EPISODE 42
The Accidental Origins of Bicycle Touring
Ever thought your daily commute was tough? Try cycling around the world on a high wheeler in the 1880s! Our guide to these incredible-but-true stories of journeys sparked by sheer chance is Canadian author David Houghton, who has traveled to over eighty countries around the world, cycling most of them, and participated in the Tour du Canada, Tour d’Afrique, and the Race Across America. David introduces us to Thomas Stevens, the Englishman who only intended to cross America on his high wheeler but accidentally kept going around the world. Then there’s Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, whose own global trek was launched not by a grand plan, but by accidentally overhearing a bet by two businessmen that a woman could not bicycle around the world… and deciding she would prove them wrong. And you won’t want to miss the tale of Thomas Orde-Lees, whose choice to bring his bicycle to Antarctica contributed to the unfortunate distinction of being voted “first to be eaten” by his starving crewmates! David’s hilarious and harrowing tales of these cycling daredevils, visionaries, and adventurers prove that a simple bike ride can accidentally become an epic, unplanned adventure.
Episode Transcript
David: I started to dig deeper and deeper into more obscure parts of bicycle history, and I started to discover some people that I wasn’t aware of and some stories that I had never heard before that I found really, really fascinating.
Gabriel: You just heard David Houghton, explaining the motivation for writing his latest book, titled 33 Cyclists: Daredevils, Visionaries and Adventurers. On this episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast, we’re going to learn about several of the 33 cyclists. There’s Englishman Thomas Stevens, the first person to circumnavigate the globe by bicycle. Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, known as Annie Londonderry, a Latvian immigrant to the United States who became the first woman to do the same. Thomas Orde-Lees, a member of Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to Antarctica, who brought his bicycle with him aboard the HMS Endurance and rode it on the ice, which was just one of his actions that made him very unpopular with Shackleton and the rest of the crew. In each story, there’s a change of plans, a crazy coincidence, a random act, so stay tuned to learn more about the accidental origins of bicycle touring.
Sandra: You’re listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you’ll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz.
Gabriel: Hello cycle touring enthusiasts! It’s hard to believe, but it’s the time of year again when you, the listeners, get to vote for your favorite episodes of the second season. Sandra and I will share the results during our 2025 holiday special episode. As several listeners pointed out, last year’s voting had some logistical issues. The biggest one was that the voting started before some of the episodes were even released, which was not fair to those episodes which came at the end of the season. For this year’s new and improved voting, we are therefore going to consider the last five episodes from last year up until today’s episode. Hence, the earliest episode included is ABT20, and we cut off at today’s episode ABT42. Secondly, last year we saw votes arrive via Instagram, email, WhatsApp, and even through personal conversations. This year, we will use a single online form to record all the votes. I will put a link in the show notes. You can also find a link to the form at the top of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website homepage and on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist Instagram bio. Besides voting for your favorite episodes, you can also choose to tell us what you like about the show, suggest how to improve the show, nominate future guests, and whatever else is on your mind. It only takes a minute to fill out the form. Sandra and I look forward to receiving your responses. Now, let’s get to today’s guest, Canadian author David Houghton, who has participated in supported cycling tours all over the world. In 2007, he also competed in the two-man team division of the Race Across America, one of the world’s toughest bicycle endurance challenges. David also loves words and stories, so it follows that he would write a book like 33 Cyclists, highlighting fascinating personalities in the 208 years since the invention of the bicycle.
Gabriel: David Houghton, thank you so much for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
David: My pleasure to be here.
Gabriel: You are the author of a number of books over the years. Do you know how many you have written, off hand?
David: I think I’ve written five, and I was a consultant on one more book. So five and a half, let’s say.
Gabriel: Okay, five and a half. And the one we’ll be talking about mostly today is your most recent effort, called 33 Cyclists: Daredevils, Visionaries and Adventurers. So we’re going to delve into the lives of a few of the daredevils, but first I wanted to find out a little bit about your relationship to bicycle touring and your history with bicycle touring.
David: Yeah, I’ve always loved bicycles from the time that I was a young kid, so I’ve always been on a bike, whether it’s a mountain bike or a road bike or any kind of bike I could get my hands on. I was a pretty avid mountain biker for a while. I used to do mountain bike races and that sort of thing, but I never really rode anything beyond 25 kilometers in length. That was kind of my universe. It was like these short sprint races, and I really had a desire to do something bigger. So I took a look online and identified what was the longest ride available, which was the Tour du Canada. I happened to be in Canada, and this is a ride across Canada from the West Coast to the East Coast, and it’s about 7,000 kilometers. It’s a big country. So I jumped from doing 25-kilometer races to doing a 7,000-kilometer kilometer trip across Canada, and I loved it. Absolutely loved everything about the experience. It was a supported ride, so that helped kind of ease me into it, but you know, there were good days, easy days, and there were challenging days, as with any trip. I fell in love with longer rides. Even while I was in the middle of riding the tour to Canada, I heard about a new, even longer tour called the Tour d’Afrique. And so as soon as I heard about that, I signed up for that. So in d’Afrique, which is 12,000 kilometers from Cairo to Cape Town. That is a really, really beautiful ride.
Gabriel: That is the classic route, which we talked about just a few episodes ago, in the episode “Connecting Africa with Purpose.” The guest, Ellie Mitchell-Heggs, has decided to do part of the ride. She wanted to do all of it, but there were some constraints. So she started actually in Rwanda and is ending up in Cape Town. This sounds like for you, again, it was a supported ride.
