What Cycling from London to Cape Town Taught Me About Life, Food, and Friendship

There are very few people who can say they're cycled from London to Cape Town, but Tom Perkins is one of them. Together with his friend and trusty cycling companion Matt Chennells, the pair set out on a mammoth journey that would take them through 26 countries – through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa – over 501 days. Their aim? To explore the length of the world on a hungry stomach, eating and cooking local cuisines in the homes of the people they met along the way. Here, Tom, who has since published a book, Spices and Spandex, about his journey, shares his story.

I was having a pint with my mate Matt in a pub in Cape Town when we came up with the idea. We'd just graduated with useless humanities degrees and had spent years studying (among other things) sub-Saharan Africa, but we'd never actually seen it. It was all just armchair knowledge, and we wanted to change that.

A couple of drinks later and we'd decided that we would cycle between two pubs: starting at the one I grew up next to in a village in southern England, and ending at our local in Cape Town. Stupidly, we told a few people that evening and woke up in the morning with a feeling of 'Oh shit, we're going to have to do this now.' And so we did.

We weren't cyclists in the slightest. None of the racks to our bikes worked, so everything was held on with hose clamps and cable ties. It was a complete shambles. When we started I'd never seen Matt in worse condition – he hadn't sat on his bike until the day that we left. I just looked at him and said, 'Are you sure you're going to be able to do this?'

Although our plan was vague I was very clear about what I wanted to get out of our trip. When you're on the road for so long you need to have a project that keeps you passionate about what you're doing. I wanted to find a way of combining my greatest loves – taking photos, writing, telling stories and, above all, food – and so it made sense to me to try and make a cook book. I just wanted to learn – to be a sponge and soak up as much knowledge as I could.

I'm not a trained chef. I've always loved cooking, but I knew that I never wanted to go down the cheffing route. With the book, I wanted to take a more social anthropological look at food: what it means to different people and places and how it brings people together. I wanted to create something that looked beyond how to perfect a plate of food.

Wherever we went, with every person we met and got to know, I would try and turn the conversation onto food. I'd ask them to teach me how to cook they're favourite food growing up, or a dish that meant a huge amount to them, or just their national dish. I'd watch them cook, and then cook with them. I spent an evening learning how to make injera – a sourdough pancake eaten across Ethiopia three times a day; I watched a Turkish woman, no taller than four feet, butcher a half ton bull with the skill of a tailor; I was invited to cook with the women in a family I stayed with in Sudan – something that's unheard of for a man.

The recipes in the book are a mixture of the things I was taught, but also my own made-up creations. There's a dish from Tanzania that I'm convinced has never been cooked there, but I wanted to put a personal spin on the incredible ingredients we found. I would walk through markets being fed everything from deep-fried locusts to fish heads.

We had little money and so had to rule out anything that was expensive. For 501 days we pretty much lived on the side of the road. It would get to a certain time in the evening and, depending on the time of the year and where we were geographically, we would start to think about where we were going to sleep that night. We'd spend about an hour before sunset looking for somewhere to camp: an abandoned bus shelter, a wood, a forest, a public park. If it was in the middle of winter we'd go to a little cafe or bar and hang around until someone would ask where we were going. With the few words we knew in that language we'd answer: 'Tent. Sleep'. The amount of times we were welcomed back to strangers' homes was uncountable.

Several months into the trip my knee – which was weak before I started after I shattered my shin – gave up. We were in the middle of desert, on the western border of Libya, just after Christmas and I could barely walk and definitely could not cycle. I got treated at a hospital in Luxor and then decided to make my way south to Sudan to visit Khartoum and figure out my next move. It's there that I met a truck driver who introduced me to his cousin Mohammed. Mohammed took me to his house and simply told me: 'This is your home'. I stayed with Mohammed and his family for over a month while I rested my knee. It was incredible. I'm still in monthly contact with him and he's got a big chapter in the book, which I sent him when it got published. That's the best thing that can happen with the book – giving it back to the people I met and helped me.

Nelson is also someone that stays with me. We were in Malawi and, having cycled 100km, it was getting dark. We realised we were in the middle of nowhere without any food. After following a dirt track we came to a village and were, luckily, greeted by Nelson, the head teacher from the school. He cleared a classroom for us to sleep in, gave us water to wash with (after cycling for 100km we didn't smell good) and invited us into his home for a traditional Malawian supper of mielie-meal (a food similar to stiff mashed potato) served with tomato and chopped avocado. When I asked him if he had any salt, his face dropped.

"The price of salt has gone up, and I can't afford to put it on my table this month," he told me. Here was a man who couldn't afford to buy salt – a basic commodity for us in the UK – but at the sight of two strangers instantly offered up what he did have. For Nelson, and so many others we met on our journey, a stranger was someone to be welcomed and enjoyed and looked after. The people we met weren't afraid of what a stranger might take from them, but what they might gain by meeting them.

Travelling by bike is the most exposing way to see any country, but also one of the most vulnerable. Looking back I realised how dangerous it was, and how naive we were. I was run over twice; I became very sick from drinking water straight from the Nile; we were in Cairo during the revolution; my knee gave up and I had to continue the trip on a vintage motorbike (which broke down every single day).

But on a journey like that you want to be able to have the contrast between the good times and bad. You need, in a perverse way, to be able to enjoy the bad times because that's what makes the story. Having to eat bull's lung soup washed down with sour cherries when I'd been bedridden with a stomach bug for a week was horrible, but it's absolutely my favourite ever eating experience. We always told ourselves that no-one had put us in any of those positions but ourselves. It was our dream trip, and we were massively privileged to do it.

Did we change? Of course. You'd have to be quite blinkered or even more stubborn than I am to think that you won't. The people that you meet, the experiences that you have and the things that you are open to on a journey like that are so awe-inspiring and different to anything that you've experienced before that change is an inevitability. You welcome it. Especially if you're 23 – it was an incredibly formative part of my life. And now I'm going to do it all over again across South America. But I'm swapping the bike for a tuk tuk this time.

In collaboration with Ford.