Juan on an ice rink in Greenland.
JUAN MENÉNDEZ GRANADOS: "THE BICYCLE ALLOWS YOU TO TRAVEL AT THE RIGHT SPEED"
A tireless adventurer, an extreme athlete eager to discover new places and little-frequented territories. And all by bike. That's how it is Juan Menendez Granados , a versatile Asturian who traveled the Camino de Santiago for the first time on wheels at the age of 16. From then on, he set realistic goals that he fulfilled. The trips were turning into expeditions and, now, at 30 years old, he faces challenges to the limit of the impossible. His expeditions have earned him an award from the Spanish Geographical Society.
Juan has traveled to every continent, except for the antartida, his new challenge for 2013 . He has pedaled through places of great scenic interest such as the Amazon, the Ural Mountains, the ice roads of the Canadian Arctic, the Australian deserts, Lake Baikal in Siberia, Tanzania and Kilimanjaro, the Pamirs in Central Asia, Greenland... Destinations where they still survive cultures and peoples that have barely had contact with the Western world. Of all of them, there is especially a trip that changed his life: the Transpyrenean . "It was when I realized that adventure was in my blood, and that I had to try to make my dreams come true," Juan tells us, whose essentials in his saddlebags are a knife, a stove, a tent and a satellite phone .
Juan on his journey through the Australian deserts.
Juan camping at Lake Baikal
Seeing the world from the saddle of his off-road bike is especially beautiful for this Spaniard: "The bicycle is a sustainable and unique means of transport that allows you to go at the right speed : not too slowly, not too fast. You see almost everything and as you move by your own means, it makes you value things, appreciate the details and establish communication with the local people. teaches you a lot ”. Among the many anecdotes that Juan keeps in his memory, there is especially one that caused him a lot of impression (and annoyance): “In my journey through the Ural Mountains, in the most remote areas of northern Russia, I was the first Westerner who saw any people from the most lost villages. That's why they took me for a spy, as if it were communist times. A few minutes later the military police appeared with the Kaleshnikov rifle and subjected me to an intense interrogation. I had to learn Russian on the fly to be able to communicate with them.”
When he is not immersed in one of his expeditions, this adventurer lives halfway between Pravia , his hometown, and Bergen . In this Norwegian city, Juan works in a Japanese restaurant and in a market selling smoked fish to obtain part of the financing for his trips. Because it is, precisely, the cost one of the greatest difficulties that he finds to carry out his trips on wheels. “They tend to be high budgets, because they are unconventional sites, and everything costs a lot. In addition, you have to deal with getting the relevant permits, and even insurance."
The pleasure of traveling at the stroke of a pedal
BERNARD DATCHARRY: "THE BICYCLE GIVES YOU FREEDOM, IT IS THE SAME SENSATION AS SAILING ON A SAILBOAT"
Bernard Datchary He was born in Paris and has lived in Madrid for 23 years with his wife, Valeria. Both lead the publishing project Robin in which they publish a new concept of guides made by and for cyclists: bike:map. And they do it with the experience of the thousands of kilometers they carry in the saddlebags. Bernard's passion for traveling by bicycle began in Extremadura, in 1993, when he began his journey by bicycle following a herd of 3,000 transhumant sheep along the Vía de la Plata, living daily with the shepherds. His transhumant epic continued with his next trip: “We selected two livestock trails, the Cañada Roncalesa and the Cañada Real Soriana Oriental, and we crossed Spain from end to end without deviating from the historical trace. It was the first real trip”, this lover of two wheels tells us.
The second bike trip took this pair of cyclists to Vietnam , his first outing outside of Spain. “We took the bikes to Hanoi and invented a route right there at our whim. For a month we did about 1,000 kilometers of pedaling. We gained a lot of experience off the track”. But if there is a trip that symbolizes a new professional stage for Bernard, it is the one he made along the Loire River, in France, from which his guide through the Loire Castles was born.
For Bernard, the bicycle is freedom . “We pedal with panniers and all the necessary gadgets to travel autonomously, which allows us to stop to sleep where we feel like it, follow the paths that inspire us, chat with people without looking at the clock (in fact, we don't have one). It is the same feeling that you can have on a sailboat. Besides, traveling by bike gives you a lesson: the simplicity . We can't carry a lot of baggage, which teaches you that you don't need things to live, but experiences, smells, sensations, a good sleeping bag and nothing else”. Of course, in Bernard's saddlebags there is never a lack of his Thermarest pillow, a tool kit and a watertight compartment for clothes and a sleeping bag”.