David: It was, yeah. We camped every night. I mean, it was not luxurious by any means. And oftentimes, if we did have the opportunity to stay in what was called a hotel, literally that hotel would be a room made of cinderblock with a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. And, you know, you might have to share your bed with a chicken or a goat. It was very rustic, but I loved the experience. And so at that point, I became very curious about cycling tours around the world. Supported tours, unsupported tours, self-guided tours. And so I started to create a database of cycling tours. And I thought, well, you know, how many can there be? I thought maybe 2,000 or 3,000. So I created a thing which was called Bicicklo. Bicicklo was basically a search engine where you could search for bicycling tours in any part of the world. And by the time I’d completed the list, there were over 7,500 tours in the database.
Gabriel: Wow.
David: So it just really opened my eyes to other destinations around the world. And I also had the opportunity to go and do some rides in some of these different countries, kind of as a guest, as I was putting this list together, I’d have tour companies contact me. And so, you know, I was able to go do rides in New Zealand and in India and Mongolia and Hawaii, all sorts of wonderful, wonderful places. So I’ve been very fortunate in that respect, that I’ve been able to travel a lot of places and enjoy them from a bicycle.
Gabriel: On this podcast, we’ve mentioned a couple of supported rides. We had a couple of episodes on charity rides, which are supported and they’re fundraisers and so forth. But it sounds like the supported rides you’re talking about are more… There’s an organizer and there’s no fundraising. You pay some amount of money to participate. Since we haven’t discussed that variant of supported tours, can you just tell people who maybe don’t know about it what to expect?
David: Yeah, there are a lot of companies offering tours throughout the world. I’ll take one example. So the company who started the Tour d’Afrique in 2003, they are now called TDA Global Cycling, and they offer long tours, cross-country tours, I think on pretty much every continent now. They’re based in Toronto, but they offer tours around the world. That’s one example. There are also a lot of other tour companies that are more local in nature. So, for example, if you wanted to go ride in, let’s say New Zealand, there are a number of cycling tour companies based in New Zealand. So they’ve got that local knowledge, where they do tours there regularly. They know all the terrain, they know what to expect from the weather. They know the best seasons to ride, all that kind of thing. So there are some companies that are very local in nature and there are some companies that are much more global in nature. But again, through my experience with Bicicklo and putting together this long list of cycling tours, I was able to get to know all of these different cycling tour companies. And there literally are hundreds of them. Once you start to look for them, you just keep finding them everywhere. And that was part of why I wanted to put this list together is, if you, for example, go to Google Search and type in “bicycle tour Italy,” let’s say, you’re going to be bombarded with all kinds of different options for big companies, small companies, every kind of possibilities. I wanted to try and help guide people a little bit more in terms of what was available. Ultimately, I had to kind of set that aside because it almost became too big of a project for me. I wanted to keep the tours updated. I wanted to keep the list of tour companies updated. I didn’t realize it when I was creating it, but it was a much bigger thing than I could possibly do without creating a much bigger company to handle it. So I set that aside and focused on writing. And that eventually is what took me to this latest book, 33 Cyclists.
Gabriel: Right. Writing, W-R-I-T-I-N-G.
David: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Writing about riding. Yeah, I felt like I needed a new goal. I like to set goals for myself. I think as probably most of your listeners do as well. I realized that 2017 was going to be the 200th anniversary of what I considered to be the invention of the bicycle. There is some discussion, let’s say, about, you know, what constitutes a bicycle, whether it has to have pedals and whether it has to have a drivetrain and so on. But to my mind, Karl Drais created the original bicycle in 1817. It was called a running machine. So I wanted to celebrate the invention of the bicycle. It was the 200th anniversary. So I thought, OK, well, I’ll do 200 bicycle rides on different bicycles in different places. And then I’ll write a blog post about some aspect of cycling. I asked my friends what they named their bicycles. And so I did a piece on bicycle naming. And then I asked my friends what gender their bicycle was. And they got some very interesting responses about male bicycles and female bicycles. But just all sorts of little things like that. And because I needed to come up with 200 blog posts, I started to dig deeper and deeper into more obscure parts of bicycle history. And I started to discover some people that I wasn’t aware of and some stories that I had never heard before that I found really, really fascinating. of that in the sense that I wanted to showcase 33 people that I thought were some of the most interesting people ever to ride a bicycle. Some of them wanted to ride fast, some of them wanted to go far, and some of them just wanted to do something crazy.
Gabriel: Yeah, you got the whole mix in there. I had a chance to look at the list of riders. Some people would not be normally associated with bicycle riding. I saw you had Freddie Mercury in there for writing the Queen song about bicycles, for example. You have many different angles.
David: I did want to include a few familiar people. Albert Einstein is in there. Freddie Mercury, as you mentioned. The Wright brothers are in there. But I only included people who are familiar. If I could find out some aspects of their story that I felt weren’t really public. So, for example, the Freddie Mercury story, you know, most people would know that he wrote “Bicycle Race” for Queen. Maybe some people would know that he actually never never rode a bicycle himself. He wasn’t a cyclist. He loved being in his Rolls-Royce. But then, as I started to dig, I just found more and more interesting facts. He was in a hotel in Switzerland and he was looking out the window and the Tour de France happened to be coming through the town that day. So he saw the Tour de France, and that’s what inspired him to write the song. But also the rider who won the stage that day happened to retire the same year that Freddie died and that rider also died literally on his bicycle. He had a heart attack while he was riding his bicycle. So it’s just all this interesting trivia, but all connected to different aspects of the bicycle and the culture and everything that comes with it.
