It was the common quest for a visa to travel into Suriname that brought Jeremy into the same room as Pat and Catherine “Cat” Patterson in Cayenne, French Guiana in the summer of 2005.  Jeremy was teaching English on the untamed edge of South America and Pat was on his second global cycling tour, Cat on her first.

Last week was an overwhelming week for Bristol2Beijing.  The release of a video on the BBC ten days ago drew amazing traffic to the expedition website and our social media feeds.  In just a few days we were blessed with more than a thousand new followers and nearly five hundred additional donors whose generous contributions pushed us above £65,000 raised, and growing!

In any other October of Luke Grenfell-Shaw’s previous 24 years, an unsuspecting classroom full of students and lecturers would have first noticed his determined stride, his sharp nose and cheek bones, his playfully spiky dirty-blond hair, or his aggressively floral shirts. This October, however, was different.