EPISODE 64
No Ordinary Bicycle Ride
Imagine visiting a museum to study a penny-farthing—a classic bicycle with a giant front wheel and a tiny rear one—not out of idle curiosity, but with the intent to build one yourself. Then, you decide to hop atop this contraption with no gears, solid rubber tires, and virtually no brakes and eventually take it around the world. It sounds nearly impossible, yet that is exactly what Joff Summerfield did. After designing and constructing his own custom penny-farthing, Joff departed Greenwich, England, in 2006, coming home two and a half years later. Five years after his return, he set out to do it again in the opposite direction, though that effort ended in tragedy. Joff’s mechanical ingenuity, while impressive, was nothing compared to the resourcefulness he needed on the road. His travels required constant improvisation, from overcoming dysentery in Turkey to navigating Tibet without a visa to subjecting himself to DIY dentistry in California. In this episode, Joff joins us to share the unexpected challenges, remarkable encounters, and sheer determination behind his journeys on two highly unequal wheels.
Episode Transcript
Joff: Now I came down a hill, and there was a little bar there, so I went in and sat down. And I was looking around and I realized that this was the same bar that all the years before, in 2000, with the first penny-farthing, it was so hard to ride. I’d stopped at the same bar and I sat down and sat in the same booth and written down a list of what all the things I’m going to do to fix this bike to make it doable to around the world, and here I was on the last day in Europe, having almost completed the whole journey. It kind of goes to show, follow your dreams.
Gabriel: You just heard Joff Summerfield, who in 2006 sold all his possessions to ride around the world on a fixed-gear high wheeler, also known as a penny-farthing, that he built himself. Joff’s tour was the culmination of several years of riding on increasingly challenging routes and refining the bicycle’s design. After completing one extraordinary lap around the globe, Joff set off to do it again, this time moving in the opposite direction. However, things did not go according to plan and he was forced to abandon the attempt after a harrowing incident in Ecuador. While that incident marked the end of that particular ride, it did not mark the end of Joff’s adventures. In this episode Joff shares the remarkable highs and testing lows of a life lived five feet in the air and how he’s found the grit to keep looking forward even when the road ahead seems entirely uncertain.
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 bicycle touring enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Last year on the episode “The Accidental Origins of Bicycle Touring,” guest David Houghton and I discussed the amazing feats of Thomas Stevens, the English-born man who became the first to ride around the world on a bicycle. And he did it on a high wheeler. Now, in that discussion David and I had this exchange:
Gabriel: 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: Well, I did hear from one anonymous listener with a name: Joff Summerfield. It’s taken a while, but we are joined by Joff today. So, Joff Summerfield, thank you so much for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast.
Joff: My pleasure. I’m really excited to be here.
Gabriel: In your case the very first question to ask is very simple. How in the world do you get the idea to go long distances on a high wheeler, which we already know from Thomas Stevens is a very difficult way to travel? So, that’s the first question. How?
Joff: It’s an important one. My origin story for this is, when I first became self-employed which was a while ago now I suddenly didn’t have any money, and so I thought okay for my holiday this year I’ll cycle to Amsterdam from England. I had an old 1940s BSA paratroopers bike, so completely the worst bike to do it on, and I rode up to Amsterdam and had a bit of an epiphany on the way that this is actually how I’m going to see the world, on a bicycle. Fantastic! Now I’m always been someone who likes engineering and making things, so I didn’t want to buy a mountain bike. I didn’t want to buy a touring bike. I wanted to make my own bike. And then that tapped into my sort of eccentric kind of brain and I thought, well the maddest thing I can think of is a penny-farthing.
Gabriel: In the 1870s and 1880s, bicycles had a massive front wheel and a tiny rear wheel. People just called them high wheelers or the ordinary. The nickname penny-farthing, which did not become popular until the bicycles were going out of style towards the end of the century, comes from two old British coins: The large penny and the much smaller farthing.
Joff: So I took myself off to a museum, had a look at how the penny-farthings were made, and came back and made my first penny-farthing and it went on from there. And the first time that I rode that initial bike it was absolutely horrendous. I’d over-engineered it and so it was way too heavy and I over-complicated it as well. So I’d made it with gears, which I shouldn’t have done, but I rode that one to Paris for the millennium. Learned an awful lot about bicycle touring, the route to take and how not to do it, basically. I got to Paris just in time for about 11 o’clock on New Year’s Eve, for the millennium. But then the bug had truly bitten and I came home and made another bike, which was much lighter and no gears, which is more to the true ethos of penny-farthings.
Gabriel: Since I am an engineer myself, a mechanical engineer at that, I want to dive in a bit more on to the aspect of the construction of it. Finding a front wheel that is so big right off the bat must pose some challenges. You can’t just go into a catalog and get a wheel that size, so you had to make your own rim, you had to make your own spokes. Let’s hear more about, first of all, the wheel construction.
Joff: So the wheels, you could make the rims and there’s various ways of doing that but they’re very very crude and they had no stiffness in them. The bike I took to Paris was with a very crude rim and it buckled halfway there and I had to despoke it and re-spoke it after straightening the rim.
Gabriel: Did you make that one or purchase it?
Joff: Yeah so that’s like out of a crescent moon shape and it’s the material they make, if you have an eye on the end of a metal hawser, so a metal steel rope, you have like the loop and that piece in the loop that is a crescent shape and that’s what you make them out of. If you roll two pieces of round tube into a big circle, weld them up, then split it down the center so you’ve then you’ve got a crescent shape, then do it again but slightly longer then you can weld that in and have the joints at opposite sides. That’s another way of doing it. Because they’re heavy as well as a steel, I ended up having rims made for me which were clincher rims. A decent depth to them as well just to make them stiff and so they’re going to last. And then there’s tires of course as well which is the next bit after that. So obviously they’re all solid tires, there’s no pneumatics. There were pneumatics at the end of the penny-farthing period but they didn’t last very long. They’re obviously not available now. So the original tiring is a solid round rubber piece with, either it’s like a wire spring that goes through the center is what people tend to use in Europe, or in the States it has a hole through the center of the solid rubber with a wire and you pull it really really tight and braze it up. Because they’re clincher rims, you get some of the air-free tires now which you can get for normal bikes. You get two of those, cut them in half and then glue and sew them together so you’ve got one long tire and they’re a much much better tire as well as there’s less rolling resistance. I mean there’s still nothing like a pneumatic tire. I mean they’re compared to a pneumatic tire. So you feel everything still but they’re better than the solid tires and they last longer, because obviously I can’t get any spare tires anyway whilst I’m on the other side of the world. So what I did I got two normal bike tires then, cut the sidewalls off, cut them in half so I had a strip of tread and I glued it on. So that way I didn’t have to take any spare tires because after 10,000 miles, I would then just go to a local bike shop, buy some tires, buy some contact adhesive. So sort of to pick here it’s kind of just the normal contact adhesive or if you are a bit to far away land then you just go to the guy who’s sitting on the streetside sort of fixing shoes and that’s the glue you need. And so I didn’t have to carry any spare tires. I just retreaded the tires, and the same with the back tire as well.
Gabriel: Right, retreading, that’s smart.
Joff: Yeah, and it weighs nothing. That’s the key thing, it weighs nothing. That’s the best thing ever. Keep it light.
Gabriel: Good. And then with the spokes, those are some very long spokes.
Joff: For my bike what I did, because again carrying spare spokes, how many spokes are you going to need over two and a half years on the front wheel, if you had a big accident or something a broke load of them, I don’t want to be carrying 64 spokes, that’s just not practical. So what I did – because they always break at the hub, they never break at the rim – I split the spokes in two. Then I had a standard spoke for the shorter end that goes from the hub to the midpoint and I made a special little joining piece so I could join them. So again they were just standard spokes, and that whey I could use a double-butted DT spoke on the inside as well which gave a bit more sort of give in the system and it worked an absolute treat. Well, up until now the bike’s got about 35,000 miles on the clock and I think it’s still under 10 spokes are broken in the front wheel.
Gabriel: That’s really clever, both for the tires and for the spokes you made adaptations so that you could use parts that are available.
Joff: Yeah, exactly.
Gabriel: Wow. Thumbs up to that, a cool solution.
Joff: Try climbing up a hill on a penny-farthing and grinding away with no gears and that makes you think like, okay let’s save some weight somewhere, that’s a good sort of encouragement for that.
Gabriel: Yeah, so actually let’s talk about that, I was surprised you said on the first bike you had gears, because I’ve never considered a penny-farthing with gears, I mean that’s the whole point the big wheel is so big because that’s how you could sort of get some mechanical advantage from pedaling. But you put in some kind of a gearbox in there?
Joff: Yep, so on the first bike I say I way over-engineered it, I put a Sturmey-Archer 3-speed hub with a drum brake, and then that was on little leaf springs which then came back to the cranks. But obviously the sprocket is only on one side and there’s a freewheel so I had to run the chain up the side of the spokes across the top in a lay shaft and then back down the other side to get the drive to the other pedal.
Gabriel: Oh gosh.
Joff: It did work, but you could drive a tank over that bike, it was so, so heavy and over-complicated. Well, I went just back to the KISS factor (keep it simple, stupid), went back to the proper way of doing it, and it was just so much better and less complicated. And I learned my lesson on that one.
Gabriel: And one last point on this bicycle which is to me so fascinating. The frame I suppose may have been the easiest part of all because there you can cut and weld just as you wish. Were there any challenges with the frame or the brakes or any other components?
