It's only falling water...

"Don't go chasing waterfalls. Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you're used to."

It was poor judgement - opening with a TLC song lyric, and you're probably wondering whether to keep reading or if your time would be better spent on Facebook, or indeed counting your eyelashes. But stick with me - some waterfalls are more than just falling water, and chasing them is the fun part. Someone should have told TLC.

In a world so explored, mapped, mastered, manipulated, plundered and bent out of shape, a brand spanking new discovery is an ever rarer gift, and in a world so exploited, it's a comfort, too. It shouts that maybe we, the spoilers and the wasters, don't know everything, and perhaps there are more hidden secrets out there waiting to be unearthed. It's even better of course when that discovery is a whopper. At three times the height of the Eiffel tower, Yumbilla Falls in the Amazonas region of Peru is exactly that, yet for decades Yumbilla had been shrouded in foliage and disregard. Only in 2007 when it was officially measured did it claim it's long overdue limelight - Yumbilla turned out to be 895 metres high and the 5th highest waterfall in the world, and last year it earned itself a trail. There are no official tours from Chachapoyas but I contacted the American who built the trail having decided I wanted a sneak preview.

For Yumbilla though perhaps 'discovery' is a bit over zealous and should be prefaced by 'international'. The locals always knew about Yumbilla. And that a new discovery was made here didn't really surprise them anyway and why would it? Because in terms of new discoveries, the Amazonas region of Peru has them in spades. Ancient burial sites, fortresses, long isolated tribes, rare bird species, pre-Inca walled cities - the land around Chachapoyas is the secret garden of South America, and it just keeps on kicking up surprises.

Before I took the time to explore the new trail to Yumbilla I booked a tour to Gocta, another lofty cascade at 771 metres and the 15th highest in the world. It wasn't just the waterfall though I had come to admire, the region also boasts a bizarre bird species that the guides would have you believe is lurking in every cranny. The Andean Cock of the Rock - a species whose vaguely comical name is a good fit for it's bizarre appearance. Bright, unapologetic orange with a head that looks out of shape, like a deformed parrot, maybe one that had flown hard and headlong into a tree in the night. They sold knitted take-home versions in the shops in Chachapoyas, but I suspected spotting one was not really that likely - it was all more of a selling point for tours, a tourist lure.

On the tour, under a sky which threatened rain, I was joined by a trio of Tazmanian backpackers. With the usual Peruvian welcome party - a scrawny dog nipping at our heels - we all took strides towards the waterfall, aside from a ten year old and a fat lady who were given ponies. As the latter eagerly mounted the animal I feared the result would be four splayed legs - like when big people jump onto horses in cartoons - and a rotund lady rolling around like a tipped insect, crying out for help and unable to get up, thankfully though the animal managed to teeter along, ruefully. Next to the reluctant beast was an elderly man, who I found out later was 89 years old, and who was bounding along as fast as the horse, perhaps making his point. Already the animal looked closer to death than he did.

As we made ground the world around us slowly morphed into a more prehistoric one, moss and cobwebs smothered the rock faces, fern replaced banana, menacing cliffs faces were projected from the undergrowth and then after an hour or so the vista we were bent on seeped in through the green curtain around the path and then surged magnificently towards us. We stopped in our tracks and watched the water in free fall, our eyes staying with it until it was a fine spray, a mist, then nothing at all. Cameras were raised and then lowered with a measure of despondency and admiration - from here Gocta wouldn't fit into even the widest angled lens, and this was only the bottom section, there was a 230 metre drop which was above the reach of our gaze. In the shadow of the behemoth I ate and I snapped photos and I thought about how measly the stream was at the bottom, embarrassing even, considering the dramatic statement nature had made just above it. And I watched the old man laugh, and heard the pony groan, like a teenager who's been evicted from bed by his mum before school. And everyone apart from the pony and TLC agreed - it was only falling water, but it was worth the effort.

Gocta Falls

The Andean Cock of the Rock in it's natural habitat (a souvenir shop)

Due to a corrupted camera memory card I am saving the story of Yumbilla on this blog until I have sorted it out.

Bordering on insanity

 

Mamacita and Mama Negra 

Some decisions have unwelcome consequences when cycling around the world. The road divides unexpectedly, I opt for the left hand turn, I'm wrong. I spend an hour backtracking. It's a bummer, I'll get over it. But when I arranged for a parcel to be sent from the UK to a town in northern Chile the road I took led to a financial mess and almost a month long stay in a small, dusty town, a place I had planned to be for just two days. My hope is that anyone reading this farcical and horrible tale of woe will give these cowboys, namely DHL, a wide birth in the future.

My mum packed a box of gear I needed for the next stage of the trip and posted it with DHL in Oxford. The box contained two bike tyres, a camera lens and a few small items such as a reading book and a bottle of mosquito repellent. The staff at DHL assured my mum the package would be with me in five days, making the member of staff concerned The World's Greatest Optimist. Over the next few weeks DHL would break several other world records.

• I arrived in San Pedro, checked the tracking number and noted a huge string of "clearance delays" meaning there was some hold up getting it through customs. I wondered if DHL had done anything to resolve this other than type "clearance delay" into a computer. I would soon learn that typing constitutes an ambitious task for DHL.
• I called them up to be told they had emailed me and that they required more information before it could clear customs. I received no such email. There was nothing in my spam filter and I checked DHL had the right email address. There are three possibilities - either this was an oversight (one of around a thousand over the next month), or a barefaced lie, or DHL has not trained it's staff how to send emails. Perhaps they wrote the email but didn't know they had to hit the send button afterwards. Perhaps the computer wouldn't function because of trouble locating the 'on' switch. Perhaps the staff couldn't access the computer room because they spent half an hour pushing a door with a pull sign above it and then gave up. All very realistic possibilities.
• DHL informed me they didn't have all the information they required to clear it through customs. So I re-sent the information that my mum had already provided when she sent the parcel. I then sent an email to NASA informing them that black holes do actually exist on earth. One resides in DHL's main office in Santiago, just behind the water filter. It sucks in email addresses, phone numbers, staff motivation, respect for customers, any sense of corporate responsibility and cute looking puppies and kittens.
• I called day after day to be told that my parcel is being processed but that DHL were powerless to speed it up. They refused to contact customs to move it through.
• Long, boring days passed by with no progress. I checked the tracking number - to my surprise the computer screen told me the box had been delivered. Strange, I had no box. Another oversight or another red and yellow lie? Perhaps it's en route. I called DHL - the information on the computer was wrong they told me. The box remains in customs. Probably safer there than anywhere near the black hole though.
• A week later DHL sent me an email explaining that if I wanted to receive the box I would have to cover the costs. The bill was totalled up and came to a mind boggling 480 US dollars. Understandably I freaked out. This was more than the value of the items in the box and around twice the amount my mum had paid to post it!
• After another two days of pestering I finally got a breakdown. DHL and customs were charging me for - 
• Duties and taxes - not much I can do about that
• A sanitary authorisation and certificate. This was required for the one bottle of mosquito repellent my mum had packed, they were asking for over 100 US dollars for this procedure. My mum had unwittingly posted The Most Expensive Bottle Of Mosquito Repellent On Earth. It better be good stuff. I asked if they or customs could simply remove the item, thereby forfeiting the need for the sanitary inspection and certificate.
  "That's not possible" I was told "But we can get an outside agency to do that".
  "Great" I said. "Let's do that"
  "But it will cost 250 US dollars."
  Amazingly The Most Expensive Bottle Of Mosquito Repellent On Earth was getting more expensive.
• Storage charges. Seeing as though I was desperate to get it posted and they were fucking around for days it seemed slightly unjust, to put it mildly, that I now had to pay them rent for refusing to deliver what I needed. I wondered what it cost them to keep a box in a corner whilst staff occasionally stared at it and shrugged. Perhaps they provided a nice chill out area for my package, made sure the room was well heated and played some ambient music so that my box didn't stress out too much whilst it was waiting to meet me.
• The icing on the cake - A DHL service charge was the final expense expected of me. Wow. If I had received good service would they be charging even more?
• So I debated, reasoned, argued and eventually a supervisor agreed to remove the service charge and bill me 313 US dollars. Still extortionate but they had me over a barrel. Refuse and I'm not going to get anything and I couldn't bring myself to walk away. I had already been waiting now for two weeks in San Pedro and my box had been listening to a Best of the Eighties compilation for three. I asked them to bill me immediately.
• Three days later the bill had still not been emailed despite my frequent phone calls to the DHL office in Santiago. When it did arrive they had upped the cost again to 398 US dollars citing extra storage charges since our agreement about the bill, an agreement in which they had assured me the bill would be the final amount I would have to pay. Apparently my box wasn't comfortable with eighties music and they had to buy in some trip-hop CDs.
• By this stage the DHL staff in Santiago had begun avoiding my calls and they were going straight to voice mail. Was I being paranoid? Perhaps. But when I called through the main line and asked to speak to a specific member of staff, amazingly they were suddenly free. They would often of course leave me on hold for long periods. The on hold message, translated from Spanish, boasted about how choosing DHL is the right choice because they are fast and easy. FAST AND EASY! At this stage I felt like Michel Douglas' character in the film Falling Down. Perhaps I should stroll into a branch of DHL with a rocket launcher?
• I made complaints through the UK DHL website. They haven't contacted me since I lodged those complaints despite assuring that they deal with all such matters promptly. But, as I have learnt, DHL live in an alternative reality in which time as we know it does not constitute the fourth dimension of the universe, it has been replaced by money. 
• At this stage I considered praying to Fed Ex instead "please Fed Ex, deliver me from evil..."
• I am still waiting for my package

I admit a small portion of the blame lies at my door. In hindsight I should have had the parcel posted to a capital city. I should also have had it sent to any country other than Chile which has notoriously strict customs controls. I also know that DHL don't have jurisdiction over Chile's Health Authority or Customs but they did virtually nothing to speed up the process, they made mistake after mistake, they never apologised, they were incompetent, unsympathetic, neglectful, slow and expensive.

I live on less than ten dollars a day. Financially this was a minor catastrophe for me and I started to seriously wonder if it would jeopardise my entire journey. The camera lens and tyres were the only expensive items in the box and if I walked away without them that would cost me dearly as well. Add in the cost of staying for three weeks in an expensive tourist town and all the phone calls to DHL. I felt like I had been viciously mugged and was helpless to act. Well this is my only reprieve....

I am not setting out to damage DHL's reputation for my own petty ends, I just wanted to tell my story and explain to those that follow my journey why I have been held up for so long. However, so that others don't fall into the same trap this blog post will be travelling far and wide, from consumer forums to travel websites and blogs. After all, I have nothing better to do, I'm still waiting for my box. As an international courier service I'm sure DHL understand the power of the Internet to build their brand and market their services. I think they should also taste some of the destructive power of negative publicity on line. I only have three requests for DHL -

• A full and unreserved apology
• An explanation as to why these string of mistakes were made
• A refund - of at least the charges by the sender

I will update you all if they ever make good on those requests, though my optimism has not just been dented, it's been fed into one of those gigantic car crushing machines and is now the size of a matchbox. Thanks very much DHL, which I have decided actually stands for Disastrous and Harrowing Logistics or Deeply Heinous Lame-asses. If you can think of an appropriate translation of the DHL acronym in relation to my recent trauma please leave in the comments section below.

Sorry about the rant, but it was cathartic. If you actually got to the end then here's a present to cheer you up... the funniest complaint letter in the world which made headlines a few years back and was actually written by a friend of a friend. Enjoy.

So I'm in Cusco, about to set off to Machu Picchu and spend far too much of my precious travel money.

Here's a description of an astronomy tour in the Atacama Desert whilst I was in San Pedro about one month ago...

I pitch into the lap of my neighbour before retreating, embarrassed and apologetic. The Toyota had abruptly veered off the paved road onto a pothole-strewn track, one of many that scores the surface of the Atacama Desert around the small town of San Pedro in northern Chile. The orange blaze of the car’s headlights dissects the night, roving over flat plains of sand and rock. Suddenly the silhouette of a solitary figure develops from the blackness, hunched over a wide cylinder.

Our group pile out into the dark, expectant and excited about an astronomy tour in the most renowned star gazing region on earth. The Atacama boasts the quintessential ingredients - altitude, little cloud cover, dry air and a lack of light pollution. As we climb out of the vehicle heads fall backwards and faint sighs of appreciation escape into the night. “Wow, what a sky!” affirms an American. A shooting star flashes across the hazy arch of the Milky Way, the cosmos responding to our tributes.

A broken circle of eight shivering bodies enclose the resident expert and his telescope. “Welcome!” announces Pablo, arms and fingers outstretched, palms tilted skyward as if our guide owns the night’s sky and we are only invited guests to the wonder of nature. Pablo is a small, animated man, mummified in an array of thick over-garments. I stand trembling in my shorts and sandals as the other tourists observe me with the same look of wonder and concern that most people reserve for the very, very drunk.

Saturn is first on the agenda, it's an opener designed to impress. We crowd the telescope, taking it in turns to admire the surreal, off-kilter rings. Pablo describes the visible constellations with the aid of green laser pointer and identifies stars that likely no longer exist; their life long since extinguished but their light still travelling through space.

Everyone has a question, most have many, and Pablo meets each with an understanding nod and an explanation, sometimes then directing lively demonstrations in which volunteers charge around, simulating orbiting bodies and solar eclipses. The curious gratified, Pablo introduces us to a star he has christened The Rastafarian. As I squint at the flek it shimmers green, gold and red and Pablo erupts into a rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘no woman no cry’. He is soon joined by a chorus of voices from the gloom.

We cram back into the Toyota and as we chug off through the rough I peer back over my seat to see a little man and his telescope, drenched in the red of the car’s rear lights, slowly dissolving back into the desert night. Those with window seats aim enlightened eyes at the celestial sphere, the hunger for star gazing not yet sated. A voice complains that the low lying white dot of Venus had sunk into the horizon. “Don’t worry”, comes the reassuring voice of our driver, “she’ll be back tomorrow night”. He smiles at his prediction. “They all will.”

Pedalling across the Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

My breath was a fog, wafting through the roseate light of morning. The temperature on my thermometer had slumped to minus 15° C (5° F)in the early hours and was stubbornly refusing to get much higher whilst my mind was violently and reluctantly dragged backwards to the European winter of 2010 when I set off from the UK amongst similar climes. I had crossed the border into Bolivia and every night I wore my wardrobe to ease the chill, every night the cold created a struggle to find sleep and every morning began with the task of melting solid ice to make coffee. I've spent weeks climbing above and dipping away from the 4000 metre mark but at 4500 metres up in Bolivia, by some mystery of meteorology, the temperature had taken another dive and I have returned to the snow zone. But now at least, I have company. 

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” 
 Jack Keruoac - On The Road

A new character enters my story - Nicky Gooch, a solo cyclist, a professional bike mechanic, a Brummie and a roman candle. We had met before in Patagonia and rode together for a few days in a gaggle of other bikers. After my time-consuming mini-disaster in San Pedro I had been over-taken by many of the cyclists I had passed further south. Nicky was a tall, straggly-haired biker with ginger stubble and a thick midlands accent. We decided to tackle the Lagunas route through Bolivia together and we made a good team. Nicky helped when I freaked out about the state of my bicycle, offering his mechanical skills or doling out reassuring advice. Equally when Nicky, a hypochondriac, developed chest pain I would remind him about all the beer, cigarettes and coffee he consumes and offer him an antacid. 

On our second afternoon in Bolivia a frigid wind gathered momentum until it's howl was all-pervasive and it's thrust marred our progress towards the 5000 metre high Paso de Sol de Manana (pass of the morning sun). By evening all we could do was push our bikes up the sandy track, unable to ride in the gale. Decisions were now shared and some of the usual burden of choice off my shoulders, that night our options were to backtrack fifteen laborious kilometres to shelter or just rough camp where we were, we agreed on the latter.

I shouted to Nicky:"it's going to be a tough night!". 
 "Good job we're f***ing hard then!" Nicky yelled back.

I hoped he was right. The wind was firing across the wilds with the force of a water cannon. With no natural shelter around I began to fear my tent wouldn't hold up to the punishment and as we built a small wall as a protective windbreak using some of the surrounding rocks, all I could think of was sheering tent poles and a crumpled mass of polyester encasing two shivering bodies. Finally, inside my tent I imagined I should be penning my final words to relatives like Captain Scott on his ill-fated journey to the South Pole "These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale...". Instead, at almost 5000 metres above sea level, in freezing, storm force gales, on the slopes of a remote Bolivian mountain, Nicky pulled out his laptop and we watched 'Only fools and horses', a dated British sitcom set in Peckham, South London.

