Our Founder

It all started with cricket.

In 2009, I left my desk job in London and cycled 28,000 kilometres to Brisbane to watch the Ashes. Fourteen months in the saddle, raising £75,000 for charity along the way, and by the time I arrived I knew something had shifted. I'd fallen in love with bicycle travel - not just the cycling, but the rhythm of it. The kindness of strangers. The odd surprise around each corner.

A couple of years later I found myself in Kigali, where I spent three years as Project Director of the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation. Cricket in Rwanda is tied to the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, and sport continues to play a role in healing the nation. We built the country's first dedicated cricket ground, one of East Africa's most beautiful buildings sits as its pavilion.

At weekends I'd head off into the hills on my bike, exploring Rwanda's volcanoes, tea plantations and red dirt roads. When I came home in 2013 I knew I wanted to share what I'd found, but it took a few years to work out how.
The answer came in Transylvania.

Shortly after my book Cycling to the Ashes was published, I found myself in the midst of a Transylvanian winter and realised this was where I'd launch The Slow Cyclist. My wife Clemmie and I spent the next two years living in remote Saxon villages, intent on condensing the best bits of my ride to Australia: kindness, hospitality, friendship, adventure, the odd surprise, into slow, bite-sized journeys.

All these years later, this remains the essence of The Slow Cyclist.

I still travel a lot but home is North Oxfordshire, where I live with Clemmie, our two boys and a growing menagerie of animals