Joff: Brakes, you basically don’t want to have brakes on them. If you’re just having a normal bike with no bags on, if you were to put the brakes on, I mean the rear wheel will just slide. If you were to put on the brakes like you would on a normal bicycle all that happens is the back wheel lifts off the ground and you have what’s called a header. And because the bars are across your lap what happens you don’t start running in midair, you pivot over the front and you go and you break your wrist first, then your elbows and then you knock your teeth out. Over the years I’ve broken or fractured both wrists, both elbows five times I think it is, but never got as far as to my teeth, so that was good. That’s a rite of passage for a penny-farthing rider. But on my touring bike I did have brakes on there because I had the bags behind me that weighed the back down, but I could only use them to moderate a speed. That’s the thing, so you always have to look ahead for potholes or anything like that or if you’ve got like a big puddle and you don’t know what’s in it, you’ve got to be really careful, there’s not a rock in there because it’ll just stop you dead and then the rear wheel will lift off the ground even with the bags on the back, so you have to be very very careful with that. I mean, if you spend three days pushing the bike up a Himalayan mountain I’m certainly not walking down it, so they’re just to moderate your speed coming down. The frame or the backbone, you can make it just out of normal steel but what happens over time they just start to straighten out and then you’ve got a straight bike and you can always see the bikes like that because the rear wheel suddenly starts getting further and further away from the front wheel, so I make all of mine out of 4130 Chro-moly steel tube and then heat treat it as well afterwards and that fixes it in place. The real issue with them is around the headstock, because all that force goes into that one point round at the headstock. I mean, you put a swan neck in but I strengthened mine inside and outside and even then it did break on the on the trip a couple of times or cracked and I had to weld it up sort of locally and to fix it. But it never fully snapped on that one, so that was good, but you know you have to watch everything. And it talks to you as well on the road. If like something cracks, you’ll hear it. It will start making crack noise, I don’t know, but it talks to you, it lets you know. It’s like your dog whines when he’s got a thorn in his paw. The bike will let you know, you know, that there’s something wrong and then you can go sort of searching for it and get it fixed, so but that’s you know. That’s part and parcel of the traveling with these bikes.
Gabriel: A unique setup for sure. Let’s pick up where we left off. You said you got to Paris on time on the first bike.
Joff: Yeah.
Gabriel: Okay, so then after Paris you decided to redesign the penny-farthing. Okay, and where did you decide to go with the second bike?
Joff: So with the second bike I went for, I went down to Land’s End, which is the most southern point of the UK and rode that to John o’Groats, which is the most northern point in Scotland, and that’s that’s a real rite of passage in the UK for for anyone who’s a touring cyclist to do Land’s End to John o’Groats.
Gabriel: End to End?
Joff: Yes, the End to End, that’s it. I mean, they aren’t actually the actual, if you look on the map, they’re not actually the most northern and most southern point but that’s where everyone goes, and they’ve got the sign you want to stand in front of. So that was the second bike. It was way better. Again, learned an awful lot about how to travel with them and where to put your bags essentially. That was the biggest learning thing, because if you use regular panniers behind the rear wheel what happens is you get a shimmy, like a motorbike does on the front and it’s alright if you put lightweight stuff in there, but if you’ve got a, like enough, your tent and everything in there, so there’s a reasonable amount of weight on there, and I still travel really really lightly, even compared to a normal cyclist. So essentially I have my two pannier bags are front panniers, so they’re the smaller ones, so not the big big rear ones. And that’s it and… But I was getting this massive shimmy and I put a like a motorbike steering damper on the front to stop it and and that helped until it broke and and then it’s just literally just gets a massive shimmy on and there’s there’s nothing you can do about it. And so that was an evolution from then. And after that I actually went to a trailer and pulled a trailer, which was brilliant other than the weight penalty and then finally I ditched that and ended up with just the two front panniers off from a normal bike, just behind one, just behind the seat on the on the backbone went just below that on the backbone so and a bar bag as well and that was the perfect setup and I never changed it after that. But it’s all about sort of going on these other trips pre the big one just really to learn how to do it properly, you know, so it’s much easier to do that way.
Gabriel: There’s a lot of learning going on when you’re the first to do this in a while.
Joff: Yes, a long while. Thomas Stevens, I have to say, he’s the hero because, whatever I went through and experienced, it was 10 times harder for him because he had no tarmac, he had no internet. What he did it, it was incredible.
Gabriel: I could kind of imagine going on a penny-farthing in the flat on a nice smooth surface. You encountered a lot of different terrains on your trip. So what was the next one after End to End?
Joff: After that then I had two false starts. So the first false start I didn’t even get out the UK, and I had a problem with my knee on the first day, which was kind of a disaster. So I had to come back and get that sorted out. And then the second time I started in Leicester, in England, at a bike event that was going on there and I got as far as Budapest. I was having a fantastic time and then I had another problem with my knees, you know. I spent sort of three days riding with one leg to see if it would heal up and it just doesn’t. You know, it’s not going to go any further so I had to come back, unfortunately, and get the knees fixed. So that was the next big one and then everything was short rides and then my third time lucky that was the the main trip when I managed to get all the way around.
Gabriel: Around the world.
Joff: That’s it. Try, try and try again.
Gabriel: Just to get a mental image, what years are we talking about?
Joff: So I left on the first of May doesn’t seem like it, but it is a while ago, yeah.
Gabriel: Okay. I have an image of the bicycle, but what clothing were you wearing? How did you decide to dress?
Joff: In normal modern gear. I mean, you wear it all out very quickly. The only sort of thing to harken back was my helmet. I really loved the movie with Michael Caine in Zulu, so it’s a traditional British army pith helmet. And they work really well because when it rains it just rains off the top and doesn’t go down your back and keeps the sun off as well. I do get heat stroke quite easily, so that kept the sun off my head as well and and worked a treat. I didn’t use sun cream at all. Obviously you’re not having a shower every day. You’re jumping in the streams and things to have a wash, but all the natural oils come back into your skin and it’s a sun protector, so I didn’t get sun burn, which would surprise me but it’s you know it’s just nature you go back to how nature designed you and you’re good to go pretty much, and you don’t stink you know. So when I used all merino wool, which is very cooling as well but it doesn’t stink so you don’t stink so you can sort of go into polite society as well without being… making people faint so which is nice.
Gabriel: I focused on the looks but it’s good there wasn’t also a smell that accompanied you. This pith helmet though it’s very British.
Joff: Yes, pretty much. The different regiments have slightly different shapes, I believe, and so this is that particular sort of southern Africa shape that I liked. I did wonder when I got further east into India and stuff whether people would not like the pith helmet, because the history, but it had, it was no problem at all and I just think because it went so well with the bike no one batted an eyelid.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: When I didn’t have the bike with me I didn’t wear it.
Gabriel: Okay. I think that’s probably good.
Joff: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, lots of times people would say, “You must be British, you must be British.” And like yeah, yeah, busted.
Gabriel: Correct. For the third ride I know that you chose a very interesting starting and ending point.
Joff: Yes, I started from Greenwich in London. So I had a stall on the craft market there for like a long time so it was very fond of Greenwich. So full of euphoria that okay, finally on the road, and I sort of came out of Greenwich across the river and then started riding away from London until I realised I was actually riding straight back into London. I’d gone, I turned left instead of right and just had to turn around and like, okay well okay I’ll reride that road.
Gabriel: It’s like, once you saw Big Ben you thought, “Oh, wait a minute.”
Joff: Yeah, there’s something, something not quite right here. That’s not the port, so I had to turn around and go back the other way. There’s only an extra hour on the day.
Gabriel: OK.
Joff: I came back on a slightly different route, just followed the Thames all the way back into London, and that was a special day when I came back because after all that time on the road, it was just like I can’t believe, I can’t believe I’ve almost finished this, and because it’s almost like you’re living in a movie the whole time. You’re in it because you’re seeing everything’s new all the time. You’re being stimulated all the time, meeting so many wonderful people. It’s just fantastic because I was away two and a half years, which is a long time, and come back and being successful was amazing, incredible feeling to come back and actually completed it.
Gabriel: So in the recent episode called “Whole Lotta Plov” with Tom Bruce, he also started from England but he didn’t know how far he would get. He ended up going around the world. He hadn’t done much planning so he just said let’s see how it goes. What were your thoughts? Were you set on going around the world or were you also thinking of, let’s just see how far I get? Let’s get farther than Budapest this time.
Joff: Planning-wise, I was exactly the same as that. Was like, I’m gonna head east.
Gabriel: OK, that’s… yes.
Joff: It was always to go around the world. But it was just head east and just see what the wind’s doing, see what people tell you, which way to go. You’ve got loads of time. Just follow your nose, really. And I’ve got no sense of direction whatsoever, so I’m gonna get lost all the time as well, you know. And I tried to follow major rivers if I could, just because they are flat and there’s always great camping by rivers. That’s the easiest way and just see what happens. I had in my head like a rough route, and I deliberately didn’t follow Thomas Stevens’ route, although our paths did cross essentially on the road. You can’t compare the two roads. They’re gonna be in different places now anyway and I’ll be riding on tarmac so you couldn’t say, “Oh, I’ve ridden his route,” because you can’t. You see, it’s changed so much since then anyway, it’s your own adventure. Thomas Stevens, he sort of metaphorically rides with all penny riders anyway. You know, in the tough times you’d have a chat with them as well.
Gabriel: Now that we talk about Thomas Stevens I had thought that you had used his gravesite as sort of a landmark.
Joff: Correct. When I started I went to his grave the day before I actually left with the bike, just to pay my respects to him. He’s just buried in North Finchley, in north London. I camped in the graveyard, then rode down to Greenwich for the main sort of leaving due the next day. And I did the reverse on the way back. And I took a little stone from his grave, put that in my bag and carried that with me all the way around. And when I came back, then I put it back in his grave so essentially he’s been around twice as well. That’s really cool. He should be more well known than he really is.
Gabriel: Well, that’s a lovely gesture, to do that. The internet was correct. Okay, good. You never know.
Joff: I can’t believe that. The internet’s always correct, isn’t it?
Gabriel: Not quite, but close.
Joff: Okay, okay. Oh dear.
Gabriel: Oh dear. Well then, as you’re heading east, what are some of the earliest adventures that you have?