Nicky on the Salar

Cooking up snow for a drink

Nicky pushing up another climb, a salt lake in the backdrop

Bolivia was a collection of rumours and I had only a few, nebulous expectations. I had seen some photos of the traditional garbs - women wearing bowler hats, adopted from the British and a traditional skirt called the pollera, a symbol of pride in being indigenous. I'd also heard enough to be worried about the bad roads and bad drivers though I knew that compared to Chile and Argentina, the price of almost everything would be lower.

Occasionally Bolivia rekindled memories of Africa, although on the surface it was a world away, there were some subtle reminders. Whilst there were plenty of shops, business had moved to the street, African-style. The smell of grilled goat's meat from the roadside vendors drifted through the cities. Bolivia had the typical South American ratio of stray dogs to people (roughly 20000000 : 1) and the outskirts of every sizable town were guarded by the ugly twin bouncers of a litter-strewn wasteland and stinking sewage. The dogs nosed through both. Tragically Bolivia joins the ranks of one of the dirtiest countries on my route so far, alongside the other unfortunates of Syria and Albania. Rubbish has become a feature of the landscape and is as prevalent as the speeding lunatics in unroadworthy vehicles plying Bolivia's main highways. But Bolivia is also full of the things I love most when I travel somewhere new - Bolivia is full of questions.  I tried to decipher strange scents on the street, the contents of the weird drinks brewed by the road and when I felt the eyes of locals taking me in, what they might be wondering. I'm enjoying Bolivia, because it keeps me guessing.

I hadn't done much research on southern Bolivia before we set off so when we rolled over the apex of another hill and a surreal cherry-red lake revealed itself beneath mountains I had no idea I was looking at the famous Laguna Colorada, the Red Lagoon, but I was impressed nonetheless. The sanguine stain of the waters is derived from a type of algae which thrives there. Flamingos waded and dipped their crooked beaks into the red, one or two began their run up to flight, dead ones were scattered over the salt-stained banks. White islands of Borax dissected the red ripples and when jeeps circled the far shore, a vaporous haze kicked up and I felt I had entered a severe, nightmarish netherworld.

The surreal orange/red of Laguna Colorada

A flamingo takes off

And so another character arrives on the scene: Marta - Polish, a solo cyclist and another roman candle. She was also only the second lady I have seen riding solo over the last two and a half years. When we met in a tiny Bolivian highland village she was explaining to a local man that she was starving after cycling all day and that she needed meat... "so do you have a machine gun so I can hunt some llamas?" she asked him with a wink. I liked her immediately. That night Myself, Nicky and Marta all binged on wine, chocolate, rice and chips in the village before setting off in opposite directions, hardy Marta was travelling to the increasingly chilly South.

Marta

Next was the small town of Uyuni and Nicky and I decided on a day off. The night before our rest day we went out in search of fun and happened upon the aptly named Extreme Fun Pub, a place in which the cocktail menu consisted of...

Hasta la vista, llama
The sexy llama bitch
Orgasmo multiple de la llama
The llama's sensual naval
Llama sperm (vodka, chocolate liquor de cafe and ???)
Llama Sutra

The drinks were served in ceramic model of a llama vagina. It was an alcoholic orgy and I think this particular photo of Nicky well illustrates just how obliterated we got...


I admit it, I was worried about cycling the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt lake. My expectations, like the geography of the Salar itself, were high. Ever since I had first glimpsed photos of cycle tourers, beaming and, I imagined, effortlessly gliding across the perfect white sea of salt, I had yearned to ride there, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth. Cyclists talked of "an unforgettable experience", what if the riding the Salar didn't live up to my mental version? What if it was disappointing? What if it was forgettable?

"Look, over there!" shouts Nicky, motioning to a thin belt of white to the West, wedged between the horizon and a featureless expanse of brown earth. My pulse quickens as I think about the fact that where the white begins, it doesn't end for almost 170 km, the Salar has an area roughly the same as the island of Jamaica. Soon we reach a memorial plaque for the victims of an accident in 2008 in which two tourist jeeps collided. The most probable scenario is that both drivers were playing the "Iron Man," travelling head to head and trying to be the last vehicle to deviate from the collision path. Both jeeps were travelling at over 100 km/hr and gasoline containers were attached to the vehicle's fronts. Thirteen died in the crash and ensuing blaze. After finding out these gruesome details, my faith in Bolivian drivers plummeted yet again, and it had been already cruising towards rock bottom, fuelled by my experience on Bolivian roads so far.

Ten minutes later we reach the edge of a mirror - a shallow but vast pool of water perfectly reflecting the azure sky above, a couple of clouds are in a listless drift across the ground and sky. Within the water, snake-shaped mounds of white salt protrude and I guess we can pedal across without getting knee deep in brine. On the other side lies the reason for all the water here, conical piles of salt stretch out in rows, this is where they mine lithium, the Salar holds up to 60% of the world's reserves. We set off, splashing through the salt water and meandering between the shimmering islands, occasionally stopping to heave our entrenched back tyres out of the sodden gunk beneath the water. A minute later blue gives way to an unending honeycomb of bright white salt and we ride along, unconfined, free, ignoring jeep trails and heading just 'across'.

The endless, gleaming jigsaw of wonky hexagons (salt tiles) has to be one of the most impressive sites in the natural world, it's a privilege to ride it and we can't resist camping out on the Salar that night as well. Our timing is perfect, tonight a full moon rides the eastern horizon, illuminating the string of tourist jeeps returning to town, and with only a light breeze I can just detect the faint thrum of their working engines. Fiery and towering tropical cumulus bunch up in the northern sky, alight with the dregs of sunlight and the occasional flash of lightning. For a while we frame photos as the final beams of light are replaced by the white glow of the moon and night claims the Salar. Coldness ends our photography session and we set up camp.

The next day we ride west, our spirited zigzag leaving faint trails and branding the crust of salt as we try to avoid the small holes which penetrate the Salar, linking the surface to an underlying pool of brine. As we travel, a light crunch of the salt beneath our wheels and the soft whistle of the wind travel with us. In recent years a sport, you could say, a tradition, has grown amongst cyclists on the Salar - The Naked Ride-By. Crazy Guy On A Bike, the largest online community of cycle tourers in the world, is full of photos of naked bodies on bicycles on the famous white backdrop. Nicky and I weren't about to let the opportunity pass. We shed our clothes and pedal along, tourist trucks in the distance may spot us but I was relying on the weird, hallucinogenic nature of the terrain to diffuse their fears.

"George, George... is that... a, a cyclist?"
"No darling, you're seeing things."
"It is George! And he's naked!"
"Yes darling, whatever you say. Driver! My wife isn't feeling well, can we go back now please?"


Here's a short video, thanks to Nicky, and some stills...












Bolivia is tough. Travellers regularly suffer the country's many challenges and extremes, they complain of cold, of altitude sickness, of diarrhoea. For me though, it was infertility that was starting to look like the most likely outcome, courtesy of Bolivia's notoriously bad roads. The sandy, washboard-type road surface amounts to back to back speed bumps and it was a painful bounce through sweeping sandy-coloured plains of sun-torched grass on the Altiplano. Nicky's theory went that "if you don't have lumpy balls in Bolivia, you're not riding hard enough". It was on these roads that I inadvertently invented 'The Bolivian Omelette". Here's the recipe -

Put four uncooked eggs into front pannier
Add eggs to a bag of grapes, hoping the grapes will act as mini shock absorbers
Cycle down any unpaved Bolivian road
Collect mix of grapes, runny egg and egg shell
Add llama meat
Fry it all up
Voilà - The Bolivian Omelette

Bolivians living up on the Altiplano have a reputation for being reserved and shy. I don't have any photos of the colourful people we met en route, nobody would consent to their photos being taken. I try not to generalise and stereotype people, I'm sure there are plenty of gregarious Bolivians, but after travelling though so many countries it becomes difficult not to, and I reckon Bolivians do the same. I've cycled through at least three Bolivian villages, the inhabitants of which probably now believe that the majority of British men have matted facial hair, mayonnaise-stained clothes and own an overwhelmingly aroma of onion and feet.

Riding through the Bolivian villages we ran a gauntlet of barking, chasing dogs whilst locals looked on, inanimate, silent and so I figured, complicit in the chase. We sometimes sang "Ghost Town" by The Specials on the way in to these deserted villages, even those locals who own shops or hostels need to supplement their income by working in the fields so it was often impossible to buy basic supplies or find a bed until the evening.

Gradually the terrain flattened out, women worked the fields, brightly coloured shawls tight across their back supporting mystery loads. A few returned my waves, but not many. By six pm I had another companion, a dark shadow-cyclist, pushed into the rough to my right by the low sun. At breaks Nick and I shared tales from the road, we sang bad eighties rock ballads and sang badly to better eighties rock ballads, we did impressions of some of the frightfully posh and endearingly naive Gap Year students called Rupert or Tarquin we've met along the way. And then we made it to Ururo.

Social protest is the traditional way of gaining government attention in Bolivia and the day we entered Ururo coincided with a 72 hour strike by The Workers' Union of Bolivia (COB) whilst the physicians and other health professionals were continuing their indefinite strike and daily demonstrations against changes in working conditions. The UK foreign office site stated:

"There are currently several ongoing social conflicts in Bolivia and blockades may occur along the main roads without notice. Due to the risk of violence, you should never try to cross a blockade."


Finally - La Paz, which can boast perhaps the most dramatic entrance to any city in the world. As we cycled through the slum district of El Alto, suddenly to our right, La Paz jumped out of the trees. Loose folds of city were awkwardly sprawled over the sides of several mountains. The shiny tin roofs of the houses glinted in the midday sun and we freewheeled into the mayhem of another enticing and animated South American city.

La Paz

After a 17 day ride with only one day off, La Paz was a welcome break, and because one day it would be nice to father children, I decided to take a whole week off Bolivia's bumpy roads. Next I ride past Lake Titicaca and to Cusco in Peru to catch up with Tom, an old friend from my time in Liverpool, before visiting the famous Inca ruins at Machu Picchu and then rattling through the rest of Peru.

Finally here's a couple of links... an article I wrote about a border crossing from Argentina to Chile in an online magazine called Sidetracked and an interview with a US based magazine called Sierra.

A waft of frigid mist drifts across the splintered wooden crosses, cloaking their detail, and a shiver ripples through my arms and down my back as I watch their shapes fade threateningly back to life. They were erected as memorials to the backpackers and locals who have plummeted to their death, and the abyss lies just a few feet from where I'm standing.

On first consideration it might seem surprising that people still die whilst cycling the North Yungas Road in Bolivia, a road eagerly referred to by its more popular and dread-inducing monikor – El Camino de la Muerte, Spanish for ‘The Death Road’. If a person were going to be a little more careful than usual, I reason, surely it would be at a location in which ‘Death’ was half the title. But, teeth chattering in the sub zero bite of 4700 metres above sea level at the very start of this now infamous freewheel, I change my mind.

The name it seems is just an invitation to push the boundaries of good sense and later bath in the glory of having nearly died, but not. This truth emerges as I catch glimpses of the fired up faces of the bikers, creased and flushed with surging adrenaline, as they rocket down the unsealed track next to a chiasmic drop which flanks the Death Road for most of its course, the reason behind all the crosses and the well-deserved reputation.

I’m here on my loaded touring bike, cleats detached for this ride, and in the midst of a throng of bikers who have opted instead to join an organised tour. In all seventeen companies now sprinkle the Death Road with bikes and riders and the setting is as staggering as the premise of riding it. Cut into the jungle-clad mountains of the Yungas, just one hour from Bolivia’s most populous city of La Paz, the foreboding rock-strewn track twists an almost continuous descent for over forty miles. Whilst rallying down over three and a half thousand vertical metres, riders travel not only from altitude to lowland but from cloud filled cold to humid tropical heat and from unsullied fear to, fingers crossed, celebration and relief.

After peering tentatively over the unguarded road’s edge and briefly marveling at the sheer cliff face and remote tree tops beneath, I wonder whether the Paraguayan prisoners of war who constructed this road in the 1930s had any inkling at the time of its eventual fate. Over the years the Death Road has claimed thousands of lives and is now a feared and notorious but popular attraction along the deeply rutted Gringo Trail of South America.

Inside the hostels of La Paz myths concerning the Death Road abound. A car flying over the edge only one week ago was the current star of the rumour mill, batted around mostly by a bunch of Israelis just back from a tour, one nursing a broken wrist after he had thrown himself from his wayward bike before it had thrown him into the jungle. To find out some hard facts, I decide to ask the experts. ‘The risks are very real. And this road is not the place to cut corners.’ Proclaims Derren Patterson of Gravity, the company home to the original posse of guides who dreamt up the ride back in 1998 and who still boast an unrivalled safety record.‘The interest for most companies is to sell the tour as cheaply as possible because cheap backpackers often only look at the price tag without thinking that in Bolivia there are no standards for activities like this.’ Cut corners, it emerges, come in the shape of re-welded frames, underpaid guides, cheap parts and even fake brake pads.

Researching the road’s murky past only led me to further question my decision to join these thrill junkies. The Death Road was the site of Bolivia's biggest road accident when, in 1983, a bus carrying over one hundred passengers hurtled over the precipice and tumbled into oblivion. By the mid-90s it was official once it was christened The World's Most Dangerous Road following a review by the Inter-American Development Bank who estimated that 200 to 300 people careered off its edge every year and that, per mile, there were more fatalities here than on any other road on earth. Not long after this unsavory honour was bestowed on the North Yungas Road guides and backpackers arrived in force, keen for a slap of adrenaline and a photo on Facebook, complete with a boastful caption. By 2006 the riders had it almost all to themselves once the construction of a new thoroughfare to the jungle was completed, taking with it most of the traffic. Amongst the cyclists who have dared not all have reached the small town of Coroico near the finish line. In the last twelve years eighteen"I survived The World's Most Dangerous Road" t-shirts have gone spare.

A view from the upper reaches of the Death Road

It's near the top of the descent that resides the most hair-raising section. At this altitude clouds frequently invade the forest, obscuring both the three metre wide sliver of rugged terrain ahead and the vertiginous drop immediately beside it. I watch as the wind drives dense whirls of cloud into the foliage to reveal an exaggerated and menacing vista, tempting and deterring the gathered riders about to take the plunge. Rows of impossibly deep Vs made up of converging mountainsides stretch away, becoming ever more blurred by a distant and sullen murk. Jungle hugs every bulge and whim of the mountains; beneath the cliffs it hides the twisted and rusting metal carcasses of hundreds of trucks and cars. As well as the magic of the precipice, it's exhilarating too being so enclosed in nature.

As I begin the descent an internal monologue kicks up, a perhaps predictable "DEATH road... be careful!” on repeat. But soon another voice takes over, going something like "YEAAAAAAH! I'm riding the DEATH road! WOOOOOOOOH!" My enthusiasm though is soon subdued as I begin wobbling wildly in the aftermath of a collision between my front tyre and a fist sized chunk of rock. I pull swiftly over to the right as a fleet of Konas and their hooting jockeys rampage past, each sensibly screaming “Coming left!” as they go. As a one day aspiring father I start to wish that I too had suspension. Throughout these upper reaches water patters onto the rocky road surface from high above, only the truly courageous, skillful or imbecilic veer to avoid getting wet; I am none of the above and receive a sopping for my cowardice. After each hairy switchback another huge curl of terror-inducing trail reveals itself along with one very clear impression - roads do not belong here.

The soundtrack of the Yungas doesn't seem to fit with the chilling vista, a timid and quirky blend of squawks, buzzes and clicks attest to the richness of life that lurks in the nearby greenery. Underneath and barely discernible there’s another layer of sound - the trickle and gush of hidden jungle streams. At times it’s tempting to wonder at the scenery, to glance behind, to search for the source of that strange jungle sound, and then the inner voice shouts ‘DEATH ROAD!’ and I reign in my curiosity and refocus my attention on my juddering bicycle and the ever present peril to my left. Today, I remind myself, I’m careful. Every so often someone is going to do their best impression of ET going home and I have promised my mum I will not be the next abyss-bound silhouette.


At one of the viewing points en route I skid to a halt and begin chatting to a gaggle of hyperventilating but for now stationary bikers and as I discover, The Death Road draws all sorts. ‘My son challenged me to give it a go!’ a pudgy middle aged man confides with a nervous grin, now bathed in perspiration and perhaps questioning the wisdom of accepting a dare from a sixteen year old. Roughly twenty five thousand riders enjoy the buzz and bragging rights every year, from masters of downhill to slack fast food junkies and from multinational gangs of backpackers to honeymooning couples, competing for glory. The tour groups issue their riders with elbow pads and helmets, as we clamber back onto bikes I can't help but consider what the protective kit and their human contents would look like after a hundred metre free fall and a jungle canopy crash-landing, but to avoid an embarrassing panic attack, I try hard not to. Behind a van trails our group of riders so that the guides can assist in case of accident, or get a front seat view if one of their clients flies a short cut to the finishing altitude.

