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Annapurna: Cycling a circuit in crisis
In this world, few things exist alone, unworried by and remote from the rest. When heavy rains and gusts ripped through India’s eastern seaboard and cyclone Hudhud was christened as such, the sun was...
View ArticleBears and how to beat them
My regular blog piece about my time in India is still a week or so away, but this month you get an extra piece because an article I wrote about a not so close call with a bear in Canada has been...
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Of calm and chaos
I spluttered out of Kathmandu, my lungs assaulted by the gritty air that lifted from fields of litter and their resident limping dogs. In the hills the smog abated and the light paled to silk. I dealt...
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Espionage is easy
I took my seat on the ferry and looked out at the high-rising dens of Hong Kong’s deal makers. The sun was low and amber - reflected in the windowed skyline, the effect was a city-wide inferno. The...
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The Chinese Burn
I was scouting for a place to camp behind a thin disguise of bushes when I saw him approaching; the mounting dusk made a tapered silhouette of a bicycle and rider. In Hunan province what makes for a...
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Cold eyeballs in the Gobi
‘Ganbei!’Again?I heaved myself to my feet and raised my glass of ‘wine’, it swayed in front of me, vague, like a ship’s lantern. ‘Ganbei!’ (‘Cheers!’) and I brought the glass to my lips. A pungence...
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Ices lakes and frozen worlds
To the lake...After pedalling just a few kilometres from Ulaanbaator there was no hint a world capital lurked close by. The sky reached to wider horizons, plucked of the reaching soviet tower blocks,...
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Mongolia's Wild West
It was hard to leave Khatgal, hard to forsake my gur into which a young girl would tiptoe each morning and fire up the wood-burning stove which in minutes improved the temperature from minus 15 to 20...
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The resurrection of Green
The Tian Shan mountains arrived four days after leaving Urumqi, green and misty-peaked. My left knee, which had been a generous font of pain for the last month, felt obligingly strong. Before I crossed...
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60 Signs that you need to STOP Cycle Touring and GO HOME
1. You put your entire leg through a rip in the crotch of your shorts when trying to find the leg hole2. You ‘sense’ wild camping opportunities, like a Jedi3. If you are a woman, there is consistently...
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The Crazy Adventures of Crazy Max
‘Ahhh you from England!’ said the man behind the counter of the snug photocopy shop in downtown Bishkek ‘you like zero zero seven?’ I had to think for a minute ‘Double-O-seven? James Bond?’ ‘Yes. But…’...
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Blood, sweat and Pamirs
‘Oh hey, do you have a map of the Pamirs?’I shook my head as the Irishman, one of four cyclists I ran into on the climb up from Osh, rummaged in his head bag and handed me a shred of dark-spotted...
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Equipment Reviews 2015
As it turns out, cycling six continents is a particularly savage way to prove the quality of gear. Things have been fraying and snapping and dissolving, and once, actually exploding. I’ve been busily...
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An unlikely tourist: travels to Afghanistan
Part one: TajikistanThe Tajik border patrols usually came in trotting formations of boyish men in camouflage gear but this troop were in the black get-up of special ops. My new friend James and I...
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Sand and caravans
North of Termiz the land turned to semi-desert: knuckles of sandstone, punched by the green plumes of weed. After the pale, deathly world of Afghanistan I was coming into the hunk of Uzbekistan that...
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Curveballs
KazbegiGeorgia is a country of curves. It greets the Black Sea in an arcing coastline; a probing tongue composes the border with Azerbaijan. The Georgian script is fantastically looping, as are the...
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Why adventurers should aim to inspire, not motivate: the trouble with...
Two weeks ago Sarah Outen returned from nearly half a decade of cycling and rowing around the world, half a decade of vigorously roughing it in a manner that puts my similarly spanned escapade to...
View ArticleThe human cost of conflict, northern Afghanistan
Home is an exciting, alarming, and chilly two months away. The homecoming is set, come down if you're free: Friday 19th February at lunch time. Warning - there may be any or all of the following:...
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Footfall
As I'm winding up this journey I'm getting a touch nostalgic so I thought I'd revisit some experiences from the road. I'm often asked what was the most frightening or dangerous moment during your trip....
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Europe part 2: Revenge of the vagabond
When the night time temperature in Germany fell to minus thirteen, I wasn’t surprised. When the sun brought a pale haze to the valleys, and when the world stiffened under ice and trees became ghoulish,...
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The succour of homesickness
Thoughts on returning home after six years around the world by bicycleIn 2008 I was working as a doctor in a hospital in central London and living in a flat nearby. It was comfortable, familiar, a...
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Home straights and homecomings
It was Germany that played host to the chilly, damp dregs of my journey around the world by bicycle. But I’d become distracted. In principle, this was still cycle touring, more pertinently I was on an...
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Life after cycling: stage 1 - The Honeymoon
I know what I said, alright. I know I made promises of a silky new blog, some quick and tidy tribute to the age of Wordpress, with an array of mind-flipping images and prose to inspire great belches of...
View ArticleVideo highlights from six years biking around the world
Apologies if you'd been expecting my monthly update and got radio-silence... It was the first time I've missed a blog post in the last seven years. My excuse is that I've been embroiled in all manner...
View ArticleFor the sake of balance...
Last week I posted a video featuring some highlights from the six years I spent travelling around the world on a bicycle, and it was predictably dominated by the people I met and cycled alongside. But...
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