The Next Chapter

Coming back ‘home’ has felt a little stranger than I expected. Not because anything here has particularly changed. If anything, that is maybe the problem. Home is familiar. I know where everything is, I know how life works here and, after months of moving every day, there is something slightly dangerous about how quickly familiarity starts to feel comfortable.

Which is why I’m still sleeping in my tent, still wild camping in the local woodlands and still doing my best to live my life from the bike as I would do when away.

There is a perfectly sensible argument against this. I am home, as much as I have a home. There are walls available. A proper bed. Electricity that arrives through a socket rather than requiring a power bank to be strategically charged whenever the sun decides to cooperate. Water comes out of taps. Food does not need to be sourced for days ahead and carried around on a bicycle.

Years of living this way have made a thin piece of fabric feel considerably more normal than it probably should. Mostly, though, I’m still in it because I don’t want to get too comfortable.

This isn’t supposed to be the end of anything. If anything, it’s an interruption. A chance to be with family at a time when we need each other and a chance to catch up with friends that I normally only see through screens and in quick, rushed messages.

Being back ‘home’ has given me something I haven’t had for a while: time to think. When I’m riding, most decisions are relatively small. Which road? Where can I find food? Is that track genuinely a shortcut or am I about to spend two hours pushing a forty-kilogram bike through something that hasn’t technically been a road since the seventies? The bigger questions tend to sit quietly in the background because the immediate ones are what matter at the time. There’s no need to think too far ahead. Doing so can be distracting and dangerous.

But being back here, with the usual day-to-day thoughts and decisions now irrelevant and bigger questions surrounding the future much more prominent, there is nowhere for them to hide.

The biggest is obvious. What’s next?

For most people, that is probably quite an enjoyable question. For me, it has become surprisingly difficult as there are too many possibilities.

I could stay in Britain. There is still a ridiculous amount here I haven’t ridden, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of Scotland. I could head back into Europe. I could find somewhere warm for winter. I could pick a country I know almost nothing about, point the bike towards it and see what happens. Usually that kind of uncertainty is exactly what I enjoy. An empty map has always been more interesting to me than a finished plan.

This time it has felt different. Perhaps because, deep down, I’m not really looking for somewhere to go for a few weeks or while away the colder months. I’m trying to work out what the next proper chapter looks like. And once I started thinking about it in those terms, a lot of the easier options stopped feeling quite right. I feel there will always be time for me to tick off those individual countries I’ve still not been to, still time to plan that two-month trip to places like Canada and Iceland. Still time for the body to be willing to push itself through these types of adventures.

Heading south into Europe would be simple. I know how Europe works. Borders are easy. Resupply is easy. Roads are generally predictable. If something breaks, finding a bike shop is rarely a major expedition in itself. There are still countless places I want to ride there, and I know I would enjoy it. But I kept coming back to the same uncomfortable thought.

Is that enough right now?

I don’t mean that dismissively. Adventure doesn’t have to involve suffering, border bureaucracy or wondering whether the next town contains food. Sometimes a good road, decent weather and somewhere pleasant to camp is more than enough. But health and fitness are still, I think, on my side and I know myself well enough by now to recognise when I’m trying to choose the sensible option rather than the one that makes the most sense.

The journeys I remember most clearly are rarely the straightforward ones. They are the ones where I was slightly unsure whether the idea was sensible in the first place. Crossing the Himalayas entirely unsupported. Venturing through the Darién Gap. Long stretches of Australia where the horizon seemed to exist mainly to mock me. Places where the challenge wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of the journey. It was part of the reason for being there. The body and mind still crave that kind of adventure and it’s hard to ignore their pleas. The more I thought about another comfortable winter somewhere familiar, the more it felt like I was avoiding the question rather than answering it.

I wanted something bigger.

Africa had been sitting somewhere in the back of my mind for years. Not as a plan as such but more as one of those enormous areas of the world I would occasionally look at on a map and think, one day.

