Life is different for men with vocations.
They have more to lose.
—Graham Greene

La gente tiene que entender que Maradona no es una máquina de dar felicidad.
—Diego Maradona

Yes, they're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinkin' alone
—Billy Joel "Piano Man"

He travels fastest who travels alone.
—Rudyard Kipling

I have always said that if I was to wake one morning and realise that the journey had become a meaningless routine then I would stop and go home. To continue just for the sake of getting right round the world, to impress people, to confound doubters or not to disappoint supporters are not reasons I want to be keeping me going. That day arrived.

I know that you think I am lucky. That all my Mondays are like your Sundays. Everyday I wake up to a new view and the days are beautiful and different. I sleep where I want to in solitude and silence. I recognise the stars. I know whether the moon is waxing or waning and what time it will rise tonight. I see the seasons slowly change. But, as Pascal said, it is not good to be too free. Shakespeare too appreciated that if all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.

This probably sounds absurd, but what I was yearning for was unreasonable deadlines, a jammed diary, a rush to try and squeeze in a quick game of squash after work, and the companionship of a cold, muddy football team. The crux of deciding that the time had come to concede defeat was that I was totally bored. Sharing the road with somebody would probably sort me out - even Eleanor Rigby has more fun than me these days! It seems that all I have is adventure and no lifetime. And I have, after far too long, finally begun to realise that what other people make of me quitting is not important.

But before taking such a drastic step I decided to pause in Mendoza for a day or two, to be absolutely certain that I was making the decision I wanted to make. Mendoza is a beautiful city famous for fine wines and beautiful girls. I stayed ten days.

I must not have portrayed too bad a picture of life on the bike though because Fabien, a French backpacker, decided to buy a bicycle and accompany me to Salta. I readily agreed and decided to keep riding for a while longer. Over the next fortnight I re-learned that, at times, any company is better than no company, but that a good travel companion is, like a good heart, these days hard to find. It was interesting to watch Fabien on his debut ride - it gave me an idea of how I have changed imperceptibly but greatly over the last two years. Nobody I know can endure for long my excessively awful (but cheap!) lifestyle of banana sandwiches, taste-free pasta and no hotels and showers, but for a Frenchman it was simply unthinkable! He loaded his bags with home-made jams and salamis and quickly decided that I was very strange. I think that he enjoyed the ride and the challenge but one evening as he lay exhausted, dirty and hungry in his tent, Fabien looked out at me and said, with feeling, "If I had known that it would be this hard I would never have started."

"Me too," I replied. "Me too."

Alone once again I needed to search for new challenges, new foci, new objectives within the broad framework of the original project in order to keep myself motivated, to fight the boredom and apathy. I came so close to quitting that I know that to keep myself motivated is going to be extremely difficult. I want to increase the fund-raising aspects of the expedition and to improve the publicity of the ride.

Back to the road: riding out of Santiago I saw fresh snow on the Andes beneath a cold blue sky. The sun poured gold onto the snow. A jetplane glinted above me. I could have been on that plane... I pushed the thought from my mind: Look! a ragged line of workers are bent over in that field, shaking earth from fat orange carrots and tying the green bushy tops into bunches. Behind me the sky is a sad orange-brown haze: Santiago's shroud of smog, a depressingly obvious reminder of how cars are killing our world.

The mountain pass over to Argentina was muffled under two metres of soft snow. "Fierce gradient - next 55km" warned the road-sign as the road furled upwards like a black ribbon in the wind, winding ever higher. I spent the night with the Chilean army in their lonely mountain post. We watched MTV and Chilean Big Brother and ate buttered toast whilst outside the cold night swallowed the silent mountains. The soldiers found it amusing that the English rugby team, comfortably the mightiest in the world at the moment [come on Aussies - try to argue that one!], have a very non-macho red rose as their emblem.

The road careers skyward through 45 brutal hairpin bends just minutes after I woke up. In the freezing dawn my breath is great gasping balloons of warm mist and I pour sweat despite wearing only a T-shirt. I ignore a series of very clear signs indicating that bicycles are forbidden and pedal on into the long road tunnel between Chile and Argentina. Almost immediately speakers in the tunnel start yelling at me and frightening echoes bounce around the darkness. I pedal faster, but the hooting sirens and flashing orange lights chasing me down tell me that someone in orange overalls and a helmet is about to get very angry. He starts yelling at me for my idiocy. I smile a lot and apologise that I "no speaka el Spanish". I am escorted in silence and the pick-up to the bright daylight and snowy freshness at the end of the tunnel and the start of Argentina. Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, is a fine sight. I think back to Kilimanjaro in East Africa and look forward to seeing Everest sometime in the future.

The north of Argentina is amazingly varied. Walt Disney valleys in pastel shades with patchwork fields and cosy homes pluming woodsmoke; windhewn red sandstone gorges where the sun arrives late but bright and cacti stand like watching sentinels on the skyline; a fierce sandstorm filled my eyes and ears with sand and seared my nostrils. Snakes of orange sand writhed across the road and dust swirled in the sky; barren empty valley floors where the villages marked on my map proved to be little more than figments of some caffeine-charged cartographer's fertile imagination at his drawing board in London. This was potentially serious as we had counted on refilling our water in these villages. Fortunately, offerings of bottles of water at roadside shrines kept us going! I hope that the donors would not begrudge us them.

Noel Coward found the potency of cheap music extraordinary. Approaching Mendoza when I had decided to quit I pulled into a service station to refill my water bottles. Blasting out over the forecourt from massive speakers was The New Radicals "You get what you give", a song that will always remind me of the last day of riding the length of Britain from Land's End to John O'Groats. We had done the ride in just nine days and the final day was a brute, with a freezing Scottish winter wind mocking our attempts to fight it. But when the five of us finally hauled ourselves into John O'Groats we felt a real triumph. Far better than the transient pleasure of giving up...

And a few weeks after Mendoza I was sitting alone at sunset on a mountain pass. Listening to David Gray's "Babylon" I looked ahead to where the sun sat pale and low in white flat clouds above the jagged mountains. The road glided down to yet another empty valley and I could see for about 50km up the wild, quiet plain in the direction the road would take me tomorrow. There was nothing constricting me, no traffic lights changing green to red holding me back. I thought of everything I have left behind and everything that lies ahead and I remembered that beginning this journey was the best decision I have ever made.

Argentina is a fantastic country, one of my favourites. The diversity is vast, both in the land and the people. The language is easy to learn (I have just started to read my first Spanish book - the autobiography of Maradona), England beat them at football last year, steak is cheaper than pasta, and being a blond gringo has it's advantages too. From here I head for the hills, towards San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) and the Salar de Uyuni (Bolivia). 4500 metre passes, 10 days of riding, walking and pushing from one village to the next, -15 Celcius nights and a sketch map on a piece of writing paper as my most reliable navigational aid. A little different to the hedonism of Mendoza and Salta, but preferable, for now, to that early flight home...

Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our South America Insiders page.