A bike ride around the world

“𝑻𝒐 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒂𝒏 𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒔 𝒕𝒐 𝒎𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒂 𝒃𝒆𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒆𝒏𝒅 𝒊𝒔 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒘𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎.” – 𝑻.𝑺. 𝑬𝒍𝒊𝒐𝒕

That’s a reflection that seemed fitting at the recent end of a 25-year stint in my working life, and it feels apt in terms of my ambition to be a round-the-world cyclist too.

This latest new beginning is a big one. I’ve cycled several multi-day rides to date, but the longest of them was ten days. My journey across Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan will be at least four times as long, and spread over about two months.

It’ll be a long time to be apart from my family – particularly our beloved 12-year-old who’ll turn 13 while I’m away. And it was the toughest of goodbyes at the airport this morning. The consolation, I keep reminding myself, is the happiest of reunions to look forward to.

Flying out to my start point is to retrace the steps I’ve taken to get to that point, and much of today’s flight path has directly tracked the route I cycled from home to the east of Turkey, particularly from the eastern edge of Austria. From Graz, the flight headed out over Hungary, and straight over Szeged, where a bike shop came to my rescue back in 2019 following a rapid succession of punctures on the Great Hungarian Plain. Then over Romania – tracking slightly south of my ride over the Carpathian Mountains (where I nervously acknowledged the large warning signs to ‘beware of the bears’ and avoided a close – and mismatched – encounter as I hauled my way up the Transalpina, the country’s highest road). Next came Bulgaria, and a flight path teasingly close to the Black Sea resorts of Varna and Burgas through which Thomas and I wended our way last summer; and finally the far west of Turkey, where we ground out a crossing through Kirklareli and Çorlu in a shadeless furnace where the temperature breached the 45c mark (the seasonal average being some 20c lower)!

The flight I’m on now will reunite me with Trabzon, where November’s end will become Wednesday morning’s beginning. It’ll be the launchpad for this most exciting of adventures.

Thanks very much to everyone who’s donated so generously to my fundraising for Alzheimer’s Society already. If anyone else would like to donate, I’d be hugely grateful for your support. My fundraising page is here: 

https://www.justgiving.com/page/centralasia2025

Like so many children, I found freedom and independence in riding a bicycle. There seemed something magical about the disproportionate reward you could reap from turning the pedals of a bike. As soon as I was old enough, I cycled to school every day, and I rode as much as I could at weekends – graduating from the orbit of our family dog walks to doing laps of Richmond Park, and not long afterwards riding to places far from home that sated my growing wanderlust. My long-suffering dad was always happy to accommodate my love of cycling from an ‘A’ to a ‘B’, rather than in a loop that brought me back to where I’d started. He’d drive to the end point and we’d load the bike in the car there. As a teenager, I marvelled at the fact that, as my strength and stamina increased, I could cycle from home (in London) to places like Brighton (61 miles away), and then Portsmouth (76 miles) and Salisbury (95 miles).

Joy in what feels like the inordinate reward of riding a bike has never left me, and my sense of wanderlust has only deepened.

That’s not to say that the effort hasn’t sometimes been painful! I’ve ridden through a bone-chilling blizzard in Glencoe on my way from Land’s End to John O’Groats…in the first week of August 2015 (for which I’d packed mittens, but not gloves)! I’ve been completely lost in a Slovenian forest where, no matter what I did to correct my course, I kept ending up like Sisyphus, back where I’d started; I’ve scaled Mont Ventoux (reckoned by many pro cyclists to be the toughest climb in the world); and I’ve ridden with my son Thomas across the shadeless plains of north-western Turkey in a 45c heatwave.

But, even when the effort has been huge, the rewards have felt significantly huger. If you keep turning the pedals on a bicycle for long enough, you cross country borders, and even continental divides, and that’s a reality that still fills me with a childlike sense of awe.

Much of that awe has been channelled into following the exploits of athletes far more accomplished than me. Alert me to the fact that someone I don’t even know is taking on a monumental bike challenge, and I’ll be glued for its duration to any tracking or blog that they make public! In September 2017, I took that fascination a step further when Mark Beaumont, the extraordinary long-distance cyclist, put out a post on social media inviting people to join him in Paris for the final stretch of his attempt not just to break the world record for cycling around the world (a record he himself had already held!), but to do so in 80 days or fewer. And so it was that I boarded a Eurostar to the French capital with my bike, and found myself cycling (under police escort!) with Mark and about 20 of his friends and family from the Palace of Versailles to the Arc de Triomphe, where his 29,000-kilometre (18,000-mile) journey had begun just 78 days, 14 hours, and 40 minutes before.

Now, my energies are being channelled into my own attempt to cycle around the world – which will, ironically, feature a plethora of rides from A to B, but ultimately amount, I hope, to one gigantic loop!

To date, over five separate rides of varied lengths, I’ve completed the 5,464-kilometre (3,395-mile) leg from home in West Sussex to eastern Turkey – a route that’s taken me through France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and all but the last 195 kilometres of Turkey.

On 9 April, I’ll be back on the Zağnospaşa bridge in Trabzon (Turkey) where my last ride (from Istanbul) ended in November to start the next leg across Central Asia.

During something like 44 days on my bike (spread over two months), I’ll be riding across Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – getting close to the Chinese border before heading up to the ‘finish’ line in Almaty via the eastern shore of the vast Issyk Kul (warm lake). I’ll cover an estimated 5,285 kilometres (3,284 miles) and climb the equivalent of more than four Mount Everests along the way!

For most of this ride, I’ll be far outside my comfort zone, riding alone and unsupported, and wild camping in some of the most remote regions of the world. If you’d like to follow my exploits, you can do so on my world bike ride site (hosted by Follow My Challenge), where my live progress will be tracked. On the site, you’ll also be able to read my blog posts and see my photographs and videos, and you’ll find my fundraising page for Alzheimer’s Society.