The Longest Ride - Round the World by Bicycle by Rob Penn

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About an hour after the crash - I had come over the handlebars flying down hill on a gravel road - the blood on my face and in my hair had congealed. Sweat was running off my forehead and my ripped T-shirt hung off one shoulder. I lent my bike against the gate of a farm, the first building I had seen since the morning, and walked up the drive. Children and women scattered, shrieking, and the farmer, a barrel-chested Kyrgyz man with taut, mongoloid features appeared from the shadows with a pistol at the end of his stiff arm.

"Dobriy dyen'. Kag dyela?" I said. There was no reply, but his eyes flicked passed me to the gate and my bicycle. At once, the pistol arm fell limp and the leathery brown skin on his face re-set to a broad grin. Ten minutes later, I was eating kebabs and yoghurt as two girls sponged my brow and, once again, I had my bicycle to thank for my salvation.

In the three years, it took me to ride 24,000 miles round the world, I was frequently amazed at the genuine and unmistakable trust people from the 31 countries I crossed placed in me, simply because I was riding a bicycle. Trust leads to, at a practical level, food and accommodation, but it is also a key to kinship and understanding. And in modern times, when we can be at least cursorily familiar with so much of the planet from an armchair, this is one of the greatest goals of travel.

Not that I knew this when I set off from New York in 1995. Having ground my existence to a lifeless uniformity working in London as a city solicitor, I was after adventure plain and simple. I chose to travel by bicycle by default - I could not ride a horse, walking was too slow, a 4-wheel drive was too expensive and I had heard too many 'worst bus journey I ever had' yarns from dreary undergraduates to contemplate public transport.

To my advantage and delight, I discovered that there is something virtuous in a bicycle. As Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: "You can't imagine a bicyclist committing a crime, can you?" Certainly, no sane thief would use one for his getaway. But it is also a ubiquitous mode of transport used by the rich and the poor. People know well of the physical effort involved and it is this hardship which raises the status of cyclist from traveller to pilgrim. Only a fraction of the world's people can afford to travel exclusively for pleasure, but pilgrimage is a feature of all the world's religions. Thereby, and no matter where I was in the world, I was fortunate to find a measure of empathy with the locals.

In the most unlikely places 'Mannanan' (my bicycle was named after the Celtic god of the Isle of Man) wrangled me an introduction: at an exclusive retreat for writers in Wyoming, in an aboriginal community on the Gulf of Carpenteria in Far North Queensland, at the door of a brothel in Sumatra, among fierce sadhus on the banks of the Ganges, with Bedouin tribesmen and war weary Bosnians and French plumbers in a go-go bar in Reims.

Happy memories do stick more keenly but to suggest that the entire journey was a breeze and an indulgence of humanity's largesse would be wrong. I was robbed three times (two further attempted robberies I managed to bungle my way out of), arrested twice - in Sri Lanka and Uzbekistan - and stoned by children in both hemispheres.

Yet what really roused me to put on my mettle were my own mistakes, all of which I rode into with a dangerous combination of innocence and hubris. I ran out of food and water in the Australian Outback because I got drunk and failed to add up the miles to the next town correctly. I rode through the cauldron of central India in searing pre-monsoon heat, got dysentery, lost my appetite, carried on riding and physically collapsed.

I reached eastern Turkey and the central Anatolian plateau in January and had to endure days when the temperature never rose above minus 5 degrees. With the wind chill, my hands and feet were painfully cold and I had to beg and force my way into homes, garages, police stations and lorry cabs to warm up. It was miserable and all the time I knew that I could have avoided it.

I entered Iran on a five day transit visa and to extend it I had to do battle with base apparatchiks in five different 'Bureau of Aliens'. When I lost my temper in the Tehran office, I was flung on to the pavement by the scruff of my neck to the amusement of a throng of Afghans waiting for work permits. In Kosovo, I wrote in my diary the names and address of an Albanian family, to send them a photo. The following day, at a Serbian military checkpoint, stentorian soldiers read this and thinking that I was working for, or at least a sympathiser with, the Kossovo Liberation Army, tore open my panniers and interrogated me. I was in Kossovo against everybody's good advice and I felt exposed and foolish.

It took the Serbian soldiers some time to get over the shock of seeing me there, on a bicycle. But I was used to this sort of consternation. In fact, I had used these stunned moments to bluff my way over a number of borders - China/Krygyzstan, Tajikistan/Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan/Iran, Lebanon/Syria and Bosnia/Croatia. Furthermore, I never had to pay a bribe. I felt that if I had arrived at these deserted border posts, manned by venal and indolent soldiers, in a converted Africa spec Land Cruiser, I would have been handing out crisp greenbacks faster than you can say "What special tax?"

Life on a bicycle is very earnest, ascetic even. The simplest things, such as washing, eating and reading a book became luxuries for me. This asceticism combined with the physical exertion and, of course, the solitude (arguably, three characteristics defining the most natural condition of travel) made me a more sensitised and, I believe, more perceptive traveller. However, the manner in which I adapted, albeit slowly, to life on the road made arriving home after three years more difficult than the greatest challenges of the trip. I was, I discovered, more adept at dealing with gun-toting, brawny, Kyrgyz farmers than I was at making conversation with London solicitors.