Joff: Initially, as soon as I got into Holland, you know, obviously such a nation of great cyclists. And you know, like the older people riding the bikes as well, and especially there I, you know, I got there and I was full of bravado and like I mean Europe at last, you know on the road again. And there was, I always remember, a little old lady on a sit-up-and-beg sort of traditional Dutch bike, and I whizzed past her and like, oh, there you go, I’m so fast and about 10 minutes later when I was sitting by the side of the road, sort of breathing heavily, she came just pootling past me, blew me away completely. There’s kind of the old tortoise and the hare thing, and that taught me a lesson as well. Just take it easy. I followed the canals as well. Just stopped, got some lunch out to have a rest. I remember a big family came along and, oh, you know, where you going? Blah blah blah. Oh yeah. Oh, can you ride for us? And like, oh I’ve just literally unpacked and sat down. I’m just gonna have some lunch and, oh okay, that’s fine, and they literally just stood there and watched me eating some lunch. And it’s like, oh, no pressure. Okay. Packed up again, put the things all back in the bags and everything and then like rode up and down for them a bit, and I don’t think so. They were all happy and I just carried on and then stopped again and have my break. I like having lots of breaks and taking lots of pictures and things. Followed the Rhine Canal to Strasbourg and then got on the start of the Danube to Donaueschingen and followed the Danube, which is wonderful. Just so many camping spots, people super super friendly. Then the end of it I think it was after Budapest this time, it was kind of like the Danube wasn’t sort of open I ended up going into some military zone and just rode in there and there’s soldiers there and they were kind of like, you really shouldn’t be here. And like, oh oh sorry mate. The bike is a passport and it gets you a get-out-of-jail-free card. And like, okay you shouldn’t be here, but what are you doing? And you explain to them what you’re doing and they’re always friendly and they just set you on the right path. Again you know it was great that it’s so friendly in Hungary. And then into Serbia. I didn’t really know what to expect, because of the previous sort of wars in Europe. But again super, super friendly. I’d gone up early to go across the border and like this might be a bit of a problem. Couldn’t have been more friendly. Went into the first village. This is probably still about eight o’clock in the morning. There was a little corner bar in the village, and there’s a guy standing outside. And he waved, Stop! Stop! Stop! so I stopped, had a chat and and it’s now come in, come in, and then they give me the little like cherry vodkas and I’m like, oh mate I can’t. It’s like, it’s about eight o’clock in the morning. Oh, no, no. He insisted and I knocked back two of these vodkas and like, oh my god, my head’s spinning. And then I finally managed to get away from them. I could have spent all day in there, but I would have been lying on the floor by the end of it. And I was riding down the road, my head kind of spinning and like oh my god, I’ve got to get some food in me and some water, just to you know try to get the alcohol. Carried on and about an hour or so later went into another village. There’s some guys there. Again, waved me down and end up spending sort of about three hours with them over lunch, and they had a big like cauldron. They were cooking over an open fire and it was it called jelen, I think it’s called, and it’s just all game and pig and cow and everything was in there. It was delicious, but again the main kind of thing with it was drinking a lot as well. So it was a very alcoholic day, that. And then that was just carrying on then down into Macedonia.
Gabriel: Did you cross into Asia in Istanbul, I guess like everybody else?
Joff: Yeah, that’s it. So I went down to Macedonia, into Greece, and then followed the coast round into Istanbul. Going into Istanbul is notorious. It’s horrible, because Istanbul is such an enormous city. You’ve got days going into it and then the crazy traffic. I’ve got to do it. I mean, you can get a bus in or something and I just didn’t want to do that. So I managed to go in and I managed to camp still as well, to free camp, because I was free camping the whole way. Even hide away in like a urban sprawl of craziness and not get discovered, which was, I was very proud of that at the time. Because the thing is when you’re free camping you want to leave the road with no one seeing you, but with the bike everyone’s looking at you. So you have to time it really carefully to suddenly disappear. I’m sure a few times people have like trotted by, have seen it, and then want to tell someone else and look back and I’ve disappeared. And then they kind of think they’re hallucinating or something but they weren’t. But I got into Istanbul okay, and when leaving Istanbul, obviously you’ve got the same problem. Which way to go? But there’s a ferry you can take from Istanbul which just takes you south, puts you into place called Yalova. You didn’t get any further east, so there’s no advantage that but, but it just saves like 2 to 3 days in horrendous traffic trying to get out of Istanbul. I took that route and went to Yalova and it was absolutely delightful, because it was a peach-growing area of Turkey. You know, there’s guys by the side of the road you can buy watermelon for, you know, for pennies, you know, and peaches as many as you like or farmers were just giving me… I mean, I sat by the side of the road one day and the farmer came past with his tractor and trailer, and his wife on there as well, full of peaches and they gave me about 10 peaches. You know, and that was me giving some back because I had nowhere to put these things, so I had to sit there and eat about five or six of them just because I couldn’t carry them, because I just had no space and you can’t stuff a peach into your bags because it’s going to get squished. Absolutely lovely, and people are so, so friendly. It was tough because of the roads were very much, very short, sharp up-and-down climbs which I couldn’t ride up on the bike. And so I had to push, and the heat as well. The heat was incredible there and that nearly cooked me. There’s one of the wonders of the world, a place called Nemrut Dağı, which is up on the top of a mountain. These fabulous statues that are up there carved statues. And it’s not very well… I didn’t know about it before I went there and just read something about it and it’s incredible. If you look it up, it’s incredible and it’s right on the top of this mountain. And people told me about it, so you won’t be able to take that bike up. That’s impossible. Which was like, okay, challenge accepted. And so you know it’s about 80 kilometers I think from the turn-off to this, to get to the top wind up these gradually deteriorating roads, but I did manage to get to the top, which was fantastic and great to get to the top, but it’s exhausting but it was good up there with the bike and the statues and it was amazing. Just before that, the town is called Malatya, that was when I had to change the the retreads. That’s my first changing of the retread on the tires. I’d stashed the bike, I just got a cheap room so I was going to have a couple of days there rest before I did this big climb up to the statues. I went out to try and find some tires and I found a bike shop and all the guys there and they couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Turkish, other than basic please and thank you. And I didn’t have the bike with me then and I intimated that I want to have two tires, and they were trying to explain to me that it’s important what the tire size is and I was saying back to them, no, it doesn’t matter. I just want two tires and they’re like putting their hands on their head.
Gabriel: Yeah. Oh this crazy foreigner.
Joff: Yeah, he’s going to get the wrong size tires. They’re such nice guys they didn’t want to sell me the wrong size tires. So eventually they agreed to sell me the tires. So they sold me the tires, and then I saw they had a vise and a hacksaw. And I said, “Can I use the vise?” And they were like looking at each other strangely and, “Yeah, yeah, if you want to.” “And can I use the hacksaw?” “Yeah.” So then I clamped the tires in the vise and hacksawed them in half.
Gabriel: No!
Joff: And they were just like, what is this lunatic doing? He just bought two tires and he’s now hacksawing them in half. They couldn’t understand, but when I left town I went back to their shop with the bike and they were very happy that I did actually come back to see them.
Gabriel: That’s what he was doing!
Joff: Exactly, yeah. That mad lunatic. Plus as well then I didn’t have a phone with me at all, so not like I could have shown them a picture on the phone. Simpler times.
Gabriel: What else happened in Turkey? That as you got to eastern Turkey things probably changed even more for you.
Joff: Istanbul, you’re obviously in the far west. That’s like a multicultural, it’s a wonderful, wonderful city. The further east you get, everything gets a lot more conservative, so it’s obviously when you travel you have to be conservative, so it always trying to sort of wear long trousers and keep long sleeves on as well and just, you know, got to respect the culture you’re in, which is important. Further east I got as well, it was getting a lot fewer towns, and I’d been drinking a lot of the time, just from springs the natural springs which the goatherds would use. And they would always have these, called Kangal is the breed of dogs, and they they’re working dogs and they’re huge great things which guards the goats from the wolves. And these dogs have these big steel collars on with bikes and that’s to stop the wolf biting their neck. But these dogs when they saw me they must thought I was the tastiest whatever that they could get and they would just go berserk at me.
Gabriel: Oh wow.
Joff: That carried a dog whip as well, so I carried a whip on my back so that for normal, normal biting dogs I could scrub the whip and then I could give them a crack across the nose to keep them off my ankles. But these dogs are so big. I mean, if they jumped me they’d knock me straight off the bike. See like the goatherds at the end of the valley, you can see the dogs and then when the dog saw me, they would come barreling down to me and then I had to jump off the bike, put the bike between me and them and whip them until the goatherds sort of trotted over on his donkey to hold them off so I could keep going. They were so, so scary and I mean, later on I camped behind a little shed and in the morning a couple of goatherds came past with a sheep. And they had, there was just a little pup, he was only like half the size of one of these, he was a Kangal but he was only like a pup, and he grabbed the bag which was attached to the bike and he pulled it and he literally pulled the bike out of my hands and pulled the bike right over. I can imagine if that was your leg or something it would just be horrendous. And I’ve read stories of people have been bitten by these Kangal breeds. You know, you’re in their environment so you can’t complain, because they’re just doing their job, and they don’t know you’re a touring cyclist. So it’s, you look like very tasty meat.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: As I went further east to say I was having a lot of problem getting enough water. It’s so hot and you’re just drinking so much water, and the springs were absolutely fine. I had a filter with me. Back then it was still very clunky kind of filter and I had the tablets with me as well. And one day I’d run out of water the previous evening and then if you drink like two liters easily and just in the tent just to rehydrate, and I had to kind of temper that so I’ve had enough just for the morning to go a little way and just hope there was a town or a village or something. And there wasn’t, so I completely ran out of water so, I mean, an old trick that old travelers would do is we’d get a rock and like a small smooth pebble and suck a pebble, and it helps quench your thirst. So tried it all with that. It’s not good for your teeth. You’re rattling around on a penny-farthing. Eventually I was just absolutely gasping and hallucinating and everything, and I came across, it was a farmer’s field. Had an irrigation tank there. Big, like six-inch pipe, pumping water out of there and I leapt on it and drank and drank and drank, and it was the best water I’ve ever tasted. Here is amazing. Unfortunately it was also the worst water I’d ever tasted because of what was in it. And I didn’t filter it and I didn’t put the tablets in, I was just so thirsty.
Gabriel: Oh boy.
Joff: That night in the tent, my stomach started making some strange noises. By the morning it was horrendous, and I managed… there was another day’s ride got me to the Yakobar. that’s a very bad pronunciation. By the time I got to there I’d got into like a cheap room and gotten the bike and I closed the door. I was there for about five days. For a weight-loss program, that’s a really good thing to do. It was horrendous and luckily they had like ice water up on the top there, as much as you could drink, just to keep hydrated, but I didn’t eat anything. For like five days it was just thrown up and so I had dysentery, essentially. When I first went out walking around town just to try and I couldn’t find a doctor anywhere, you know I just went into a chemist and pantomimed, and they took some drugs off the end of the cabinet and I have no idea what they were and so, “Yeah, okay. I’ll have the lot.” I stayed for a few more days and just to like let this dysentery try and flush out, but I was so weak, it was bakingly hot though, because it’s, I mean it’s right on the southern, sort of southeastern border of Turkey, sort of near the Syrian desert, and it was absolutely roasting there, and there’s no air conditioning or anything like that, no fan. And I just had to know where I needed to go, to Erzurum which is kind of in the far east, which is where the Iranian consulate was. And so I thought just got to leave, just to try and get where it’s cooler, at least I feel better, and then just to get out of this room as well.