Gabriel: Let’s talk about a couple of the more relevant chapters and find out a bit more about some of these characters.
David: Let’s start with Thomas Stevens, because I think he accidentally rode around the world. He was the first man who accidentally ride around the world, because he actually only set off to ride across the United States. Thomas Stevens was a 29-year-old. He was riding a high wheeler bicycle, which I’m sure your listeners have seen. Not an easy bicycle to ride. He set off at eight o’clock in the morning on April and started riding across the country. His goal was to ride across the United States. He took a pair of socks. He took a spare shirt, a raincoat and a revolver. Those seemed to be the necessary components of a successful ride. Given that it was 1884, there really were no roads to speak of. There were paths. The conditions were terrible. I’ll just read a little bit from his journals. He said, “I find it preferable to keep to the railway track, alongside of which there are occasionally rideable paths, while on the wagon roads, little or no riding can be done on account of the hills and the sticky nature of the red soil.” His average speed as he crossed the United States was two miles per hour.
Gabriel: Whoa!
David: It took him 104 days to get to Boston. So he did manage to get from San Francisco to Boston in just a little over three months. And he rested there. From Boston he went to New York to spend the winter there. And as he was in New York, he started to conjure up a bigger plan, which was, OK, well, now that he’s ridden across the United States, he figures he’s ready to be the first man to cycle around the world. He made an agreement with a magazine called Outing and they made him a special correspondent, so he would send back his writing on a regular basis and they would publish it in their magazine. So they paid for his passage on a steamship to Liverpool. So he arrived in Liverpool in April of 1885. And when he got there, he went straight to London and went to a number of foreign embassies because he wanted to get some information about these various countries he would be riding through. He had very little knowledge of any of the countries he was about to go through. And in many cases, they had very little knowledge, too. They shared what maps they had and a lot of the maps were incomplete.
Gabriel: Blank.
David: Yeah, vast areas were just left blank, you know, like, “here be monsters” kind of a thing. But nonetheless, he gathered up what he could. And on May 4th, Hill Church in Liverpool. Off he went. So from Britain, he got himself through France, Germany, Austria, Hungary. A lot of times he was relying on strangers for directions. And of course, at that time, people didn’t really travel very far from their home. So if he was asking about a destination that was 200 miles away, they would generally have no idea, but they would make it up, right? “Take a right and head over that way.” And so he got lost more times than he could possibly count. As you can imagine, he was eating unfamiliar foods, which led to some gastrointestinal distress. But he did get himself through Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and ended up in Constantinople, which we now know is Istanbul. He rested there. He got himself a bigger gun. I’m not sure why he got a bigger gun, but he must have been concerned of what was to come. He set off again and got himself through Anatolia, Armenia, Kurdistan, Iraq, Iran. Any of your listeners who have traveled through that part of the world, the Stans particularly, know that it’s very challenging terrain and it’s an unpredictable place to ride. So you can imagine what that would have been like in seen a bicycle before.
Gabriel: Yeah, actually, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like, to cover an entire continent to just by finding one goat track to the next.
David: On a high wheel bicycle.
Gabriel: Yeah, I don’t know if somebody invented hike-a-bike, but it must have been him, because he must have pushed more than ridden.
David: This is a big steel bicycle that he is heaving around. So even if it’s a hike-a-bike, it’s certainly not easy.
Gabriel: Incredible.
David: I’ll jump to a little bit of his writing because of this point, he’s sending his notes back to Outing magazine and they’re publishing his journey. So he said at one point, “The road from Constantinople toward Anatolia is not without its perils. But the greatest hazard proves to be the human element. More than once I’m halted by brigands who eye my machine with weary suspicion. In one village, an old Turk inspects it closely and mutters to his companions, ‘It is the devil’s carriage.’ Their superstitions prove my salvation, for rather than robbing me, they keep their distance, watching with equal parts, awe and fear as I mount and ride away.” That just says so much about how people would have perceived him peering on the horizon, up in the air on this massive wheel atop this bizarre machine.
Gabriel: Yeah.
David: Stevens makes his way to Iran. Winter is coming now and the Shah of Iran invites him to stay the winter at his palace. So he accepts this. And again, there’s various people coming through the palace, kind of looking at this strange machine that Stevens has with him. And there’s one little story that I love. There was a Persian noble who gestures toward the high wheeler bicycle. And he asks Stevens through an interpreter, “Does it eat?” And Stevens thinks for a moment, and then he assures this Persian noble that it does not eat. And the man strokes his beard for a moment and then says, “Well, then, it is of little use.” So various other events along the way, as he continues this journey, he tries to get into Afghanistan. He’s stopped by border guards. He tries to escape them and ride off into the distance, but they catch him on horseback and they take his bicycle apart. They take it to pieces and literally walk him back to the border.
Gabriel: Oh.
David: So he has to make his way back to Constantinople. And from there, he sets off for India. From India, he does eventually make his way through Hong Kong, tries to get through China, but that’s too difficult, so he takes a boat to Japan. And so the final leg of his journey is from Kobe to Yokohama, where he concludes his journey. So at this point, it’s taken him two years and he’s covered 13,000 miles.
