Tristan Ridley lives on his bike. In fact, when we talk, he’s at the front end of the longest time he’s spent at home in the UK for years. He’s just got back from cycling across Iceland, and is about to launch again into Mexico at the end of October after bikepacking through the US to the border last year. But today we’re talking about the trip he had been planning for years – a challenge to cycle from Brighton to John O’Groats in under two weeks on £100. Spoiler alert – he did it on £74.47.
His set up was an amalgamation of found and near-free objects: a £10 Peugeot city bike with zebra print handle bars and rusting frame from the 1970s; a sleeping bag free from Facebook marketplace and a roll mat for £3. He strapped Sainsbury’s bags for life onto his pannier rack and he was ready to go: “If you’ve got a rack on your bike, you can make virtually anything work,” he tells me.
“I wanted to do a trip that just showed that [while good kit] is great and it is going to allow you to be more comfortable, you don’t actually need it. You can have fun without that.”
“The great thing about bike travel is that it’s so accessible. You just need a bike.”
A seasoned adventurer, Ridley is used to challenges most of us could only gawp at. He’s been travelling pretty much non-stop since he was a teenager, from bikepacking in Aotearoa, New Zealand for the first time through the country’s mountainous south, to his decision to cycle home to England from Papua New Guinea straight after. Over the intervening decade, he’s cycled around 88,000 kilometres through 72 countries . But his challenge back at home proved his most daunting yet.
“I was genuinely uncertain about whether it was going to be possible. I really didn’t know whether it would fail completely. And that’s quite rare for me with the kinds of trips that I do – I do very challenging trips, but I generally have a lot of confidence that it’ll be fine, it’ll work out.”
“[This trip] was very clear cut – this is my budget, this is my time frame… there was a very real chance that either I wouldn’t be able to get a bike together in the time frame, or I would get a bike, but then I’d not have enough money to eat, or I’d get the bike, and then it would collapse and I wouldn’t have enough money to repair or replace it. So I really didn’t know how far I’d get. And that was exciting. I think the risk of failure is a really cool aspect in any trip.”
Ridley started his trip near his home in Brighton, with the goal of getting to John O’Groats within two weeks. A drizzly day met him as he pushed through the South Downs, passing through a Lidl to pick up jam and bread (paid for by Wendy, who Ridley got talking to in the queue) and home to a friend in London for spag bol before a big night of rest. Though as he emerged out of London, Ridley was on his own, locking into the long haul north and away from home and friends.
Part of his plan to stave off spending was to ask restaurants and cafes for food in exchange for work – for cleaning, pot-washing, or lawn mowing in exchange for a bed for the night.
“But multiple times people said, ‘We don’t need you to wash dishes, but what are you doing?’ And then I would explain, and they would say, we love it. We’re going to give you a meal anyway, have, whatever you want.”
He collected out-of-date sandwiches from closing supermarkets, was given three Yorkshire puddings to snack on mid-ride, and had a repeat breakfast of cold baked beans straight out of the tin to keep costs down. Nutrition was out of the window for the cyclist acutely attuned to long hours without food on the bike, carb-loading on bread and pasta, and on fruit wherever he could find it (“vitamin loading” to “stave off the scurvy”) but in York, his luck seemed to have run out.
“I think I struck out seven or eight times initially, and I was all set to give up [on finding food]. And then I went into an Indian restaurant on the edge of town, and I asked the guys there, and they were like, ‘you know, we’d love to, but the managers not here. We can’t have authority to do that.’
“Fair enough. But then a lady who was sitting there waiting for her food had overheard me explaining what I was doing, and she was like, that’s awesome. Love it. I’ll get you some dinner. And she just bought me a curry.”
“Further up, there were days where it was really hard. There was one day where I think again, I struck out nine times in different places and got varying reactions from, oh no, we don’t do food at the moment, to absolute confusion as to what I was on about. And then right at the end I went to a little restaurant on the Northumberland coast, and I asked the waitresses, and they put me onto the chefs, and they said they’d do it if I took a photo with them. And then I met other people who also plied me with beer and just really looked after me.”
“It was really humbling, actually. I was really touched by how many people were supportive, and wanted to help the trip.”
But some of Ridley’s 50,000+ Instagram followers, weren’t so encouraging with the cyclist’s techniques of finding food, accusing him of being a “scrounger”.
“I felt pretty okay with doing it for one specific trip,” he says.
“But I do also have something of a problem with people that do it in developing countries. For me, it’s got to be voluntary and relatively small scale. I think if you’re someone who can afford it, who’s travelling for a long period through those places, [but are] relying on the kindness of very poor locals…the poorer people are, the more they’ll help if people say they need it, because they understand what poverty is and what it means to not have food.
“Doing a short trip in a rich country…I think I can justify that, because it’s to make a point. And I think all of the people that helped me out weren’t handicapping themselves in a major way. I’d like to think that I will pay that forward as well and help someone out that needs it. And so the cycle continues.”
Ridley’s trip wasn’t only a test of his endurance on a rickety budget bike from the 70’s, or simply to prove that it is possible to bikepack on limited cash, but also – perhaps incidentally – to show that people are kind, and willing to help if they’re let in. But Ridley is, crucially, a white man, and afforded privileges that people of other genders and ethnicities might not be so fortunate to receive. He’s aware of the way he moves through the spaces he visits, a gentle care honed in a life on the road, meeting people from all walks of life, and he tells me that he hopes – and strongly feels – that the people who treated him with kindness on his trip through Britain, would do the same for anyone they met.
In the end, after nearly two weeks travelling by bike through England and Scotland, Ridley’s trip ended in Edinburgh, just short of his goal of John O’Groats. “I’m really happy with with how it went,” he tells me, mind already on the next adventure. “I think it came together really nicely.”
What Tristan Spent
£10 – bike
£5.50 – camping gear
£2.98 – food
£55.99 – buses/flights home
“I guess my general advice for people that are interested in going on a bike trip, but for whom money isn’t is an issue or a constraint is just to say: you don’t need fancy gear. I’m not saying you go out and buy a junkyard bike and and then spend two pounds over the trip. I’m saying, get all the gear as cheap as you can, use second hand sources – there’s so much available.
“The biggest takeaway and the biggest point of this trip wasn’t to show that you can cycle Britain on £2.98, it’s been just showing that money shouldn’t be the constraint that people think it is.
“But it does depend on what you’re doing. If you wanted to do the trip I’ve just done which was cycling right across the middle of Iceland, I wouldn’t have gone near that with a £2.98 setup, and a junkyard bike. It would have been terrible. But most people, especially when you’re just starting out, you don’t need to go that far. You don’t need to be doing anything that crazy. You just need a target, to pick a place from your front door. If you’ve got a week, pick a place that’s a week away, and then take the train home at the end. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
“I think that’s ultimately what it’s about, just keeping it simple and just going out on the trip. And once you’re out there who cares what bike you’ve got, just have fun.”
