The first step ...
To be honest, it's not the first step. The real first step was taken years ago when we realised that we would like to spend much of our lives travelling, by any means, for as long and as far as possible.
We don't really think of ourselves as cyclists. We're just travellers who sometimes use bicycles to get from one place to another.
So now with the kids grown up and the first grandchildren born, we have sold the house in which we had lived for the past nineteen years and donated, sold and given away any material possesion that isn’t needed for our nomadic life in our Landrover and off-road camper or on our bicycles.
When friends and family first heard of our plans to spend the next 10-15 years travelling by bicycle and Landy, many remarked on how adventurous and exciting it will be and how “brave” we must be to be doing it. But when one reads CGOAB and sees how many people have done similar things, and continue to do them, it all seems so mundane and unexceptional. In fact, I don’t think that adventure and excitement really entered my mind when we made the decision – we just want to travel.
It would have been great to have started the cycling with a food and wine fueled trip through the winelands of France but, being Africans, independant travel is now essentially impossible in Europe and North America. However, Africa, lots of Asia and almost all of South America are very happy to have us as visitors. So we have taken the easy way out and chosen, for our first real bicycle journey, South-East Asia, a region through which we have backpacked and (casually) cycled a few of times before.
In fact, it was cycling in Thailand and Cambodia that got Leigh to realise that she enjoys being on a bicycle.
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