I sit in the tent and see something moving under my food. I stay still. It comes back. I thought it was a fox but it looks wrong, the tail isn’t bushy and it’s too sleek. It has a cat-like face and a muscular body like a lion

A smiling nomadic yak farmer and his wife invited us into their large white yurt. A kettle sats on a black, dung stove in the middle of the room, warming the cool mountain air and producing the earthy smoke that I’d begun to associate with mountain living

Arrival Tainan. Parades of gods and pounding drums, giant puppets and painted faces. Ghost money burning in metal bins. Thick clouds of sweet incense hiding vivid dragons and ancient banyan trees in the manicured gardens of temples

VHF radio sang emergency calls to them at intervals throughout the day, yet neither wreckage nor life raft was found. Pictures of the crew, my seven friends, were pasted across international headlines “Lost at Sea”. I was still waiting on their boat, waiting for their return

In arid, one degree humidity, the late spring sun cast an exhausting forty nine degrees Celsius upon the corrugated sandpit that is the Great Central Road. Not a cloud in the sky. A car hadn’t passed in hours

I stood, literally breathless, after a week of climbing. Legs, heart and head, all ached. Finally, overcast skies were banished and valleys of pure rock emerged as a deep blue adorned the space between grey mountain peaks

The five week wait for Iranian and Uzbek visa's punctuated my pedalling and, wandering between the mosques and bazaars of Istanbul, meeting people and reading, I began to reflect on changes in myself

Suddenly, turning a corner, I cycled into an artist’s wonderland. Laying Dolly on the orange dirt I walked tentatively around the outdoor gallery. In this Technicolor world, hundreds of brightly coloured faces stared at me from totem poles and rocks

Wobbling off the ferry in Boulogne-Sur-Mer, with the instant emersion into new sights and sounds and the slow movement forward, a beaming smile spread across my face. There is something magical about making progress on a bike

June 2010, two weeks until departure. As a master of procrastination, I have, yet again, managed to stare through a computer monitor all day, sipped through gallons of tea and still don’t feel ready to leave