10 Years on 2 Wheels: 77 Countries, 250,000 Miles

by Helge Pedersen, Nicole Malone-Ryan (Illustrator), Scott Squire (Editor)

It may well be a cliché to talk about learning through the University of Life, but this is just how Helge Pedersen has matured and developed his personal philosophy over the 10 years it has taken him to ride his motorcycle 250,000 miles through 77 countries. Pedersen hails from Kristiansand, Norway. In 1981, Pedersen bought a BMW R80 G/S motorcycle. In order to prepare it for a lengthy journey, he added a 40-liter fuel tank and other bits and pieces. Finally, as Helge had imagined so many years earlier, he was on his way to a foreign land Africa, where he traveled alone for two years. Crossing the world s largest desert via motorcycle was Helge s first big challenge on his African odyssey. As a departing gift, some friends had given him their version of a map of the Sahara a sheet of sandpaper marked with the letter ?N? for North. That ?map? proved to be as good as any other. After reaching the southern tip of Africa, Helge turned north towards Malawi. A dream came true when a fellow countryman hired him to help with his safari business, centered in Kasungu National Park. Five months later Helge was on the road again. After climbing to the top of Kilimanjaro, Africa s highest mountain, he journeyed on to Southern Sudan where civil war forced him to change plans and ride through Somalia. Together with another tourist, the Somali military placed the two bikers under house arrest until it was confirmed neither were Soviet or Cuban soldiers crossing from Ethiopia with the intention of sabotaging military installations. North Yemen offered another imprisonment, which challenged Pedersen s endurance. With no common language between them, Helge waited while soldiers confirmed his identity. He spent an excruciating day, worrying about loosing a hand to a swift ax in a country that practiced such radical punishment. Helge returned home only to find the travel bug had truly set its fangs he could not settle down. Plans for the next stage of his travels began to take shape. This time, the goal was to go around the world. With sponsorships and magazine contracts firmly in place, Pedersen boarded a cargo ship to Argentina, working in exchange for his passage. Once he arrived, he traveled to a national park set among the peaked mountains of Ushuaia, the southernmost town in South America. It was there he learned to speak Spanish to help him along the way during his South American travels. Helge had calculated the Latin American trip would take approximately one year, but it took him nearly three years to reach North America. Helge is the first motorcyclist ever to ride overland from South America to North America via the infamous Darien Gap 80 road less miles of virtually impenetrable, bug-infested jungle and swamps, nothing but Indian trails emerging in Panama City three weeks later with infected legs and broken bones. Crossing the Darien proved to be his most difficult endeavor. After two months of traveling through the States, Helge arrived in Seattle, Washington. While presenting a slide show, he met his girlfriend, Karen Ofsthus, an American-born woman with immigrant grandparents from Norway. Pedersen crisscrossed the U.S., occasionally with Karen as a passenger. Participating in a relationship had become the new challenge in his life, and far greater than crossing deserts or impenetrable jungles. Pedersen eventually continued his travels to Asia, once again working his passage on a Norwegian freighter destined for Japan. Later, Karen joined him, and together they traveled over 9,000 miles on the four main islands of Nippon. Karen, a wildlife and environmental naturalist, was called home to work, leaving Helge to travel alone in South Korea, Australia and SE Asia. After a 10-month separation, they reunited in Turkey and, together, completed the return trip to Norway. It was ten years after Pedersen had first departed

Genres: Motorcycle, Adventure, Travel, Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1998

Reviews

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love reading books like this. Having been raised in capitalist America, and properly educated that I must out-work, out-earn, and out-consume my neighbors to find true happiness I found this book challenges my chosen (indoctrinated?) lifestyle.

Pedersen tells the story of taking 10 years to tour the world on his BMW motorcycle. Finances and career are secondary, and somehow things always work out. He finds that in spite of significant cultural and political differences, we have more in common than may be apparent. No matter where he finds himself, human kindness and hospitality see him through.

Good pictures, great adventure, and a good challenge to the equation that consumption equals happiness.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

What’s a journey! Hard to distill 10 years into 200 pages, but Helge succeeds. Was looking for a little more route info, but could see the necessity of needing to choose high impacts stories from each leg.

[Foto Konstantis · Rating 5 out of 5]

its great

[Rob Sperl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting book. As described, he’s a photojournalist, so just as many pictures as reading. Each page is a different subject about his travels. Nice to see an early adventure rider’s experience.

[PeaceRose · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author did spend 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 – information is lacking in most travel books, for obvious reasons. However, as it is, I’ve found this a very enjoyable book, full of interesting facts and details. Here are just some of my favorite parts:

⦁ sleeping in abandoned houses in the USA (once sharing one with a skunk!);
⦁ an association of BMW motorcyclists in North America who help each other in stranded circumstances;
⦁ being surrounded by five whales while on a small boat off the Valdes Peninsula in Argentina;
⦁ 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;
⦁ having to wait for two days on the other side once he got across the Zaire because the immigration officer had gone fishing;
⦁ his (Norwegian) embassy in Kenya arranging him a visa to Somalia as a dry fish salesman;
⦁ attracting attention in Djibouti for camping on the sidewalk, to the point of being interviewed for TV;
⦁ hearing "shots" in the Sahara because stones split there due to daily temperature variations;
⦁ being able to telex BMW for replacement parts from a Saharan oasis (this was in 1982!);
⦁ 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.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best "coffee table" books I've ever seen. Seldom do they do more than sit and look pretty, but this one is different. Helge Pedersen (from Norway) spent ten years traveling around various parts of the world, mostly by himself. He has a nice writing style, and a good eye for photography, and the result is a wonderful book about his travels. With two hundred plus pages of photography and description of his travels, it made for several hours of high reading enjoyment. Not that my urge to travel needs any fuel, but he has once again ignited my desire to go see new (and old) places, and people and cultures that are different (and familiar). This book is out of print, and the used editions I saw were expensive, but I obtained it easily through interlibrary loan. It was well worth the effort!

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the best travel, adventure travel books that I have ever read. I would never give up what I have in my life in order to experience what Helge experienced but it is fun to live it and dream through his book.

[CURTIS NUGENT · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a coffee table sized book covering Helge Pedersen's 10 year trip around the world on a BMW R80GS. The book was published before the advent of digital photography and for its time is quite good.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful photography and an entertaining account of the world on the back of a BMW.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

He took his BMW GS adventure bike on canoes through the Darien Gap in Central America in the mid-1980's. No connection between N and S America.