Proposed Route

I've spent a good deal of time looking ar possible routes for our adventure. There are loads of blogs and chat forums about, it's difficult to know where to start. We more or less plan to do a reverse of the DHL Race to the RWC (but without taking in too much of China, none of Japan, nor going through Iran!)

At the moment, we think our route will look something like this:

If we stick to this, countries en route will be:

1. Thailand
2. Myanmar
3. India
4. Nepal and then India again
5. Pakistan
6. China
7. Tajikistan
8. Uzbekistan
9. Kazakhstan
10. Azerbaijan
11. Armenia
12. Turkey
13. Bulgaria
14. Serbia
15. Croatia
16. Slovenia
17. Austria
18. Switzerland
19. France
20. UK

So, twenty countries in total. There are stretches of this ride where the route we will actually end up taking is in doubt, and we'll have to see what conditions are like on the ground at the time. Specifically, I'm not sure:

• how the stretch once we leave Pakistan will work
• which of the 'stans we'll be able to go through
• what happens on the western edge of the Caspian Sea

But working all this out will be part of the fun :-)

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Planning for a post-COVID world

It won't have escaped your notice that the world is on lockdown at the moment and that there's little prospect of the restrictions lifting any time soon.

I'm starting to feel rather glad that we tendered our resignations from December this year, not from August as would have been the norm. We did this because we thought we'd dodge the rainy season, and also because we thought it would increase our chances of being able to secure new jobs for September 2021. But it now has the added benefit of buying us a bit more time to ride out the COVID-19 disaster.

There is, though, every possibility that things still won't be properly 'fixed' by December. Border restrictions may not yet have lifted and/or there could be a sense that western travellers across Asia are unwelcome. Our original cycle plans might have to be shelved :-(

So I've started to draw up alternative plans just in case. Here they are in descending order of preference:

1. West Coast of N. America (Alaska>Canada>West Coast States)
2. West Coast States only
3. Australia Sydney > Perth
4. Russia (Siberia > Moscow)
5. Straight back home to 'normal life'

Having got the opportunity to take some time off, I'd really rather not waste it - so an immediate return to normality comes at the bottom of the list. 

My thinking is that more developed nations are likely to be further forward in January 2021 than are poorer parts of the world, hence the pivot to the first world. I also suspect that crossing borders will be an issue, and so have gravitated towards tours that stay in one country throughout.

I still hold out hope that we can do what we originally set out to do - cycle home from Bangkok. But if we can't we have other options...

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Kit List

A good part of the fun in preparing for a trip like this is making all the preparations beforehand. I've pored over the kit taken by other long-distance cyclists - always a feature of their blogs.

We've also done some big cycles before, and have refined what we pack over the years.

This is what we plan to take (links to a Google Sheet). 

Having discovered ThingLink on Rolling East's gear page recently, once we've assembled all the stuff I'll have some fun putting some visuals together as per this experiment:

 

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Caveat Emptor

It's now out in the public domain that we're doing this ride. We've handed in our notice for December 2020 and started telling people what our plans are.

I can barely contain my excitement, but the response from others has been mixed. Some, as you'd expect, aren't that interested (and I'm conscious of not wanting to become a cycle bore); some, usually cyclists themselves, are thrilled and a little jealous; but a good number are terrified and think we're mad.

Quite apart from the very real chance that COVID-19 might put paid to all our plans, there are a good number of people - Thais in particular - who think that cycling is just plain dangerous. A colleague pointed me to the 2015 death of a Chilean round-the-world the world cyclist. And also to the death of a South Korean cyclist. Both of these tragic accidents happened in Thailand. Then, with only a few clicks, I found myself reading the harrowing tale of a British couple - doing exactly what we plan to do in reverse - who were killed on a Thai road.

There's no doubt that Thai roads are dangerous - some of the most dangerous in the world in fact.  As cyclists, however careful we are, we will be at the mercy of other road users.

I don't want to die on this trip, and I don't want Jo to die either(!) We will do what we can to minimise the risks, but we still want to do the ride. One of the motivating factors is being able to shed, for a few precious months, the suffocating bonds of bureaucracy and to be free. If anything, in the rich world, health and safety has gone too far. People live in a perpetual state of terror, wasting untold amounts of money to try and buy their safety.

Our risk of dying - even in Thailand - in a road accident is small. If we're unlucky, at least we'll have shuffled off the mortal coil with the wind in our hair and a smile on our faces. The blog of Mary Thompson and Peter Root - still online at the time of writing - is a testament to lives well-lived, if cut cruelly short.

We'll be careful, but we won't be writing risk-assessments, nor asking for permission. That would defeat the whole purpose.

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