EDWARD Genochio left his home in Exeter, England, in March 2004, with the plan to ride his bike solo all the way to China, a country he had visited a few times in the 1990s and found extremely fascinating.

He rode an average of 100 kilometres per day, usually riding every day without exception. Carrying a tent and a small camping stove with him, he camped every night during his journey through Europe and Russia, cooking his own food and therefore remaining self-sufficient.

¡°There were some tough times ¡ª giant Siberian horseflies, muggers on motorbikes and the growing risk of going stir-crazy as I pedalled solo across thousands of miles of empty Russian swamp...¡± said Genochio, ¡°The compensation was the opportunity to cross half the world at almost ground level, and to meet fascinating and friendly people along the way.¡±

During his journey, which he completed without the use of any transport other than his bicycle, apart from a ferry across the English Channel and another across the Yangtze River, he visited 17 countries. In China, his route took him through Inner Mongolia to Beijing, then south through Hebei, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces to Shanghai.

¡°China is an interesting country because if you get bored with one city there is always some place different to go to. The contrast between Shanghai and, say, a little village in Yunnan Province, is much greater than that between Shanghai and Exeter where I am from,¡± said Genochio.

When he arrived in Shanghai in October 2004, eight months after leaving home, he found he had covered only 18,000 kilometres, 2,000 kilometres short of his original estimate. So to make up the difference, he decided to continue his ride through the mainland to Hong Kong, where he finally arrived in January 2005, having completed 20,500 kilometres altogether.

Along his journey, Genochio raised more than US$10,000 for various charities in the countries he visited, including an orphanage for street children in Mongolia, and a cerebral palsy rehabilitation centre in Shanghai.

Charitable sideline

However, he admitted that raising money for charities was not his original intention for the trip. In England, explained Genochio, it has become almost a tradition that whenever anybody decides to do anything unusual such as riding a bike to China or jumping out of an aeroplane with a parachute, people always assume that they do it to raise money for charities. So when the news got around that he was to ride a bike solo to China, the business community back home immediately started to reach into their pockets.

¡°Though charity was not my original intention, I found it actually added a new dimension to my journey which would have otherwise been a selfish pastime,¡± said Genochio.

¡°When riding a bicycle across Siberia, a lot of the time was quite boring and seemingly pointless to be honest, as there were so many thousands of kilometres with nothing to look at. So I was quite glad when I started to see this as partly a charity thing,¡± he added.

Before riding back home to England from China following a different route later this year, Genochio has decided to spend a few months in Shanghai, working on a book about his journey. If it turns out to be successful, he hopes it will take him into a new career path ¡ª travel writing.

¡°I always enjoy travelling and writing and I hope to combine the two and make a living out of it,¡± he said.

After graduating from the University of Cambridge in geology in 1999, Genochio worked in the field of website programming, which he did not enjoy much. He set himself a target date to escape from it all.

¡°I always knew that he did not enjoy his job and I wanted him to find something that he would like doing, but I did not expect that to be riding a bike solo to China,¡± said Emily Holden, Genochio¡¯s girlfriend who is now staying with him in Shanghai.

¡°Now I think he did quite an amazing thing, to have the courage, the patience and the stamina to cover that distance.¡±

That is probably why the once little-known Englishman has attracted so much attention from the local media in Shanghai where most of the people would rather stay on the normal, boring track than taking a possible life-changing plunge, said Grace Qiu, a TV journalist who covered his story for local television.