Category: Big Adventures
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VIDEO: Bikepacking Outer Mongolia (Part Two)
This is Part Two of my mountain-bike adventure video series from Mongolia (here’s Part One by the way). In this episode, we’re searching desperately for something more interesting than riding across the endless steppe. I unfortunately get ill and we have to lay up for a couple of days in the town of Moron, and then we decide to head north to Lake Khovsgol. Please leave your comments below. Continue reading →
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A Winter Cycle-Tour In Scandinavia
English seasons annoy me. None more so than winter. OK: So in December we had a couple of weeks of ‘real winter’ — sub-zero temperatures, snow, ice; something approaching the kind of kick-up-the-backside that this country needs to stir society from its mollycoddled torpor. But now it has succumbed to the all-too-inevitable British veil of grey, nondescript tedium. It seems I have no choice. Continue reading →
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VIDEO: Bikepacking Outer Mongolia (Part One)
I recently spent several weeks bikepacking across Mongolia with my good friend Andy. We decided to pool our filmmaking experience to try to create a really entertaining bicycle adventure video which also captured the scale and diversity of the country. This is the fruit of our labours — please take 10 minutes out of your day to give the first episode a try. The remaining three episodes will appear on this blog over the next few weeks. My main reason for producing these videos has been to practice the craft of editing, so your feedback on the series would really help… Continue reading →
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Video: 3½ Years Into 3 Minutes
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A super-short blast through my time away from the UK, from bolshy beginnings in 2007 to humble homecomings a few weeks ago. [vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/18113861[/vimeo] Look out for more video coming very soon. Merry Christmas! Continue reading →
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Everybody Loves A Happy Ending
I rode into my small village in the East Midlands, one thousand two hundred and twenty-two days after cycling out of it, whooping with the recognition of every stick and stone, following Tenny on her bicycle past the park gates, round the tight bend which it was always so easy to overshoot, down the leafy hill on which my brother went over the handlebars of his BMX aged 8, past the first houses and the springwater trickling from the wall and the dingy old pub I never went to and round the bend to the third house on the left,… Continue reading →
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The Briefest Glimpse of Northern Europe
French Flanders had an entirely different feel to the still-summery Provence, where we’d left the Mediterranean grape harvest in full swing. The suburbs of Lille, with their steep-roofed red-brick houses and street-facing gardens littered with the orange and brown leaves of autumn, felt distinctly British in comparison. Continue reading →
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Approaching The Island
The last three weeks have been a medley of the memorable and the mundane in the south of France. I’ve found little time or opportunity to write about it, however; cheap internet cafés are practically non-existent here in Western Europe. Everyone has their own computer here , so it’s no surprise, but it’s something I’ve sorely missed. Continue reading →
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The End Of The Road Is Coming
It’s coming. The end of the road. One more border, one more ferry crossing. And it will be finished. I’m incredibly excited on one hand; terrified on the other. What will it mean? What happens next? Is it really the end of anything? Easy to philosophise away, this kind of thing. Another young Westerner returns to the society he left so selfishly to find something better, discovers that nothing much has changed. This will just be another stop on life’s journey, right? Continue reading →
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Homeward Bound — Skipping Through Italy
I’d worked hard to fund the ride home. Never before while on the road had I felt sufficiently flush as to splash out on a fresh delicious pizza, or a mouth-wateringly flavoursome ice-cream, or a expertly-prepared cappucino on an almost-daily basis! Continue reading →
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Thoughts From The Far End Of Europe (Part 2)
I wrote Part 1 of this article about three years ago. I’d just crossed the south-eastern border of Bulgaria. Landscape and society was shaded with new colours, and the whole panorama of history looked increasingly unfamiliar: Byzantines and Arabs battled in place of Normans and Anglo-Saxons; exotic Assyrians ousted the quaint familiarity of the Celts. Islam began with the coming of Mohammed, seven hundred years after we had settled on the birth-date of Christ, so in my next destination, Iran, the year was 1386. Continue reading →