About Me

Stubble

I’m Tom from Eng­land. (That’s me in the silly hat.) I reg­u­larly go on bike adven­tures to scary-sounding places like Sudan, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Mon­go­lia, and find that they’re not actu­ally scary at all. I take nice pic­tures and write lots about what hap­pens. In between trips, I do whatever I can to make a liv­ing. One day I plan to write a book and make a film of my travels.

Take a look at the blog, see the map of my travels, fol­low me on Twit­ter for the very latest, or read on for some answers to frequently-asked questions.

Why adven­ture cycling?

I guess it star­ted when my par­ents took the sta­bil­isers off my first bike and I dis­ap­peared across the vil­lage green, aged 4. Cue much fret­ting and wail­ing from afore­men­tioned parents.

As a child one of my ambi­tions was to ride my BMX off a ramp into the nearby River Wel­land. (I built a ramp, but was never brave enough to get up enough speed.)

In my teen­age years, my friend Andy and I would occa­sion­ally drag our town-dwelling friends reluct­antly off on long day-rides in the sur­round­ing coun­tryside, while our more reg­u­lar rides included drag­ging our bikes down the mud­di­est farm tracks we could find in order to find new cross-country routes and escape from as many farm­ers as possible.

At uni­ver­sity I got fat and lazy in my first year and spent much of my second and third years try­ing to burn off all the beer and cheesy chips by throw­ing myself up and down the muddy hill­sides of Exmoor on a mountain-bike with my house­mate Mark.

The spring after gradu­at­ing I organ­ised Andy and another friend to come to Scot­land and spend a week lug­ging bikes and back­packs along the rainy off-road trails of the West High­lands. We attemp­ted to camp in the rain using tents bought from Aldi for £10, with pre­dict­able res­ults. This, the first multi-day trip I’d done, was thor­oughly miser­able and the most fun I’ve ever had on a bike.

The logical pro­gres­sion from there seemed to be to try and ride as far as pos­sible and see what happened.

What have you done since then?

Midday heat in the Sahara Andy, Mark and I rode from my vil­lage through Europe to Bud­apest, at which point Mark called his jour­ney off. As a pair, Andy and I rode ill-prepared out of Europe and across West Asia to Armenia, which by this time was suf­fer­ing its cold­est winter for sev­eral dec­ades. After seven months on the road without a break, I unex­pec­tedly fell in love with an Iranian-Armenian girl study­ing in Yerevan, and all previously-trumpeted plans to cycle a lap of Earth went out the win­dow in an instant.

I some­how con­vinced her to cycle with me to Tehran that sum­mer, but I craved some­thing big­ger, harder and more chal­len­ging. So in Janu­ary 2009 I cycled alone through the Middle East to Egypt and then headed south into Africa proper. I rode as far as the Horn of Africa, try­ing to deal with the Sahara, mal­aria, and crowds of rock-lobbing chil­dren, and strug­gling for dir­ec­tion I found that I had to fol­low my heart. So I rode across the hot­test place on Earth and hitched a boat over to Yemen, cross­ing south­ern Ara­bia in sum­mer, back to Iran and being reunited with Tenny half a year after I’d last seen her. We got mar­ried later that year.

But wan­der­lust isn’t so eas­ily or romantic­ally foiled! In spring 2010 I found myself with a couple of months to spare. So did Andy, so we met up in Moscow and trav­elled over­land to Mon­go­lia to spend a few weeks boun­cing across the wil­der­ness. This, we decided after­wards, had finally ful­filled our ambi­tion to take mountain-biking to its logical con­clu­sion.

I’ve yet to use a plane on any of these bike trips.

My men­tal list of places in which I’d like to travel con­tin­ues to grow…