Martin Dorey is a writer and lifelong surfer, camper and campervanner. He writes books about camping, camper vans and environmental issues. He is the founder of The 2 Minute Foundation, a beach cleaning charity. He lives in Cornwall with his partner Lizzy. His latest book is The Green Camping Book: How to camp sustainably, ethically and responsibly.
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I never thought of myself as an adventurer. I travel a lot, mostly by campervan, but don’t ever go to places no one has been before (or even where people don’t often go). But I do like to see places from a different angle whenever I can. It helps to keep them fresh.
In 2021, for example, I paddle boarded down the Thames from Goring to Maidenhead, a journey of 56km that took two days. While I had driven along the Thames Valley many times, seeing it this way made it feel new and exciting. My partner and I camped half way at a campsite I have visited before, but it might well have been somewhere in the middle of nowhere. That was what the new perspective brought to the party.
So, when we set off in May this year to cycle our way from home in Cornwall to Portugal, I was thinking about it in the same way. I never really thought of it as an expedition or Big Adventure. We were going to see the places we’d seen before but from a completely different angle. The aim – to surf all of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard – wasn’t so very different from many of the journeys I have done before. It’s a favourite. An old friend. A pilgrimage to the hallowed surf spots of Europe made by surfers since the early sixties.
The difference was that we’d do it in a way that was slow, deliberate and with as little environmental impact as possible. Surfers have a carbon footprint that is 50% higher than the average person, 75% of which is travel, so I felt we had an important message to carry with us.
Plus, no one had done it on bikes, with surfboards, before. Of that, I was sure.
We would prove it is possible to go on a surf trip without hooning about in a van or taking a plane and that it can be ‘eco-friendly’ without being any more difficult. We took a Trangia stove to cook on (it used distilled alcohol as fuel), surfed wooden surfboards and wore wetsuits made of natural rubber instead of neoprene made from cancer-causing chemicals. Much of our kit was second hand, or, if not, bought from companies with excellent environmental credentials. I even wore cycling shorts made from merino (no, in case you were wondering, never itchy).
It seemed like a good idea at the time. We would ride our bikes towing surfboards on trailers from home to Cape St Vincent, the most south westerly point of Mainland Europe. Cycling meant we would have unprecedented access to beaches and coastal cities that are difficult to access in a van, and would be able to use cycle paths like France’s Velodyssee, a 1300km route down the west coast of France. In Spain we would be obliged to travel on the old roads, steep and winding routes that were used before the motorways were built, some of which are used by the Camino Norte, the pilgrim’s route to Santiago de Compostela. We would get a privileged view of the coast – seeing it in the way the first surfers saw it in the early days of surf travel and how pilgrims have seen it for centuries.
In Portugal, if we got that far, we’d follow the Camino Portuguese along the coast to Porto. After that, we guessed, we would be used to route finding. How hard could it be?
I spent a year planning and daydreaming about what it would be like to arrive in places that I have arrived in before, only from a different point of view. I just couldn’t imagine how it might feel to cycle into Lisbon or even to cycle onto the ferry that has taken me so many times from Royan to Les Landes, on the west coast of France.
In the end it was so much more than I could ever have imagined. The further we travelled the more we realised we were on a real, bona fide adventure. And it was epic.
Lizzy and I rode for 77 days, with 62 nights under canvas, 10 in chalets, 1 in a youth hostel, 3 in hotels and 1 in a five-star hotel (Lizzy was unwell in Santiago de Compostela and we felt we deserved it!). We rode for 3400km, much of which was off road, and surfed on some of Europe’s most famous surfing beaches.
I loved being a nomad. No matter the hardship we endured (and we did) somehow everything came right when we got back on the bikes in the morning. It might have been a slog climbing the mountains in northern Spain (we climbed the equivalent of Yr Wydfa every day for weeks) but it never lasted. The other side was always a breeze. Camping in a tiny two-man tent was much better than I had feared too. It became home, no matter where we put it. Oddly enough, after a while I got so used to being in a different place each night that I never once lost my bearings when I got up to pee in the middle of the night (about the only downside of life under canvas for someone over 50).
Cooking fresh food, eating well, sleeping, surfing and cycling became our life and it was glorious. Even the cold winds, the midday heat, the lashing rain and the terrifying Portuguese traffic wouldn’t stop me doing it again.
And if it inspired just one person to ditch the car in favour of the humble bicycle then I’ll be even happier. All of us have work to do, because our planet needs us to do things differently now. And the great news? If I can do it, so can you. And it’ll be absolutely, flipping, life-changingly brilliant.
We’ve all got a bit of adventure in us.
