Distance: 12,000 km (7500 miles)
Duration: 9 months

From one cape to another – Good Hope to Horn – and the start of the Americas: two continents; one axis; 15,000 miles from toe to top (London to Brighton multiplied by 278. But with a lot more ups and downs).

Loathe to retrace his Chilean Gap Year skid-marks, Steve inches northwards to the east of the Andes through Argentina’s big landscape country: Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia and Pampas. Over the Bolivian border and onto the Gringo Trail – the Amazon route would be more original but not great for cycling. Ascend towards the rarefied air and cobalt blue skies of the Altiplano; soar over the crystal-white hexagon sheet of the Salar de Uyuni, then into Peru at Titicaca.

North-westwards now, through Cusco and beyond, past the Incan ruins and rice terraces of the Urubamba Valley and traverse the Andes to the Pacific coast. From here, Lima or thereabouts, it’s north-bound all the way, the route running alongside the gleaming peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. Onwards to the Ecuadorian highlands: lung capacity of an elephant, red-blood cell ratio of an alpaca. And up through the heart of Colombia, where Steve will pick his campsites very carefully.

Unless, by some miracle of political arbitration, paramilitaries have ceased their kidnap-athon of those who try to jump the Darien Gap, Steve will take another boat ride, a short one this time – Cartagena to Panama. Beyond the canal, a patchwork isthmus of countries all stitched together by the Pan-American Highway. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala. To list them like that is to trivialise the tribulations – jungles, volcanoes and tropical heat. Then all of Mexico, west of the Sierra Madre.

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