Thunder and Sunshine E-Book

Alastair Humphreys

• Herausgeber: Eye Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Thunder and Sunshine is the sequel to the best-selling Moods of Future Joys. At the age of 24, Alastair Humphreys left England in August 2001 to cycle round the world. By the time he arrived back home, four years later, he had ridden 46,000 miles across in just over 1500 days, through five continents and 60 countries on a tiny budget of just £7,000. His journey, as well as a quest for adventure, helped to raise the profile of the charity Hope and Homes for Children. When scores of people have visited the Poles and £30,000 is needed to get up Everest, Alastair s expedition was refreshingly original. Alastair was alone on the road for four years, in countries few people visit, and enduring an 85° C temperature range. This was an expedition of self-belief and optimism rather than satellite hook-ups and lucrative sponsorship. Thunder & Sunshine is the story of Alastair s journey from South Africa back to Yorkshire, via the whole of the Americas, South to North, then Siberia in winter, Japan, and back through China, Central Asia and Europe.

Leseprobe

Published by Eye Books Ltd 29 Barrow Street Much Wenlock Shropshire TF13 6EN

www.eye-books.com

Published in Great Britain First edition 2007 Second edition 2015

© 2007 Alastair Humphreys

Cover design by Dan Armstrong

The events and opinions in this book originate from the author. The publisher accepts no responsibility for their accuracy.

The moral right of Alastair Humphreys to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purposes of review, without prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

ISBN: 978-1-903070-88-8

For Sarah, my wife

After all it is only a book and no worlds are made or destroyed by it. But it becomes important out of all proportion to its importance. And I might just as well get to it because putting it off isn’t going to help a bit.

John Steinbeck

Foreword

Bear Grylls

Alastair is a man who has earned the title of ‘a man’ the hard way. He is one of the few who understands that the romance of high adventure is but a mirage, and that the reality of such an epic journey as his is one of loneliness, aching muscles and of being at times both humbled and intimidated under the vast expanses of our planet’s wildernesses.

Alone, with only his bike as companion, Alastair tells in brutal honesty the often grim reality of cycling the globe. At times the journey is furious with bustling cities and bureaucratic checkpoints and at other moments he gives a very moving sense of what solitude does to us. He struggles to answer what it is that makes him punish himself under the scale and burden of this once-in-a-lifetime challenge. The answer is always the least important part. It is the journey that matters, and what that journey does to us.

I think it is fair to say that if Alastair had had any idea of how hard and long the road would have really been he might well have thought twice about taking on such a challenge. But thinking twice doesn’t always lead down the road of achieving something monumental. Sometimes to make something of our lives requires us to dream, and then to shun the doubts and fears and grasp that dream with both hands and get out there and just start making some steps towards that dream. We need to commit, deep inside ourselves, not to rest until the job is done.

My mother often told me, “When a job is once begun, leave it not till it is done; be it big or be it small, do it well, or not at all.” Alastair sure did this job well, and I am full of admiration for this remarkable man and his epic journey. Oh, there is one other quote that sums him up: “Commitment is doing the thing you said you would do, long after the mood in which you said it in has left you.” Alastair, I bet that romantic mood had long left you on that lonely road as you headed into the wind and rain winding your way to the start of the Andes, eh?! But that’s why you are special.

Praise for Thunder & Sunshine

“...mesmerising story. You can almost feel the sand being kicked up in your face as you turn the page...This book is a literary match to his physical achievement.”

Geographical

“...if a lad from Yorkshire can overcome international terrorism, dysentery, a crushing Siberian winter and a month without showering... then there’s not really any reason why we all can’t. He may not have meant it, but Humphreys’ engaging, sometimes brutal, sometimes comic style is above all a call to arms... documented with unflinching honesty... anyone reading his book may, in the great tradition of watching British explorers, be more curious as to whether this man was insane or not.”

The Guardian

“Wonderful...”

Midweek, BBC Radio 4

“An epic adventure.”

Benedict Allen

“An incredible journey of distance, strength and determination.”

Josie Dew

Contents

Foreword

Praise for Thunder & Sunshine

Alastair’s Route Round the World

Prologue

THE AMERICAS

Gone to Patagonia

New Beginnings

My Road

Here or There

Feeling and Understanding

The Sound of Your Wheels

The Last Time for First Times

Imaginings of Fear

Throwing Off the Bow Line

Closer Now

Large and In Charge

Coming Alive

By Paddle and Track

A Little While Longer

ASIA

A Road in the Forest

Heaven and Hell

The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel

I Like Chinese

The Middle of Nowhere

The Centre of Civilisation

The Golden Road At Last

Dancing My Way Through

Back To The End

Getting On With It

My Penguin’s Egg

To Be Continued...

Photographs

Recipes from the Road

Kit List

The Magic Letter

A List of ‘-ests’

Acknowledgements

Hope and Homes for Children

About Eye Books

About the Author

From your front door, it’s a long ride home.

Alastair Humphreys

Souls... that ever with a frolic welcome took, The thunder and the sunshine.

‘Ulysses’, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Prologue

I had come so far. I could barely comprehend that I had not finished, that I still had so much further still to go. Over a year ago I had cycled away from home, bound for Australia. I had pedalled out of my village in Yorkshire, out of sight of my watching family, and out into the world. I did not know what I would find, nor whether I would cope. I knew only that it was a significant moment. I knew that, in the unlikely event of success, that I would probably categorise things for ever more as taking place either before or after that day I began my ride.

Riding to Australia was to be the first part of my dream to cycle the whole way around our planet, but, just a fortnight into my journey, the events of September 11th 2001 changed everything. As a new world exploded into the vacuum of our post Cold War complacency and war brewed in far away Afghanistan, my planned route through Central Asia was under threat. So I paused in Istanbul and concocted a new plan. I began riding through the Middle East instead, towards Africa. I arrived in Cairo and steeled myself to begin riding south. I did not expect to get far. To my surprise I managed to stick it out, overcoming massive self-doubt about my suitability for such an expedition. I pedalled all the way down Africa to Cape Town, to the ocean, to the end of the road, and to the end of Africa. I could ride no further.

