We were 45, all brave. Under an optimistic blue sky, we stand with our bikes on the banks of the Bosphorus on the Asian side of Istanbul, posing for the camera, wearing our helmets. The date, August 4, 2007. In 15 minutes, we would embark on what some considered an impossible, even silly expedition: a 10,700 km journey that followed the legendary Silk Road. A three and a half month journey through Asia, ending in front of the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Hard? Surely. Foolish? Maybe. Impossible? Unlucky.

In fact, it wasn’t the first epic bike ride he’d ever taken. On January 15, 2003, I and 32 other adventurous spirits embarked on the inaugural Tour d’Afrique race, from Cairo, Egypt to Cape Town, South Africa, in 120 grueling days.

That first day, in the shadow of the pyramids, the question I asked myself was: can this really be done? Can we walk every meter, later acronym and defined as EFI or (Every F…ing Inch)? After all, when we announced the trip in the media eight months earlier, I was accused of being a charlatan, a crazy adventurer who risked people’s lives, and a naive fool who obviously “hadn’t spent a day in Africa.”

The group reached the outskirts of Cape Town an hour ahead of schedule.

Two years later, I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower, posing with another group. We were about to start a 4,000 km eight-country tour from Paris to Istanbul, which we ironically called The Orient Express Bicycle Tour. Ironic in that it offered anything but the luxury amenities found on the famous continental train ride. The question I asked myself on that occasion was: can I earn an honest living doing transcontinental bike tours? The evidence seemed to suggest that I could.

Now, on this beautiful morning in Istanbul, posing for another camera, I was wondering what question he might ask me while crossing the Asian continent. There were many options. The route is rich in architecture, majestic mountains and endless deserts, all suitable for contemplation. You are deep in history, having witnessed the rapacious violence of the armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the Great Game, the precursor to the Cold War, the great designs of the former Soviet Empire, all rich material to analyze the search incessant man by power and violence. Or I could face more difficult topics, including personal problems and how to make sense of my life.

In the end, it was the humble bike I sat on that was worth thinking about. Having conquered two continents, he knew that long-distance cycling was closer to the ancient hunter-gatherer state of mind. The cyclist, like the hunter-gatherer, must constantly worry about his safety, his food, a place to sleep and how to enjoy the satisfaction of getting through a hard day (knowing that the next one will be no less). challenging).

The bicycle: cheap, non-polluting, small and silent. Wikipedia, among others, calls it the most efficient machine ever built by humans, because a person on a bicycle expends less energy than any other creature or machine traveling the same distance. Appropriately, I pointed in the direction of China, a country where a billion people (give or take a few hundred million) still used bicycles as their primary mode of transportation. And all its potential was still untapped. Somewhere, he had read that enterprising students were designing a small grinding device that could be attached to a bicycle: grinding your own grain, on the go. Or maybe it was a water filter. I had certainly seen generator-equipped bikes in museums where a visitor pedaling at 50 (or less) watts could power an incandescent lamp. The only fuel needed for all of this: a peanut butter sandwich.

Armed with these stories and memories, my question was easily put: can the bicycle save the world? That it needs to be saved seems indisputable. We all know that we are going down a path that is destructive to nature and therefore to life as we know it.

It turned out that I did not have enough time to plunge into the depths of such serious contemplation. I was too busy living, having fun, engaging with drunken Georgians (the ex-Soviet kind) selling roadside watermelons at 10am, savoring the beauty of a provincial Chinese town, or choosing a meal by pointing to a number on a menu and waiting. Praying– that it wasn’t derived from an ancient member of an alien species she’d never heard of.

Of course, it was not an uninterrupted panorama of pleasure. In Turkey, we cycled through one of the worst heatwaves in its modern history, with temperatures in excess of 45°C for several consecutive days. Hot asphalt stuck to my tires. It didn’t get any better when, in Tbilisi, Georgia, two miles from the hotel where we were supposed to take a well-deserved rest, a crazed taxi driver ran over one of my bicycle companions. He flew like a missile, landing in front of me. The driver shamelessly quickly backed the car away from him before he had time to dismount. No doubt he was descended from Genghis Khan. Fortunately, the cyclist was not seriously injured.

