One intrepid biker, 1400 Tibetan kilometres
Brad's a great character with a cracking story to tell. Check out his tale and take a look at his You Tube video link at the end of the interview!
You were a professional footballer, so what drew you to the sport of cycling?
Well, it is strange really, I travelled overseas after getting fed up with footy. I hadn’t made it onto the final list at Essendon (AFL club) and played a few years in Ballarat and I earned a bit of money so I decided I was going to travel. My first three months were in a car and the car was pretty unreliable so I thought I have to find something that I can actually fix myself. I was drawn to bike riding and touring and I ended up doing nearly two years on the bike and did about 35 countries including Iceland and the Farah Islands, Norway and Eastern Europe. When I got back I knew that there was a chance to go back and play footy and I didn’t want to do that so I thought I would give this cycling thing a go.
Your last trip was from Lhasa to Katmandu - a total of 1,400 grueling kilometres. How did you manage the trip solo?
I got the idea for this trip from a Dutch guy I met in Laos earlier in the year (2007), I went cycling through the mountains there, and he put me onto it. It was one of those trips that you have got to do once in your lifetime. So that planted the seed and I was able to get a few weeks off work and thought I would have a go at it. So Tibet was somewhere that was really interesting to me. Over a number of years I have watched the history unfold and had been interested in the Dalai Lama and I thought why not give it a go. I also understood I could do a detour off the main highway from Tibet to Katmandu and a short detour to Everest Base Camp.
How do you plan a trip like that when you live so far away?
The internet makes things a lot easier these days. There are forums set up for these kinds of people that only do cycling touring so you could actually ask pretty specific questions. I used the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree site so there was lots of stuff there. The really difficult thing is actually getting accurate maps. There probably isn’t an accurate map of Tibet at all, it’s a place that’s pretty remote and doesn’t have a whole lot of infrastructure so getting even accurate elevation readings was pretty difficult. On one hand getting up to date information was ok but getting accurate information was always a challenge.
So you are dealing with the element of the unknown?
The unknown and what really set this trip apart from previous ones was the altitude. I had never done any time at high altitude so for those that don’t know you fly into Lhasa at 3,700 metres so you are already well above 10,000 feet and you basically don’t come down from there. I spent most of the three and half weeks at over 4,000 metres and quite a large proportion of it at over 5,000 metres.
What sort of training do you do before you head off to do something like that? Do you need to be super fit?
Obviously it is endurance more than speed. And to be honest I probably didn’t go in with either (laughs). I had done a trip earlier in the year in Vietnam and Laos and I went into that really unfit and after week one I started to come good. I certainly went into this one a lot fitter. To put it into perspective I lost six kilos in a little over three weeks. You can’t really prepare because you’re averaging about six hours a day on the bike so there is no way you can train for that back home. But the main thing I tried to do was to get a couple of weekends where I would do two long rides to just get used to doing them back to back.
What sort of gear do you need? You would have to have had a GPS.
No I didn’t have a GPS. I had a map and a compass and a reasonable sense of direction, but the latter sometimes fails me. My mountain bike was ten years old and I ran touring tyres. I only took rear panniers to keep the weight to a minimum. I had a tent a camp stove and a thermarest. All up my bike was probably 12 kilos and luggage was about 25 kilos.
Were there sealed roads or dirt roads? What were some of the harder points of the trip?
About 400 of the 1400 kilometres were sealed. That was the first 400. The road conditions were pretty horrendous and famously so. It’s a stretch of road that people do in 4WD’s and complain. In fact I had one guy saying to me that when I was complaining about the hard day I had had on the bike, ‘gee you reckon that was hard you should try doing that in a 4WD’. So it was pretty extreme conditions.
At any time were you scared about what was unfolding?
No. I guess the thing at high altitude you are always worried about the weather turning. There was one stretch of road that I did from Everest base camp across through a really remote area and the year before at the same time of year two cyclists had died of hypothermia on that same stretch. The difference is I did it on a day when the weather did not turn but if it does it can turn pretty quickly and be very nasty.
You did this trip solo, do you sit there at night and chat to the nearest yak?
Sometimes you get so bored with your own company that not even I’ll listen to me. People think you have some much time but I feel like I am so busy when I am doing this stuff. You are putting pretty long days including packing and riding.
At the end of the trip you managed to get involved in the Nepalese mountain bike championships?
I rolled into Katmandu about three days before I was due to fly out and there were all these signs up saying that the championships were on. I went to one of the local bike shops and managed to get myself a late entry. It was a really fantastic experience it was kind of like Tour de France Nepalese style. Basically winding through all these tiny little villages and you have kids out there with cow bells and screaming which was really great. There was the odd additional obstacle as well as I came round a corner and there was a water buffalo there in the middle of the track so I made some hasty movement of him and me. There was probably 90 odd people in it and about 20 of them were foreigners.
What’s the next trip?
The trips that I am really drawn to are Iran and Pakistan are the two that I would really like to get to, the other one that I have been starting to get into is Bolivia.
Thanks for your time
Watch some of Brad's trip on YouTube - click here
LISTEN TO BRAD TELL HIS AMAZING STORY
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