About Me

I’m Tom from England. (That’s me with the silly ice-beard.) Since 2007 I’ve been going on bike adventures to places like Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Mongolia and Lapland. I’m currently living in London and I’m married to Tenny.

Why adventure cycling?

I guess it started when my parents took the stabilisers off my first bike and I disappeared across the village green, aged 4. Cue much fretting and wailing from aforementioned parents.

As a child one of my ambitions was to ride my BMX off a ramp into the nearby River Welland. (I built a ramp, but was never brave enough to get up enough speed.)

At university I got fat and lazy in my first year and spent much of my second and third years trying to burn off all the beer and cheesy chips by throwing myself up and down the muddy hillsides of Exmoor on a mountain-bike with my housemate Mark.

The spring after graduating I went with 2 mates to Scotland and spent a week lugging bikes and backpacks along the rainy off-road trails of the West Highlands. . This, the first multi-day trip I’d done, was thoroughly miserable and the most fun I’ve ever had on a bike.

The logical progression from there seemed to be to try and ride as far as possible and see what happened. In late 2006 my mate Andy and I began planning a long trip that we would name Ride Earth.

What was Ride Earth?

We had set our sights on a circumnavigation. Andy, Mark and I rode from my village through Europe to Budapest, at which point Mark headed home. As a pair, Andy and I rode ill-prepared out of Europe and across West Asia to Armenia, which by this time was suffering its coldest winter for several decades.

After seven months on the road without a break, I unexpectedly fell in love with an Iranian-Armenian girl studying in Yerevan, and all previously-trumpeted plans to cycle a lap of Earth went out the window in an instant.

I somehow convinced her to cycle with me to Tehran that summer, but I still needed something bigger, harder and more challenging. So in January 2009 I cycled alone through the Middle East to Egypt and then headed south into Africa proper.

I rode as far as the Horn of Africa, trying to deal with the Sahara, malaria, and crowds of rock-lobbing children, and struggling for direction I found that I had to follow my heart. So I rode across the Afar Desert, the hottest place on Earth and hitched a boat over to Yemen, crossing southern Arabia in summer, back to Iran and being reunited with Tenny half a year after I’d last seen her. We got married later that year.

In spring 2010 I found myself with a couple of months to spare. So did Andy, so we met up in Moscow and travelled overland to Mongolia to spend a few weeks bouncing across the steppe. This, we decided afterwards, had fulfilled our ambition to take mountain-biking to its logical conclusion.

During the latter half of 2010, Tenny and I rode back through Europe, and I eventually cycled back into my village — three and a half years after leaving. In February 2011 I spent another month on the road alone — this time in the far north of Scandinavia.

Now?

It would be great to enable more people to open up with their dreams and go and live them, because taking that leap was a pivotal point in my life. I took so much inspiration from the stories of others, and I so hope that the forthcoming book and film I’m involved in will help with that.

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