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So I recently expended my entire life savings on writing a book and making a film, which was exactly what I wanted to do and why my life savings existed. As a result, however, I find myself in the not unfamiliar situation of needing to stop arsing around and make some cash.

This is not a complaint, lest it sound like one. Nobody talks about the details of their personal finances. Nobody blogs about it. There is an enormous social stigma attached to being cash-poor. To ask for free hot water in order to brew your own instant coffee on the train, for example, is to invite looks ranging from pity to gloating to disgust.

I don’t see it as shameful at all. My attitude was born from years of pedalling the globe on a thread of a shoestring, eking every calorie out of every penny, itinerant and jobless and sleeping rough, and finding more contentment and happiness in it than being wealthy and career-driven and settled could ever serve up.

So when I’m forced — by my own idealism, stubbornness, lack of planning, dismal abilities as a businessman, whatever — to do the same within society instead of on its edge, I see it as just the same game of initiative and lateral thinking and resourcefulness as before, scoring counter-cultural points against consumerism and very much enjoying doing so.

There’s one big problem with having cash in abundance. It invites you to buy into convenience, into the ‘easy life’ that the pursuit of money promised in the first place.

This happens oh-so-gradually, but it doesn’t take long before you’re conveniently buying coffee on the way through the ticket barriers, upgrading your phone so you can use all those convenient apps, grabbing a convenient takeaway on the way home, and getting convenient open-returns instead of booking trains a month in advance. You can afford these conveniences now. So why not?

It’s not that paying for convenience sucks away every last penny — it usually doesn’t. It’s that it makes you lazy. Life isn’t quite as full of those immediate little victories as it used to be.

You miss the satisfaction of successfully procuring an extra discount from the yellow-sticker-man in the clearance aisle.

You no longer pop into charity shops, just-in-case, and so you don’t find the mint condition made-in-England 45l Berghaus rucksack that’s just gone on sale for a fiver.

You forget that it’s stupidly fun to boil up a brew in a parkful of folk too busy swilling from Starbucks flagons to notice the smoke.

You can’t remember how to quarter the price of train journeys through cunningly combining advance fares between ill-frequented stops.

You feel strangely helpless when your smartphone battery dies and you can’t remember how to navigate the city streets without a little screen telling you which way to go.

You don’t have time to grow your own food on the windowsill or beneath the skylight or in the vegetable patch because you’re too busy maximising your post-work free time to have time to do so.

And you’re no happier than when you were scrimping and saving, because happiness is mostly genetic, and an easy life that doesn’t test you or teach you misses the mark of what humans really find satisfying anyway.

I’m not saying poverty should be anyone’s goal, and I know some of these examples are at the extreme end of things (relative to life in the UK, in any case).

But I am saying that having the rug of financial stability pulled out from under us — even temporarily, for example in the form of a big bike trip — has a lot to teach us about navigating life.

It simply depends on the perspective with which we approach it.

What do you think?

Continued (16 comments) →]]> Full disclosure: I visited Tern, the folding bike manufacturer, in Taiwan last year as part of a tour of the nation’s bike industry. I got in touch later to see if I could test their touring model for its obvious relevance here. Tern loaned me the bike described here for a few months in order that I could do so.

Over the years I’ve become a lot less of a fundamentalist about this thing called cycle touring. And one principle I cut loose a while back was that these journeys should be conducted entirely by pedal power — the ‘cycle every inch’ mentality. There are many reasons your might want to combine cycling with trains, buses, hitching and the like. Perhaps time is limited. Perhaps there’s an itinerary to keep to. Perhaps particular regions are more interesting than others. Whatever.

The problem is that every break from riding involves detatching panniers, unthreading pedals, removing wheels, getting covered in filth, arguing with drivers and conductors, nicking cardboard boxes from behind bike shops, and other such delights. The more developed the country, incidentally, the greater the fuss.

So what if it were possible to eliminate all this and happily skip around a continent, hopping on and off any kind of transport while simultaneously enjoying all that’s wonderful about cycle touring?

It’s been at the back of my mind for years, but I hadn’t experienced it until I got my hands on Tern Bicycles’ Link P24h.

Folding bikes have been around for decades, of course. Today’s Brompton is simply the current generation. But they were never really built for touring. Tiny little wheels make every crack and pothole feel like a trench. They’re twitchy. The handlebars flex. Gear ratios are fine on the flats, but try pottering up a steep country lane with a pair of panniers and a tent on the back. They simply don’t deliver quality of ride you’ll get from the most popular touring bikes.

What’s interesting about Tern’s bike is that, while acknowledging that every folding bike is a series of compromises, it was nevertheless built to be a tourer. It has the bigger 20-inch wheels, proper luggage racks, wide gearing, fenders and bottle cages, touring components, and plenty of other thoughtful inclusions.

But I wanted to see if the bike was as good in reality as it was on paper. So I took one around the UK with my storytelling events, seeing new cities, and getting as much touring done in between as possible.

Because of the scattered locations and dates of the events, I needed to hook into the public transport network regularly. This would have been as good as impossible with a full-size touring bike, what with the state of the rail system we’re blessed with in the UK (don’t get me started).

But, crucially, the Link P24h fitted the British rail operators’ definition of a folding bike (which is at least one thing they seem able to agree on). So no ‘cycle reservations’ to make. No cramped bicycle compartments to occupy. No travel bans on peak-time trains to work around. Nothing to think about at all, in fact, except for what British train passengers usually think about (in between asking themselves if a one-way second-class off-peak ticket across a small island nation should ever really cost over £200).

