Trailblazer Guide Books

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 - Adventure Travel

England to Australia: unfit, unsupported and unprepared

Tim Brewer is living proof that anyone can undertake a long-distance cycle tour without previous cycle-touring experience or even a great deal of planning and organisation. Sustained largely by buckets of enthusiasm, a yearning for adventure and that all-important sense of humour, in 2006 he set out to cycle from England to Australia.

As I left university, and found myself staring down the barrel of ‘graduate recruitment schemes’, ‘selection days’ and reams of application forms, running away was an easy decision. I’d always intended to travel for a while, after three years in the damp of north-east England I was in dire need of a holiday. I’d saved enough cash, all I needed was a plan.
    I’d worked in a call-centre, trying to flog people new electromagnetic spectrophotometers – always an easy sell. On the wall was a world map, one of my favourite sources of distraction. After long enough staring at a geographical, rather than political, world map, the familiar patterns – Africa there, Europe up to roughly that bit then it’s basically Russia, India underneath, the Americas – start to disintegrate. Suddenly there’s just a big chunk of land, undivided. If you start in Europe, and head south-east, you reach Singapore before you run out of land. If you’re bored and susceptible to wanderlust, that’s a thought that’s going to fester.
    I don’t remember when I first thought of going by bicycle, but I do remember when I first said it out loud. I was drunk. It was not the culmination of a careful study of various possibilities, it was not well thought out, no charitable motivation or grand scheme beyond what, in the lucidity of midnight gin, was perfectly clear: ‘Seriously, mate, how cool would it be to cycle to Australia?’
    Over the next few weeks, I received various replies to this question, but it was the reply of my equally drunken companion that sealed my fate: ‘Yeah! That’d be awesome! Seriously – you should do that! That would be amazing!’
    Others were less supportive.
    ‘You won’t’, ‘You can’t’ and ‘You’ll die!’ were the helpful contributions of three friends in a later conversation. That the feat was theoretically possible was nearly believable, but it was perfectly obvious that I was not the person to do it.
    I was nominated for the award of ‘sportsman of the year’ at college, for services to darts, pool and poker. I was the ‘king of pub sports’. A heavy drinker, I was 19 stone (266lb, 120kg), smoked an ounce of tobacco a week and was a stranger to exercise. One friend, in a voice that said ‘I want to believe’ asked incredulously, ‘Are you at least doing some training?’ My answer was simple. ‘What would training involve? Cycling every day?’
    Apart saving money, there didn’t seem much I needed to do. At the beginning of August 2006 I made a single act of commission – I gave my notice at work. From that point on, as far as I was concerned, I was off. No-one seemed to understand how simple it was.
    ‘Do you have a bike?’ No. ‘Do you have a route?’ No. ‘A tent?’ No. ‘Insurance?’
    Details, details, details. Five minutes with the Yellow Pages gave me the numbers for all the local bike shops, five in all. The first four calls were brief:
    ‘Do you sell touring bikes?’ ‘No’.
    The fifth, however, was a winner:
    ‘Yep, we’ve got everything from your one-day audax style to your full-on round the world tourer.’
    ‘That’s it – the second one – I’m pretty sure that’s what I’m after, I’ll be round in half an hour’.
    Later that afternoon the internet provided me with insurance and a self-inflating roll-mat. I had to order sportswear and Lycras online from a specialist. In the world of cycling a 36-inch waist is ‘extra large’. My Lycras were 6XL.
     A fortnight before departure I popped into a camping shop and bought a tent and sleeping bag. Nothing flash – they looked small enough to carry on a bike and weren’t too pricey. A couple of days before my departure I realised I’d probably need some inoculations for parts of India or Asia, so I dropped into the MediClinic in Waterloo station. The doctor took my form, which gave my intended destinations and departure date, scanned it, and looked gravely over his specs.
    ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘It says here you leave on Friday, rabies inoculation is a month long course, and Hepatitis B is six months!’
    ‘That’s OK, I won’t be anywhere risky for more than six months, all I want is the first jab, I’ll pick the others up on the way.’
    The doctor gave me a peculiar look – he seemed to be pleased with me, like I’d discovered the answer to a riddle. He’d never heard of anyone doing such a thing before, but the idea clearly appealed to him. He gave me the first course of my injections, and wished me well.
    Cumulatively, my preparations took about three hours.
    I packed my bags the night before I left. Looking back, my load was ridiculous – about seven changes of clothes and a pannier full of paperbacks. No cooking apparatus. No penknife. I
didn’t even have a bicycle lock.