Towards the lower reaches I relax a little more and gravity spins my wheels ever faster. The temperature rises, clouds evaporate, multi-hued butterflies dance beneath my handlebars and fetching purple flowers and banana plantations fill my peripheral vision. Then all of a sudden I'm coasting through a village and towards a rumbling river, above birds of prey glide languorously in low loops and Bolivia welcomes me back from the edge of reason with beaming children and ogling women festooned in bowler hats and traditional pollera skirts of shocking pink. I spot the father of the teenager, his face now as iridescent as the skirts but also alight with jubilation. I exhale my relief knowing that I too have made it, although I’m concerned for my brake pads, they are now at death’s door. The bikers swiftly pile into town and just as rapidly into bars where they high five and down celebratory beers. Others pull wheelies but most don't feel the need to show off any more than donning their "I survived..." t-shirts. A quick body count by a guide confirms that, this time, everyone gets one.

There's a subset of cyclists who enjoy climbs, I'm one of them, and from the off my inner masochist wasn’t entirely happy with the prospect of spinning downhill for hours. Where's the payback? I needed to know. Where the pain to go with the gain? Fortunately for the guilty, the Death Road has another currency - you pay for the freewheeling with fear and there’s now no doubt in my mind - it’s more than a fair price.

But of course for the vast majority the Death Road will fail to fulfill its eponymous promise, in fact for me the opposite was true and I finished the ride not just giddy with relief, but fiercely alive. They could change the title, somehow though, I don't think it would have quite the same draw.




After escaping the action of La Paz I headed west to the shores of Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America and the highest lake of it's size in the world at a lofty 3812 metres above sea level. The road around the lake holds me tight to it's shore, often just a few faded green fields melting into the lake water lie between us. Further out, amongst the passive blue ripples, rise the giant mounds of islands that from a distance resemble the humps of huge sea monsters frozen in time. Beyond the islands, and the invisible opposing shore, hover snowy mountain tops, their bases lost in a grey-blue blur which hangs mysteriously over the lake.

Copacabana is another popular stop on the Gringo Trail, a 'path' that I swore to abandon once I had made it as far as Cusco in Peru. A wave of drug dealers, gangs of Israelis revelling in their post army exodus, overly assertive restaurant touts and chocolate selling hippies surge through the cobbled streets. I sniff out the cheapest hostel in town and set about trying to repair my only boots which have a jagged gash which now reveals half the sole. South Americans have much smaller feet and finding replacements my size has been impossible. Tomorrow I want to escape the masses and trek across Sun Island.

The tree scattered hills behind Copacabana slowly deflate behind the frothy, parabolic wake of our boat and the expanding blue of Lake Titicaca. I sit hunched up, hugging my knees to my chest and shivering on the open top deck of a boat heading for Sun Island, one of the lake's largest and famed for the array of Inca ruins pockmarking the rocky terrain. I am engulfed in different languages, I recognise German, Hebrew, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Amongst the assembled tourists is a German chewing coca leaf and a couple of French tourists who have embraced Bolivian culture to the extent that they are adorned in the loud colours of the traditional knit-wear. I smile secretly to myself as I imagine them wondering into the arrivals terminal at some major European airport, still festooned in the traditional garbs, perhaps also with alpaca fleece coats and pan pipes.

We chug along beside the southern end of the island. The choppy, tight undulations of the terrain have a wave-like quality, the land seems like an elevated, drab version of the lake itself. Spiky succulents sprout out of the rocky slopes and shore side wooden fishing boats break into a wobbly dance as they meet the churning wake of our craft.


We walk from the beaches up the rocky path with a guide who has a crooked toothless grin and a cow boy style hat, as large black and white birds of prey patrol the sky above. He takes us to an alter, the original sacrificial table used by the Incas when they killed virgins on special ceremonies. He talks us through the presumed details of the brutal process, the murder and subsequent removal of the heart. To demonstrate he raises a clawed hand enclosing the imaginary heart fresh from the virgin's chest, the circle of gasping tourists fix excited and appalled eyes on the hand.


Afterwards I set off with Coni, a Swizz girl I met on the boat. For three hours we walk the path as it arcs and dips over the rolling spine of the island, the dark blue view of the lake never escapes my eye line. As I amble past terraced fields and watch the gulls gliding from lake to shore, I admire the tranquillity of the setting, impressed that it's now a world away from the violent and dramatic distant past we have been privy to. 



The train seemed the most time-conservative way to reach Machu Picchu. I take a seat opposite an American couple from Colorado who chat away in that relaxed and familiar way that Americans have when they strike up conversation with strangers. A little later an older American lady sits down next to me, a conversational non-sequitur who rambles through topics, from the people she has met with very large feet to what happens to horses when they get a cold. The train tracks coddle the bank of the Urubamba river, frothy and eye-catching. With the passing minutes the forest grows thicker, trees overhang the far river bank, their creepers and vines dangling into the water like a congregation of still and pensive fishermen. The train finally stops at Agua Calientes and I step onto a platform full of jostling, confused tourists and hotel porters.

Crowded buses make runs up the hill to Machu Picchu but I feel a little guilty about taking the train instead of the trekking option so decide to redeem myself by hiking for an hour uphill to reach it. In the morning heat it's a sweaty battle up, but when I emerge from the jungle foliage and Machu Picchu shouts it's presence, I stop dead and appreciate the enormous landscape which is swimming in sunlight and throngs of sightseers. The feeling is akin to walking onto a stage and the curtain being drawn to reveal the audience because surrounding the ruins runs a huge circle of the blunt, verdant cones of even grander mountains.


After joining the shuffling hoards, and trying to covertly listen to knowledgeable tour guides, I make it back to Agua Calientes where I am chuffed to catch up with Tom, a good friend from my time in Liverpool, along with his wife Thea and her parents. That night the town is alive with outlandish costumes, noisy drunks and dancing backpackers. The occasion is a saint's day, although as I have learnt of late, the Peruvians will take any excuse for a fiesta.


So in contrast to my usual type of blog piece, this month I decided to write three short pieces about popular tourist activities in Bolivia and Peru. For the next post expect my more usual tales of adventure from a remote part of Peru as I cycle one of the toughest routes so far, taking in over five passes each in excess of 5000 metres altitude and hitting some notoriously bad roads on which I will climb higher in one week than from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest. Once through the central highlands I'll join the coast and scoot along to Lima where I plan to visit projects looking at TB control in the shanty towns around the capital as well as a project which is focused on the eradication of tapeworm infection. I will report back next month.

Taking a break towards the top of a 5100 metre (16,700 feet) high pass in the central Peruvian highlands

San Pedro & The Valley Of The Moon - tick
Uyuni & The Salar - tick
La Paz & The Death Road - tick
Copacabana & Lake Titicaca - tick
Cusco & Machu Picchu - tick

I wouldn't have missed any of it, but the Gringo Trail comes with a price, and not just a financial one. The obvious path was becoming lugubrious and for weeks I had been mentally setting it against the lure of an untrammeled, exotic alternative I imagined must be out there, somewhere. And I was getting fed up with the people who inhabit these tourist-laden towns, who so often see each bus load of newcomers as just a fat wodge of the local currency, and who address me in brusque tones and dole out petty reprimands -

"No, you can't charge your IPOD here!"
"Use an outside bin, not that one!"
"We don't have towels here!"
"Take your hands off my crotch, I'm a married man!"

OK, so maybe not the last one, but I had made a decison - I didn't want to wend, zombie-like, to the next place the guide book told me to. I wanted to be the dissident ant in the army, breaking from the hoards to forge my own, more original route. At any rate, if you have arrived into Cusco from Bolivia, the Gringo trail hits a crossroads. Some will head to the Canyon country around Peru's second city of Arequipa, some will take a side trip to the jungle, others will travel through the central highlands to Lima and more still will venture to the desert coast and Pacific Ocean, edging towards Lima and maybe stopping on the way to fly over the world famous Nazca lines.

In 2010 a British couple, also cyclists, were sat at a computer in Peru, glancing intermittently at their GPS and scouring Google Earth for an adventure to sate their wanderlust. They crafted a route that meandered south from the Cusco region through a remote section of the high Andes and would hopefully deliver them into the depths of the Cotahuasi Canyon. The Pikes completed the mountain passage and went on to author one of my favourite websites, Andes By Bike, which describes the finer points of this monster excursion into the unknown, the most difficult route detailed on their website. The numbers and the practical details they provided spoke of the challenges involved -

• Over 130 km of cycling at over 4500 metres
• Five passes in excess of 5000 metres
• 9160 metres vertical metres climbed in one week (greater than from sea level to the summit of Mount Everest)
• Road conditions frequently poor, gradients can be very steep

For the first few days out of Cusco I oscillated wildly between a bare and windy domain at high altitude to hot tropical valleys. In the flourishing lowlands I felt for the first time that I was back in the tropics as I climbed past wooden huts partly hidden by burgeoning fruit trees which owned papaya, banana, oranges and more. I stared incredulously down upon the city of Abancay, an amorphous brown smudge, wondering where else but in Peru could you look down at a settlement that lies a full kilometre and a half below you. 

As I rested towards the top of another pass, devouring a delicious Chirimoya, or custard-apple, (nothing like an apple, tastes a bit like custard), a familiar and hairy face rolled up. It belonged to Mikael, a Frenchman I had met in La Paz, 1000 days into his world tour on a recumbent bicycle. We cycled off together, Mikael on his weird contraption stealing the limelight and getting terrorised by dogs far more than me, to a canine his legs were probably like rotating steaks on a spit roast. A couple of days later we came to my junction. Mikael's stretch of tarmac eased through the valley, my earthy trail zigzagged into mystery and it was here I waved goodbye to Mikael, to smooth asphalt, to shops and to amenities, to gringos, to cosy beds and warm nights, to caution and comfort and convenience and perhaps when it was all gone and I'd finished pining for it, perhaps I would find something more.

Mikael, the laid back Frenchman

Andean Geese

Ariel view of grazing llama

Cycling the deepest canyon on earth

Sitting on the precipice beside Sipia falls

Riding in the shadow of the volcano Coropuna

Turkey vultures feeding on the carcass of a seal washed up on the Pacific coast

Closing in on the 4890 metres summit of Punta Olimpica, The Cordillera Blanca Range, Peru

I wake to a harsh light spilling into my tent. As I peer out into the night there's a glare of torchlight and the shape of a figure just discernible through the gloom, shuffling towards me. I take a glance at my watch - it's 3 am. The light relents as a dirtied face appears at the tent flap. There are gaps in his teeth and a smear of grime across his forehead. He grunts whilst his roaming eyes appraise me and my belongings. I poke my head out of the inner tent to greet the stranger and meet a millisecond of disbelief followed by the biggest sinking feeling of my life - in his hand is a revolver. The clip is half out and displaying exactly four shiny gold bullets. He inserts the clip into the gun and uses the weapon to beckon me out of my tent. In the dead of night, miles from the nearest town, alone in rural Peru, heart slamming into my chest wall - I follow.

Two weeks before red and white flags flapped in a light breeze as I pedalled through a molten stream of traffic and harried pedestrians sloshing through Lima's clamorous streets. The apparent outpouring of national pride over independence day was not all it seemed - flags on public buildings and businesses over the independence weekend are legally required in Peru and those that don't feel sufficiently Peruvian to display the national strip pay a fine. My two weeks in Lima had been spent writing for magazines, visiting tropical disease experts and a community TB project, dancing, more dancing, engrossing myself in the Olympics on the tele and couchsurfing. The Games were still in mid sway in my home country but I was done with city living and ready for the hills.

Between spells of volleyball and table tennis on TV I had been engrossed in my map trying to decide how I was going to get to country 32 - Ecuador. At one stage my plan was to load my bike onto a self built Balsa wood raft and row down a tributary of the Amazon, the adventure I eluded to in my last post, but there were too many obstacles to overcome - the plan is on hold. Eventually a befittingly titled mountain pass caught my eye - Punta Olimpica or 'The Olympic Peak' - if I couldn't watch the Olympics in my home country then this would have to do. It promised to be an epic climb up to 4890 metres and the pass traversed the venerated Cordillera Blanca - the highest mountain range on earth outside the Himalayas. I would get up close and personal with Huascaran - Peru's highest peak, and afterwards it would be a freestyle through Peru's mountainous back country - known locally as La Sierra.

I zipped along the coast to the soundtrack of "GRINGO!" - Peruvians suffer from a sort of 'gringo tourettes' which comes with a silly grin. Soon I met my junction to the hills, the new road was immediately swallowed up by a dense field of sugar cane. Several hours later I was spat out into chili growing country - the hills were orange and iridescent with the drying vegetables. The road climbed continuously from near sea level to over 4000 metres, crossing the Cordillera Negra. The ascent was paved but whilst my legs coped well, my bike suffered and I had seven broken spokes in three days - the salty sea air had probably inflicted the damage. But Peru offered a chance to redeem my lost time through Lorry Surfing. It was a game I played in Ethiopia - a slow moving truck crawls past you up the incline and, with a combination of luck and skill, you grab onto the back and your legs get a break for as long as your arm can take the strain.

Chili country

In the evenings I sometimes joined Peruvians to watch TV in restaurants, one of which had a frowning Jesus and crucifix on one wall and a photo of a pouting model in a g-string decorating a calender on the other. Peruvians might seem outwardly demure but they enjoy a bit of titillation as much as anyone. From about six every night the most popular TV show in Peru begins - 'The war of Girls and Boys' - from what I can gather it's a rowdy competition between a clique of sexy, gyrating girls in hot pants and a posse of tanned, peck juddering hunks. Nobody looks particularly Peruvian and regardless of the outcome of each round, the girls launch into an explicit display of booty shaking to dance music whilst the boys whoop and throw in some pelvic thrusts in response. Meanwhile the young and the elderly throughout Peru are glued to their screens.

Eventually I hit the Cordillera Blanca and began the climb up to Punta Olimpica, past glaciers where huge chunks of ice broke free, fell and smashed into rocks below, past frozen waterfalls and past the snow covered colossus of Huascaran. The civil engineer must have been on some strong medication when he or she planned a route across this range. After a month on the coast I once again had to pedal through the pounding headache of altitude sickness, but the views of Huascaran eased the pain - next to me was the highest point in all of the tropical regions on our planet, and one with a violent past. On the 31st of May 1970 an earthquake rocked this region and an avalanche half a mile wide and a mile long rushed down the side of Huascaran, burying nearby towns and killing more than 20,000 people.

Huascaran

Riding in the shadows of glaciers

After roughing it I was craving a bed and decided to chance my luck by asking at a village church where a cheery bunch of Italian missionaries were there to greet me. Without even finishing my well rehearsed request I was ushered inside and given a tour, offered a shower and guided to the dinner table. Over the meal a young missionary enquired

"Are you a Catholic?"
"I'm afraid not"I replied
"But you are a Christian?"
"Oh yes"

Yes! YES! What the hell was I thinking? I'm not sure why I didn't just confess to my secular ways instead of unashamedly delivering a barefaced lie to God's dedicated flock, but I suspect my brain had been bypassed - I blame my rumbling stomach and my worn out legs. Together they colluded and, in some sort of internal mutiny fuelled by the paranoid vision of another night of noodles in my tent, they had managed to power my lips and vocal cords.

Everyone stands, turns to face the Crucifix and begins to voice a prayer in unison. Crap. I don't know the words. They'll find me out for sure. OK, relax, relax. Just mime or mumble or something. Then silence. Everyone is conversing internally with the Lord, so am I. Please God don't let them ask where I go to church or my favourite bible passage. And don't send me to hell for lying to Christians. Some holy call and response stuff follows, I feign solemn ecclesiastical meditation as best I can, wishing it over. The sign of the cross is almost my undoing as I go right instead of left. Son of God before the Holy Ghost you idiot!

We sit and dig into soup followed by two potatoes and lettuce. These Christians don't eat much, I think, although I'm not too sure what I had expected. I suppose I thought that missionary status aside, being Italian they may have got round to annexing a pizzeria onto the nave of the church. Alas there is not an anchovy, a slab of focaccia or even a clump of fettuccine in sight. Being British and thus eternally afraid of appearing rude, I opt not to ask for more, even though I usually consume about twice as much grub as a non-cyclist and by the looks of them, eight times as much as an Italian missionary. Only one of the bunch doesn't fit the skinny mould - he's enormous - it's perplexing. To stave off hunger I try to figure out why. Perhaps he's just arrived, I theorise. Perhaps he's been here a good while but was previously the fattest man on earth and had to be airdropped into Peru by chopper flying priests. Perhaps after one too many lettuce heavy meals he resorted to eating a Peruvian choir boy or a less dedicated missionary and nobody has noticed.