Gabriel: Wow.
David: One of the concluding parts of his journal is lovely. I’ll just read it here. “The bicycle, that simple yet marvelous machine, has proven itself not only a vehicle of recreation, but an instrument of discovery. It has taken me where few have dared to venture, through lands where its presence has been met with awe, confusion and fear. It has rolled over the ruins of ancient empires and the bustling streets of modern capitals, requiring nothing but the strength of its rider and the will to press forward.
Gabriel: Lovely.
David: He was accidentally their first man to make his way all around the world on a bicycle.
Gabriel: I’m just trying to picture… I mean, the high wheeler, this is obviously direct drive.
David: That’s right.
Gabriel: You’ve got some advantage from turning the cranks on the big wheel.
David: Yeah.
Gabriel: But there is no shifting gears.
David: No. And these tires were not inflatable. This is just a piece of rubber on a steel rim, so you can imagine the shock through the wheel up into your body as you’re riding this thing over goat paths. It would not have been a comfortable ride by any means.
Gabriel: I just can’t imagine it. It’s absolutely incredible. And you see people, or you read about people, who recreate rides on vintage machines. But I don’t think anybody has dared to go that vintage. I might be wrong. I may hear from a listener, “You’re wrong, somebody has done it.” Because ultimately somebody has done almost everything before.
David: You do see some strange things out there in the world. I’ll tell you one story. I was doing a ride through Mongolia with a group of riders and the terrain was not ridiculously harsh. It was reasonable. It was quite rideable. There’s well established tracks. But you know, we thought we were pretty rough and tumble riding across Mongolia, until we saw a group of riders coming towards us, and it was six people on unicycles.
Gabriel: There you go.
David: And they were riding across Mongolia on unicycles. And I thought, OK, respect to you. Well done.
Gabriel: Chapeau.
David: Yeah, chapeau, sir.
Gabriel: Yeah, no matter what you do, no matter how far out there you are, somebody else is doing this. So I am now convinced that somebody has taken a high wheeler, I don’t know, around the world probably, in recent times.
David: Probably, yeah. I would not be surprised. I’ll bet your listeners will know and I’ll bet you’ll be hearing from them.
Gabriel: If anybody knows, I’m anxious to find out. Excellent. Well, that is a good story and it makes me want to know about the next character that you picked out, because that was certainly fascinating.
David: After Thomas Stevens does his ride around the world on his high wheeler, there’s something very important that happens and that is in 1885, John Kemp Starley comes up with the safety bicycle. The safety bicycle, finally, is the bicycle that we know today. It has two wheels of equal size. You can sit on it and put your feet on the ground. It’s a lot more comfortable. It’s a lot more practical. It starts to attract a lot more women to the bicycle. It attracts more people of different ages, younger riders, older riders. It’s just much, much, much more accessible, the safety bicycle.
Gabriel: And it has a drivetrain. Even if it doesn’t have multiple gears, it has a drivetrain.
David: Exactly. It does have a drivetrain. Yeah, so it’s much more efficient to ride. So it’s the fact that the safety bicycle becomes popular that leads to the second story I want to talk about, which is another trip around the world. But it’s the first woman to ride around the world. We’re still not even to incredible things, crazy things. Another accidental cyclist comes along in 1894. In Boston, there’s a woman named Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who works selling ad space for various Boston newspapers. And while she’s at work one day, she accidentally overhears a conversation about two wealthy Boston businessmen, and they have a bet for twenty thousand dollars, which is a massive amount of money in 1894. They’ve wagered this twenty thousand dollars on the fact that no woman can travel around the world by bicycle. Well, she’s going to take them on, even though she’s only ridden a bicycle three times before. She stands five foot three and weighs 99 pounds. She is not an imposing figure, but she has motivation a-plenty. She’s ready to take this on. So she agrees to their wager, but they set up even more challenges for her. So she has to start her journey penniless, without a penny. She has to earn five thousand dollars during her trip, as well as covering her expenses. And she has to finish her trip within fifteen months. Now, don’t forget, Thomas Stevens took two years to get around the world by bicycle. She’s got 15 months. So she gets on her 44-pound Columbia women’s bicycle. It is a safety bicycle, so two wheels of equal size. Not unlike Thomas Stevens, she’s got a change of clothes and she’s got a pearl-handled revolver. You always want to take your gun on your bicycle at this time in history. She sets off from the Massachusetts State House in June of 1894. Now, the idea of a man riding a bicycle around the world is outrageous, but the idea of a woman riding a bicycle around the world is just scandalous. Absolutely scandalous. But right from the point where she sets off, she starts to make things work for her. The one thing that she had going for her, in addition to her motivation, is the fact that she worked as an advertising solicitor, so she knew how to get advertisers to spend their money. So the first thing she did was she made a deal with a company called the Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company, and they paid her one hundred dollars. And she literally changed her name to Annie Londonderry. So from this point forward, she was called Annie Londonderry, and she continued to get other advertisers to sponsor her as she went through her journey. When you look at riders in the pro races now, their jerseys are covered in logos from corporate sponsors. She was literally doing this in 1894. She was way ahead of the trend.
Gabriel: I’m wondering if this Londonderry Lithia Spring Water is the equivalent of Red Bull from the times.
David: Yeah, maybe it had some special ingredients that provided energy along the way.
Gabriel: Yeah.
David: That’s very possible.