Gabriel: Oh yeah.
Joff: Yeah, so I hit the road again but I say I was really really weak, could make a few miles a day but as long as I was moving that’s fine. And I got a reasonable amount of elevation up, and I camped by the side of the road, pretty nice spot, and then in the middle of the night I hear all these kind of trucks and jeeps, as it turned out, all circling around me with the headlights on the car. And it was the Turkish army.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: And it was like, oh no, you can’t camp here. This is the most dangerous road in Turkey because of the PKK, the Kurdish group. And I was like, oh, that’s fine they don’t mind, they like me. It’s fine they, you know, they’re all fine, because they like us because the First Gulf War. But they were insistent. They made me pack all my tent up in the middle of the night. But the great thing was they said we’ve arranged somewhere you can stay in a local village. Okay. So I had this army escort of like, there’s two jeeps and the soldier on the back with his machine gun, then a truck behind full of more soldiers with guns, using their headlights to… because I couldn’t have any lights on the bike, driving along the road. I’m getting this escort. I’m in the middle of this thing and going down into this village, and everyone’s waking up and like what’s going on, and took me into this village and gave me over to this family for the night, and they were lovely and they fed me and said everyone had got up and everyone had made food. I slept on the roof of their house, which was lovely under the stars. It was actually a great experience in the end. The Turkish soldiers, especially in the east, they had lots of army bases everywhere, and I could see them with the binoculars and you can almost see them nudging their mate, giving them the binoculars and looking at me. And I knew when I would come up the hill they would come out and they would arrest me. You’ve got to come in with us and I had to show the passport. But they’d always feed me and the funny thing was they’d always take me away from the bike and they would search the bike, because I always knew, because I could always pack it much better than I could, and then everything was so neat and there’d always be food in there. Water bottles would be filled up, and it was great and it was always, I really hope I get arrested about lunchtime, because I know I’m going to get a good feed. And they were great and they’d always send me on my way and nice pictures with them.
Gabriel: How many times did you get arrested?
Joff: Probably four or five.
Gabriel: You missed it when you left.
Joff: It was great, but at the end I ended up in Erzurum, where the Iranian consulate was. Getting an Iranian visa was difficult. I eventually got one, but it was only for 12 days, which wouldn’t give me any time to get into Iran. I didn’t want to take lifts to the zip across. Because my original rough idea had been to go through Iran and Pakistan and into India. I got the visa and then I rode on to the border but I was still down, maximum I could do was 20 miles a day, just still the aftershock of the dysentery and stuff. I rocked up at the border and it just like I’ve got to make a decision now. I stood by the side of the road for about an hour, and like, okay what’s the best thing to do? Do I go into Iran and then get stuck there and then still not be well or should I make a radical change? Got on a train and got back to Istanbul and flew to Australia, to the northern Australia, which is a massive change.
Gabriel: Okay.
Joff: Flew to Cairns, went to see a doctor. Got some antibiotics and stuff, the proper stuff, just to get well, which was the best thing. The funny thing was on the first night in Cairns, I was all jetlagged and stuff, and I went into a hostel there, and they were a couple of Irish lads, and they said oh, come, come to the pub and oh man, I’ve still got this dysentery lurking around in me. It’s been a long flight and now I don’t know and they insisted I went to the pub with them and there was a wet T-shirt competition. So, completely different cultures. I’d just been in eastern Turkey, which is really conservative, and suddenly I’m sitting in a pub in Australia watching a wet T-shirt competition, and like you go, you know, in a couple of space of two days there’s a big contrast.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: That was the Aussie leg of the journey that sort of started there.
Gabriel: But why Australia? That really surprised me, when you threw that in. I thought you may have flown a little further to skip Iran but, I mean, you went all the way.
Joff: Ah well, I could have done exactly that. Then flown to India, then from India or Nepal into Tibet and China that way. This way was, go to Australia, get well and it was the best decision I made. Oz was fantastic because the Aussies are also outdoorsy and they’re stopping all the time for a chat and camping everywhere. They have all these rest areas, which all the grey nomads stop in, and they all turn up at sort of six o’clock every night in all the big camper vans and the majority live on the road. It’s brilliant. And of course I’d always normally eaten by then, but they all come out and they’re all sort of older people and they all want to be your mum and dad then straight away and then, oh do you want a beer? Do you want the food? And in the morning, again, a bit like the peaches in Turkey, it ended up with like a pile of tin cans and I said really, honestly, I cannot put tin cans in the bike. What, one tin can. That’s perfect, thank you. But they were super. Took me six months to ride the length of Australia. Spent it all on the east coast and got down to Melbourne. Then I went over to Tasmania as well and did a lap of Tasmania. In February every year they have the penny-farthing world championships…
Gabriel: Oh!
Joff: Which has been going 30, 40 years now. I think I’ve always read about it. Just the timing worked out perfectly for me to go and take part in that event, which was fantastic. And Tasmania is an incredible island. It’s what I would imagine England was like in 1950.
Gabriel: This championship, it’s always in the same place every year?
Joff: Yes, in Evandale. In Evandale they have a bronze statue of a penny-farthing rider and a penny-farthing, so more by luck than judgment I did time it to get there to see the event, which I done take part as well, which is great, you know. Really, really enjoyed it.
Gabriel: Yeah, you must have been a bit of a celebrity by then, as like, “Oh wow, Joff’s joining us from England!”
Joff: I couldn’t have been treated in a better way than they all treated me. I mean, the penny-farthing world is quite a small one, so everyone knows pretty much everyone.
Gabriel: Yeah, the word can still spread in 2006.
Joff: Absolutely, yeah. I left Australia and I flew out of Melbourne to go on to New Zealand. Such a beautiful country and the whole Lord of the Rings thing. Great, great cycling there. And I went down to Dunedin in the south, which is the home of Burt Munro, The World’s Fastest Indian movie.
Gabriel: Yeah, that movie, just to fill people in, that movie is about Burt Munro, this man from New Zealand who has this Indian motorcycle and he has a dream of taking it to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and having, like, the fastest ride ever.
Joff: That’s it.
Gabriel: It’s an impossible dream. Everybody says forget about it, because by now he’s this, yeah, old man. Yeah, Anthony Hopkins plays him and he’s got to be in his 70s.
Joff: I think so, yeah. I mean, he’s completely eccentric as well, which I kind of relate to.
Gabriel: There’s some parallels there, you know, with tinkering in the garage. That’s what you were doing. I mean, you’re obviously a much younger man, but doing things that people said couldn’t be done, so it makes sense that you should visit.
Joff: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’m a petrolhead. My original profession is a race engine builder, so it kind of really relates to that as well and…
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: There was that store, that’s where he got lots of cheap parts from and stuff for his bikes. His original bikes are in the hardware shop now on display, and so I’d parked up outside and gone into sort of play homage to the bikes and his engineering, and when I came out this old chap was looking at my bike. I explained why I’d come there and he said, oh, I’m the actual kid that was in the movie.
Gabriel: Yes.
Joff: In the movie I think the kid’s seven, eight years old I suppose.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: He then let me take my penny-farthing into the store to have a picture of the penny next to Burt Munro’s bikes as well, and then we went and had tea and cakes upstairs, which is lovely.
Gabriel: Oh.
Joff: So that was the start of my New Zealand ride. Started really, really well. The big difference to Australia is there was no bugs and animals. Whereas Australia, there’s crocodiles, there’s snakes, there’s frogs, there’s kangaroos, there’s wallaby everywhere, there’s like some weird animals.
Gabriel: Spiders.
Joff: Yeah, spiders, that, you know and then half of them want to kill you as well. Whereas New Zealand, there’s none. There’s little kiwi birds and sandflies. That’s the only thing. You camp on the beach, there’s sandflies everywhere, and you soon learn not to be walking around in shops in the evenings there because the sandflies will get you and they just eat you absolutely alive. They’re like midges in Scotland, or like a tiny mosquito. The only difference is when they bite, you can’t feel it, so you can’t swat it.
Gabriel: Right.
Joff: The bug repellent, it’s expensive, so do I buy a cake or do I buy a bottle of bug repellent? Cake always won. Kiwi told me that the cheap way of doing it is you buy a bottle of baby oil and you buy a jar of Marmite. I don’t know if you know what Marmite is?
Gabriel: Oh yes.
Joff: It’s like a yeast extract, and you mix the baby oil with the Marmite, give it a good shake, it gets a bit lumpy but you shake it all up, and you rub that in, and that’s a really good way, and it works actually. I wasn’t sure if they were winding me up but I tried it and it works just as well as the store-bought insect repellent, and you had a lovely smell of Marmite.
Gabriel: Yeah, so we were just talking about how you didn’t smell bad but now, as I picture you walking around covered in baby oil and Marmite, I think that might have repelled some humans as well.
Joff: Oh no, you love it or you hate it. I love it.
Gabriel: Yeah, I’m afraid I’m in the hate-it category.
Joff: Yeah.
Gabriel: With Marmite and Vegemite and all the other Mites.
Joff: You know, by that stage you don’t really care, as long as the bugs aren’t biting you, then that’s fine and it would last a few days anyway. That was my first proper accident there as well, in New Zealand. Fabulous country to ride in. The only problem with it was just the truck drivers. They give you no room at all. I’m not sure if they’re on uppers or something. I mean, here you have your tachographs and stuff so you can only drive for eight hours, but there I think they just go from one end to the other, and perhaps do it constantly for three days. You’ve got to listen for them coming and get out of their way basically. And they had the big logging trucks as well. And I was riding along and I heard one coming and he just winged me and knocked me off the bike into the gutter, and there was a sign there. I literally hit the sign right in the center, and so it’s kind of a good shot, really, and I fractured the wrist, I know I could deal with, that’s fine.
Gabriel: Oh gosh.
