Cyclist
Like father, like son: Two round-the-world rides, 40 years apart
When Phill Hargreaves was 11, his parents decided he needed a hobby to keep him from ‘getting into scrapes’ so they bought him a racing bike and introduced him to the local group of the Cyclists’ Touring Club.
Suddenly, instead of being confined to within a few hundred metres of his front door in Derby, he could ride into the surrounding hills and beyond. He persuaded his teachers to allow him to cycle to school trips while the rest of his class went by coach. By the time he left school at 16, he’d seen most of Britain by bike.
He ‘dabbled’ in time-trials and road racing but realised he ‘wasn’t prepared to put in the effort to be any good’. He was more interested in touring and visiting new places. His first holiday after leaving school was three weeks cycling around Switzerland.
After completing his apprenticeship as an electrician aged 21, he and a couple of mates, ‘the two Daves’, set off to cycle to Australia. They planned a detour to Everest Base Camp on the way, even though they had no idea whether anyone had done it before or if they’d even be allowed to. The year was 1984, before the age of the internet, smartphones and GPS.
Somewhere in Turkey they lost one of the Daves. Hargreaves and the remaining Dave didn’t see Dave Cross again until they returned to the UK and learned he’d made it to Bangkok on his own.
Hargreaves and Dave Clark reached Kathmandu, from where they managed to ride or push their touring bikes and skinny tyres to Everest Base Camp at an altitude of 5,364m. When they arrived, they were surprised to find a group of Americans assembling a bike they’d carried there in pieces.
‘They took some photographs then took it apart again. They put the frame and wheels in their rucksacks and left,’ says Hargreaves. ‘We told them they’d cheated. As far as we knew, we were the first cyclists to have ridden there and back.’
Shortly afterwards, Hargreaves lost the remaining Dave, who contracted the latest in a series of illnesses and flew home. Hargreaves continued alone and arrived in Darwin, Australia, with just £50 in his pocket. He got a job on a trawler and spent five months at sea saving up enough money to fund his return journey to Britain, surviving ‘shoot-outs at sea’ between rival vessels competing for prawns.
Hargreaves resumed cycling in China, where he used a wall map of the country and a compass for navigation. He was supposed to have an Alien’s Travel Permit but ‘I just kept my head down and hoped nobody noticed’.
He was heading for Xian to see the terracotta warriors when his luck ran out and he was arrested. He ended up back in Peking (now Beijing) from where he caught the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow before cycling the rest of the way home. He’d been away for three years.
‘I gave a couple of slide shows about my journey to the CTC, but no one was really interested. It wasn’t seen as a particularly big deal.’
In 1993 he met Ali, an artist and fellow adventurer who was about to go travelling around Australia, New Zealand and Nepal, having previously travelled around Africa by truck. They kept in touch and married in 1996. They had two sons, Ollie and Jamie, and were soon taking them on their hiking, climbing, skiing and cycling adventures.
‘Life’s short, isn’t it? You’ve got to get out and do stuff,’ is Hargreaves’ philosophy.
The son’s story
‘We were indoctrinated into a life of adventure,’ says Jamie, now 24. ‘We never had “normal” holidays when we were growing up, it was always cycling somewhere or climbing a mountain.’
The boys couldn’t escape their dad’s stories or the photos on the kitchen wall. He regularly gave talks at their primary school.
‘I was actually more into climbing than cycling,’ says Jamie. ‘But by 15 I’d pretty much decided I wanted to do what my dad had done.’
In 2023 he tracked down a bike that was the same make, model and year as the one his dad had ridden, a 1984 Mercian ‘King of Mercia’ touring bike. He added a pair of custom-built 42-spoke wheels with 28mm tyres and a year later, shortly after turning 22 and completing his dissertation on product design at Sheffield Hallam University, set off in his dad’s wheel tracks. It was almost 40 years to the day since his dad had started the same journey.
‘Dad had never put any pressure on us. He left us to do what we wanted to do and I think he was honoured that I chose to make the same journey, and glad I was going to see the world for what it was rather than what we are told it is,’ says Jamie.
Dad Phill adds, ‘I think everybody who leaves school should go travelling because it’s not just the adventure side of it; it opens your eyes to how everybody else lives and reminds you just how lucky we are in the West with what we’ve got.’