Gabriel: Yeah, it just seems like she had a lithia-powered battery. I mean, I really don’t know what the lithia even means.
David: I don’t know what lithia is, and I think we better investigate that.
Gabriel: You knew that bicycle bell was coming. Lithia water, I found out, is a type of mineral water where lithium salts occur, either naturally or added. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, there was a lithium health craze in the United States. Coca-Cola made Lithia Coke and 7Up was previously known as 7Up Lithiated Lemon Soda. Although many of the health claims made by manufacturers were debunked and lithium was even banned in the United States from 1948 to 1970, it is now a common medication for treating bipolar disorder.
David: So she takes a very similar path around the world, goes through Egypt, Jerusalem, the Middle East, Yemen, makes her way to Singapore, China and Japan, and basically manages to pull this off. She arrives back in Boston just before the is no evidence that these two Boston businessmen ever paid her the 20,000 dollars that they had said that they would. But the great thing is that she wrote a book about her experiences. She wrote many, many newspaper articles about her experiences, and she regularly gave talks and seminars about her experiences riding around the world. And that essentially provided her with enough money to provide for her family for the rest of her life. Her ride was a very big success and really showed that women were capable of anything that men were capable of on the bicycle.
Gabriel: Did your research uncover any incidents that she had along the way because she was a woman, that you think that would not have happened to Mr. Stevens?
David: Yes, I’ll give you this one. So at this time, women are starting to make the transition between very frilly clothing to more practical clothing so that they can ride a bicycle, right? This is a time where women are starting to wear things that are practical versus fashionable. So she set off from Boston wearing some very frilly costumes, but realized that this wasn’t going to work for the duration of her ride. So by the time she got to New York, she actually bought a men’s suit. And she started wearing a man’s suit when she rode. One of her first destinations in Europe was in France. And as soon as she crossed the border from England into France, she was arrested because apparently they had a law that decreed that no woman could wear a man’s suit. So they held her in jail for a couple of days until they made some kind of agreement that she would be allowed to ride. But even the fact that a woman was wearing a man’s suit while riding a bicycle was just, again, scandalous for the time and people just couldn’t wrap their heads around it.
Gabriel: Yeah, and when the bicycle came out, there was really a lot of negative publicity around it and people were thinking this will be the downfall of society.
David: Yeah, absolutely.
Gabriel: And for women to do it, that was doubly bad.
David: Yes. It gave women a lot of freedom, which they hadn’t been given before. It gave them the freedom to travel, the freedom to dress differently, the freedom to go further from their town or village, wherever they happen to live and explore a little bit more and maybe meet new people, new cultures. It really opened things up for women in a way that was really important to, I think, the evolution of society.
Gabriel: Yeah, fascinating. And now we’ve gotten all the way to Lael Wilcox, who has gone around the world.
David: I think Lail’s trip was 109 days. She’s about to do it again and I know she wants to be quicker. Since she mentioned Lael and I got huge respect for Lael, of course, the last story in my book is about Vedangi Kulkarni, an Indian rider who has ridden around the world twice. She is the youngest woman ever to have ridden around the world and the only woman to have ridden around the world twice. So again, just incredible accomplishments.
Gabriel: And that’s very recent.
David: Yes, very recent. Yeah, she just finished her ride earlier this year, completely unsupported.
Gabriel: Right. Lael is obviously an ultra endurance rider. She’s just like laser-focused, hammering it out, no sleep.
David: It’s a different kind of ride. If you look at Mark Beaumont, he wanted to ride around the world in eighty days and did it, I think, in 78 and a half. He had an incredible crew around him, taking care of him. So it’s a different kind of a ride versus what Vedangi Kulkarni did. And not to disparage either of them. There’s obviously so many different ways to ride. And that’s what fascinates me about the bicycle is, you can build a crew and do it as fast as humanly possible, or you can do it more on your own, more DIY. And take your time and enjoy the experience and enjoy what happens to you along the way. And not worry so much about setting a speed record, but more just immersing yourself in the experience.
Gabriel: Your stories keep me wanting to hear more. So who’s the next character?
David: Let’s jump ahead in time a little bit and let’s go to a very far-flung destination. So we’ll go ahead to 1914. And around that time, there were a lot of people fascinated with exploring the Antarctic, especially the British, but a number of countries were sending explorers down to try and reach the South Pole and explore the Antarctic. And it was the new frontier. There was a man named Thomas Orde-Lees, who was a captain in the Royal Marines. And he was a very avid cyclist. He was actually the physical education director for His Majesty’s Royal Marines. Love cycling. He did a thing called trick cycling, which I guess, you know, we still have today in an evolved kind of way, but he would do all sorts of weird moves on his bicycle, putting his legs through the frames and over the handlebars. It was very popular at that time. So he was one of the preeminent trick cyclists in England. He hears that Ernest Shackleton, who I’m sure you’ll be familiar with, is about to set off for Antarctica to go and explore. So he applies for a job to be on Shackleton’s ship. This is the eve of World War I. So we’re in 1914. Britain is just about to get engaged in World War One. So Ernest Shackleton has to take his request all the way up to Winston Churchill to see if he can bring Orde-Lees with him on the mission to Antarctica. And Churchill grants him that opportunity.
Gabriel: What was his post officially because I assume he was not the official trick cyclist?