After dinner my stomach and legs team up once again. Somehow my digestive system has gotten wind of the fried chicken place a few doors down from the parish and has convinced my legs to take action. On the pretence of getting supplies for tomorrow, I'm off to top up on calories. I duck into the restaurant and swiftly order a piece of chicken the size of at least two of the missionaries and devour with gusto. Hood up and I'm out, I think I've made it without being spotted and deemed, rightfully, an ungrateful and greedy liar. I'm full of guilt and chicken. The chicken was good though, maybe even worth a little hellfire. The next night I spot another parish and give an assured knock. Again the priest shows me to my room, asking  
"And will you join us later for food and prayer?"
"Of course I will" I respond, adding, in English, "And God bless you father".
Hell hell hell, I'm going to hell.

God's wrath not yet evident, I wave goodbye and pedal into La Sierra. The last team of generous and thoughtful missionaries had noticed holes in my socks and I left with a welcome bag of new clothes and food. I would need lots of the latter - Peru was about to kick my ass...


At a glance the graph above could represent the heart tracing of a patient about to head to the mortuary or the polygraph of a British politician. In fact this is a graph of altitude verses distance from the Peruvian coast to Cajamarca, the city from where I'm writing this post - a distance of just over 1000 kilometres, most of which was on dirt roads. From hot tropical valley floors Peru's roads flung me dramatically up to empty mountainous grassland and down again. Climbs sometimes lasted two full, exhausting days. In the valleys I gorged on mangoes, got savaged by sand flies and got noticed by everybody - few, if any, tourists choose this route. I rode along dishing out Buenos Dias's to every stranger on my path, who's faces worked frowns as they contemplated the puzzle of why this gringo would choose to ride here. Children asked - "are you from the jungle?" - I'm obviously from far away, and so is the jungle. Their world geography ends at Peru's Amazon basin.

There was no clarity to this world, La Sierra was a haze. Colours were pastel, bleached and subdued with the exception of the Jacaranda which raged an angry violet in the day and lulled to a deep soothing purple in the evening. The odd steaminess made the countryside feel lazy and relaxed but I could never quite join the tranquillity - my sliver of track rode the mountains like a dolphin rides the surf. But I was content in Peru's little visited back garden. Jumbles of livestock shambled past, goaded on by women, sometimes scattering in a panic if I rode past too quick. The men were forever building new homes for relatives and friends, lumping mud into moulds and drying out their new bricks in the sun. Watermelons were lined up in broad rows whilst cobs of corn dried on balconies and women's clothes were hung out to dry, the loud luminescent pinks and greens of the fabric I have seen in combination only once before in an illegal techno rave in a field near Oxford in the mid 90s.

As I eased into the upper reaches of a climb in the late evening fireflies danced around my handlebars and layers of land were exposed beneath me - it was a strange apparition. In amongst the mishmash of interlocking valleys I could still look down upon the spot where I had lunch yesterday, the town where I bartered for mangoes and the field I slept in the previous night. Tomorrow morning I would finish my climb and drop over two vertical kilometres, back into the unabating fever of the tropical lowlands, and then tomorrow afternoon the battle against gravity would begin all over again.

Lights from a small mountain settlement twinkle in the dusk

The slow going in the Sierra left me low on money and I was forced to limit my spending to the equivalent of 60 pence a day, all of which was invested in packet noodles and fruit. From concerned parents I managed to earn three mangoes for examining a three month old baby with a rash, medical examinations for food was a new and promising angle, but my legs were destroyed from all the uphill work, I was desperate for a shower and I was growing ever more hungry. Men continually offered me free lifts in pickups, and I was getting closer to saying yes. As I passed through a small town a young girl was sent over to me by her mother to offer me food and I was soon digging into a pile of rice, lentils and meat. A bag of fresh fruit was a gift 'for the road' and then even a little money was handed my way so that I would make it to Cajabamba - I owed it to them now to keep pedalling. Gradually the roads got better, the gradients more amiable, the children cleaner and the offers of lifts less frequent as I neared Cajabamba - a proper town.

So why cycle every inch? I pondered the question as I pedalled through shabby litter-strewn mining towns that came after the Sierra, places that on the surface there was no logical reason to ride through. Surely I could just buy the odd bus ticket to get me through the drab and dull bits? Nobody would know. I don't though, and I have my reasons. Mainly it's because I don't trust myself. If one day the weather was so bad that I allowed myself a bus ride, perhaps next time I would find a less reasonable excuse, perhaps I would be too tired, perhaps "I just don't feel like it". If I break my rule I risk opening the flood gates to buses and taxis and trains. Don't fancy Honduras? Well maybe I'll just fly to California. Back in 2010 I set off on an adventure to see the world, warts and all. I have never wanted to career through only the airbrushed, pretty bits that I have to share with a million other tourists. I want to form a more authentic impression of our planet. The detritus, the waste and the problems, especially when industry and communities are slammed together, are all part of the true picture and can offer insight into the often awkward balance of man and nature. If I have a choice of course I would elect for the scenic ride but if I stick to my rule and cycle every inch then that choice doesn't always exist, and in a way, I think that's fortunate. Finally it's because I ride for a sense of achievement. When I get to northern Alaska I can rejoice in the knowledge that I made it there from southern Argentina under my own steam.

Fear is everywhere in this world. Everywhere I go I am warned of the 'bad people' who are out to get me. In Peru in particular it seems these boogie men are everywhere and time and again I hear "¿No tienes miedo"- "Are you not afraid?" Banditry certainly exists here, in fact of all the cyclists I know who have taken a flight home without the bike they brought with them, many returned from Peru. In Patagonia I even met a cyclist who showed me a little dink on his bicycle frame - it was from where a bullet had ricocheted off as he tried to escape from bandits on the coast. Locals have plenty of stories too and form rural patrols - The Rondas Campesinas - a band of men who I met on the road who fill in for the police. A Ronda is basically a cross between a country bumpkin and a vigilante, if you can imagine that.

Fear is so often misdirected and an incident on the road to Cajamarca reminded me of this. A fine drizzle was falling onto the tarmac. Up ahead the road turned sharply to the left. As I edged uphill towards the curve a rickshaw came careering round the corner. With too much velocity coming round the hairpin and on a wet surface he lost control and the vehicle sped off the tarmac and crashed into a hedgerow, flipping onto it's side. I went to help the injured -  a pregnant lady passenger with a nose bleed, the careless idiot at the helm was unhurt.

If the accident had occurred thirty seconds later than it did, if I had finished my morning porridge a little quicker, if I had not bothered to stop and check my tent was well packed on the back of the bike, the hedge would have suffered less and I may have been the point of collision. So forget kidnapping and ransom, terrorist bombs and shootings, grizzly tropical diseases, high speed air crashes and the like. The sombre fact is that of the Brits who die from 'unnatural' causes abroad, most lose their lives in Road Traffic Accidents.

Back to the stranger in the night...

My brain is telling me to explain, but my mouth is dry and can't form the words. There had been a storm. When I spotted the lonely house on the hill with a roof that jutted out beyond the walls, I knew it was the only shelter I would find. I had knocked and nobody had answered, I had waited and nobody had come. Finally I had decided to camp by the house, presuming it empty, the gun wielding man introduced himself as Pedro and told me that he was the tenant. Smiling now he ushered me into his home and put the gun aside. I had scared him, apparently. Last month an armed man had appeared at his front door. The bandit had levelled his gun to Pedro's temple. The stranger stole everything in his small and modest home, he had invested in the gun afterwards for protection. He was a miner, he told me. It made sense - around the hills I had noticed small tunnels dug into the rock, these weren't commercial mines, the companies were digging for gold the other side of the pass, this side was a free-for-all. Pedro's family lived in the city of Trujillo a few hundred kilometres away, he worked at night in the tunnels hunting for gold, hence his swarthy face and late return home. He gave me a steaming mug of cocoa and some rice and briefly disappeared. A minute later he was back and unfurled a piece of cloth on the table, two gleaming gold nuggets were displayed for which he told me he will sell in the city for 112 Soles a gram (roughly 30 pounds). I thanked him for the cocoa and rice with far too much enthusiasm, because that's not really what I was thanking him for.

A Rainbow Lorikeet munching on an Illawarra Flame Tree, Queensland

Summer days in Queensland are whacked by a hail of meteoric commotions that arrive without warning and linger for as long as traveling bullets. It doesn't drizzle here, the build up to a downpour takes seconds. A drop or two bedew our panniers, and then it pelts down with the gusto of a power shower. The patter from falling sheets of rain quickly overtakes our voices, and minutes later dies a sudden death as spears of sunlight sear into our rain coats. There’s more: territorial magpies swoop and cockroaches the size of hamsters smash into our head-torches so that nights resound with our yelps which mingle with the screeches and beating wings of fruit bats as prodigious as any of Tolkien's creations. There’s a cacophony of cicadas too and the simian guffaw of kookaburras which explodes without warning from the forest into which the sun abruptly plummets, within minutes blackness consumes the day. Australia has us on tenterhooks, we’re always wondering where the next drama will spring from.

A surprise in the plug socket

I’ve cycled in hotter, wetter, more defeating places, but amid the unrelenting fever of Colombian jungles or Ethiopian deserts concerned citizens didn’t stop to exhort me to abandon my journey and fly home immediately, in Australia scores of passers by do so, indirectly, each day. Partly this might be because Claire exudes a rosy hue - more from exercise than from the sun - but which inspires people to take action. The manner in which we are warned about the perils of a bike ride through Queensland in the summer is akin to the response sensible parents might offer the six year old who demands a Black Mamba for Christmas. The assumptions are clear - you have no idea what you’re doing, say their cautious pauses between probing questions, their sympathetic head tilt. You haven’t done even the most cursory research, have you? They list the tribulations to highlight our folly – always the heat, the rain, the insects, sometimes the dengue fever; they compare Queensland in December to a swamp, and inevitably they finish with the daily lesson : ‘It’s not the heat that’ll get you, it’s the humidity’. Occasionally they dive in with bare faced sarcasm: ‘Picked a nice cool time of year to go biking!’. I return their smirk but with the added sliver of a look which I hope conveys a message of ‘Go away'and perhaps'I want to hurt you.’

These very Australian ‘One-Line Wonders’ as we’ve starting calling them, can be as welcome as they can be unwanted. A chirpy ‘You doing it the hard way then!’ or ‘good on yers!’ can herald an invitation to camp nearby, and we enjoy having a laugh with those who judge us brave over stupid, suspecting we're probably a little of both.

‘Uhhh! Stephen, I’m broken! I feel like trifle! I feel like a dropped trifle and the dogs licking at it on the floor!’ We’re getting to know each other and I know by now that this is a bad sign. When Claire’s feeling particularly defeated she talks in culinary metaphors, feeling like custard or warm yogurt can be the antecedent to a crumpled heap of human by the road, she’s never reached the trifle stage before and I’m worried, it sounds like it might be worse than custard. But there are ways and means to cope with the ever present heat. Soon afterwards Claire strolls into a gas station, on first glance she appears to be perusing the cold drink selection, but there is something unusual in her adopted posture, arching her back, her midriff protrudes into the fridge, brushing up against a row of Pepsi cans. I join her, feigning indecision in event the staff are watching, gradually extending my thigh to meet the 7UP and catching wafts of icy air up my shorts. Eventually, as I'm busy estimating how much of my ass I could squeeze beside the ginger ale, a staff member is sent on patrol, probably tasked with finding out why two people are behaving so strangely, so we re-enter the furnace.

In the coastal town of Mackay we garnered information about quiet back roads from Peter and Jackie, touring cyclists and our affable hosts. Soon we were riding among flush, sun-dashed fields of sugarcane, massive in scope, which melded with the horizon. The leaves shivered in an idle breeze. Gradually hillocks of forest spotted the crops and were decorated by scrims of cloud. The cane fields were soon overtaken by more forest as we skimmed the outskirts of Eugella National Park. Gum trees were riven by shrubs of pastel pink flowers and raptors circled high above us. We reached Boulder Creek with a couple of hours until the sun began it’s impatient plunge beneath the tropical horizon. Tangled vines and creepers sought ownership of the river, invading the corridor above it, and we plunged into the water to discover shrimps and turtles and then set up camp on the banks. Crocodile free swimming holes are a luxury here.

Tully is the wettest town in Australia – one year almost eight metres of falling water splashed onto it’s streets and shops and residents, twelve times the annual average of London. As we cycled through the town the air was so muggy it weighed upon us like gravity. We stopped under trees, cowering in their nets of shade, wiping off old, hot sweat that refused to join the sodden, cloying air, and swiping away the harassing marsh flies - harbingers of rain. It’s a predictable pattern : the wind quickens from a murky horizon and the fuzzy hills, a drop or two splash us though overhead the sky is a broad, unbroken desert of blue - the drops have been wrenched by gusts from the maw of a traveling storm, still kilometres away. We make eyes at each other now. The sky is soon mussed, building clouds are scattered among leaden fractures which in turn wrestle with half a rainbow and become lost in a clump of pale and distant cumulus. Then it’s on us, and the rain falls in sheets. The patter eclipses the rustle of the sugarcane, and the dulcet wafts of cut cane and fetid stink of fallen mangoes are drowned out too. Sometimes there’s a bus stop or a gas station where we can huddle inside, where someone will saunter by, pausing just briefly to tilt their heads, narrow their eyes and remind us: ‘Not a good day for a ride, is it?’. 

But it’s over soon and we’re off again, the sliding air shedding rainwater from our clothes as we pedal, warm water splashing up between my toes. Trucks surge past trailing comet tails of spray. Two shaggy and sodden emus amble through the scrub. A troop of grey kangaroos just watch us, ears pricked. The trials of summer biking here are assuaged by these wild spectators, by the familiar tailwinds that rush at our backs and rear panniers like tiny hands propelling us through the puddles, and by the exotic fruit on offer – the mangoes, passion fruit, melon and lychees - from roadside vendors. Just as suddenly as the rain comes and the sun departs and some wild creature bays, croaks or trills comes a realisation just as acute and just as intense - that biking in Queensland at any time of year is fantastic.

With our arrival in the tropics road signs forewarn our new enemies – cyclones, crocodiles, dengue. Australia can’t hide from its disaster-ravaged history – we passed logs wedged high in trees and sprawling riverside debris from the unprecedented floods near Gayndah, past the scorched forests of NSW and the flattened ones near Cardwell in the wake of the category five Cyclone Yasi three years ago. It all helps bring a feeling of unease, of being hunted, augmented by the locals who warn us about gimpi gimpi (or the less imaginatively titled ‘stinging tree’ which invites a circuitous conversation 'What's it called?''The stinging tree'. 'Yeah, whats it called?''The Stinging Tree') an innocuous looking shrub which injects pain inducing neurotoxins into anyone who brushes past it. There are crocs too, so we cast our eyes down to the turbid waters of creeks as we ride over bridges, hunting for those lambent eyes, and lest we forget the centimeter sized jellyfish called Irukandji which lurk off coast and boast venom 100 times more potent than that of a cobra. On one occasion we left a tourist information centre trembling with cyclone preparation kits in hand and advice to camp in somewhere called Alligator Nest Picnic Area. It would be funny, if it wasn’t all so terrifying.

Townsville meant that Cairns, our last stop in Australia and the end of a 4000 km ride from Melbourne, was in spitting distance. Having paid for accommodation only once in three months of traveling Australia (a campsite) we decided one night in a cheap hostel was in order, a very minor splurge so we could physically and mentally reboot. Cycle touring breeds a deep appreciation of what you might otherwise take for granted. Showers, beds and roofs are now all a little unfamiliar and indulgent. We set off the following day towards Big Crystal Creek - a swimming hole we plunged into, greedy for relief from the heat.

Insects rule the tropics. There are ants, lots of them. We camp on them, sit on them, and find them milling about our food which is enclosed in impenetrable ant-proof panniers and boxes. There’s a cadence to the trolling thrum of cicadas that waxes and wanes as we ride through pockets of them and I will never forget Claire’s manic dance around the road with Lycra around her ankles - it was the day I learnt that going for a pee can be complicated by a centipede in your pants. Nights are spent sweating more than sleeping – lying motionless on our backs, adhered to our sleeping mats, wincing as we listen to the shrill buzz of a solitary mosquito intruder. We are in a world of sweat rash, of smelly feet, of misty sunglasses, of moldy food. And it's times like this, hard times, when I wonder whether the joy of cycle touring is actually just imagined, or relative, that it’s just a sequence of discomforts chased by a more memorable recovery which feels good only because the unpleasant thing has stopped - like taking off a tight pair of shoes – not really enjoyable, just relief. But the hard times never last and soon I’m optimistic enough to realize I was just being grumpy.

