For the sake of balance...
Last week I posted a video featuring some highlights from the six years I spent travelling around the world on a bicycle, and it was predictably dominated by the people I met and cycled alongside. But...
View ArticleVideo highlights from six years biking around the world
Apologies if you'd been expecting my monthly update and got radio-silence... It was the first time I've missed a blog post in the last seven years. My excuse is that I've been embroiled in all manner...
View ArticleLife after cycling: stage 1 - The Honeymoon
I know what I said, alright. I know I made promises of a silky new blog, some quick and tidy tribute to the age of Wordpress, with an array of mind-flipping images and prose to inspire great belches of...
View ArticleHome straights and homecomings
It was Germany that played host to the chilly, damp dregs of my journey around the world by bicycle. But I’d become distracted. In principle, this was still cycle touring, more pertinently I was on an...
View ArticleThe succour of homesickness
Thoughts on returning home after six years around the world by bicycleIn 2008 I was working as a doctor in a hospital in central London and living in a flat nearby. It was comfortable, familiar, a...
View ArticleEurope part 2: Revenge of the vagabond
When the night time temperature in Germany fell to minus thirteen, I wasn’t surprised. When the sun brought a pale haze to the valleys, and when the world stiffened under ice and trees became ghoulish,...
View ArticleFootfall
As I'm winding up this journey I'm getting a touch nostalgic so I thought I'd revisit some experiences from the road. I'm often asked what was the most frightening or dangerous moment during your trip....
View ArticleThe human cost of conflict, northern Afghanistan
Home is an exciting, alarming, and chilly two months away. The homecoming is set, come down if you're free: Friday 19th February at lunch time. Warning - there may be any or all of the following:...
View ArticleWhy adventurers should aim to inspire, not motivate: the trouble with...
Two weeks ago Sarah Outen returned from nearly half a decade of cycling and rowing around the world, half a decade of vigorously roughing it in a manner that puts my similarly spanned escapade to...
View ArticleCurveballs
KazbegiGeorgia is a country of curves. It greets the Black Sea in an arcing coastline; a probing tongue composes the border with Azerbaijan. The Georgian script is fantastically looping, as are the...
View ArticleSand and caravans
North of Termiz the land turned to semi-desert: knuckles of sandstone, punched by the green plumes of weed. After the pale, deathly world of Afghanistan I was coming into the hunk of Uzbekistan that...
View ArticleAn unlikely tourist: travels to Afghanistan
Part one: TajikistanThe Tajik border patrols usually came in trotting formations of boyish men in camouflage gear but this troop were in the black get-up of special ops. My new friend James and I...
View ArticleFugitive faces
Cambodia and The Lake Clinic‘Ladies and Gentlemen, can I have your attention please? We have reached the office where we will all get our VISAs to Cambodia’ ‘Scam!’ crooned someone from the front seats...
View ArticleDogs in fridges
Dengue fever doesn't feature in the advertising campaigns of Thailand’s ministry of tourism. They don’t produce brochures scattered with photos of pallid, sweaty westerners with handlebar-ribs and...
View ArticleDear Iron Rider
The first clue that the Tree In Lodge Hostel in Singapore is a kind of sanctuary for roving cycle tourers is the front door, which has been fitted with a bicycle crank arm for a handle. Inside a...
View ArticleSwings and dives
Photo courtesy of Zoe Danielski, a future professional.High Times in JakartaSitting next to one of Jakarta’s most eminent food critics, at one of the city’s finest restaurants, I dredge up a memory...
View ArticleRising up, back on the street
A three part story this time: Komodo, Lombok and Bali.Komodo castaways‘Um, excuse me, how many tourists have been attacked by the dragons? You know, badly’Confident that everyone was itching to ask our...
View ArticleThe death-defying meesters
A windshield was just a slant of glass until East Timor.Deep, aching regret chased my decision to add myself to the human-stuffing inside this microlet - the local bus - whipping through the clamorous...
View ArticleThe art of Island Bopping
What is that? Long, thin, oblique; the island was a lone speech mark amid the wordless Pacific Ocean. I zoomed in until Googlemaps gave up it's identity - 'New Caledonia'. The name didn't ring any...
View ArticleThe Land of the Misty Sunglasses
A Rainbow Lorikeet munching on an Illawarra Flame Tree, QueenslandSummer days in Queensland are whacked by a hail of meteoric commotions that arrive without warning and linger for as long as traveling...
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