Johannes, Kobi and Fabiano
These young Germans adventurers are riding through South America on their bicycles. No jokes.
"We traveling until September. Eight months. Seven, eight months. Our goal is gonna be Panama.
- Argentina, Chile. We changed like three or four times between Argentina and Chile, Bolivia, North Peru, then Ecuador, Columbia and Panama."
"Do a bike tour. For me is just the best thing ever You don’t have to start with a big tour for eight months you can just go for a few days in your home country. It is not hat difficult because you know the language and anything. To me it’s the most intense way of traveling/ you see so many things you don’t see by traveling by car or by bus. I think you’d want to do something bigger afterwards”
"A great moment was also when we came down to a small city, really really small and it had a plaza with stands selling sweets and restaurants. And we were just going crazy about it. ‘Okay we can enter a restaurant, order something we get real food. We just ordered all the sweets available and it we just sat there and put everything in. It was just a wonderful moment to be in civilization again."
"I think the goal too is just to never give up even if that’s something hard. I'm thinking of Bolivia there were some days were it was just hard because of the wind, because of snowstorms, because of sand storms, because of the altitude.
There are always some difficulties. Then if you manage everything just together then once you’ve done it’s just nice memories You don’t even think so much about the hard days.
- In the end the hard days are your highlights. Because right at that moment you think ‘I wanna be in a hotel, I wanna be home I want to be home, have my mom cook for me...
- The bus is passing by and you think why am I so silly riding that bike I can just get this bus!
- But in the end, those annoying things are your highlights."
“What I like the most is that the small things become important. When we are bicycling the only thing important are where do we stay for the night, where do we build our tent, where do we get food, where do we get water. The basics. “
“For me the biggest accomplishment is that we really just did it. Start the tour. We had an idea during our studies. Certain crazy ideas of going there and do this. We just really managed to get the free time, get the money, figure a way to get our bicycles here in the planes we did all the planning that was needed to start it. Sometimes you think of many things you could do, or ‘I want to do this and that but now it’s just the reality being here. When I sit on the being it is just completely normal that I’m going in bike through a landscape that is just completely insane. And then I have to remind myself that it is something really special in the moment. It’s south America, I’m not going in the Alpes in Germany. It’s really amazing that I’m here, and that I can be here and enjoy the view."
"It did not really get warm; It was jut cold the all day, windy the all day and.. so . Early tough cycling. You don’t even look forward to the tent in the evening cause you can’t sit next to it and enjoy the evening.
- You just want to go to sleep because the sleeping bed is warm. It was so cold that our bottle of water froze next to our sleeping bad. And we had to buy food for 10 days because there was nothing. No groceries, no nothing. You don’t get anything up there. We bought pasta and ketchup for 10 days and rice with soup for 10 days
- And then cookies. It was not good for 10 days, it’s too big and...
- After 5 days, it gets bad and you can’t eat it anymore. So we had to buy cookies. So it was like dried cookies without chocolate or anything. It was just awful. And in the morning we always had porridge, and we can’t see it anymore. Every day in the morning just porridge, with water But it’s my highlight of the tour.
- It was the best time"
“We met a guy. He was an old guy from Pennsylvannia, I think he was. He started cycling maybe 10 or 20 years ago and he wants to go to China and then he heads to Russia and then in China they say you are not allowed to enter our country. So then it says, ‘ok if it is not going to work this way, I’m just going to the other way around’. So he turns around, goes to Europe again, he goes to the states, then he thought ‘oh I’m in America’ let’s go to South America again. Then we met, then let’s go to North America again, then Alaska, then try to go to China there, the other way around. SO there is always a possibility to do something. The solutions are so crazy sometimes.”
“My favorite part was when we were biking up [on the Pase de la Cumbre, from Santiago de Chile to Argentina, over the mountains], and then we met two guys with the small buggy... It was a buggy with only 3 wheels because one wheel was broken, and the buggy was so big, and there was… nothing fitted in there, it was like probably that much of cloth-… I don’t know what they had in there. And we were asking them "What are you doing here guys ?" and they said: "Oh we are from Brazil and we are travelling, but now we are out of money so now we have to go back.
-So they were just walking there
-We don’t have any idea where they slept because they did not have a tent or something so we have any idea how they survived the night. They’re probably from a very poor part of Brazil. I mean, we are from Europe, we spent thousands of euros, of dollars on equipment, on bicycles, on tent. We got the best equipment right? But they had nothing. But they did it. They’ve decided to travel anyway. That’s the most impressive people for me on that tour. We had snow this night. We met them the next day so somehow they survived the night. I don’t have any idea where they slept. They did not even had a sleeping bag."
