holly and ben go adventuring.

Tag: cycle-touring

  • Home from home

    25th August – 1st September 2026

    There was something immediately familiar about Hong Kong, something greater than the sum of its parts: the traffic was quiet and orderly, following rules we knew and understood, there was an extortionately priced M&S on almost every corner and for the first time since entering China we were not stared and pointed at for being foreign. I was more than a little excited when we had introduced it to our itinerary to reset our 30 days visa free in China, for in addition to this familiarity it has three things I love in quite dramatic proportions: buildings, hills and sea.

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  • City fix

    1st – 7th August 2026

    A mere week after the desolate mountains of Central Asia, with the help of a flight from Kashgar, we found ourselves in a windowless shopping centre in the heart of Chengdu. This would not be either of our first choice of places to be in, and after weeks of failing to buy the most basic things, it felt completely bizarre to be surrounded by so much stuff.

    Given we will be spending some time off the bikes and will be going hiking at the end of the trip we were shopping for backpacks. Buying backpacks was the kind of decision which made complete sense up to the very moment we made it, at which point we began trying to work out how we would each strap a 48 litre rucksack to our bike and cycle many, many kilometers with it on top of everything else we are already carrying. Still, I was now the proud owner of a mustard yellow backpack, and that has to count for something.

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  • Wheel of fortune

    Until recently the most challenging ride I have ever done was the North Coast 500 in Scotland. I was very aware that this would be surpassed by the Pamir Highway, but I didn’t expect it to happen with quite such immediacy or brutality. A mere 48 hours into the route through the Pamirs we struck up a deal with ourselves. We needed a reward to keep us going and that reward is not going to Mongolia.

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  • Stuck in the loop

    11th – 24th July 2026

    There is a myth which spans various Pamir Highway blogs about the obligatory “Khorog rest week” which I thought there was little truth in. I was proven very wrong. When we arrived at our very relaxing homestay in Khorog we initially intended to stay for two days – one for rest and one for admin. When Ben got sick we had no choice but to extend our stay. We finally thought we were ready to go when we realised we had a fatal visa related flaw in our plan for the next stage of our trip. After a poor night’s sleep did little to resolve matters we decided to stay another day so that we could leave with a clear plan for the route ahead. We began to wonder: would we ever leave Khorog?

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  • Finding our limit

    3rd – 10th July 2026

    We had opted not to stay in the hostel in Dushanbe where supposedly every cyclist stays before departing on the Pamir Highway. If we had, we would have learnt that the route option we were about to attempt was brutal. We approached the whole thing with such a naive sense of optimism; Ben assumed that given it was a “highway” it would a smoothly paved surface to the very end. I knew this not to be the case, and despite also knowing that I lack confidence on even the most compact gravel surfaces, I chose to turn a blind eye. Perhaps we both sensed that the only way we’d have any hope of cycling it was by being blissfully unaware.

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