Great rides: Charging around the world

There are two basic mistakes you can make with any cycling adventure: not starting and not going all the way. Everything else – the planning, any trepidation, the reason for going – quickly falls into place.

Pedalling away from the familiar daily tumult, I left behind schedules, social clamour, my dear wife and the whole damn business of regular living. I escaped along bridleways that skirted fields, passing hidden castles in forests, riding on pencil-thin backroads and remote gravel tracks.

I was two stone overweight, 66 years old and cycling around the world on an electric bike. The beautiful thing about cycling is its simplicity and flexibility. Hardly any tools other than a spanner, innertubes and glue. Hardwearing tyres. A small camera. A map app on my mobile phone. And, on this journey, a spare battery for my e-bike.

European cycle paths and passes

In an attempt to get fitter, I’d ridden 7,000km from Nordkapp to Tarifa. But age makes you leaky and built-up stamina rapidly drains away. As a young man I would literally race across each continent.

Now, heaving up the Bwlch y Groes in mountainous Welsh countryside, en route to Athens, my mind was focused on the simple details in front of me, such as the tiny colonising plants pimpling through stones and dirt. The destination seemed less important; the tableaux of nature more so.

The start of any journey matters in that small things set the tempo. I was alone with the sound from my tyres, my own heartbeat, the sweat and ache of my body, patterns of breath, small noises from the landscape.

I rode onward across the polders of Holland, pushing through the flatlands and onto the Flanders Fields of Belgium. I cycled along canal towpaths and river banks; there were shiny fruits on trees and many flowers along the Rivers Main and Danube.

I traversed old motoring passes through Switzerland, then climbed easily up the Grossglockner mountain road to emerge in a Tyrolean landscape plucked from a fairytale.

Cycling in the sunshine feeling free, the world was rich with possibility. I was riding all day, stamping on the pedals to ride a distance that could be covered in an hour or two by car. But it was equally important to phone home regularly and send notices from the deep interior of the journey.

I wanted to return home as easily as I’d left. “I was surprised, as always,” wrote Jack Kerouac in his seminal beat book On the Road, “by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.”

I didn’t have much of a plan but an imperative in everyone’s life begins when the dead people you know outnumber the living. That is when I had decided to go.

I rode down the Alps and onto the plains of Lombardy in the dead of night, contrasting the serenity of a castle I’d seen in the dark with the thrusting din of the highway – a highway I was soon able to escape.

Old railway routes have been converted to cycleways such as the Via Verde della Costa dei Trabocchi down Italy’s Adriatic Coast, where every few yards I heard the clink of food and beer. A warm breeze creased past my helmet. Greasy rain slurped into puddles.

By evening each day, as the gentle Italian sun began to set, a new port would appear: Pescara, Bari, Brindisi. Majestic cranes were sharply outlined against a pure blue sky. I crossed Greece in a similar fashion. Then things changed in a big way.

Middle East tensions

On 7 October Hamas invaded Israel. At 10am that day I made a last-minute decision to delay my flight to Tel Aviv. By 3pm the news said that the incursion – across my proposed southern route to Aqaba – had left hundreds dead. By 4pm all flights into Israel were cancelled. I decided to re-route to Amman in Jordan and start my traverse of the Middle East there.

Gentle and slow, quietly reflective, e-cycling is the antithesis of the world at large. Had I caught the original flight, I’d have been cycling through Israel, across Sderot and Beersheba, in the midst of human catastrophe. It felt like a guardian angel moment.

The one complication for my journey was that my batteries were stuck in a customs office in a place I could no longer access. E-bike batteries can’t be transported by air without detailed paperwork and can’t be purchased in remote places. This meant cycling across the Middle East without any battery assistance.

At roughly twice the weight of a normal touring bike, my e-bike was hard to pedal without assistance, especially uphill into a headwind. But it was give up or go on. Reverting to pure cycling, I rode across Jordan and into Saudi Arabia.

Until recently it wasn’t possible to cycle across Saudi Arabia during a traverse of the Middle East. Beyond Tabuk, I reached the quieter roads around Al-Ula, a market city in northwest Saudi Arabia that lies on the incense route stretching across the Levant, linking India with the Persian Gulf.

Cities across Saudi Arabia, like cities everywhere, display one face to the traveller arriving overland and a different one to everyone else. Al-Ula had its head in the mountains that drop down to desert plains.

Riyadh was swish. Buryadah had tall buildings and fancy streets. There is always a city where you arrive for the first time, and another which you leave never to return.

As I cycled towards Wilfred Thesiger’s ‘Empty Quarter’, the desert revealed no outward marks, just blanks in time as well as space. Thesiger said that once one entered the desert “no man can live this life and emerge unchanged. The imprint of the desert, however faint, will have within him the yearning to return.”

Saudi Arabia, inflamed by day, was bleak and cold by night as I slept in the sand. The wind always came with sunrise, now pushing me (still battery-less) like a ship lost at sea.

Saudi’s gleaming cities were very different from its villages, which seemed to me like construction sites built on sandpits next to a quarries. And they were different on a human level. Every day, when I was in a village shop checking out my groceries, a person behind me would insist on paying for whatever I needed.

Weeks passed. Then, on the hard shoulder of a motorway, I arrived in Dubai. I crated up my bicycle and flew with it to Mumbai in India, where my new batteries were waiting.

