Book: Cycling Home from Siberia by Rob Lilwall

Rob and his friend Al Humphreys started from Magadan in Siberia, a town on the Sea of Okhotsk, west of the Kamchatka Peninsula, latitude 60 degrees north. They started in September of 2004 and starting riding a big loop through Russia, through frozen, remote, gulag territory Russia. They were told repeatedly they would die--and although exactly how changed with whomever they spoke--they were never expected to survive. Al was the steady experienced rider, and with his help, Rob and he made it to Japan.

Al chose to leave this grand adventure there and Rob continued alone the rest of the way, approximately 31000 miles, through Japan, through South Korea, down through China, by boat to the Phillipines, and then to Papua New Guinea, on around eastern and southern coasts of Australia, by boat to Singapore, through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, a bit of China again, Tibet, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan (with much trepidation), Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, through the north of Iran, around the southern end of the Caspian Sea, through Turkey, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium and home to England. What an adventure! from the bitter ravaging cold in Russia to the humid steaming jungles of Papua New Guinea. Rob camped along the road, crashed in hostels, or often stayed with families who were forever inviting him for a meal and a place on their floor for the night.

Rob was relatively inexperienced and hardly travel-wise when he started, but after surviving 3 years on his bicycle, he returned to London "disheveled, bearded" and asking himself, "How will I cope with the normal world again?"

There are some wonderful black and white photos and a hundred stories...amazing stories of one man on a bicycle and all the people he encounters in all the countries he passes through.

Just an example of Rob's writing. He is dodging checkpoints in Tibet, waiting until the middle of the night and creeping past hoping the guards would be sleeping:

"I was getting cold, so I set off again, and rattled downward through a gloom of snow and potholes, clinging to my brakes. An hour later, I am still halfway up the mountain and it was virtually dark. ...I dug out my temperamental spare flashlight from the bottom of a pannier, and it then it took me twenty minutes of wheeling the bike down through the complete darkness until I spotted a small patch of flat land on a cliff top beside the road. I put the tent up and climbed inside. My body was aching, and I was too tired to cook so, in a bad mood, I ate cold oats with water and lay down to sleep...The next morning, I looked outside to discover, with a shock, that I had pitched my tent right next to a yak skeleton."

Rob and his wife now are directors of a children's charity: www.viva.org

And you can see some video clips from a National Geographic DVD at: www.roblilwall.com