"Man should never travel faster than the speed of a camel lest he leave his soul behind"

Beginnings

Every end is also a beginning; the places before us are the places between. My journey began with a failure of my own making, but there are no regrets, only never to be repeated experiences on the road to who I am today. Having fallen out of love with one life, I began building another. Inspired by previous experiences, I sometimes fell into the trap of trying to reproduce them. For the most part however, ten months of my life was lived in the moment, turning the pedals, looking no further than the next cafe, resting point or city stop ahead.

With no experience of cycle touring and just enough suspension of disbelief to make what seemed like an unrealisable fantasy happen, I rode halfway around the world with three people I’d never met until a matter of days before departure. Crossing Siberia before winter set in demanded twelve hour, hundred mile days and the inevitable contingencies called for resourcefulness and initiative. But the most remarkable thing about the experience was the decision to do something remarkable, to make something that happens to other people, happen to me.

Ultimately it was relationships that made the experience and it was the bikes that made these possible. We were welcomed into the homes of locals, touched that we'd ridden so far to be with them; we were wedded to the land and each other in a way no other means of transport allowed and our common endeavour was to forge an unbreakable bond between us.

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It was 9 p.m. on a miserable Friday evening in April 2001 and I was at Stoke railway station to meet a man about a bike. Having travelled up from Brighton, I’d reserved a seat on a connecting train from Derby to Stoke only to discover that the train never existed.

Virgin Trains were very apologetic and readily provided a taxi for myself and three other disgruntled passengers to take us to where we should have been somewhat earlier. I found Andy waiting on the station with the necessary patience of a man who rejected the use of a mobile phone. I apologised, unsure whether on behalf of myself, the train operator or indeed, the then Railtrack.

After this inauspicious start, we drove to Andy’s parents’ house high on the hills of the nearby Peak District, keen to suss each other out. Andy had thin sandy hair and a wiry frame that befitted a man who'd managed to save money for travel while on a student income. After meeting his parents, we retreated to the kitchen where he fed me his signature dish for the first time - rice with chopped vegetables and lashings of sweet chilli sauce in an interpretation of curry peculiar to him. He explained that he had been vegetarian since instinctively rejecting meat at a very early age - unlike myself, who had come to that diet later and in a more calculated way.

Having known me for little more than an hour, Andy overwhelmed me with countless slides from previous trips including photos of him standing alongside amusing road signs for Condom in France and Hell in Norway. What was he trying to prove, I wondered?

We exchanged a few travel stories before he moved onto his video collection, including the complete works of Monty Python and much else besides. It was impressive in its size and scope and revealing about the man. As I tried to work Andy out, I have no doubt he was wondering about me too.

The death of a dream.

Soon after graduating in a liberal arts subject that qualified me to wonder what to do with my life, I plunged myself into the 1997 Winchester by-election campaign. On the basis of a month’s tramping the streets, knocking on doors and stuffing envelopes in a dingy basement, I came by a volunteer position in the office of Archy Kirkwood MP. Working in the Westminster village at a time of great optimism was intoxicating. News stories were being played out down the corridor. Heroes and villains were at close quarters. There was an endless supply of ideas and people eager to debate them. However, I lacked the missionary zeal of those with their careers mapped out on the backs of envelopes. Having finally found a paid job working for another MP after a year of volunteering, I was unceremoniously dumped after three months, presumably because I lacked either the ambition or the inclination to do a good enough job. Undeterred, from the very bottom of the greasy pole I attempted to salvage my career by finding my way back into a third parliamentarian’s office as a volunteer, but fate had other ideas.

The true genesis of this trip, the defining moment that led me to where I am now was 2 a.m. on a Tuesday evening in January 1999 when I finished reading Enduring Love, a novel dealing with obsession, beginning with a random life-changing event. I was given the book by Kate - a fellow researcher who happened to be my recently ex-girlfriend - perhaps in an attempt to tell me I should let her go. Having obsessively read to the end, I went to sleep tired, sinking into the bed in my cramped attic room.

