In June 2007, Tom Allen and Andy Welch pedalled away from their homes in the UK with a crazy idea that just might work – to travel round the world by bicycle. On their way, through sponsorship they have been raising funds in support of the Wilderness Foundation UK. This is a recap of their ongoing adventure.
In the beginning, everything seemed so simple. My mate Andy and I had gathered everything we needed, and we were standing outside my house amidst friends and family, all gathered to wish us well on the long journey we had ahead of us.
Suddenly, as we waved and cycled away from the crowd and down the streets we knew so well, a strange thing happened. The stress of the previous year of frantic planning, sponsorship-hunting and fundraising instantly evaporated. Such a huge psychological sigh of relief – we were finally on the road!
But in the same moment it hit home just how little we’d really grasped what we were setting out to do. This very act – pedalling down a quiet rural road with no idea where I was going to sleep – was going to be the reality, day in, day out, for months and years, behind the deceptive romance of the phrase “we’re going to cycle round the world”.
Sure enough, this would be no high adventure. It would be an intrinsically simple life – the simple struggles of mountains, storms, deserts, loneliness and language-barriers, coupled with the simple rewards of a warm sleeping bag, a hot meal, a river or lake to swim in, and the welcome of a stranger’s home in a foreign land.
Since then, there were countless amazing, joyful times, as well as a number of extremely tough ones. Not least, I overcame terrible homesickness and the challenge of living on less than 5 Euros a day in Europe, but four months later we rolled into the mystical Istanbul, Turkey, and the beginning of Asia.
Later, I would struggle through a truly bitter winter in the Caucasus, where temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius at night, ill-equipped for such weather, talking my way into buildings every night to escape the biting cold. I would cross the vast, desolate expanses of the Sahara desert in Sudan; get malaria and have rocks thrown at me ! every day in Ethiopia; cycle through the hottest place on Earth, the Danakil Depression; have an armed escort for a thousand kilometres through troubled Yemen; roast in 60-degree heat in the Omani desert summer; and make it through the seven-lane highways of Dubai!
But leaving home was the toughest thing of all. At the time, neither of us had done any travelling whatsoever. We knew precious little of the world outside. And we had a vague inkling that what we were embarking on was ill-advised, under-prepared, and monumentally over-ambitious considering our experience.
Over the following months, we had a baptism of fire in which we realised we’d bitten off far more than we could comfortably chew – luckily in the relative comfort and close proximity of Europe – but that steep learning curve taught us many valuable things. Most important amongst these, perhaps, was that the world might be our oyster but it was also rather enormous, and that maybe it would be better to get to know a few parts of it more intimately than to try and swallow it all in one go.
Thus, our idea to single-mindedly circumnavigate the world evolved over thousands of kilometres of experience and retrospection, and is now more about gradually crawling the surface of the planet, without too many restrictive plans, slowing and stopping to delve a little deeper, putting down roots, and forming relationships with places and people, and using the bicycle as the tool to accomplish all of this.
I came to love my blog as an outlet for the turmoil and challenge of an unpredictable life to anyone who cared to listen. I was pleased when I discovered that others actually enjoyed reading my outpourings. Andy’s and my blogs evolved alongside the journey and are now a place to find not only tales from the road but also wider musings on the ins and outs of an itinerant lifestyle, observations of countries and cultures, practical advice for budding cycle travellers, and motivational material to help others achieve their own personal ambitions.
Photography was another very important creative outlet, and we’ve been truly spoilt for subject matter.
Sometimes it’s been an almost-impossible endeavour to balance this kind of life, to continue raising funds, to perceive and then to choose the best of many possible paths, to keep things in perspective and to consider the future as well as the present, and sometimes just to deal with bad roads, big hills and plain boredom and loneliness.
But the ultimate reward has been a deep feeling of taking control of life – learning to live lightly, realising the futility of the material quest, and finding fulfilment in a world that doesn’t have wealth and power as its prerequisites. Long-term cycle-touring isn’t for everyone – but so far, it’s suiting us just fine.
Tom Allen and Andy Welch left England in June 2007, and between them have cycled more than 35,000 kilometres through more than 30 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. Their website is at http://www.ride-earth.org.uk. They have just launched a photography calendar for 2010 in order to raise funds for the continuing expedition.
