The last time we spoke with Jimmy Ashby, Australian Geographic’s 2019 Young Adventurer of the Year, he had just completed one of his most difficult bicycle adventures to date, 1350km of punishing outback riding along the Anne Beadell Highway, from Laverton in the Northern Goldfields region of Western Australia through to Coober Pedy in South Australia.
That domestic ride was, in a way, forced upon Jimmy by international travel restrictions throughout the Covid pandemic that prevented a planned ride through Central Asia, but as soon as borders started reopening Jimmy began to put his next overseas plan together, and at the start of this year he packed his bag and his bike and jumped on flight to Thailand.
When we caught up with Jimmy recently, he was settled into a comfy hotel room in Phoenix Arizona, outside of which the mercury was nudging a stifling 46°C. And he was recovering from a less than happy experience in the days just prior that saw him holed up in his tent, barely able to move.
So how did he end up here, in the USA’s southwest? Let’s take a step back to the start of 2024…
At the start line
“I’d reached a point at home where I was craving a longer adventure,” Jimmy explains. “I rode around the world six years ago, and since then I hadn’t done more than a month or two travelling and riding my bike, and I think I hit a point of just being burnt out of work. So, I sort of packed up my life, sold some things and committed to taking six months to travel in the lead up to the Tour Divide, to just live on my bike in a simple way.”
Jimmy’s definition of simple was to spend time riding through the steep mountainous country in Thailand’s north, where the tracks and roads turn to slop as soon as it rains.
“I spent a month in Northern Thailand, in the Mae Hong Son region, just out of Chiang Mai…essentially just living in a bungalow in the mountains, eating lots of fresh fruit, pad thais; this is just a part of the world I love,” Jimmy enthuses.
He ended up in a small town called Pai, where “you can get these great little bungalows for $10 a night, and when you leave the town, you’ve just got a plethora of roads and passes to explore.
“My plans from there were all a little bit loose and empty. I planned to go up to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey, but when I was in Thailand at the start of the year, I met a girl and she was going to Taiwan, to ride a bike around Taiwan, and she invited me to go to Taiwan… I’m in my mid-20s, and when a girl invites you to go to Taiwan, you go to Taiwan, yeah?” Jimmy laughs.
Before that though, Jimmy had a date with Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and he spent four weeks riding here and through Oman. Of Dubai, Jimmy says, “What a city! It’s an incredible place to ride through… and then I left the city, and it’s like one big sand pit.
“I found these great roads through these sand dunes that no one was going on and at one point I found myself just walking across sand dunes for about three hours to connect a road. And then you come out of nowhere and there’s a mosque calling to prayer, and the most incredible sunrises and sunsets, and then just these mountains come out of nowhere.
“The western Hajar Mountains of Oman kind of come into the UAE, and they’re just phenomenal. Like Jebel Shams, Jebel Akhdar, these mountains, they’re phenomenal, and between them there’s these epic gorges, the most incredible gorges.
“And in the gorges are wadis… a wadi is like a passage of water. You’re in the middle of the desert and you come around the corner and you think you’re hallucinating because suddenly there’s palm trees and flowing water. I couldn’t believe it. It’s like a thing out of a movie.”
From vast desert to tropical tranquility
From the UAE and Oman, Jimmy made his way to Taiwan to join up with the girl from Colorado who he had met earlier in Northern Thailand.
“I went to Taiwan because I’m young and I was in love,” Jimmy laughs, describing his arrival in the island country as a massive culture shock after spending several weeks riding through the conservative Middle East, where women are largely covered by their burkas and men wear full-length gowns.
“In Taiwan, suddenly you’re filled with pop culture,” Jimmy says. “You walk down the main street and it’s that real Japanese and Korean influence of Pokemon and those sorts of characters. Just the smells and the tastes, I was like, ‘Whoa! How did I get here from there?’ It was a wild 24-hour trip.”
As it was never on his radar, Jimmy didn’t really know what to expect of Taiwan, and he was certainly surprised with the country’s popular cycling culture, particularly cycle touring.
“I ended up spending five weeks in Taiwan, I rode a lap around the island with this girl from Colorado [and two of her friends], and then she flew home, and I stayed on for another couple of weeks.
“You can essentially ride the whole way around the island, which is about 1000km, just on bike paths.
“What I didn’t realise is that Taiwan is so mountainous. There’s a 4000m-high mountain range that divides the country. So, you start from the coast, and to get to the other side, it might only be a few hundred kilometres, but you spend two days just going up, and then you go down. It’s incredible.”
Over his five-week stay, Jimmy reckons he pedalled along just about every road in Taiwan, from top to bottom, crisscrossing the island as he went.
“I loved it so much that I’ve convinced my parents to book a flight there,” Jimmy says of Taiwan. “They’re actually heading there at the end of the year to spend three weeks riding their bikes.”
And what happened to the girl from Colorado? “I’m still young, but I’m not in love,” Jimmy says.
