China to the UK by bike - Chapter 1

The best-laid plans

Sometimes the biggest ideas come from the smallest and seemingly meaningless interactions. While living in Shanghai in 2021, I was on a trip hiking and cycling in neighbouring Zhejiang province with a few friends. As often the case on these kinds of trips, the topic of crazy adventures we had heard of often came up. My friend Leigh was talking about how cool it would be to cycle from Shanghai to Hong Kong, and we all started raising the bar until we were talking about cycling from China back to Europe. For some reason, instead of the normal joking around, it excited me. I knew I was due to leave China within the next couple of years, and biking back to the UK suddenly seemed a huge motivation. My job in China was petering out - expats were no longer wanted within my company, and it is demoralising to be not needed and simply slink away. Going back with a bang - and a huge bang at that - by cycling home, excited me. I told them I would do it. It seemed crazy, but once I had said it, there was no going back.

The next year and a half became focused on doing the trip. I avidly researched the route, the amazing countries and the experiences I could have along the way. However, it was soon apparent this would be a lot harder than I thought. Prior to 2019, the route had actually been relatively well covered by hardcore cycle tourists. However, COVID had brought in more stringent restrictions in China and much of Central Asia than elsewhere in the world, and most of the borders I would need to cross were closed. But I still held out hope that by the time I needed to leave China in 2023, things would have opened up, and set about planning in earnest.

The route I chose was likely to take me 4-5 months, covering 12,000km along the path of the old Silk Road from China to Europe. It would take me through the high mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, across the deserts of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan into Iran. The countries sounded foreign to Western ears and foreboding, but the stories I read of the warm-hearted hospitality from the poorest people in these areas encouraged me. From there, I planned to go north, through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Türkiye, then on into Europe. I would follow the Adriatic Coast through Albania, Croatia and Slovenia into Italy, with the beautiful mountainous coastlines and summer weather enticing me. I would finish off crossing the Alps and then embarking on my own unique ‘Tour de France’, before taking the ferry to the UK and home.

Plans made, bike bought, waiting on my contract to finish and desperately hoping borders would open sometime soon, I met Turan at a friend’s birthday party in September 2022. As fate would have it, I had just been researching her home country, Azerbaijan, the night before, as I would pass through it on my trip. She was amazing and changed my outlook on life straight away. I had assumed relationships would be something I might pick up again in three or four years time, once I had finished my adventures and settled back into the UK. But she was wonderful - she had a warmth and playfulness that was immediately apparent as soon as we struck up conversation, and I lost myself straight away in those beautiful, big dark eyes.

Our first date was wonderful but tinged with wistfulness at the same time. I knew I had to leave China the following year. Turan made it clear she loved Shanghai - it was the first place she had lived where she really felt free, and it is an incredibly social city as an expat - she couldn’t see herself leaving. I was drawn to her and longed to be close to her, but at the same time, I didn’t want to give up on my dream trip.

The next few months were a whirlwind. Things happened quicker and in crazy ways different to what either of us had expected. We came together at difficult times for both of us personally, but being together seemed to make us into renewed people. I felt completely new and blessed with a new vigour for life. The world around me just seemed somehow more beautiful when I was with her. We lived through weird times - surviving the first week of ‘Covid victory’ in China, where the government ended nearly three years of strict control measures overnight, meaning Shanghai became a ghost town as everyone caught COVID within the first week. We followed this with a trip to the tropical island of Hainan to celebrate Christmas and New Year with many of Turan’s friends. On the plane back, we discussed how we could stay together. I was willing to try and move jobs to stay in China, but Turan gave me the chance to keep my goal of returning to the UK, saying she had always had a dream of studying in Europe and agreeing to move there with me.

It did change the way I wanted to do the trip. I fell more and more in love with her over the next few months, as we took every opportunity to experience this country we had both loved so much in the time we had left. We took weekend trips to remote places, visited Hong Kong together, and explored every corner of the city we had called home for the last five years. When I proposed to her over a picnic at the same riverside park at which we had our first date less than seven months before, we knew we didn’t want to spend such a long time apart. The plan changed - instead of taking the scenic route home, I would commit to meeting Turan in Istanbul on my birthday, 20th June, giving me just two months to make it back to the UK by bike.

I changed the route, cutting down the distance to a minimum. Setting off from the westerly province of Xinjiang, I could do a stripped-down journey of 7,000km. But that would still require 120km a day, a significant undertaking considering the uncertainty about the route - I could still not find any stories online of any cyclists navigating the route since 2019 - and my own fitness. I had only ridden a bike once in the previous 6 months, and had required minor knee surgery after that to repair troublesome cartilage damage! I was fit from running, but spending 7-8 hours a day in the saddle was going to be something else entirely.

Mercifully, the Kazakhstan - China border opened in early 2023, and I set off on 19th April. After a 50-hour train ride to Xinjiang and a few hiccups along the way, I reached the border on the 21st of April, with two months exactly to do my trip. As I crossed the 5km of barbed wire and watchtowers that China deems reasonable, I was worried about the uncertainty that lay ahead, but most of all excited - I was finally doing what I had planned so long to do.