Did you guys buy new bikes and stuff?

Did you work out a lot to get in shape?

 How many guns are you bringing?

 How are you crossing the oceans?

How far do you bike every day?

Where do you sleep at night?

How far will the whole trip be?

What’s a typical bike day like?

What are you doing for malaria?

How do you pay for it?

Are you crazy?

 Why?

-  Did you guys buy new bikes and stuff?

Yes, we bought new bikes, and lots of other new equipment.  We spent a lot of time talking to people more knowledgeable than ourselves (www.lamaisonduvelo.be for example) and visiting as many different stores as possible before actually purchasing anything, and yet even then the whole experience left us feeling kind of sad and dirty.  We’re just not shoppers at heart. But yes, preparing the equipment was a major part of our preparations for the trip, and feel free to check out our equipment section and to get in touch if you have any specific questions on specific bits of gear we are bringing with us.

Did you work out a lot to get in shape?

Well, we certainly tried to!  We both joined a gym and took some spinning classes and tried to ride our bikes as much as possible on weekends.  Dave had the good fortune to work out and play with the greatest ultimate frisbee team in the universe, and that helped a lot too.  Then just before departure we scheduled four weeks of visiting family – that way we were sure to spend as much time as possible sitting on our butts and eating, and so no matter what we may have done before to get in shape, we were both pretty well out of it by the time of our departure…

How many guns are you bringing?

None, but thanks for asking – we find that question pretty funny.

How are you crossing the oceans?

Since part of our goal was to minimize the environmental impact of our travels, we would love to just rent a cabin on a cargo ship – but unfortunately that tends to be significantly more expensive than traveling by plane.  So yeah, in the end, we’re going to fly.  And yes, we’ve heard all the other ideas (Pump your tires up so they’ll float!  Get going really fast!  Bike around the boat the whole trip!).

How far do you bike every day?

This is kind of a tricky question since we haven’t quite started the trip yet and we can’t really be sure of what local conditions will permit once we’re underway.  In general though, judging from other travelers and from our previous biking experience, we hope to average about 100 kilometers a day.

How far will the whole trip be?

As far as it needs to be – and not one kilometer more or less!  How far will that be?  We expect something around 45,000 kilometers.

What’s a typical bike day like?

This is kind of a tricky question since we’ve found that ‘typical’ days are kind of hard to come by.  What a day is like depends so much on outside circumstances – the quality of the road, the strength and direction of the wind, the hills – even just how far we biked the day before or plan to bike the next day.

Generally though, we wake up at 5:30 and try to be on the road with breakfast in our bellies by 7:30.  This way, we get to cycle during the coolest part of the day, and should anything unforseen come up (technical troubles, detours, what have you), we still have the whole day ahead of us to take care of it and get to our destination.

We try to take a mid-morning break, either for tea (or coffee if we’re lucky) or just to eat some fruit we’ve bought along the way.  Then lunch comes around 1:00, though we can push it back later if we are making good time.  We try not to take lunch before we’vedone at least 50 km or so.  Dave needs food pretty often while biking, so we’re limited in how late we can push lunch – this is the part of the day when he takes to sneaking cookies from his handlebar bag.

And then the afternoon is pretty much like the morning.  We take a mid-afternoon break and then bike on to our final destination where we either ask around for a place to plant our tent or check into a cheap hotel before eating, updating our journal, reading some, and then passing out at the ungodly hour of 9:00 pm.

Where do you sleep at night?

We have a tent with us and sleeping bags and so we hope to camp out most nights. In some countries this will be easier than others and wild camping is definitely on the menu. We also are members of a few hospitality sites like Couch Surfing and Warm Showers, and we use those whenever possible. All of this is a great way to keep costs down and to meet new people.

What are you doing for malaria?

As with most things, there is a great answer to this question on the World Biking website, so go check that out if you want more information. For our part, things are still coming together on this front.  Prevention is a big part of it – we will do our best to be indoors and protected around sunrise and sunset; mosquito nets for sleeping; mosquito head nets when we’re outside at the wrong time of day; DEET on our skin, clothes, and material; all kinds of good things like that.  Dave had originally hoped to simply drink gin and tonics all day like a disenchanted British colonial officer in a 19^thWe are both resigned to the fact that we may very well get malaria anyway, and we’re bringing along some treatments for when that happens. century novel (“Shall we play another round of whist Mr. Hennepen?”), but now he thinks he will take Doxycycline every day since that seems to be more effective (not to mention less imperialist).  Annabelle is less certain.  Doxy is an antibiotic and it can be harsh on the system, particularly for women, after taking it too long.  But then… Well… It would suck to get malaria…  She’ll probably take Doxy as well.

