Author's Statement

 

My book is perhaps the first of its kind and I wrote it because the only bike touring books in the shops seemed to be stuck in the past and didn’t cover modern cyclists’ needs. I thought bike touring had moved so far beyond those ‘Ten great tours in France’ types of book. For one thing, I never bought a guidebook when I went touring and certainly never followed someone else’s route, so those books were useless to me. For another, most riders nowadays are a bit more adventurous than that, with their bikes, gear and the places they go to. And more and more  They need a book to get them started, to read at home while planning a trip, a book that would raise the right questions but not tell them exactly what they needed or which road to take. Probably all of us have bought some gear on recommendation once, taken it on a trip – and never used it. A book with long lists of gear to take would only serve to make the world look like a dangerous place where you needed tons of gadgets to survive. But a bike trip isn’t a space mission! So I aimed to write a book that didn’t insult the intelligence but gave you some leads, a book you could learn from and outgrow, but hopefully with something for everyone, unless they really had travelled the whole world and knew it all inside out.

The book was not intended only for prospective round the world riders. That’s a dream many of us have, but far more cyclists have homes and jobs and go for shorter trips, yet travel far beyond western Europe even for a couple of weeks. I myself have not been on a multi-year round the world tour, preferring trips of a month or two focussed on a particular region rather than one long trip and I didn’t intend to write about places I knew nothing about and had not visited. I thought the book would be so much richer for having the experiences of many different writers, people with special interests and expertise in various regions of the world, writing about what made those places so special to them. I chose the best writers I could find, from all over the world, and asked them to write for the book on their favourite areas. Other areas, such as the USA and Japan, I wrote myself as I have lived for years in both countries and did numerous tours in each.

The Adventure Cycle-touring Handbook begins with some fundamental questions about what kind of travel you might be planning, and quickly moves to choice of bikes and then key gear decisions before discussing what’s out there and what works for long-distance touring in tough conditions. I have almost 20 years of cycling experience in my adult years alone, with tours on an off for all those years. I have owned about ten bikes in that time and toured on all of them, camping wherever possible, not just on bike trips but also on hiking and kayak trips. As for tents and stoves, the truth is even more shocking as I have owned around 15 of each – let’s just say I practice the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment: some things I break, some I get tired of, others I give away or sell and move on to something else!

The last section of the book is a collection of short stories. Chosen to entertain and inform, there is something to be learned from each.

Click here for where to buy the book