JASON LEWIS

Q: What inspired you to circumnavigate the globe?
I was 26. I had a small business cleaning windows and carpets. I felt very claustrophobic in England and I was eager to get out and see the world. The idea to circumnavigate the globe was proposed by my friend, Steve Smith, over beers at 2 am. We spent two years sending out letters to potential sponsors, but there was absolutely no interest from any companies in England. We had long hair and tattoos and weren’t the kind of people that any sensible company would want to associate with. So we borrowed £10,000 from friends and family, which was enough to pay for our boat and supplies. From the beginning, it was ‘roll the dice and let’s see how far we get’.

Lewis (right) cycles through Cáceres‎, Spain, with Smith during the first leg of the journey in 1994. Photo © Kenny Brown

Q: Why did you agree to do this? Was it the allure of doing something no one had done before?
That was just a small part of it. I had done a bit of travelling and I had a real appetite to do something bigger. I wanted to step away from what society had to offer and go into the wilderness. And I wanted to do something useful. We partnered with a UK charity called the Council for Education and World Citizenship. They provided an introduction to Unesco and we visited more than 900 Unesco schools. But my main motivation was somewhat selfish – I wanted to see what I could learn about myself.

Q: What did it mean to you to travel only by human power?
To use your own self – just your mind, your body and your spirit to power yourself around the planet. This was the attractive part of the expedition. I liked the purity and the simplicity of it, and it sounded like the ultimate challenge. Plus, you didn’t have to be an expert yachtsman or mountaineer. If you could ride a bike, or put one foot in front of another, you could do this trip.

I try to conserve everything. I reuse everything. It drives my girlfriend crazy but I even reuse ziplock bags over and over again.

Lewis contemplates a flying fish, 500 miles east of the Caribbean, 1994.

Q: What was your travel experience at that point?
My dad was in the army. We were posted to different countries – Germany, Somaliland, Kenya. But I spent most of my childhood in Dorset in southwest England. My dad took me camping and introduced me to the outdoors from an early age. Although he excelled in the military, he was always something of a maverick, so I take some of my sense of being a misfit, an outsider, from my dad.

After reading Jack Kerouac and Hunter S Thompson, I made my first big trip when I was 21. I flew to New York City, bought an old car and drove it as far as Montana. The car blew up in a snowstorm and I ended up hitchhiking the rest of the way across the US.

Q: In order to circumnavigate the globe using only human power, you must have been very fit.
Not at all. We were so busy before we left, I didn’t really have time to get fit. The first week was not pretty, but it got better. I wasn’t an athlete at all; neither of us were. I figured that by the time we cycled down to Portugal we’d be fit enough to pedal boat across the Atlantic.

Q: Tell us about the methods of transport you used.
I cycled from London to Portugal; pedal boated to Miami; rollerbladed to San Francisco; then we had an aborted biking leg through Central America trying to get to Peru. We kayaked across the Sea of Cortez back to San Francisco; pedal boated across to Hawaii, from where I hiked across the Big Island. The rest of the way across the Pacific to Australia was via pedal boat. I cycled across the Outback, kayaked from Singapore to Indonesia to India, and pedal boated through Africa. From there I cycled back through the Middle East to France, and used the pedal boat for the last bit across the English Channel back to London. On top of all that, there were some rivers, like the Mekong, that I had to swim across.

Smith dives into the Atlantic for a much needed cool off, 1994.

Q: Did you travel with your own bike, kayak, rollerblades and pedal boat, or did you pick them up when you needed them?
Everything depended on the people we met along the way. That was a hallmark of our adventure – different people stepped forward to solve logistical problems for us. We were given bikes in London; [courier company] DHL sent them across from Portugal to Miami while we were on the pedal boat. A local store in Miami gave me rollerblades; they were a homemade pair that this guy was engineering, so I was kind of like his guinea pig. We had no idea how to get the boat across the US so we docked it in a boatyard in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Then when I was in Colorado, giving a talk at a university, one of the students said we could borrow his car, and Kenny, our cameraman, used that car to tow the boat cross-country to San Francisco.

Q: What was your favourite mode of transport?
Biking is the most efficient, but kayaking is the most enjoyable. You can see the sea life and you’re really connected to the water.

Q: What was the hardest?
Walking. Walking is terrible. For the amount of effort you have to put in, you don’t get many miles out of it. And you’re carrying a pack; it’s hard on your feet.

Q: How did you plan each segment?
The route changed often depending on how the trip evolved. The ocean sections were set because you’re going on the prevailing winds and currents and trying to avoid the hurricane seasons. The land sections were more arbitrary and were dictated by the schools we wanted to visit along the way or by political barriers. For example, getting permission to kayak across Indonesia was difficult. No one had ever kayaked through Indonesia before, so the customs and immigration authorities had no idea what a kayak even was. Also, tensions were still running high at the border crossing between East and West Timor, a legacy of the 1975 invasion of East Timor by Indonesia.

Lewis rollerblading through Arkansas, US, in 1995.

Q: How did you pick the route?
In order for it to be considered a legitimate circumnavigation, you have to hit at least one pair of antipodes – meaning two points opposite each other on the Earth’s surface. And you need to cross all lines of longitude, plus the equator at least twice, with a minimum distance covered of 21,600 nautical miles. We planned to travel east from London, but I was worried about running out of money in Siberia. So we changed the route to go west, crossing the Atlantic by pedal boat.

Q: How did you keep the expedition going from there?
It took 111 days of pedalling, and when we reached Miami I think we had about £30 to our names. If we had landed almost anywhere else, I think the expedition would have died.

