I have learnt a lot over the last couple of weeks by telling my story to different audiences, from schools and cycling crowds to Parkinson’s Disease groups. It has been an interesting lesson in storytelling and I’m looking forward to more on the horizon, including a primary school next week (I have bought a giant inflatable globe for the occasion).

On a couple of these occasions I have shared the billing with someone else. In Penzance it was a sea kayaker called Geoff Allen, who has taken on some incredible journeys; he told us about circumnavigating Japan, all four main islands, and a circumnavigation of South Georgia. I have always been fascinated by ocean travel in tiny vessels, from curachs to kayaks, so I was riveted.

One of the stories Geoff told from his Japan expedition was about a young teacher he’d met whose dream had always been to kayak around Japan. This man felt duty bound to stay in his job, as an integral part of the community, and had all but given up on his floating dreams. The character shown above, a Kappa, a Shinto sprite with at least one living in each of Japan’s streams and lakes, finally came to his rescue and gave him the excuse he needed. According to Geoff’s tale this conscientious teacher turned himself into a Kappa, allowing him to be as enigmatic as the Kappas whose ranks he was joining. Not long after his metamorphosis he was bobbing around in the ocean chasing his 4000 mile dream, safe in the knowledge that as a mischievous Kappa, he could pretty much do whatever he wanted.

I spent a little bit of time looking into these miscreant sprites. Being “responsible” and “staying put” seem to be synonymous in most places; that’s an interesting idea, especially in societies that have grown out of planting seeds in one spot and then waiting around for them to grow. I couldn’t find any information that specifically explained the teacher’s morphing trick; probably he just made it up so that he could do what he wanted to. I did find this picture, however (you can tell that my research extended as far as wikipedia and google):

Its a warning sign! My favourite. Its aimed at children I guess and most of the the warnings are reasonable; there are broken bottles and currents in rivers. However, the mean little character grabbing the upset girl in the bottom image is a Kappa! Now I imagine the teacher as a little boy being scared stiff of Kappas from this sort of well-intentioned scaremongering… don’t go near the river, there’s monsters there! Stay here! Be sensible! There are similar stories everywhere that encourage people not to go off on their own, in case the bogeyman gets them. Even if the teacher’s logic is idiosyncratic, its brilliant. He loosened the sprite’s grip by turning himself into one, and away he went.

Lots of people have been asking me how my legs feel now I’ve stopped cycling. I will prefix my answer to this question by talking about how my legs felt towards the end of the ride.

By the time I got half way across the US my legs had reached equilibrium; they had expanded and contracted up to that point depending principally on diet and how well/unwell I was. They were, and still are, composed of endurance muscle; not massive tree trunks as many people were expecting, but somewhat svelte. Not Sir Hoy sprinting machines but perfectly capable of turning over for 14+ hours a day.

The tendonitis that I had in both ankles towards the beginning of the trip was long gone. As an aside, that sort of pain is relatively easy to ignore, mainly because tendonitis doesn’t really have long term side effects (or so I’m told). Whenever I had a particularly hilly day my left knee would develop pain underneath the patella; this continued throughout the 6 months but disappeared as soon as the terrain flattened out.

Since my return I have taken one piece of advice that has come from several reliable people; make sure you cycle a little bit every day. To be honest I haven’t cycled every day but this is more due to convenience than being unable to face the saddle (I still love to pedal). When I have cycled I’ve done around 10 miles. I think that my body has decided that we don’t do long distances for the time being; I went as far as I had to and now everything needs a break.

I have also been doing a fair bit of walking to try and re-build those muscles that haven’t been used so much for the last 6 months. I’m going to try running in about a week. Decorating the new flat, carrying boxes upstairs and tidying up my workshop have all helped. During the first week back being on my feet caused me some pain in my knees and shin splints, but this has gone now. The legs are not normal, but they are getting there.

Something that I think helped me enormously during the ride, enabling me to maintain the same position for hours and days on end, is good core strength and reasonable posture. I did work on this before departure but I think doing physical work throughout my 20’s gave me a good base. Either way, my posture has not suffered and I’m not trapped in a cycling crouch as some had feared! I have noticed that my feet are slightly splayed when I walk, but this should get back to normal fairly quickly.

I’m seeing a physio this week; I’m sure this will bring up some details that I am missing, so I’ll keep you posted. For now, don’t ask me to cycle more than 10 miles, I’m not allowed.

Music was so important to me on the road. Days when my battery was too low or there was too much rain for headphones were much slower than the rest. Music was a link to memories of friends and family; if the cadence was right it also kept the pedals turning at a good pace. I had about 5 days worth of music on my iPhone; I have condensed that to 20 tunes for your amusement (with a Spotify link if you have it). Some of them I couldn’t find on Spotify but here’s a cross-section, I hope you enjoy it. I could go on about each song in detail, but I might save that for the book.

