A cyclist has travelled more than 15,000 miles from the UK to Australia by bike, following the route his father took at the same age in 1984.
Jamie Hargreaves, 23, retraced his father Phill’s tracks, riding through 30 countries and three continents on the same model and year of bike. The trip took seven months, ending just before Christmas.
After starting the journey in May from Derby, where his father began 38 years earlier, Hargreaves caught the ferry to France where he then cycled southeast through Belgium, Italy, Slovenia and Croatia on the way to Turkey.
Hargreaves and his father with the original Mercia bike
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The keen outdoorsman, from Poynton in Cheshire, tried to follow his father’s path as closely as possible, diverging only where modern geopolitics presented a roadblock. He was unable to travel from Turkey through Iran, as his father did in 1984, and instead headed through Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan before rejoining the original route in Pakistan.
The route took Hargreaves through Nepal, where he reached Everest base camp, followed by another base camp on the world’s tenth highest mountain in an effort to one-up his dad. “I had to beat my old man,” he told the BBC. “So I did Annapurna base camp too.”
More than 130,000 people followed the journey on Instagram, where Hargreaves recreated the photographs his father, now 63, took nearly four decades ago.
Modern Singapore and his father’s photo from 40 years ago
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The Kazakhstan desert was one of the trip’s most gruelling stretches, and he had to cycle in the wind for about a month. “The wind was blowing east to west and we were cycling west to east pretty much the whole way so it was really hard work, it wrote us off,” he said. “I lost my spark when I arrived in southeast Asia until I met my girlfriend in Vietnam.”
Hargreaves begged and bartered for food on the trip, and carried all his necessities on his back — along with his one luxury, a ukulele.
After Nepal, Hargreaves flew to Bangkok before hopping back on the bike to cycle through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, ultimately finishing in Australia.
Although the initial plan had been to end in Derby, Australia, Hargreaves realised that this would mean finishing in the “middle of nowhere” and adjusted his finish line to Derby Street, Sydney, where he arrived on December 13.
Phill Hargreaves said: “I’m very proud that he managed to follow the route that I followed 40 years ago.”
He added that he was “especially proud” that his son had gone to Annapurna base camp as well as Everest base camp.