The Continental Cyclist

In 2019, well past retirement age, defying family and friends, I decided to cycle across the world’s continents. Until then my only experience of biking was ambling around town on a 20-year-old Norco.  Was I nuts or did I have an instinctive sense that possibilities did not end with age?

There I was one January morning in the midst of a sandstorm in Cairo about to embark on a four-month cycling trek, wild camping, down the length of Africa to Cape Town. 

I was wildly apprehensive. I berated myself. How could I have been so stupid to think that I could do something like this? Wasn’t I way too old for such ventures, as demanding mentally as physically?  As the days passed cycling along the Red Sea and ancient rice fields, through Sudanese deserts, in the lush tropics of Tanzania and along Botswana’s Elephant Highway an unimaginable magic seized hold of me. It never left me. After that I could not stop chasing after the ineffable sensation that had lodged in me. 

Over the last few years I’ve spent  the equivalent of three years in the saddle cycling more than 60,000 kilometers biking up and down the Rockies from Tuktuyuktuk, an Inuit hamlet on the Arctic Ocean to the Panama Canal; down Andean South America from Cartagena at its northern edge to Ushuaia at the southern tip of the continent and on the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul. During Covid I managed to squeeze in a ride across America from Los Angeles to Savannah, Georgia.

In my long, lonely days in the saddle, riding across great swathes of this breathtaking planet of ours and in my interactions with the broadest imaginable range of individuals—indigenous peoples in the Arctic, Quechua speakers of Peru, Turkic Muslims in Central Asia, among many others—I came to a different understanding of myself and our world. There was in all this a kind of continual rebirth. 

Read about my encounters and adventures on the road, click the link below.