But I had to ride further. I had set out to cycle round the world and Africa had been an incredible experience, but my journey was only really beginning. I still had so far to ride.

Part 1

‘The sea on my left’

THE AMERICAS

Patagonia to Alaska

Gotta do what it is that I do, Then I’m coming back. Got the sun in my face, Sleeping rough on the road, I’ll tell you all about it, When I get home.

‘Long Way Round,’ Stereophonics

Cape Town to Panama

Gone to Patagonia

Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.

Erma Bombeck

At home, above the fireplace, since I was a child, hung a painting. A maelstrom of slate green waves and leaden troughs, a wild and savage ocean, heaved and pounded and shattered. In the thick of the fury, unmoved and constant, the rain-shrouded, craggy black outcrop of Cape Horn looms, the southernmost tip of South America and, amongst sailors, the most feared and revered spot on our planet. Incredibly, ludicrously, alone in the midst of such power and fury, is a little boat. Just 53 feet of mahogany, sailed by one man. This painting of the yacht Gipsy Moth IV, sailed by Francis Chichester, was my first introduction to Patagonia and the deep south of the world, 50 degrees below the equator, past the ‘Roaring 40s’ and into the ‘Screaming 50s.’ Sailors said, “Below 40 degrees, there is no law. Below 50 degrees, there is no God.”

Patagonia spans both Argentina and Chile. Mountains plateau and plains taper down to the rocky southern tip. South across the Straits of Magellan is the island of Tierra del Fuego, and at the far tip of that island, Ushuaia, the most southern town on the planet.

The names, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego and Ushuaia, had thrilled and lured me for years. As I stepped off the bus in Ushuaia, I discovered that my yearning for el fin del mundo was not particularly original. A six-foot tall fluffy penguin demanded two pesos to pose for a picture with me to celebrate my arrival among the tourists at the remote end of the world. Ushuaia is a colourful hotchpotch of pink, blue, green and orange corrugated metal buildings in the lee of dark mountains on the tranquil shore of the Beagle Channel.

Tourism flourishes in Ushuaia, but probably not for the guided city tour, highlights of which included the old house of Mr Pastoriza, who worked in a sardine canning company. The project failed because the sardines never appeared. Or Mr Solomon’s General Goods Store which became famous for the variety of its products, and which closed in 1970. No. People went to enjoy the beautiful ruggedness of Patagonia, to look out to sea, knowing that only Antarctica lay beyond the horizon. I looked in the opposite direction. I looked north, up the road I meant to follow to its very end, in Alaska.

The morning I began riding, I found it even harder than usual to get up. How do you persuade yourself to leave a nice warm sleeping bag and begin cycling, with 17,848 kilometres between you and your destination? Staying in bed seemed a far more attractive option. All the riding I had done counted for nothing now. I was back at the beginning, a brand new start at the bottom of a continental landmass, whose top was one third of the circumference of the globe away.

I pedalled south out of town, and down to the seashore where the road to Alaska truly began. I looked across the slate-coloured Lapataia Bay. Patches of white snow were on the upper scree slopes of the sharp grey mountains behind me. To welcome me back onto the road, a headwind was brewing. A clean green stream wound through the boggy fields and blended into the clean, pebbly shallows of the bay. My ears were cold and a light mist pearled tiny droplets over my fleece jacket and eyelashes. I stood still and felt small in the silence, and in awe of the phenomenal distance ahead of me. The bike was heavier than I was accustomed to, loaded with clothes I hadn’t needed in Africa, like a fleece jacket, a hat and a pair of gloves. The gaffa tape was peeling from one of the holes in my faded bags. I needed to fix that; I was probably in for a few weeks of rain. Far away, a chainsaw started up and amplified how quiet the little cove was. My hand swirled through the cold water, I was intimidated by the road ahead. The old self-doubt rose through me, but I was determined not to cry. This runaway expedition had dragged me along and stampeded me. I was just managing to cling on. I was going to enjoy this ride up the Americas. I was determined. Come on, Al, let’s go have some fun!

I climbed onto my bike and began to pedal, away from one sea towards another, far distant one. The first pedal strokes of millions, turning up the crunching dirt track through the lichen covered forest, away from the sea, back into Ushuaia and out the other side. It was mid-February. I hoped to reach Alaska by the end of summer next year.

My ride up the Americas was under way. I planned to cross to Asia and cycle back to England. This leg of my journey had begun months before, thousands of miles away, on another distant shore.

New Beginnings

Every new beginning comes from some other new beginning’s end.

‘Feeling Strangely Fine,’ Semisonic

Strange that South America should begin under South Africa’s Table Mountain. I was aboard Maiden bound for Rio de Janeiro yet, as I gripped a halyard on the yacht’s foredeck, it felt more like a start than a farewell. Table Bay teemed with all the glamour and excitement of the triennial Cape to Rio race. Amongst the racing yachts were sailing boats, jet-skis, power boats, canoes, press boats, gin palaces and bathtub rowing boats. A dramatic horizon of spears of masts, and bird-wing curves of white sail. Television helicopters swept low over the fleet, swooping for the perfect shot. Beneath the rotors water fretted in a circular frenzy and sailors panicked as their sails crashed from filled efficiency into flapping maelstrom. The shoreline was lined with people and on Signal Hill scores of binoculars flashed. I tipped back my head in the warm breeze to squint at the sun and I was happy. I was ready to go.