Joff: This was right, right on the coast edge as well but as I kind of picked the bike up and leaned it on this wall there and it made a big drop down to the sea, I had my journals and stuff bungeed onto the top rack and they’d obviously become dislodged, which I didn’t notice. When I picked the bike up they all fell out and straight into the sea.
Gabriel: Oh.
Joff: Oh my god. Thankfully, they were in a waterproof bag and so I had to then run about 100 yards along the coast, bashed up and stuff, after being knocked off the bike, and climbed down one-handedly, then waded along through the sea to retrieve my journals, which thankfully I did and it’s like, come on, this isn’t fair.
Gabriel: But they didn’t get washed out.
Joff: Yeah, I was very lucky and yeah, it wasn’t a rough sea or anything like that, so they could just float there and not go too far. Kind of strapped up my wrist for the rest of the day and subsequent days, because when I fractured my wrist before they just stick you in a sling and like give you some painkillers, and just say well, you’ve just got to leave it, let it heal itself, so I knew what the score was. I bought some painkillers a bit further down the road and just ignored it. After a few days it was all right, I think, and they got me up to Auckland in the north. Coming to the end of that stretch, that was going to be the start of the big sort of next period, which was to go off to China. Well, firstly I went to Hong Kong, because of visawise, you could only get, I think it was a three-month tourist visa, which wasn’t going to be long enough for me, but I’d read that you could go to Hong Kong through an agency, get a business visa, which was six months. So I flew to Hong Kong and stashed the bike in the airport and then booked an appointment with this agency, and I didn’t honestly think I was going to be able to get one at all. It just seemed too good to be true, but it was very, very smooth. Paid I think it’s a hundred dollars US at the time, but I was a businessman going to China.
Gabriel: What was your stated business?
Joff: I can’t remember. I just made something up.
Gabriel: Import export.
Joff: I left that to them, to be honest. They didn’t seem to care very much. The reason I had to do that was because I was going into Tibet and once you’re going to Tibet you can’t extend your visa. You can only extend it in China, and I met people who fell foul of it as well, and they had to leave their bikes in Lhasa in Tibet, fly to China, get the visa extension, fly back again. So it cost them a fortune in extra flights and travel.
Gabriel: Yeah. Wow.
Joff: So I got the visa, then flew up to Beijing, that was the first kind of bit on the road in China. After Beijing I got up to the Great Wall so I could ride the bike on the Great Wall, or down the Great Wall, not up it certainly, but I got the bike up onto the Great Wall so I could ride it for two meters probably, on the Great Wall, before I had a massive accident. A bit of a culture shock, I have to say, but again everyone was fabulous. I mean the driving’s appalling there. You can see a car coming in a side road. They’re not going to stop. You just got to realize they’re not going to stop. They’ll just pull out and it’s like, oh well, if there’s another car coming, fine. They don’t seem to mind, but once you learn that, just ride very defensively and stay out of everyone’s way. The trucks gave you loads of room when they passed you, that was all right. But the good thing for me was that they just built some main motorways, and so all the traditional smaller side roads, they were all very light on traffic, because everyone was now using the direct motorways, which was brilliant for me and all the small guesthouses and little restaurants, or I wouldn’t say restaurants, they the more like cafes, and literally just a glass thing, just for tables. All the customers had gone, so they were desperate for customers, so it was brilliant for me. A lot of the time I’d stay in the guesthouses because it would cost like a pound a night and the food was fantastic. It’s going to one of these cafes, you just walk around or walk into the kitchen and just go, oh, that’s the… lift the pots, some of that, some of that. Helps to make animal noises. No idea what it is, but I’ll have that. Again, it would cost about a pound. So cheap, and you could eat as much as you like. And in one time I went into a village, starving hungry and I saw – you could tell where the restaurants were because they normally had the doors – didn’t have a door, per se. They had the plastic strips going down, stopped the bugs sort of flying in and out. They didn’t have a big window there on this occasion. Sometimes they didn’t. Okay. So I wheeled the bike in through the door went to against the wall and everyone’s looking at me really surprised, which they always did anyway, and I kind of made the noises for the food and the chicken, and the lady was rolling out some noodles on the side, so it’s just like sort of one room, and they cooked me up lunch. Then I was like, oh a bit of chai tea? And all they had was hot water in jam jars, which is quite a common thing. Sat down and they’re all being inquisitive and stuff. You’ll find quite normal. Then I finished up and then went to pay and they didn’t really know how much to charge me, which seemed a bit odd because I always knew how much and I thought about it, but when I looked around, took another sweep and I said, oh, hang on a minute. Oh, that’s mum, that’s dad, that’s granny, that’s the kids. This isn’t a restaurant, this is someone’s house. It was someone’s house and I’ve literally walked in with a colonial pith helmet on a penny-farthing into their living room, leaned the bike and demanded food, and they’d fed me. And I was so embarrassed and I gave them four times what I would normally pay. You’ve just given me a great story and been just so lovely. And they all came out and waved me off as I rode away and it was brilliant. So I carried on and went down to Xi’an, a wonderful city with the terracotta army obviously, and that’s there to see all of that and a sort of place called Pingyao. It’s a city that was a small walled city but it avoided the Cultural Revolution, so it wasn’t kind of destroyed by Mao. And there’s no cars allowed inside the walls, city walls, so it was like proper old China and it was so nice, I mean, I stayed there a few days, just because it was just so lovely and historic. If you haven’t heard of it, look it up and that’s what I would put on your bucket list, if you can ever get there. Pingyao in China. But after that went down to Chengdu, and Chengdu is the point where I turned west to head to Tibet. Tibet had been like a big dream of mine for a long time and I never thought it was going to ever be possible. I hadn’t really considered it originally for this trip, because would it be impossible and just like, yeah, I’m going to give it a go, and see how far I get. At the time it was a Chinese visa wouldn’t allow you to go into Tibet, so you need to get an alien travels permit. You couldn’t get those as an independent traveler so if you’re going in on the airplane or you’re going in on the train, you could get one. That’s part of your ticket and you only got it once you got on the plane or on the train. One of the options was to buy a plane ticket or a train ticket. Just seemed too expensive and too much for a risk to not be actually able to get the permit. Still, the easiest way is just to sneak through across the border in the middle of the night.
Gabriel: Okay.
Joff: I made that choice. In Chengdu, I found exactly where the border was so I could get it, but as it was, when I turned up it was kind of on a corner and I came around the corner, the road forked and there was a border post and there’s loads of soldiers there and police and like, oh I’ve rode straight into them, and they’ve all seen the bike, and they’re all over the bike. So I was like, oh god, I wanted to be this really subtly and I didn’t mean to do it in the middle of the day, and now you’ve seen me. So they made me fill out a form to say where I’m going and I was like, to the south. Oh, the south. Yeah, yeah, to the south. Didn’t mention Tibet, obviously. You know, your occupation, Mickey Mouse puppeteer or something. It made no difference. They had these little, they look like little garden sheds, so I said I was staying there tonight. I’m very tired. Okay. And then, about 2 a.m. in the morning, woke up and then had to get the bike out of the shed and onto the road without making any noise at all, because it’s absolutely silent there. You’ve got to be careful of the dogs. There’s dogs everywhere, and if the dogs scent you, they start barking. That wakes everyone up. Got it out the shed, got it onto the road, there’s a big long sort of bridge there. I went across the bridge, under the barriers to the border. I could see a few sleeping dogs and a few dim lights in places and sleeping soldiers, and I snuck in and I got across and like, oh thank god for that, and then did like an hour’s ride to get away from the border.
Gabriel: You’re doing all of this with a high wheeler.
Joff: Yeah, I know.
Gabriel: It is the most conspicuous thing you could do.
Joff: Well, exactly, yeah. Yeah, it’s mental, really. Once we into bad thing is that wasn’t the last one, because they have checkpoints. There was, I think, between the border and Lhasa, there was probably five or six proper military checkpoints. I’d be like Checkpoint Charlie in the old sort of German border, which I knew I had to cross, but thankfully they have these stones outside of the road, the are kilometer markers, very clear. I’d researched it and fout out where the checkpoints exactly were, so I knew, so I wasn’t going to have the same issue of running straight into one. Obviously, you’ve got the military convoys coming down and the police coming down the road, because there’s only one road. You can’t actually avoid them, because there’s no trees, there because you’re up at decent elevation now, this is all like above 3,000 meters. By accident I discovered earlier in the trip that everyone thinks you’re going in the direction that the bike is pointed, so what I did when I saw like a convoy, because you could see all the dust and stuff, because these are big military convoys, I’d hop off the bike, cross the road, point it back towards China, pretend to be having a drink, and wave at them. You’re not trying to hide, because then you look suspicious. You’re pointing it out of Tibet, which they want you to be leaving anyway, and it worked an absolute treat, yeah. I say, I never had any issues, which is brilliant, you know, and it’s just that bit of psychology, really. So I carried on and then I came to one of the checkpoints. For the checkpoints I’d camp out sort of like a mile beforehand or so and then cross the checkpoint again in the middle of the night so I came up to this and it was the narrowest one-car-wide bridge, so the barriers over either end and it went through like a little rock tunnel or a covering or something. So I don’t ride up to it. I creep up to it and sort of tiptoe, just because then in quiet, and obviously there’s no lights so you’re by moonlight. And I crept up to the checkpoint and I was just about bring the bike under, and I noticed on the side there was a soldier. They were standing there with his gun on his shoulder, fast asleep. Oh god. All right, don’t wake him up. Chinese soldier’s got a gun in the middle of the night. He’ll see me, shoot me presuming I’m a ghost or something and roll me into the river. My heart was pounding and I got the bike under the barrier as quiet as I could, and the barriers are kind of quite low, and quite an effort to get it under and up again without making any noise, especially. I got it under the barrier and I got away and I was walking across the bridge, tiptoeing away, just thinking yes, so smug and so happy. Went to the other side, there’s another barrier. Stupidly, I don’t know why I didn’t even think of it, when I got to the other side, I nearly stepped on the toes of another soldier guarding the barrier on the other side. I was so happy to get past the first one I’d forgotten about there’s going to be another one on the other side. And literally the guy was standing a foot and a half away from me, again fast asleep with gun on his shoulder. Modern days where your phone needs to get selfie, but that wouldn’t have been a good idea. I’ve never been so slow and quiet in my life, trying to get the bike under that barrier with him just being so close, without knocking anything or touching anything, and then get up the other side, and then to be able to get away again, which I did without him waking up.
