“Live for the present, respect the future.” This simple yet profound motto is at the heart of The Slow Cyclist, a company founded by Oli Broom. As he speaks to Rouleur from his home in Oxfordshire, it’s clear that these words encapsulate not only the ethos of his company but also his personal life. Though life today, settled in the UK with his wife and young family, is quite different from the adventures he embarked on 15 years ago, Broom’s passion for travel, exploration, and cycling remains undiminished.
Broom’s life now is a mixture of stability and adventure. While Oxfordshire provides a peaceful home base, he continues to fuel his passion for exploration, often on two wheels. Just a few days after our conversation, he’s set to leave for Portugal following a month-long trip to France. These journeys are not just about the destinations but about the experience of travel itself – the slow, immersive exploration that cycling uniquely offers.
His first real taste of this way of travel was back in 2009 when he decided to cycle from London in the UK to Brisbane, Australia, to watch the Ashes. The idea of cycling to Australia was both ambitious and, to many, eccentric. But for Broom, it was the perfect blend of his love for travel and cycling that he wasn’t getting from his desk job as a chartered surveyor in London.
“I wasn’t really inspired,” Broom said. “I was aware enough of that that I wanted to change it and was willing to do so. And I felt like it needed to be a big change. I couldn’t have just stopped working, I would have had to have moved back in with my parents. I needed time to think because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.”
Eighteen months, 14,000 miles and just himself and his bike for company – time and space was what he got.
Setting off on an adventure of a lifetime
Broom had cycled in the past. He recalled fond memories of going out on his BMX as a child around his village and his friend losing his two front teeth, then as he grew up and left school, highlighting trips to the Brecon Beacons during his university years with friends. But it was when he was working in London that he decided to cycle to Paris, buying a £20 mountain bike off of Gumtree after having his bike stolen from his first-floor balcony in the city.
“That is probably why it took us eight days to get there,” he laughed about cycling to Paris on a heavy mountain bike. “But I had a sneaky sort of feeling that after seeing if I could ride to Paris, doing a multi-day, week-long ride, I could probably do a year or so.”
And that was it, the big change he was looking for. This time, however, he wouldn't go atop his £20 mountain bike, but instead, a bike that the England and Wales Cricket Board offered him that arrived two days before he was leaving for his 14,000-mile trip. “The night before I left was the first time I had ridden a bike with panniers before. I remember I was staying at my parent's house and this was around 10 o'clock at night, and I was leaving at seven the next morning. I was wobbling about. Ridiculous really. But I had plenty of time to get used to it,” he said.
Broom is not someone who prepares every minuscule detail ahead of something. His motto is more, give it a go, what is the worst that can happen? He said: “I slightly bury my head in the sand because what if I discovered I didn't like cycling with a fully loaded bike, then I probably wouldn't have gone, and I really wanted to. The best training you can do for a bike ride around the world is the first few weeks anyway. There is no point being super fit on day one – you've got a long way to go.”
The aim of the monumental trip was not to go as fast as he could anyway – the aim of the ride was not only to discover more about himself but to use the bike as a form of travel and adventure. Although Broom admitted that it could have probably taken less than 18 months to complete the journey, he wanted to a decent amount of time in different places, getting under the skin of them and meeting the people who make up each country's culture and heritage.
The best memories he recalls from the trip are the ones he least expected, something he says makes the best travel experiences. “It is the little pool in the middle of the forest that you find when you are on a walk or swim under a waterfall,” Broom said. “Nowadays, it is quite hard to have those experiences as we live on our phones and have so much information, but I do think those are the best experiences when you are not expecting something.”
Sudan, the Sarah Desert, India and Syria were all unexpected places Broom cherishes from that year. He explained just how warm and gentle everyone from those countries was when he was there and highlighted that he wouldn't have met so many interesting people if he was in a car going 30 miles per hour. A bike opens up so many experiences – some good and some more challenging...
“Australia was the country that challenged me the most, however,” Broom added. “I was off-road quite a lot, pushing my bike through sand in the middle of nowhere. I mean, the middle of nowhere doesn't even do it justice. You're hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town, pushing your bike through sand, surrounded by creeks full of crocodiles. After being on the road for a year, I coped quite well with that, but if that had been my first place to cycle through, I probably would have gone home.”
But this was what Broom was searching for – the ability to know and understand himself better, find out what he was capable of and build up a level of mental and physical resilience that would enable him to know the next steps to take in his life.
