George Kohler and his son Josh had stopped for a drink on top of the Tibetan Plateau, 4,000m above sea level, when they spotted the Chinese police coming towards them. For four months they’d been heading east from their home in Norfolk on their around-the-world adventure. They’d spent the previous two days climbing through yak-dotted valleys, past temples and prayer flags. Everything seemed so idyllic. What could possibly be wrong?
“Using Google Translate, they said we couldn’t go any further,” recalls 23-year-old Josh. “They took us down to the police station to talk to us more, and basically said the county we were in was forbidden for foreigners.”
It could have been a fraught encounter. Fortunately, one of the officers recognised the father-son duo from their social media videos, and knew their story. “He wanted to have a selfie with us,” Josh smiles. And within a few hours, they were escorted by truck to the next city, where they were freed to pedal on – south to Australia, on to South America, and finally homeward across Europe.
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Four days after finishing, George and Josh are sitting side by side at home, opposite me on a video call. Their homecoming, Josh says, was “heart-warming”: 70 people, mostly total strangers, cycled the final 25km stretch with them into the village of Halvergate, where over 100 more applauded them, including an official from Guinness World Records.
“It’s hard for us to comprehend what we’ve actually achieved,” says 57-year-old George. “I think it will sink in over the next few weeks.”
It was George’s son Josh, a content creator and filmmaker, who had the initial idea for the trip. Around five years ago, when Josh was still at school, the adventurer Leon McCarron came to give a talk to his classmates, and told of a cycling expedition he had done across America. Josh returned home and devoured McCarron’s book. He then persuaded his father to buy bikes, and the following year, after a Land’s-End-to-John-o’-Groats tester, the pair rode 6,000km from New York to San Francisco. When Josh then looked to a bigger, global adventure, George took little convincing. “I’m always up for a challenge,” the father says.
The planning stage alone took a year. The pair’s motivation to do the ride was three-fold, George explains. “First was to challenge ourselves,” he says. “Second was to raise funds for UNICEF and a local bicycle community-interest company called Bicycle Links. And thirdly, to try and inspire others.
“We’re just an ordinary father and son that went out on quite a long bike ride. If we can do it as ordinary people, there’s no reason why anyone else can’t go on their own adventures, however big or small that may be.” The three world records came only as “add-ons” to their original goals.
Keen to dive into the meat of the ride, I ask what the hardest moment was. Josh immediately has a flashback to crossing the treeless southern expanse of Australia. “It was just brutal,” he says. “I think over the 60 days we cycled, only four of them we had tailwinds – the rest were either a headwind or a crosswind – and we were there in the middle of summer, so the temperature got to 46°C at one point.”
(Image credit: Josh Kohler)
George concurs the story with a nod. He then cites another memorably difficult episode which came earlier in the trip, when crossing a mountain pass in Kyrgyzstan. “It was two days of uphill cycling along a dirt track,” he says, “and then when we got to the top, at over 3,000m, the downhill [surface] was just as bad.”
To add insult to injury, Josh was attacked by bees at the foot of the climb. “So he’s getting stung, after which he drops his bike on his foot, and he’s hopping around in pain,” George says. When they finally found a stretch of tarmac, he adds, it was like “riding on silk”. Then came a shop – an oasis – where they bought a two-litre bottle of ice-cold Fanta and drank it in a few swift gulps.
Fizzy drinks, unsurprisingly, were far from the strangest thing the pair used to fuel their sometimes 200km-long days in the saddle. What was the most unusual food they ate? “Pig brain,” they answer in unison. “It was in a market in Chengdu [China],” Josh adds. George then takes over. “Some of the other stuff we ate was chicken feet and frog porridge, but pig brain just wouldn’t go down,” he says.
Hold on. What’s frog porridge? “It was in Malaysia,” George smiles. “It’s a savoury porridge with frogs’ legs, cooked in a spicy broth. You mix the two together, and it’s actually really tasty… We were burning through 4,000-5,000 calories a day, so we pretty much ate anything we could get our hands on.”
When they grew tired in the evenings, the pair swapped mostly between staying in cheap hotels and camping. (They had two water-based incidents: one when a sprinkler soaked their tent in Australia, and another when they awoke to find themselves almost submerged in the Yellow River in China.) They also relied on the kindness of strangers for a warm shower and a bed. George recalls in particular one man in Kazakhstan who let them sleep on the floor of the mosque he ran. “It was fantastic,” he says.
(Image credit: JoelCant/PlatinumLive)
As the Kohlers recount their travel tales, they keep turning and smiling to each other, basking in the nostalgia, often riffing off each other’s anecdotes. They seem so content in each other’s company, I wonder if tensions ever flared up. Surely, as families so naturally do, they butted heads a few times? “Oh, I think we had an argument almost every day,” says Josh. “But we just approached it with the thought that we would not go to sleep angry with each other.
“When you spend that much time with another person, especially a family member, you’re going to clash… We knew it was going to cause friction, and it certainly did, but I think our relationship is so much stronger, and we appreciate each other a lot more, and have been able to understand each other a lot more.”
In that vein, it’s noteworthy that their proudest feelings from the trip are not about themselves, but each other. “I’m proud of having seen the growth and maturity in Joshua over this journey,” says George, his son sitting to his left. “He’s come out of it an absolute gladiator. I’ve seen him face challenges that most people would just crumble over.”
Josh, likewise, says he “couldn’t be more grateful” for the time he spent with his father, who runs his own chimney-sweeping business. “To be able to take the time off work to do this with me, and keep up with me when he’s 30-odd years older than me, and be able to dig in and keep going for 400 days – and just put up with me generally – is pretty impressive,” Josh says. “I’m so proud of him for his leadership and how we’ve tackled this together.”
George’s break from work will run until the busy season starts again in September – “my wife has a list as long as your arm of things I need to get on with here [at home],” he says. Meanwhile, Josh is now working on a documentary about the trip, which he hopes he’ll have done in a year.
Have they got plans for another adventure? “Nothing concrete,” they both insist, though they’ve had ideas. “Who knows,” George says, “there might be another challenge that pops up that we have a go at.”
For the moment, though, their attention is on fundraising. The pair initially set themselves a target of collecting £10,000 for the humanitarian charity UNICEF with their around-the-world ride. “We achieved that in four or five months,” Josh says. “Then we upped it to £30,000 to do a pound per kilometre, and we hit that about a month ago.” Their total tipped over £67,000 this week.
“Hopefully we can get it to £100,000,” Josh continues. “That would be amazing. We’ll keep pushing and hopefully that number will go to six figures.”
Donations to the Kohlers’ UNICEF fundraising can be made on their JustGiving page.