GlobeCycle tunes: http://open.spotify.com/user/jbowthorpe/playlist/62lhWHx5BKltc0NgW4bQOO

Ugly Duckling – Introduckling
David Bowie – Looking for Water
Grateful Dead – Friend of the Devil
Amadou & Mariam – Sabali
Alarm Will Sound – Fingerbib (Aphex Twin cover)
Common – The 6th Sense (feat. Bilal)
Eddie Okwedy – Happy Survival
Fatlip – What’s Up Fatlip?
Life In A Blender – Chicken Dance
Gorillaz – All Alone
Loudon Wainwright III – The Swimming Song
The Magic Numbers – Forever Lost
MF Doom – Arrow Root
Monkey – Monkey Bee
Pixies – Dig for Fire
Pulp – Ansaphone
Q-Tip – Let’s Ride
Stereolab – Fluorescences
Warren Zevon – Lawyers, Guns and Money
Teenage Fanclub – Dumb Dumb Dumb

Here he comes!

It’s almost done! James is about 10miles from Le Havre - all being well he’ll sail this evening and be in Portsmouth tonight.

Below are all the estimated times and places for James’s ride tomorrow but please bear in mind things could drift a bit and do keep an eye on the website/twitter for any changes.  One change to note is that meeting point in Hyde Park is now the bandstand and not the Serpentine Cafe.

See you there!

SATURDAY 19 SEPTEMBER

6.30am     Meet at Portsmouth Guildhall, Guildhall Square, Portsmouth, PO1 2AB

7am          Leave Guildhall to cycle to London - see the route here: http://bit.ly/3wBXwC

4pm          Arrive Richmond Park, near cafe at Roehampton Gate

4.30pm     Leave Richmond Park for Hyde Park

5.30pm     Arrive Hyde Park bandstand - FINI!! (Nearest gates are the ones at Hyde Park Corner)

I thought I’d write a quick blog to explain GlobeCycle to anyone who has just joined in.

My name is James Bowthorpe, I’m from London in the UK. I volunteer at a Parkinson’s Disease (PD) research clinic based at King’s College London in the Institute of Psychiatry. I started this work more than 2.5 years ago to get experience in a clinical setting for medical school applications; I chose this clinic because my grandfather had PD and I wanted to find out more about the disease.

After a year or so I started to understand the work a bit better and it finally dawned on me that there was a great need for it to be properly funded; it has gotten by on a shoestring budget for several years. The doctors that lead the research are working constantly at funding the next 5 years of work, and I decided last year that I wanted to help by taking on the hardest challenge I could find. The world record for fastest circumnavigation of the globe had just been broken, with many saying the new record was “unbreakable”. I decided that this would be the thing to do to raise 1.8million GBP.

I am over 14,000 miles into the 18,000 mile challenge and I will break the record by at least 2 weeks. I have just started to up my mileage from around 120 per day to 150 in an attempt to make it back to London on the 13th September. This would have me break the record by closer to 4 weeks. I have said from the outset that the need to fund this groundbreaking work properly is reflected in the speed and urgency of my record attempt.

I have already passed through France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia New Zealand and Canada. I then cycled down the west coast of the US to Los Angeles where I started to cross the country. I am following the TransAm route (as mapped by the Adventure Cycling Association) to NYC where I will have a rest day. I will then fly from Boston to Lisbon, Portugal, where I start perdalling again, through Portugal, Spain and France; a quick ferry across the English Channel and the final miles to my starting point in Hyde Park in London.

You can see where I have been at www.whereintheworldisjames.com; this is a live GPS tracking site (20 minute delay if you are trying to find me with it!) where GPS tagged photos appear on my route where they were taken. You can follow me on Twitter from this site and also view my YouTube channel (needs updating!). The overall site for the challenge is www.globecycle.org where you’ll find this blog and also more information about GlobeCycle (PDF’s for media), the work that it is supporting and how you can help by donating.

Thats it for now; I hope to keep updating tthis til the finish line, but at 150 miles per day I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I’m a little lax!

Thanks for following, J

This isn’t easy by the way and I frequently need something to make me laugh; keep me buoyant.
There’s plenty of it about but I particularly like to run the following through my mind.
Cycling along in Turkey lots of people will be friendly from their cars, asking you where you’re from or what your name is. I have just realised that this is not hilarious, by any stretch, but it works for me. Anyway, one such friendly soul with arms outstretched, cried out to me, “Whats my name!?”. I’m pretty sure he got one word wrong there, but as it happened quite swiftly I just shouted back, sort of honestly, “I don’t know!”. The car carried on, it’s passenger perhaps struggling with having briefly met someone who didn’t know their own name.
I can play this back over and over and still get a laugh (from myself). Then I start to wonder maybe he DIDNT know what his name was, still doesn’t, and just gets driven around asking people. This makes me feel less bad about saying, “I don’t know”, but it’s not very likely is it?

