Ever since I cycled down the west coast of Canada and the United States as a means of saving the bus fare on a round-the-world trip, I dreamed of cycling the whole length of that landmass, from the southern tip of South America all the way up to the Arctic Ocean. Returning home to a job I didn’t enjoy, that dream burned at my mind until, as a mature student in 1999, I was given the opportunity to take a year out and decided now was my time.

This was at a time of huge advances in communication technology, but I chose to journey without a mobile phone or any other means of communicating with the outside world—something we might struggle to comprehend these days. If I got into trouble, if I got injured, if I became lost, it was up to me to sort myself out. No close friends were willing to leave the comforts of home, so the fledgling internet did at least prove useful in finding a travel companion. But within nine days of the start of my journey, I found myself alone, close to the bottom of the world and with many thousands of miles of the unknown still ahead.

This book tells how the desire to fulfill a burning 10-year dream helped me overcome illness, injury, exhaustion, loneliness, and so much more; how I, a normal guy from a working-class family in Leeds—among many other adventures—found myself singing to bears to keep them at bay; ran out of water crossing the driest desert in the world; had a volcano rain ash down on me; and found myself hiding out from bandits most nights while pedaling through Mexico.