At the border with Azerbaijan we were met not only by a delegation from the Ministry of Tourism, but also by an eight-piece orchestra, traditional dancers and the entire Azerbaijan youth cycling team. Azerbaijan, of course, is a Muslim country, but in each restaurant we received three glasses of water, wine and vodka respectively. And this was for breakfast.

Turkmenistan spoke to my heart. I grew up under the shadow of a totalitarian regime (communist Czechoslovakia), so traveling in the desert with a continuous police escort made me feel like old times. It didn’t take long for me to re-adopt the behavior necessary to live and thrive in such societies, to stretch the boundaries of the forbidden while avoiding trouble.

At one point, a police officer ordered me into his car. I smiled and politely declined his order, offering to buy him and his colleagues cokes and ice cream. That sealed our new friendship.

Through the Turkmeni desert to the next Stan: Uzbekistan. No deserts, no mountains, and luckily no sweltering heat. A day’s drive from the border we arrive at the legendary city of Bukhara (the name means monastery in Sanskrit), a glorious sight. We toured the earthen Ark Fortress, home to the rulers of Bukhara for over a millennium; the Registan, a green square at its feet; and the Kalon Minaret, the tower of death, named after the numerous victims thrown from its heights. A traditional proverb says that Samarkand is the beauty of the Earth, but Bukhara is the beauty of the spirit. But part of that spirit was also pure evil. On the eve of the 20th century, the emir of Bukhara enjoyed gouging out the eyes of his dissident subjects.

We arrive in Tajikistan to find a country still trying to recover from a recent civil war. About 60% of Tajiks live in abject poverty and the minimum wage is $1 a month. Nowhere is the spirit of Stalin more visible than in the zigzag borders of Tajikistan, drawn by the young Georgian commissar in 1924 on the well-known principle of divide and rule. The country is 65% Tajik, a different ethnolinguistic group than the Turkish people around them. And there are more Tajiks living in exile in neighboring countries than in Tajikistan. Still, it’s an impressive place, where the altitude rarely drops below 3,000 meters.

In Kyrgyzstan, after a rest day in Osh, we embarked on a serious climb to the Taldyk Pass, at 3,700 metres. Let me tell you, on that oxygen-deprived elevation, you’re not thinking about saving the world. You are thinking of saving yourself, if you are capable of thinking. But the journey downhill, through the mountain pass into China, was exhilarating.

The old ‘bike kingdom’, of course, is no more. Now, China is El Dorado for all the automakers in the world. Here, at last, was time for sober contemplation. You may ask yourself: how can you think with 1.3 billion people around you? But in fact, the vast majority of Chinese live in the east. Large portions of the west are almost, like northern Canada, virtually uninhabited.

Still-modern China and the frenetic pace of change hit you on all sides. The construction of a new highway cuts through the Taklamakan desert, an uiger word meaning “to go in but not out.” Huge apartment buildings sprout up like mushrooms after a good rain. Small Chinese cities are home to millions. China is on the move. And so are the Chinese. His entrepreneurial energy, pent up in the decades following the 1948 communist revolution, has now been released and is flowing faster than a newly opened dam.

So can bikes save the world? Of course he can. Imagine every city with boulevards full of bicycles, pedestrians, trams and parks where children can be children again. Is it so hard to imagine? After all, in Copenhagen 36% of all trips are made by bicycle (only 27% by car). By 2015, within five years, they aim to be at 50%. It is in our urban centers that transformation must occur; half of the world’s population now lives in cities. That’s over three billion plus breathing, or should it be wheezing? — soul.

What if we persuade Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros to chip in $10 million for the best new human-powered vehicle? Think of the benefits to human health, reduced demand for our rapidly depleting fossil fuels. Just as the X Prize created space tourism, this prize would spawn all sorts of new human-powered inventions.

But we have to act. And as I cycled mile after mile in today’s China, I was reminded of something I had learned in spite of myself as an aid worker in Africa. Human beings tend not to respond until disaster strikes.

Henry Gold is President of Tour d’Afrique Ltd www.tourdafrique, a Toronto-based adventure travel company that organizes annual cycling races and expeditions in Africa, Europe, Asia and South America.