“I came to the conclusion I needed to build something for myself. I needed to forge my own path. It was the happiest I had ever been up until that point in my life and although I was on my own, I spent a lot of time with people, and I loved the fact that I had created this project and was in charge of my own destiny.”
Moving to Rwanda and the start of a new project
Broom went on to write a book about his across-the-globe journey, titled Cycling to the Ashes: A Cricketing Odyssey from London to Brisbane, and moved to Rwanda in Africa after getting a job there. He recalled the cycling scene there, with Team Africa Rising just getting started.
“Some of their riders were doing quite well, and they had ambitions of going to the Tour de France. They had a coach who was a US rider, who had been at the Tour, and I would go cycling in the volcanoes in the north, and you'd see them all riding in their team kits – it was quite cool. You got the feeling that the roads up there had been built simply for them.
“But cycling around Rwanda, too, is just amazing. It is all natural. There is nothing that has been built for cycling, but you are cycling down trails that have been worn down over centuries of people walking to get water or walking between towns. Then you have these smooth red dirt roads, which are lovely for touring, and then in the north, it is more volcanic with lakes and eucalyptus forests. You can cycle along the chain of volcanoes that it is just insane that you have these volcanoes where the gorillas are and then the plains on the other side. It's honestly the most amazing place to cycle. People everywhere also cheer you on.”
Rwanda is where Broom had the inspiration for The Slow Cyclist. He wanted to show people just how incredible Rwanda was when you explored it this way. In 2013, he moved back to the UK and started trying to persuade some of his friends to go to Rwanda with him. However, the trip didn't get much interest. Even though it was then 20 years on from the Rwandan genocide, Broom felt there was still a fear from people visiting the African country.
“I started thinking maybe I need to start closer to home, so I went to Transylvania,” he said. This decision proved a good one to make, and Broom recalled a lot more interest in this trip – a trip still on The Slow Cyclist's itinerary today. The company's first official trip took place in 2014 after Broom had a stint working on the Tour de France in Yorkshire, and this was to Transylvania. But Broom said that Rwanda is their most popular trip for inquiries to date, and each year The Slow Cyclist takes around 100 people there on their trips.
“We recently had some feedback from some who had travelled with us, and he said, ‘This is real travel. It feels raw and real.’ It is not too pampered our trips. I mean, we do a bit of pampering, but there is still that sense of raw travel involved,” Broom said.
This element of travel is what Broom himself loves about exploring a region or country by bike – the raw beauty you get to discover. But another element that he has been keen to blend into his trips is the connection with local people and businesses. As a result, The Slow Cyclist employs local people and another example is Broom's new trip to Armenia, where they are working with an independent bike shop to lead the routes and showcase the local mountains. They also search for local homestays, hotels, cafés and restaurants to include on their routes, allowing not only people to experience local but also to provide business to those part of the trip.
All The Slow Cyclist trips are completed on e-bikes, a policy that was implemented two years ago for all trips.
From a year on the road to 10 years of The Slow Cyclist
“If you had asked me before I left Australia what I would be doing 10 years later, this wouldn't be one of them,” Broom said. “But I really like it. It is great fun, and there are so many different aspects to it. Essentially, it is travel, but it is also stories and connections.”
Next year, The Slow Cyclist will be celebrating its 10th anniversary, and Broom says he has plans to commemorate a decade of adventure travel with two special edition trips to Transylvania and Rwanda – both places which hold a special place in Broom's heart. “I will lead those trips too, which I don't often get to do,” he added.
Despite running a growing company for the past 10 years, Broom's passion for the bicycle is still as strong as it was when he tested his panniers the night before leaving for his epic adventure. He now shares this love for travel on the bike with his children, taking them to the Taurus Mountains in Turkey last year, following The Slow Cyclist itinerary. As a child, for Broom, cycling was about freedom, and he wants his children to experience this too.
“It's liberating being on a bike in a new place,” he said. “And it is also genuinely mindful. When you're on a bike, you get a real chance to think or even not think. You can find yourself cycling for hours and just not really thinking about much. You are just focussing on the places around you. You forget about everyday life and the stresses and strains, you are just in the moment. Cycling for me is not about a sport – it's a way of travelling.”
Read more from the Why I Ride series, including Sir Chris Hoy, Lael Wilcox, Sophie Storm Roberts and Paul Ainsworth.