And when it came to taking a ferry over to the Isle of Arran for some wild-bivvying on a day off between gigs? Oh, hello there, foot passenger; that’ll just be a fiver…

Although I hadn’t considered it before, I also really liked the fact that I could carry the bike inside with me on the couple of occasions I was unceremoniously stuck in a hotel room for the night. If you’re regularly Couchsurfing or hostelling on a tour, this is an extremely convenient plus-point.

Riding the bike, obviously, is as important a consideration as carting it around. And I live in Cumbria, which features some of the most challenging road riding in England. The country’s steepest paved road is at the top of my neighbouring valley. (It’s a 32% grade. For comparison, San Francisco’s steepest is 34%.)

This is where compact folding bikes commonly suffer. Tiny 16″ wheels get you from A to B, but there’s a reason full-size wheels are almost twice the diameter: comfort and rolling ease. Engineering compromises mean narrow gear ratios in comparison with full-size bikes, which is OK in London, but not in Cumbria or Scotland or the Alps and with 20kg of luggage on board. And shorter wheelbases often mean problems with heel clearance when bigger panniers are involved.

So Tern’s designers got clever. First, they took a tried and tested (important) 3-speed Sturmey Archer rear hub and stuck an 8-speed cassette and derailleur on top of it, resulting in a 24-speed bike with a single front chainring. Then they fitted 20″ wheels instead of diddly 16″ ones (and you can feel the difference). They designed and fitted a rear rack, the Traveller Rack, specifically for putting full-size panniers on a folding bike, without your heels getting in the way and without affecting the fold. Finally, they added a front rack for small panniers and a KLICKfix bracket for any compatible basket or bar-bag you might wish to use.

Basically, they built a tourer.

And so I pottered happily up and down the Lakeland lanes between Oxenholme and home-sweet-holme in comfort, with boxes of books and DVDs as well as my usual touring and camping gear, and without once climbing out of the saddle to push, nor breaking more of a sweat than I wanted to. Even light off-road was met with confidence-inspiring capability.

Tern’s designers also brought in innovations from their Biologic arm, which focuses on components and accessories. There’s a dynamo in the front hub (though you’d never know it from the effect it has on the ride), and it powers a built-in front light and optionally a rechargeable power pack, the ReeCharge, that’ll keep anything USB-compatible powered up all day. That includes your GPS-enabled smartphone.

According to Tern, their newest hub (called the Joule 3) is comparable to the industry-leading Schmidt in terms of efficiency, but at a fraction of the price. A big claim, but it appears to be well-founded, as my Reecharge unit has remained fully charged despite plenty of GPS (and MP3) use.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tom-allen/8769022084/

So if you’re silly enough to be touring at night, or you’re on your way into a big city at the end of a day, you’ll be seen and your batteries will never run out. More cleverly, you can run your smartphone or GPS all day on pedal power too. For short tours with pre-planned routes, that makes a lot of sense. (Personally, I prefer to pedal-power a pair of speakers and an MP3 player so I can have a soundtrack to my ride, but each to their own.)

I’ve also been using Biologic’s Tour Bag, which is an Ortlieb-esque bar-bag with a bit more room that attaches to a KLICKfix adapter on the frame (not the bars). The result adds 10kg extra capacity without affecting the steering — in fact, it neatly counterbalances a pair of rear panniers. It also has small pockets lining its interior for organising things more neatly; something I always missed with the Ortlieb Ultimate 5.

Other things I like about this bike include a multi-tool built into one end of the handlebars for quick adjustments, a very capable specially-designed multi-tool for every common adjustment on the bike (invaluable, as some of the moving parts do need occasional tightening), ergonomic grips which are some of the most comfortable I’ve ever used, a generous three bottle-cage mounts on the modest frame, a seat-post with a fricken’ tyre pump hidden inside it (genius), a solid choice of V-brakes, proper fenders, and the perfect choice of touring tyres (Schwalbe Marathon Supreme).

Now I’ve had a bit of practice, I can fold and unfold it in about 15 seconds (a particularly big hit with the ladies, I can assure you). And I can take it into coffee shops, rather than always choosing the window seat and glancing sideways in paranoia every couple of minutes.

And I do like the fact that I can take my bike kayaking (or, to use the technical term, FoldBikeRafting), though it probably wasn’t designed with that in mind.

The bike isn’t perfect. For one thing, it simply isn’t as comfortable to ride on bumpier roads as a full-size tourer, because big wheels always roll nicer. The long steerer tube and handlebars flex a little, whereas full-size frames respond with precision. And you’ll probably want to replace the harsh saddle and slightly flimsy folding pedals with your own preferred ones. But none of this is a deal-breaker for the kind of short-to-medium-term touring I’m imagining this bike being used for. In fact, I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed riding it.

One thing I always arrange with manufacturers is to feedback on their stuff; partly to force myself to remain critical despite something being free or loaned, and partly because I prefer two-way relationships when working with companies on the commercial end of things. I want to help make Tern’s bike better, because I like riding good bikes and I assume lots of other people do too.

I was sent a 2012 model of the Link P24h, and after a month I wrote back to Tern about the type of kickstand, the rack size and position, the durability of the magnetic couplings when folded, suggested drop-bar or bar-end options, and raised some concerns about a slipping chain. I also mentioned conservativism amongst tourers when it came to new ideas such as the 3-speed/8-speed hub combo.