When I had left home I had assumed that I would fly across the oceans between continents. However the idea of making it around the planet without leaving its surface germinated as I rode the hot and dry roads of Africa. How would I find a sailing boat willing to give me a lift across an ocean? Especially with so little money...

I sought advice at the Royal Cape Yacht Club in Cape Town. I set about making myself useful, crewing in races, cleaning boats, networking, phoning people to ask if anybody knew anybody who knew anybody planning to sail across the Atlantic. After six weeks of dead ends and rejections, Terry Nielsen, owner and skipper of ocean-going yacht Maiden, offered me a ride. He was competing in the Cape to Rio race, had a spare berth and was happy to give me a ride.

I loaded my bike and gear into a freight container that was taking the fleet’s spare sails and anchors to Rio de Janeiro, and I lived out of a tiny rucksack for another month until departure. I fixed my bike, gave talks, partied, sat on the beach, made friends and tried to get my head round the fact that, contrary to everything I had been telling myself, Cape Town was not actually the end of the road. I had cajoled and dragged myself down the length of Africa only by convincing myself this would be the end. I had refused to think further ahead than Cape Town. If I was to cycle around the world though, Cape Town was not even half of the journey. I seemed to be on an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending path. Once passage across the ocean had come my way, and the departure date set, the reality and the implications sank in. If I continued to South America I would be putting myself, once again, at the beginning of a very long road. A new horizon would open up, demanding to be crossed, challenging me to try.

My aim was to cycle round the world, to complete a circumnavigation, crossing the length of the world’s three greatest landmasses. I had ridden the length of Africa. Now I planned to ride from the bottom of South America to the northern coast of Alaska, and then search for a boat to cross the Pacific, and ride across Asia, back to Europe and home.

After Christmas and New Year and only just before the start of the race, a badly delayed Maiden reached Cape Town. As crew flew in from around the world we prepared her for the race. An ocean-crossing novice, I tried to make myself useful, and at the same time not get in the way. Two hours before the race began I doubted we would make it to the start-line on time. I was stuck in a supermarket checkout queue with one trolley full of bananas and another of bread, last minute additions to the three weeks food supply for 15 people. Grannies fumbled in their purses for the exact change while I fretted about missing my escape from Africa.

I sprinted down the jetty with the shopping bags, the bowline was thrown off, I jumped aboard and we were away. The friends I had made in Cape Town walked down the jetty waving. More fragile, precious connections broken. I was on my own again, in motion once again, and I had left Africa.

As the spectators turned for home the 30 or so competing yachts faced 4,000 miles of ocean. Our crew of 15 had just come together and only now, at sea, was there time for proper introductions. My new companions were English, German, South African, Zimbabwean, Canadian, American and Spanish. We were students, businessmen, professional sailors, oil-workers, shop owners and architects. We were men and women, from 18 to 50-ish. We were a shambles. We were happy. Alberto, the second in command, was a charming Spanish Casanova who had been sailing his way round the world for three years on various yachts. He stood at the stern playing his guitar and singing, Bob Marley style, “Every little wind, is gonna be alright.” Retired lawyer Terry set about turning the rabble into a team. Hen, a city girl in a dinky little Union Jack crop top, looked towards the empty horizon and declared cheerfully, “Well, at least we are out of sight of land now.” Everyone laughed and turned her round; there were pedestrians on the shore just a few hundred metres away. Spirits were high although the wind was not and our boat had already stopped. The on-board GPS gave us an ETA for Rio de Janeiro of October; the finish line was ten months away on current progress. Perhaps I should have bought more bananas.

As our first night at sea approached, the breeze stiffened and the yacht stopped wallowing and began to heel. As Maiden came to life, she cut through the waves and I felt a thrill to be travelling again. I was totally free, and I was a lucky man for that. I sat with my legs dangling over the rushing water. I had not cut my hair since leaving home, and the sun-bleached dreadlocks whipped around my face. We chased the sunset, bearing west, heaving across the planet by the pure force of wind in our sails. The yacht ahead of us silhouetted dark against a late orange sky, the one behind us glowed peach on green waves. Maiden’s hull thumped the waves, and spray leapt up to my face. I was soaked, frozen, nauseous and grinning like an idiot.

Seasickness caught me and I spent that first night hanging over the side of the boat. In my cycling clothes and shoes I was soaking wet and cold. I had no sailing gear. But by sunset on the second day I had found sea legs and I set to learning about life aboard a 58-foot yacht. We were divided into two four-hour watches. The on-watch cooked, cleaned made repairs and sailed the boat. The off-watch slept. Our life slipping into our new tiny little world revolved on the sequence of watches. Each yacht in the race had by now diverged on its own chosen route searching for the best possible winds across the vast spread of ocean. We were alone on the vast blue canvas. Nothing else was in sight.

It took 24 days to sail across the Atlantic. Think how many people you talk to, how many miles you drive and how many phone calls you make in 24 days. Weeks in the office, weekends at home. Ever-changing horizons. Hours of television, reams of newspapers. Text messages, emails, changes of pants. But, for us, at sea, the world was reduced to blue water, 58 feet of boat and 14 other people who, until the starting cannon, had not known each other. There was nowhere to go. It was a massive simplification of my life, already simplified when I pedalled away from my past life and priorities and cares.

I loved crossing the ocean, it was so different to a cyclist’s life. On the bike I had grown sensitive, literally. I had become so aware of all that was around me, of the sights and sounds, smells and tastes, and the feel of the wind on my face. As the miles of sea crept by, I read 17 books, drank countless cups of tea, daydreamed of sailing around the world, snoozed in the sail lockers and nattered like a granny with everybody.