Day 1 – Kent
My first day’s ride was eight gruelling hours, covering the 50 uninspiring kilometres between my home in Dartford and Faversham, where an old friend had offered to put me up for the night. England being England, this involved nearly every source of discouragement I would face, including drizzle, headwinds, heavy traffic and aggressive drivers. It was also far further than was advisable for a man in my condition. Three nights later my legs and mind had recovered enough for me to move on. This taught me two vital lessons – 1. don’t overreach, and 2. leave the country by the nearest port.
    It took about a week for me to build up to 60 or 70km days, and that became my target throughout Europe. This, too, was a blessing in disguise; there are parts of Europe where 70km can take you through three countries. Unlike most of the rest of the world, interesting, historical or beautiful towns are crammed together in Europe – it would have been a shame to go faster.
    Europe is the perfect training ground for cycle touring. Following rivers avoided long climbs, while cyclepaths kept me away from traffic; camping in campsites, which I look back on and cringe for the expense, meant I had safety and facilities at the end of every day, and often they were full of other cyclists. Carrying eleven paperbacks would be considered certifiable behaviour by almost all cycle tourers – all that extra weight could cut 10km from your potential day’s ride! But since I set off too unfit to ride a full day on an unladen bike, this was irrelevant. The important thing was to have something to occupy the long afternoons of recovery.
    My excessive wardrobe was discarded piecemeal as each item became simultaneously worn out and, thanks to weight-loss, unwearable. Although I wasted a lot of money on restaurants, due to having no cooking equipment, the variety of local food is one of the highlights of western Europe, and was one of the things that kept me motivated. If I’d lived off Qwik-cook spagetti and tinned tuna all through Europe (as I later did in the Australian outback) I may well have turned back. It must be admitted that ‘tuna surprise’ would have given most eastern European food a run for its money.
    The trick to being overpacked, I discovered, is to be overpacked with stuff you don’t mind throwing away. Almost none of what I took was new or of sentimental value, and nothing I bought along the way was expensive. So, as if by osmosis, my load fluctuated according to conditions and shrank without causing me pain.

Day 5 – France
My first night in France was also the first time I unpacked my tent, so I was pleased to find all its parts present and correct. Waking up with the sun in Calais, I ranger-ed my choses, opened the map of northern France my Grandfather had given me, and muttered to myself ‘right... which way’s Australia?’ I identified a fairly straight road heading south-east, and set off.
    My first full day in ‘abroad’ I cycled 60km through green fields and very small villages to Clairmarais, near St. Omer, stopping at 2 o’clock to pitch my tent and find food. The former being accomplished with minimal hassle, since I had shrewdly stopped at a campsite, the latter proved nearly impossible. The outskirts of St. Omer, and particularly Clairmarais, are beautiful villages of canals, irrigation ditches, farmland. Not, however, of shops or restaurants. Eventually, I stopped at one of the roadside stalls selling homegrown produce which stand outside almost every house (presumably everyone buys from each other). I was looking for anything which could be eaten without preparation of any kind, since I still didn’t even have a penknife. I asked for four figs and two plums, explaining when she began to weigh 2kg of plums that it was for my dinner and just two would suffice.
    ‘For your dinner?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘How about some jam then.’
    ‘I haven’t any bread.’
    Dark clouds passed overhead, thunder rolled somewhere. She gave me a look of concern like I’d just told her I didn’t have a face. She disappeared inside her house, and returned with a loaf of sliced white. The sun came out and birds sang again. I’m not ashamed to admit that I tore into these paltry rations like a pig at a trough. Cycling, it turns out, is hungry work. The fruit was sweet and juicy, even if the inside of figs does look like a botched operation, and bread dipped in jam is an underrated pleasure.

