From Asia’s first sun to where the land ends

I’ve had this trip in my head for years: set off by bike from Cape Nosappu, in Hokkaido, one of the first places in Asia to see the sunrise, and keep riding west until Cabo da Roca, in Portugal, the westernmost point of mainland Europe. Where, as Camões wrote, the land ends and the sea begins.

It means crossing two whole continents. And for years, too, I haven’t dared.

What this site is about

This site is the home of the trip. Instagram and YouTube will spread it around; here it stays whole, in order of route and day. Scrolling down the home page you travel the road from east to west, and the sky lives a full day: it’s before dawn in Japan, midday in Central Asia and sunset in Portugal.

Above all, it’s a diary. Every day I’ll write and post photos of what happens on the road: the kilometres, the places, the people. I already know there will be days with no signal, no battery or no strength left, and that posting something every day will be hard; but the idea is to try. Every country will have its diary, and every day, its own page. And before all that, this chapter: the idea, the route, the gear, the training, the doubts, and the day I finally set a date.

The itinerary, more or less

A trip this size can’t be planned end to end. Visas, seasons, borders and the road itself will keep changing the plan, and that’s how it should be. This is today’s idea, a fairly direct line west:

1. Japan. From Cape Nosappu south through Hokkaido, Sapporo and Hakodate; then Honshu: Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, down to Fukuoka.
2. Ferry to South Korea, Fukuoka to Busan, then north to Seoul and Incheon.
3. Ferry to China across the Yellow Sea, to Tianjin. Beijing, Xi’an, Lanzhou, Dunhuang and the desert to Ürümqi: the longest stretch of all.
4. Kazakhstan, entering through Almaty.
5. Kyrgyzstan, through Bishkek and Osh, with the mountains overhead.
6. Uzbekistan: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Nukus. The Silk Road.
7. Kazakhstan again, across the steppe to Aktau, on the Caspian shore.
8. Ferry across the Caspian Sea to Baku, in Azerbaijan.
9. Georgia: Tbilisi and the ride down to the Black Sea at Batumi.
10. Turkey, along the Black Sea coast to Istanbul, where you cross into Europe.
11. Greece, from Thessaloniki to Igoumenitsa.
12. Ferry to Italy across the Ionian Sea, to Bari. Then Rome, Florence and Genoa.
13. France, along the coast: Nice, Marseille, Montpellier.
14. Spain: Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Cáceres.
15. Portugal: Évora, Lisbon and, at the very end, Cabo da Roca.

That’s fourteen countries (Kazakhstan twice) and four ferry crossings. Straight lines between those points add up to about sixteen thousand kilometres; on the bike it will be a lot more.

How I’ll tell it

I’m a photographer and videographer, so I’ll tell it the way I know best: in photos and video. Here, on Instagram and on YouTube. Follow now and you’re there from before the start.