GILROY
– Halfway through his five-year, 50,000-mile trek around the
globe, Alastair Humphreys finally got to stay with family – here in
Gilroy.
GILROY – Halfway through his five-year, 50,000-mile trek around the globe, Alastair Humphreys finally got to stay with family – here in Gilroy.
From his tiny home town of Airton in Yorkshire, England, the blond-haired 27-year-old has cycled solo for two and a half years through Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America. He’s doing it partly out of a zest for life and partly to benefit a charity that finds homes for orphans in Eastern Europe and Africa.
He’s already pedaled more than 25,000 miles – the earth’s circumference – but Gilroy is only about the halfway mark on his journey. He figures he still has roughly two years and 25,000 miles ahead before he shows up again at his parents’ door.
In the meantime, he’s found family in his mother’s second cousin, Dee Hickman, of Gilroy, the first member of the small family to be born in the U.S. The two hadn’t seen each other in 10 years before Saturday.
“We don’t often get to see family,” said Hickman Monday at the Bike Center shop on Monterey Street. “He was just a kid when I saw him. … That was my first trip back to England.
“I’ve stayed with a couple of friends, but most of the world has just been with strangers – which is cool in itself,” Humphreys said. “But it’s also nice to stay with people who know a bit about you and know your past.”
Hickman can’t get enough of Humphreys’ tales, from sleeping in African huts surrounded by lions to sailing across the Atlantic on a racing yacht. She’s sure all his equipment will some day be in a museum exhibit.
“The Guinness Book of Records defines a journey around the world as one that covers 16,000 miles and four continents,” Humphreys says on the home page of his Web site, www.roundtheworldbybike.com. “Now I am doing the job properly: 50,000 miles, five continents, 50 countries. Alone and on a bicycle. No buses, no hitching, no support vehicles.”
Humphreys left home in August 2001, at age 24, after graduating from Edinburgh and Oxford universities. One day he may be a biology teacher, as per his education, but not yet.
“All through university, I knew I wanted to try to make a career from adventurous travel, but I didn’t really know specifically what I was going to do. So I spent my university working to save up money, but I didn’t know what I was saving for.
“It was only really my last year in university – the year when you’re supposed to be working very hard – that I firmed up this idea and started really going for it. So it was sort of four years of dreaming and looking at maps and playing on the Internet and then one year of actually, solidly coming up with a plan.”
He is putting his novelty value to use for a higher purpose – to raise awareness and funds for Hope and Homes for Children, a charity founded in the former Yugoslavia.
“In Eastern Europe, they’re trying to take kids out of these huge state orphanages, which are more like prisons, and find them foster families,” Humphreys said. “In Africa, they try primarily to find the original family from displaced children from wars – or where they can’t find family members then to find them a foster family. It’s very country-specific because every country has different situations.”
Not everyone around the world gets what he is doing. In Africa, he said, most people just thought he was weird.
“Even in America, I say to people, ‘Yeah, I’ve come from Africa, I came through Latin America, blah, blah, blah,’ and they go, ‘Where are you going to go from here?’ And I say, ‘Oh, I’m going to cycle to San Francisco.’ And they go, ‘San Francisco?! On a bicycle?!’
When he set off on a $400 (U.S.) bicycle named Rita, he had $11,000 in his bank account and spoke two languages besides English. He’s now on his third bike and his fourth foreign tongue; he’s not quite sure how much money he has left.
“French and German I spoke before this, but they’ve been pretty useless since I left France and Germany,” Humphreys said. “I was in Latin America for a year, so my Spanish was pretty good by the end of that. And now I’ve just started teaching myself Chinese, but that’s not going very well. I haven’t learned one word yet. … I have discs to listen to as I cycle, but it just sounds like Chinese to me at the moment.”
Otherwise, impromptu sign language and drawings will have to do.
Rita gave way to Rita 2 in South America, but by the time Humphreys got to Phoenix, Ariz., Rita 2 was pretty worn. There, a group of well-wishers raised enough money to buy him a much better machine.
“The first two I had were $350, $400 bikes – The whole trip’s on kind of a ridiculous budget – whereas this one cost significantly more than that,” Humphreys said.
“In Latin America I was doing about 60, 70 miles a day. Here in the U.S. I’m doing about 100 miles a day. … It’s so easy. The roads are good. The mountains are pretty small. (There is) lots of food, and you don’t need to carry much water. And I’ve got an amazingly good bike now as well.”
As for meals, he has gotten far on bananas and pasta, plus a wide variety of local delicacies. The worst thing he’s eaten was guinea pig in South America. The only thing he refused to try was boiled mice kabobs in Malawi.
Now he’s heading to Alaska, hopefully before winter sets in.
“I’m going to need to get a ship across to somewhere in Asia – I don’t really care where. … Then I’ve just got to cycle home from there.”
The upcoming boat to Asia will be the first time Humphreys has traveled by engine power. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean as a crewman in a yacht race from Cape Town, South Africa, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and he sailed from Colombia to Panama as well.
“If I can get a boat to Asia, then it means I’ll do the whole world without an airplane, which is pretty rare these days,” Humphreys said.
By the time he is ready to make his trip across the Pacific, he expects the winter winds will prevent him from finding a sailing vessel.
“I’m going to have to concede defeat on that,” Humphreys said, but he didn’t seem too worried. With an adventure as pure as this one, it’s not much of a compromise.
For more information on Alastair Humphreys’ voyage and Hope and Homes for Children, log on to www.roundtheworldbybike.com.