Into the Himalaya

Having collected my batteries from customs, I headed to Delhi. India has always seemed to me less like a developing nation than a highly developed one in a state of some decay. Palaces, skyscrapers and hovels rub shoulders.

Riding north on hidden-away farm tracks, I passed villages of peasant farmers painstakingly building their own homes from breeze blocks and cement.

From Delhi I cycled to Nepal, making for the Kali Gandaki Gorge. Annapurna, a 26,545ft peak, towers over the landscape and makes this valley the deepest in the world. Transecting the high mountains, a truck track cuts across the roof of Nepal to Tibet, linking trade as it has for centuries.

I sat drinking tea in the Hotel Eagles Nest in the Western Himalayas while my bicycle’s battery charged. Beyond the window, deep shadows lay in a valley that was crisped with small glaciers and snow. The river was a torrent far below.

I’d entered Nepal at the western border post of Bhimdatta, and buzzed along the main highway, where there was more calm. North of Pokhara in the mountains, the road narrowed and at 2,000ft the paved surface took on the topography of a stream bed. It was cut out of a cliff face, with a 500ft sheer drop.

From opposite directions, trucks bore down on each other, mirrors drawn in, drivers holding their breath. I would stand with my back to the cliff, pressing tightly into a crack, not daring to move until they’d passed.

After 10 hours of cycling through the mountains, at night in the traffic or alone in the evening rain, my tired brain played tricks. Sometimes I felt elation, then despair. I was moved, then scared.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.” That was my trigger to get going on the difficult days.

From Pokhara in Nepal I continued to Kathmandu, the fastest-growing city in Asia. Then I returned to India, crossing beautiful Bihar. After many days I reached Kolkata, where I flew to Bangkok and started my trek across South-East Asia.

Across South-East Asia

Small roads took me through the jungly terrain of northern Laos, where trees and high mountains met the Chinese border. Guesthouses everywhere cost £8 a night.

Food was cheap and excellent: Khao jee pâté sandwiches, spread with thick pork liver pâté, stuffed with Lao sausage, sliced papaya, carrots, shallots, cucumber, cilantro and chili sauce. Laos, with her gentleness and smiles, is one of the finest countries in the world.

I ached now and my back was bent. My legs were fine but the bones in my neck hurt. I had lost a sixth of my bodyweight and was lighter than I’d been for 48 years. I rode faster while using less power, pedalling quickly across continents with plenty of time to think.

At one junction I paused at the countdown click of a set of stop lights. I wondered for a minute whether I was on this journey around the world because it was meant to be. As the lights changed, a strange sense of paranoia gave way to a grin. I rode on, heading for the border with Vietnam.

Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Singapore came and went. It’s a deep-breath feeling, taking in the fact that in just a few days you can cycle the width of a country. Then suddenly I was in Western Australia, fettling my bike in Perth for the next leg.

Australia in 48ºC heat

Much of Australia’s interior feels like it hasn’t had time to change. Farmers in the Bush move, as author Don Watson says, “with the stiff-backed, stiff-buttocked gait” of men on the range everywhere. They scatter the flies from their backs with their hats, only to “let the wire-screen door slap behind them on its rat-tail spring”. It was 2,400 miles to Sydney.

Towns on the Eyre Highway were façades of a few stores, reduced down to the bare minimum of what a small town needs: Australia Post, a Mechanics’ Institute; a library with free internet. I stocked up with simple provisions of water, potatoes, canned stew and bread, ready for camping every night on the edge the outback.

I charged my batteries in cafés as I drank flat whites, sheltering from the midsummer desert heat that roasted me alive.

Café society plays a cohesive part in any local community, especially for travellers. In South Australia small towns are no bigger than a microdot on a map, yet bikers and motorists travel vast distances for hot drinks accompanied by a pastry in what for a stranger looks like a wilderness.

Those who used to travel across this landscape, meanwhile, seemed displaced. I saw Aboriginal Australians in the city pushing trolleys loaded with squashed cans and dirty blankets.

More days passed, then weeks. I was riding at least 90 miles each day, sometimes over 180 after entering the lush lands of Victoria. It was a marked transition. From desert heat, I was immersed in garden scents and horizons of wheat.

The United States – then home

Another flight, this time from Japan to the west coast of America. Soon I was cycling across Los Angeles. From space it looked like a scab but at ground level this matrix of suburbia was not untidy, and drivers passed me with courtesy.

During a battery-charging stop further on, I got chatting with one American who absently patted his hip – where there was the shape of a holster. He said: “I mean, we in the middle of the country, we have our crazy folk but we keep them hidden in the house so no one can see ’em, but out there they jus’ as gone an’ roam the streets.”

Looking away, he shook his big head. In politically polarised America, people talk in code, trying to figure out which part of the debate you’re supporting. On the road here people do talk to passing travellers, but it seems only outliers walk or cycle.

As I powered along Highway 10 out of California, I was surprised by the spring snows along the Mogollon Rim, north of Payson. Over the following weeks, I crossed the Bible Belt of southern America to the east coast, then flew to Portugal. The last leg from Lisbon to Amsterdam was a final push in the rain.

We long-distance travellers tread the world like ghosts. Another ride in the bag. A simple journey anyone can do.