I was living in the UK, but decided I couldn’t there forever. I’d been thinking about going home, and how I’m going to do it. I could just take the easy option, and get on a plane, but where would the fun be in that? Instead, I decided to do something a bit more epic: I rode home. On my bike. By myself.
Departure date, was February 17 2007. From the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, 0° longitude, I traveled across Europe, Turkey, Central Asia, before entering China. Across China to Beijing, then down to Hong Kong via Shanghai, and then on to Singapore. First flight to Darwin, then rode down the centre of Australia to Adelaide, and across to Melbourne.
A short ride in New Zealand from Auckland to Whangarei, and I finally reached home on June 1 2008, 15.5 months and 29,511km after leaving London.
I stayed and worked a while in New Zealand, but in late 2009, I decided to finish off the lap. So I flew to Santiago, rode from there down to Ushuaia, later flew to London, and rode up to the meridian again, before riding up to Scotland.
You can look at notes on the gear I took, or the hassles with visas. Or maybe you just want to know why. But probably you want to look at this route map below. You can zoom in, or open it in a full size frame. It’s not 100% accurate, but it’s close enough.
View RTW by bike in a larger map