Western Australia is pretty sparsely populated. The Nullarbor has enough people in it to fill a bus. The Eyre Peninsula is quiet, mainly sheep. Adelaide and environs are quite dense, but not enough to feel at all crowded. There’s then another quiet patch before Geelong hits you, with Melbourne following swiftly behind with a large metropolitan area and a conurbation that seemed to go on forever (today). This is all from my narrow bike/road perspective of course, but what I’m getting to is this. At some point a population, any population, will get dense enough to contain a person who will try and throw a kebab at you as they pass you at speed on the freeway. They will miss, mainly due to a lack of understanding, intuitive or otherwise, of physics, but the attempt remains. We can’t let cities get out of control like this; doner gets wasted, cyclists get bemused or upset and the freeway starts to smell of chilli sauce.

I then met David and Andy, father and son, who run a takeaway in Yarragon, a small town just off the M1. Their family were from Cornwall, so we chatted about that. David also gave me the lowdown on the road ahead. He said that I would pass through the Haunted Hills, so called because no cattle rancher of horseman could successfully keep livestock there; the animals seemed to refuse to graze there, so it was assumed the hills were haunted. I must’ve looked a bit scared because David said not to worry, the hills weren’t haunted “anymore”. When they started to develop the area they discovered large coal deposits in the Haunted Hills; as a part of this there were large pockets of air in the rock, not far below the surface. The cattle could feel the hollowness beneath their feet as they walked, unsettling them enough to put them off their food.

As far as cycling goes I am extremely tired and cannot wait for my rest day. The breakfast (1st) waiting beside me is a tin of sweetened condensed milk. If I eat it all (I will) that’ll be 1200 calories in one hit - amazing stuff.

Bangkok to Singapore has come and gone a bit quickly. I know! That’s the point! But I’d have liked to have taken more pictures and more video. At the back of my mind the whole way down I was thinking about the days off I had for recovery from illness; this drove me on with little thought for video chat or taking photos. Besides, it can take 5-10 minutes for the camera to get a GPS fix; if I can’t be eating during this time, that’s 10 minutes I don’t have. I am streamlining the system a bit to make both easier to do so there’ll be more from Australia.

So now it’s the 10th June. Today I saw a dead camel. The ride was uphill with a heavy crosswind. On the other hand I passed a lot of road workers who have now all congregated at this roadhouse. They are really funny and kind; John has given me his Hi-Vis vest and Mo went out to his truck to get me some standard issue suncream.

The road is quite hard at the moment, but fascinating too. Im heading into the Nullarbor; essentially semi-desert and not something I’m that familiar with, but the whole place is thriving. Yes, lots of bushes but also hardy looking, smooth-trunked trees and lots of life I couldnt begin to name. People live here quite comfortably with AC, generators, water tanks and continuous deliveries. All the places on the map are basically petrol stations (where you can buy aircraft fuel too), servicing touring RV’s, road trains and the relatively few people that live here.

Now it’s the 19th. Some days are a real physical struggle at the moment; I’m approaching halfway, so I suppose it’s no surprise. There is a lot to look forward to though and people are starting to get the message of what I’m trying to do. My pre-recorded interview was on the radio this morning and I’ve had friendly beeps and waves all day. Sydney, my next rest day, is looking good for more media so that’ll help spread the word. I may even be on a breakfast TV show, which would be a dream come true. Honestly! I’ve always wondered what goes on at those things, what the feel is like, and I might be about to find out. The fact that it goes out to millions of people across Australia is also good.

I have spent quite a while trying to open this jar of raspberry jam - near impossible with my depleted hand strength - and now it’s open. So, if you’ll excuse me…

End of 21st June.
Another cold cold morning but everything soon warmed up with the sun. I traveled through a bit more wine and farm country before reaching the Cooranga National Park; a long sliver of water, protected from the Southern Ocean by a long sliver of land, sand dunes and bushes.
Today I met an 82 year old man at a petrol station. We talked for a few minutes; he told me he was born in Adelaide and I said that I was born in Somerset and lived in London. He sparkled a bit, saying that he had been to London once, had had a heart attack and stayed there for a heart transplant. “Some holiday.”

Later on I met Mariana who has just finished studying in Melbourne and is now riding her Australian postal service scooter back to Barcelona where she’s from. This involves a bit of freighter travel from Darwin, which sounds fun, and a whole load of scootering. I haven’t had a chance to look yet but her blog is http://www.takemehomelittlepostie.wordpress.com
Good luck Mariana! I was a bit concerned she didn’t have a sleeping mat but she said she’d get one in Adelaide; essential! Maybe even more important than a sleeping bag, the ground just sucks heat out of you.

I’m heading for Colac tonight, got some catching up to do! Uploading this using free Mac D’s wifi; courtesy of the clown. Handy, plus you can watch Usher videos etc. through the window.