north↑wards

English Translation will be uploaded soon.

English Translation will be uploaded soon.

Before I started my tour, several people warned me about the american traffic: The cars are extremly big and cyclists unusual and probably out-of-favour. After I cycled in Italy and was treated pretty bad by motorists, I expected the worst.
When I finally arrived here, everything looked different: San Francisco can easily be called a bicycle-town. There were bike lanes everywhere and especially during rush-hour I was faster by bike than many motorists. The whole route along the pacific coast was very a real cyclists-paradise: In most places I could ride on bike paths or wide shoulders and whenever there were more narrow sections there used to be signs to warn motorists to pay attention to cyclists. Most of them were very nice and smiled at me, overtook with enough distance and often even waved to me!
On the past 3000km I have been hunked at only 4 times and only once a man showed me his middle finger - in comparison to the uncountable nice gestures this is nothing. Sometimes cars even slowed down on the same height and started to talk to me through the car window.

Canada is also nice: The shoulders are even bigger and on ferries bicycle are often almost for free. Moreover I am always the first one to leave the ferry while all the cars have to wait another few minutes.
The most impressive "feature" were the signals on narrow bridges and before narrow tunnels: As a cyclist I could usually push a button which activated the sign and set the speed limit down to 30mph and informed motorists about the bicycle on the route. That's something I have never seen in Europe so far.

Of course there were also bad things: Often the bike paths end just randomly somewhere and I just stood on a road with intensiv traffic. Crossing 4-lane roads to turn left ist often pretty dangerous and cars often don't pay attention to the bike lane when they turn right. Moreover motorists with trailers often do not seem to know what they are doing when overtaking: while the vehicle as enough distance to the bike the trailer is often coming very close. However, at least the last two things are also pretty often seen in Europe.

On that note: A cheer for the bicycle-continent North America where not only the cars are bigger but also the roads have more space for cyclists than in Europe

I passed the 2000km mark 2 days ago already which means time is up for a new blog entry on the front page. In the past days, many people asked me how this homepage works how I take my pictures and so on. Now I try to answer the most common ones here and explain the topic as "untechnical" as possible:

How do the daily entry make their way onto the page?
My page is pretty much working on its own. It is able to set up new report-pages and add maps and pictures. The only thing I need to do, is to fill in a big form similar to a guestbook entry and give all the data about a certain day: The reports, distance, coordinates and so on. The rest is done by the page.

Where do you get an internet connection
It is more or less 2 places which offer easy access to fast enough internet: McDonalds and Libraries. Normally I just start riding in the morning and stop at the first of these places and upload yesterdays report - which I write the evening before usually. This means that people are always reading my blog a little bit too late and I am already 100km further down the road...

How much time does the whole thing take?
Writing the reports usually takes around 30min. This includes the German and the English version (which is pretty small usually) as well as the selection of the pictures of the day. Filling in the form and uploading it takes usually another 10-30min (depending on the connection). Including all the mails, Whatsapp-messages and guestbook entries I reply to, the page takes more than 60min per day.
However I do only use basic equipment: I do not have a spelling correction and usually I do not even read the texts again after writing. I am sorry for all language mistakes and weird phrases.

Which camera do you use and how does it work with the pictures?
I take pictures with my very light sensitive Canon PowerShot G15. This is one of the best compact cameras aviable at the moment and offers all the manual
The pictures are never edited. When I upload them the server automatically compresses them to make it faster to open the page and look at the pictures.

Is it going to be the same all the time until the tour ends?
No. As soon as I get more into the wild, I won't have the possibility to upload daily reports anymore. I will still write them the in the same form but upload them 2-5 at a time.

How many people are visiting this page?
Since I started the tour approx. 800 different people visited the website. More than half of them returned regularly and in summary it is more than 9.500 clicks so far! Around 80% are German speaking and 15% English. I am very happy to see the big interest into this project.

Why do you even upload all this stuff onto a page?
The page is more important to me than to any reader. Since I am travelling on my own for more than 3 months this page helps me to do a short debreathing every day (when I write the report) and also reminds me that there are people somewhere, who are knowing, where I am and what I am doing at the moment.

If you have more questions don't hesitate to use the guestbook. I really appreciate every contact with readers!

Today my cycling computer counted the 450.000st rotation of my front wheel. This means I did the 1000st kilometer of the tour. In the past days I had an elevation gain of more than 33.000ft. On this occasion I would like to give you an idea of how much I am eating these days. I am the kind of person who always eats a lot but the calories these days are reaching new heights:

Breakfast
- 200g cereals = half pack (900cal)
- with 7dl milk (350cal)

Lunch
- 250g pasta or rice (800cal)
- 200g meat (280cal)
- 200g tomato sauce (60cal)

Afternoon / Anytime
- 1-3 bars, e.g. snickers (500cal)
- protein Shake with 3dl milk (250cal)
- (a lot of) cookies / chips / ice cream (1000cal)

Dinner
- 250g pasta or rice (800cal)
- 200g meat (280cal)
- 200g tomato sauce (60cal)

That's a very general listing. For example McDonalds-food is missing. However I already count significantly more than 5000 calories - that's as much as 2.5 "normal humans" are eating per day. What I cannot tell so far is, wheter or not I am gaining weight since the campgrounds do not provide balances. There is one guy I didn't reach yet: I've heard that Michael Phelps ate 8000-10.000 calories per day in his best days - that's still quite a bit of a way to go ;-)

After 21h travelling I arrived in SF today and fortunately the bike also arrived without taking any damage. Despite the fact that I only slept about 5h in the past 48h I decided to cycle from the airport into town. After I assembled my bike in an official assembling station of the airport, I rode on the (for European relations) huge roads into town. Fortunately, there was this guy called Joshua Churchill, who accompanied me on the way and prevented me from wasting a lot of time searching for the right directions.
After around 23km cycling I arrived at my hosts house. It is situated next to the 2 biggest Outdoor-Shops of the city. I am going to stay here for 3 or 4 nights to buy some missing equipment and take a look of the city, before I definitely start to cycle northwards.

I attached here a timelapse of my 2h packing-work to get my huge bike into an airport-compatible box and some pictures of the journey.

At the moment I am still 12'000km far away from San Francisco, but it is only one month left to go until I start cycling there. Right now I still enjoy my last 3 weeks in Southeast Asia (in Vietnam). Afterwards I'm returning to Switzerland, to un- and repack all my stuff, before I leave for SF on April, 21. In summary, I am going to lay back around 19.000km in 10 days and travel around 2/3 of our planet.

The following list provides links to reports for everyone, who is interested in the things I did in Southeast Asia. The reports are in German, pictures can be found at the bottom of the page:

• Climbing the highest peak of Cambodia - far off the beaten track
• 3-days trek in northern Cambodia
• 4-days treak to hilltribes in northern laos
• More reports on my profile on hikr.org