I woke up, head throbbing, barely aware of where or indeed who I was. Something was wrong. I had large blisters across the balls of my feet and no immediate idea how I’d got them. Piecing together the shattered fragments of my short-term memory, I concluded that I must have had a seizure in the bathroom. The only explanation for the burns on the balls of my feet and each toe was that I’d clenched them around a radiator pipe. In the semi-conscious haze that follows an epileptic fit, I failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Keen to be near the object of my obsession, rather than putting my feet in a bucket of ice, I burst the blisters and cycled to work.

Only when I visited my parents two days later was I compelled to recognise the seriousness of the situation. They took one look at me, said “no arguments” and drove me straight to A&E, where the doctors told me I was just short of needing a skin graft.

After two months of bandages, crutches and morphine, I tried to return to my volunteer job at Parliament but found my services were no longer required. A week is a long time in politics. Two months is fatal.

Perhaps as a result of my recent immobility, my thoughts returned to seeing some more of the world. I’d gained an appetite for independent travel on a shambolic commercial overland trip from London to Kathmandu when I was eighteen. With the company going bust in Delhi, I had been left to make my own way to Kathmandu on Indian trains and buses.

With an appreciation of progressive overland travel and the challenges and opportunities presented while travelling alone, it was only now that I began to follow this to its logical conclusion.

To understand progressive changes in people, culture and landscape, it is necessary to travel through the places between and doing so at a human pace with none of the steel and glass barriers presented by cars, buses and trains offers the greatest contact with people and land.

Expedition cycling would be challenging and offer a perspective on travel more or less possible to those with the means two thousand years ago. Alexander the Great made it to India, Ghengis Khan came the other way, so what was to stop me one hundred and twenty years after the invention of that most liberating and democratic of machines, the modern bicycle?

Well. I had no idea whether people did this kind of thing let alone what preparation it would entail. I had only general travelling experience and little knowledge of mechanics. And my organisational skills had been found wanting in my abortive political career.

Mustering all my search skills I threw up a few relevant hits, the most inspiring being a site by a Swiss man called Claude Marthaler, aka the Yakman. He’d been cycling around the world for nearly six years and provided a wealth of information including links to other cyclists’ websites. This was a revelation. It dawned on me that these guys were mortal and if they could do it, so could I.

Preparations

Picking myself up off the floor, I got myself a McJob and it was in the long hours of repetitive data entry that I first discussed my idea. Forcing my hand, I threw a hostage to fortune and made a concerted effort to mention it to as many people as possible.

I joined the Cyclists Touring Club hoping to learn more about touring and find a travelling companion. The infectious torrent of rich sights, sounds and smells that is India was already in my blood and it was tempting to go back. With the bare bones of a plan, I placed an advert in the CTC magazine.

My ad received several responses, three of which seemed like serious contenders. These narrowed themselves down to two leaving me with a choice between an experienced and organised accountant and a rough diamond builder. Judgement of character was a skill I would need to hone and through a misplaced prejudice about accountants, I picked the wrong man. The dodgy builder disappeared clean off the face of the earth - possibly for tax purposes - three weeks before we were due to leave and I never heard from him again.

With neither the experience nor inclination to undertake the journey alone I had to fundamentally reassess my situation. It would take time to find another partner and crossing Europe in the winter was not attractive. Having put my plans on hold, inevitably my funds were depleted as I lost direction and focus.

Drifting aimlessly through cyberspace, I came across The Lonely Planet’s Thorntree bulletin board and a posting asking if anyone else was “crazy enough to cycle from England to Singapore via Siberia”.

This grabbed my attention. I’d never considered this route before and it both inspired and filled me with awe. Crossing Siberia sounded wild, exciting and just a little daunting, the Gobi Desert even more so. Until now I’d overlooked Russia, thinking of it as just another European culture with less to offer than the orient, which contrary to my philosophy of emphasising the journey, I’d considered my true destination. I’d imagined Siberia to be cold and empty, a characterisation that does it a great injustice and I’d never had any burning desire to go to China. In short, it sounded like a fantastic route.

My only doubt was that I didn’t think I could wait until the following June when Andy was due to graduate. It had been too long already and six months seemed like an awfully long time.

