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Joining me today is Graydon Hazenberg. In 1998, Graydon, his twin sisters, and a friend rode bicycles for nearly four months from Islamabad to Mount Kailash in Tibet. He wrote about his adventure in his new travelogue, Pedalling to Kailash: Cycling Adventures and Misadventures Across the Roof of the World (2021).
Now, Graydon’s book is special not just because of the challenging nature of his adventure, but because he — as you’ll hear him mention — embarked on different type of challenge in self-publishing the book after nearly 25 years.
We also talk about what traveling to Tibet was like in the late 1990s, how plotting waypoints on maps helped him reconstruct the journey and write, and his path to to self-publishing.
Connect with Graydon Hazenberg on his website or on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Purchase Pedalling to Kailash by Graydon Hazenberg
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10 comments
A Kiwi/CDN friend of mine passed away this past summer but had been a cycling maniac for many years-with trips all over Canada, India, Middle east, South America and Europe. One trip he did from Algiers through the Sahara down to Nigeria in 1985. He spent 17 weeks cycling through the Sahara. I kept bugging him to write up his trips as he was an excellent writer and photographer. He opted to write them out on paper and had not transcribed them onto a flash drive. His stories would be most entertaining. A group of us want to get his book published.
Sorry to hear about his passing. But what an impressive experience and trove of insight. It might open an ethical debate if your friend didn’t ever want or intend his journals to be read by others or published (to say nothing about the act of interpretation that would occur), but it all does sound fascinating.
The funny part of my Kiwi friend Mark Holmes’ Sahara biking saga was that he had three passports–his parents were British, he was born in Canada and they they emigrated to NZ–so he was (always) travelling with three passports. You can imagine the heat from the desert and that Sahel region as I just returned from two year contract in Mauritania. At any rate, I digress. He had passport pouches around his neck but decided because of the heat, to wrap them around his handlebar bag and forgot about them. He arrives at the Nigerian or Niger border and soon realizes that the pouches must have got caught in his front wheel and he had no passports at all for the border guards who were already suspicious of a skinny long red hair hippie looking guy with just biking shorts on landing at their remote borderpost claiming to have cycled through the Sahara for 17 + weeks from Algiers.
What serendipity! I just found your podcast via your guest spot on “The Creative Penn.” This episode is quite interesting for me since I made an around-the-world bicycle journey in 1991 and also published a book about it last year, 30 years after the trip. Traveling in the ’90s, especially by bicycle, was so different than it is today. Like Graydon, I used my old maps and journals to bring the trip back to life for my book, “Bicycle Odyssey – A Journey of Inner and Outer Discovery.”
Wow. Sounds awesome too. There seems to be a large international biking community interested in this sort of thing. Quite nice it is to have such a large community. Best of luck to you and your book!
Thank you, Jeremy!
Can I get back to you once I’ve been published? I’m hoping to get books on Yemen and Iran published too.
No problem. Best of luck to you.
How does a writer get to do a podcast interview on your show? I hope my book “Love, Apartheid and Other Tales from Africa” about travelling through racist South Africa” in 1984 is to be published by “The Next Chapter” soon. I did most of my travel in the 1980s and 1990s overland through Africa, Iran, India, and Yemen. Love your show and podcast with Hazenberg on his bike ride and info on publishing–thanks!
Hi, Emerson. Your book/journey sounds interesting. The decision to speak with authors is mine. And, because of my limited time, I can’t interview everyone. I wish I could do this full time and speak with more authors, but alas… In any case, that for listening!