The region west of Cairns is known as the Atherton Tablelands and seemed an enticing adventure before unhealthy amounts Christmas pudding rendered me immobile on someone's couch. We climbed up in shadows cast by Cedar and Walnut, beside us a dense and titillatingly mysterious under-story of orchids, cycads and shrubs which could hide all sorts of extraordinary beasts. We dodged Wait-a-wile, a barbed vine which droops down to the road and threatened to snag and then wrench us off our bikes. I like too it's other colloquial name : Lawyer Vine. Once this thorny plant becomes attached it will not let you go (until it has drawn blood).



We took a day off to relax in a campsite and mosey through the patches of rain forest near Malanda, primed to catch glimpses of platypus, pythons and tree kangaroos but instead just finding scores of brush turkey. Then a night of gabbing away to Neil and Claire and their family over wine and a Sunday roast before pedaling through rolling hills, and I pondered the misleading analogy of the region to a table. I wonder if coming round for dinner at the home of whoever came up with the epithet would be an adventure – passing the salt might be more complicated if you have to negotiate peaks and crevasses of mahogany.

The road to Cairns was a fun-filled slalom as we negotiated the 263 descendant turns of the Gillies Highway. We rolled into Cairns just before Christmas, Claire as fit as Cadel Evans and often leaving me behind straining for oxygen, to Ian and Sarah and their two year old champion swimmer and future Wallabies scrum half William. Ian and I worked together in Whiston Hospital as first year docs many moons ago and shared a flat, he now works for the flying doctors but has begun the process of Australianation by freaking out visitors to the country, in my case with tales of kangaroos that disembowel people and other on the surface unlikely, yet in the context of Australia, immediately believable calamities. This was my forth Christmas away from home and my first traditional Christmas feast complete with Roast potatoes and Yorkshire Puddings. I'm still recovering.

I usually offer up a polite but firm 'no thank you' when I meet people on days off my bicycle who invite me out for a bike ride, relishing the prospect as much as a bath of Irukandji, but when Ian, a connoisseur of the world class mountain bike trails that twist and bound through the nearby mountains, offered to take me and Claire out on bikes without panniers, with suspension and that weighed about as much as my tent, we jumped at the chance. Despite some teething troubles which involved skidding around preternaturally tight corners emitting squeals which carried equal measures of prayer and blasphemy, I surpassed my primary ambition of mere survival and bloody loved it.

Australian drivers still fill me with rage as they shout ‘Get off the bloody road!’ or ‘You should pay rego!’ (the Aussie version of a road tax – these people are too dim and inbred to understand the concept of rego not to mention the unquantifiable health, social and environmental effects of fuel guzzling vehicles). It must be that tailgating and side-swiping pedestrians and bikers has been incorporated into the Australian driving test, I think, after another truck belts past, a hair’s breadth between us, sucking me helplessly towards the wheels. I muse too about the driving habits of serial killers and wife beating misogynists. It’s not bad driving that’s the problem, I decide, or a brief lapse in judgment, it runs deeper than that. These people are devoid of empathy, their bolshy over taking maneuvers speak volumes about exactly how much they give a shit about fellow humans. There is good news on the horizon though – a new law in Queensland will soon penalize drivers for getting within 1 or 1.5 metres of a cyclist and when it comes into force I hope all cycle tourers in this part of Australia set the Go Pros rolling and deliver SD cards to local police stations.

Our plans have been in flux of late but one has finally come together: I’ll spend the next three weeks walking solo the length of the pacific island of New Caledonia with a bare minimum of kit in search of a story and magazine feature. Claire will be traveling to Tasmania where she will be riding around the island. We will meet back in Cairns towards the end of January, fly to Darwin and then to Dili in East Timor before hopping to Java and Sumatra and Borneo.

Finally my good friend Oli who you may remember from this guest blog post, needs your help. He's made it to the semi-final of the lastminute.com Spontaneity Champion competition which slammed into his life and left a trail of destruction in its wake. Now an entire family's Christmas is in danger of being obliterated by this hideous phenomenon. Oliver, a once 'normal' individual, has been reduced to a grotesque state by his obsession with an online voting process. He remains constantly glued to the screen of his laptop and smart phone and is consuming paracetamol packets at a time, in a futile attempt to stave off the crippling headaches brought on by excessive screen time. His mind is fragmenting under the strain of this process and his family feel helpless. Christmas is descending into mania for the Davy family - but you have the power to help. Follow this link and click on the pink button to give Oliver Davy some respite. Enjoy your New Year in the knowledge that you have contributed to the rescue of someone else's.

Thank yous this month – Mad Props go to Ian, Sarah and William (for an awful lot, but especially the his and hers boxer shorts emblazoned with cartoon santas), Neil, Claire and family, Peter and Jackie, and of course Australia - you have been a joy-filled playground, a worthy adversary and a cuddly, endearing, slightly pissed and eccentric friend. Cheers mate.

A Christmas present from Claire

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 bells but since Wikipaedia didn't mention genocide, cannibalism or ebola, I booked a flight. Its anonymity to me just seemed like a good reason to do so.

The almost ticked out clock of my Aussie VISA meant I needed a border run, but this too was an excuse for an adventure - the spontaneous, half-baked kind, unbidden by the toil of research and careful choice. I had in mind an island, and the south Pacific bares 7500 to choose from. I scribbled 'no bicycle, pack light, travel by foot' into my journal and then canvassed the bespeckled ocean on googlemaps for inspiration.

New Caledonia is an archipelago and autonomous French overseas territory, and the main island, uninspiringly entitled Grand Terre, is 1200 km from Australian shores, or about half way to Figi. It lies like a giant frozen throwing knife launched from New Zealand and aimed at Papua New Guinea, and after those two, Grand Terre is the third largest island in the Pacific.

Hiking is not how the mainstream wile away hours on a palm-fringed Pacific islands, but I wasn’t planning on indulging in contented comas on surf-soaked white sand beaches, diving amongst coral reefs, or retiring to a resort to wash down the day's hedonism with lobster and kava. I was going just to walk, hoping later to emerge blister-footed, laden with stories and contentedly beat.

A windshield was just a slant of glass until East Timor.

I sat rigid and began to regret adding myself to the human-stuffing inside this microlet - the local bus - whipping through the clamorous streets of Dili. I had bagged a front row view of the East Timor’s capital city, along with three other men whose buttocks also vied for a share of the two front seats. Despite the unyielding terror my perspective endowed, I was fascinated. I snatched a glimpse of a motorbike as it disappeared behind a two foot long yellow caterpillar. An ambulance, plowing so fast through traffic it was surely going to maim more people than it could ever save, flickered in and out of view amid plastic yellow birds and a limp Manchester United jersey. Where I expected sky, there was only yellow fur.

Almost every inch of glass was covered with cutesy toy animals and football paraphernalia, suckered on, through which the teenaged driver peered. His head jerked left and right to counter the motion of the dangling zoo. His red tinged Mohawk jerked too. And it went on like this – lurching past invisible vehicles, Daffy Duck consuming a gaggle of pedestrians, fleeting thoughts of my family and early life, a vision of a crumpled bus and a blood-stained Winnie the Pooh. Was it my audible whimpering that invited the driver to wink at me and offer a double thumbs-up? Maybe, but considering a Darwin Award was on the cards it seemed a perverse way to offer reassurance, all I could do was fake a smile and will those thumbs back to the only place thumbs of visually impaired drivers should be - on the steering wheel.

Given the circumstances, it was hard to imagine adding another dynamic more crippling to the driver’s ability to concentrate, bar a passenger launching a bucket of ice and another of fire ants onto his lap. For starters the Indonesian pop music that blasted from speakers was jet plane loud and each bass note sent tinny rattles through the chassis, bounced the vast array of juxtaposed cuddly animals and inspired violent head bopping from the front row, me excluded, though I was often jolted involuntarily roof-ward when we smashed into Dili’s cavernous potholes. A weave of scents – petrol fumes, cooking meat, and rank vegetables – gushed through the open windows. Between songs the noise of the streets clawed back, caged roosters crowed, the tangle of careering motorbikes revved and backfired.

I recognised my hostel (superimposed by Tigger) and tapped a coin on the roof to signal my stop. Disgorged now, a jumble of insouciant school children in the back of the bus stared out at me on the pavement. Perhaps only a front seat had offered full appreciation of our breathless foreplay with providence. The driver winked at me once again, yelled ‘See you next time meeester!’ and as he jerked the vehicle back from kerb to chaos I could only stand, watch and ruefully mouth those parting words - Next time meester. Next time. If we did meet again I might be on a bicycle, and on the less survivable side of the windshield.


It seems unforgivable to label anywhere in the world’s largest continent as quintessentially Asian but on the streets of Dili the clichés added up. Meandering roosters, pots of bubbling broth and dumplings, careering motorbikes adding to the heavy fug of hanging smog. These streets belonged to the people, they worked them and they lived them. For almost a year I have pedalled through sanitised, au fait, developed nations. My eyes are wider now, I’m leaning forward, senses piqued, and content because we have a new border to our back and a torrential rain of differences, drenching me with questions. We went in search of some history to help bring to life the newest country of the millennium, one of the poorest in Asia and a land without tourist information, a British consulate, or even a purchasable road map.

Rubble was one of those unanswered questions. In Dili piles of it spot the city, it’s a playground for children, and casts refuges of shade in the late afternoon for the city’s many stray, mangy dogs. It tells a story too - of a wretched history, branded by war and rebellion. The former Portuguese colony was heading for full independence in 1975 when Indonesia invaded with backing from the US who at the time were making warmongering something of a hobby themselves having just ravaged Vietnam. Indonesia was the most important non-communist state in SE Asia and the US wanted them on side. One inconsequential point I should mention: the Timor sea has massive oil reserves, though I’m sure American military strategists and politicians never once gathered around a map of East Timor, rubbed their hands and gawked with glee. That would be wholly unprecedented.

Australia were complicit in the invasion too, and their actions since East Timor’s independence have marked them out as guilty of coveting Timor’s black gold. They have acted in the classic bully boy style rich countries deal with poor ones, at best protectionist and deeply cynical, at worst corrupt and in violation of international law. It’s notable that Australia, in the the midst of a lucrative mining boom, enjoyed negotiating with East Timor only when the fledgling country was particularly desperate, at its lowest ebb, and would take whatever was on offer. More recently East Timor has accused the Aussie government of spying. It is all quite complicated, but there is anger on the streets of Dili, and the walls of the Australian embassy speak of the outrage...

The crocodile is the national animal of East Timor

After East Timor we’d cross into Indonesia and every emerging fact about the nation left me further incredulous. With 250 million people the population of Indonesia is larger than that of Brazil, 3.5% of the world’s people are Indonesian. The 19,000 islands (you heard right) have a land area about on par with Mexico. With 60 days on our Indonesian VISA the plan was an island hop, seven in all: Timor (where we’d cross into Indonesia), Flores, Sumbawa, Lombok, Bali, train through most of Java (to bypass the busiest Indonesian streets and a particularly cantankerous volcano) to Jakarta, Sumatra and finally exiting the nation via a boat to Singapore. 60 days was double what we might have been granted, though I like to think our letter in Indonesian to the attaché helped in that regard (Dear Sir, we are so excited about visiting your beautiful country, which whilst we have never been there, we are certain it will be the most beautiful in the world…)

We rode the coast road first which passed by thatched huts clumped in small villages, scented with wood smoke and teeming with shambling goats and tribes of popeyed children who chased at our wheels yelling ‘Bon Dia!’– a Portuguese welcome that lives on. Our welcome rippled through villages and the smiles seemed to leap out at us, full-faced, awe-inscribed, made with great red-stained lips from chewing the Betel Nut and which made their owners look maniacal, like the Joker from Batman.



I hate to make naff comparisons between countries but there was something of Ethiopia in this part Indonesia, specifically the attention we were gifted, or as was often the case, stabbed with. The polite ‘Bon Dia’ was replaced in busier West Timor by a verbal orgy dominated by screams of ‘MEEEESTER!’ (aimed at both myself and Claire) as in ‘I LOVE YOU MEESTER!' a favourite, or ‘I NEVER FORGET YOU MEESTER!’. Occasionally ‘I HATE YOU MEESTER!’ or ‘FUCK YOU MEESTER!’ and chased by a hysterical scattering of children. Often though it was just ‘HEY! HEEEEYYY! HEEEEYYYYYYYY!’ The ‘Hey’ is not the kind of ‘Hey, hows it going?’ kind, it’s the kind of ‘HEY!’ that ordinarily is only used in response to a stranger stealing a newborn baby, sprinting off down the street with it under their arm and shouting ‘Dave, go long!’. It’s a ‘Hey!’ that’s not meant to engage anyone or kindle conversation, it’s self-serving, in your face and imbued with unnecessary violence.‘HEYYYYYYY!’ is not screamed so much as vomited all over you.

The attention luckily isn’t always so affronting, and these islands are a hotbed of hospitality, actually after four years of bicycle travel around the world it’s hard to think of a country in which local people have hosted me as often. We camped outside churches and often in people’s homes where we chewed betel nut, played with kids and aired our flaky Indonesian. Every face threw smiles our way, they bounced off our own. Huts were upended to make space, food was cooked in our honour, children milled around us, adults crouched on their haunches, content just to watch and grin those sardonic scarlet smiles. One particularly benevolent man became so embarrassed after ants got into our panniers and his chicken ran amok and over our sleeping bodies in the night, that he refused our offer of money and we left with panniers choking with fruit from his meager garden. It was heartbreaking and our Indonesian couldn't communicate our gratitude, so we just smiled a lot until he understood.



In Timor motorbikes often pulled up beside us, their riders question-ready and beaming. One man sat beside me on the grass as we took a break, he’d been giving me the eye. ‘Oh Meeester Stephen, I so glad I meet you, you’re so handsome!’ he piped up, his head lolling coquettishly to one side. Every so often he giggled and chirped ‘Oh Meester Stephen!’ as if I’d told the funniest joke he’d heard in years. He referred to Claire as ‘Meester Stephen wife’ a moniker which, to her chagrin, has stuck - I use it every time I need her attention, enjoying the implied sense of ownership and theft of her individualism. There was talk before of the possibility of Claire getting harassed by leering romantics in some countries, so we decided to pretend we are married, we didn't foresee though my meteoric rise to gay icon-hood in Indonesia and I think Claire’s secretly a tinge jealous she hasn't been wolf whistled as much as I have.

Here’s how it works on Indonesian roads: A vehicle pulls level, perhaps a car, most likely a motorbike. Multiply the wheel number by two and you have roughly the number of occupants, unless it’s a bus, then square it seven times and add infinity. The driver will drill me with an undeviating gaze, oblivious does not begin to describe it, for him the known universe has just vanished. He is like a shark in a shoal of mackerel, scattering horn-sounding oncoming traffic to ditches and crash barriers. After a dragging infinitude, amid the screams of maimed motorists and police sirens, the driver will summon the courage to ask ‘Hello Meester. What is your hobby?’ Indonesian drivers are ambidextrous lane users who rarely resort to trifling things like binocular vision, still, they are genuinely better than Australians, which really does say something.



Ahhhh Indonesian food. Cheap and gratifyingly ambiguous if not always wholesome. Warungs are local haunts where the food is served, and it’s best not to think about the bound slavering dogs that can be seen on the back of Indonesian motorbikes en route to some local restaurant. Coffee comes with enough sugar not just to make diabetes completely unavoidable but to actually caramelise your circulating blood volume. We went economy class for the boat to island number two, Flores, and for our thriftiness we received a fish head and a sprinkle of rice for dinner. Cockroaches and chickens had the run of our shared living quarters and when we returned from sallies to the toilets we had tales of stomach churning adventure. We shared with about 70 men who were stretched out on black mattresses amid botanical garden humidity and hanging body odour. Because this is Indonesia our 70 cohabitants were also 70 rampant chain smokers puffing their way to emphysema by our next dock, some were almost certainly going to be photographed posthumously for government anti-smoking campaigns. Our floating dorm mates had other traits in common too – they all owned mobile phones with the capacity to play bass-less music and had strikingly bad musical sensibilities, evidenced by the frequency with which ‘you raise me up’ by Westlife drifted through the cabin like the unwelcome smells. They were also all very enthusiastic amateur photographers whose preferred subject matter was white people attempting sleep. They too were karaoke enthusiasts, hawkers, stand-up comedians, wide eyed voyeurs, incessant hecklers, greeny-hacking experts and English language students who would from time to time shake one of us awake and ask ‘Hello meester. What is your hobby?’ 