After lapping Taiwan Jimmy flew to the Philippines, alighting in Manila, one of the world’s most intense megacities that is teeming with people and choked by seemingly endless traffic jams and general chaos. When I asked him how he escaped Manila, Jimmy said, “I just prayed and hoped and rode my bike… it was terrifying. It felt like it took days for me to get out of Manila. The congestion and the city just seemed to keep going, for hundreds of kilometres.”
Good coffee and a mountain high
“I eventually made my way to the east coast of Luzon and connected all these back roads along the beaches… once I was on the coast it was beautiful.”
It may have been beautiful, but it was also hot, and the warm ocean water provided little respite, so Jimmy was keen to escape the coast and get up into the mountains as soon as possible. He ended up riding to Sagada and Bontoc, and at about 2000m, here he found the temperature to be far more tolerable.
“This area is where all the rice fields are, those iconic rice fields that are like levels in the mountains,” Jimmy says, adding that these terraced rice fields are referred to as the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’.
Jimmy says he befriended all the cafe owners in Sagada that made good brownies and coffee, and he found a great Airbnb with a wonderful host to base himself at as he explored the region on his bike. But then things took a turn…
“I met some cool people, rode up and down the mountains, but then I had a massive abscess grow on my back. I was like, ‘Ooh, this isn’t good’. So, I went to hospital.”
Initially Jimmy found himself in a kidney hospital, but left there as soon as he realised his error and he then made his way to the main hospital in Sagada.
“I just walked into the ER room, and it felt like suddenly I had four people around me thinking I was super ill… half an hour later, I’m on an operating table face down.
“I ended up having a local anaesthetic and being cut open and having tubes down my back. It was pretty comical, actually. These very young doctors around me in this foreign hospital where they didn’t really speak English just sort of cutting me open, going at it. And there were lots of oohs and aahs and excitement around it.
“It was pretty wild. But the craziest thing was all the surgery and treatment and antibiotics. I was in the hospital for a night, and there’s these funny photos of one of the doctors is taking on his phone. There are three young nurses around me, their gloves don’t really fit, they’re all smiling and posing with the abscess!”
The overnight hospital stays and the antibiotics to sort the infected abscess ended up costing Jimmy around A$200. Ironically, when he had the stitches removed later in the US, the 10-minute procedure set him back A$300.
The Tour Divide and trouble
From the Philippines, Jimmy flew into San Francisco. “I rode east to Colorado, so across San Francisco, California, the Sierras, Nevada, Utah, and then ended up in Colorado, where I spent a couple of weeks.”
He then flew up to Canada for the start of the 2024 Tour Divide, a ride that is described as ‘the most recognised and important off-pavement cycling route in the United States, crisscrossing the Continental Divide from north to south, starting in Banff, Alberta, Canada, and finishing at the US/Mexico border in Antelope Wells, New Mexico”.
“This is where it all sort of unfolded and crumbled apart,” Jimmy explains of his experience from his hotel room in Phoenix. Eight days and 3000km into the 4400km Tour Divide, Jimmy caught what he describes as “a really bad stomach bug”.
“I was riding across Wyoming through what’s called the basin,” Jimmy explains. “It’s like this big remote stretch that everyone talks about on the route, but it’s only a couple of hundred kilometres between two towns, which is funny coming from Australia.
“Essentially, I rode into there in the night and my body just stopped regulating temperature. I couldn’t keep warm, I couldn’t keep cold, then my whole stomach just started to erupt. I spent the night hidden behind this bush in my little bivy bag, just crapping my pants.”
“I think I was in fourth place, and I think a couple riders passed me during the night, but essentially for about nine hours I just lied behind this bush, floating in and out of consciousness, just crapping my pants because I couldn’t get out of my sleeping bag fast enough.
“When the sun rose, I rode 100km to a little oil town called Wamsutter. I got a hotel for what ended up being two nights and just didn’t recover from there.”
Jimmy says he tried to continue with his Tour Divide mission, riding another 400km or so into Colorado, but he realised his health wasn’t improving and he had to pull out. With “all the steep and gnarly passes of Montana” behind him, it wasn’t an easy decision, but despite his physical state Jimmy still managed to view his situation philosophically: “Failure brings growth, so yeah, that’s how it goes.”
“At the end of the day, sure, my year was leading up to the Tour Divide, but it’s a very small part of what’s been a huge six months,” Jimmy continues. “What has happened, it’s made me excited to go back and do it better next year. It hasn’t taken anything away from what’s been a massive adventure this past six months.”
When speaking with Jimmy in Arizona, he hadn’t had his medical condition diagnosed by a professional due to the expense of medical treatment in the US, but he was quite certain the antibiotics he was prescribed earlier in the Philippines played a big part in it.
“Those few weeks I was on those antibiotics, which was only a month before the race, the antibiotics just strip your gut. So, I’m thinking that played a role in the digestion issues, and I just wasn’t digesting food.”
Jimmy’s bike was packed away and boxed up ready for transit when we spoke to him, and after spending more than a thousand hours in the saddle over the previous six months he says he’s more than ready to head home to Australia.
“When I get home, I’ll jump back into work and there’s no doubt I’ll have an adventure ready for something. There’s all sorts of events and trails and places to go.”
