — even if it’s living minimally — you sure as hell gotta do it to the max. And why not?

A can of clarified coconut oil. A tupperware container as big as my head, containing zip-lock bags of dried oregano, sage, black pepper, kosher salt, mixed Italian herbs. A half-kilo tub of garlic powder. Dehydrated refried beans. Too many kinds of tea to count. Hot chocolate. Homemade bread. A bottle of flipping extra-virgin olive oil! Lemons, limes, roma tomatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, carrots, onions. Half a chicken. Fresh coriander and parsley. From Erin’s mum’s garden.

Noodles suddenly seemed ridiculously boring.

Was I becoming ridiculously boring?

Plates, bowls and chopping boards were extracted, a 12-pack of glacier-fresh Kokanee was cracked open, and we fired up three stoves with a Sublime SoCal ska-punk soundtrack drowning out the burners — and the blasted rain. And I was glad we’d met Erin and Nick. Even if I was in danger of becoming a world-weary and grumpy old man, these two, evidently, were on a mission to bring back the fun.

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they’ve supplied.

While I will not cast myself as a very close relative, Claire was still my cousin, and it is impossible to put into words the kind of pain that this side of my family has gone through.

These events, now a headline story in the national British media, have led to something unexpected and positive. Claire's charity fundraising attempts have multiplied, and her JustGiving page total (at the time of writing) sits at just over £750,000.

But Claire will be remembered for the inspiration that she has now become to a huge number of people. She was an individual, someone just like you and me, acting with selflessness and dedication in the hope of changing a few lives for the better.

She has reminded us that we all, in whatever small way, have the chance to make our own such contribution to the world. And - more poignantly - that none of us knows when the chance might pass.

The family hopes that Claire's fundraising total will reach £1 million. Please make a donation here, no matter how small.

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I lay on my back, staring upwards into blackness. Water dripped steadily from the heavy branches above, pounding repetitively on the fly sheet of my new 1-man tent, invisible and paper-thin. The shelter felt small. Inadequate.

"BEN!!!"

A brief pause. Some muffled movement from his pitch a few metres behind my head. Then, groggily:

"What?"

"There's a bear outside."

One of the most popular articles on this site is a beginner's guide to wild camping, which receives thousands of visits each month via search engines and sites like StumbleUpon. "No animal will come to you looking for a fight," I wrote, "because random aggression hasn’t generally been an evolutionarily stable strategy."

CLANG!!!

The hollow metallic sound - which could be nothing but my new ultralight cooking pot being tossed down a rocky bank - echoed across the small clearing where we'd made camp for the night. It was the second day of riding; the second 60-mile day of endless evergreen timber plantations masquerading as forests, of log-laden juggernauts and lumberjacks in huge empty pickup trucks and silence and drizzle. And we'd camped within one of the remaining islands of untouched habitat that comprised the Olympic National Forest in the far north west of Washington State. After a long day in the saddle, we'd been hoping for a good night's sleep.

But now in the depths of night I was wired, every fibre of my being alert yet motionless, ready to spring into action. All was silent, and, unable to exist in ignorance, I grabbed the headtorch and zipped open the tent door and shone the weak beam through the falling rain in a long horizontal arc, until I spotted what I'd been expecting to find - two glittering eyes on a pitch black backdrop.

The eyes stared at me for an instant. Then the animal raised its head.

"Ben. There's a fucking bear outside, and it's stolen my cooking pot."

I continued to give Ben a running commentary, assuming that the more noise I could make the better, while the poor lad, whacked from spending his first two full days of riding ploughing through silent wilderness and tree farms, merely grunted tiredly in response, obviously far more interested in going back to sleep than in the presence of a wild animal with teeth.

Was this fear? Of course it was. When we sense danger and we don't know what to do, we panic, freeze up, run, fight, or a combination thereof. Our hearts pound, adrenaline fires along the limbs.

I sensed all of this happening to me, in that instant. And with a weird duality, I also saw its absurdity. I'd been in too many situations to seriously entertain the notion that this was a dangerous one. While my animal instincts conjured up images of a primal stand-off, a fight to the death, of sprinting half-naked through the rain with a monster on my tail, my rational mind sat back and laughed. It was nothing but a nosy little black bear rooting through our rubbish bag. I might as well make a mental note to string my food and trash bags up a tree next time and go back to sleep!