We arrived in Ende, the largest city on the mountain-crowded island of Flores, and after gleaning route advice from another intrepid long-term biker, the wise and dreadlocked Jonno of ‘Homeless But Not Hopeless’ renown, we decided to visit the venerated lakes at Kelimutu. We left our bikes in Ende for the detour and so on the way I was endowed with a wind-blasted panoramic view because I was about about two foot taller than the child who drove the Indonesian motorbike taxi. We dodged slumbering dogs, up, past the infinity pools of flooded rice paddies, up some more, into a world of tree ferns. We both later confided that our thoughts had at times veered towards craniotomies and neurological rehab. We jumped off the motorbikes and our drivers headed off, presumably for warm milk, cookies and bedtime stories, and we trekked up to the three lakes - one a bottle green, another black watered and red rimmed and the third a kind of turquoise that ordinarily belongs only to exotic butterflies viewed after a hit of LSD.



Leaving Ende we cycled past a statue of two extended fingers, the international symbol of peace or victory, or at least that’s what those who arrive to the town get, when you leave you get the more unwelcome reverse, perhaps whoever commissioned the statue hadn't thought of that, but I like to think they had. Rain fell, big, sopping drops of it, making the road ahead steam. Black beaches were laid out below us, and the coastal road was crumbling slowly into the surf. Villages were a jumble of palm thatched huts and heaps of coconut husks where raggedy children played and the balmy smell of humanity loitered. Dogs harangued us. Women collected blue-green stones on the beach and carried them on their heads. ‘MEESTER!’ - the chant ambushed us everywhere, firing in from the road’s mysterious margins like darts from blow pipes. Sudden cones of volcanoes appeared through billowing cloud. Tribes of children ran at our wheels, all eyes, giggling into their hands. Buses swept past, honking, arms flailing, music pounding, giddy screams. Indonesia never lost its heady pace.




Indonesians love music, they love it marginally more than sugar, football and hair-gel and less than unfettered noise masquerading as music, which is the national obsession. Indonesian buses, or bemos, zipped past on our way into West Timor’s main city, Kupang, hecklers hanging out of the bass rattling doors, their rear windows decorated with an image of a local hero – sometimes pop sensation Avril Lavigne, sometimes Harry Potter, sometimes Jesus Christ. I wonder if these celebs ever share other territory here, Harry Potter on stained glass perhaps, sexy miniatures of Avril Lavigne next to Buddha and Ganesha at roadside shrines.

On the roads motorbikes back fired and smoke billowed from burning litter, both added a flavor of ‘war zone’ to our surroundings. Occasionally a great cavalcade of big polished cars sped past us, led by siren sounding police cars. The occupants I imagined to be some important visiting foreign dignitary, perhaps the third uncle of the former vice attaché to Mali.

One night we stayed in a convent and visited the nearby school, led by Sister Selfie and Father Fluffy, and I promise those names are genuine. Last year a section of the sea front school collapsed into the lapping waves. Most of the kids we were told are just lucky to be in high school, they won’t go on to university or city jobs, most likely they’ll be stone pickers like the bent and laconic old people we saw as we arrived. It was a sobering thought, and whilst the ecomony is growing fast here, so is the population, and many Indonesians have the kind of obstacles I never did. I never opened textbooks to find starfish and hermit crabs. The blackboard was never obscured by driftwood. History class never got cancelled because of high tide.

Claire and Oscar looking out of the cobweb rice paddies near Ruteng

As we travelled across the island I sunk into a black mood, mainly because I couldn’t fix my brakes, the hills kept rolling in and the attention we garnered was exhausting. I could say ‘hello’ and mean it the first 679 times, but by 680, which in Flores is around 2pm, it got hard to keep smiling. Also, I had a rubber chicken on my handlebars called Herb, and it’s impossible not to look like a giant douchebag if you’re miserable and have a rubber chicken on your handlebars. I hated myself for being so grumpy, especially after children galloped out of their homes, yelping exuberantly, joy written in their eyes, only in place of the fun and fascinating foreigner they expected they found a mopey, stone faced let-down. For those Indonesian children it must be the same as coming down stairs on Christmas morning to find Santa drunk, puking on his santa boots, sexually assaulting his reindeer and then removing his beard to reveal that he is in fact Bob, your dad’s drinking buddy from the Red Lion.

Herb the chicken is the newest member of team Cycling The Six

People often ask me whether wild camping is dangerous. I’ve never been robbed in my tent, though I’ve met scores of travelers who have been stripped of their money and gear and almost always the story is set on a bus or in a hotel. Unfortunately in Ruteng our own story unfurled…

After four nights rough camping or sleeping in villages we choose a cheap hostel to spend the night. The next day we left our room to have breakfast which was served on the same floor, about ten metres away, and so we didn’t think to lock the room, and yes, that does make us giant shamefaced douchebags. After about twenty minutes we realised someone had been in our room, rummaged through our bags and snatched a couple of million rupees (about 150 dollars). The usual emotions ploughed in – anger, disappointment in humankind, and a not insignificant amount of self-blame. We called on the hotel manager who had a single agenda, and it wasn’t sleuthing or sympathy. He wanted just to communicate how far from responsible his hotel was for our problem. Light years, apparently. I set off for the police station.

I explained the situation to gathered officers and spent the next half an hour repeating bits of the statement and agreeing with them when they reminded me that doors have locks and that locks stop bad people stealing your shit and that I’m a bit of a twat for letting this happen. Whilst I waited for something else to occur, perhaps a police report, though the prospect looked remote, one officer staring glumly at a ream of papers said to me ‘Ohhh, it’s terrible. It really is. Do people die like this in your country?’ He handed me a real life crime scene photo of a very dead, mutilated man, his face barely recognizable as a face. Before I could laugh insanely or puke, it may have been either, six armed police men tore through the station, jumped into a van and set out for our hostel.

Meanwhile back in Hotel Rima Claire was busy penning a letter for the insurance company whilst the hotel owner peered over her shoulder and cajoled her into changing the story: ‘Can’t you just say you lost the money on a plane?’ Then the agitated squadron and heavy artillery arrived to photograph the crime scene. Claire was ferried to the police station where together we gave a statement. On recording our details Claire was awarded an extra decade in age. They asked all kinds of pertinent questions like ‘religion?’ and ‘how many children do you have?’ to which we answered ‘none’. There was a brief silence followed by muttering. I filled it by asking Claire what she was planning for her 40th next May. The silence deepened. Claire asked the officer what was happening now. ‘Well, we are just wondering why you have no children’ he replied. ‘And no religion’ confirmed another. We left wondering if the report would get added to a dusty pile labelled ‘atheists’.

The dregs of Flores were starkly beautiful with rice paddies and vibrant green corn fields in every direction. Children sometimes ran behind pushing us up the hills but they soon got tired and ended up hanging on, wobbling the bikes and making it harder. Three times in Flores the road spiraled down to sea level and rose to over a vertical kilometer, the last day though – Lembor to Labuan Bajo – had some of the most protracted and brutal grades I had encountered for months, 30% on some turns. Every bend in the road revealed another tortured future of leg pain, wheezing and a torrent of sweat. I promised Claire the road would soon stop its incessant reach for the sky, but it didn’t, and we brooded. After hours of agony and small conquered targets we topped a pass and I joked a bit about Claire’s thundering promises of capitulation she’d made two hours ago. We laughed, but my jokes were premature, the road dipped and once again we were battling slopes Olympic tobogganists would wince at. Once we arrived in Labuan Bajo (which in our parlance had morphed into ‘Larry The Badger’) we were elated and swiftly laid waste to the hostel buffet as the sky purpled in the wake of a sunken sun and the silhouettes of bobbing boats scattered the harbor. The view would always have been a pearler, but we knew it was our grit and those lung-crunching twists of road behind us that made it extra special.


Thank yous – Oscar, Dave and Karen, Dave and Mary, Nahad and family, and scores of anonymous Indonesians in villages thoughout Timor and Flores who took care of us, hopefully the pleasure was reciprocal. Next up: Komodo, Lombok, Bali and Java, and a blog post from Jakarta.

Claire has recently interviewed several local artists and musicians in East Timor – part of her project to explore world music and its creators – here’s her piece.

A three part story this time: Komodo, Lombok and Bali.

Photo courtesy of Zoe Danielski, a future professional.

High Times in Jakarta

Sitting next to one of Jakarta’s most eminent food critics, at one of the city’s finest restaurants, I dredge up a memory from the week gone. Just days ago we made a go of slumber on the earthy floor of a tumbledown plywood hut, layered with fire ants, where a panicked chicken had the run of our recumbent, rigid bodies. I pop another morsel of Javanese cuisine into my mouth and think of how, that night, our bellies churned with hunger after another snack-dinner of MSG and salt under the guise of ‘noodles’. I rub my bites from the fire ants, still fresh. It fascinates me - the violence of the contrast, forged by fate. A travelling life is glutted with swings and dives like this, and tomorrow is always a mystery worth turning up for.

Java is home to 115 million people, all jammed together in a land the size of England. There are temples and volcanoes to gawk at, but mind-boggling population density brings smog, gridlock and the quintessentially Indonesian shout-a-thon we’re beleaguered by. Instead then we flew straight to Jakarta from Bali, and our departure airport was heaving with the bedraggled human remnants of the island’s famed hedonistic side, one we’d ducked. A train of oddballs shuffled past our airport seats, bedecked in enormous sunglasses, leather singlets, backward caps, dishevelled in their now-inapt party garbs, broken insomniacs nursing rum hangovers.

My bike box might have been the rattiest, most unwieldy thing in Bali airport, punched by holes and flailing tape. The magnitude of its shabbiness was matched by that of its weight, and we had easily maxed out on our baggage allowance. Hoisting it onto the scales at check-in, I clocked the 33 kg flashing on the electronic screen before the clerk did, and surreptitiously planted my foot beneath the box slashing the record of its real weight by 8 kg. My half-taunt calf muscle though sent the scale wavering madly between 23 and 30 kg so I leaned an elbow on Claire’s shoulder to steady myself, feigned nonchalance, rolled off pithy answers to the clerk’s questions and hoped she didn’t notice the band of Indonesian business men behind us who had discovered our ploy and were all pointing at my foot and hooting with laughter. Finally she penned '27 kg' on the box side - we were off to the capital.

A man emerged from a swirl of ambling travellers at Jakarta’s airport, hand outstretched, smiling broadly. Months before an email had arrived from Simon offering us a bed and shower when we got this far, things had snowballed since then though and the well-connected CEO of an insurance broker, and one-time mountain adventurer himself, had instrumented media interviews, fancy meals out, presentations at the British Chamber of Commerce and the British International School, and accommodation with his friends. A five day tornado of action twisted into life.

Our kind hosts were a family living in Jakarta - Anne, Phillip and Zoe, and they took us out on our first foray into the city by bicycle. Every Sunday Jakartans wend to the central business district where the roads are closed to traffic. The smog cast dim hulks of the city’s superstructures, music boomed from roadside speakers and kids ripped through the milky light on all manner of wheeled contraptions.

During our five days in Jakarta I might have eaten better and more than anywhere – all-you-can-plunder buffets, sushi, barbecue, local cuisine and more. Interviews and presentations broke up the feasting, and Jakarta’s legacy became new friends, money in the coffer and some extra blubber that the coming miles on Asian roads will slowly rob me of.

The girl and the mattress 

Courtesy of Zoe Danielski

Sumatran students who wanted to know if we had permission from our parents to travel

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 bleeding gums and the words ‘Come to Thailand – land of smiles, white-sand beaches, and devastating tropical disease.’ And whilst malaria is on the down worldwide, dengue has blossomed. A graph of dengue over time has the look of a ski jump. Since my own bout everyone I meet seems to have had it, or knows someone who has. Nobody, as far as I know, was lured to the experience by a brochure.

I left Ao Nang after ten days that brimmed with frustration and lassitude.With dengue, you don’t really feel like eating, and for bicycle travel that’s kind of a requisite. On day one, those anorexic days showed in every laboured mile, but the next day I woke feeling a world better, my cadence returned, and I clocked up 140 km by nightfall. On a rural back road three South Africans on bikes pulled over. Cycle touring for them had been a spur-of-the-moment call, spelt out in their makeshift racks, tacked on to local mountain bike frames. They’d fudged what they needed using string and tape. A kickstand was a piece of wood. Things flapped and jutted. I was inspired by their invention: They were a visual statement of the fact that there are no obstacles to ambition.

The north of Thailand and Laos are inviting places to ride, awash with great scenery, food and things to stop and see. But I was a little uninspired by the thought of months in the more visited realms of SE Asia, the breezy bits, so I formulated a new plan. I wanted to instill some sense of purpose into my journey again, and I yearned for more of an adventure. To those ends I set up visits to medical clinics, one for refugees on the Burmese border and another set in an isolated part of Cambodia. And I changed my route. Anachronistic Burma fits the adventure mandate, despite the growing taste for tourism, so this comes next. Then I'll be following in the track marks of a few intrepid bikers who have recently crossed into the Indian province of Nagaland via the tightly controlled border with Burma, one that requires permits. More permits will be required for the adventurous terrain of Arunachal Pradesh. I’ve even set my sights on Bhutan, though the VISA remains a long shot. The Indian and Nepalese Himalayas come next (perhaps even riding the Annapurna circuit), then through Pakistan, over the Khunjerab pass before it closes for the winter. Central Asia will be a bitter challenge in mid-winter with temperatures dropping to perhaps to minus 30 or minus 40, but a challenge is what I need so I’ll get kitted out in Kathmandu. Spring in the Caucuses, chased by summer in Europe, will be the prize. Home, very tentatively, planned for September 2015.

I pedalled hard up the west of Thailand pulling long days, chowing down Pad Thai in my short breaks and hammering through until dusk. Wooden shacks selling pineapple and mango and papaya were arrayed on the roadsides, in their shadows cable-thin kids stewed in hammocks, stirring only to the whistle of a customer. The heat was stifling, the air curdled. Afternoons were a fuzzy-headed fight against heat that dared me to stop and rest every half hour. Snakes of searing green lay dead on the road, like scattered twine. Old women kept alive that old Thai cliché, ‘the Land of Smiles’, through their sudden, brown-toothed grins. Here and there I rolled past the hum and jostle of local markets, cooks and sellers perched behind stalls hoping to lasso me with offers I couldn’t understand. The air was perfumed with barbecued meat, a drifting promise of the weight I’d lost to dengue fever.

I get sentimental when I leave places behind. Some smarting reminder of all that I have grown to relish suddenly stirs and every memory becomes tainted by a sense of loss and nostalgia.

January the 7th 2010: I was shivering and sitting astride my bicycle in the port of Dover waiting for a barrier across the road to lift so I could board my ferry to France, suspecting then that England would next feature in my life in half a decade or more. 'Sorry about this' remarked the lady in the ticket booth'the barrier's a little temperamental'.
'Oh yeah? Just like my wife!'announced a burly truck driver who was leaning out of his window and grinning inanely. England, I thought, I will miss you. I will miss your quirky humour, your self-effacing satire, your casual misogyny.

It was Mexico's job then to issue me a farewell that would serve as a keen reminder that behind me fifteen months and more than 25,000 km of Latin America would soon be dormant, my bond with the continent broken, my experience over and condensed into a scrap yard of memories. The reminder was a giant duck. To be more specific - a man dressed in a monstrous yellow duck costume who was dancing on a street corner and holding a sign which advertised the pharmacy beside him. He was raving as if his life depended on it, to some salsa infused Latin blend which blasted from speakers at a volume that would ensure it was audible in the stratosphere. So questions - What do ducks have to do with pharmacies? Why is the duck dancing? Who came up with this idea, and how drunk were they?

The answer to these of course is irrelevant - this is Mexico, or more broadly Latin America, and here loud music, dancing and dressing up are all essential ingredients of the Latin lifestyle. So why not use them to get more people into your pharmacy? It makes perfect sense, all except the choice of animal outfit, but probably the duck costume was just the one that happened to be available that morning.

The approaching hassle and hoopla involved in crossing the US border at Tijuana troubled me and I was convinced that US immigration would find some tiny infraction on which to deprive me of my 90 day VISA waver. US border guards don't have a shining reputation in the areas of reason or lenience (or humility, humour, fairness, benevolence or compassion). I believe eye contact with a US immigration official is grounds enough for a good thrashing and a life ban from the USA. Referring to an official as buddy, bub, dude, geezer or my man carries an mandatory sentence of 25 to life in solitary confinement. Potential border guards at interview are made to watch videos of dogs doing human things in hilarious dog trousers. Failure to laugh means the candidate has either no sense of humour, or just didn't get it. Either way that makes them the perfect machine the US government needs to stop all the scary drug addicts, terrorists, job seekers and riffraff getting in. Or at least that's what I believed before crossing the border, I was about to be proved wrong.

Disabled people quite rightly don't wait in line like everyone else at the Tijuana border but instead go straight through to the gate. You would not believe how many disabled people cross this border, call me cynical but I soon became convinced some entrepreneurial Mexican was renting out white canes and walking sticks to those waiting in line just down the block.

