A hidden valley – but for how long?

It’s not often I feel sad to leave a place when riding my bike. Usually I’m super excited to get cracking but last week I left a beautiful tea horse road node village and felt, well, sad.
I intend to go back in 5 weeks and will write more about it then. I was lucky enough [...]
Beat Heim in Australian Mountain Bike magazine

For anyone who is thinking of packing their bike up in a box and heading off on holiday with their pride & joy, check out my Beat Heim interview in this month’s AMB magazine, on the shelves now!
The guys did a great job (nice work Jordan) on the layout as always. Hopefully some of Beat’s [...]
How do we get across those mountains then?

Tim was worried that if we were left out here for the night, we would surely perish, Andy was pretty quiet and I began to really feel the cold. 45 minutes went by and still nothing. I was starting to shiver now and I was beginning to come around to Tim’s thinking.
Nu Jiang Shan pass on You Tube

Facebook and You Tube are blocked on main land China and the proxy service is painfully slow so I waited to get to Hong Kong before I updated. I’ll pop some stills and a short back ground on the trip so far later on today but here is a short clip I uploaded yesterday.
All packed!

Oh my goodness, I can’t believe it’s all come around so quickly. I’ve had a mad week finishing immunisations, bike preps, packing and re-packing. Singapore Airways have been awesome, allowing me an additional 10KG but I have a sneaking suspicion I’ll be over that!
Thanks to Brad & Ingrid at Gear Corp for all their great [...]
Grub gets a front end face lift

Big thanks to the guys at Favourite Cycles in Manly for helping me get ready for the big ride. Favourite Cycles have long been a supporter of my trips and their knowledge on all things bikes is astounding! Leighton took me through replacing a bottom bracket after hours last night, as well as using the [...]
Australian Geographic sponsor Search for Shambhala

I’m proud to announce that the Australian Geographic Society have come on board for the Search for Shambhala solo mountain bike expedition this year! The Australian Geographic Society support community, research and adventure projects throughout Australia and overseas and is an invaluable source of knowledge and inspiration.
I applied for a grant from AG late last [...]
Mushypea talk at the Apple Store, Sydney

I’ll be giving a short talk at the Apple store in George Street, Sydney tomorrow evening from 5 pm. The theme of the talk will be “Made on a mac” and will feature some of my photos and video that, funnily enough, have been made on my mac.
Should be great fun, I’ll bring in my [...]
Testing testing 123…

My flights are booked for 29th May to China to begin my year long search for Shambhala by mountain bike. So that gives me about two weeks to finish up research and gear testing before I pack up my bike once again for the big unknown.
While testing my new bike in Queensland this week, I [...]
Where can I get one of these cuties?

This week I was lucky enough to give an informal talk on compact adventure photography at Balmain Photography club in Sydney’s inner west.
We covered topics including:
Camera selection and accessories
Demonstration of the Ricoh GX200 and attachments
3″ wonders – mini pods
JPG rocks
How to power you batteries with PowerTraveller
Equipment protection using cases rather than gadget bags
Covering up basic [...]
Gulf2Gulf screened at the Mont24 film festival

Mushypea’s Gulf2Gulf was lucky enough to have been selected to be shown at the Mont24 mountain bike race film festival at Sparrow Hill forest, Canberra. It was great to see her on the big screen last Saturday evening during the night racing. With team mates out on the course racing around the 19km circuit, Fergal and I [...]
Erden Eruc of ‘Around n Over’ cycles in to Sydney

Noel McFarlane of Gemini Bicycles (distributors of BOB trailers in Australia) invited me along to photograph Erden Eruc as he arrived in Sydney this week on the Australian leg (the second leg) of his Six Summits Project. Erden is raising awareness for human powered travel around the world.
Noel and I managed to pin down Erden for a [...]
Mushypea interview on EscapeTheCity.Org

The good guys at Escape the city in the UK are doing some great work inspiring young professionals (and the not so young in my case!) to bite the bullet and “Escape the corporate mainstream and Do Something Different”.
I was thrilled to be interviewed for their site a couple of weeks ago. At first I [...]
A cycling legend visits Sydney

It’s great meeting a hero, someone you’ve followed and been inspired by for years. Swiss born Beat Heim visited Sydney two weeks ago on the last part of his Asian Odyssey bicycle trip, a two year long, 50000 km epic that started in Mongolia in 2008.
Mushypea enters the Mont24 movie festival

Thanks to some great feedback on the full length Gulf2Gulf DVD, I thought I’d enter a shortened version in to the Mont24 film festival to see how she goes. It’s the first time I’ve entered a film competition so I’m sure it will be a great learning curve for me. I’m not sure when I’ll [...]
The Dirty Nomad e-magazines

Over the next few weeks I’ll be popping some of my published and unpublished features on this site for any cyclists out there who might be interested in planning their own long distance off road mountain biking adventure. Some of the e-zines will be straight out of the magazines and I hope to find some [...]
Gulf2Gulf goes full length

After almost a year the final cut of the Gulf2Gulf DVD came hot off the mac production line last night. If anyone is thinking of doing this trip (I know there a few) then let me know and I’d be happy to pop a copy in the post.
The DVD is split into two parts, [...]
DP&D publish ‘Traveling Light’

Packing a photographic punch, without packing the kitchen sink
Digital Photography & Design publish ‘Traveling Light’, a short guide to taking photographs on (or should I say ‘off‘) the road with a compact camera.
Here’s what’s covered:
Profiling
Using the Interval Mode
MiniPods – 3″ lifesavers!
Don’t give up on JPG; it’s a lot less messy than RAW
Camera & Battery storage [...]
Kona COG publish

Kona Mountain Bike’s funky new blog, COG, features a primer of the Tour de Timor story this week and can be seen on the following link; http://cog.konaworld.com/archives/1646
Here’s a photo I took of Team Kona Australia rider Campbell Townsend on the King of the Mountain (KOM) on stage 4. Melbourne based rider Campbell rode his Kona [...]
SMH use mushypea photo
Check this out, Ivan makes the front page of the Online Sydney Morning Herald (SMH)! 20 seconds into the video, we can see Ivan during stage 1 riding along the coast from Dili to Baucau.
If you look carefully around 2 min 40s you’ll see a still shot in the video. Jock Cheetham, a [...]
Sydney: Green, Global & Connected

The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore MP and SMH Editor Peter Fray were among the speakers taking part in a talk last night on Sydney’s transport issues and what we can do now to plan for a city in 2030.
With a state election in 79 weeks, NSW Lord Mayor [...]
The Best of British! Peaty takes the Worlds in Canberra!

Sometimes I can get a bit proud to be British, and this is one of those moments. I didn’t even check the World’s results as I thought Sam H would’ve got it, but no, GB’s Mr Peat wrapped it up after 15 yrs and got the gong at 35yrs old! LEGEND
And this interview almost had [...]
Mushypea gets on Track (.org.nz)

Planning on riding in NZ but don’t know where to start? Well check out this cool site documenting the intricate trail network around the north and south island of our neighbours across the pond. This great site dedicated to trails in NZ is using a mushypea (YouTube mu5hype4) video clip to help give an idea [...]
Mushypea on Ricoh’s Facebook page

Mushypea is featured on the Ricoh Facebook site.
Click on the photo below to head straight there ….
“Dave Turner is an Adventure Cyclist and Freelance writer/photographer. He writes and photographs his journeys for mountain bike magazines in the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand, hoping to inspire others to grab their bikes and go in search [...]