David: No. Shackleton didn’t need a trick cyclist. That’s the funny thing. He was in charge of the physical fitness of the men on the ship. But he was also, and this is the really crucial part, he was going to be in charge of provisions, which is primarily the food. He was going to be in charge of when the men ate, how much they ate, what they ate. His official role was chief of supplies and provisions. And this is a really crucial part of the story. August 8th, 1914, Shackleton and his crew set off on the HMS Endurance for Antarctica. And while they’re on their way south from England, it becomes clear very quickly that Orde-Lees is not popular with the men. Because he’s in charge of the provisions, no one seems to feel like they’re getting fed enough. They’re not happy with the food. And they start to refer to him as “the belly burglar.” Because, because they’re just not satisfied with the rations he’s providing. But eventually they do reach ice fields off the coast of Antarctica. So they’re able to get off the ship and get out onto the ice and explore a little bit. And I’ll read you just a little bit from Orde-Lees’ journals at the time. He wrote, “As the weather was mild, I got out my old Rudge-Whitworth bicycle and took it out onto the lead and had the delightful pleasure of a good ride. As I had no audience to deride me, I ventured on a little trick riding with some little success. No one knows what it means to me to have a bicycle and a place to ride it, However rough and heavy the going.” He’s obviously brought his trick bicycle along with him to Antarctica, and he takes it out and rides a few times. Although one time he gets himself lost and they have to send out a search party to find him, takes hours to find him. And so basically after that he’s quarantined. He and his bicycle have to stay on the ship. So the challenge that they face is that the endurance Shackleton ship becomes stuck in the ice. Can’t move forward, can’t move backward, can’t do anything. All that they can do is wait it out. Their ship is trapped in the ice in January of 1915, and they literally are camped out waiting to see if they can get their ship free for almost that entire year. But on November 21st of that same year, months and months and months later, the pressure of this ice finally just crushes the hull of the ship. And the ship goes down to the bottom of the Weddell Sea. So now they’ve lost their ship, right? All that they have is things that they have taken off the ship and put on to the ice. One of those things, of course, being Orde-Lees’ bicycle. At this point, Shackleton says, OK, they’re going to have to set off without all their personal belongings. You’re going to have to leave a lot of things behind. Every man is allowed two pounds worth of personal belongings. So obviously the bicycle is not going along on the trip. So they leave it behind and they set off with three small wooden boats and whatever provisions they can carry with them. And they make an 800-mile voyage down to a little peninsula called Elephant Island. Even though they are now on solid land, they know that no one is ever going to come and rescue them. They’re too remote. So Shackleton decides he’s going to set off and go see if he can find a rescue crew. Shackleton sets off in a lifeboat with a few of his men and he’s gone for four months. And during that four months, of course, they’re running out of food. There’s very little that they have left in their provisions, so they’re eating whatever they can catch or kill. Charles Green, the expedition cook, is running his stove on seal blubber. And he’s trying to offer up to the men whatever he can. They eat curried seal and dog pemmican. And so I’ll give you another note from Orde-Lees at this point. He says, “The monotony of our days on the flow is broken only by the relentless wind and the occasional distant roar of the ice shifting. The rations grow smaller and the cold seeps ever deeper into our bones, but we endure. Seal meat and penguin blubber sustain us now, their taste is unwelcome as their necessity is urgent. The ice holds us captive and yet we cling to life.” Of course, over the course of these four months, as they have less and less to eat, Orde-Lees is less and less popular with the man because he’s the one who’s supposed to be providing them with their meals and their provisions. At a certain point, the notion of cannibalism comes up.
Gabriel: Ooof!
David: They get to have some discussions about, OK, well, if it did come to this, if they had to resort to cannibalism, what would be our approach? And of course, Orde-Lees is the first one to go. They all agree. You might be skinny, but he’s very annoying and they’ve had enough of him and he hasn’t provided them with enough food. He’s number one on the list.
Gabriel: Wow.
David: But thankfully for Orde-Lees, with only eight days of food supplies left, Shackleton reappears and saves the crew. And there’s a great quote from Green, the cook. Green says, “They had chosen my poor friend, Orde-Lees, and I’d have to cook him.” Which was something that Green wasn’t looking forward to. And thankfully, never had to resort to. Apparently Orde-Lees, he was number one on the list to be eaten if and when the time came.
Gabriel: It was the bicycle, wasn’t it?
David: Or maybe it was the bicycle. They didn’t like him going and riding around on the ice on his bicycle, performing tricks.
Gabriel: “Yeah, there he is, bunny-hopping onto the deck of the Endurance again. Oh, this guy!” He does seem very accidental.
David: It was very accidental. You’re right, that’s funny.
Gabriel: His tours were very short, but…
David: Yes.
Gabriel: He was on Antarctica. He’s got to be one of the first people to ride a bicycle on Antarctica, on the continent.
David: He was actually the second person…
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
David: To ride a bicycle in Antarctica. That’s the funny thing. There was a man who had gone down on a separate mission before him and left the bicycle in Antarctica, but Orde-Lees didn’t know about that. So he brought his own at this point. There’s already two bicycles in Antarctica and it’s only 1914.
Gabriel: Do you remember the name of this first person?
David: The first one was Thomas Griffith Taylor. He went down with Captain Robert Falcon Scott in mission. He was a geographer, so he took his bicycle so that he could ride on the ice and start to map out the terrain in the Antarctic. They built quite a good-sized shed there and he left his bicycle in the corner of the shed. And apparently it’s still there. It’s in very good shape because of the cold. It’s been very well preserved. So if you want, you can go down and check it out to this day.
