Epilogue: From Brighton to Bangkok and beyond…

18 months, 22 countries, and 16,650km of cycling still didn’t prepare us for our bike ride through Bangkok. After having one last celebratory shellfish and whisky supper in Ban Krut, we caught a train to Bangkok where we would be staying in our friend Suparp’s apartment for a couple of days before flying to Hong Kong. This short cycle of about 15km turned out to be one of the “longest” and most memorable of our lives as we traversed multilane highways, dodged hordes of motorbikes, and were variously led down small alleys where we had to bodily lift our bikes over an assortment of obstacles, and often found ourselves trapped in the hustle and bustle of street markets.

Miraculously we made it unscathed, and spent the next couple of days scouring the city for packing materials in order to box up our bikes for their first flight. We ended up with two mammoth boxes, padded out with a weird assortment of foam, pieces of polystyrene scrounged from a rubbish dump, and our raggedy cycling clothes. The larger of the two boxes, to the baffled amusement of our building’s security staff, we hauled bodily to the local 7-Eleven store to weigh on their outdoor scales to make sure it met our baggage allowance.

4am the next day, after a slight panic when our first oversized taxi didn’t turn up, we were at Bangkok airport undertaking another assault course as we negotiated various obstacles with our gigantic bike boxes.

Eventually, after a somewhat fearful goodbye to our bikes, we checked-in and boarded a flight to our new home, Hong Kong.

Landing in Hong Kong was surreal. When we had spent 6 weeks there 6 months earlier, it had been a wonderful respite from a year of continuous cycling, and we had loved every minute of our holiday. But now, it was our final destination - our new home for three years. With trepidation, we waited for our bikes, which thankfully arrived completely unscathed, and we were soon distracted from our contemplation of our new home by the need to rebuild them. After a couple of very sweaty hours on the airport forecourt, eliciting considerable interest from the ground staff, wheels, handlebars and saddles were back in place and we were ready to set off for our first Hong Kong cycle. This was an intense adventure along the airport highways, and through a construction site (it is part of China after all), before we arrived in Tung Chung and made our way to Sunny Bikes, where we deposited our trusty steads for a month whilst we sorted out somewhere to live. A happy reunion then ensued with Harriet’s brother Ed and his wife Hannah, and we met for the first time our handsome new nephew, Jesse.

A month later and we moved into the second floor of a lovely village house on the island of Lantau, 5 minutes from the beach and surrounded by mountains, wetland and wild water buffalo – not your stereotypical image of Hong Kong!

There remained one last memorable cycle to get our bikes to our new home. There is just one road that crosses central Lantau, and this road goes over a mountain with gradients ranging from 10 – 22%. As we sweated and panted our way up this travellator (it is affectionally called “the Beast” by local cyclists) with faces red as beetroots we felt that this was a very fitting finale to our cycle trip.

We may no longer be pedalling, but we feel that in many ways our adventure is continuing in Hong Kong, a thought that helps us tremendously as we mentally wrestle with the idea of our cycle tour coming to an end. Over a year and a half ago we took a leap of faith as we set off from Brighton without a final destination, not knowing how long we would cycle for, or even whether we would like cycle touring. All we knew was that we wanted to explore the world, have an adventure, and try something that seemed both exciting and scary to us in equal measure. There had been rumblings in the back of both of our minds about whether this was a sensible thing to do - was it too dangerous, would our minds and bodies be up to it, would we be able to get work after such a hiatus? However, when such doubts rose we asked ourselves a very simple question – would we regret it more if we tried and our plans didn’t work out, or if we didn’t attempt the trip at all? We always came to the same answer.

It’s impossible to fully sum up what we have learnt from this trip, about ourselves and about the world. A motorbike tourer who recently travelled across Iran described this type of journey as ‘vulnerable travel’. But while there were times when we felt vulnerable, that was never our overriding experience. For us, the term ‘exposed travel’ seems to fit better. When you cycle, you are exposed to everything: the sun, wind and rain, the sounds of the birds and insects, the thunder of the traffic around you or the absolute peace of a mountain summit, even the highs and lows of your own moods. Equally, you’re exposed to the people around you, to their gazes and interest but also to their kindness, and that for us was the part of the trip which impacted us most. It is hard to speak about this sort of thing without sounding terribly cheesy, but we were so overcome throughout our journey by the hospitality, generosity and warmth of the people we met, from our amazing Warmshowers hosts in Bosnia, Greece and Turkey, via the countless random acts of benevolence on the roads and in the towns of Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, all the way to our Airbnb ‘saviours’, Suparp and Tsurumi in Thailand.

In 18 months of travelling we encountered so many different people, from so many different cultures, most of whom we could not communicate with beyond hand gestures and the odd, often-mispronounced word we had gleaned from google. But overwhelmingly, the interest and surprise which our presence invoked was met by acts of kindness – the bunch of grapes picked from a vine by a young boy in Azerbaijan, the camping spot offered to us by the honey seller in Kazakhstan when we were exhausted and hungry, the hat given by an old man to protect Harriet’s face on a scorching Turkish afternoon, or just the innumerable smiles and gestures of encouragement we received as we sweated up yet another hill.

In contrast, we can count the number of negative encounters, quite literally, on one hand. The level of warmth we received still astounds us.

These encounters often challenged preconceptions we had before we began our trip, and forced us to rethink our views of particular countries and cultures. The difference between the somewhat simplistic conceptions we had had before we left - the potential danger we anticipated in Albania and Kyrgyzstan, or the arid landscape we expected to see in Azerbaijan, for example – and the complex, challenging, but often breathtaking reality of those places was vast. In fact, it was often these places that we developed the strongest affection for, and were most loath to leave.

Our cycle trip continues to influence our lives in other ways. We have opened our doors to cyclists, signing up as hosts on Warmshowers- the Coachsurfer-like website for cycle tourers which led to some of the most memorable encounters of our trip. Our first guest was Tobias, a cyclist from Germany on his way to Singapore. It was satisfying to feel that we were repaying a tiny bit of the kindness and generosity that had been shown to us over the time we were away, although it did feel quite strange being the host rather than the guest- we definitely had a few sentimental pangs about our time on our bikes. While we’re thoroughly enjoying our new existence, we are realising that it will take some time to completely adjust to life post-cycle tour. Having spent virtually every moment of the last 18 months together, we are now getting used to dealing with the trials and tribulations of daily life individually. Having been constantly stimulated by new experiences, we are adapting to having a routine again. And having had a simple purpose - cycling from a to b each day, with our main decisions revolving around the terrain, our stomachs and where we would rest our heads - we now have to deal with bills, bus timetables and ensuring we look a little bit more respectable (or at least smell a bit better).

But each evening we still do the stretches that we did virtually every day whilst cycling, only now we do them under the stars on our roof terrace, with the sea stretching out in front of us and forest-clad hills behind. We then settle into our cheap Ikea deckchairs, look up into the night sky above the island of Lantau and start to talk about the possibility of cycling across Mongolia…

We hope that you have enjoyed our blog and being part of our journey over the last year and a half. During the course of our trip we set up JustGiving pages for two charities whose work we think is really important, and would love it if you were able to make a small donation using the following links:

The Clock Tower Sanctuary

MAG (Mines Advisory Group)