Valeria looks at the Vietnamese landscape.
Bernard and Valeria do not conceive their trips without a bicycle.
ALICIA URREA: "ON A BICYCLE, ADVENTURE IS EVERYWHERE"
Alicia Urrea and Alvaro Martin they pedal in pairs all over the world. As a result of his experience, his rodadas.net blog was born in 2005, today converted into a small community where all those who want to embark on their journeys on wheels come together.
“ Patience, good humor and flexibility ”. These are the mental panniers that you always have to carry before getting on the bike and discovering the world, according to Alicia. This Madrid graduate in journalism made her first big trip in 2001 with a borrowed bike that was too big for her. Even so, she did not hesitate to prepare the saddlebags and tour Holland on pedals. Since then they have not stopped making trips throughout Spain, Europe and other parts of the world.
“We have made two especially long trips. The first one was from Istanbul to Madrid, crossing all of Europe in four months, the summer we finished university”, says Alicia. The second was in May 2010, when they traveled four stages of four months each on four different continents. They pedaled first through Canada and Alaska; then four months between Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. Four more in Southeast Asia and the Tibetan area of China and finally another four in Europe, from the North Cape to Madrid. In total 18,653 kilometers by bike getting to know some of the most amazing landscapes and cultures on earth. “All trips bring something special”, explains Alicia: “The longest ones mean that you have more time to get into the dynamics of the trip and allow you to go to completely different places than what we are used to, both culturally and in terms of landscape. , weather, etc. The ones we do close to home teach us that adventure is everywhere and that there are incredible places just around the corner waiting to be discovered.”
Alicia Urrea on one of her trips to Laos.
For this blogger, freedom, speed and vulnerability are the three advantages of traveling by bike . “Freedom because you don't depend on public transport schedules to go where you want to go, and that gives you the opportunity to explore, which gives you a completely different vision of the country, allows you to go further. The second advantage, speed, means that by moving at just the right speed, you can assimilate what you are seeing much better. You don't go so fast that you miss the details, nor do you go so slowly that things overwhelm you. It is the perfect speed to breathe the places you visit and understand them. And vulnerability is one of the most magical things. You ride a bike, people think that a) you are like a goat / you are a brave person / you are making an effort to get closer to them and b) you have to take care of yourself. And in that framework, very nice things happen.
Alicia remembers with special affection an anecdote of hers in her adventure through Canada: “In one of the toughest sections of Canada, with rain and very low temperatures, we managed to camp in a fairly closed forest. In the morning, a farmer woke us up and invited us to spend a few days with her family in her cabin. She taught us more about living in Canada's forests than we could have learned in any other way. She was our savior."
André and his family are true 'bicycle nomads'
ANDRÉ COADOU: "IT IS A LUXURY TO BE A NOMAD BIKE IN THE 21ST CENTURY"
André Coadou and Brigitte Benstein They are a French couple who, after living in a village in Mali for a year, decided to pedal across the entire African continent, from Paris to South Africa. A journey of more than 20,000 kilometers at the stroke of the pedal that lasted 20 months. It was not his first bike trip. Before they met, André traveled the American continent when he was 25 years old and cycled from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Brigitte traveled by bicycle with her friends through Europe and other countries such as China or Mongolia. Currently, both continue touring places as exotic as Madagascar or New Zealand, only this time they do it with one more passenger: their daughter. Clementine , 10 years old.
“Sharing these trips with my daughter and my wife is something very nice, it allows us to really be together”, explains André. Clémentine started traveling with her parents when she was 9 months old, in a stroller hooked to her father's bike. At the age of five, André built her a somewhat special tandem to pedal as a family, something very natural for her.
As this Spanish teacher in France recounts, “it is a luxury to be able to be a _bici nomad_in the 21st century. In our western world, everyone runs after the superficial, but With the bike you can get to know the places in greater depth, without rushing which helps to relativize the problems and difficulties of everyday life”. In addition to the warmth of his family, André only needs three things to discover the world by bicycle: "a good mattress, a stove to cook with and a camera to immortalize the most incredible trips on the saddle".