Tag Archives: Local Culture

Moving Forward From Vanilla Cycle Touring

By Tom | Published: July 30, 2010
Five years ago, I inven­ted cycle-touring. After reject­ing back­pack­ing out-of-hand as a ful­filling post-university form of escap­ism, I even­tu­ally hit upon the idea to ride a bicycle — a bicycle! — from Eng­land, all the way to Croa­tia. The loose motiv­a­tion for this was to visit a friend, but hav­ing a cool adven­ture in exotic, [...]
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The Long Road Back To Yerevan

By Tom | Published: July 13, 2010
Com­ing home meant two things: a very long jour­ney by pub­lic trans­port, and lug­ging an unwieldy col­lec­tion of funny-shaped bags and bits of metal through a vari­ety of cit­ies in the sum­mer heat. Choos­ing to travel exclus­ively by land meant that the excur­sion was really much more than just a bike ride in Mon­go­lia. It was [...]
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Mongolia: The Cream Of Adventure Cycle-Touring

By Tom | Published: July 3, 2010
In 2006, Andy and I took our mountain-bikes up to Inverness and spent a week rid­ing an off-road route to Fort Wil­liam, which we had put together from detailed Ordin­ance Sur­vey maps. We made a lot of mis­takes — car­ry­ing all of our kit in heavy back­packs, rely­ing for a good night’s sleep on a [...]
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The Marco Polo of the Middle East

By Tom | Published: April 30, 2010
While I was trav­el­ling through Europe, people would some­times smile and jok­ingly pass ref­er­ence to Marco Polo, the medi­eval Italian mer­chant who brought home epic tales of Asia, now immor­tal­ised as one of history’s great adven­tur­ers, and whose exper­i­ences neither I nor any­one else stand the slight­est chance of recre­at­ing in today’s world. While I [...]
Posted in Off The Bike | Also tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Why I Can’t Live In Armenia (I’m Too British)

By Tom | Published: January 23, 2010
My life is bor­ing. My daily routine con­sists of get­ting up an hour before sun­rise, going for a run, jump­ing into (and rap­idly out of) a cold shower, hav­ing break­fast and then sit­ting down for an 8-to-12-hour stint in front of my com­puter screen. I am mak­ing web­sites for a liv­ing these days. It puts [...]
Posted in Off The Bike, Random Musings | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | 18 Comments