Tern’s CEO’s response was reassuring; many of the ideas were already incorporated for the (current) 2013 model of the Link P24h, and others were on the drawing board for next season. The rear Traveller Rack is due to be upgraded again for stability under even heavier loads, bar-ends are on the way for a variety of hand positions, the kickstand will be replaced with one more effective under top-heavy loads, and the occasional chain-slipping (a perennial issue for many folders with short chainlines, apparently) is being tweaked. He also mentioned a secretive new folding touring offering for next year, which is a tiny bit exciting.

And so, in between events, I spent an unusually sunny February on the kind of off-the-cuff bike travel that it would be wonderful to spend a summer doing in, say, Europe, where there’s a very good case for picking a few areas to explore intimately rather than trying to blast across the continent in a single season.

I’m really impressed the Tern team and their dedication to producing folding bikes for all niches, including touring. Given the raft of compromises inherent in any folding bike, I guess the acid test is whether I’d accept them and buy the P24h and its luggage options myself. Don’t get me wrong; if I wanted to cycle long-term across multiple continents, I’d stick with my Sutra. But if I was heading off for a few weeks exploring Europe, for example, and I wanted ultimate flexibility with where I went and how, I wouldn’t hesitate to ride off atop a Tern Link P24h.

(With my Brooks on it, of course.)

Tern bicycles and accessories are exclusively sold in the UK by Evans Cycles*, who have shops all over the country and a very popular online store. The Link P24h can be found here*, but if you’re interested in buying one I’d suggest (as always) an in-store visit for a test ride and to spec it to your needs.

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Tales of adventure tend to fall into one of two camps.

The first is about the adventurer who sets out to overcome an impossible challenge. Setting forth from familiar surrounds, he (it’s almost always ‘he’) regales us with impressive-sounding escapades that take place in worlds of decreasing familiarity, undergoing transformation after transformation — until a flash of enlightenment occurs: the impossible has been conquered! And the adventurer returns, transcendant, heroic, victorious, to bestow his new-found wisdom upon we adoring legions.

The second is about the common man (or, increasingly, woman). We see that he has no abilities beyond normal human potential. But he is afflicted by some deep desire; one with which we can all identify. And this leads him into extraordinary circumstances which test him in a variety of ways, and he, too, undergoes transformations and enlightenments. But we can see that we’d respond in just the same way, and that the challenges, while real enough, are not as impossible as they seem. And he returns, transformed, but humbled, to live again among us.

Almost every tale worth telling could be fashioned in either of these two ways. Which is chosen depends almost entirely on the ego of the teller. Because there are no superhuman adventurers; not really. It’s just Hollywood and its many messianic narratives that have convinced us that there are.

And so, as an adventure storyteller, it’s easy to play to the stereotype, thinking that only feats of physical and mental domination are worth writing about, and that sounding more outwardly impressive than anyone else is the only way to justify your opening your mouth or picking up your pen. Indeed, entire careers are built upon this principle, and with that much at stake, the myth of the superhuman adventurer will be readily defended.

There’s another way, which is to acknowledge humanity and frailty and self-doubt, and in turn to invite a reader or audience member to see that he or she has a hell of a lot more in common with us than not, and to acknowledge that anything impressive-sounding is simply the result of lots of tiny actions about which, individually, there is nothing very impressive at all.

But because this makes the storyteller’s neck an extremely inviting target for people (and they’re out there, especially on the Internet) who’ve been conditioned to judge and draw comparisons and who derive self-worth from belittling the actions of others, and because we’ve believed since school that external praise is the ultimate goal and that heroics are the easiest means of getting it, it’s very difficult to muster the bravery to lay ourselves bare. Casting yourself as the star of your own hero myth is less painful than acknowledging publicly that you are, in fact, just everyman.

I’ve tried with all of my storytelling to point out that there’s no difference between me and any other unathletic middle-class British bloke, and that my pedal-powered mile-count is beyond meaningless. I won’t even use tired rhetoric along the lines of “the only difference was that I took the first step”, because there were so many people who pushed me until I stumbled forward.

And while I’ve enjoyed — superficially — reading plenty of adventure travel narratives composed of cherry-picked, obviously exaggerated anecdotes, written for gob-smacking derring-do value alone, I’d rather read a book that ends with me saying to myself not “wow — I could never do that!” but “wow — I can’t wait to give this a go!”.

And so I’d rather write words that have the same effect — even if it means sticking my neck out.

What do you think?

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I don’t normally dedicate entire blog posts to a single event, but this is one that deserves special attention. Because there aren’t many events in the UK calendar that deal specifically with the planning of long overland adventures.

HUBB UK, however, is one of them. Spawned from the hugely popular Horizons Unlimited overland travel bulletin-board, and covering cycle-touring, motorcycling, 4x4-ing and other forms of overland independent transport, this is much more than a handful of lectures: it’s a full-on festival lasting four days (with camping and beer and everything), consisting of over 200 sessions of talks, demonstrations, workshops, Q&As, challenges and competitions on every topic you’d imagine relevant to adventurous overland journeys.

The event’s stated purpose is ‘Inspiring, Informing and Connecting’, but I think it’s the first of these that’s the most important. Knowing that what you’re dreaming of doing is possible — and that others like you have already done it — is the most empowering piece of knowledge to have while you’re laying plans for your first big trip.

So while there’ll undoubtedly be plenty of informing and connecting on the cards, it’s really for the inspiration that I suggest you come along. I’ll be there all weekend, presenting on adventure filmmaking and getting involved wherever else I can, and I hope to meet a few readers in the process!

