Hippos, Hugs and Heavenly Views
Tanja Willens and Johanna Hochedlinger cycled 24,000 kilometres from Cape Town to Vienna, braving hippos and wild dogs and learning the beautiful simplicity of life on the move.
Your alarm-clock is a chorus of birds at dawn. Soon after the heat from the first rays of the African sun will drive you from your tent anyway - turning it into a sauna. You eat the leftovers from the food you bought in local shops the evening before and start pedalling, through new landscapes, among unfamiliar communities.
Your thoughts are focussed on the necessities of a vivid existence, eating, drinking and turning those pedals around, while your mind quietly absorbs the thousand new impressions. There are far too many to process immediately. Only in the cool of the evening, when you lie dog-tired in the tent, they will float through your consciousness. It’s the delicious zone where reality and dreams merge into one.
Life, I find, only feels complicated when you are sedentary, paying bills, doom-scrolling the news, worrying about the precariousness of our privileged lives. On the road, on a giant bike-packing adventure, everything seems simple.
Camp, eat, ride, eat, wash, camp: repeat.
A Giant Adventure
This was the life of Tanja Willers and Johanna Hochedlinger on a 24,000km trip as they rode from Cape Town back to their hometown of Vienna. It was a massive adventure, which they are still processing now through a multi-media stage tour and a new book, “Zwei Frauen, Zwei Räder, ein Zelt", published by Tyrolia.
Mud, Deserts and Snowstorms
FM4
Here you can listen to the FM4 Interview Podcast with Tanja Willers and Johanna Hochedlinger
There’s plenty to tell. Their journey took them through 21 very different countries and through very different weather and climatic conditions. They carried their bikes through the floods on the rainy season in Zambia, set off at first sunlight to cope with the searing heat of the Arabian desert and finally pedaled through a snowstorm as they finally reached Austria – an epic adventure with some hair-raising moments.
There’s plenty of biodiversity in the story, some of it served up as dinner: oryx sausages, crocodile steaks (believe me, you usually just eat what you are served when accepting hospitality). They even had elephant stew:
„We cooked it ourselves after a guy handed us roughly one kilo of warm elephant meat because his village was about to cut that whole elephant up,“ recalls Tanja. "Apparently it was shot the same day by a nearby farmer. I was literally standing there with a warm dripping lump of meat in my hands thinking „okayyyyyy...what now?“
Stuck In The Mud
But sometimes they feared there would end up on the wrong side of the dinner equation. The cyclists were chased by fierce dogs in the Balkans, saw lions in Botswana and came uncomfortably close to hippos in Zambia.
It happened like this: they were cycling near a national park when they heard the hippos roaring in a nearby bushy area. The bulky beasts were out of sight, but sounded dangerously close, and, as ever traveller knows, besides mosquitos, hippos are the biggest killers in Africa. And they are surprisingly fast.
Roaming Pedals
The two women were on a dirt road that had been badly churned up by the early rainy-season downpours. Everything got clogged up. “Our tires no longer rotated properly. We had to somehow push everything slowly through the mud,” remembers Johanna. “We just stood there. It was midday heat, there was a blinding sun and the hippos were in the bush.”
„Find A Tree!“
In a bid to get moving more quickly, Tanja started to remove the mudguards so that there was more room for the tires to rotate, but that meant taking the bikes apart.
“There was this one moment where all four wheels were off the wheels. There were two frame bags and tires lying in the mud. There were lots of individual parts,” she remembers. “I was shaking all over and urging Johanna to find the next tree where we can climb up."
As Tanja fiddled nervously with screws, Johanna, as well as scouting for trees, was reaching for communication technology. “We had a satellite phone with us and it had a tracking beacon. I thought to myself, ‘if we don’t survive this, then at least I wanted our loved ones to know where to look for our remains’”
Roaming Pedals
More than wild animals, my worst fears on long-bike rides have always revolved around mechanical mishaps. Tanja is a certified bicycle mechanic, which was a reassuring thought as the two women headed out to tackle thousands of kilometres on very bumpy roads. In the end though, her spanners stayed in the bags for the majority of the adventure.