Tent zipped up again to avoid a mosquito invasion, I lay back down and waited. A few minutes passed. Then a thunder of footfalls towards me, a rustle of plastic, and silence. The trash bag, clearly, had just been disembowelled. Again I wondered what had happened to the cooking pot that I'd heard rolling down the bank and into Lake Quinault. It was a lovely new model from MSR. I'd only used it twice. What a waste!

There's no getting away from fear, the most basic of survival instincts. It's something to be acknowledged and treated with respect, for it's the very thing that prolonged us for millions of evolutionary steps and ultimately allows us to exist today.

But it's also important to put fear into perspective. Almost all natural threats to human life have been eradicated, and the world has never been a safer or more peaceful place, yet far too many otherwise well-educated people go through life with a warped sense of what they should and shouldn't be afraid of.

And we are unfortunate enough to live in a world where fear is now used as a sales tool, where mainstream media outlets compete to sell us what looks deceptively like information but in fact provides us with little more than prejudice and paranoia.

This has been especially apparent in recent weeks, during which I've been screening Janapar to a broad spread of people, watching their reactions to the situations depicted in the film, and answering the questions that follow. Unfortunately it seems to be very difficult to meaningfully teach the lessons of the road, and I'm beginning to think that the best thing anyone in my kind of position can do is encourage people wholeheartedly to experiment and to gain that experience themselves, as Ben is now doing. What kind of a world that might lead to is anyone's guess, but it seems to make more sense than sitting back and keeping it all to myself.

I lay awake in my tent for another hour, observing my imagination effortlessly warping the sound of sloshing waves into wading bear-legs and twisting the patter of water droplets on leaf litter into twigs cracking under big bear feet. And I was glad that the animal had paid its visit, for the lesson itself, for its confirmation of my wild-camping precepts, and for the sense of perspective it had offered some of my remaining fears.

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they've supplied.

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“Once you’ve s-s-swum the winter season at the S-s-serpentine, you’re s-s-suddenly immensely liberated! B-b-because you know that whenever you encounter water, as long as it’s still liquid… you can go for a s-s-s-s-swim!”

Roger’s words came to my mind as I waded into the crystal clear meltwater of Lake Crescent in the north of Washington’s Olympic Peninsular under a rare blue sky. By any sensible standards the water temperature would be classified as absolutely flipping freezing, and I as a certifiable nutcase. But I’d put in the months of acclimatisation, and this made the spontaneous springtime dip — in a setting that would put Switzerland to shame — all the more sweet.

It was lunchtime on the first full day of riding, although it had been several days since we’d left Vancouver, as our departure had happened gradually, a chain of Ben’s ever-more-far-flung friends hosting us on our way through the north-west reaches of the city to Horseshoe Bay, then — after a ferry ride to Vancouver Island — in charming and mellow Victoria, BC’s administrative capital, at the southern end of the island. Ben’s four years in Canada had earned him a sprawling social network, which he’d now be leaving behind with no ticket home.

I’d been mildly concerned that the presence in my passport of multiple visas for Iran, Russia and places that don’t officially exist might cause problems with the American authorities, and I’d half-planned an alternative ride into the wild, empty north of Canada. Sure enough, there was an agonising wait at the border control as the computer system spent a full 6 minutes thinking about whether or not to allow me — the last passenger in line — to board the ship.

But a second attempt went through without delay, and in no time at all we’d crossed the narrow strait dividing the island from the Olympic Peninsular. We rolled up at the residence of U.S Coast Guard Service helicopter mechanic Evan in Port Angeles, Ben’s last housecall before the contact list ran dry and the open road would become our home.

It would be rude to pass up an opportunity to get up close with some gigantic pieces of cutting edge military hardware. So that’s exactly what we did.

We also went for a hike in the States’ only rainforest region — again, under mercifully clear skies. They wouldn’t last long.

Lunchtime swim done, Ben and I set about riding west and south on Highway 101 to Forks, a town of indescribable dreariness, famous for two things: being the wettest place in the entirety of the United States, and being the primary setting for the Twilight series of movies (although, as Ben tells me, they were actually filmed in Vancouver and Squamish, according to his ex-girlfriend’s eccentric band manager Jackson Rathbone who plays Edward’s brother Jasper, if you care about that sort of thing, as I don’t). I can report a smattering of forlorn Twilight-related tours and signposts along the town’s main strip, though no sign of any sexually-repressed teenage vampire lovers.