We were at the mercy of people we met on the dockside. We got our sea legs and started networking. We got talks lined up at yacht clubs, Rotary clubs, Kiwanis clubs; we put the boat on display at a boat show; we printed up t-shirts that we sold. After six months of fundraising we had enough to pay back our friends and family in the UK and could continue on the next leg to San Francisco.

Smith pedals while Lewis updates their website, 1,000 miles west of the California coast en route to Hilo, Hawaii,1998.

Q: What were the hardest parts of the expedition?
The fundraising was much more difficult than anything else. Physically powering yourself is the easiest part. Arriving on a new continent without any money and trying to book talks and figure out how to raise money, that’s the exhausting part. You make new friends everywhere but you constantly have to say goodbye to them.

Q: Where were you most exhausted and dispirited?
I have a very grim recollection of living in the pedal boat while it was parked inside a shopping mall in Cairns, Australia. I had spent 176 days pedalling across the Pacific from San Francisco and I needed to raise money to cross Australia. A shopping centre agreed to put the boat on display, and during the day I would be there, answering people’s questions and trying to sell them a t-shirt or the chance to put their name on my boat for $20. When the mall closed at night I would hide in the toilets, and then after security left I would sneak back in and sleep in my boat.

That was a fairly dark time. I hate shopping malls. I had set out on this journey to get away from consumerism, and there I was living inside consumer hell. It seemed like the ultimate paradox, but I was willing to sell my soul, basically, to eat and raise enough money to complete the next leg of the journey.

Q: Is that how you financed the rest of the expedition, bit by bit as you went?
It was the same story throughout all 16 legs of the voyage.

Lewis sits atop his pedal boat in the mid-Pacific, after Smith left the circumnavigation on Hawaii. This was his first time alone – 73 days later he reached the island of Tarawa. Photo © Kenny Brown

When you’re from a rich country trying to raise money to cross the world, to a lot of people it seems ridiculous. I only got a major financial sponsor when we got to Singapore, 11 years into the expedition, and that was just about $15,000. But it was enough money to get me back to London. I wasn’t spending much. Cycling is cheap. For the overland segments of the trip, my budget was $5 per day.

Q: Did you miss home?
At times, I did. That was why Steve left about 4.5 years into the expedition; he needed to get back home. We spent 53 days pedal boating to Hawaii from San Francisco, and he decided that at his core, he wasn’t a traveller. He missed community, he missed his family, he missed going out for breakfast on Sunday morning.

Lewis kayaking in the Riau Archipelago, Indonesia, 2005. Photo © Kenny Brown

I spent two and a half weeks pedalling but going nowhere. I was in the Doldrums in the middle of the Pacific, between Hawaii and Tarawa, and the problem was the currents. I was in this counter current where I would pedal for 16 to 17 hours and make a bit of headway, but then I’d have to sleep and I’d turn on the GPS and I’d be back where I started.

I was having conversations with alter egos that kept me company. I wasn’t hallucinating; I just needed to chat because I was so fed up and so lonely. I chatted with the Frenchman in the Monty Python skits, and other characters from TV shows or people I knew. It was just a way to generate company. It’s very hard to keep motivating yourself.

Q: Did you consider quitting at any point?
I was sick of travelling by the time I finally got back to London. I knew I’d been out there too long but I’d already invested so many years of my life in the expedition. And so many people had invested in me, people who had given $20, bought a t-shirt, helped us with our boat, whatever. I felt this groundswell of support. I had to finish, if for nothing else, for all these people.

Q: What was the biggest crisis you faced along the way?
When I was rollerblading across the States, I was hit by a car in Colorado. The driver was an 82-year-old drunk driver who also had cataracts. My backpack went right through his windshield and was on his wife’s lap, but he still tried to deny he’d hit me. He said he thought he hit an animal, so he didn’t stop. It took me nine months to recover but I finished crossing the country on my rollerblades. It was pretty painful so I had someone biking alongside me carrying my backpack. I think the action of rollerblading actually helped my legs heal.

Lewis bikes near Dolalghat, Nepal, in 2005. Photo © Kumar Ale

Q: Did you have insurance to cover your medical bills?
I did not have insurance at any point during the trip. Luckily, the guy who hit me did, and that’s what covered the $110,000 worth of medical bills.

Q: Tell me about one of your favourite moments from the trip.
I had a memorable encounter with a police officer when I was rollerblading through Mississippi wearing a pair of women’s culottes. I couldn’t wear my lycra shorts as I had been bitten by fire ants around my groin area, so I looked in a thrift shop for some very baggy shorts – but the only thing they had were these knee-length women’s trousers. I was getting whistles from truck drivers until they got closer and saw my beard.

The local sheriff in the city of Winona pulled me over. I thought he was going to give me a breathalyser and drugs test. But he was of Scottish ancestry and thought I was wearing a kilt, so we got to talking and became friends based on this very tenuous connection. He let me go and even gave me $20 for my next meal.

Q: What places are you determined to return to?
I fell in love with Flores and the Komodo Islands in Indonesia. The abundance and diversity of sea life was incredible. I saw an enormous manta ray breach and do a summersault just 15ft from my kayak. That was one of the enduring memories of my trip. And then you have the Komodo dragons. It’s like a land that time forgot, something from a prehistoric time.

I’d also love to go back to northern Sudan. The Nubian people have an incredible sense of hospitality. I never had to worry about where I was going to sleep at night. I’d be riding my bike along the banks of the Nile and would pass by 3,000-year-old statues, just lying there in the desert. In Egypt, you have to wrestle other tourists to see these antiquities, but in Sudan they’re just lying there.

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