I’ll also be demonstrating the results of an ongoing project/experiment, involving fully-loaded touring bikes, recycling centres, Poundland, and very very tight travel budgets! More on that soon…

Find out more at the HUBB UK website.

Continued (5 comments) →]]> Click here to view the embedded video.

A lot’s happened since Janapar’s premiere at Raindance last year, but one of the nicest moments was winning one of the top awards at Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, one of the UK’s main fixtures in the adventure & outdoor festival calendar.

It was particularly rewarding given the ridiculous amount of work that had gone into putting it together — four years of shooting, two years of production and 6 months of distribution so far, unpaid, and the ongoing storytelling project still occupies a large chunk of my time.

I learned a huge amount during the production process — as did James, who’d spent half a decade cutting his teeth in the TV industry. And there are plenty of articles on the way for those of you who are interested in trying your hands at adventure filmmaking — hopefully on a more sensible scale! (If you’re not interested, don’t worry; tales from the road in Iran and new adventure cycling projects are coming too.)

Today I’d like to share a special 12-minute documentary, going behind the scenes in the studios, edit suites, voiceover booths and broom cupboards we worked in — a rare insight into the production process of an adventure film.

This short featurette originally appeared in Janapar’s DVD extras, and in the online bonus material for the instant HD download of the film (both of which are currently available at a discount).

Feel free to ask any questions about this filmmaking process in the comments — I’d be more than happy to answer them!

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In the summer of 2007, my best mate Andy Welch and I set off from my front door. We’d called our expedition ‘Ride Earth’, and were all set to cycle round the world. But the experiences that followed changed all we thought we knew about, travel, adventure and cycle-touring.

Weave Of The Ride, Andy’s own account of that eight-month journey from England to Armenia, offers an alternative perspective on the story that ends with Ride Earth’s disbandment and the beginning of two new solo adventures. In this guest post, Andy goes into detail about his new book.

* * *

“Weave Of The Ride is a book about a journey from England through Belgium, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey to Georgia in the Caucasus, on mountain bikes converted into touring bikes. It covers the early part of a journey that Tom accompanied me on before we parted ways in Armenia.

“The story begins with the dissatisfaction of everyday life and the desire to do something about it, which culminated in the idea to cycle around the world. This turned out to be a life-changing decision. It meant throwing caution to the wind, quitting the job, selling everything and cutting loose from the everyday grind altogether. Thus began a process of changing my life from one path to another, turning a lifelong passion of cycling into a vocation.

“Life on the road was a quest for something more profound. What I got was a life that required a great deal more energy and lateral thinking than I’d been used to, and which triggered a learning experience that had me asking much bigger questions of life. So this book is not just about the bike and the days in the saddle, but about the conundrum that many face of wondering whether life has something more to offer — and not being satisfied simply by taking on a marathon bike ride.

“The brooding rain of the Black Sea coastline, the wild urban dust of Bucharest, the vibrant energy of Tbilisi; friends were made amidst a plethora of meetings with interesting and diverse people within an ever-evolving landscape. But when I reached Georgia I immediately fell in love with the country. The book covers extensively my experience of this little-known nation just east of Turkey.

“Weave Of The Ride also covers the realisation that unless you spend eight months in close proximity to a friend, you probably don’t know that ‘friend’ very well. The friendship becomes a lot more real, and is tested to the limit.

“I started writing this book when I returned from India in 2009, yet the final edit has only just been completed. I was motivated by a desire to spread an entertaining and often humorous story, showing how dissatisfaction countered by focus and preparation can lead to a transition in life that opens up unimaginable worlds of experience.

“You may be thinking: “I’ve read Tom’s book Janapar — why should I read Weave Of The Ride?” Imagine if you could read your wife, girlfriend, best friend or business partners’ mind. The beauty of reading both books is to see one journey from two points of view; to see how two people living the same life can experience it completely differently.

“I hope you enjoy it!”

* * *

Weave Of The Ride is available now in paperback and Kindle editions. You can visit the book’s dedicated webpage here.

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The best gift I’ve ever received on the road is this; a stove made from nothing but a discarded drinks can. In this video we’re going to learn how to make it (with a little help from my friend Armen).

You can get your raw materials from the trashcan, make it in 10 minutes with a pocket knife, and get fuel from any pharmacy or hardware store. Oh, and it costs a hundred bucks less than the Whisperlite. What’s not to like?

I’ve been using these stoves for years now. Here are a few ideas for getting more out of them:

• Arrange several stoves in a pretty pattern and cook a big pot of food for your friends
• If windy, use your camping mattress (especially the cheap foam ones) as a wrap-around windshield
• Hunt down more efficient fuels than medical alcohol
• Try making giant stoves out of those oversized cans of Fosters
• Make them in campsites and hostels to give away as gifts, to trade for other useful stuff, in exchange for beer money, or simply to attract members of the opposite sex

This article is part of my ongoing mission to bring cycle touring back to its roots, which lie in simplicity and spontaneity over grand plans and fancy kit. There’s going to be a lot more where this came from over the next few months, so sign up for my newsletter if you’d like to be kept in the loop.

What are your favourite DIY camping/travel tips? Please share them in the comments below.

Continued (6 comments) →]]> As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader, my goal for 2013 is to become fluent in Farsi (Persian) by the end of the year.

A big part of this attempt, I previously wrote, would be done by totally immersing myself in the language on trips to Iran, a country to which this footloose Brit now has strong personal ties (watch the film to find out exactly how this happened).

