About Us

Keith and Tamar

Hello! We’re Keith and Tamar (from Northern Ireland and England). In April 2011 we gave up our jobs and started pedalling. We toured round the UK then headed south through Ireland, took a ferry to France and then followed river lines (mostly the Loire and the Danube) across Europe. We got as far as Russia but then had to fly home for family reasons.
In May 2012 we set off pedalling again, this time taking a more northerly route across Europe, through Holland, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and then into Russia. We spent 7 weeks crossing a large part of Russia over to Siberia before going south into Kazakhstan and then into Kyrgyzstan and then into China. After spending October & November in an increasingly cold China, we flew back to the UK for December & January for a variety of reasons.
We flew back to China in early 2013 and pedalled a meandering route around SE Asia (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Malaysia, Indonesia) learning to scuba dive on the way. By the end of 2013 we were professional divemasters. We pedalled and dived our way through 2014 and became scuba instructors in 2015 when we decided to go out separate ways and this blog came to an end.

Meerkat
Meerkat keeps a lookout from the front of the boom.
He enjoys being the centre of attention and looked particularly proud standing in front of a statue of his great-great-uncle Lenin.
He doesn’t pull his weight up the hills though.

The Bike
We’re riding a Hase Pino Tour. This is a semi-recumbent tandem and we LOVE it.

Why a tandem?
Many couples enjoy perfectly successful travels on solo bikes, but we knew that two solos wouldn’t work for us. The frustration of one person always waiting for the other, or one person always riding to exhaustion to keep up, would have driven us nuts. Map-reading whilst on the move is more difficult on solo bikes, communication between riders is fragmented, and cities are a whole host of opportunities for losing sight of each other.
Riding a tandem solves many of these problems. You arrive at the top and bottom of hills together, the stoker can read a map and look for road signs whilst the pilot concentrates on avoiding traffic and pot-holes, communication is relatively easy unless you’re whipping down a hill with the wind in your ears, and it’s impossible to lose each other (although that could be considered a down-side if you’re having an argument!)
Why a semi-recumbent tandem?
Whilst riding a tandem has many advantages, we had found a couple of disadvantages riding a ‘standard’ tandem.

• The stoker can’t see what’s in the road immediately ahead, so any sudden and unannounced changes in direction or road surface are unsettling.
• Any movement from the stoker (for instance an unconscious flinch towards the kerb when a large lorry roars past) has to be compensated for by the pilot…which becomes tiring and annoying after a long day in the saddle.

The semi-recumbent Pino resolves these two issues as both the stoker AND the pilot have an unimpeded view of the road ahead so there are no surprises for the stoker, and because the stoker’s feet are up at hip height, shifts in their bodyweight have far less impact on the handling of the bike, meaning the pilot can steer the bike confidently with no unexpected stoker input.
This particular stoker also has a history of lower-back problems and finds riding a recumbent far more comfortable than a standard bike.