I enjoy travel stories. I like when people tell me tales of interesting places they’ve been that are off the beaten path and not exactly something you’d see in a commercial on TV. One of my favorite series of TV programs ever are the BBC travel documentaries with Michael Palin and his many adventures bopping round the globe on a rather grandiose scale. Documentaries like “Hemingway’s Travels,” “Pole to Pole,” “Sahara” and “Round the World in 80 Days” feature his incredible wit, his open mindedness towards other cultures, and spectacular visuals shot with motion and still cameras.
I watch those programs and own the accompanying BBC published photo book and journals that the Beeb publishes to support the broadcast editions. But I think I’ve found my new Michael Palin. In fact, I bet Michael Palin would be awfully proud of this adventure and this travelogue.
14degrees is the story of Mr. Robert Thomson, a New Zealander living and working in Japan at Asia Pacific University, who decided to embark on a journey around the world. On a bike. And not just any old bike… a recumbent bike. Recumbent bikes are the ones where you’re sitting upright with your legs out in front of you pedaling away.
He outlines his reasoning and his route, he has an FAQ page which mostly deals with the bike itself. He has a flickr generated photo gallery and many videos of his adventures on the road. Primarily, the core of the content of the site exists inside the blog section. The blog begins in February of 2006 with him setting up the planning and purchase of the bike and discussion of whether or not he will need a PDA, and finishing up his work in Japan. He outlines the gear he will be taking along, and sets out on the journey in July of 2006 after training and getting used to the recumbent bike.
For the better part of the blog, he shares photos as often as possible. The first several weeks have very short English updates and long and involved Japanese updates, which disappointed me greatly. That is the only thing I find at fault with the blog… that I have no clue what he’s discussing for that period of time. The photos alone are interesting and kept me moving into the next months, where the English updates are more dominant and the Japanese versions dwindle…
Readers also get to witness his beard grow! He eventually shaves it off, but another Michael Palin reference comes to mind with the long shaggy beard and the “It’s Man” intro to the Monty Python episodes where Palin is a castaway and a hairy wreck. Thomson never looks THAT incredibly wooly, but certainly does farm quite the chin-blanket for several months.
I was most impressed with the stories of his finding places to sleep for free along his journey… abandoned places, monasteries, fields, people’s homes, and how through places like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and other -jans and -stans he manages not only to remain safe, but finds people who are kind, loving, supportive. He finds some nasty bureaucracy and huge flaming hoops of stupid to ride his bike through too as he deals with crossing from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but he survives the frustrations and comes out on the other side a man with a bike and some snow to ride through.
Rob shipped his bike home in June and is now using a skateboard to traverse the globe. Take THAT Mr. Palin! As of this writing, Robert is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean heading to the United States of America, where he will take a southerly route across the US and possibly Mexico on his longboard. If successful in his boarding across North America, he claims he’ll be the first person to do so, unassisted. And that’s worthy of a BBC special and a book, with introduction penned by Mr. Palin himself I think.
I am giving this blog a 4.5 rating, the .5 drop is for the stuff I can’t read in Japanese (sorry Robert…) and am greatly looking forward to his USA leg of the journey.
I hope that people here are as kind to him as the people on the steppes of central Asia, and that he finds kindness, care and comfort at the hands of my countrymen. I know sleeping out in the open or in abandoned buildings is not as easy here as it probably was in Eastern Europe, but he’s got Couchsurfing.com as an option and I’m sure he will meet people on the road who will take him in.
I greatly enjoyed reading the blog to this point and cannot wait to see what he has lined up in the US. I wish he was heading to Boston instead of areas south of here… I’d like to shake this man’s hand and offer up a futon for him to sleep on.