Touring on a shoestring

I can think of nowhere on Earth that you could not cycle for less than £5 a day. Even Japan is not very expensive, so long as you do not spend anything.

There are two major barriers that stop cyclists going on longer trips: time and money. Making time is for another article, for a discussion on assessing your life priorities and for imagining looking back on your life from your death bed - and deciding whether you would regret not having spent more time making money and chasing promotion or whether you would regret not making more time for big, beautiful, adventurous, life-affirming rides.

I was fortunate. I was relatively unfettered by commitments. The only difficult thing was making the scary decision to say, ‘I am going to leave it all behind and head off on a long ride.’ It was a hard decision, but so much preferable to looking back with regret. So I had taken the big decision to begin. The next difficulty was that I did not have very much money. During university I had managed to save my Student Loans. My entire worldly wealth came to about £7,000.

Find out how Al did it by clicking on the PDF below.