Alastair Humphreys - Thunder & Sunshine

From your front door, its a long ride home.
Alastair Humphreys

Souls that ever with a frolic welcome took,
The thunder and the sunshine.
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Thunder & Sunshine, second edition, reprinted 2009

Published by Eye Books Ltd 2007

Eye Books

29 Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

Tel. +44 (0) 207 708 2942

www.eye-books.com

Typeset in Bembo and Bodoni

ISBN-13: 9781903070543

Copyright 2007 Alastair Humphreys

Cover design and creative direction by David Whelan for Eye Books, with editorial assistance from Laura Chastney.

The events and opinions in this book originate from the author. The publisher accepts no responsibility for their accuracy.

The moral right of Alastair Humphreys to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or otherwise, except brief extracts for the purpose of review, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

Printed and bound in Great Britain.

eyeOpener

The main focus of Eye Books has always been tales of travelling and journeys - but the stories resulting from these are not only geographical and physical, but relate also to the emotional and human reactions that these journeys have on the individuals involved. The reason why the expeditions were considered and the effects of carrying them out.

Life is not a competition. Those who do not achieve major feats are certainly not failures, and those who DO achieve great feats are not all heroes. However, the story that this book tells must surely rank high, not just for the achievement but also for human courage and inspiration. It tells of challenges that would have destroyed most people, and of a 4 year endurance test - both of these by someone to whom a secure and conventional future was an option.

Alastairs decision to do what he did - to test himself (in the fullest sense of the word) - involved him confronting not only outside challenges, but being challenged by so many different values and cultures and realities. His decision was also taken as a result of his awareness of other people and his desire to help others - not just with the considerable amount of money that he raised for Hope and Homes for Children, but his reaction to the many strangers he met along the way and their undoubted reaction to meeting him. This will certainly have left an impression on him and on them.

Whatever strengths Alastair needed during this trip, he remains essentially human, both feeling and expressing all the frailties of fear, despair, loneliness, homesickness, exhaustion as well as genuine wonderment of all the goodness that he saw. It is definitely 4 years of living on the brink. Perhaps it is only by getting so close to the brink that enables people to view and experience the things that go unnoticed by most.

In publishing this story, I hope we have played a small part in helping others share the experience and will have given the readers a chance to glimpse the greater horizon on life, and in the honesty of the writing we have seen not just the journey of a man with a bike, but the journey of a man who saw, as Louis Armstrong sang, a wonderful world.

Details of other books written by Alastair Humphreys and other Eye Books authors may be found at the back of this book or on the website below.

Dan Hiscocks
Publisher Eye Books

For Sarah, my wife

After all it is only a book and no worlds are made or destroyed by it. But it becomes important out of all proportion to its importance. And I might just as well get to it because putting it off isnt going to help a bit.

John Steinbeck

Alastair is a man who has earned the title of, a man, the hard way. He is one of the few who understands that the romance of high adventure is but a mirage, and that the reality of such an epic journey as his is one of loneliness, aching muscles and of being at times both humbled and intimidated under the vast expanses of our planets wildernesses.

Alone, with only his bike as companion, Alastair tells in brutal honesty the often grim reality of cycling the globe. At times the journey is furious with bustling cities and bureaucratic checkpoints and at other moments he gives a very moving sense of what solitude does to us. He struggles to answer what it is that makes him punish himself under the scale and burden of this once-in-a-lifetime challenge. The answer is always the least important part. It is the journey that matters, and what that journey does to us.

I think it is fair to say that if Alastair had had any idea of how hard and long the road would have really been he might well have thought twice about taking on such a challenge. But thinking twice doesnt always lead down the road of achieving something monumental. Sometimes to make something of our lives requires us to dream, and then to shun the doubts and fears and grasp that dream with both hands and get out there and just start making some steps towards that dream. We need to commit, deep inside ourselves, not to rest until the job is done. My mother often told me, when a job is once begun, leave it not till it is done; be it big or be it small, do it well, or not at all. Alastair sure did this job well, and I am full of admiration for this remarkable man and his epic journey. Oh, there is one other quote that sums him up, commitment is doing the thing you said you would do, long after the mood in which you said it in has left you. Alastair: I bet that romantic mood had long left you on that lonely road as you headed into the wind and rain winding your way to the start of the Andes, eh?! But thats why you are special.

Bear Grylls, 2007

mesmerisingstory. You can almost feel the sand being kicked up in your face as you turn the page Tins book is a literary match to his physical achievement.
Geographical

if a lad from Yorkshire can overcome international terrorism, dysentery, a crushing Siberian winter and a month without showering then theres not really any reason why we all cant. He may not have meant it, but Humphreys engaging, sometimes brutal, sometimes comic style is above all a call to arms documented with unflinching honesty. Humphreys conveys his loneliness, wanderlust, grit and despair in a manner reminiscent of the great tradition of British explorers. He may have spent many hours asking why the hell he was doing this; anyone reading his book may, in the great tradition of watching British explorers, be more curious as to whether this man was insane or not.
The Guardian

Wonderful
Midweek, BBC Radio 4

An Epic Adventure
Benedict Allen

An incredible journey of distance, strength and
determination
Josie Dew

I had come so far. I could barely comprehend that I had not finished, that I still had so much further still to go. Over a year ago I had cycled away from home, bound for Australia. I had pedalled out of my village in Yorkshire, out of sight of my watching family, and out into the world. I did not know what I would find, nor whether I would cope. I knew only that it was a significant moment. I knew that, in the unlikely event of success, that I would probably categorise things for ever more as taking place either before or after that day I began my ride.

Riding to Australia was to be the first part of my dream to cycle the whole way around our planet, but, just a fortnight into my journey, the events of September 11th 2001 changed everything. As a new world exploded into the vacuum of our post Cold War complacency and war brewed in far away Afghanistan, my planned route through Central Asia was under threat. So I paused in Istanbul and concocted a new plan. I began riding through the Middle East instead, towards Africa. I arrived in Cairo and steeled myself to begin riding south. I did not expect to get far. To my surprise I managed to stick it out, overcoming massive self-doubt about my suitability for such an expedition. I pedalled all the way down Africa to Cape Town, to the ocean, to the end of the road, and to the end of Africa. I could ride no further.