Distance: North America 9000 km (5625 miles)
               And then Japan 3000 km (1875 miles)
Duration: 5 months

El Paso, Texas. Some time in 2012. By now fluent in Spanish, smelling quite terrible and into his 30’s, Steve has been riding for two years. Sort of halfway.

Into the baked interior of America’s Southwest: ghost towns, slot gorges and looks of incredulity from rotund road-trippers who have never seen a bicycle before, let alone one ridden by a human yeti. Meandering northwest through the sandstone iconography of Arizona’s wide open spaces. The Grand Canyon – attrition’s masterpiece – and the bright lights of Vegas: conflicting symbols of the American Dream. Death Valley: arrow straight roads and temperatures hitting 50.

Thoroughly fed up of deserts, Steve rejoins the Pacific coast at San Francisco, crosses the Golden Gate Bridge and zips northwards on Route 101: El Camino Real, The Pacific Highway, The Royal Road. For him, just another seemingly interminable stretch of tarmac: California, Oregon and Washington states.

Canada now…all similar ground from here: grizzlies and glaciers, moose and mountains. Two or three souls per square kilometre. Cold. Conquering the Canadian Rockies then bisecting huge Alaska to an outpost town that only maniacs set on a terrestrial circumnavigation seem to know about: Point Barrow. That’s the Americas…tick.

Who knows what travails Dr Fabes will have endured to reach this frontier. Maybe he will be communicating only in grunts; maybe he will have found the meaning of life; perhaps he will have become some latter day saint, accompanied by an entourage of worshipful disciples like in Forrest Gump. Whatever the case, Steve will take a train to Anchorage where he will shower vigorously to make himself more appealing to the mariners he hopes to pressgang into ferrying him to Hokkaido, Japan.

Next...