Small events broke up the days: Pete being smacked in the head by a passing flying fish one night, and exacting his revenge by frying the 14 he found on deck for breakfast; hilarity over a version of clay pigeon shooting involving a tray of rotten eggs; Terry’s angry shouts of, “Only admirals and arseholes stand in the hatchway;” Sparky, our Mr Fixit genius, trying heroically to repair the water desalinator; an increasingly vocal campaign amongst the rest of the crew to cut my hair; the clamouring race for second helpings at dinner with the greediest of us on deck sitting right above the kitchen hatch for rapid access to leftovers; the stillness as we sat together and shared the sunsets.

Helming duties rotated hourly and occasional frenzies of activity were needed when the sails were changed, but generally there was not a lot to do. We were becalmed and barely moved for several days. Cabin fever escalated. The heat was getting to us all and the unusual wallowing motion of the boat was far harder to sleep through than the severe, but constant, heeling of the boat in a strong wind. So we covered ourselves from head to foot in soap and leapt from the bow for a swim and a wash, surfacing in a fizzing cloud of soap bubbles and hoping that there weren’t any sharks nearby. It was an uneasy feeling to jump from my tiny island of sanctuary into water five kilometres deep with thousands of kilometres to the nearest landfall and God only knows how many millions of kilometres of emptiness above me. I felt very small.

Music blasted constantly through the speakers on deck and arguments flew about music preferences. Ken, the broad, strong Canadian oil worker with a handlebar moustache who I shared my bunk with, would put on one of his CDs and emerge on deck declaring, “There’s only two types of music worth listening to, boys and girls, and that’s Country, and Western!” before launching into one of his surprisingly camp dance routines. Minutes later the CD would be abruptly changed by a Country Music hater, of which there were 14, and the arguments would begin again. Every dawn the on-watch people would debate what tune to pick to welcome the sunrise with. My favourite was the morning when our watch lined up in the stern at the first golden sliver of sun and moshed to full-volume Come as you are from Nirvana before waking the other watch with a cacophony of banging pans. They were not best pleased.

We spent hours fishing as dorado circled beneath the boat, mocking our attempts to catch them. Eventually we hooked one, our only one, and hauled the 10kg of slippery muscle on board, watching its incredible death display as its entire body changed colour, shimmering through blue and gold and green and crimson until death drained all the colour and we sliced the beautiful fish into strips and ate the poor thing.

We all cheered as we crossed the Greenwich Meridian. The GPS rolled over to 0.00.000, and Alberto made the first tea of the Western hemisphere. I only had 360 degrees to travel.

I lay on shaded parts of the deck trying to mentally prepare myself for what lay ahead. I studied my map of South America and grew excited as I looked at the roads and mountains and cities and tried to imagine what lay in wait. I looked forward to turning the red lines of the roads and the yellow dots of towns into real memories. I reminisced about Africa, already remembering it as a wonderful experience, for “one always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.”

The days blazed beneath a pale blue sky and above an incredibly clear blue ocean streaked deep with shafts of white light. The world felt a simple and pure place. Sunset brought relief from the heat, leaving the world to darkness, us and the comforting glow of the GPS and compass. When there was no moon the black sky was crowded with so many stars and shooting stars that they seemed to spill over into the ocean, where showers of phosphorescent sparks streamed in our wake like a bonfire, a wake of churning white water that stretched back to Africa and the end of the thin tyre tracks beginning from my home. We began the race with a fat cream moon in a golden halo, dead ahead of us and made bets on the precise time of moonset. Silver clouds shone as we cruised down the yellow carpet of moonlight while the helmsman heaved on the wheel as we surfed the heavy, fast black waves. Eternal motion, racing ever onwards towards South America. The fair wind was flying now and we excitedly crowded over the GPS hoping to beat speed records set by the other watch.

Behind us, morning caught the boat; the water mauve, the pallid sky orange and blue and the clouds still grey. Only the strong stars survived. Eventually even Venus faded.

“Land ahoy!” At long last South America edged above the horizon. Excitement rippled amongst us, all craning for a better view on the starboard side of the boat. My first thought was “Wow it’s hilly!” as I switched seamlessly back into cyclist mentality once again. I was nervous but excited to see folds of rock and vertical lines once again after weeks on a horizontal flat blue disc. The water turned to a shallow, muddy green as we hugged the coast southwards, turtles drifted by and the passing of large ships once again prompted renewed vigilance on watch. The rich smell of earth and trees gripped me like a pheromone, until, in the last hours before reaching Rio, all natural scents were obliterated by the breaking out of deodorant and aftershave, and clean but crumpled T-shirts, specially preserved for the occasion, were donned.

We arrived in the bay of Rio de Janeiro in the dead of night, beneath the outline of Sugarloaf mountain and the iconic illuminated statue of Christ that appeared to hang in the dark sky above us. It was so exciting to see them with my own eyes. A klaxon from the yacht club sounded to welcome us across the finish line and a small launch with race officials chugged out to meet us. The race meant little to any of us. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean, on the other hand, was an achievement we were all thrilled with. The officials welcomed us with a gift of a large case of beer but informed us that we would have to stay at anchor for the night until the immigration office opened in the morning. Those Brazilian girls would have to wait another day for the pleasure of our company. The anchor was dropped and after the handshakes, hugs and congratulations, we sat on deck to savour our first beer in weeks and the unusual stillness of being stationary. Around us was the sweep of the bay, the streetlights, palm trees, tower blocks, buses and taxis of the city. It was amazing to have arrived on the other side of an ocean, under sail. I could not wait to set foot on this new world. Celebratory cigar smoke and laughter wafted in the tropical night air. Amid the joviality I sat alone, perched on the boom and hugging my knees. I was nervous.

Poor Cape Town! It had been the most beautiful city I had ever seen, but Rio now cast even her into the shadows. Looking down from Sugarloaf mountain to all the yachts in the harbour I could not believe how lucky I was to be there, and to have arrived by sea. I relished the insane atmosphere of the Flamengo-Fluminense football derby in the gigantic Maracanã stadium and the beaches and the edgy, exciting favelas. Add samba, football, bikinis, painfully tight fluorescent Speedos and a permanent party, to the most beautiful cityscape on Earth and you have Rio de Janeiro. Rio walked with a bum wiggle, sang, danced and never slept.