Gabriel: Well, you are really looking for excitement with this trip to Tibet.
Joff: Yeah, well I’m not particularly looking for it, but it comes along.
Gabriel: Wow.
Joff: So then I sort of carried on and got on to Lhasa, which was incredible, an amazing city. Amazing history, you know. I read all the books that the Dalai Lama and how wonderful he was. I’d kind of gone along along with that and then stuck anything you go there and see it reality it was actually very very different, which I found fascinating. The Dalai Lama, you can’t mention him or anything whilst you’re in Tibet, and the people are incredibly devout. I kind of looked at the inequalities. Like in all the other countries, there’s been the Red Cross, there’s been the Red Crescent. In Tibet, if you’re sick, well it’s because of what you did in a previous life, so you could lay down there and die, and I mean there was, there was beggars, crippled lying on the street with begging bowls, and the monks would step over them and go in. They would never pay for food or accommodation anywhere and they would go up to the monasteries and stuff, and everyone pays into the monastery. I mean, I stayed with a wonderful family, fabulous Tibetan traditional mud brick Tibetan house, a beautiful, beautiful place. They’re living in a medieval situation, but you know they’re paying money to the monks to keep these monasteries going, and the way they did it was, was by having no education other than Buddhism. You would never question anything else, you’d never know about the outside world, and that’s how it ran. Yeah, I came out of Tibet with a very different theory on how peaceful the Dalai Lama actually is afterwards. You know, I’m not saying I’m right, I’m not saying I’m wrong. You go there and you see something, and it’s different from the movies or the books, but that made Tibet more fascinating for me as well. It was the hardest country for me to cross, just because the altitude. I think the highest I got, base camp, was about five and a half thousand, six thousand meters, and sort of fifteen and a half, sixteen thousand feet.
Gabriel: You mean Mount Everest Base Camp?
Joff: Yeah. So after Lhasa going south you go to Shagatse, then there’s Mount Everest there as well. There’s two base camps. There’s the Tibetan one and there’s the Nepalese one as well.
Gabriel: Right.
Joff: So I went to the Tibetan one. I mean riding up to Everest Base Camp, you’re up to Mount Everest sort of penny-farthing. Having ridden there is, it was great and it was cool because there were only a few real adventure tourists there coming up in sort of jeeps, and they’re rolling down the window and they’re like, where are you from? How on earth did you get here on that? But it was amazing to get there, to stand in front of Mount Everest. I was very, very lucky, because it was clear when I was there as well. Sometimes you get there and it’s like all cloudy so you can’t see anything.
Gabriel: I thought people had to cross through a lot of snow just to get to the base camp.
Joff: Base camp is a broad term as well. I went to where the end of the road was.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Joff: It was the highest I’d been and I was absolutely shattered by the time I’d get there as well, because it was taking me to get up the mountains. It’s taking me two or three days sometimes pushing the bike up the mountains to get to the top and then this wonderful downhill which would last all these S-bends literally, and the S-bends going up they would go up and literally into the clouds, and you’d always know where the top was because there would always be the prayer flags. It was incredible. It was really, really amazing, but utterly exhausting.
Gabriel: Yeah, I can imagine.
Joff: Even pushing up the mountains, I would just stop and make sure the brakes aren’t jamming because it felt everything was jamming on, but it wasn’t. It was just the fact that it was no tarmac and it’s just so high, you’ve got no oxygen. I was down to doing ten steps pushing the bike up and stopping. Ten steps and stopping to catch my breath, and literally in tears, just being so, so hard and tiring, but the beautiful thing is, is that when you’re there, you’ve got no choice. There’s no turning around. There’s no bus, there’s no go to the local station and get on it. On one occasion I’d camped and it’d been sleeting and snowing all day long, so I was wet. Put my tent up. So you always carry a dry set of clothes, so you can change in the tent. You can have a dry set of clothes in the tent. Then I’ve gone in the tent, put the dry clothes on, had a cold night and then in the morning, I had to put the wet clothes on, because I didn’t know where I was going to be the next day, and I still had to have a dry set of clothes. That’s horrendous. In the morning, putting a wet set of clothes on and the hands were frozen, trying to pack up all the poles and the tent and everything. Got back on the bike and I rode for about 10 minutes and then my hands were so numb I couldn’t hold the bars, so I had to get off and walk. I mean, I could have ridden the road. I just couldn’t hold the bars. And my hands were so numb, I pushed the bike for a bit and then came across as a little Tibetan cottage, and I could see smoke coming out of the chimney, so I knocked on the door. Opened into a smoke-filled room, about six or seven people in there, the family in there, they brought me in and they knew exactly what was wrong. They pulled my gloves. I stuck them on the stove. Sat me down in front of the stove to dry out, I say jam jars full of hot water for me, and they saved a bacon that day. And it was amazing, you know. I was there for about an hour drying out and they sent me on my way afterwards, and I was now dry and I could hold my hands and I could ride and the weather cleared a bit as well.
Gabriel: Amazing.
Joff: After Tibet, so I dropped off the plateau and then down into Nepal and down to Kathmandu. You drop so much elevation down into Kathmandu, and suddenly all the trees come back, all this lush vegetation, some of these always beautiful girls washing their hair in the streams. I’m pumped full of always oxygen now, so I’m just like euphoric, you know, and you could buy chocolate again. Got down to Kathmandu, spent a week or so there just to sort of recuperate and eat a lot of food, to be honest.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: I didn’t spend too long in Nepal, because I was heading down into India. Got down to Varanasi in India, and there on the Ganges, which is amazing, just the sights and smells and chaos. From the tranquility of Tibet and somewhat in Nepal, to go down to Varanasi, this chaos and just thousands and thousands and thousands of people everywhere, and all living in the river, and washing in the river, cows giving birth to their calves in the river, everything. And the dead bodies floating past in the river, just don’t drink the water. The other people were drinking the water, which was incredible really. Some Western hippies I saw drinking the water and I was like, oh god, I had dysentery I mean I get your spiritual journey but well, I wouldn’t drink the water.
Gabriel: There are limits.
Joff: Yeah, exactly. And then I got on the Grand Trunk Road across India and I found India very stressful in the end, just because the amount of people and the amount of attention I was getting. That did sort of start getting to me quite a lot. By the time I got to Jaipur, I was happy to leave. So I had to fly from Jaipur into Bangkok, and then to go into Thailand it was such a revelation. Wonderful people and so friendly. And on the first day there I was walking, stashed the bike and going for a walk in the park, and a fella came up to me and he said, “Oh, hi, where are you from” and I said, “Oh no, I haven’t got any money for you mate.” and I was still in my India head and he said, “Oh no, I was just being friendly, I’m sorry,” and walked away and I realized I’ve been actually really rude. I felt so bad I went after him and like apologized profusely. I said, I’ve just been in India and it’s just like everyone’s on you. And it’s okay, no problem. Thailand was glorious. It was so so nice, and sort of did a big loop sort of round there into Cambodia. So we come to the border with Cambodia and the Thai roads are perfect, they’re absolutely smooth, and you go to Cambodia and suddenly you cross the border and the road is absolutely awful. I was told that the reason was that they make the road so bad from the border to Phnom Penh is because they want people to fly, so the airlines sort of bribe the people so they don’t repair the road. But I rode it. It was great, but I kept and getting told by people, whatever you do do not camp in Cambodia, because of all the landmines that are still there, even though they’ve been doing a massive clear up of them for 40 years. There’s still so many and then and you start noticing there’s animals and fields that have got a leg missing, there’s kids that got legs missing, they’ve trodden on a landmine, and it’s like, wow. And then you know got on to Phnom Penh, sort of a wonderful, dusty city. Going from there the main reason for going to Cambodia was to see Angkor Wat. And the town nearby is Siem Reap and then rode into Angkor Wat with the penny, one of the wonders of the world. Incredible there and the architecture and the size of the place. That was, yeah, that was fantastic. And then went back into Thailand and then it was down through Malaysia and to Kuala Lumpur, and there was a bit of a struggle to get an American visa, back to the western world after there.
Gabriel: The last leg of your journey. You went across the United States, I guess.
Joff: That’s it, yeah. So I landed in San Francisco. It was about February time now. When I got there they said, “Which way are you going?” I said, “I’ll cross the Rockies.” They said, “No, you’re not, because it’s still snowed in now.”
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: Handn’t thought about that. That’s a good point so I went south down to Bakersfield and cut in at Bakersfield in through to Death Valley, and at this stage I bumped into a chap called Oliver, who’s a German cyclist. He runs a hostel up in Montana and in the winter he goes off bike touring. So I rode with him for about a month, which is really cool. First time I’ve done a sort of decent distance with someone else, because I go slower than normal bike tourists and he said, “I’ve got loads of time.” We went down into Death Valley. I’d been having a toothache for a while and I tried different things, painkillers. I said before we actually go in I’ve got to go and see a dentist and the last sort of town before we head down into the valley. Went to see the dentist and he said. “Oh yeah, you’ve got to have your wisdom tooth out.” “Oh god. Do you know how much that’ll cost?” He said, “About $200.” Now you know for a traveling cyclist $200 is a lot of money. So I said to him, “You know, if I come back tomorrow, how would you pull the tooth out?” He said you’d grab it like that. He showed me the pliers.
Gabriel: Oh no. I see where this is going.
Joff: I’ve been through, seen in India and everything, and everything’s done on the street, and I’ve seen them doing it there, so it’s kind of like you know I’ve never done this before. And I said to the Oliver, I said, you’d give me a hand wouldn’t you? And he wasn’t squeamish. He’s like, “Yeah, that’s all right.” So we camped in this little gully off the road and he had a hip flask full of whiskey. I said, well there’s a great anaesthetic and I had some Leatherman pliers so I had a shot of the whiskey and we pulled it out. It’s definitely a life experience and I wouldn’t do it again. I would pay the $200, I can safely say. I did later on in the States meet a dentist. He gave me a big long rundown of all the things that could have gone wrong.
Gabriel: Okay. Do not attempt at home.
Joff: Yeah, I don’t recommend it.
Gabriel: Oh gosh, Joff.
