Also very interesting man

Thoughts on returning home after six years around the world by bicycle

My journey around the globe began fatefully - with a life-changing decision, taken in the pub.

Pint in hand, mini-atlas flipped open on the table, I sat in the beer garden of The George near London Bridge on some forgotten day in 2008, parading a new plan to a small circle of friends. Eagerly poised, a pen hovering above the tiny dot of London, I flashed a grin at my frowning audience and plunged in, sketching out my route around the globe and across six continents. All would be conveniently handled, I’d affirmed, by bicycle. ‘In six years, give or take.’

‘I’ll nail this bit first…’ - an airy slash of pen whisked me across Eurasia, where I deftly trounced the Alps, Pamirs and Himalayas; ‘and then over here…’ spanning the most roadless hunks of Sahara, ‘and then through this bit…’ and I was pootling up through the Darien Gap. Someone muttered something about warlords and drug cartels, but I’d swiped at their concerns with my pint-hand, dripping lager on Mexico, and was soon merrily skidding about Alaskan tundra. In less than a minute I’d breezed back to London: venturesome beard, book deal.

The pessimists, they didn’t know how it would be. I was going to plunge down ragged trails, spreading wings of dust over the precipice. I would freewheel over ice, rock and savannah, the wind forever at my back; delicious freedom, and all in the vanity of solitude. I would consider the lonely sky. Probably I’d be back in The George in six years’ time, leaning back, exultant, my feet propped up on the table and holding forth: ‘And when I was in Turkmenistan…’ I would pronounce, ending hours later with a long sigh and something like ‘and then I had to hold the poor fella down and cut his damn arms off with my cone spanner’. Someone would buy me beer.

http://www.cyclingthe6.com/