As well as retracing his father’s route, Jamie had another objective – to recreate the photographs from the kitchen wall that had fired his imagination as a child. Phill had meticulously noted the locations of all his photographs in a small notebook. He set about cross-referencing these fading, handwritten descriptions with Google Maps before sending Jamie scans of the original photos via WhatsApp.
Jamie then used a combination of Google Street View and ChatGPT to pinpoint the exact locations. In the wilderness of the Himalayas he had to resort to more low-tech methods – studying the valleys and ridge lines with the naked eye to find a match with the image on his phone screen.
‘Recreating the photos was sometimes hard but very special. I felt such a connection to dad,’ he says. ‘Every time I found the photo spot, I realised the only thing separating us was the number of circles we’ve done around the sun.’
Back at the family home in Poynton, Cheshire, dad Phill followed Jamie’s progress on social media.
‘He did a fantastic job with the photos,’ he says. ‘There was one in front of a glacier that I thought he’d never find because the ice would have receded so much, but he found the exact place. Another time he rang from Lahore in Pakistan to tell me he was standing in the exact spot in the Red Fort that I’d stood 40 years earlier. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.’
One photo Jamie was unable to recreate, however, showed his dad out of the saddle on the Everest Base Camp trail in front of a spectacular Himalayan backdrop. The photo is one of the jewels in the archive of the Rough Stuff Fellowship, the original off-road cycling club that Phill was a member of.
‘I’d seen that photo every breakfast, lunch and dinner of my life so really wanted to recreate it,’ says Jamie. ‘But they’d built a Buddhist stupa [monument for praying] at the exact spot and it just didn’t work. It was a bit annoying to be honest.’
Jamie faced another obstacle with some of his photo recreations.
‘Dad had the two Daves with him most of the way to take his photo but I was often on my own,’ he says. ‘I’d have to flag down passing cars and get random people to take my picture. But first I’d have to explain to them that I wanted to exactly mirror a photo from 40 years ago.’
Jamie eventually arrived at Everest Base Camp after a week of hiking and biking along a narrow trail, competing for space with heavily-laden yaks and donkeys, and regularly crossing cable footbridges suspended hundreds of metres in the air.
At one point he was knocked over a cliff edge by a donkey, suffering cuts and bruises and a buckled front wheel. Just days from his goal, he was stopped at a military checkpoint and told he needed a permit for his bike. He spent an anxious night waiting for it to be faxed from Kathmandu.
Before setting off for Everest Base Camp, Jamie and co-rider Malachi Francis, whom he’d met outside a supermarket in Turkey, had taken ten days to ride the Annapurna Circuit, a 200km trail around the Annapurna Massif. But there was one more Himalayan challenge.
‘He wanted to go one better and say, “I’m going to beat you, I’m going to beat you,”’ laughs his dad, acknowledging Jamie’s achievement in becoming the first known rider to take his bike up to the Annapurna Base Camp at 4,130 metres, a five-day trek during which he mostly carried his bike up a series of steep stairways built into the mountainside.
Jamie arrived in Thailand ‘drained of energy and out of love with bikepacking because southeast Asia felt so touristy’. He only regained his mojo after meeting French-Canadian artist Eve Dussault at a pub quiz in Vietnam and persuading her to join him on the final leg to Australia. She flew home from Bali while he continued to Sydney. They were reunited in the UK when Jamie flew home in December.
While all this was happening, his older brother, Ollie, had set off on his own big adventure, pedalling to Bangkok to meet his girlfriend. Dad Phill managed to join both sons for sections of their respective journeys, though neither turned out as planned.
Most of his week with Jamie was spent rebuilding his son’s bike following a collision with a parked van on the hard shoulder of a highway in Georgia. And his week spent cycling the legendary Pamir Highway in Tajikistan with Ollie was curtailed when Phill suffered blood clots on his lungs as a result of high-altitude pulmonary oedema.
But the Hargreaves’ spirit of adventure remains undiminished. At the time of writing, Phill is touring Morocco on his 25-year-old BMW 1150 GS motorbike, while Ollie and his girlfriend are cycling from Thailand to Australia.
Jamie, meanwhile, has just completed a tandem ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats towing two wheelie bins and collecting litter from Britain’s roadsides and three highest peaks along the way. He and co-rider Alfie Cookson, a ‘cycling handyman’ from Clitheroe, wanted to ‘normalise picking up litter. Or at least not dropping it in the first place’.
Echoing his dad’s motto, Jamie says, ‘Life’s short. You just have to crack on with it.’
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