Africa is difficult to think about as a single destination anyway. It is a continent, not a country, and the distances alone make that obvious very quickly. But once the thought of cycling this continent reappeared on my return, I couldn’t quite get rid of it. What if I just kept heading south? Not southern Europe but further. Down to Morocco and then keep going.

It started, as most of my better decisions seem to — at least at the time — with a question that was initially much too large to answer. Could I cycle from the UK to Cape Town?

Even writing that down makes it sound slightly ridiculous, which I have learned over time, means I’m probably on the right track.

There is always a moment with these things where an idea stops being fantasy and begins turning into something you might actually do. It normally happens very quietly. No dramatic announcement. No map spread across a table while inspirational music plays in the background. Just a gradual change in the questions you start asking. Instead of:

Would that be possible? You start asking: Which way would I go? Then: What countries would that involve? Then: What about visas? And before long you realise you have accidentally started planning it, begun dreaming of it and spend your evenings lying awake in the tent visualising the reality of it.

That is more or less what happened with Africa.

The sensible part of my brain immediately produced a fairly impressive list of reasons why this would be complicated. Visas. Borders. Vaccinations. Malaria. Weather. Seasons. Equipment. Power. Security. Finding routes through countries where the straightforward line on a map may not necessarily be the sensible one on the ground. All are valid concerns.

Unfortunately for the sensible part of my brain, the other, more adventurous part of me had already made the decision that now was the right time to finally get to explore Africa. Any reasons why I shouldn’t or couldn’t were quickly silenced by equally powerful reasons as to why I should and why I can. I’m almost powerless to stop it, or maybe I just don’t want to.

Deep down I realise I crave another big adventure. My round-the-world trip seems so long ago now and I miss the thrill of the challenge that comes with not knowing how each day will go, where I’ll sleep, if the route is safe or even passable. I miss the thrill of looking at the map in the tent at night and picking a route for the following day that follows a path of most uncertainty.

That is partly why I’m still in the tent.

I know how easily a temporary return can become something else. One comfortable night becomes a week. A week becomes a month. Suddenly the bike is leaning against a wall and you are explaining to yourself that you are still travelling, you’re just taking a slightly longer break than expected. There is nothing wrong with stopping. But I don’t want to stop. I still wake up wanting to know what is beyond the next horizon. I still like the uncertainty. Perhaps most importantly, I still feel as though there is far more of the world left to understand than I have already seen.

Sleeping outside here keeps that feeling close. It is difficult to convince yourself that you have settled down when you are climbing into a tent every evening, packing it all away every morning and silently emerging from the woods in the hope not to be spotted.

There are more practical advantages too. I don’t have to readjust to sleeping on the ground. I don’t have to rediscover which pieces of equipment I’ve forgotten how to pack.

And if anything leaks, breaks, collapses or otherwise reveals itself to be unsuitable, I would much rather discover that here at ‘home’ than several thousand kilometres further south.

Mostly, though, it keeps me in the right frame of mind.

I’m home. But I’m not home. Not really.

The next few weeks suddenly look rather different. There is a lot to work out. More than I want to get into here, partly because much of it is still changing.

For now, Africa is an idea that has become serious enough that I can no longer pretend I’m merely thinking about it. If it is to happen, then there are appointments to make, equipment to reconsider, routes to understand and a fairly intimidating number of border rules to read.

There is also FTtouring itself. For years I’ve travelled first and worried about documenting it afterwards. This time I want to do things slightly differently. The website is finally becoming a proper home for the journals, guides and stories I’ve accumulated along the way. There is a new journey ahead, but there is also the challenge of working out how to share it properly while still actually living it. That balance matters.

I have no interest in spending a year cycling through Africa only to discover that I experienced most of it through a phone screen. The riding still has to come first. The people. The places. The wildlife. The difficult days. The completely unnecessary detours that inevitably turn out to be the best part. Everything else has to fit around that. Exactly how remains another problem for another week.