Letter from the Past – You made it!

Climbing up a mountain in Turkey while bike touring.

I recently returned home after 2.5 years cycling around the world. On my desk I found a letter I had written to myself before I left, back when there was no guarantee of my success – in fact, failure seemed more likely. It is the ramblings of a young idealist, but something about it forces […]

Cycling Across Australia 8 – The Oodnadatta Track

The sandy unsealed desert road of Oodnadatta Track in Outback Australia

Jaimi and I arrived in William Creek, a ‘town’ with more planes than local residents (9 planes vs. 6 locals), which made it something of an anti-climax after 3 days of cycling through desert on the Oodnadatta Track. The pub – the centre of every Aussie outback town (the centre of the universe for the […]

Cycling Across Australia 7 – The Oodnadatta Track

A loaded touring bike on the centre of an unsealed road in Australian Outback on Oodnadatta Track

The desert demands so much, and provides so little.When I was cycling the Oodnadatta Track, I decided in a melodramatic fit of frustration that this was surely the most godforsaken place in the world.It is now a few weeks since I reached Marree and finished the Oodnadatta Track, which has given me some time to […]

Cycling Across Australia 6 – Riding to Uluru

For anyone travelling through the centre of Australia, Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) will surely be one of the highlights. It is the icon of the Outback. Getting there was a detour which would add a week to my Australia crossing, but after several thousand kilometrers of nothing, a week of cycling to look at a big […]

Cycling Across Australia 5 – The Red Centre Way

CRAAAACK! Jaimi skidded to a halt in front of me. I swerved, braking hard and narrowly avoided colliding into her. I saw her mudguard mangled into the rear wheel, plastic and metal, buckled and bent. “It’s just your mud guard,” I told her, relieved; had it been the derailleur (the thing that changes the gears) […]

Cycling Across Australia 4: The Storm in the Desert

Hesitant pedal strokes swept me away from the refuge of Alice Springs. Now, the simple comforts people often take for granted would be a struggle. It would be weeks before I slept in a house, or had a shower again. My panniers were crammed with 11 days of basic food. Pasta. Porridge. Tuna. I hoped […]

Cycling Across Australia 3: The Outback Stripped Bare

Summer swept across Australia with gusto, a fiery net ensnaring Jaimi and I, even as we fought to cycle south, further from the equator. Cooler weather remained 200 kilometres to the south, but by the time we got there, it had slipped further out of reach. While the temperature remained constant, we were at least […]

Cycling Across Australia 2 – Finding Beauty in the Nothing

I love the unpredictability of travelling, all the random and serendipitous encounters that surprise you along the way. In Katherine, I met an English Girl, Jaimi. Like me, she had spent the last two years cycling from England, and though similar routes led us to Australia, sometimes only two weeks apart, we had never met […]

Cycling Across Australia 1: Did I bite off too much?

As the plane had descended into Darwin, I had gazed south. Beyond the grey smudge of city, I could see a huge distance – perhaps 40 or 50 kilometres – of nothingness, which stretched right up to the horizon. I pictured this vastness extending over that horizon, then the horizon after that and, indeed, for […]

One road ends, and another begins

I am sitting with my cousin on the rooftop of a restaurant in Istanbul sipping in the cool evening atmosphere. The blue mosque and the Hagia Sofia are illuminated nearby. A dervish is whirling in the square below us. A thousand minarets pierce the skyline. But I am almost oblivious to all of that, captivated instead […]