When I started my tour in late April 2007 I had some vague ideas about the route. I had written them down on my website already and they were stored in my head. No maps, no real preparation. That was nice because whenever somebody from the area told me there was a nicer way, I could quickly adjust and got rewarded pretty often by cycling along a canal or UNESCO world heritage places for example.
As a rider of the Beijing to Paris Carfree rally I had to get to Beijing somehow. I chose a pretty indirect route, far away from the direct one. Look on the right side under Europe and Asia to see where exactly I cycled. I hadn’t planed on going through Tibet at all, but when I got the chance to in Kashi, in Western China, I took it and I’m really happy about it.
Even before starting the rally I knew that my ambitions were bigger: Together with the domain parispeking.de I had registered velaia.de. Velaia Standing for the VELo (=French for bicycle) and gAIA (=theory from James Lovelock that earth is like a major being consisting of subentities similar to the cells in the human body). So in Lhasa I bought the ticket to fly to Australia.
The 3 month visa for Australia is easily attainable online for many citizens from western countries. Together with a credit card it’s a job of 10 minutes to get the permit. I flew into Sydney and cycled a tour in the south-east of Australia covering many coastal kilometers in relatively crowded areas of Australia but also several hundred kilometers in Australian Mountains (Snowy Mountains) and in the outback.
New Zealand, being quite a tourist hyped country, also stood on my list to cycle. So I got a cheap flight from Sydney to Christchurch and discovered the South Island for 1.5 months and took another month for the North Island in the middle of autumn.
Afterwards I flew to the northern hemisphere again, namely San Francisco with record summer temperatures. From there I cycled over the Great Basin to Zion National Park and Grand Canyon National Park and back to the West Coast to meet my father in late June in Caracas, Venezuela.
Already as early as Lhasa had he phoned me and we agreed on a 5 month appointment for cycling together in South America. Now, my plans had been pretty unclear again. I was the organizer and only had a 1:4 millon map of the northern part of South America and an idea of cycling along the Andes, always as high up as possible. That’s how we happened to cycle the probably most strenuous route from the north to the south of this continent, adding up almost 200 000 m (200 km!) in altitude gain in only 5 months and being rewarded with some of the most amazing adventures and experiences.
After the high plateau in Bolivia we had a fast, almost race-like ride through the Atacama Desert and flew back to Europe at the beginning of December. I left the flight together with my recumbent bike in Paris and cycled over the Netherlands (Amsterdam) back to my home in Southern Germany for Christmas.
Alltogether I had therefore just exceeded the radius of the Earth with 40 135 km cycled.
For some countries you can find additional information on the subpages to this post. I hope there’ll be time to complete the list with all the cycled countries and a lot of information about each country.
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