Eventually I reached the gate to meet what could only be described as a triumph in personnel selection. You would not mess with this lady, the face of the USA looked fresh from bludgeoning a small group of orphans to death for kicks. Once she signalled for me to move forward I wheeled my bike cautiously past only to hear 'Hey!' I froze and turned slowly, trembling, half expecting her to radio in the SWOT team. 'Just leave your bike here, I'll watch it for you. It'll be easier than dragging it through. So where are you riding from?'. I was so taken aback it took me ten seconds to mumble Mexico, which of course was obvious.

The man who would or would not issue my 90 day VISA waver had the opportunity to add some hilarity to my story but he was nothing like the stereotype either and turned out to be very pleasant, all smiles and quips, though he did linger a second longer than was comfortable over my Syrian VISA which takes up a whole page in my passport. 'Wouldn't want you as my doctor!' he joshed after I told him I hadn't worked for three years. It was a fair point.

I filled in the immigration form, making sure I added ticks to all the right boxes.

'Have you ever been convicted or involved in Genocide?' Yes or No.

"Genocide? well now, let me think, I'm so god damn busy these days. What was I doing Tuesday?.... Let me just phone my PA and check. Hi Jane. Yes I'm fine. Just at immigration, this nice American gentlemen wants to know if I've been involved in genocide at all over the last few years, can you just check in my diary for me? Great. Nothing? Sure? Maybe check under W for War Crimes will you, just to be on the safe side."

The strange tick boxes continued "Have you ever been involved in espionage or sabotage?"Now my guess is that someone clever enough to work as a professional spy for some top secret agency or political movement would not get caught out by a tick box. I can imagine the sweat cascading down the face of a shifty looking panic-stricken man in a large over coat holding a briefcase whose brain is screaming'yes or no? YES OR NO?! Shit! Play it cool and think goddamn it, THINK!'

So finally into the United States for the first time ever, country number 41 of my world ride and 55 of my life. Not even a cursory search, no drugs dogs, no SWOT team, no white noise or pepper spray, just a thumbs up from the customs guy and a brand spanking new stamp in my now cluttered passport. I rolled my bike out into what I thought was San Diego - immediately there was something mightily familiar about it. I couldn't quite put my finger on it - perhaps it was the many Taco stands, or the Spanish road signs, or the fact that everyone was speaking Spanish, or ALL THE MEXICANS. I was so bewildered I had to return to immigration to check I hadn't sauntered though the wrong turn-style and been directed accidentally back into Mexico, but no, this was the USA. That fact became clear when I ventured into a fast food joint to be served a burger roughly the size of my head and ate whilst cars pulled into the drive-through with wheels roughly the size of an average Mexican family.

People, I noticed, were overwhelming polite in stores, often so sunny in fact they left me dumb struck. Crazy people shuffled around muttering expletives, and there were a lot of crazy people. There were parking meters and malls and joggers and 12 lane freeways and Americans doing American things in their natural habitat. There were benches advertising injury lawyers which reminded me of a sentence by one of my favourite American authors Tom Robbins:

The logic of a contemporary American: “I’m suffering. Therefore, somebody must owe me money. I’m hiring a lawyer.”

Photo courtesy of mi amigo Max, thanks Max

I zigzagged through the southern reaches of San Diego trying to get north without an illegal jaunt down the freeway, listening to golden era west coast hip hop in my IPOD (America's greatest invention, the hip hop not the IPOD) and soon pulled into a cafe outside of which a sign boasted 'Top Gun. Sleazy bar scene filmed here July 1985'. A beautiful waitress called Adra paid for my drink and told me she was getting off in half an hour, if I waited she would ride with me. Three hours later, drinking one of the twenty varieties of on-tap beer amongst the hipsters of Ocean Beach, eating noodles someone else had insisted on paying for, my inbox brimming with offers of places to crash from here to Vancouver, I was chuffed to bits to be in the States.

Life, I was sure, would be suddenly and soothingly easy once in the USA, it would be like taking off a tight pair of shoes. As it turned out, I was half right. Here cyclists are treated as worthy members of the road using community and not like some strange tribe that's getting in the way of progress. Signs emblazoned with bikes declared 'Share The Road' and I felt the desire to pucker up and kiss them. And there were bike lanes, lanes just for bikes, a concept so alien to me now after my journey through Latin America that I almost forgot they had been invented. On each of the two occasions I happened upon a bike lane in South America I had an urge to call up the mayor's office and ask politely if he or she would be available for a hug. Of course on one of these occasions the lane drifted peacefully on for a whole 100 metres before inexplicably terminating at a tree stump.



The USA - a place where I can choose from 17 varieties of peanuts in a store that opens at seven, closes at eleven and has a title to reassure me of this fact. A place in which I don't have to worry if the ATM will spit out my card and keep the cash. A place I can drink the tap water without fear of amoebic dysentery and a place with things called signposts. HALLELUJAH!

Everything is bigger (including some of the people), faster (except the really big people), snazzier, flashier and a whole lot more familiar. But things have got a little more complicated too. I can't afford hostels, though hospitality abounds. Internet cafes and call centres have vanished so I coughed up for my first computer and phone for three years, a pair of jeans would complete the Normal Life ensemble but I don't have the courage just yet. People keep telling me (so far very politely) to take my bike outside when I wheel it inside stores, a habit formed from three years touring countries where I can. And there are rules, so many rules. In California I can't drink a beer on the beach full stop, or get served in a bar without ID despite being more than a decade over the legal age limit. Technically (this is true) I can't even throw a Frisbee on a beach in LA without a life guards permission. America might pride itself on being the country of the free, but it incarcerates proportionally more people, (many, many more people) than any other country on earth. Not all of these opened a beer on the beach, though there are more Ultimate Frisbee players in jail in the US than anywhere else on our planet. And I believe that's a fact.

So America is a confusing place then, and so what? The fact that 'lands of contrast' has become a horrible cliche and features somewhere in the Lonely Planet guidebook to every country on earth is because in reality every country has it's bizarre contradictions. My friends Benny and Jo arrived from the UK and their present, I am sure, was a comment on contemporary America. They brought me a bacon doughnut. Surely nothing better symbolises sweet and savoury America than the bacon doughnut. My palate is still in some sort of irreconcilable civil war.

The Bacon-Spangled Doughnut

The Pacific Coast Highway terminates abruptly on the way to LA, the only options are the freeway (illegal for bikers) and a road through the Pendleton Army Base. A police officer nearby informed me I would need a helmet to ride through the latter, but I thought I would try my luck anyway since I don't have one and so was out of options. The soldier I spoke with seemed to have some sort of severe vocal tick and he would intermittently blurt out "Liability, Sir!" in answer to any of my questions and pleas to be allowed to pass. I retreated to think about my strategy but the police officer came back, now angry after finding out from the soldier with Tourettes that I had tried to get in when he had told me not to. Once he finally chilled out he radioed colleagues to find out the location of the nearest thrift store so that I could buy a helmet for the 13 miles of high liability virtually car-free, pancake-flat, benign bike path where the greatest risk would be collision with my own shadow. When one couldn't be located close by we had a heated debate about my options (which he eventually conceded were non-existent) and I told him I would try the freeway. Incredibly he agreed this might be my best option. He AGREED! Overwhelmed by this I waved him off before he changed his mind, cruised onto the freeway and cycled as fast as I could to the next exit (stealthily past the highway patrol who were writing up a ticket for somebody and didn't notice me). Then I was off and onto a bike path once again shouting 'Phew!'

Now I'm not going to argue that helmets are unnecessary, that frankly, would be mental. In fact if you called me an idiot for not wearing one I might agree with you. In some countries helmets are compulsory full stop and I'm surprised that they're not in California because there are many more outlandish health and safety measures, warnings and mandates in place, a spin off from the litigation heavy society here. As I reached Los Angeles a sign warned me I was entering a Tsunami Risk Zone. Wow. Surely as I've been cycling the coastline of the Pacific rim I have been biking in a 'Tsunami Risk Zone' for more than a year. I didn't worry much about tsunamis before, perhaps I should have? I didn't realise how much danger I was in. And it continued - The host of the planetarium show in the observatory in the Hollywood hills warned me about motion sickness. There are signs in America that warn people about the grave threat of falling acorns. Clearly there are a lot of things to worry about here, strangely much, much more than in the wild parts of Africa and South America I have spent the last three years. I had better be careful.

"Sorry Santa, those are the rules, I don't care about how upset the orphans will be."

First you have to pay for their funeral, and now this

Between San Diego and LA I stayed in a hiker biker camp for six dollars: Thank you USA, I forgive you now for getting me all scared about tsunamis, you have redeemed yourself. These are great little spots inside the State Parks and dotted all the way up the Pacific coast. It was here I met Chris, another cycle tourer who was on his way to a course to learn how to be a tour leader for the Adventure Cycling Association. We biked together the whole of the next day, cycled up through Long Beach, where I must report Snoop Dog was nowhere to be seen, and camped on someones lawn after getting nice and drunk.


The following day I consulted Googlemaps and made my way to Silver Lake to meet some old friends. Googlemaps is a wonderful thing though it doesn't, as I found out, steer you away from gang land territory. 'You are entering the City of Compton' a sign told me, gulp. Having forgotten to purchase 'The Cycle Touring Guide to Compton' I decided to up my velocity.

Benny and Jo are old friends from the UK who were on holiday here and alongside their friend Rachel we busied ourselves taking in the sights - the freaks of Venice beach, the Hollywood mansions and hills, the Getty museum and more before watching Benny perform a gig in Hollywood. Benny AKA Benny Diction is an MC (my mum would say 'one of those rappers'), check out one of his recent videos. Afterwards I stayed with Ryan, a genuinely nice, generous fella and the man in charge of Exploration Challenge, a TV series in production which features yours truly.




I am occasionally looking up at tall buildings in a style similar to Crocodile Dundee when he arrives in New York. I still find myself walking into a room, bar or restaurant and thinking'Wow, look how many Americans there are in here!'. And soon afterwards 'Oh yeah, right.' But I am adjusting to the American way of life, mainly by a daily habit of consuming my weight in cheese.

Here are a five things I have learnt so far in the USA

• Whilst store keepers are consistently chirpy, welcoming souls they do not like it when people stand by the door walking rapidly in and out in order to activate an automatic voice which tells departing shoppers to 'Have a Nice Day!'
• A sign with the words 'Ped Xing' is not, as I had hoped, advertising the presence of a road named after one of the lesser known (and Chinese) founding fathers. It's just a short (and aesthetically painful) version of 'Pedestrian Crossing'.
• Every Californian is either vegan, or has at least 20 vegan friends
• If I order a tuna (pronounced in the British way) sandwich I will receive a chicken one
• The policy of prescription 'Medical Marijuana' is the most corrupt and bizarre system ever invented (and is tantamount to legalisation) though this topic alone deserves it's own full post.

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 on the bus bound for Siem Reap, Cambodia.

‘It's not a scam!’ the man beseeched us. ‘Scam! Scam! Scam!’ The shouts ricocheted around the bus, each one a whip crack to our disparaged guide. With a final hangdog sigh, he sat down and our bus moved off, gangway untrammeled.

Our ‘guide’ was not savy enough to know that scores of forums, books and blogs all take pains to explain the routine: a representative of the bus company will try to get the passengers to pay for an unneeded, expensive VISA well before the actual border. It’s a bare-faced pretense that helped the epithet ‘Scambodia’ do the rounds, and we were all hip to the jive.

I left my bike in Bangkok for this fleeting side trip to Cambodia. From Siem Reap my plan was to visit a floating medical clinic on the Tonle Sap Lake and the temples at Ankor Wat before hightailing it back into Thailand and riding into Burma, chasing the clock as my Indian VISA marches on, and assailed by monsoon rains.

At the border I looked out from the vantage point of my bus seat to the bumpy terrain of tops of heads cut by trains of rickshaws and hand-pedalled carts with raggedy kids gripped to the sides, and chickens under free arms; a TV camera crew filmed the melee. An estimated 200,000 illegal workers from Cambodia were fleeing the country in the wake of the Thai military coup, fearing arrest.

Siem Reap, the launching point for tours of the world’s largest temple complex at Ankor Wat, is a vast muddle of tourists, haranguing tuk tuk drivers (slash drug dealers) and well-primped transexual masseuses, a pair of which grabbed me by the arms. ‘Massage! Massage!’ I slipped the grip of one, ducked, side stepped, tugged my arm away from the other but her grip was more determined than I imagined and the effect was to drag her brutally down the street which made a cluster of backpackers giggle wickedly.

There are several sureties that come with visiting any of the world’s most popular tourist attractions and Ankor Wat was no different to the Pyramids, Petra or Machu Picchu. Someone will usually try to convince you that a more authentic experience means arriving on the back of a large mammal. The British will get miffed because for those of other nations, forming an orderly queue is not such a venerable pastime. There are always people too skinflint to pay for their own tour guide who glide around the margins of tour groups, their deceit half-cloaked by the unfurled maps and newspapers they feign to study. And someone will perform an indecent act with one of the religious statues to the glee of their friends - this may include high fiving Buddha, picking an imaginary bugga from the trunk of Ganesha, or riding bareback on the Virgin Mary.
I sprawled my map over the bed – Burma looked up at me, daringly. The border crossing I would use had been open only seven months, and crossing the country into India had been the mission of only a half dozen or so intrepid bikers since the rules were relaxed. Rarely had the prospect of a new frontier felt so thrilling.

I rolled under the golden arch which declared ‘The Republic of the Union of Myanmar’ thinking about how debatable those terms are: Republic, Union, and even Myanmar.

I rode on, the inside of every passing truck was thick with bodies, their eyes ablaze amid the shadows of their neighbours, full of astonishment as they peeked at me. Bare-chested men, red-mouthed from chewing betel net, wearing lungis riding up to their naval, and with dragon tattoos from shoulder blade to small of back, nodded hello from the shade of teak leaf-roofed huts. I didn’t mind the steep hills, the mashed up tarmac, the tails of stench that trailed from trucks chocker with chickens. The scenery, the smiles, the exoticism - all more than a fair trade.

That night I found a hostel in a town of dust and nervous dogs. The plywood paneled room was only just big enough for the bed, and I lay down, watching mosquitoes dance on the ceiling, listening to the sounds of this new land.

Burma proved not to be as behind the times as I had expected, ATMs and Internet exist outside the capital despite what Lonely Planet says; change is afoot, and guidebooks are out of date as they are published. I stopped for food - the girl who served me instructed her friend to ready her camera phone and then she jumped into the frame with me, hand draped over my shoulder. A few minutes after fiddling with the device, she showed me her handiwork – on the screen the image of us was now surrounded by a pink, heart shaped frame, like a wedding photo.

A motorbike raged past, it’s driver had swiveled 180 degrees to assure himself the best possible gawk at me whilst his un-chauffeured machine rallied off on a tangent to the direction of the road, eventually satisfied he turned back to the road to find himself almost upon the forest, and he jerked to the left, turned to me again, grinned insanely, wordlessly saying ‘hey, check that out!’ and disappeared.

A mum and her son. Burmese put Thanaka on their faces - a cosmetic paste made from ground bark

Pimped up bikers at LA's Ciclavia Bike Ride

As sunset encroached we waded a river and found a multinational posse of trekkers camped out near the hot springs. After lolling in the steamy waters, perfect relief after the time spent on foot, we cooked around a campfire before collapsing into slumber. I woke to find that my legs, unaccustomed to doing much except move in circles, were no longer as functional as I remembered them. Plus, I was in a world of pain.

A Gopher Snake

Yellow bellied Newt

We started with Yosemite Falls, the highest waterfall in the lower 48 states and allegedly the 5th highest in the world, which was funny because I had visited the fifth highest in Peru, 150 metres higher than Yosemite (Yosemite is actually 20th) but natural wonders always get a little embellished by their tour guides. The next day was a tour to Glacier Point and Jack our guide told the legend of Bridalveil falls - looking into the falling water for thirty seconds would mean you will be married in six months. My mum, anxious for a daughter in law and grandchildren one day, nudged me and grinned. Our bus continued past Ponderosa pine trees, the bark coloured a lustrous green by staghorn lichen, which eventually gave way to ghost forests where the larvae of tip moths had laid waste to the life and greenery. As we descended the larger leaved black oak, maple and incense cedar crept back into view. El Capitan was visible again too and Jack told of an 81 year old climber who scaled the granite monster a few years before. It was my turn to do the nudging, my mum considers herself a spritely 62 year old.

Mmm. maybe I'll get the train.

