Can you imagine doing a world tour by bike? Perhaps you use your bike to go to your classes, or to the supermarket. Or maybe you made a cycling tour for a few days in your own country. The bicycle is an ecofriendly, cheap, fast (especially in big cities) and healthy way of transportation. But doing a world tour by bike is a different story!
Tos Alles (ex-AEGEE-Utrecht member) and Hilde de Leeuw (honorary member of AEGEE-Utrecht) made a world tour by bike. They spent almost a year cycling from Utrecht to Montevideo and they managed to cycle 10.000 km in total. It is clear that you can’t cross the ocean by bike, so they cycled from Utrecht to Huelva, hitchhiked across the ocean by sailboat to Recife and cycled from Recife to Montevideo. The same distance by car would have taken a CO2 emission of 1320 kg, this is the amount of CO2 that a grown-up deciduous tree would absorb in 55 years. If you traveled 10.000 km by train this would lead to a CO2 emission of 280 kg., which is the amount of CO2 that a grown-up deciduous tree would absorb in 12 years. Do you want to know more about Tos and Hilde’s sustainable world tour? Read the interview below!
Iris: Why did you decide to do a world tour by bike?
Hilde: I wasn’t familiar with cycling holidays, I hitchhiked and backpacked a lot, but together with Tos we had a cycling holiday for five days in the Ardennes and I really liked it! Before that, I have never realized that it would be fun. Tos had often gone on cycling holidays with his family when he was younger. Cycling gives you so much freedom; you have everything you need with you. Your means of transportation is your bike and everything else you need can be stored on your bike. I have never felt such freedom while I was travelling before.
Tos: We wanted to go on a tour for a long time and the short cycling holiday was so much fun that we thought, why would’nt we do a world tour by bike? Cycling is a very easy and cheap way to travel, you can travel long distances in a day and it is less labour intensive than hiking.
What did the cycling bring you? How did the cycling affect you physically? What did you get out of the cycling?
Tos: Very brown arms and legs, with tan lines that made me look like a zebra.
Hilde: Huge calves, they were like steal! Furthermore, you know exactly what your body can handle and what it can’t after a few weeks of cycling. Sometimes it was hard to cycle when the roads were bad or the mountains very high, but we always knew, there would be an end!
Was it dangerous to do this bike tour?
Tos: After we left Belgium, there were no proper cycling lanes anymore, so it was better not to choose busy roads to ride on. Sometimes when we rode on a busy road it was a bit dangerous.
Hilde: The only danger we experienced were the cars, and it is a lot nicer to cycle on little roads. We used to camp in the nature and we slept at different people’s homes, so it was more convenient to stay on the smaller roads.
What was your most beautiful experience during the tour?
Hilde: Our time on the sailboat was very special. Especially when it was dark and we could see the bright stars shining above us. In those moments, I felt really small and I realized that the universe is so big and that we know so little about it.
Tos: For me, it was nice that our tour was about the journey and not about a destination. We didn’t figure out a route before we set off and thought we would just see how it worked out. You are cycling from village to village and there are days when you meet no one, and that feeling of taking a journey was really nice…
Do you want to receive tips regarding your own cycling holiday or cycling in general? Visit the facebook page Filosofietsen: http://www.facebook.com/Filosofietsen , for Dutch speaking AEGEEans the website: filosofietsen.nl, or send an e-mail to iris.hordijk[at]aegee-utrecht.nl
Did you know that AEGEE-Utrecht is organising together with AEGEE-Nijmegen a Travel SU in which you travel by bike?
Be inspired and start cycling!
Source for CO2 emissions: http://www.delijn.be/over/milieu/co2_uitstoot_verkeer.htm#2
Source for pictures: www.filosofietsen.nl
Written by Iris Hordijk, AEGEE-Utrecht and Speaker of EnWG