Day 12 – Belgium
I reached St. Truidan, as planned, after a 66km ride, at 6pm. There was a festival going on in the main square; a festival of the clearly-unsafe-and-uninsured-thirty-year-old-travelling-fairground kind that we all know and love. The tourist office was closed, so I asked around for an internet café. After a couple of mistakes/miscommunications/downright lies, I was directed to the library. The internet, bless its little heart, tried hard, really hard, to find the nearest campsite. I know it did, I trust it. This campsite was, precisely, 41.5km further on.
    I arrived at around 10pm, after only taking directions twice and backtracking once. To my delight, the campsite had a bar, and within 15 minutes my tent was pitched, and I was in it, boasting to the locals of how far I’d come. Unbelievably, I felt strong and loose, ready to ride another 100km if I needed to. This was a chimera, unfortunately, and the next morning I could barely move.
    I should mention at this point, in case any of you should find it useful, that telling people you’re cycling to Australia gets you free beer.
    This was my first 100km ride – I hoped the second would not be for a while. The next morning I was surprised to find I wasn´t too sore; not stiff, nor aching, but weak. Very very weak. It took all my concentration to deconstruct the tent, let alone cycle anywhere. The 20km to Maastricht were painfully slow.

Day 14 – Germany
I arrived in Aachen after the tourist information office had closed. There were internet cafés all over the place, so I let Google be my guide. This, it transpired, was both foolish and serendipitous. The internet told me, in all good faith I´m sure, that the nearest campsite was 25km away, and that there were only three hotels in the town and that they were fully booked. I happened to have arrived in the middle of the world equestrian games, so the town was heaving with horsey people.
    I set off following a cycle route which, in daylight, leads through open countryside, farmland, quaint little hamlets and traffic-free footpaths. At night it was a treacherous, pot-holed, unpredictable death-trap and at irregular intervals the devilish, iridescent gaze of satan´s bovine sentinels would flash from the dark and a flap of bats rush past my face. When, after about an hour, I saw a small local pub with its front door open and heard chatter and laughter from within, there was no way I could just ride on.
    As much for conversation as anything else, I asked for directions to the nearest campsite. Never has such a simple question produced such an energetic response. The bar was horseshoe-shaped, and barely fitted in the front part of the pub, so when people were sat around it was a squeeze to move. Everyone around the bar had an opinion – which way to go, where to go, it’s too late, too cold, too far away. I drank my beer and chatted with the couple who owned the bar and a few locals. After about ten minutes, a man came into the bar and demanded, in rapid French, directions to the nearest main road. To my surprise, the man I´d been talking to in German replied in fluent French. I thought it strange that a French tourist would walk into a bar in Germany and assume that they would be understood. I said as much. ´Ah!´ replied the landlord, ´but we are in Belgium. Germany is 200m that way!´
     I found this fascinating. That the people in this pub lived in a different country from their neighbours, had a different government, different constitution, from those on the other side of the street. I tried asking them about it, whether straddling the border affects their lives, but the conversation was now being held simultaneously in French, German and English, depending on who was involved. It’s hard enough for me to maintain coherence in one foreign tongue, so this was enough to make my ears bleed.
    While I was talking to the people in my corner of the bar, in the background the problem of where I was to stay – my problem – had become the property of a conference of locals. Someone phoned a more local campsite, but they were full of horsey people. In the meantime, my glass was continually refilled. Never quite to the top, always just ´a little top up´. On the house. Some chocolate appeared, as if from nowhere, to keep me going.
    Feeling thoroughly adopted into the fold of Chez Alito, I begin to entertain the hope that somebody would let me pitch my tent in their field. (This was a country pub – everyone has a field). Maybe they could see this in my eyes, maybe it was a current, an irresistible mental eddy around that horseshoe bar, but almost immediately the landlady turned to me and asked ´would staying in someone´s garden be okay?´
    She indicated the someones who made this kind offer, a middle-aged couple with whom I´d exchanged a few words but little conversation. I didn´t waste any time protesting – they could change their minds. I was, instead, the very picture of surprise and gratitude; introduced myself, bought a round. The husband had a strange looking drink, a red liqueur with squirty cream on top in a shot glass with a long stem. I asked what it was, and while the rest of the bar tried to explain – ‘its like strawberries, but smaller’, ‘do you know ´red berries’?’ the landlady wandered off and returned with one for me to try. On the house. I think it was redcurrant based, but it tasted mostly of alcohol.
    A short while later my hosts were ready to leave. ‘Come, you do not make your tent tonight.’
    So I collected what I needed for the night and parked the bike behind the bar. They lived two streets away, in Germany. A beautiful small house with an orchard in the garden. They made their sofa-bed for me, told me breakfast would be at nine in the morning and then they´d take me back to the pub. As I lay, mildly intoxicated, between crisp, clean sheets, already dreaming of the scrambled egg breakfast waiting for me in the morning, a treacherous thought stole into my mind: ‘better preparation would have prevented this’.