Gabriel: OK, where exactly is it?
David: It is… Oh, it’s at Cape Evans on the north shore of Antarctica.
Gabriel: OK, now I’m trying to think. In the race to the South Pole, Norway had Amundsen.
David: That’s right.
Gabriel: Who ended up getting there first.
David: Yeah, he beat Scott.
Gabriel: Right, but Scott’s expedition ended in disaster. Shackleton was able to save his people.
David: Yeah.
Gabriel: But Scott, it did not work out. They ran out of everything.
David: I think that was Scott’s second mission that was disastrous. So I think his first one, the one that Thomas Griffith Taylor was on, was an earlier expedition that they were able to come back from, kind of regroup. And then they set off for a second mission. And that was the one that really did not go well at all.
Gabriel: And do you know if this first cyclist, Mr. Taylor?
David: Thomas Griffith Taylor.
Gabriel: Oh, yeah, Griffith Taylor. Did he perish with Scott?
David: No, he managed to get himself back to England.
Gabriel: OK.
David: I don’t think all of Scott’s crew set off for the pole. I think it was only maybe half of his crew members that set off with him. And they were the ones who perished along the way. But there were some who had kind of waited at the base camp and they survived. It was still a pretty depressing mission for them.
Gabriel: It must have been. Well, those are three selected daredevils and adventurers. I just have to ask, what do you do for a living, besides writing books?
David: So I write for a living.
Gabriel: Aha.
David: I work in advertising and branding. So I write for a very wide variety of companies and brands. So it’s nice to be able to write about the one thing that I really love most in my life, which is bicycles and cyclists. And I think the thing that fascinates me so much about cycling is that there’s so many different aspects to it. There’s obviously so many different kinds of bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes, mountain bikes, tandems, recumbents and so many different ways to ride, reasons to ride. You know, I mentioned the book is about some people want to ride fast, some people want to ride far, Some people just want to do crazy stuff. Everyone has their own motivation. And that’s what fascinates me about the bicycle is that there’s no real one common denominator. There’s just so many different ways you can approach it. And there’s so many different things that you can get out of it. You can go on a bicycle because you want to just have time to think. You can ride a bicycle because you’re sad and you want to improve your mood. That’s what’s so endlessly variable about the bicycle. That’s what makes it so fascinating.
Gabriel: Based on what you’ve said, I’m going to guess that at least some of the other books you have written are bicycle-related.
David: Well, of course, they’re all bicycle-related.
Gabriel: OK, well…
David: I think part of the reason why I wanted to write 33 Cyclists was because I wanted to write about other people’s experiences. And the reason I say that is because my earlier books were about my personal experiences. So, for example, I wrote a book called 66 Days with Satan, which was about my experience of… I like your response. It was about riding across Canada with the Tour du Canada. My second book was called The E-F-I Club, and that was about my experience riding the Tour d’Afrique. And then my third book was called The United States of Delirium, and that’s about the Race Across America. I did ride the Race Across America in a two-man team because I wanted to experience what it was like, but the book itself is about the solo riders. So these are men and women who do the ride. It’s a nonstop ride from California to New Jersey that goes out every year, every summer, and very few people know about it. It’s not a well-known race, but I think it’s an exceptionally challenging race for that kind of rider. These are people who kind of put together a desire to do long distance riding with a desire to go really fast and not sleep. That was an incredible combination. I was really fascinated by that mindset. So that’s what that book was about.
Gabriel: This is interesting, because the Race Across America, there you do have support.
David: Yes.
Gabriel: Whereas there’s this Trans Am, which is this other race, which Lael Wilcox, back to Lael.
David: Yeah.
Gabriel: Lael Wilcox actually won. And that is completely unsupported, so you just head off.
David: That’s right.
Gabriel: With no support and you show up and you sleep in a gas station or under a bridge or something.
David: Yeah.
Gabriel: So, those are both across the United States, but slightly different parameters.
David: Yeah. And I think in a way, the Trans Am is a more well-known and a more iconic race, because it is unsupported, because it demands so much. I mean, not to take anything away from the people who do the Race Across America, but having a support team does change what the race requires of a rider. So it’s a very different experience. Both exceptionally tough, incredible races.
Gabriel: I feel like the Race Across America has been going on for longer.
David: Yes, it has. It’s been going on since 1983, I believe.
Gabriel: That’s a good while. OK. And then your fourth book.
David: Yeah, the fourth book was the people who created the Tour d’Afrique, TDA Global Cycling, were about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. That would have been 2013. So I curated a coffee table book for them. It’s called 10: (obviously) Celebrating Ten Years of the Tour d’Afrique. And it’s really a compilation of photographs and journal entries and quotes from different riders who’ve done the Tour d’Afrique over that ten-year span. Because everyone has their own experience during the Tour d’Afrique. And, you know, everyone feels great at a certain point and everyone breaks down and falls apart at some point. So it was really a pleasure for me to kind of relive my Tour d’Afrique experience while putting this book together, that kind of reflected everyone’s experience doing the Tour d’Afrique. The tour typically goes through ten different countries. And each of the countries is just so different in terms of the culture and the landscape and the languages and the roads and the music and everything. It just makes for a really rich experience. So we were able to put together a very beautiful book to celebrate their 10th anniversary.
Gabriel: And TDA Global Cycling is still going strong today.
