A book for those who "need to believe they can do something remarkable"

Toby, aged 45, said: “In 2001, following a relationship break-up, a period of ill-health and year or so of drifting through temporary jobs, I joined a group of three strangers I found online, planning to cycle from Stoke on Trent to Singapore.

“It was a mammoth undertaking, not least because I was inexperienced and unprepared. My companions were considerably more experienced. It was clear at the beginning that they, and others, did not believe I would make it beyond western Europe – and when we arrived in Singapore they told me they were delighted to be proven wrong.

“The planning of the book was really the trip itself. 12-hour days give a lot of thinking time, and it would have been a great disservice not to make something out of it.

“It’s a coming of age story of sorts – how someone with no direction made a decision to get on his feet and do something remarkable. So to some extent I am the subject, but the people and places between are equally or more the subject of the book.

“It will appeal to those with a desire to see the places between, those who want to truly understand the peoples and lands they are travelling through. And it will appeal to those who have taken a knock and need to believe that they can do something remarkable. It should appeal to all who believe in the most liberating and democratic form of travel, the bicycle.

“I began writing several years after the trip, in part out of a sense of duty – to do myself and the trip justice. I mostly wrote up from my diaries, written in my Moleskine notebook. Over time I honed it, cut the parts that were mostly interesting only to me personally and improved the use of language and structure.

“I was an English teacher in Taiwan from 2002 until 2010, and have been an editor on magazines since, so I learned a lot about English grammar, syntax, style, pacing etc – things that I didn’t know I didn’t know.

“The starting point was June 1 2001 when we set out from Andy’s parents’ house in Werrington, Stoke-on-Trent. Andy had planned to ride to Singapore because it was the southernmost tip of continental Asia and the furthest place he could ride continuously to that began with an S, having already done Stoke to Sarajevo and Stoke to St Petersburg. Stoke to Singapore via Siberia fitted the narrative. The prologue sets out how I came to be at a loss aged 27 and living with my parents. I hadn’t written professionally before this. I started writing the book in 2005, three years after moving to Taiwan at the end of the bike odyssey. I knew I could write reasonably well and it was a life-changing journey that demanded to be written about. Having finished the book, I discovered that it is no easy thing to get published and after a few rejections, I moved on. In 2019, I decided to revisit the project, comprehensively edit it and put it out into the world, perhaps to put it to bed, or perhaps as the beginning of another life journey.”