Day 35 – Prague
On my last day in Prague, I managed to get my penultimate Hepatitis B inoculation, rendering me completely invincible until February. My strategy for inoculations provided interesting experience, as it forced me to deal with the health services of different countries, without actually having to fall sick to do it. In socialist France I visited a doctor who ran his own practice from a terraced house, took the prescription he wrote to the pharmacy, who gave me the drugs to bring back to the doctor. It was a little inefficient, but empowering, all the people involved were autonomous agents, interacting. In post-communist Czech Republic, on the other hand, I had to find the special foreigner’s section of the main hospital, where I was told exactly where to go and what to do. No autonomy, but organised, efficient equanimity. In the UK, with capitalist ideology running a nationalised service, there´s no autonomy and no organisation, but at least it’s expensive.

Day 45 – Vienna
I arrived in Vienna after a 137km slog over hills. It was dark and I was exhausted. I wandered towards the first bar I saw, in search of directions to a hostel. A toothless, stooped, geriatric alcoholic was loitering at the door, so I asked him for advice.
    ‘Where are you from?’ was his reply. Clearly my German accent still needed work.
    ‘London.’
    ‘You come by bike?’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘From London?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Wow.’
    ‘Well, it’s not that fa...’ I tried to be self deprecating but he interrupted me, ‘Wow. Before you left you must have been enormous!’
    I rode 137km in one day to be told I was still fat. Charming.

Day 85 – Istanbul
Reaching Turkey was a milestone. Cycling from the northwest corner of Europe to the southeast was, in my mind, a tremendous achievement, and I’d always told myself that no matter how much I hated it, I’d make it to Istanbul. No-one could say I’d ‘given up’ or ‘failed’ if I made it that far. In the event, there was no question of turning back. From the Bulgarian border to Istanbul was 250km of steep, gruelling hills. I covered the ground in two, 12-hour days. I was still overweight but fitter than I’d ever been and I’d made it across a continent under my own steam. I’d discarded most of my excess baggage, bought most of what I lacked, learned how to keep most of the bike working and could now trust my own legs to keep pushing. If nothing else, I’d shown that there are two ways to set out on a tour – you can begin with meticulous preparation, arduous training, and head straight for the nearest mountain; or, you can make a very, very slow start.

Through Asia to Australia
After six months, thanks to a spontaneous approach to route planning, I reached India via a circuitous tour of the Middle East, culminating in hitching a ride on a cargo ship from Suez to Mumbai. My workshy route had avoided all mountains thus far, and I was still around 100kg.
    Ten months after my departure I tackled my first mountain. Since this was the Karakoram Highway, and followed immediately by crossing Tibet, I was glad of the extended run-up. By the time I reached the Kunjerab Pass, I was finally more fit than fat. Exactly one year after my lumbering departure I woke up, unzipped my tent and looked out at a turquoise lake. At 4500m elevation in the Himalayas, two days from the nearest village in the middle of a (technically) illegal ride through West Tibet, I had clearly changed my attitude somewhat. Along with the 50kg of bodyweight I’d shed, I’d lost half my preconceptions and most of my inhibitions.
    By the time I met my long-suffering girlfriend at Hong Kong airport I was 70kg. This was the slightest I’d been since I was tall enough to ride a rollercoaster.