On reading this article I thought of Lois on the Loose. I read that book last July. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
PAGE ONE - JANUARY 8, 2010
Ivan Pisarenko, Uneasy Rider: One Biker, Two Continents, Four Years
BUENOS AIRES -- In 2005, a year from finishing law school, Ivan Pisarenko got restless. The 33-year-old Argentine decided to take a break for a very big motorcycle road trip, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
The approximately 17,000-mile journey was supposed to take nine months. But because of detours involving Mexican bandits, Salvadoran rock stars and Colombian soldiers, Mr. Pisarenko still hasn't completed the trip four years later. At one point, he was hit by an Ecuadorean SUV, and upon his return to Argentina in October, he had his bike confiscated by customs officials.
But the persistence of Mr. Pisarenko, who has braved sharks and border officials, has made him a minor folk hero of the Western Hemisphere.
The number of people like Mr. Pisarenko attempting to ride the length of the Americas has grown at least tenfold in the past decade, to roughly 2,000 a year, according to Grant Johnson, co-founder of Horizons Unlimited, a Web site on motorcycle road trips.
Kevin Sanders, who heads GlobeBusters, a U.K. motorcycle tour company, says the Alaska to Patagonia route offers a wondrous variety of terrain, from northern tundra to the mountainous Andes and the Pampas plains. Mr. Sanders says that bikers on the Americas route face less risk of violence than in Africa and less government snooping than in China.
Ivan's Motorcycle Diary
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Follow his route and see photos.
* More photos and interactive graphics
Mr. Sanders and his wife, Julia, hold the world record for riding from Alaska to Patagonia -- just 35 days in 2003. A trivia section on the Sanderses' Web site says they rode for 28 hours without sleep on one stretch and nearly had a catastrophic collision on the so-called Mountain of Death in Costa Rica. Mr. Sanders made do with just two pairs of boxer shorts.
Long-distance motorcycling, to a host of destinations world-wide, has been on a roll, with sales of touring bikes in the U.S. more than doubling from 1998 to 2008, according to the Motorcycle Industry Council. Sales slipped in the past year of recession. Travelers have found inspiration in media productions like "Long Way Round," the documentary chronicling actor Ewan McGregor's bike trip from London to New York via Central Asia, and "The Motorcycle Diaries," the biopic on the youthful travels of Che Guevara.
Mr. Johnson says the Internet has also encouraged epic trips, allowing riders to write their own motorcycle diaries, as well as find backers and exchange travel tips.
Mr. Pisarenko worked hard to promote his trip Web site, America en Dos Ruedas, America on Two Wheels, selling T-shirts bearing its logo and giving interviews to a slew of newspapers and TV stations en route.
Those efforts earned him thousands of messages of support and a measure of celebrity. In Ecuador, Mr. Pisarenko starred in a TV commercial for a caffeine pill. In Argentina, his Honda Transalp 650 motorcycle was exhibited reverentially at a recent bike show. Of more practical use to Mr. Pisarenko, who has been traveling on a shoestring, more than 300 people contacted him en route with offers of lodging.
Mr. Pisarenko shipped his bike to Seattle and departed from there on May 20, 2005, heading north through Alaskan towns like Coldfoot and Wiseman on to Prudhoe Bay.
Then he turned around and rode south through Canada, the Western U.S. and into Baja California. In Mexico, robbers accosted him at a roadside cantina. When Mr. Pisarenko told them he barely had a peso, the impatient outlaws demanded to know where he was coming from. After he said it was Alaska -- and then explained to them where that is -- they were so astonished they bought him a drink rather than rob him.
In Central America, Mr. Pisarenko earned his keep by serving as the personal photographer for a Salvadoran rock band, Prueba de Sonido (Sound Check), and selling photos of a Honduran diver who takes tourists down to the lair of Caribbean reef sharks.
As he took odd jobs along the way, and got caught up in the lives of people he met, Mr. Pisarenko's trip extended from months to years. In 2007, the Argentine was taking photos of the inhabitants of Honduras's tiny Chachahuate Key when a boy came up and said he didn't have a single photo of himself.
Touched, Mr. Pisarenko promised Chachahuate's schoolteacher, José Francisco Velázquez, that he would prepare a portrait for each of the 40 children on the island. There was no place nearby to print photos, so Mr. Pisarenko emailed the images to an Argentine printer and then waited...and waited. It took five weeks for the pictures to arrive by mail, "but the kids will remember Ivan forever," says Mr. Velázquez, by telephone.
Mr. Pisarenko shipped his bike by boat to Colombia from Panama to avoid the Darien Gap, the nearly impenetrable 100-mile strip of marsh and forest separating the two countries.
He arrived with some trepidation in Colombia, where ruthless motorcycle-riding drug hitmen have prompted an odd riding regulation: Motorcyclists must wear vests in bright colors with the license number on the back, to identify them to police.
Mr. Pisarenko was stopped at a roadblock by military police on the lookout for traffickers or Marxist guerrillas. The troops' suspicions vanished, he says, when they got a good look at his beat-up motorcycle, plastered with travel stickers that seemed to be all that was holding it together.
"They decided no one would ride that bike to a war," he says. The sympathetic soldiers gave him a meal, two gallons of gasoline and a Colombian military scarf, and sent him on his way.
Moving on to Ecuador, Mr. Pisarenko was invited to a dinner where the main course was guinea pig, an entree widely enjoyed in the Andes. "I only forced it down because I was the guest of honor," the biker says.
Maybe the guinea pig was an omen. On Nov. 8, 2008, Mr. Pisarenko was on an isolated Ecuadorean highway when an SUV appeared from out of nowhere and collided with his bike. His family flew him back to Buenos Aires, where he spent six months recovering from a broken pelvis.
In April last year, he returned to Ecuador by plane, repaired the wreck of his bike and hit the road again. In Peru, he was given a mutt named Wari, named for an ancient indigenous culture, whom Mr. Pisarenko bundled up and carried with him on his motorcycle.
When Mr. Pisarenko arrived back home to Argentina in October, border officials greeted him by impounding his bike. They said he had violated article 970 of the Argentine Customs code, which allows a bike to leave the country for only 180 days.
Luckily for Mr. Pisarenko, the Argentine press got wind of the case, and the story of the bureaucrats hassling the intrepid adventurer was splashed all over the pages of Argentina's biggest newspaper, Clarin. The customs officials sheepishly gave him his bike back.
Mr. Pisarenko spent the holidays resting up in Buenos Aires, but he's embarking this week on the last 1,900-mile stretch to Tierra del Fuego.
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