For most of my life I owned very little. I dropped out of college and for almost a decade wandered remote parts of Asia in cheap sneakers and worn jeans, with lots of time and no money. The cities I knew best were steeped in medieval richness; the lands I passed through were governed by ancient agricultural traditions. When I reached for a physical object, it was almost surely made of wood, fiber, or stone. I ate with my hands, trekked on foot through mountain valleys, and slept wherever. I carried very little stuff. My personal possessions totaled a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, a penknife, and some cameras. Living close to the land, I experienced the immediacy that opens up when the buffer of technology is removed. I got colder often, hotter more frequently, soaking wet a lot, bitten by insects faster, and synchronized quicker to the rhythm of the day and seasons. Time seemed abundant. After eight years in Asia, I returned to the United States. I sold what little I had and bought an inexpensive bicycle, which I rode on a 5,000-mile meander across the American continent, west to east.

Kelly, K. (2010) What technology wants. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Ciascuno ha le sue spiegazioni per la malattia insana dell'andar su ruote, perché infinite sono le esperienze alternative che la bici riesce a sintetizzare. C'é il viaggio come leggerezza, come nomadismo esistenziale ed eliminazione del superfluo, raccontato per esempio da Marco Aime nell'attraversamento del Sahel. Ci sono la lentezza e la memoria, descritte da Giulio Mozzi, scrittore padovano che ha percorso l'Italia a piedi. Ci sono la fuga e la solitudine negli elementi, come ha saputo dire quel lupo solitario che è lo skipper Paolo Rizzi dopo un naufragio in mezzo all'Atlantico. O il viaggio come introspezione, il pellegrinaggio talvolta penitenziale di Werner Herzog e Peter Handke.

Around the World For a Wager

Hale and tanned, but marked by scars made by cruel fetters in a Russian prison, Henri Mosse arrived in San Francisco recently from the Far East on the French steamer Amiral Juareguiberry en route to Paris striving to win a strange race.

The steamer reached port on a Saturday night, but was held in quarantine until the next morning on account of the presence on board of a large number of Japanese steerage passengers, who were bound for Vancouver, B.C. Mosse and an Englishman now in India are the sole surviving competitors in a race around the world, and both are nearing the end of their long journey. One or the other will win a prize of 50,000 francs by arriving first in Paris.

Mosse was chauffeur in the French capital when the Sportsmen's Club, of London, suggested to the Touring Club, of Paris, that each organisation should furnish four men and send them out on a competitive tour of the world, without funds, except two francs each, the men to travel in pairs, an Englishman with a Frenchman.

The four pairs were to go over different routes. After all preliminaries had been arranged, the start was made on June 14, 1904, and the limit for the world tour was fixed for June 14, 1906. Two of the men started by the way of Africa, two by way of America and the remaining couple by way of Asia Minor. Mosse and his English companion took the Asia Minor route, and got along well together until Constantinople was reached, in July, 1904, when the Englishman, George Moss, succumbed to an attack of fever. The Frenchman, Mosse, came on alone, and had many hairbreadth escapes. At Odessa, on the Black Sea, he was suspected of being a Japanese spy, and for 25 days was kept in chains in a foul prison. His ankles still bear the scars of the irons. Upon being released he passed on afoot and by sea to India, and still later to China.

In the district of Bing Sam, in the interior of China, Mosse was captured by highwaymen and robbed of £4, all the money he had. But he was well treated by the bandits, who offered him a Chinese wife if he should care to remain a while with them.

Mosse chose to keep moving, and he tramped along until he reached the coast, where he took ship for Japan. At Yokohama he joined the Amiral Juareguiberry and worked his way thence to San Francisco. He must leave the vessel there, for it is a condition of the contest that he shall travel overland whenever it is possible. Mosse has been kept posted by the French Club as to his competitors. Letters he has received at various points along his strange course have informed him that the couple going by the African route were murdered by treacherous Abyssinians on the desert, who cut off the heads of the Frenchman and Englishman. The two men who went by way of Australia both took sick and died in the same hospital of a fever. The Frenchman who went by way of America was lost in China, his companion proceeding to India, where he was at last accounts plodding along.

The victory in the long race rests between Mosse and the Englishman in India, the only survivors of the contest. The winner will receive a prize of 50,000 francs, and there is no second prize. That Mosse has visited all the strange places he talks about is proven by the autographs and seals of officials in the countless out-of-the-way places all the way from Paris to Yokohama.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12143, 17 September 1907, Page 3.

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert