Ride Planet Earth

Hi,

this is my first blog. I’m not great with computers so this is kinda a big deal for me. But it’s something I had to do. You see, I’m soon going to be embarking on something special, a special chapter in my life. And I want it to be recorded, because I think it has the potential to have implications that go beyond me.

I’m planning a trip, the ultimate trip so far as I’m concerned. I’m going to try and ride a bicycle from Brisbane Australia (my home country) to Paris France, on the other side of the planet. I’m doing this for lots of different reasons, some purely personal, the others environmental and social.

I’ve been planning this trip for many years, mainly just inside my head. At the World Cup in Germany 2006 I was hitch-hiking to Stuttgart for Australia’s crunch game against Croatia and amazingly one of my best friends from highschool in Canberra was driving past and picked me up. That’s Keegan Knowles, and I spoke to him about the idea, of cycling from London to Asia and within a couple of weeks he had set up a web-site and was contacting sponsors and we were going to be on our way to Singapore in March 07. But it didn’t pan out, we got a great response from friends and raised almost one thousand pounds for Save the Children but nothing for ourselves so didn’t have the resources to go.

But I’ve been saving ever since, and at the end of July of this year, 2008, I’m off. One of the main motivators for doing this is the desire to do something actively about climate change and environmental destruction. I’m going to be documenting the whole journey on video, and finally when it’s done will produce a documentary of the experience. The focus will not be my trials, as gruelling and challenging as I expect they’ll be, but rather the people that I meet along the way, and how climate change has been effecting their livelihoods and communities. I especially want to find out how climate change has effected those who have been forced to move because of it, the “environmental refugees”. They are a group of people not formally recognised by governments and international law however forced to deal with the harsh and devastating realities of the rapid modern climatic changes and a group that is expected to grow and grow. I will be travelling through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Pakistan, amongst other countries that have been at the brunt of traumatic environmental disasters over the past few years. These are places where the impacts of a polluted environment, higher temperatures, changes in sea level and climate patterns are everyday matters of life, death and survival, not just rhetoric.

I want to raise awareness of these issues, and of some of the solutions, like environmentally friendly transport and travel. We don’t have to get every where fast.

So I hope that this is the start of something. I’m going to ride my bike to Paris, I hope that people start thinking about riding their bikes, or walking, to the local shops, or to work.

I’m going to track the planning process on this blog, before the real thing, so I’ll be writing an update soon.

Thanks,

Kim