Online Bicycle Travel Magazine "Bunyan Velo"

Bunyan Velo Issue 5

"Bunyan Velo is a quarterly collection of photographs, essays, and stories celebrating the simple pleasures of traveling by bicycle." An example of the amazingly well executed publications that are available online for free. This particular irregularly published magazine features more articles that are longer with more photography than anything you would subscribe to published in print on a regular basis. My only quibble is that it is too much!

The Masked Rider by Neil Peart (Book Review)

The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa by Neil Peart

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Neil Peart is the drummer for the band Rush - as an author he is mostly known for writing a book about a 55,000 mile trip by motorcycle after his daughter and wife died in less than a year. This book was written and published years before that and is much lighter.

Peart had participated in cycle tours in Europe but decided to try something more challenging that would be combined with an interest in Africa, so he went on an organized bike tour of Cameroon in 1988. The operator only had Peart and three other clients on the trip. The book is a description of his trip and what it was like.

Generally "adventure" travel books don't describe organized tours but in this case the tour was probably more arduous than many independent cycle tours. The tour lasted for a month, for one thing. In the per-Internet world, they were quite isolated almost the entire time, relying on the relatively modest belongings the carried on their bikes.

There is plenty of description of how physically difficult this was over the month, with the heat and generally primitive conditions. (They generally used lower cost accommodations even when western style ones were available, mostly to keep costs down.). He does a good job of describing what he saw and experienced. Much of the focus, as with most travel books, is on his interactions with people, both the people of Cameroon and his fellow travelers and the tour leader. (I wonder what his fellow travelers thought of this - it is somewhat critical of each of them.)

From time to time Peart engages in introspective reflections that I gather are more the point of his motorcycle book - I found these passages did not interrupt the narrative. I enjoyed reading this and will likely read it again.

You were always aware this was a book about travel by bicycle but there was not much description of anything particularly technical about that aspect. As a cyclist I felt like I had a good sense of the difficulties for cycling in this part of the world as a tourist from reading this (although things have likely changed since this was almost 25 years ago). The tour operator is still in business at http://www.ibike.org/bikeafrica/.



View all my reviews

Kickstarter Funded Bike Travel

Reading Kickstarter proposals and seeing what success they have is an interesting way of learning something about human nature. There aren't that many connected with cycling but the few I see are interesting. Most are seeking funding for products related to bicycles for which they believe there is a market; some are for projects that are for projects that use bicycles as the delivery system - vegan baked goods provided on a bicycle sales cart, for example. A few are proposals to fund bicycle travel of one sort or another.

I am puzzled why this fellow's proposal was approved by the Kickstarter folks - it doesn't seem a likely candidate. Kickstarter is mostly, in my observation, about fun and then secondarily some "feel good, do good-ism" but in more high level ways (like funding portaits of South Africans and their bicycles.

A mystery is how this fellow can have 245 Facebook friends and only raise a total of five (5!) dollars (from five people).

There is a long history of riding long trips around the United States or even around the world that started with the "ordinary" bicycles of the 1860s but grew with the development of the more modern "safety" bicycle that is much like today's bikes, funding the travel with ad hoc fundraising along the way. In the 1890s Annie Londonderry funded her travel around the world by raising the money as she went along, primarily by giving talks (for which she was paid) and selling various momentoes. At the end she supposedly received $10,000 from a wager that she couldn't complete the trip.


In 1904 two men used this route to win a $5,000 wager by visiting all 48 states in 18 months

Cycle travel

Getting in Gear: Bike Trips From Colorado to Croatia in the New York Times. Detailed look at bike tourism example in US southwest but lists other examples.