One Bike, Three Years, Five Continents (and One Pair of Clothes)
Meet Ben Page. Ben is the award-winning filmmaker behind The Frozen Road, a self-shot documentary about riding his bike through the Yukon, into the Artic Circle, and to the tiny village of Tuktoyaktuk at the edge of the Arctic sea, the furthest north he could go on Canadian mainland.
That’s Ben Page under all that frozen snot
The Frozen Road is a remarkable film. The fact that he shot it himself is an incredible accomplishment. He went to extraordinary lengths to capture the scope of the landscape, the vast Arctic, and his mission.
But The Frozen Road is only the tip of the iceberg of Ben’s larger mission, which he completed at the end of 2017. The film details one month out of a three-year journey. His dream was to ride his bike around the world. But not just around the world in the shortest line. He rode long-wise across five continents.
One time I rode my bike to an adjacent neighborhood. It took me 45 minutes and I swore I would never do that again.
A few months back, I saw his film at the 5Point Film Fest in Carbondale, Colorado and was truly inspired by the film. I wanted to know more about how he made his dream happen.
If you’d like to hear the full conversation, check out the podcast here.
What was your route? What was your mission?
I began at the bottom of South America in Ushuaia, and rode up to Tuktuyaktuk in the Artic Circle in Canada. That was leg one. Then I rode from Beijing to Instanbul. I actually did that with several friends, so that was fun and a much different vibe. Then I rode from Cape Town, up Africa, to Cairo, Egypt. And finally I rode from Athens, Greece to my hometown in the UK.
Where did the seed of the idea come from? How did this all start?
I had the idea when I was a teenager. I’d done a bike tour to Switzerland that first sowed the seeds to do this. The dream was to pedal a bike around the world. But it wasn’t just following the equator or following a line of latitude, I was trying to cross five continents. I knew I'd set off as soon as I finished university. So I had four years to save up. When I graduated I had 9,000 pounds, which was my fuel for the next three years.
The Mountain Kingdom of Lesotho, southern Africa
How did people react when to your idea before you had set off?
I was brought up in a fairly outdoorsy family. I grew up climbing and camping, so it felt fairly natural. I told people about the idea, and most people I talked to seemed to get it. They didn’t really get The Frozen Road part. But as a trip, it’s something a lot of people would like to do, and therefore, they can understand the reasons for doing it. So I didn’t really experience too much resistance from people. But as the journey wore on and I got myself into various silly or dangerous situations, I started to get a bit of hesitancy and calls from my mum, “You sure you want to be doing this, Ben?” I was putting my parents through a bit of emotional grief at times. But it’s not like I was facing a wall of doubters.
How much did it cost to spend three years riding around the world?
I lived on about 3 pounds a day, which is pretty easy to do. You’re not paying for transportation or lodging. The money went towards food, visas, and flights between continents. It’s so easy to live cheaply on a bike.
Comfort usually comes at a cost. It’s amazing how adaptable you become. And how quickly you become used to certain scenarios. Talk to someone who’s never spent a night outdoors and the idea of sleeping in a tent for a few years is extremely foreign. But spend a week in a tent and that just becomes home and that’s normal. It’s a shifting baseline of experience and you become quite used to what was foreign previously. And that means that you can live pretty cheaply and you just get used it. If you teach yourselves to live cheaply, then you open up these doors of freedom.
Somewhere in Mongolia
“Just get used to discomfort. And then the world’s your oyster.”
What sparked your creative side? You're now an award winning filmmaker. Were you interested in film before you left?
I picked up a camera for the first time when I first started riding in South America, so that was a year before The Frozen Road. It was getting more important as the journey went on that I was teaching myself how to film each day on the journey. I had to learn how to capture my experiences. So The Frozen Road, as well as the physical challenge, seemed like a fantastic creative challenge to make my first film.
I filmed my journey quite intensively, knowing I was going to turn it into a film afterwards. So I did take the extra effort to climb the hills and set up the shots. And in my head I was like, I’ve seen lots of films where someone’s filming on a GoPro and they're good because theres a story there. But there’s still room for cinematography and to get some nice beautiful shots. I wanted the film to look like someone else has been filming it. In my mind that's a mark of quality. So I had that intention, to put that extra effort to make it look nice and to convey the sense of scale of the landscape.
Riding into the Caucus Mountains
Tell me about your kit. What gear did you have? What was your set up?
The bike I finished with was different than the bike I set off with. I set off with a steel frame bike I cobbled together with a bunch of mountain bike parts, and that’s what carried me all the way up to Canada from Ushuaia. But that wasn’t very good for where I was trying to go, I was trying to take it off-road, through the mountains and on small tracks and footpaths. My original bike wasn’t really suitable for that.
