Cycling to The Ashes

Oli Broom is cycling to Brisbane from London, raising money for charity - I've done the easy bit, his website!....

www.cyclingtotheashes.com

 nThe site will allow Oli to keep everyone up to date with all thats going on as he makes his way across the world to Brisbane. He has full access to add and update pages and post photos. Furthermore, it is integrated with twitter, displaying all his latest posts. It also links with facebook and Umapper which details his route. Further additions are anticipated in the future and I look forward to assisting Oli on his website throughout the trip.

Article from The Telegraph below...

Oliver Broom, a 29-year-old chartered surveyor, will start pedalling on Oct 10 from outside Lord’s Cricket Ground, north London, in a bid to raise £100,000 for charity and teach, play or promote cricket in 30 countries as part of his ‘Cycling to the Ashes’ project.

Setting off from Lord’s, Broom will be joined by 10 friends who will accompany him to Dover. The Berkshire-born cyclist will then have only two wheels as companions for the next 14 months, using Twitter and his website blog to detail life on the road. A film documentary is also in the pipeline.

He said: "I have fears of getting bored on my bike day after day, although I'm hoping that a host of audio books will look after that."

He will spend the first few months in Europe where he will pedal through the farmland of northern France down to Strasbourg. "From there I’ll nip across southern Germany to the Danube. I will follow the river as far as Belgrade, making some diversions to visit some Slovenian cricketers and a school in Zagreb. It will be getting cold by now, so I’ll pedal on towards Istanbul and the gateway to Asia."

From south-east Turkey, Broom will enter Syria where he hopes “to inspire a Syrian to start playing cricket and one day they might be a member of the International Cricket Council” before passing Damascus and encountering the deserts of Jordan.

The Briton will then take the ferry to Nuweiba on the Sinai peninsula and on to Egypt, cycling south towards the Sahara, attempting to teach cricket in Sudan before Ethiopia and Kenya signal the completion of his African leg.

Potential problems along the way include stone-throwing children in Ethiopia. He said: "Anyone who has ever cycled through here warns of this problem, and the only tactic I have come up with so far is to wear a motorcycle helmet, which might look a bit odd. I know I'm likely to get into some tricky situations, but it's a matter of dealing with them as required."

Crossing to India’s east coast, Broom’s appetite for cricket will then be whetted by spending two months following the Indian Premier League, the lucrative franchise-based Twenty20 tournament. Northern India will follow before a scheduled route of Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar. From Laos, he will cycle south through Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia and a boat to Darwin, Australia.

He has been inspired by other long-distance overland adventures, citing his father’s trip from London to Cape Town in the 1970s "when it was very tricky", Rory Stewart's walk across Afghanistan described in ‘The Places in Between‘, and Alastair Humphrey’s four-year cycle ride as chronicled in ‘Moods of Future Joys‘.

Old Radleian Andrew Strauss, the England cricket captain, said: "I’ve known Oli since our school days and can vouch for his sanity. I look forward to seeing him on his bike in Brisbane."

Broom added: “Since we regained the Ashes at the Oval I'm now really excited about cycling from Darwin to Brisbane and spending plenty of energy on winding up Australians about losing the Ashes....again."