Saskatoon teen youngest to circle the globe on a bicycle

He’s conquered the globe on a bicycle, but he can’t legally buy a beer at home.

Saskatoon’s B’yauling Toni became the youngest person ever to circumnavigate Earth on a bicycle when he arrived back in the Bridge City on Tuesday.

The teenager was 17 when he left home seven months ago, biking nearly 31,000 kilometres across 16 countries in a generally eastward direction to complete the feat.

“I really love cycling, I’ve been cycling all my life,” he told Saskatchewan Afternoon’s David Kirton on Wednesday.

“I really wanted to, after high school, to do something bigger and continue to cycle and travel.”

He left six days after he graduated and cycled from Saskatoon to Halifax.

From there he travelled to Portugal and made his way across Europe through Spain, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Latvia and Estonia.

Then he traversed the vast expanse of Russia before cutting through Mongolia and China.

Toni said the hardest stretch of his trip was through Mongolia’s Gobi desert.

“The roads there, a lot of them aren’t paved and you’re just working with tracks in the sand,” he said.

On top of the cycling difficulties, he found out the hard way that food can be hard to come by because of the nomadic lifestyle in Mongolia.

He became ill from malnutrition, and could barely walk — let alone cycle — for several days.

“There were three days where I couldn’t get out of this little yurt,” Toni said. “It was an unfortunate situation.”

From Shanghai he flew to Australia and biked through the southern coast Down Under before jetting over to New Zealand and returning to Canada, arriving in Vancouver in mid-December.

He made his way back home to Saskatoon in the middle of the winter through the Rockies and across the prairies.

“That was one part I did plan,” he said. “I’ve actually been very interested in winter touring.”

While the journey itself is impressive, the way Toni went about it might add to the intrigue: He was completely alone, with no physical support from family or friends.

“I barely had contact with anyone back home,” he said. “I’d email my dad occasionally, maybe once a month.”

When Toni arrived home Tuesday, he was 18 years, 100 days old, which broke the record for being the youngest person to circumnavigate the world on a bicycle.

The previous record holder was Tom Davies, a British cyclist who completed the feat at 19.

Journeying around the world also comes with its share of dangers, as both Davies and Toni have shown.

A BBC report from 2015 detailed how Davies was chased by dogs in Albania.

Toni said he was robbed twice during his seven-month odyssey, and he was hit by a car in Wellington, New Zealand.

“A person rear-ended me because they were angry I was on the road,” he said. “There were a few scary times.”

Throughout his worldwide trip, Toni has been raising money to support Saskatoon’s Outdoor School Program — which offers nature-based learning to children through outdoor activities like snowshoeing, cycling and canoeing.

His GoFundMe page has raised over $12,000, with half going toward funding his trip and the other half going toward the Outdoor School Program.