When I concocted this idea I thought it was a good opportunity to contact a bunch of bike companies and say, "I’m making a film, would you like to give me a free bike?" Everyone said no. But one company, an Alaskan-based fat bike company called FatBack Bikes very kindly gave me this fat bike, which was fantastic. I continued to ride that across Asia and Africa and Europe. It’s not a very conventional bike to take around the world. You usually go for fairly standard geometries and steel frames so if things break or go wrong you can weld them and you can fix them. But a carbon fiber fat bike is very different to that. So thankfully I ran into very few mechanical problems, which was really lucky because it would’ve been so difficult to fix.
But when I was in Zambia I snapped my crank and I couldn’t get a replacement for the crank so I ended up drilling a hole through the crank and putting a bolt through it and using that as a replacement pedal for the next month as I rode up to Nairobi.
As for kit, you just go as lightweight as possible. I was kind of trapped by the weight of carrying camera gear and laptops and electronics that I needed to film a journey. I only had one set of clothes, a tent, and a light weight sleeping bag.
If you don’t use something for a week, then you should probably get rid of it.
How Ben celebrates Christmas
What have been some positive developments out of your travels?
I left university with a degree in geography and no idea what I wanted to do, except I knew I wanted to do this ride. But I didn’t expect it to lead to anything other than the sheer value of doing the trip itself. But along the way I was teaching myself to film, and then I made The Frozen Road. I developed the seedlings of a career when I arrived back home, which is fantastic rather than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs having the post trip blues and thinking about what’s next.
I just spent a month in Nepal making a film with Joey Schusler, which is really exciting. I learned a lot because all I’d done is film myself, which is quite narcissistic really. I’d much rather be behind the camera telling someone else’s story. It’s given me a lot of confidence to pursue something creative. I’ve never considered myself particularly creative. But entering the realm of film and photography has opened my eyes to a different way to view things.
How did you cultivate your skills as a filmmaker and artist?
I am terrible at art. It was three years of teaching myself how to use a camera and edit, teaching myself how to think about what is involved in ideas and themes in filmmaking. It was three years documenting a story. If anyone follows something daily for three years, there going to learn something from it. And of course they may learn they never want to do that again!
It has come around fairly fast now that I'm home. But it was a long process to get here.
"He lacked wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with his youth. And when wisdom was his, youth would have been spent." - Jack London
This is a quote from your film. What does this mean to you?
I read several Jack London books while I was riding through South America. That sowed the seeds of me wanting to ride into the Arctic and see the landscapes he wrote about for myself. The quote you picked out about wisdom and youth is so true. I was fairly young going into that journey. I’d just turned 24. I had no experience in that kind of environment. I was so naïve. I was really a young person in that instance. And that journey through the Arctic was really rewarding but really hard. I got into a few difficulties. It’s through that process that you learn. You do these trips to learn. You learn and you grow and you become a man. That’s how the film opens up, “Any man who is a man can travel alone.” For me that’s questioning why a young person feels the need in our western society to go off and prove oneself. That quote was a catalyst for me, and it’s something I’ve found to be true.
Alone on the Dempster Highway
What wisdom have you learned?
It’s amazing what you can do, if you just start doing it.
It’s almost impossible to map and and plan say, riding around the world or something. But you just have to set off and get the ball rolling. And you deal with all the difficulties and hazards along the way. You don’t need to get trapped and stuck in the idea that everything needs to be mapped out and planned at the start because you’re adaptable, and on the road you’ll figure things out. You’ll make the right decisions and you'll make the wrong decisions. But both are good decisions because you will learn from both.
The less planning the better.
I put my hand on my heart and say proudly that I am terrible at planning. And the trip I’ve just done doesn’t need any planning because it’s so slow. You’ve got a long time to make these important decisions. Obviously there are a lot of things in life that require planning. But don’t get too caught up in making sure it's all gonna run like clockwork because there will be moments when something unexpected pops up and then you’re not in a position to deal with it.
Being on your own is fantastic when everything is going right. And suddenly it’s the worst possible place when things go wrong.
What would you tell someone dreaming of something audacious but hasn’t crossed the threshold to actually go and make it happen?
Find a way to commit to it.
My most committing move for my ride was when I bought my flight to South America. All it takes is a moment of courage. For me, it was the moment to click "buy." After that there was no way I could go back.
Another great technique is just to tell a lot of people you’re gonna do it, and then out of sheer social embarrassment you’ve got to do it!
One of the things I learned on the ride was that you can actually gain a lot by just doing something for three or six months. You can shorten a trip, and do a lot in that time, and still gain a lot. It’s not easy for people to get three to six months off work. But if you can, that is just a wonderful period of time. It gives you the time to explore places and travel at your own speed. But you never take where you are for granted because you’ve still got a fresh comparison of what you were doing back home.
Camping in Karakalpakstan
What's next for you?
I filmed my journey from start to finish. And the big project now is turning that into a feature length film. I’ve got three years of footage of this journey around the world. The Frozen Road was a single month out of a three year trip. So there’s a lot more of the story to tell.
It’s quite scary and daunting to think of putting that together. But I’m quite excited as well.
Any final words of wisdom?
Every adventure seeds the next one.
If you stick at things long enough, it just kind of works out.
If it scares you, that means you should probably go off and do it.