Ben will now also remember Forks as the setting for his first post-cycling energy crash, rendering him sprawled and barely functional in a booth in one of the town’s few diners, slurping desperately on a chocolate & butterscotch milkshake, unable to consider riding any further, and at the same time being fully aware of the inevitability of doing so before the approaching darkness fell completely.

He will also remember his first taste of spontaneous hospitality, when Dustin invited us in for coffee after we asked about a place to pitch our tents, and provided directions to a state park campground just two miles away, where we could sleep safely — and, being still closed for the winter, sleep for free!

These everyday features of bicycle travel, so familiar to me, were a pleasingly appropriate setting of scene for the long-planned ride that would now begin to unfold.

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they’ve supplied.

The city is well-known as being one of the most desirable places in the world to live, but what I hadn’t quite appreciated before arriving were the reasons for the accolade. I previously supposed that many of the reasons must be subjective — a dense and varied culture, plenty of material wealth, relative isolation, boundless potential for one’s leisure time — few of which I’d deem a necessity for a meaningful and contented existence.

But few of us would fail to be seduced and subdued by Vancouver’s intimacy with nature; unimposing and mellow urban landscapes set amongst — rather than dominating — the surrounding encroachment of ocean, mountain and virgin forest, each a short walk from any front door out of which you might step out.

And fewer still would be loathe to live in a place without a segregating hangover of class divides; where people of all background and origin live together, truly integrated, with not a whiff of the strained and confused attempt at multiculturalism with which Europe still struggles; where striking up conversation with a stranger on a bus or in the street is a pleasant, expected part of daily life; and where one feels that all that makes Vancouver great is acknowledged and appreciated by those who live here, whether Vancouver born and raised, immigrant citizens of several years, or fresh new arrivals. This seems to be a place of gentle contentment, of free expression without pretension — and of good old-fashioned fun.

My brother Ben and I were staying with some friends of his who had invited us to make use of the two spare rooms in their house. Set very handily in the central district of Kitsilano, we used this spacious family home as the base for a variety of forays, including several epic inner-city hikes, a social visit to a coffee shop in which Ben worked for 2 years while earning his permanent Canadian residency, a day of spring skiing at nearby Whistler-Blackcomb — and, of course, Vancouver’s annual pillow fight, which took place by the steps of the art gallery and lasted a full half-hour.

This all-too-brief glimpse of life in Vancouver was rounded off with my obligatory swim in the chilly waters of the North Pacific, followed by an important trip downtown to the headquarters of Kona Bikes to collect a pair of gleaming Sutras. Because the visit, unfortunately, was not intended as a city break. No — I came to Vancouver to prepare for a new kind of journey; one which will in many ways be unlike any that have come before. Motivations change with time and experience, and there’ll be more on that in a future piece.

By the way, if you’re a regular reader and you’re wondering what became of the Great Camera Debate a couple of weeks ago, here’s the answer. I ended up keeping my old digital SLR body (thanks more to Gumtree’s total and utter ineptitude than personal choice). I flogged all my lenses and accessories, however, and bought a fixed-length 28mm prime lens made in the 70’s. The camera will spend the next two months in full manual mode.

I hope that this will put in the constraints I was looking for, without the maybe-a-little-extreme measure of carrying film canisters around. As with so many of the choices we face, the best answer turned out to be a compromise.

My U.S. Pacific Coast ride is kindly supported by Kona Bikes, Cascade Designs and Schwalbe. Read more about the gear they’ve supplied.

After a lot of head-scratching, many re-scripts, and two failed editing attempts in November and January, James and I sat down on Thursday last week with a gallon of coffee and spent a rather wired day in front of a few hundred hours of footage and a copy of Final Cut Pro. The video above is the result - the first theatrical trailer for Janapar - and we hope it'll be the one that does the story justice.

Some may be surprised that we haven't exactly pandered to the adventure film genre. But if you've been following my blog for more than a year or two, you'll know that the story behind this documentary is slightly more complicated - and, therefore, slightly more interesting - than a very long bike ride.

If you like what you see, I strongly encourage you to share it, either with the social media buttons beside this article, or over on the (newly revamped) Janapar micro-site. And I'd love to hear what you think of the trailer in the comments below.

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