I’m now coming to the end of my first journey in Iran, and there’ll be plenty of stories appearing on this blog over the next few weeks, as well some interesting and unexpected observations that have come out of my experiments in learning a foreign language through travel itself.

But in the meantime, allow me to whet your appetite with a handful of pictures that may hint at the kind of escapades I’ve been up to…

The best way to keep up with this blog is by subscribing to my newsletter.

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1. Get a bicycle.
   It doesn’t really matter which one, as long as it’s comfortable, but you won’t get far without it.
2. Quit your job.
   You’ll need a few years for this, so write a letter to your boss explaining that you’re sorry but there’s something you have to do.
3. Leave.
   You can’t cycle round the world without setting off. So strap a tent and sleeping bag to your bike, ask the neighbour to look after the cat, and pedal away from home.

Once you have accomplished the above three steps, the rest will work itself out.

Enjoy!

* * *

Optional additional steps:

• Do research.
  You could spend several months collecting information about border crossings, visas, equipment, routes, seasons, budgets and timescales. But equally you could leave now, take it day by day and figure these things out on the road, trusting that instinct and initiative (and free wifi) will serve you better in the long run than an encyclopedic knowledge of international bureaucracy.
• Train.
  You could get a gym membership and a personal trainer and join a local cycling club and spend several months building up fitness, just like real athletes do. Alternatively, you could attain an equal (or higher) level of fitness by cycling all day, every day, during your first few weeks on the road.
• Spend time saving money.
  You could put tens of thousands of pounds/dollars/euros in the bank to create a feeling of security. Or your could sell everything you own right now, set off at the end of your notice period, and then simply avoid buying anything. You’ll sleep rough, eat bread and jam and fruit off trees, Couchsurf, accept all invitations, and avoid sightseeing (you can do that when you retire). When you’re low on cash, simply use the skills you didn’t know you had to earn more locally.
• Get loads of fancy equipment.
  You could blow a few grand on the best touring bike, the lightest tent, the reliable-est stove, the waterproof-est waterproofs, etcetera. But equally you could salvage a bike from a scrapyard, get a tent from a charity shop, raid TK Maxx, and make a stove out of a beer can (saving several years’ worth of bread and jam in the process).
• Plan a route.
  You could spend a long time poring over maps at home so you’ll know exactly where you’re going every day. Alternatively, since the beauty of the bicycle is in the freedom it affords its rider, you could simply leave on a compass bearing or a whim and see where the road takes you, since it doesn’t really matter where you are as long as you’re moving.
• Start a website, Twitter account and Facebook page.
  You could get up to speed on websites and blogging and social media and use all of these things to communicate your journey in real-time from the road. Or you could take this rare opportunity to reduce your online obligations to zero and experience life on Earth instead. (You can tell the story better later anyway.)
• Hustle for sponsorship.
  You could spend months drafting proposals and cold-calling companies in search of sponsorship. Or you could spend the same months working overtime to buy the same stuff. Then, when you change your plans or fall in love, it won’t matter to anyone other than you.
• Attach a ’cause’ to your ride.
  You could decide to set a fundraising target for a charity, possibly for a genuinely personal reason but more likely because you feel you should justify taking a few years off being a responsible hard-working citizen. Or you could decide that travel needs no justification and that the long-term benefits of doing it can’t be measured (least of all financially).
• Get media coverage.
  You could contact local and national press with details of your epic undertaking. Or you could prefer to think that the freedom you wanted from cycle touring feels more real when nobody is watching (and when you’re not obliged to send press releases from your tent when you’d rather be reading Kerouac).
• Burn all your bridges.
  You could sell your house, fire your boss, divorce your husband/wife and children and leave with a gigantic middle finger attached to the back of your bike. Alternatively, you could transform your work and family life into something that can be sustained long-term, both on the road and if/when your ride comes to an end.
• Aim to break a record.
  You could attempt to set a new world record for cycling round the world. Or you could remember that you were never an athlete anyway, that the point of cycling was the independence and flexibility it’d give you, and that you’d rather enjoy the ride than planning it to end as quickly as possible.
• Measure statistics.
  You could aim to keep a daily count of your distance, altitude, average speed, air pressure, etcetera, in order to try and quantify your success. Or you could decide that the distance you’ve pedalled has as much relevance to success as the colour of your increasingly-grubby T-shirt, and that without numbers to think about you can better concentrate on how you’re actually feeling about things right now.
• Set an end date.
  You could plan to hit a series of global milestones in order to arrive back home at a premeditated point in time. Alternatively, you could realise that if you learn anything on the road it’ll likely change you; that your global milestones might one day not make sense any more, that ‘coming back’ might become an equally irrelevant idea, or that — shock horror — you might even get bored of pedalling altogether.
• Actually cycle round the world.
  You could actually finish what you foolishly started all those years ago, which would be a fantastic example of concept winning over experience. Or you could quit being stubborn and allow your journey could grow in unpredictable ways, resulting in your route looking less like a neat line across continents and more like Mr Messy.

* * *

There are so many ways to make long-term adventure cycling more complicated than it could be.

For certain individuals, added complexities may be entirely relevant. To take my own example, it made complete sense to start a blog 7 years ago, because I wanted to write and a public blog was a means to hold myself accountable and combat my own laziness.

Nowadays, as a result of having that outlet, I write for the love of it. I’m inspired by my subject. I loved every minute of the two years I spent crafting my first book (and even when I hated it, I loved it). I’d still write if the Internet didn’t exist and all I had was a diary.