I loved it.

I considered riding away from the yacht directly towards Alaska. It would have been the simple and logical step, maintaining the purity of stepping off my bike in Cape Town and getting back onto it at the other side of the ocean. However I also wanted to ride the complete length of the Americas, from Southern Patagonia to Northern Alaska. Unfortunately I could not find a boat to take me from Rio down to Cape Horn. So I had to decide what I wanted most: to ride an unbroken trail away from Rio or to ride the full length of the Americas.

After being brutally parted from 17 months of hair growth by our crew at the post-race party, for which I was paid £50 for the entertainment value, I decided that I wanted to ride the full length of the continent. I loaded my bike and bags onto a bus and headed south. Five and a half days later, with a new respect for the endurance capacities of bus-travelling backpackers, I arrived in Ushuaia, and set about pedalling back north again.

My Road

It may be your village, but it’s my road.

Ffyona Campbell

The first day back on the bike I rode over a low pass through the black, jagged mountains into a landscape of peaceful blue lakes and forest. I camped early, in a field of clover overlooking a still lake. The evening was warm and at those latitudes the sun would not set for three more hours. It felt good, as always, to be camping and self-sufficient and free, but I was anxious at how I would stiffen my sinews and summon the perseverance to keep myself going.

Outside the tent I rearranged the equipment in my bags, packing things into their proper places. Organising myself helped me to believe that I was serious about this ride. I sat down to cook, grinding fresh peppercorns with the pliers on my Leatherman tool into the boiling pasta and a stock cube. This was the first pan of pasta in a bubbling chain of hundreds, fuelling me on towards the north.

I awoke to the lovely rattle of rain on the taut tent, and rolled over to sleep some more until it stopped. A couple of hours later I was riding through the dripping beauty of lichen-stringed forests, skirting lakes and crossing sinuous trout rivers with curves of perfect camping spots. Patagonia, like Mr Kipling, really does make exceedingly good lakes. Compared to Africa, I felt comfortable here. Fells and dew-soaked clover fields were carpeted with daisies and dandelions. I enjoyed the cold nights and wan sunsets, and despite being further from England than I had ever been, I felt quite at home.

I moved on to classic Patagonian pampas; flat, soggy moorland beneath an enormous sky. The distances in Patagonia are virtually unimaginable to anyone raised in the efficient compactness of Europe. Only occasionally was there a solitary farmhouse, red-roofed and white-walled. Stopping to refill my water bottles at these estancias, I would often be invited in and treated to a bowl of the mutton soup that bubbled constantly on old kitchen stoves. At one estancia, a father, son and grandson galloped home on dappled brown horses for lunch, three generations of gaucho, hungry after a long morning tending the cattle and sheep. They dropped their cowboy hats on the massive kitchen table as they shook my hand and welcomed me to Argentina, jovially asking when they were going to get their Falkland Islands back. They did not seem surprised to find me sitting at their table and tucking into their lunch. I told them they could have Las Malvinas back when Maradona apologised for his cheating. “Touché!” they laughed, or whatever the Spanish equivalent is.

The wild winds from the north were my nemesis for the next couple of months. At their worst, they made me pedal hard, in first gear, on flat tarmac, just to keep a speed of 3mph. The only two options to deal with the wind were to ride or to hide. There was no point hiding and waiting because the winds of Patagonia never end, so that left two other options: to ride or to quit. I rode, and fought for every kilometre. Often the winds were so strong that I had to walk and push the bike. Pushing a bicycle downhill is a singularly depressing experience. Vehicles stopped to offer me lifts, but there was much too far to go for me to take the easy option.

Tierra del Fuego is sliced into Argentinian and Chilean halves. Historically there was not much love lost between the two, and they have spent a lot of time bickering over possession of pieces of Patagonia. I crossed over the Magellan Straits to the South American mainland at Punta Arenas, and over the next few weeks bounced back and forth between Argentina and Chile, and between rain and sunshine as I wound my way northwards. Border crossings were simple, thankfully, but the countries are very different in speech, outlook and attitude.

Argentina had endured decades of military rule, with paramilitary death squads crushing opposition and a ‘dirty war’ resulting in 30,000 ‘disappeared’ people. This internal conflict and military rule ended after the Falklands War in 1982. The next two decades were far more pleasant for Argentina until she defaulted on the largest loan repayment in history. The economy crashed, and political chaos ensued.

An unknown Patagonian governor, Néstor Kirchner, became president with a mere 22 percent of the nation’s vote while I was in Argentina. It did not bode well in a country that had six presidents in the last couple of years. Yet he was very successful, and Argentina has bounced back superbly. Chileans will no doubt be less pleased about their neighbour and rival’s recovery.

Chile’s own economic crisis led to General Pinochet’s violent coup, encouraged by the US in 1973, which ushered in years of purges and exiles. Around 80,000 people were tortured, murdered or ‘disappeared.’ Right-wing Pinochet suspended all opposition parties and democracy did not return until 15 years later. Since then Chileans have worked hard to redeem their country’s human rights reputation, and it has become one of the continent’s most developed, stable and economically successful countries.

In both countries I was invited into homes for food and maté, the favourite drink of the South. Maté is a hot infusion of what looks, and tastes, suspiciously like grass cuttings, drunk through a silver straw from a calabash. Maté is a drink to share, a social event, an excuse to idle away time and talk for hours. The locations and people changed each time I drank it, the maté and the conversation rarely did. We talked of Maradona and Las Malvinas, Pinochet and Beckham, England and bicycles, family, work and lifestyles. We wondered whether war would start soon in Iraq and we all hoped that it would not.

