Helge Pedersen

The author did spent ten years (1982-1992) exploring the world on his motorcycle, plus a bit in 1996. He crisscrossed every continent, except Antarctica, sometimes repeatedly along different routes. Often he stayed in one place for weeks or even months to recuperate or earn enough money to continue his trip. (He always slept in his tent, so that he only needed money for food and gas, and earned his passage on ships when he needed to cross water.) As Pedersen writes, he spent nine months in Brazil alone and could have written a book just about that country. I do wish he had done so, because this book, although not superficial and almost invariably interesting, did leave me wishing for more. I also wished there was more about wildlife, both text-wise and photography-wise, and that, considering that he’s obviously very social and made plenty of friends wherever he went, he’d asked and written about how people live in other places – something that generally lacks in most travel books, for obvious reasons. However, as it is, I’ve found this a very enjoyable book, full of interesting information and details. Here are just some of my favorite parts: about sleeping in abandoned houses in the USA (once sharing one with a skunk!), about an association of BMW motorcyclists in North America who help each other in stranded circumstances, about being surrounded by five whales while on a small boat off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, about a ferryman who commandeered the shoelaces of a dozen bystanders to tie Pedersen’s motorcycle to two wooden planks set between two canoes before transporting it across the Zaire, about having to wait for two days on the other side because the immigration officer had gone fishing, about his embassy in Kenya arranging him a visa to Somalia as a dry fish salesman, about attracting attention in Djibouti for camping on the sidewalk, to the point of being interviewed for TV, about hearing "shots" in the Sahara because stones split there due to daily temperature variations, about being able to telex BMW for replacement parts from a Saharan oasis (this was 1982!), and about celebrating Christmas in the Sahara with two Dutch motorcyclists he met there: "We drew a Christmas tree in the sand and rode our bikes around it, singing carols." I was actually surprised that wherever he went, he always found other European tourists there, no matter how off the beaten track the place was. I was particularly surprised that he managed to persuade one of them (a backpacker from Germany) to help him drag his motorcycle up and down steep hills in the impenetrable jungle in Colombia, machetes in hand (for free). I (and he) was also surprised how often people who had little themselves offered him free food. A memorable book.… (más)