Cycling from England to India I Riding East ep. 1

It's hard to believe how much has happened in a single month, and even harder to imagine just how much we'll experience if this journey takes us around the world. Unleash my sleeping bag and yeah hopefully get through. Unforgettable. Yeah amazing. And now we're just going up into the woods. Into the German woods. Hey I'm Josh and I'm Sarah. We have dreamed of cycling around the world for many many years and in autumn we left on that journey and this is our first video from us first heading east towards India. We hope you guys enjoy it. You ready? Ready. We're on the ruddy ferry. You ready? It's the first time we have left the UK in five years. Five years, wow. So everything is unbelievably fresh and new and really exciting. Sort of trying new things, seeing new places, getting to grips with the language. We have a whole lot of land between us and India, and India is a place that we've dreamed of going for such a long time. And our plan is to cycle there and everything in between we're not 100% sure. We're not too sure how we're going to get there, but we are going to get there somehow. We like following our feet. We like getting distracted and we like recommendations. So yeah, the adventure begins. We're going to be cycling through winter. There's going to be some big mountains to cross for us to physically and metaphorically. Yeah, we're just going to see how it goes, how it all pans out. So just a few things about the trip as we get going. We hoped to cycle to many places around the world, but we didn't actually have a route planned. And although we wanted to cycle a very long way, we wanted to try and do it slowly. This wasn't our first time attempting this trip. November wasn't our intended leaving date either, but sometimes life throws a careful and long story short, we were very grateful to be on the road. So we are in our second country. We crossed from Holland into Germany and it just feels amazing that like our legs are taking us across the continent. Yeah. And thinking that, you know, we just keep pedaling slowly, getting a bit stronger, getting a bit faster. And we'll keep coming into new countries and new places, which is really cool. It was a beginning of a long awaited trip and we felt this pressure to cover ground quickly. We were also pretty nervous about winter coming. So we joined a popular cycle route, flat and easy to navigate. We could follow it the whole way across Germany if we wanted to. But gradually our bodies adjusted, the processes became easier and we could start to embrace being on the road. It's a science she says. So it's going to be our first sub-zero night. Yeah. How are you feeling? A little bit apprehensive, I'm honest. A bit cold now, but we have got the door open because we're cooking. But I'm hopeful that I can stay warm and snugly with my sleeping bag and hopefully make it through. Two weeks in and we felt ready to jump ship, leaving the comforts of the trail. We've never been very good at following routes anyway. The adventure always seems to start when you create your own path. And that's what we did. We enter Bavaria, the most forested part of Germany, filled with miles upon miles of remote woodland. We forget about distances but agree to head we're camping in the woods tonight and I really love woods in the daytime. They're beautiful, kind of moss filled tree kind of wonderland. But I don't like camping in woods for one practicality reasons, because the ground is often sort of full of spiky branches, pine cones, things like this. And we've not brought clothes cell mats for our pad, so I do worry about our precious pad. And secondly, I'm scared of the dark and I get terrified that behind every branch is a ghoul or a monster, rather than like humans. But yeah, a ghoul or a monster is coming to get me. So my top tip, because we've just unloaded our bikes in the dark, is to not look up at anything around you. I find if I just look at my feet and the kind of bags that I'm doing, then I'm not aware of all the tiny dark corners and all the scary trees where the monsters could be hiding. All the cycle clothes from yesterday are kind of a little bit frozen, so putting them on in the morning is really, really, really tricky. So now they all warm up soon, as soon as we start moving, but we've got a downhill for quite a while as we start, so... It's minus three or four. And we're cold. It was minus eight last night, it's probably one of the worst nights I've slept. I'm so cold. I'm sorry. I am finding it quite tough being cold, like most of the time, and it's like rarer that I'll be warm than cold. That's quite difficult, like being uncomfortable more than being comfortable, I guess. But there are times when I do feel warm, and like in the tent, for example, when we do get in the tent and get snuggled in, that does feel warm. Are there any tips, like you would like, takeaway tips that you have learned from cold cycling? Yeah, try to stay warm and don't have a hard time. Did you enjoy that? And I wish you all the luck, best luck on your journey. Thank you. Yeah. And if you ever come to Cape Town, we'll find you there. We'll find you in Cape Town. And we'll go surfing. Yes. All right. Yeah, we head south. Yeah. What's the story? The story is an old man who was sick, needs help. And there were some children, and they helped the old man. Heinz explained the historical significance of all the stalls at the market, and all the old bits of folklore we love to learn about. This is fruits. Oh, I'm so sorry. Everybody's shouting to me because I'm from Zurnab. I'm from Zurnab, I'm not from Zurnab. So your accent is different? My accent is different. My knowledge is different. Because you must live here 77 years to be accepted. Otherwise, you come from outside, you're an outsider. OK, so are you seen as outside? I'm an outsider here. When you're cycling, it's easy just to pass by without learning about your surroundings. But thanks to Heinz, we learned so much about Nuremberg, Germany and Bavarian culture. And then just as quickly as he came, Heinz was gone. One of many, many fleeting visits will not forget. So how do you feel compared to the beginning of the trip? At the beginning of the trip, I