Both countries shared the wild landscapes and the mad headwind. In Chile, the Torres del Paine were cupped in a chaos of shattered rock, whipped by an angry wind. A steep gorge held a murky pale green triangular lake, the wind thrashing spray from the surface. Above this bleak scene rose the torres or towers, three majestic needles of pale orange rock hundreds of metres high, with grey cloud fussing around the peaks. A faint white sun failed to warm me as I stared at the imposing glory of the towers of rock.

Equally magnificent, Argentina’s Perito Moreno glacier is a massive wall of blue ice, 18-storeys-high, advancing across Lake Argentina. The glacier was only a tiny finger at the distant end of one of the many arms of the enormous Hielo Sur, the largest icefield outside Antarctica or Greenland. Nevertheless, a 60-metre wall of contorted blue ice is still a fine old sight. Weakened by the warmth of the afternoon sun, the front of the ice wall constantly crumbles. Enormous chunks, as big as cars, as big as buses, break away from the wall and teeter and crack and then, almost in slow motion, crash into the lake in a magnificent thunder of rumbling echoes and huge waves of water. I was transfixed for a whole day.

In Africa, I had promised myself that I would never again complain about being cold, so delicious had the prospect seemed. So I murmured, “How delightful,” as I surfaced from my warm sleeping bag into dark dawns, with numb hands and feet, and donned two woolly hats to begin cycling early before the morning wind became too strong. My bike laden with a week’s supply of food, I enjoyed the independence and the freedom of the empty spaces. Unfortunately, my rear wheel could not cope with the weight of the bike on the rocky track, and spokes were beginning to break. I was used to this, and replacing them was simple, but the latest spokes I had bought were a couple of millimetres shorter than the old ones. If I replaced one spoke, I would need to replace them all. Back in Africa this would have stressed me, but I was a more relaxed rider these days and felt confident that I would muddle through somehow.

I knocked on the door of a remote machinery depot to ask for water. Ramón, a small, wiry, middle-aged man with an oil-smeared face and cigarette-stained teeth shook my hand and invited me inside. At the kitchen table, his face broke into a smile as I fretted about my broken wheel in my improving Spanish. He insisted that I stay the night.

“Escuchame ché, Listen pal, todo lo que necesitás en la vida es paciencia o plata!” he said. “All you need in life is patience or money!”

Permanently short of both, I laughed, promised to strive for patience at least, and thanked him for his invitation to stay. He lived alone in the depot for a month at a time, guarding the machinery, before returning to town on leave to his wife and three children who he missed badly during the long, lonely weeks maintaining and guarding a handful of tractors. Neither of us could imagine who would steal a steamroller in that empty wilderness, but we were both glad for some company.

Ramón had been cooking as I arrived, and my nostrils hinted that dinner was almost ready. I protested that I did not want him to give up half his dinner for me, and assured him that I had my own food. He said nothing, just smiled, walked out the back door, and staggered back inside with a barbecued slab of lamb large enough to feed at least a dozen people. The table shuddered with the weight of meat, steaming magnificently and smelling wonderful as Ramón sprinkled homemade seasoning over it from an old Coke bottle with small holes stabbed through the lid. “Chimichurri,” he called the sauce, dreamily.

“Eat!” he commanded, and he plonked a plate heavy with meat onto the table in front of me.

“Back home my wife makes me eat all this comida sana, healthy food,” complained Ramón, his mouth full of meat. “It is not good for a man! Aqui estoy libre: out here I am free, free to eat like a man, like an Argentinian. Free to eat meat!”

A couple of days later my wheel was unrideable, and I camped in a wood near the village of El Chaltén to completely rebuild it. I bought a box of rough red wine for 40p in the village to compensate for my mechanical phobia and returned to my tent. Storm clouds swirled around the beautiful yet ferocious Mount Fitzroy above me. The wind was strengthening by the minute, and I added extra rocks to the guy ropes supporting my tent before I climbed inside to start building the new wheel.

Hours later, a dismembered confusion of cogs and rim and a tangle of bike spokes were strewn about the hunched gloom of the tent. My back was braced against the tent wall that bucked and thrashed in the punishment of the storm, screaming and pummelling down from the mountain. The beam from my head torch was the only light, a feeble glow over the chaos. Wet canvas flapped and cracked around my face. Puddles were growing on the floor and everything was wet. The sour wine was half-finished but my back wheel was not nearly so advanced. Frustration boiled: at my inadequate, lightweight tools, at the cramped workspace, at my incompetence, at the weather, at the brutally wearing roads and at the whole bloody silliness of this escapade. “What am I doing here?” I tried to remember.

But, before I slept that night, I finished the task and I was proud. Slightly egg-shaped it may have been, but I had a wheel that would keep me moving. In the morning, the tent was dusted with snow and the wind had not eased, but the sky was bright and clear. Mount Fitzroy looked incredible above me, its vast massifs of rock powdered in snow and gleaming in the dawn.

I wanted to ride the 750-mile Carretera Austral, the Southern Highway, a stunningly beautiful yet terribly corrugated gravel road running north through Chile. I had heard rumours of an adventurous, alternative border crossing that would take me to Villa O’Higgins where the Carretera Austral began. The crossing was not open to vehicles, and it did not appear on my map. It would require cross-country travel and a boat ride, but information on the route proved elusive. Even a helpful police station, after much noisy telephoning and gesticulation, could only advise me that “There is no road, and there are only two boats a month.”

I asked when the boats departed.

“Perhaps around the 5th and the 20th of the month?” they suggested, without much confidence.

Thanking them for their help, I rode past Lago del Desierto with lots of food in my bags. I was prepared for a long wait for the boat. I rode away from the towering peaks of Fitzroy towards a broad blue glacier, the egg-shaped wheel bouncing me up and down. A few bridges were down and the river crossings were cold, but the sun shone as I approached the remote border post, where the guards were under-worked and walking around in their socks.

