Cycling the globe - a rite of passage

Let me tell you about my little plan. My name's Zsolt, and I hail from Transylvania, a place that conjures up all sorts of intriguing images, mostly involving mist and fangs. I had this rather ambitious notion bubbling away: to hop on my bicycle and pedal my way around the entire blooming planet.

Apparently, this grand scheme has been gestating since I was a "wee lad," which sounds charmingly archaic, even to my own ears. Not just a quick whizz around the local park, mind you. We're talking a good three or four years in the saddle. The aim? Well, naturally, to soak up the "sights and sounds" – the usual tourist guff – but also, rather more earnestly, to "find myself" and morph into some sort of "badass adventurer." I blame Japan squarely for this. Back in '08, I visited the land of the rising sun and contracted a particularly virulent strain of the travel bug. Attempts to scratch this itch have been entirely futile. A persistent little bugger, this travel bug.

For the best part of the last eighteen years, I've been working as a carer, looking after people with learning disabilities. I've evidently seen the full spectrum of human experience, "the good, the bad, and the ugly," having lived and worked in various "alternative communities" that are rather more interesting than your average care home. And during those peculiar COVID years, when the clapping broke out for the "essential workers," I was right there in the thick of it, tending to elderly ladies in the Southeast of Britain. Lovely they may have been, the realization dawned that eighteen years is, in fact, quite a long time to be doing anything, and a break was in order. And not a weekend getaway to Bognor Regis. But a proper, extended hiatus. Involving a bicycle. The plan was to simply pedal off and see what the world throws at me. Love? Danger? Self-discovery? The possibilities, one supposes, were endless. What was certain, though, that this was my "trip of a lifetime".

Now, I've already put in a fair few miles. I cycled across the entirety of Europe, a hefty chunk of Turkey, then through Southeast Asia, South Korea, half of Japan (a second dose of that travel bug, no doubt), and then the length of Central and South America. At the moment, I'm in Brazil, enjoying the sunshine, the beaches, and putting in the miles as usual. Come June of 2025, I'll be winging my way back to Europe to Portugal, heading east through Europe, and then, budget permitting, perhaps a jaunt through Central Asia and the Middle East. It's a rather ambitious itinerary, I'll admit.

And this is where you, the kindly and geographically-minded public, come in. I, you see, am after a bit of financial assistance to keep these wheels turning. The funds I raise will go towards the essentials: travel, the bewildering array of equipment one apparently needs for such an undertaking, accommodation (no five-star establishments), food to keep the engine running, and, crucially, those unforeseen "emergencies" that tend to crop up when one is cycling through, say, Outer Mongolia. My grand vision is to cycle across six continents and fifty countries in a mere two or three or five years, and I intend to keep you all in the loop with my "experiences and insights." So, the plea is out: dig deep, folks. Every dollar, pound, or euro, I assure you, counts. And every mile, apparently, matters. So, help me make this rather bonkers, but undeniably impressive, dream a reality.