But for every would-be bicycle traveller for whom extra steps are relevant, there are a hundred others who’ve kept it simple and thus you’ve never heard of. I’ve met several cyclists here in Iran over the last few weeks, for example, who have no blogs or Flickr accounts and simply write to their families from Internet cafes every couple of weeks.

These invisible travellers, happily doing their own thing and beholden to no-one, actually constitute the majority of long-term touring cyclists, though you’d hardly know it from surfing the web. And that why surfing the web, for a would-be long-term bicycle traveller, is dangerous.

The single biggest danger of the extra steps so often seen and suggested is that they introduce spiralling complexity and thus increase the chances of a dream journey never happening.

Part of the problem is the nature of the Internet itself — it’s incredibly easy to have the idea, Google it, and immediately get so bogged down in the details of the way Celebrity Cyclist X did it that the original idea is lost.

I see this every November, when I spend a weekend hanging out at the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition-planning conference, Explore, in London. My unofficial job at Explore is to tell legions of would-be adventure cyclists that they don’t need to come to Explore to plan their cycling adventure; they just need to get on a bike and go.

It’s a bizarre and circular arrangement, but it seems to work as I invariably get emails from people on the road, months down the line, saying thanks for advice which was just a restatement of the time-honoured KISS principle.

It’s also been difficult to ignore the growing number of high-profile cycling expeditions that — according to their own definitions of success — fail. Institutions are built, grand achievements are pointed to… and then the complex concepts fail to live up to the experience, which in reality is about as simple as life ever gets.

Most of those journeys start as simple dreams to go and let loose on a bike for a while and see what happens. Unnecessary complications are bringing them down.

Some riders have the gonads to acknowledge that what should have simply been a personal decision (I feel like stopping now) has become a public failure (I couldn’t do what I told the world I’d do). Others simply disappear from the web, taking branded T-shirts and fundraising targets with them.

So for god’s sake don’t imitate what you see so often online. If you’ve got the dream, take steps 1 to 3, then enjoy the ride. Only take extra steps if they really, really, really make sense to you.

* * *

I’m aware that it sounds too easy to simply grab a bike and leave (even though it really is that easy — just ask Maria). Because of that, I’m beginning work on a new storytelling project.

It won’t be about my own travels (I think we’ve all had enough of that for a while, right?) — instead it’ll be a collective narrative of dozens of people from across the spectrum of long-term bicycle travel.

The aim of the project will be to make the point that there are countless ways to make the same journey, as one contributor already put it. It’ll show how a vast range of ordinary people have upped sticks and embarked upon extraordinary personal journeys by bicycle, and how they identified what worked personally for them.

By telling these stories, I’d really like to demystify the ‘hero myth’ of the round-the-world ride, showing how cycle touring is many strokes to many folks, and how ultimately it’s a dream available to all, without prescription or limitation, and regardless of the original source of inspiration.

I’m looking for contributors for this collective narrative: ordinary people who’ve made extraordinary personal journeys by bicycle. If you fit this description and you’d like to contribute, I’d love to hear from you. Just answer this initial survey now to get things rolling, and I’ll be in touch!

And if you’ve got even a twinkle of a dream to head off on your own Big Ride (or you’re already getting bogged down in the details) and you’d like to be among the first to know when the project is nearing completion, you can sign up for updates here.

Continued (23 comments) →]]> There’s a 90-day visa in my passport, my bags are packed, and I’ll be leaving for Iran in the next couple of days. But before I go, I’ve promised quite a few people a write-up of my experience running a successful Kickstarter campaign. Here goes…

Last year I took a gamble on crowdfunding my first book project. After three weeks of planning and preparation, I clicked the ‘launch’ button early one morning from the comfort of my bed, and nodded off for a little doze.

What happened next was this:

• £300 in pledges had come in before I got up.
• By the end of the day the total had climbed to £2,422 — 40% of my target.
• By the end of the first week the £6,000 goal had not just been met but exceeded.
• The campaign ended after 21 days with a pledged total of nearly £10,000 — more than 150% of the £6,000 I’d asked for.

I was stunned by this dice-roll on an untested concept. I’d launched the campaign during Kickstarter’s own opening day in the UK!

But I’m aware that it wasn’t just luck: there were identifiable factors that made it a success. In this article I want to share them.

I’ll be going into detail (with figures) about the financial side of the project, and I’ll also point out the unforeseen hurdles I encountered. My hope is that it will benefit you if you’re considering crowdfunding your own projects in the future.

Should I crowdfund my project?

Crowdfunding is a way of raising cash and support to do something that you’d be unable to do without it — an appeal to invest, rather than to buy or donate. The best crowdfunding projects are passion projects; things that you, the creator, care deeply about pulling off, and for which the return on investment is often an emotional one.

To get a flavour of the backers’ experience, I funded a number of eccentric ideas — kitting out a vintage van to bring ‘good and proper tea’ back to the streets of London, shooting a documentary about the Cairngorms in winter, producing an iPad magazine on the topic of Couchsurfing — simply because it was obvious that the creators were in love with their projects.

Emilie is now parked up outside Kings’ Cross serving tea & toasted muffins to frozen Londoners. Chris & Terry’s film is scheduled for screening at Keswick Mountain Festival in May. SOFAzine unfortunately did not make their ambitious target in time, but the first issue is still being produced regardless.

Chipping in with a tenner is therefore an act of anarchy: it’s enabling someone to do what they love without ending up in debt, selling out to venture capitalists, or acting as a corporate shill, which is how too many people have been forced to raise funds — until now.