I had crossed into 30 countries now, but this was the first time that a customs officer had offered me a cup of tea as he toasted his slippered feet beside a wood fire. I was concerned about finding my way through the forest and over the pass to the Chilean frontier, so one of the guards pulled on some boots and walked outside with me, laces flapping, to show me the way. At a narrow gap in the trees he pointed out a skinny, muddy path, dotted with horse manure. “You want to get to Chile, amigo?” he chuckled, “Just follow the shit. It’ll take you right there!” He clapped me on the back, wished me buen viaje, and turned back to the warmth of his hut.

I set off feeling that Hansel and Gretel were luckier with breadcrumbs to show them the way, rather than piles of poo. I hiked up the steep footpath, axle-deep in mud. I had to shuttle my bike and bags because the path was too jumbled with rocks and roots to push the bike, and it was all too heavy to carry in one load. There were cold streams to cross too. The five miles up to the pass in the damp green forest took five hours to complete. Only my huffing and puffing, slipping and cursing broke the silence of dripping drops of water from the trees. At the top of the pass I found a tall pole, like a lamppost. On one side a plaque read ‘Argentina’, the other ‘Chile.’ I amused myself for a short while hopping backwards and forwards between nations before remounting my bike and pedalling down into Chile.

Below me was Lago O’Higgins, turbid grey with floating hunks of blue ice. The mountains beyond the lake were slabs of bare rock, the peaks topped with permanent snow and fields of ice. White waterfalls plummeted in slow motion down the cliffs from the ice-fields. The lower slopes were only dusted with snow, which somehow made them look more cold and bleak than a thick icing of fluffy whiteness. Summer was fading fast, and I needed to outrun it northwards. I had foolishly lost my raincoat, shoving it too hastily under the bungees on my rear rack, and was now sporting a very stylish bin bag, with holes cut for my head and arms.

The track improved as I rode the 10 miles downhill to the Chilean checkpoint, but the road surface and a large plodding bull that I was too scared to overtake meant that the descent took two hours. By the time I reached the lake it was evening and the handful of Chilean officials there decided that my arrival was a good enough reason to stop work for the day, fire up the barbecue and get some lamb cooking. As I was the only person who passed north in the entire month I suppose that it had constituted a stressful day at the office for them.

I set up camp above the jetty in a small cove and waited for the boat. The lake and the blue icebergs shone in the evening sun. All around was a ring of mountains. I hoped that the boat would arrive sometime...

I was relieved in the end to be waiting on the lakeshore for just two days. The two days of porridge, popcorn and coffee, lying in my sleeping bag and struggling with a hoarded crossword puzzle were relaxing. Two weeks may have become a little dull, but on the other hand, I may have finished the crossword by then.

Before I saw it, I heard the tap, tap, tap of a diesel engine that had me scampering from my tent. The small boat, yellow and blue, came into view soon afterwards and I waited for it on the jetty. A ruddy, cheery woman of indeterminate age hurled me the stern line as the fishing boat nudged towards the jetty. I was rather proud of the slick clove hitch I threw around a bollard to secure the boat, but the woman laughed and called me a ‘gringo’ as she jumped down from the boat with a graceless thud to replace my hitch with a traditional Chilean granny knot.

The crew of five, in old woolly hats and rakish berets, welcomed me aboard with big smiles and handshakes. I was then left to strike my tent and load my bike aboard as the crew climbed the grassy hill to the police hut. I settled down for a snooze on a bench below decks while I waited, assuming they would be back soon. The crew, by now very drunk, made their slurred return at 5am, and I was awoken by the engines cranking up. We were off.

In that rainy darkness, as the ferry puttered along Lago O’Higgins, I found out that my country was at war. That Britain had invaded Iraq. The middle-aged captain, stout in knitted pullovers, with a dashing blue beret crumpled above his enormous sprouting ears and radish-red nose, made me feel uncomfortable as he told me. His tone was cordial enough, but his use of the word ‘you’ suggesting that I had personally invaded Iraq, cut deep and I realised how much of a representative for my country I was. Many people I encountered had never met a real-life Englishman, and I knew that my opinions and actions would be generalised as typical of the whole nation. Any traits of my own, like rarely showering, riding a bicycle round the world, or not taking sugar in my tea, were liable to become standard terms of reference for all my country-folk in the minds of the people I met. I do apologise.

I was not the only passenger on the boat. As well as the crew were a couple of shivering dogs, their tails tucked between their legs, a wriggling sack of quietly clucking indignant chickens, three relaxed sheep, and four sleepy children. The children were heading for school in Villa O’Higgins. They would stay there for six months, until the next summer, when they would cross the lake again to work on their family farm.

As morning came the cloud was lower than ever, the water an oily grey. The engine punched at the silence and the chickens seemed to have resigned themselves to their fate as we drew up to the jetty at Villa O’Higgins. It was a silent, empty world, a balm for the soul. I thanked the crew for the ride, paid my fare, lowered my bike down onto the jetty and began cycling once more.

The village of Villa O’Higgins is the southern-most point of the ‘Carretera Austral’, not, as it sounds, a faux Irish pub in Ibiza. An advantage for cyclists is that despotic dictators seem to like building symbolic roads. The Carretera Austral was General Pinochet’s little project, a plan to unite the isolated far south of Chile with the rest of the country.

The Carretera Austral proved to be the most beautiful ride of the world so far. I revelled in the mountains, forests, clear lakes, waterfalls, glaciers, uncannily bright blue rivers, log cabins and lush green alpine pastures. Mountains and glaciers stood sentry as I edged my way between them. At the source of the vividly turquoise River Backer, I sat in a wooden cart with solid wooden wheels and drank maté with three gauchos. The horse stood dolefully in the shafts and tore noisily at the damp grass while we chatted. It was easy to become blasé about such magnificence and the freedom to enjoy it, in the same way that people living in our civilisation take beds, showers and electric lights for granted. I filled my water bottles from the clean streams, doused my head under waterfalls so cold they hurt my skull, and camped safely and peacefully wherever I wanted.