Joff: Yeah, it’s a life experience. I do have a photo of it as well. Death Valley was incredible and on to Vegas, of course, and Grand Canyon, which is stunning. I camped on the edge of the Grand Canyon and you wake up in the morning and open your tent and there’s the Grand Canyon there. That’s pretty incredible, the number one most stunning natural thing I’ve ever seen.
Gabriel: Free camping is not allowed in the Grand Canyon.
Joff: Well, they say that. I think what they mean to say is, if you leave it as you found it, then it’s fine.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Joff: I think the 247th amendment in the American Constitution says if you wear a pith helmet and you’re riding on a penny-farthing you are fine for free camp.
Gabriel: I’m sure the park rangers would have been impressed to hear about the 247th amendment.
Joff: That’s it, yeah. Well, I always said either green or if I can, dark colored tents. Never have a bright colored tent, because they’ll spot you. But yeah, carried on from there, just carried on across country and dipping on the Adventure Cycling route, which was good fun to do because then you met loads of other cyclists then as well.
Gabriel: Which one were you on?
Joff: It was the one that goes through the center of the country.
Gabriel: The TransAmerica?
Joff: Yeah, I think that was it was. Yeah, beause I didn’t do the whole thing. That year there was the American Wheelmen. It’s a historic bicycle group, loads of penny-farthings and they were having their meet then in Dover, in Delaware, so I managed again to time it just to get there at the right time for that as well.
Gabriel: You just happened to be there.
Joff: Yeah, which was perfect timing, so that was great as well. That’s really nice, to meet all of them. And then headed north up from there. So I had family in Toronto at the time and that’s going to be my last stop in North America. Then flew across to Lisbon in Portugal and that’s the last leg. And I was a little bit pushed for time then, just because winter was coming so I just followed this sort of south coast round and I was very fortunate for the last leg. It was a very mild winter, so I had a really nice run up through France to get back to the UK. Came across on the ferry and landed in Dover. I’m sitting in Dover right now. It’s where I live now.
Gabriel: Oh, okay.
Joff: I can literally see the ferries out of my window which is really kind of cool. And then did that last ride for a couple of days back into London to follow the Thames round and had a really nice leisurely couple of days, just really taking in like, wow, I’m back in England now and the end of the journey. And that was two and a half years and 22,000 miles of pedaling.
Gabriel: And how many miles of pushing?
Joff: I’m not sure. It was clocking them all, especially in the mountains, and there was as much pushing upwards as there was going rolling down, because I could do about a six percent grade if it’s perfect tarmac. If it’s like a rough aggressive tarmac, or the no-tarmac, that makes it much harder, just because the solid rubber on the tires.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: And sometimes even if I could ride it, if I’m not on the bike I can’t get on the bike. So what you have to do is turn the bike around, go downhill, so you can get on roll downhill, then do a U-turn so you can then ride back up the hill.
Gabriel: Did you carry on doing bicycle tours on the penny-farthing or what happened after the big adventure? How did your life change?
Joff: I’d sold a few bikes to people beforehand, but when I came back, you know, everyone was asking me, can you make me bike? I’ve certainly tested my product. I got a workshop in London, so I started making bikes and selling those. I did that for about five years. When I started in ’98, ’99, there was just a veteran cycle club but no one who was just really out there riding pennies, modern pennies. You know, exactly the same but modern pennies. But by the time I got back there was a few other people doing it as well then, which is great and that’s got up to now, there’s loads of events you can go to, you know the UK, America, Australia and in Europe as well. Loads of races and rides you can do. There’s loads of people that they’ve got penny-farthings, which is brilliant. It’s the more the better as far as I’m concerned. After about five years, I was kind of like yeah, everything’s going well now, I’m really comfortable. This is actually the time to give it all up again. This is how I pay for these trips. I just sell everything I own. I’ve never had any sponsors or anything like that, so I just pay for it myself. Just sell everything and worry about what’s going to happen when I come back. Yeah, let’s go and do it again. So I sold everything again, closed the workshop down. The idea this time was to go around the world again but in the opposite direction, so it’s essentially I started in Toronto and I went straight into the States and stayed really north this time, into North Dakota and across country there up into Montana. I went right up to near the Canadian border again and Oliver, who I’d ridden in the States with previously, who helped pull my tooth out, I went up and stayed with him in his hostel there, which was great seeing him again.
Gabriel: No dental work this time, I hope.
Joff: No dental work that time. No, no. I got them checked before I went. And just headed down through the States and then from San Diego into Mexico. I went down the Bsja peninsula and across into mainland Mexico and down through, oh I forgot the name of the country. What’s the first country?
Gabriel: Guatemala?
Joff: Guatemala. There we go, brain fade. Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Got the Darién Gap, which is always the sort of famous one, you know. Are you going to go across? And nobody does and everyone tends to put their bikes on yachts and sail around right. That wasn’t really an option for me, because I couldn’t really get the bike on the yacht and obviously I looked at the Darién Gap, but at the time of the year was the wet season, which would make it very, very difficult, even to try it. I think it was Ian Hibbell that got through there in the ’70s. I think he’s the only one that’s ever got through with his bike. I’ve seen pictures of him like wading through swamps with his bike. I mean, it’s not very far – it’s 90 kilometers – but you know, there’s still lots of stuff going on there and military things going on there. So I was in Costa Rica and I looked to the map. So actually Caracas in Venezuela is actually further north than where I was in Costa Rica. No one’s going to Venezuela. Wonder why that is? Well, I’ll go there and find out. So I flew just across east to Caracas in Venezuela and have a go riding through Venezuela. People were lovely, but previous trip, Asia, had been cheap but Venezuela, because they’ve got this incredible inflation, it was so, so cheap. So I’d taken dollars in with me the. Good thing in Costa Rica, you could get dollars very easily in exchange, and so I took a big wedge of like one-dollar bills, and it was incredible. If you used your card in a machine, I think you’ll get six bolivars, I think it was at the time, for a dollar, but if you do it on the black market you get 350, 450. I barely camped at all. I say I get like a little guest house or motel for 50p, and they had air conditioning and always great internet. I mean even there was posh hotel and I thought I’ll go in there and just to get a drink. You know, the drink’s going to be cheap, and then I went in and, how much actually is it for a night to stay here? I think that was like five dollars.
Gabriel: Whoa.
Joff: This was a five-star hotel. It was a five-star but it was run down because, you know, there’s all the sanctions. But the food was great. I thought god, I’m gonna have a night here just for I’m gonna have a splash out and spend a whole fiver.
Gabriel: Yes, splash out.
Joff: That’s it. Have a five-star hotel, just sort of treat myself. My visa was running out. Unfortunately, there was an election at the time so Maduro, he started even making a bit of conflict with Colombia and before I got to the border crossing with Colombia, they closed it and the only one they said was open, potentially, was one like 200 miles further north, so I had to ride 200 miles in the wrong direction and this was down really like at low sea levels, the sea level was squelchingly hot and I got through to the border town and I’ve been going through this place, and oh my god, this is really dodgy, and got to the border and there’s always soldiers there because I thought, well, maybe I can bribe my way through or something. Now, I could see Colombia but they were just like, there’s no chance, can’t go through, and I only a few days left on my visa as well, so I rode back up the road about a quarter mile, so they couldn’t see me and dived into the bush. I went a couple hundred yards into the bush, then back towards the border to try and sneak across.
Gabriel: Here he goes again.
Joff: Yeah. Pushing a penny-farthing whilst wearing a pith helmet through the bush, it’s quite noisy. Unfortunately. I came across a patrol, Venezuelan army patrol. They was just a little bit upset. They were quite cross, I have to say. They took me out, put me in a room and shouted at me for a bit in Spanish, but I didn’t just understand. But then I just think I was more hassle than I was worth and they let me go. Fair enough. I won’t try that again.
Gabriel: But they let you go on the Venezuelan side still.
Joff: On the Venezuelan side, yeah. So I’m still stuck in Venezuela. If they’d been Colombian soldiers, that’d been brilliant. You know I’d been happy with that.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: I managed to race down to another city, which they have a small airport, and I managed to get on a flight to Colombia. One last flight, which I managed to get on. And they were saying the bike’s too big, we can’t take the bike, the bike’s too big, the bike’s too big and I was like, oh can you take surfboards? They had a measurement that you must be within this measurement. Normally I’d just leave the bike as it is, but they wanted it packed, so I put it in a cardboard box as much as I could, and I just wrote on the cardboard box what their maximum measurement was. And the bike was bigger but I thought, well, hopefully if I write it on there really, really clearly they won’t actually physically measure it. And then I also got a tape measure which I bought. I rigged the tape measure, so I added a bit to the end, so it looked like it was smaller than it was, so if the needed a tape measure I could’ve given them mine.
Gabriel: Genius move!
Joff: But they read it on the box. Ok, that’s good. Great! They didn’t actually physically measure it, so I was so relieved, and then got it on the plane and got to Colombia and then I went down into Ecuador, down to Quito, and had a really nice time in Quito, and then dropped down to the coast to speed up a little bit to head to Peru. In all my free camping time, never ever had any problems, and what I normally do is I stop by the side of the road and pretend to have a drink, pretend I’m taking a photo or something. When there’s a gap in the traffic, I’ve already scoped like a path off or some trees I can dive into, so no one sees me leave the road, and occasionally you get discovered by farmers and stuff but I never camp on a crop, never ever had to cross at an actual fence to get to a camping spot. So I went in. There’s really nice, under the banana palms and stuff, and I gone in there put the tent up and I say it’s a black tent so it really hides in the shade, and I could just see where I’d come in from. And then I saw a motorbike coming and two guys on it. I’d just taken my top off which was like a dark black top, and so I’m pink as anything so glowing, and there’s me that they saw. They came through looking for me. So I was like, okay, here we go. And they weren’t walking like happy, friendly farmers. One guy had all face tattoos and looked fairly scary and the other guy was a younger guy. You say hello to be friendly and everything, and the first guy pulled out a gun, stuck it in my face, and they dragged me out the tent and roughed me up a bit. You take what you want guys, you know, as long as it’s not the bike. You know, that’s the main thing. Do they tied me up and tied my ankles as well.
Gabriel: Geez.
