Category: Touring Advice
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Cycle Tour Sponsorship: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Imagine the following entirely hypothetical situation. Several months into your round-the-world cycle tour, you are still glowing with what you see as a victory over the whole of capitalism — when something goes wrong. A piece of equipment isn’t doing its job properly, and you need one particular sponsor’s help to replace it. So you write to them. They don’t respond. You spend a small fortune to call them from a public phone booth. But the person you want is not available right now. And after endless weeks of being fobbed off because someone in an office somewhere is still in… Continue reading →
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Kona Sutra 2013 Touring Bike: First Look
Kona have just announced their bike line-up for the 2013 season. While I don’t usually post on product launches, Kona have supported my adventures for half a decade, and last week they reminded me why I’m glad to be working with them (aside from getting to ride their bikes for free). I wrote a detailed review of the 2012 Sutra touring bike after riding it from Vancouver to San Francisco in the spring. In the review, I pointed out a couple of big improvements I’d like to see made to this very capable long-term expedition tourer. Several other owners echoed these sentiments… Continue reading →
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MSR Hubba 1P Solo Tent — Owner Review
Full disclosure: Cascade Designs sent me this tent to test during my journeys in 2012 (at my request). I’ve been using it ever since for solo camping. They were confident enough to do this in the knowledge that I would share my opinions of their products — whether positive or negative — on this blog. 2011’s Arctic Cycle finished off the Vaude Hogan 2P tent I’d been using for solo camping over the previous few years. It was a great piece of kit, enduring at a rough guess getting on for 500 pitches in temperatures from below ‑30°C (not what it… Continue reading →
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Kona Sutra Touring Bike: Legacy Review & Detailed Photos
The Kona Sutra has undergone many changes since I wrote this review of the 2012 model after a two-month ride down the U.S. West Coast from Vancouver to Los Angeles. You can find the current version of the Sutra in my list of the all-time best touring bikes. For a long-haul road trip it would be foolish to test-ride a bike that didn’t first fit my criteria on paper. The 2012 Sutra did indeed seem well suited to a two-month road tour of a developed nation. It’s been a pleasant surprise to ride and has exceeded my expectations. The Kona… Continue reading →
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Essential Gear for a Deep Winter Cycle Tour
The original version of this article appeared in the February 2012 issue of Geographical. Blue light invaded my cocoon of flapping fabric. My waking thought was one of despair. The wind, which had made pitching camp so hopeless and miserable the previous evening, hadn’t died. It was thirty degrees below zero. I lay on my back, remembering how I had stumbled about in the dark tying guylines to bicycle wheels and half-buried panniers in a vain attempt to anchor my three season tent in the deep, sugary snow. I tried to muster the motivation to get up, pack up and hit… Continue reading →
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How To Make A Living As An Adventurer
I received the following email the other day: I am a little bit confused as to what exactly you do for a living. I know that you are an adventurer, but I don’t get where you get your ‘everyday money’. Sponsorship is one thing for a trip, but if you don’t have a 9–5 job, where do you get the daily money from? It’s a good question. But what exactly might my correspondee think ‘adventurer’ actually means? Types of ‘Adventurer’ (or Explorer, or Expeditioner) (Warning: one or more of the following stereotypes may be considered offensive.) Continue reading →
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10 Questions & Answers On Surviving The Scandinavian Arctic On A Bike
Timely or what? The Norwegian Cyclists Association have been in touch about my trip last year to Scandinavia, in which I rode a thousand miles from Oslo through Sweden and Lapland and across the Arctic Circle to Bodø. The following post is an edited version of the interview I did for their magazine På sykkel. It might help us here in London, as we struggle to cope with ten centimetres of wet slush… 1. First, could you please give us a few facts about yourself; age, location, what kind of work you were doing until you started cycling, and a few of the countries you… Continue reading →
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New Year, New Gear — Considerations When Comfortably Roughing It
I have a good working relationship with Mountain Safety Research, better known as MSR, who for several decades have been quietly turning out top-quality equipment for use in the world’s wild places. The little green 2‑man Vaude tent which was my home for so long is now well past its best, and with two significant trips planned for 2012, I decided it was time to replace it with one of MSR’s tried-and-tested offerings. Continue reading →
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Five Reasons To Go Cycle Touring In Armenia
Cycle touring in Armenia isn’t on many people’s to-do lists. All the better, then, for those who do turn up on their touring bikes in this tiny Caucasian nation. And since low-cost carriers such as WizzAir have launched flights to Armenia, travel costs from Europe have plummeted. Dreaming of returning and carrying out a proper adventure in Armenia, I thought the time was ripe to publish a few reasons to make it your next cycling destination. Of course there are more than five good reasons to cycle in Armenia, but here are those I’ve focused on: 1. Mountains If you love slogging… Continue reading →
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8 Handy Bits Of Software For Travellers & Adventurers
If you’ve ignored all my advice to go on low-tech adventures and are packing a laptop and mobile net connection alongside your merino-wool boxer shorts and solar panels, you might find these bits of software make your precious time at the battery-powered screen a bit easier, safer and more productive. (And 7 out of the 8 are free.) Continue reading →