100kg of weight
“I mostly just had to look after the routine maintenance jobs such as changing brake pads, changing chains. Our bikes didn’t have any real breakdowns,” she says. “It’s worth checking out a sturdy bike before a trip like this because we did a lot of off-roading. With the bike, plus luggage, plus rider we are talking about one hundred kilograms on the move,” she says. “And the screws and the frame have to withstand that.”
Iranian Kindness and Saudi Misunderstandings
Tanja and Johanna, who call themselves Roaming Pedals, are a romantic couple and yet their journey took them through deeply conservative countries where same-sex love is illegal and viciously prosecuted; countries such as Saudi Arabia. How did they deal with this situation?
“There was actually no need to hide it,” laughs Johanna, who is a head taller than Tanja. This, incongruously, led to some convenient misunderstandings. “The absurd thing was when we were stopped by Saudi people offering to help us. Usually, I was hugged tightly and brushed off and Tanja was ignored because people assumed that I was a man.”
Street Life vs Political Life
They were also in Iran; a place that sometimes sounds fearsome when we read about it in the news headlines, but constantly pops up as one of the friendliest places for touring cyclists. “Every day you are confronted with how interested people are in you and how interested they are in making a good impression,” remembers Johanna.
That’s true, agrees Tanja, but she doesn’t want to sugarcoat the state-led homophobia and human-rights abuses. "The state doesn’t stop executing people and discriminating against people just because you’re traveling through there and only experience hospitality,” she says. “It’s just what you encounter on the street is usually different than what’s happening in the corridors of power.”
People are People
Neither the street nor the party headquarters define the ‘real’ Saudi Arabia, the ‘real’ Iran or indeed the real Britain or Austria. All countries are made up of contradictions and nuances. The value of travel and travel writing is to help us understand those nuances. I think of travel as an empathy machine, and Tanja agrees.
“Every day, you come into contact with so many people every day and you realize that people everywhere have the same needs. Politicians impose bans and pass laws,” she says “But most people you speak too just want to be safe, eat, sleep and look after each other.”
Lovers’ Tiffs
Every romantic couple has its moments, of course, and any tensions are super-charged when you are spending 24 hours together in close-proximity with few creature comforts.
By the time they reached Iran they had been on the road for months. “In Tehran we were shouting at each other on the street,” laughs Joahnna. “It got to the point that people who had just come to us and wanted to talk to us turned around and marched away because it was too uncomfortable for them.”
Tanja says they even thought of travelling alone for a week until they considered the mutual dependence of their travelling life. One had the tent, the other the cooking pots.
Roaming Pedals
So, on bad days, they rode side-by-side or behind each other plugged into music and podcasts. “On a bike, you can always find some ‘me time’, wherever you are”, laughs Tanja.
In a way, finishing the journey was harder that beginning it.
No Rush To Finish
Camping, eating local food and powering their own travel, they were spending no more than 500 euros a month, which wouldn’t pay the rent in most European cities.
They were in no rush to get home, stopping for days on end to relax, process their experiences so far and to eat. “It’s amazing,” smiles Tanja, “You are so hungry all the time even after 3 days of rest!” They stopped on Zanzibar and in Tehran and Istanbul.”
They often say that the hardest part of an adventure is setting out; that first rotation of the pedals that commits you to the adventure. But maybe coming home is even harder?
„I remember being only 50 kilometres from Vienna and realized it was the last day,“ remembers Tanja. "We were riding through the rain and knew we’d be sleeping in an apartment, and the adventure was almost over.”
The Next Adventure?
The tour and writing the book have helped keep the connection to those adventurous days and they promise more in the future.
“It wasn’t the first trip we’d taken together, it was just our very first bike trip, but since we’ve been together, we’ve often been traveling with each other and there are always new projects,” says Tanja. “We’ll start again in the summer and then in a big way next year, but we can’t reveal anything about it yet!"
Secrets are important, so are adventures.
You can find our more about the book and the tour dates here
and see many more pictures here