Camping beside rivers was torture: as my revolting pasta boiled on the stove, smug trout rose lazily for flies, taunting my incompetent angling. My improvised night lines of hook, line, bread and flip-flop float were not successful either. One evening, as my clothes and gear hung drying on the trees, an armadillo strutted hastily past my tent. I had been told that armadillo tasted very good in a casserole. It certainly sounded a lot better than what I was eating, but I let him trot on home undisturbed.

Autumn was overtaking summer and sharp, misty mornings of flaming colours jumbled with warm afternoons and sunsets. I stopped in villages to buy pasta, small earth-covered vegetables, bread rolls and manjar, condensed milk boiled to caramel, eaten in place of jam. Log cabins plumed ribbons of smoke and men worked among yapping dogs and fretting chickens to pile chopped wood against their homes in readiness for winter.

I was chased by an angry dog that sank its teeth into my panniers and refused to let go, despite my kicking it in the head as I rode. I jumped off my bike. The dog ran off but, feeling vindictive, I sprinted after it. The poor dog looked very surprised and fled into a garden. I did not give up the chase and I ran, hot on the dog’s heels, straight into the garden. I pulled up quickly as a family stared at me from their breakfast table. I gave them a big smile, waved a cheery “Buenos días!” and strolled nonchalantly back out of their garden, feeling like Basil Fawlty.

Approaching Argentina once more, and the end of this magical highway, the land opened up into fenced pastures and small-holdings. The sun shone through clouds along curving rivers and above creases of mountains. It reminded me of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. I always enjoyed reminders of other happy memories, other beautiful roads and other campsites. They helped me pin reference points on the timeline of all my riding and gave me confidence for having come so far.

The next few thousand kilometres blurred in my mind. There were days with volcanoes, conical and white, breathing a thin curl of smoke with James Dean nonchalance and an insinuation of waiting menace. There were exiled Welsh towns with dragons and cream teas, and forests of monkey-puzzle trees, spiky and dark with pale fruit that tasted like chestnuts. There were enough days of dirt road to remind myself that I was in an adventure, yet not so many as to make me think fondly of how much I could be earning in an office in London.

There were miles of empty coastline with pelotons of pelicans, gliding in formation inches above the noisy Pacific waves. But those days could not match the majesty of the Carretera Austral and besides, I still had more than 20,000km of noisy Pacific waves to watch, so I did not linger. There was a sad moment when I crossed the first river in Chile where the water was too polluted to drink and I realised that I was entering a new phase of South America, a region less idyllic for those who lived there than the fairytale, carefree wilderness I had been so fortunate to experience.

I passed through edgy towns that were no more than collections of liquor stores flogging cheap pisco and gloomy wooden shops spacing their wares out to fill the shelves. Those rough towns told of a South America where so many still live in poverty, with streets of cheap breeze block buildings, blowing rubbish, dirt roads and eroded footpaths on brown grass winding around wrecked old cars, gomerias (tyre repair shacks) and burnt out rings of car tyres. All around was unemployment and unattainable dreams.

But being amongst people was a good thing. In Concepción I gave a talk at a school to a young class, where the children felt sorry for my not having had a birthday party for two years. On my last day in town there was a knock on the door of the house I was staying in. I opened it and saw nobody. Then, adjusting my view from my eye level to my knee level, I saw Class 5a on the doorstep, grinning. They were armed with hotdogs, cake, fizzy drinks and enough chocolate to see me half way to Bolivia. They were ready to party!

One evening I pulled up to a roadside house on a quiet country road to ask for water. Several hours later I was alone and half-drunk inside the house, on a soft sofa and listening to Ella Fitzgerald. The man who answered the door had replied to my request for water with, “No prefieres cerveza? Wouldn’t you rather have beer?”

He ushered me inside, poured two beers and we sat down at his kitchen table. David told me that he was 42 and waiting nervously to go out on a date. He downed his beer, got sad about his father’s recent death, downed another beer and cursed me for giving him the idea of moving to England and starting a new life. He ate half a Viagra pill, “I’m not so old that I need a whole one yet!” and headed out to meet his young girlfriend. I was alone in a total stranger’s house, trusted to spend the evening relaxing on his sofa with a spare bedroom and a comfy bed to sleep in. I felt flattered that he had not allowed me to meet his girlfriend in case my youth and dashing good looks swept her off her feet.

One afternoon I slogged up and down very steep spurs between beaches and inlets as the road paralleled the coast. At the bottom of the hills, beside the crashing waves, were little single-street fishing villages. I was tired and looking forward to stopping for the evening. A car passed me, then turned and came back to warn me that I must stop for the night in the next village. To continue, they said, was too dangerous. I wondered what the danger could be.

“Ladrones?” I asked. “Thieves?”

“No.” The driver shook his head.

“Pumas?”

“No.”

The grave danger was that there was ‘nada’ ahead, ‘nothing’.

No people, no houses, no thieves, no pumas and no psychopathic murderers. Nothing but beaches and forests. Assured of a very safe night I thanked the man for his kind concern and rode on to camp alone in the nada.

Almost every human spends every night inside a building with the comfort of enclosed familiarity and security. I could understand how ‘nothing’ could be a frightening concept, combined with our other primitive fears of night and darkness. But I had grown used to being outside. I welcomed the darkness as an ally. I felt fortunate to not know where I would camp, to live my days by the hours of the sun and to sit watching the lonely sea and the sky, listening to the flung spray and the seagulls crying.