By David Cowlishaw Staff Reporter - Barrow Evening Mail.

Back into Barrow on Saturday pedalled Nicholas Hancock - tired, dishevelled, but grateful that he'd been mugged only once during a jaunt that had taken nine gruelling months,

He’s just cycled 6,250 miles around the Mediterranean, follow­ing the route blazed by Arab explorer Ibn Batuta more than six centuries ago."

'I'm making the journey to spread a little goodwill between Christians and Muslims,' Nick, 57, had said when he set off on his Peugeot fromWest Shore Park on Walney in September.

'It's sad that this remarkable man Ibn Batuta, who almost certainly travelled further than Marco Polo, is so little known in the West.'

And, the goodwill apart, Nick's gargantuan trip was aimed at recti­fying ,just that - a dozen countries traversed mile by aching mile in the heat of the day and amid unknown hazards at night.

With him retired teacher Nick took civic greetings from Barrow's then mayor Jim Park, scattering the letters en route. Most were received with courtesy by the assorted dignitaries; one, handed over in Alanya, Turkey, was met with a elaborate rebuff.

But it was also in Turkey, at Gol Hisar, that the local bigwig was so overwhelmed by Sunny Jim's letter of salutations he promptly invited Barrow's current mayor Rose Hamezeian to spend a week as his guest, visiting a castle beside a lake and perhaps picking her way through the ruins of a Roman city.

Will she go? At the town hall on Saturday, Rose, herself a cyclist ('short distances') smiled as she handed Nick a mounted Barrow coat-of-arms- at a recep­eption for him in the mayoral parlour. ”Perhaps in the autumn. I do have some holidays.

She leant forward fascinated as Nick told of his trip.

France, Spain, Morocco... In Tangier, boys exuberant­ly threw stones at the strange spectacle of a balding Englishman pedalling along in shorts 'but I was received-with dignity by all the people who mattered and I did get to see Ibn Batuta's tomb,' he said proudly.

His next plotted destination was Algeria but he was refused a visa, so, anticipating similar turndowns by Tunisia and Libya in those anti-Western days, Nick pedalled back to Spain and bundled the bike on an aircraft bound for Cairo.

MEATBALLS

The governor of Cairo pressed a little ceramic plate on him and then he moved on, averaging 70 to 80 miles a day at nine miles an hour, spending no more than £15 a day including 'marvellously cheap' hotels or youth hostels and feeding off bread, wine, yoghurt, chocolate and meatballs eaten cold from the tin.

Before long he was in the Sinai desert, facing the prospect of no hotels for 200 miles (he had dumped his tent as too heavy a luxury)

'1 cycled till 10pm. Pausing a while, I heard footsteps and found myself surrounded by soldiers. But all they wanted was to escort me to a military camp for some rest.'

The Gulf war had erupted by the time he reached Petra in Jordan. 'There was, well. a certain amount of hostility. I took a bus to Amman,

'There a TV film crew paid my taxi fare to Damascus, a city where I stayed in the worst hotel room I've ever been in, even if it did cost £20 for the night.'

STRUGGLE

He took another bus to Iskenderum in Turkey, again assailed by guilt that he was not cycling all the way. 'The raison d'etre for the trip seemed to be disappearing,' he said ruefully. He even boarded a train once.

Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary. He was headed home now, mending tiresome punctures along the way, shattering spokes galore and, in Germany, discover­ing his rear axle had broken.

The mugging? That came in Valencia when, cross­ing a park, he was 'jumped' by a man half his age demanding money.

'We fought. We struggled. I had strength born of despair, which surprised both of us, In the end we agreed to compromise, I handed over a thousand pesetas.'

Now Nick may write a book .