guess I felt a lot more tired than what I'm feeling at the moment. I feel like I'm easing into the rhythm of things, slowly getting used to being on the move all day, the early mornings, just thinking about the next thing. I think I'm slowly getting into the rhythm of that and finding that a bit more usual. It's exhausting me a bit less. I also feel like I'm a little bit stronger as well. I can lift my bike a bit better and get up hills a bit easier as well. And maybe as well, just like easing into, I guess, the flow and the open mindedness of sort of being on the road and just saying yes to things that come. I think when we first left, it was sort of like, we've got to get from here to here. We've got to do this today. We've got to make sure we do this. Fixed plan. Yeah. And just slowly easing into the fact that, oh yeah, we don't need to have a plan at really any point in the day. We set the destination, we set the time. As long as we can get somewhere to sleep and food to eat and water to drink, it's like the rest can sort of just fall into place. I feel like I'm easing into that mentality as well. Okay. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it. and is entirely possible to cross the whole country in many different ways, barely leaving river paths. If you ask a local for route recommendations, in our experience, more often than not, they will recommend following a river. We could follow the Danube all the way to the Black Sea. That would be almost halfway to India. It would be mostly flat, fast and easy to navigate. But by this point, we were both aware that wasn't the kind of journey we were wanting. So we stayed with a warm showers host, Flo and Leah. And Flo was telling us about, we're asking for really beautiful natural places to see. And he told us about the German jungle, which is like this big, huge, densely forested section. Immediately our interest has peaked. Yeah. Towards the Czech border. So between like Germany and the Czech Republic. So now we are cycling up and into the hills and into the forests. Yeah. We've completely rerouted because our route originally was going to take us nowhere through there. But when we heard about this place, we thought we have to go there. So we completely changed our route in order to go to the German jungle. Yeah. Sold on the German jungle. And now we're just going up into the woods. Into the German jungle. It definitely got stronger and definitely the miles are coming easier, but we felt really rushed at the beginning of this trip. We rushed getting out from England and it had felt like as though we were just on someone else's time schedule. Like we're trying to get from A to B fast, just cover lots of ground to get across Europe. Now I feel like we're finding our own pace a little bit. We're getting into our own stride and that has meant feeling comfortable, not covering much distance. And just like today, we've just come up, pushed the bikes up for hours into the hills just to wander around the snowy forest and just kind of gradually feeling comfortable that this is a really long trip and we've not kind of come away to travel from A to B or go places really fast. We want to just wander and spend time in nature and meet people. And that can mean just spending a day, not getting any further east, but just wandering up into the hills. And I think it's taking a bit of time for us to feel comfortable doing that. So today is our, I think probably going to be our hardest day cycling. Yeah, well in terms of the first half of the trip has all been very, very flat. We've now come up into this big, incredibly dense, beautiful forested area towards the Czech border. And now today we go up to about 1100 meters climbing and we've, I've routed it, a lot of it is off road. And tonight, last night was minus one. Yes. And tonight gets to minus four. Yeah, so chilly. So we need to make sure that we get up and over before tonight so that we can find somewhere a bit lower down. Yeah, don't want to camp up too high. So I think this is going to be first kind of real climb. Yeah. And also because after here, we will be going towards bigger mountains. So I guess I'm seeing it as like seeing how we get on today. Yeah. In preparation. Preparation for the bigger mountains to come. Yeah. How are you feeling? A bit nervous. Yeah. We, I mean, we're going to, it's early so we can get up. Yes, we can take it slow, we can take it at our own pace, but yeah, a bit nervous that it's going to be a harder climb. As a team. We got it. As a team. Going uphill, you're not likely to do any damage falling off really so slowly, but that would take such a long time to get up and that coming down, it'll be so icy. We won't be able to really cycle at all. We'll have to go really slowly downhill and then we'll get caught in the dark. That's my concern. So the, the options that we have are to either backtrack ourselves back towards that town and we, we would really have to backtrack like a long way. Okay. We got this. Or push for like another. We got this. We're getting close, I think. I'm really surprised these tyres are so slippy. 2.25 and we managed to stay relatively upright. Yeah. I thought we were, well, we were close to turning back. Another mile ish. We have reached Tarmac. I think we said a lot, but I'm really happy to This is the highest point on probably our trip so far and on a complete detour that we guess we, we could have just cycled along a flat river. Yeah, probably a few degrees warmer. This, definitely verging on type 2 fun. Yeah. It's now very, very low visibility. We need to get down. Yes. Hopefully drop out the snow, find a place to camp and hopefully somewhere to warm up. Yes. And get some food and wash our hands. I'll be honest, at the start of this trip with winter looming, to say I was apprehensive would have been a big understatement. But these last days had been some of the most memorable of our lives. We reached this high point at the start of winter. Lying ahead were much taller mountains, but now we were actually excited for them. It felt like our journey was just beginning and we hoped it would be one filled with detours. Thank you for watching. We are eager to see where the road takes us and so glad to be sharing it with you.