21th march Andrey Urzhumtsev have arrived in Cape Town for continue his big African journey.
Follow him in his travel-blog! New fotos, videos and real adventure!
About traveler:
A Live Journal normally opens with the author’s story about Why, What For and How s/he decided to create a blog. Let’s not break with tradition.
Back in the 1990s-2000s, I had to travel on business a lot. My life schedule was very tight: sometimes it was so tight that I was in Paris in the morning and had dinner in Genève. In some particular cases I happened to visit 5-7 cities a week. All friends and acquaintances were green of envy: what a dynamic life I lived! Yet, those adventures did not really give me much delight: for some reason, all cities and countries seemed alike. Nothing went off the beaten track: liner’s illuminator – airport – car – hotel – back to the capital. Nothing but numbers, terms and conditions, and deadlines remained in my mind after trips like that …On Monday morning it seemed like it was already Thursday, while on Tuesday evening it felt like it was Wednesday. Very much like the never-ending Groundhog Day.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not complaining. I always loved my job; all the more so, I was considered pretty successful in my field. Despite all this, however, I was haunted by the feeling that my life was passing me by, and I had to miss something really important.
My desire to break the humdrum multiplied by a midlife crisis triggered acquisition of my first bike. It was an old yet quite powerful Suzuki. After a couple of falls off the bike I ranked myself a first-class biker.
I first learnt about real bikers when I bought my next Suzuki. The vendor suggested a model that he found most reliable. To prove the argument, he told me the story of man who had once saddled such an iron horse and traveled 40000 kilometers (~24854 miles). At that point, the story impressed me, yet not so much as to repeat the deed.
However, I decided to by a Harley Davidson some time later. Many of HD veterans rode over to the auto showroom quite often to have a coffee or simply to talk. And that is where I first heard about annual Harley festivals. “Interesting” is not a proper word to describe their stories: they amazed and pushed you to do whatever possible to ever experience anything of the kind. I learnt that dozens of thousands bikers from all over Europe would come together in, let’s say, Hamburg or Welden (the Alps, Austria). Moreover, I heard about packs of Italian, Spanish, Greek, and French bikers up and ready to drive thousands of miles to spend 3-4 days with their like-minded fellows. The HD Club in Moscow organized occasional treks to such festivals, and, naturally, I could not by come along.
My very first drive to the Alps with HD bikers lived up to my expectations: it proved utterly and completely every single story I had heard in Moscow. It was very impressive indeed: streams of bikers under their national flags, a never-ending avalanche of them; there were hundreds, thousands of bikers on bikes of all hues: from ancient bikes worth thousands of euros to state-of-the-art ones that would cost you hundred thousands of euros. And so diverse were their owners aged from seventeen to seventy.
But what amazed me most is the road. I had often visited the places along the route to the Welden festival. Finland, Austria, Germany, and Italy – I had known these countries way ago. However, this journey revealed to me a new side of them of which I had been totally oblivious. Firstly, I learned much more about the real locals, not the ones who inhabit the capital or tourist sites: I got to know open, benevolent, and eager to help common people. Secondly, I chanced to learn more about the European province. Little towns and villages give you a totally different idea of a country’s national flavor than sights on a standard tourist agenda. A regular lifestyle, national cuisine, doll house style buildings, and a nature like in a fairy tale…I had been in the Alps many times but mostly in the winter: it appears in the summer they are just as beautiful! A serpentine road high in the mountains is a real gift to drivers who enjoy sport driving.
And finally, the way people treated each other on the roads and at the festival came as a pleasant surprise. In Moscow or St. Pete, a biker’s coolness it determined, first and foremost, by his/her bike’s class and trademark but there nobody gave it a damn. People mingled without caring for status, financial standing, nationality, and religion. They cared for something very much different: for how many places other bikers had visited and what they had already seen.
Seems like these are the things that got me on the hook during my first journey and that still make me find new routes every year and investigate new countries.
Some people jump with parachute, others dive to get an adrenalin shot, and yet others conquer mountain peaks. For each its own. I am not here to promote motorsports or urge you to hurry to a car showroom for a bike: the reason I am here is to reveal new sides of things that might seem to us customary and well known.