Joff: Luckily I’ve got an older brother. When they tie you up, you twist your wrists so it makes it look tighter. You pretend it’s like really very tight and hurting you, so that later on you can then twist your wrists straight back and it’s loose. You can get undone, so I knew I could get undone. They took everything. So I had all my kit. I had a laptop with me, cameras and everything. Thankfully, when they went to the waterproof bag with the journals in, they emptied all that out. I had my passport in there as well, and they didn’t recognize the passport. They didn’t take the passport and they didn’t want the journals, just paper, you know. They’d done really, really well for themselves, and they took all my clothes, they took shoes, they took literally my cycle shorts and a vest that I had with me.
Gabriel: Oh, wow.
Joff: So they didn’t take the tent, which is good. I don’t think they could carry it, really, and the bike obviously… I mean they were on a motorbike anyway, so they couldn’t have taken the bike. And then they found the credit cards and they wanted to know what the PIN number was. Either you’re not going to give it to them, you’ve got to take a few thumps from that, and then you give in and you tell them a number and I had like, a gun against the temple, which is kind of the convincer as well.
Gabriel: Oh, geez.
Joff: So I told them a number. I didn’t know how far the next town or cashpoint was, so I knew that when they went that I had a certain amount of time to get undone and before they came back, because it was the wrong number. I didn’t know if they were both going to go or any one was going to go and one stay whilst the other tried the credit cards. So I was hoping that they were both going to go. When these things happen, you’ve got to go in the opposite direction. I’ve read Derren Brown. He’s an illusionist and I remember reading, a story that he’s told, that he came out of a gig once and a guy tried to mug him. And what he did was say, “Oh, your shoes they’re an amazing color. They’re so bright. What bright red shoes they are,” and they weren’t even red shoes. The guy was mugging him and the guy expects you to go “Oh,” like fight or flight, but he did something completely opposite, and that breaks the pattern. So if you break the pattern, you can save yourself. I end up sitting by the side of the road with a guy. Even though I was terrified inside, you know I acted really, really calm and no problem like tranquilo, tranquilo, you know, like limited Spanish, you know, just because, you know, he got a gun, just to break the pattern. If you start screaming and shouting, well you’re in the middle of nowhere in the jungle. essentially one bang is not going to make any difference. No one’s going to come running and wonder what it is, so you break the pattern so that doesn’t happen, which is what I did and just kept on talking to make yourself seem human. Although they can’t understand you, make yourself seem more human. Don’t be silent, because you just look like a sack of potatoes then. At the end, once they’d packed up all their stuff, because they didn’t like me looking at them, they wrapped my jacket around my head so I couldn’t look at them. The guy with the gun came and kneeled on me and put the gun against my head. I don’t know what they were saying, because it wasn’t in Spanish, it was the local language. And you could tell by his tone that he wasn’t so keen on him shooting me and they kind of were discussing it for a bit. Then he got off. I was expecting him to get a whack on the head, which didn’t happen, thankfully, and as soon as I kind of heard the motorbike start, then it was just like, get untied as fast as possible, then get out of there and get down to the road. Got down to the road and waved a car down, like a farmer, and he called the police. So they were there actually quite quickly. They stuck me on a coach back to Quito, because this is at sea level. Quito is… I don’t know what the elevation is, but it’s high and it’s cold. And so I had the bike and the tent and no bags to carry them in, well the tent and stuff and bare feet, and I ended up in a bus station in Quito about 3 a.m. And of course the worst place you ever want to be is the bus station in a sort of South American town or city at first thing in the morning, and I said oh, here we go again. So sitting there in the bus station, just get through the night. In the morning I’ll find my way back into town and sort everything out, but then the local guys came over and like, what’s going on? Because they could see I’ve been walking on through the jungle, with my stuff. My feet were bloody and I explained to them what had happened. One guy went home, got me some shoes. Another guy got me a jacket, they gave me a load of food, and it was just like this is the balance this is the balance. Ecuador isn’t a dangerous country. It’s a wonderful country, wonderful people, I just happened to meet two really horrible people. I went back to the hostel I’d stayed in in Quito and they were like, you just stay for free, mate, until you sort your stuff out. For like four, four and a half years of riding adventures of travel on the bike, that’s the first time that had ever happened. Unfortunately, that did bring that trip to the end.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Joff: They’d taken everything and I wouldn’t have been keen on free camping for quite a while after that.
Gabriel: I mean, I can’t even imagine you know that these people are discussing whether to shoot you or not.
Joff: It’s a different world.
Gabriel: That is heavy-duty.
Joff: You know, I’ve gone into the lion’s den, essentially, and I met the lion, but thankfully I got out of it. It’s a life experience. Been there, done it now. I don’t want to do it again. The fabulous experience is the thousands of people that I’ve met on these journeys, who have been so warm, so friendly, helpful, outweighs that one short experience by a million times, you know, and if I hadn’t taken my shirt off and they’d spotted me maybe they would have looked in and not seen me and got on somewhere else and not found me.
Gabriel: Well, was that the end of your touring time?
Joff: No, so since 2018 I always wanted to go to Iceland and as far as I could see no one had done a lap of Iceland on a penny-farthing, so I went up to Iceland and did the lap of Iceland on the bike and actually filmed that one properly as well. First trip I took photos and on the second trip I filmed.
Gabriel: Can we watch you? Are there links?
Joff: Yeah, it’s on YouTube.
Gabriel: What do we search for?
Joff: Just under my name, Joff Summerfield.
Gabriel: Okay.
Gabriel: There is just a wild video on YouTube of Joff on the descent in Death Valley, California. His body is pitched forward, his legs are up, and those cranks are just spinning like mad due to the speed that he’s gotten. Braking was not really an option, except breaking some bones, maybe, if he fell. That is definitely the racer’s mentality. I’ve put a link to the video in the show notes. Check it out if you get a chance.
Joff: Yeah, Iceland was stunning. Again a bit like New Zealand, more than New Zealand, actually. Every corner you turned, the landscape changed and was stunning. Incredible waterfalls, 24 hours of daylight as well.
Gabriel: And do you still have the around-the-world bike in your garage?
Joff: Oh yes. Absolutely. I’d never sell that. That’s them and I’ve done it on the same bike, all the trips other than the very first one to Paris. I say that’s all the same bike. It’s about 34,000 miles on the clock now.
Gabriel: Amazing. Does the bike have a name?
Joff: I kind of refer to it as my wife, because we’ve gone everywhere together and done everything together, and I won’t ever divorce. It’s sitting in the workshop, happily though not in retirement but having this bit of a sabbatical at the moment. I never cleaned it at all, so it’s all battle-scarred. Like all of us, we wear our scars with pride and it’s like to restore it, and paint it all up under the nice paint job and stuff again it kind of will hide all those scratches and scrapes and dinks and donks and bent bits, they all have their own little story behind them. A quick little bit of 3in1 oil in it, they’ll be ready to go. So that’s it.
Gabriel: And if there’s anything wrong, the bike will let you know.
Joff: Oh absolutely, yes. It’ll cry. Because the workshop’s quite small, the cranks do stick out a bit, give a nick you every time you pass, every now and again on the knee, just to remind you it’s still there.
Gabriel: And why the sabbatical?
Joff: Life was a normal life, and I got an ache in my jaw. Didn’t think anything of it. Went to the doctors, who said, don’t worry about it. And then it didn’t go away and then I went back. Finally, they sent me to the hospital, did a biopsy, and then I got a phone call saying that I got cancer. Went into the health system which is, the NHS had been incredible. I couldn’t give them more praise. Went through a million and one tests and everything. They told me I got stage-4 cancer, with a bit of a tumor, which has spread, so they blasted me with immunotherapy and the chemo right from the very start and that took a big hit right start. I lost an absolute ton of weight. I was down to 55 kilos, 50 kilos or something, which I put back on now so I’m overweight now because I’m not doing exercise. Thankfully, the treatment is working in the sense where it spread, that’s all retracting and so that’s that’s really good. I say I can’t ride the penny at the moment still but is looking, I mean I’ve got it, the tumor, for life. It’s inoperable and so I’ve got that for life but if they can maintain it and they’re gradually dropping the dose that they give me, you know, very gently, and every time they do that I get a bit more energy, which is the key thing. So I go on a chemo every two weeks and stuff and that’s life now. I’m having a great life. I’ve gone sort of full circle now in the fact that I say when I grew up in a motor racing family and everything was motor racing and I worked in motorsport and worked in Formula One and now I’m heading back to do motorsport stuff. I want to go racing, you know, whilst I’ve got the time. I want to go and enjoy it and do stuff. The long distance cycling, I mean never say never, but I think that’s over now. But if I can get back on the penny at some stage I’ll be happy for that.
Gabriel: I’m sure that all of your bicycle touring experiences have helped you with this challenge that you’ve been facing, because your resilience level is off the charts. So this is one more test.
Joff: Yeah, I look at it as the next adventure. And it’s like the metaphor of the mountain. You know, you’ve got to go to the top of the mountain first, and then you’ve got to get to the prayer flags first before you can have the downward path. You do have to have the resilience. it’s a case of fighting it and beating it. It’s a challenging journey, but it’s a journey nonetheless and hopefully I’m winning at the moment, and we’ll just have to see the future.
Gabriel: All I can say is I hope that for these couple of hours of looking back at your many, many incredible bicycle adventures, from building your own bicycle to biking on every continent except Antarctica, I mean, that is inspiration for people.
Joff: Well, thank you. I think the main kind of takeaway is that before I ever did this I was reading the books about people doing it. I read Thomas Stevens’ books, you know. Josie Dew was another one that I read, right, so early doubles and Anne Mustoe, and wondered if I could do that and these people are special. I’ve never met them so I can’t ask them that, but I don’t think they think they’re special. There’s nothing special about me. It’s just making that decision to do it and nothing’s impossible, and everyone can go and do this. People I’ve met on the road who are backpacking or something, they said, “Well, I wish I could do that.” Well, you just have to make that decision and then you can do it. You don’t have to do it on a penny-farthing. You can do it at a normal bike. Do it whichever way you like. Nothing’s impossible and the road in the world is there waiting for you. I want to see 100 more people do it on penny-farthings.
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.
Joff: If I went bike touring on a regular touring bike, I think it would feel very, very strange now. I mean, I ride regular bikes.
Gabriel: I think your wife would be very upset if you did that.
Joff: Oh, absolutely, yeah. Very jealous.
Show Notes
You can watch Joff’s daring Death Valley descent, as well as many other videos, on his YouTube channel.