David: Yeah. One thing that I’ve noticed about supported tours and guided tours is that a lot of people who do unsupported rides will look at the routes and the maps that are being used for the supported and guided tours and use them as a bit of a guideline, because that’s an easy way to access, what are the best routes? What are the best roads? What are the best towns to stop in? You know, it’s easy to get all that sort of information just by looking at how the organized tours are moving through that country or that location.
Gabriel: Yeah, I’m sure the feeling is that it’s sort of a vetted route.
David: That’s right.
Gabriel: That is safe or has certain amenities along the way and would be good to follow.
David: Yeah, exactly.
Gabriel: I think now certainly bikepacking.com has their official Cairo to Cape Town route and they probably overlap a little bit with the one you took.
David: Yeah, the interesting thing about Africa, this won’t be a surprise to anyone, but it’s not uncommon to have to change the route. Oftentimes there’s some kind of civil unrest or some kind of danger or things just aren’t ideal. So I know that Tour d’Afrique company has had to tweak their route a number of times based on what’s happening in particular countries. And so I’m sure that would be the same for bikepacking as well. So there is, generally speaking, a recommended route to get from Cairo to Cape Town, but that might need a little bit of tweaking along the way, just to make sure that you’re avoiding whatever would be problematic.
Gabriel: Yeah, for sure. One of the 33 characters is associated with TDA or Tour d’Afrique. Henry Gold.
David: Yes, Henry Yeah, it’s chapter 30.
Gabriel: Chapter 30. Let me look it up.
David: I’m just going to go to that chapter.
Gabriel: You beat me to it.
David: Yeah. Well, Henry Gold, who created that first Tour d’Afrique is just someone I have a huge amount of admiration for. He’s not a racing cyclist by any means. He just loves to get out there on a bike. He’s in no rush, but he’s really on the bike because he wants to experience what’s around him, meet people, go somewhere he’s never been. And he also wants to bring other people along with him to get other people onto these tours that they offer, to him, I think, is the ultimate thrill to just get people out of their comfort zone, bring them somewhere where they wouldn’t necessarily go and experience all that that has to offer. You know, as well as I do, being on a bicycle is a very sensory experience versus being in a car, on a train or in a plane. Like you’re literally seeing things, smelling things. People can reach out and stop you in the middle of the road. I’ve had that happen. You’re feeling everything that’s going on around you. And that’s what makes it such a rich experience.
Gabriel: Absolutely. What about your last book, or half book, as you call it?
David: In 2021, a British publisher contacted me and asked me to get involved in a book which is called Ride: Cycle the World. And again, it’s a coffee table book and it’s all about different routes around the world. I think it’s a book that your audience would really love taking a look through, because it provides information and detail and routes in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, everywhere around the world. And so I was able to provide a fair bit of information, particularly on the African continent, in terms of where to go and what to expect.
Gabriel: And that brings us to 2025 and 33 Cyclists. Although I haven’t read the entire book yet, I must say I’m really enjoying it so far.
David: Oh, that’s fantastic. When I talk to people about it, I say it’s not bicycle centric, it’s bicycle adjacent. What I mean by that is it’s not obsessed with the mechanics and the gear ratios, all that kind of stuff. All these stories happen to have bicycles in them, but they’re very much about the people who were either on the bike or, in the case of Freddie Mercury, not on the bike.
Gabriel: How can somebody get a hold of a copy?
David: Well, they can get the book on Amazon anywhere around the world or they can order the book at their local bookstore. So all they have to do is ask for 33 Cyclists by David Houghton and they’ll be on their way.
Gabriel: Sounds good. I will put links in the show notes to the Amazon pages in the US, UK and Germany.
David: Thank you so much.
Gabriel: Of course.
David: Kind of related to your accidental bicycle tourist theme, putting the book together, the 33 cyclists that are in the book, there was a bit of an accidental aspect to that as well, because as I found out about different cyclists, they would often lead me to people that I wasn’t familiar with and stories that I had never read before. So the journey of putting the book together was definitely not a linear one. Yeah, I started with 10 cyclists and then it became 15 and 20. But the route that I took to discover these people and kind of uncover their stories was all over the map. Sometimes I call the book 33 Rabbit Holes, because with any of these cyclists, I started doing research and digging up old newspaper articles and that sort of thing. And you could just be let off in so many different directions with different aspects of their life. What I tried to bring to the surface was things that people wouldn’t necessarily know about this person and then just little details that were really interesting. You know, the kind of things that for me, bring a character to life. The little aspects of what were they thinking when they rode a bicycle or what song were they singing in their head or just those little things that make every person unique. That was part of the accidental journey of putting this book together.
Gabriel: David’s stories about Thomas Stevens, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, Thomas Orde-Lees, and even Freddie Mercury, really fascinated me. David mentioned the Tour d’Afrique, which has evolved into TDA Global Cycling, a few times during the episode. David also assured me that Henry Gold, the man behind the operation, would have lots of interesting stories to tell. Henry Gold and the Tour d’Afrique. That’s next time on the podcast.
Gabriel: The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You’ll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you.
David: It’s hard to get publishers to publish cycling books in my experience, there’s not a huge amount of interest. You know, everyone’s focused on fantasy books right now. That’s what they want to publish, for better or for worse.
Show Notes
You can purchase 33 Cyclists: Daredevils, Visionaries and Adventurers by David Houghton at your local bookstore or on Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon DE.
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