In 2015, Joshua Cunningham rode his bike from London to Hong Kong. His journey took him some 12 months and 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles), through 26 countries. Here, he shares some of the photographs and tales he collected along the way.

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”

The bicycle travel experience is one of complete immersion—in place, people, terrain, climate, culture and cuisine. By traveling through a region, as opposed to skipping between locations within it, you have yourself the opportunity to see everything the guidebooks literally miss out—and everything that they would actively choose to avoid too.

And as I made my way across the Eurasian landmass in 2015, the depth of Hemingway’s words became abundantly clear.