 How do you pay for it?

Well, for starters, we consider this question a little indelicate… but that has never stopped people from asking, so maybe that’s just us. We usually respond to this question in the following way:

1. We’ve been planning this trip for years and we’ve been saving for this trip for years – it’s true it’s not something you can just do over night.
2. We don’t smoke, we don’t have a car, we rent a small apartment, we don’t go out to bars every night, we shop at second hand stores (for clothes, books, furniture, everything…). It’s amazing sometimes how much money you can save with a little bit of effort.
3. Biking is the cheapest way to travel.  We have a tent with us and a camping stove as well, and we hope to keep our budget down to ten Euros a day.

If you want to know more, there is an excellent discussion of how to finance a bike trip on the World Biking website.  On the level of details there is little we can add to that, and we even use that for much of our own planning.

Are you crazy?

Like a fox!

Why?

There are far too many aspects of this question to just respond simply.  Let’s try to break it down maybe…

Why by bike?

Because we like biking!  It is far and away the best way to travel – once you go bike, you never go back.  Riding on a bike, the world passes much more slowly than in a car or bus or motorcycle, and suddenly the little details of the landscape or culture which you might have totally missed if traveling with another mode of transportation come out and become important.  This is to say nothing of the extra contacts you get with people (since regrettably it’s still not every day that we see cyclists with five bags on their bikes rolling along), the sense of accomplishment at the end of each day, the pleasure of spending all your time out of doors getting physical exercise, and the simple, basic, tout bête pleasure of coasting downhill on a bicycle – it’s as fun now as it was when we were kids.

We are grateful every day that the lovely people at Mundu Bicyclette encouraged us to take our first long bike trip – and we hope you’ll go out and give it a try soon.  Once you go bike, you never go back…

Why permaculture farms?

Well there is more on permaculture in the permaculture section.  In general, we hope to start a farm somewhere when we finish our trip.  We hope to find land and like-minded people and then to grow our own food, produce our own energy, and to try to return to the earth a small fraction of the benefits we have already taken from it in our lives.  In essence, we hope to live along the three principles of permaculture:  Take care of the earth; Take care of people; Distribute the surplus.  And so we hope to learn as much as possible about how to do it during our trip.

Why this route?

The route we show on the map is obviously subject to change as the trip develops – it’s almost impossible to plan a trip like this from a distance; you have to really be there on the ground and in contact with people to know what is possible and what is not and what is worth doing and what is not. The overall route though was decided upon after many years of debate and discussion.  We wanted very much to leave from Brussels by bike and never leave the surface of the Earth during our whole trip, but then we also wanted to see southern and eastern Africa and southeast Asia, and South America, and we only have three years…  And so voila, we wound up with the route you see there – a function also of political (Sudan, Congo) and meterological realities (we were obliged to start in November).  There are many parts of the world we would love to see which we are unfortunately not going to pass through (Turkey, for instance), but we like to think of these as little projects for future bike trips with the kids…

Why three years?

Three years is a delicate balance of how much time we think we will need to see all the things we would like to see and then how much time we have before starting on our other life projects (kids, farms, etc.) – and not to mention how much time we can subject our mothers to this sort of traveling without being thrown out of the family… Our general feeling is that by taking a chunk of our twenties (and yes, gulp, thirties) to visit all these places in one big trip, we can avoid the standard vacation formula of the two-week package tour.  You know the one, where you spend a huge amount of money to be carted around by bus in a country where you’re not used to the food and you don’t speak the language and really only have ten days to “see everything.”  That formula seems to us to make a huge environmental impact for very little benefit – what country can really be “seen” in ten days? This way we take our time, we do it as ecologically as we can realistically muster, and then when we’re older we’ll travel in the places a bit closer to home and a bit more child-friendly.  Europe, the US, and the like…

But why?

This one, well…  We find that if you have to ask what’s so great about long-distance bike touring, then we might not be able to explain it.  Suffice it to say: it’s hard, it’s exhausting, it’s frustrating, and it’s a kind of happiness we cannot find any other way.  It’s an adventure.  No two days are ever the same, and we learn something new about ourselves and about the world we live in every day. Once you go bike, you never go back…

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