Time flies when you’re twiddling your thumbs. Christmas came and went and when in February Andy wanted to finalise his group, I counted myself out thinking I could get away earlier. A month later, it dawned on me that Andy would be going away on the first of June and I’d be twiddling my thumbs as ever. With belated clarity of thought, I asked if I could sign up.

“So, Toby. Do you have any 'bikepacking' experience?”

“Er, no.” 

“Do you have a valid passport?” 

“Yes - but it expires in June. I think I can get one in time.”

Andy was probably having doubts by this point. I knew what he was thinking. He’d spent two years planning this trip and here I was planning to join two months before departure.

My passport arrived promptly, the visas slotted into place and the vaccinations were painless, if expensive. I finalised my equipment and once absolutely sure I was leaving, informed my manager that I’d be leaving office life behind - by bike.

In the days before departure, an air of unreality descended. I was disconcertingly relaxed and couldn’t quite believe I was doing this. Surely it was all a big bluff, I was a joker destined never to achieve what was no more than pub talk. Others may have felt the same. I was sure I must have forgotten something but after two years of procrastination it was time to hit the road.

Feeling it was important to start with the others from day one, I travelled to Stoke-on-Trent on the twenty-ninth of May 2001. Scott had flown in from the States the previous week and Rory would arrive from Leicester two days later. We would be staying two nights at my home en route to Dover, giving me three days to warm up and discover what I’d forgotten.

Andy met me at the station and we rode the few miles to his home in Werrington. Since meeting online, Andy had met Rory and me separately but the first time we were all together would be when Rory arrived on the night before departure. In the meantime, we learned a little more about each other.

Andy loved practical jokes. I had early warning of this when he told me about complex illusions he’d set up as a kid. One summer evening, he partially buried his best friend Harvey in the woods before summoning his classmates to perform a ritual, apparently raising the dead. On another occasion, he rigged up a speaker in his sister’s wardrobe, ran wires under the carpet to a microphone in his room and woke her in the middle of the night with ghastly cries. No practical joke was too much effort. While living in Scotland he’d erected a plaque outside his house declaring himself the ambassador of The People’s Democratic Republic of Absurdistan, telling curious locals that it was a cash-strapped result of the fragmentation of the Soviet Union. He’d even drawn the maps and written the history of the place.

Scott had spent the last week getting to know Andy and quietly planning in his organised and efficient way. He came from Texas and was an engineer but beyond that, I knew little about him. He was well built, looking a little like the rich, handsome and able college football playing villain of American coming of age movies. Scott knew what he wanted to do, would say so then do it. I on the other hand, often didn’t know what I wanted until after I’d done it.

I was sleeping in the Ganners' caravan and in a portent of things to come, Andy banged on the door at 7:30 a.m.

“What d'ya want for brekkie, Toby?”

Another couple of hours sleep came to mind.

Feeling rudely awakened for a “non school day”, I politely informed him that I saw no need for eating breakfast in the middle of the night. In my defence, aged 38, his body clock was twelve years ahead of mine.

In the days before departure everyone had far more to do than me, leaving me wondering what I was missing out. Scott had arrived in England with considerably more luggage than was practical. This included a laptop, solar panels, chargers and a digital camera. He headed off to the Post Office to send them back to the States and still managed to find more to send home when we reached London. He was over prepared and over equipped. I was the reverse.

We had to wait until twelve hours before departure for Rory to arrive from London and complete the gang of four. When he walked into Andy’s dinning room grinning broadly like an overexcited schoolboy, Rory was exactly the person I’d expected from our brief telephone conversations. A fully paid up member of the north London chattering classes, he too was an engineer, designing bits and pieces for Caterpillar in Leicester. He’d been taking bikes apart and latterly, putting them back together since an early age, sharing with me a fascination with how things worked and taking them apart to find out.

As we ate and talked, there was an instant bond between us. This was going to be fun. We burned Scott’s bike box in the garden after dinner and had a few drinks to celebrate. Harvey was there too, leaving Andy with a special present, “The Magic Hand” lest he should get lonely at night on the long ride.

I had worried that it might be difficult for four strangers to spend ten months together in extreme conditions. The trip itself remained an unknown but any doubts were dispelled as the four of us came together knowing our lives were from this point on intertwined.