‘Can ask what is your good name Sir?’ asked the immigration official in the border town of Moreh.
I told him my good name.
‘And can I ask what is your religion?’
My answer arrived in a stream of vowel sounds, a mumble ‘none’.
‘None!’
‘No Sir’ I said, bowing my head in deep, illogical shame.

My cap was pulled down low, and as he led me out into the street I didn't see the top of the gate. My head smashed into it so hard I was knocked to the floor. Dazed, the guard helped me to my feet.

‘See Sir.’ He said. ‘Everyone needs a religion’.

It took a while to get this photo, after each snap one of the three students would appraise the image in my viewfinder and decide they weren't looking sultry enough. 'Another!' I was ordered.

I had travelled straight from the Burmese monsoon into the more illustrious Indian one. Rain gushed through the streets and pummelled my panniers as it has for months now. In Moreh I took a break, I needed one after the rush across Burma, and spent most of the next day gorging in the same eating house. In the morning I had spotted a man come out of it, jiggling airily to Bollywood tunes blaring from within, and holding out a wodge of chapattis for a passing cow. Was there a more clichéd an image of India than this? Deciding not I ventured inside where I found an amply constructed matriarch, whose belly on occasion loomed at me from between shivers of her sari, and her moustached husband who wiggled his head in that most convivial of Indianisms. The Bollywood medley came and went, victim to the region’s many, many power outages. I stopped often at the shop next door too because the purple-saried Indian girl working there was a smoldering beauty and kept called me ‘my brudder’. I am in love with the Indian accent. What’s more satisfying to the ear? It has music, zeal, insouciant charm. It’s an accent suited to the voice from the Intercom in the event of an imminent aeroplane disaster: things could be worse, I would muse, as my burning co-passengers thrashed and wailed around me.

To Indians, on discovering the extent of my journey, I am a 'roamer', and I am not 'single' with its rather dreary connotations, but a 'bachelor': yesteryear’s player. There are scores of appealing inventions: hotels advertise 'lodging and fooding', and the idea that food can be a warped into a present participle is a nice one I think because it implies that food might also become a verb. ‘I’m so famished I’m gonna food the hell out of this place’. Or ‘He fooded excessively for most of his natural life, before his stomach exploded.’ Metaphorical language too has an Indian tang: A young student once told me that he’d love to travel, but that in reality he was to remain ‘like a frog in a well’. Brilliant. And on a poster in the street I found an advertisement for a self-styled sexologist offering all kinds of cures for sexual related problems, from STDs and impotence, but it was the thought-provoking ailment of 'sexual devility' which tickled me most, conjuring the image of a pot-bellied man in a red devil outfit with a lusty glint in his eye. 'Doctor you must help me, I keep scaring girls with this damn sexual devility!'

India felt to arrive on me, more than I did to it, perhaps because of where I’d come in from. On occasion I pass a border where the two countries couldn’t be more at odds: Egypt and Sudan, Albania and Greece, Ethiopia and everywhere. Add Myanmar and India to the list. The roads are the first clue: the drivers more bullish, the streets more hectic. Even the animals move differently: nothing whimpers on the side-lines like in Myanmar, here the cows and goats meander unbidden, assuredly loping up and down the street with the calm of pacing school examiners, and moving through the traffic like the tuk tuks – edging slowly and forcibly across the road despite the blare of horns. Nowhere on earth has the intrigue, the explosion of colour and the air (happily in the figurative sense, unfortunately in the literal) of India.

Tea pickers

The road to Imphal was beset by police and army roadblocks - far more than I had encountered in Burma – the officials were hunting for smugglers of opium or currency. I was usually introduced to the commander - there was never any confusion about who that might be: dark aviator sunglasses, a galaxy of obsequious subordinates spilling about him and the mien of leader: someone who simultaneously exuded a warm and don’t-mess-with-me confidence. The soldier’s questions ranged from the eye-brow raising ‘what weapons do you carry?’ to the apparently pointless ‘father’s profession?’ to the unanswerable ‘vehicle registration?’ after which I’d leave them to grapple with that nightmare scenario shared by officials the world over: a form with an empty box. Occasionally we'd chat about the differences between India and the UK which would often culminate in some optimistic ruminations: ‘You have exciting life in England, no? This is simple life for us in India. In England you go out to casinos all the time, and you run about doing exciting things’.

I didn’t reach Imphal in one day because the road climbed to 1600 metres to an army encampment which straddled a cloud-rushed ridge. On the other side of the mountains my chain snapped: I was oil-stained and dejected when a young guy swung by on his motorbike and offered me a place to stay.

Lightson and his family were the very essence of hospitality. They prepared a bed for me and a meal of fish curry and rice. In India there is a grave responsibility to finish everything on your plate – no problem: the food was delicious. His aunt prowled behind our backs, ladle in one hand and huge pan of rice in the other. Frequently she would snap forward and dump another glut of rice on to our plates. I watched how the others would handle this as the meal progressed – as she went for the swoop they whipped their hands in front of their plates, barring the path of the barreling heap of rice, whilst emitting repellent grunting sounds. But she was persistent. When I tried she just batted my hand away and delivered more rice. It was amazing hospitality, and I had a great trouble moving after the meal.

Then into Imphal, the state capital of Manipur, where I met up with Pedal Attack - a vast tribe of tattooed mountain bikers who adopted me soon after I visited a local bike shop. I spent the next dew days being taken out to scenic sites and restaurants and to a local school where I gave a presentation. Amongst the din and chaos of Indians cities it was great to meet people so enthusiastic and passionate about biking. Thank you guys.

Lightson and fmaily

Leemax from Pedal Attack took me to Loktak lake on his Royal Enfield motorbike

These guys carry car batteries on their backs and electrocute the fish in order to catch them.

The North East of India is a collection of eight states, herniating off the rest of the country and at the slimmest point (the 'chicken neck') only a 14 mile wide tract of land connects it to the rest. Many people here would recognize their tribal allegiance, or even just their state, as surmounting their Indian citizenship.

Religion might factor in to this sense of detachment: the majority here are Christian rather than Hindu (and devotedly so). Whilst I sensed a real optimism about the North East (tourism is growing fast in the wake of lifted restrictions and successful PR) the region still has its problems. Imphal was gripped by protests over the reticence of the government to bring in the ‘Inner Line Permit’ - a system aimed at protecting local interests. In the streets I saw a great rush of students in protest, on the walls posters declared ‘Save Manipuri People – Endangered Human Species’ and on the local news hospitalized students were shown in the aftermath of the rounds of tear gas fired by police. The issue is a complicated one, well beyond the ken of a passing tourist like me, but there was a bit of me that was glad to see some evidence of mass dissent, however staged (how political are most 15 year olds?), after a month in Myanmar where to stymie that sort of rebellion, tear gas would be the hors d'oeuvre.

Imphal is pinned in by nine hulking mountains and the rising road out was decorated by government signs that read ‘Drive, don’t fly’, ‘Drive horsepower, not rum-power’ and ‘drunk drivers are bloody idiots’. Soon I battled up the road into the state of Meghalaya which was layered in thick mud, sometimes half a metre deep, halting the passage of traffic entirely. I had to get the help of a team of local men to haul my bike through. To my left a vast sheet of flat land was sprawled, spangled with sun-kissed lakes and rivers, spotted with vegetation. As I admired it a voice from behind me answered my question. ‘Bangladesh!’ it said. Of course it was, but with a single entry VISA for India, it would remain the stuff of remote glimpses.

That night the police at a roadblock found a small tin-roofed shack for me to stay in (‘we salute you and your amazing adventure!’), but first they had to evict seven chickens, one policeman walked out of it with one chicken neck in his grip, mid-execution. It was candle-lit and cobwebbed and dank inside, but it was mine, and from the window the lakes of Bangladesh shimmered like fish scales. The night was jagged with the creak of cicadas, the whirr of the wind and the prickle of rain on metal.

The next day no vehicles were granted permission to use the roads throughout the state of Meghalaya – it was Indian Independence day and local ‘outfits’ (‘militants’ according to the police) had instigated a ban on all traveling vehicles – a protest against a government decision to outlaw a form of coal mining called ‘rat hole mining’ on the grounds that it can lead to landslides, unsafe working conditions and pollution. For me, this meant no traffic and no horns, bliss then, if it weren’t for the torrential, unceasing rain. There was a big depression in the Bay of Bengal – big, I was told, even by monsoon standards. Days were slate-grey and bleary with cloud and soon every bit of clothing I owned was wet through which meant grim-faced shuddering when it was time to get dressed.

India - where even the insects are colourful.

The coolest thing about landslides is the mimicry of elements: for an instant land becomes water. Earth looks to flow and boil, a splash of rock here, a foam of shattering shale there. Running in the dun-coloured gash in the forest beside the road through the Jaintia hills was an actual waterfall, inseparable though from the powerful rockfalls beside it. The road had been closed for two days and as the mountain frayed, spitting out man sized boulders, all I could do was stand about with the truck drivers, who were wrapped in checkered shawls and hypnotized by the tumble. Finally there was something more stare-worthy than I was.

‘Last year we were stuck for a week’ a man told me resignedly. Eventually a JCB got to work but a massive pool of mud remained on the road. A panic of drivers ploughed into it, knowing this might be their only chance for who knows how long. As they drove madly they spread giant wings of mud from their tyres, covering me head to toe. My turn arrived: I whizzed into the soup, eyes ahead, up at the falling rock, ahead, up. Few cars came after me, there must have been another great collapse of the mountain soon after I got through.

Indian streets are knotted with bands of men, chewing paan (betel nut), each crowd absorbing wandering pairs and trios. Everything requires an audience: card games, conversations, arguments, me. India is just a place where people group, compulsively (they have to in a nation of 1.2 billion and growing fast) and here the observation most startling about me, more than the fact I pedal everywhere, is that I do it alone.

I don't want to indulge in too many gratuitous generalisations but privacy is to be a touch suspicious of in India, famously so. Ostensibly this means people having a good poke and peer at my bike and the contents of my panniers, and there is always interest in the affairs of strangers. Sometimes I hear conversations along the lines of:

‘I’m off to visit Ana’
‘Who’s that?’
‘You don’t know her. She’s in hospital’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Something with her ears I think’
‘What is wrong with her ears?’



Yes, people stared, yes they grouped about me, yes, it wasn't always easy, but the Indian hospitality was unyielding. ‘There are good people everywhere’ one of Indian silver-haired professorly type told me in Silchar. ‘I was in England in 1988. I asked an Englishman where was this building, and he showed me right to it! He walked with me for 50 yards!’

He remained there frozen, truly impressed. I thought about how much his example paled in comparison to the generosity I received in the first two measly weeks in the country. Six different people have hosted me so far, strangers all, generally inviting me after spotting me on the street, and more have offered. I wondered if I would recount these stories to visiting Indians back in the UK one day. The man of course then paid for my breakfast, insisting as he did so that he was representing India.

My bicycle often acts as an ice-breaker and opens the door to conversation. At length, it’s established: I’m British, I can’t speak Hindi, I’m going to Darjeeling, Yes I’m a bachelor, yes I’m alone, yes really, yes completely alone. Lately I’ve been getting fed up with the surface nature of travel through countries in which I don’t know the language, so in India its great to learn what people feel about all kinds of issues: the legal system,dowries, population control, religion, the environment, Imperialism and the Commonwealth Games. Oh and cricket, of course.

The rain continued when I reached Jowai on Independence Day, an event which the town celebrates through a display of profound glumness. There was the incessant rain of course, but more depressing to locals was the decimation of their industry: this was the heart of the mining country.

I arrived into Shillong ready for time off, and wet through, though the rain had eased a touch. That’s not to say it was anything less than torrential, it was just marginally less sopping, like stepping out from under Victoria Falls and directly under Niagara. Shillong was much nicer than the other Indian cities I’d visited - with a very blue cathedral, the odd cafe and even pedestrianized areas (though cars do drive down it) and a no-beep zone (though everyone still beeps).

There is nothing as shameful as finding yourself in KFC when you are in a country of food of sublime flavour and renown. Nothing. Not even if I had stolen lunch from a blind street child would I feel this guilty. The Colonel's crispy chicken only just quelled my self-loathing. But it was in KFC that I met Ankan.

Ankan: an immensely affable and intelligent guy working on an environmental project who had spent time studying in the States. Within minutes of our meeting he had invited me to stay and I took him up on the offer. A presentation was arranged, media interviews, delicious dinners, and drinks and meetings and tea and then we teamed up with his friends: Rahul, Annelie and Max to visit the world famous living root bridges near Cherapunji.

We also did a lot of eating - of good food, not KFC. I'm getting used to people referring to me in the third person when I'm eating. As I gorged in Shillong, among my new awestruck friends, I heard things like:

'wow, look at him eat. How much do you think he'll manage?'
'Dunno. Doesn't look like he'll stop any time soon'
'Give him more rice, lets see what happens'

The Root Bridges, Near Cherripunji, Meghalaya

I am in the about the wettest place on earth, in the wettest time of year, during a particularly wet spell and I am wet. Soaking, in fact. I stare out at a high rim of land, the Sohra plateau, striped by immense waterfalls, a view so vast it's addictive. I notice Max by my side. ‘Might clear up’ I venture. He stares out, grimly. Silence. Lightning silvers the murk.

Why weather researchers still quote the annual rainfall of Cherripunji in milimetres is not clear considering it comes by the metre, usually around twelve of them each year. It has been raining hard and unendingly for three weeks, a local family tell me. Uncountable waterfalls streamed down every rock face on the way here. We were all out late last night and the twisting road flaired our hangovers.

Outside the car water immediately hijacks my senses: it is all I can see, hear and feel. ‘The clouds come from Bangladesh’ explains Rahul,’and when they hit the mountain, BOOM! They burst. Its incredible man’. Twelve metres, I recall. Incredible indeed.

Resigned to the fact I’m about to get wet, I stomp in the puddles which soon turn into streams. We descend steps, the first of a couple of thousand to the river below, and in its state of swollen fury, I can already hear it’s rumble.

'If you need to pee, do it now.' says Rahul. 'I’m serious. Forest is sacred. No peeing.'

Locals have stories. Of a woman dressed only in white who dissolves out of the mist and wanders through villages: the spirit of the forest. You would do well not to offend her. Another tale recounts the plight of a local man who had forsaken the spirit of the forest in some way. Slowly, tell locals, he went mad - cooking meals for a family he didn't have.

Eventually we make it down and cross iron bridges, where the violence of the water beneath our feet is mesmerizing, to reach our destination. The living root bridges were built by the War-Khasis native tribe who guided the growth of secondary roots of the Indian Rubber trees using wooden planks so that the roots eventually traversed entire rivers. It takes time to grow a bridge - decades in fact - and some here are over 500 years old.

The one we have hiked to see is known as the Double Decker. As I shuffle across, peering below and then into the mist-dressed jungle, a butterfly as fat and black as a bat flutters past me. The bridge is solid, so sway or give, sturdier in fact than the metal ones in our wake. Miraculously the rain has eased for our hike back, but not for long. As we reach our ride it rains anew. Pelts it down. I say a silent goodbye to the massive waterfalls still in sight, their majesty a good trade for the rain in my hair, in my boots, seeping into my clothes, foisting shudders. I realise at once that my hangover has vanished. In fact, I feel great.


I left Shillong a touch sentimental to be leaving behind new friends and there are a heap of thank yous this month:

Ankan – thank you so much dude, Aiban, Rahul, Annelie and Max, everyone at Asian Confluence, Sumanta (you will feature in the next blog post my friend), all of the boys at Pedal Attack, Lightson and family, the school in Imphal, Vikash and a big thank you to India for being generally fantastic.

Next – I’m heading to Darjeeling and then I cross into Nepal because my Indian VISA expires and I’m optimistically aiming to cross the Himalayas before the pass closes for the winter. Kathmandu will be home whilst I score VISAs for onward travel, collate kit and rest. Oh and write: I have a bunch of articles appearing in various magazines and websites soon – look out for pieces in Adventure Travel, CNN, Adventure.com and Wild among others. I’ll post links to these on my facebook page – and if you haven’t liked it yet: here’s your chance…

A Nepali market

There is a thing that lurks in the fetid, nethermost crevasses of my rear pannier. Perhaps it was once white, but it’s impossible to tell. It is the Gollum of bathroom accessories. Claire once held it aloft with a finger, asking, with a more than a faint sense of alarm, ‘what is this?’ It was a genuine question. ‘My towel’. She cocked her head, working her imagination where the most credulous would falter. It’s the kind of thing you might use to wrap your dog in, if your dog was bleeding and needed to be taken urgently to a vet. But only if you really hated your dog. And Sumatra, the kind Sir, drove an 80 km round trip to give it to me. There is no better demonstration of how generous the Indians are than that.

Older tea pickers with lordosis

Nepali man, and a Nepali smile, wearing a Nepali Topi