Be aware that backers can be just as invested in your success as in your product or service. Belief in your project shows through when you’re open about it; the stakes are set high as a result; backers empathise with this and want to help.

This is particularly important for the personal video appeal that should be the centrepiece of your campaign, no matter how uncomfortable you are on camera.

It’s easy to get the message wrong. I recently considered backing an ambitious design project and signed up for email updates, but received a flurry of emails along the lines of “buy our product now via Kickstarter before it’s too late!!!”.

Instead of remaining enthusiastic about the designers’ concept, I felt irritated by the hard sell and the false sense of urgency, and so I didn’t back the project.

While it’s still up to you to deliver on your promise, you’ll have an ongoing relationship with a small army of people who have entrusted you with their cash and want you to succeed.

And, as the creator, delivering your promise will be all the more fulfilling. I took great pleasure and satisfaction in sending out project updates every week, and in writing messages and signing finished books for the 339 people who funded it.

What does a successful crowdfunding campaign look like?

Campaigns seem to fall into a couple of categories. The first is similar to a sales pitch:

“Here’s why my thing is the best thing since sliced bread, and here’s why you can’t live without it.”

It’s a common formula, and it results in investors backing the product, rather than the creator.

The second is different:

“Here’s why it’s so important that I do this thing, and why I’m going to do it to the best of my ability, even though it’s not necessarily going to change the world”.

It’s an appeal to invest in the creator’s mission as much as or more than the end result, even if a physical product is indeed part of the backers’ reward.

While both are entirely valid approaches, my campaign fell into the second category — mainly because attempting to pitch my little tale as the best thing since sliced bread would be untrue. It isn’t. It’s just a story. There was no more reason for me to bring the book into existence than there was for any other creative whim that was ever entertained.

(Which didn’t mean I wasn’t going to tell the best god-damned story I was capable of telling — I did!)

Successful campaigns are convincing ones. You can convince people of a deceit, a delusion or a wild exaggeration. Or you can convince people of something real and honest. In our free-market economy there are plenty of both.

Which you choose is a question of personal morals and ethics. I recently had an interesting Skype chat with an Outside magazine journalist on this topic, and she’s since published this pithy article.

Why a successful–looking campaign doesn’t automagically equal success

If I had penned the best copy ever committed to paper, recorded the most persuasive video in the world, clicked the ‘launch’ button, and then spent 21 days sitting on my backside waiting for the money to roll in, I would not have brought in £9,399 in pledges. This I can say with absolute certainty.

How?

‘Cos I got statistics:

What this figure means is that if I’d relied on people stumbling across my campaign on Kickstarter’s website, I would have received only £1,433 in pledges. In other words, I’d have got nowhere near my target, and the campaign would have failed.

It also means that £7,966 in pledged funds originated from somewhere other than Kickstarter’s campaign listings. I got statistics for that, too:

In case you’re wondering what ‘direct traffic’ (the single biggest source of funds) consisted of, I can tell you: it was clickthroughs from my email newsletter.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. I’ve been blogging for 6 years now, and I’ve always made it easy to subscribe to email updates.

Admittedly, my original mailing list was composed entirely of friends and family, and my early writing was utter codswallop.

But as a result of working on my craft, telling compelling stories and dishing out whatever lessons I gleaned, I’ve now got a list of about 2,000 subscribers who have actively requested that I contact them directly about what I’m doing.

And so it should not have been a surprise that when I announced to these people — many of whom had followed the story from its very beginning — that I was looking for help publishing the book, they were actively waiting to do so.

If you’re creating something and you’re putting it out in the public domain, you should also be inviting people who are interested in your work to give you a direct line to their inboxes.

Not only does this allow you to be more generous with your work, reaching people directly with your creations, but you’ll have a community of trusting people waiting to hear about your next project.

Last October, my next project happened to be a crowdfunding campaign.

More broadly, as the Kickstarter School constantly reiterates, it’s your existing contacts who will be on the front line in helping your project become a success.

I wrote individually to each of my closest friends and family members asking them to help spread the word, and many of them not only obliged but also backed the project themselves.

As you can see from the stats, the resulting social media buzz was the next biggest source of funds after my mailing list.

Keeping Momentum Going

Most crowdfunding platforms allow you to specify how long your campaign will run for. And it’s easy to assume that longer equals better — after all, it’ll give people more time to pledge, right?

Wrong. It’ll give people more time to procrastinate, make excuses and forget.

It’ll also mean that you have to sustain interest in your campaign for longer. There’s only so much trumpet-blowing you can do before you start to get irritating (to others and also to yourself!).

I was excited to see the pledges coming in, and I tried to keep the noise I made about it interesting and entertaining, for example by pledging to leap naked into a freezing cold lake (and film it) if I made a particular target by the end of the day.

(The water was bloody freezing.)

But what became clear was that it was the launch and the conclusion of the campaign that mattered most, as the following graph will demonstrate:

Of course it’s possible to use the use the middle period of a campaign to spread the word beyond your existing networks and into communities to whom you’re not already connected.

But there’s going to be less support from people who don’t already know you, and thus there’s a sweet spot for duration. That’s why the majority of successful Kickstarter campaign are under 30 days long.

Shorter also means you’ll be less likely to lose enthusiasm for your own project. And it’s easier to reignite interest in the end days of a campaign if you haven’t already spent weeks boring the crap out of the same group of people with your updates!

Getting your budget right

It goes without saying that it’s important to ask for the right amount. Projects of all kinds go over budget all the time. Mine did, too, and I’ll explain why shortly, but importantly it didn’t affect the finished result.

Most of the crowdfunded projects you hear negative noise about are ones which ran out of funding and thus could not deliver on their promises at all.

Fees, taxes and failed pledges

The first thing to remember when putting a budget together is that a £10 pledge does not equal £10 in the bank. Of the £9,399 pledged to Janapar, I was left with £8,346.61 to play with, meaning 9% of the total went elsewhere before it reached me.

Here’s how that breaks down:

• £79 in pledges was lost to failed card transactions,
• £466 went towards Kickstarter’s fee (only fair; they gotta eat),
• £345.15 was taken in payment processing fees (because bankers gotta eat too, right?),
• £162.23 was taken out to pay the VAT on the fees above.

So don’t forget to add 10% on top of your budget to account for these subtractions.

That’s after adding a slush fund to pay for the project costs you weren’t expecting, such as…

Completely ridiculous postage costs

Be really, really careful if you offer to post things to people as rewards, particularly if it involves overseas postage. I was burned badly on this, because I hadn’t allowed for the finished book being quite a bit chunkier and heavier (though better-looking and nicer to read) than my original estimate.

The basic reward I offered was a simple £10 paperback. Where I went wrong was — at the last minute and in a needless attempt to make the reward more attractive — adding that I would post it anywhere in the world for free as part of the £10 pledge.

Whoops.

The finished 400-page paperback, packed in a cardboard bookwrap with a set of postcards and a thank-you note, weighed 520g, which was considerably more than the hypothetical 300-page paperback I’d originally budgeted for. Posting this by standard airmail to Australia (for example) ended up costing £9.54 a copy.

Factoring in the cost of printing and packaging, I was actually spending £1-£1.50 a pop on a decent chunk of my overseas backers, with nothing of their £10 pledges left for the project itself!

I know at least one self-publishing author who deliberately writes books to fit Royal Mail’s criteria for a Large Letter (as opposed to a Small Packet), precisely in order to avoid exorbitant postage costs.

The hidden costs of ‘admin’

Thankfully, the number of UK-based backers, and the popularity of the £25 book-and-DVD reward, meant that I did still have some cash left after the post office run to pay for the things I actually needed the funds for, such as editing, design and printing.

Despite this, there were still lots of little things that added up to a substantial chunk of the book’s budget.

Here’s a rough breakdown of where the money went:

You’ll notice that there’s no writer’s fee in my budget. Some people are happy to pay themselves a salary out of raised funds; personally I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable with this — I believe that contributing your own time and energy for free is a fundamental principle of a passion project, and an important demonstration to potential backers of your commitment and priorities as a project creator.

You’ll also notice that there’s no budget for publicity. A commercial publisher will spend a considerable amount on making a book visible to the public via traditional advertising and publicity.

On the other hand I’ve relied entirely on social media, word-of-mouth and real-life events to get the book to the people I wrote it for.

(That’s also one of the reasons why, having successfully self-published the first edition, I’ll be looking for a publishing partner for future editions and for distributing the book more widely. Ultimately I’m more interested in writing books and articles than in running my own publishing company!)

Overall budgeting

Completing the project and delivering the rewards cost me just over £1,000 more than I received from the Kickstarter campaign, despite raising over 50% more than the original target.

I’d already planned to make up the deficit through pre-sales of the book, but at times it was touch-and-go whether or not I would be able to do this without propping things up from my own personal funds.

This was a palpable reminder of several things: of the importance of conservative budgeting; that things always take longer and cost more than you think; and that ‘proper’ book publishing is indeed a quite expensive business (and therefore worth the effort for motivated individuals to crowdfund it!).

One of the screening questions asked by Kickstarter to filter out non-committal creators has to do with what might go wrong and what risks are involved. This is more than just box-ticking — it’s important to have a Plan B, else you’ll risk having a lot of disgruntled backers at your door.

Would you crowdfund another project?

Yes, I would — for the right project.

Having run one campaign, I feel much better placed to understand what kind of project suits the crowdfunding approach. They’re creative, niche projects for which it’s more important to simply get it made than to profit from doing so, and for which there’s already an established audience.

I think it’s possible to use crowdfunding to launch a commercial venture, too, but there’s one important caveat: your most avid followers will already have ‘bought’ whatever it is you’re making by the time you start selling it.

Taking things beyond the initial creation and reward fulfilment will therefore involve finding new audiences and customers. This can easily turn into a full-time job — fine if that’s what you’re aiming to do, but potentially quite frustrating if you never really wanted to become responsible for running a small business.

But the campaign achieved its goal: to professionally produce and publish a debut book and put it in the hands of the people who were waiting to read it.

And I’m not sure how I’d have done that without this wonderful marriage of trust, technology and community known as crowdfunding.

# # #

Considering making your first pledge? Current crowdfunding projects worth a look include the Walking The Nile expedition, The Nutter bicycle multitool, the expedition to row the Pacific, the cinema in the 1967 VW campervan, and (of course) a plan to build the Death Star.

Janapar: Love on a Bike, my crowdfunded debut book, is now on general release, available from Amazon.co.uk and by request from all good UK booksellers. It already has a 5-star average rating and lots of lovely reader reviews — please do give it a read.

I hope this article has been useful to you. Do check out the excellent Kickstarter School for more on the nuts & bolts of crowdfunding campaigns. And feel free to put questions forward in the comments below — although I’m on the road, I’ll write responses whenever the opportunity arises!