Cyclist dies one week from world tour finish. The tourist killed after he was hit by a truck while cycling near Te Puke had been biking around the world for the past three years and was due to fly home on Friday. The man was named today as Stephan Stoermer, 38, of Frankfurt.

Walter Stolle's Bicycle Saga, or Around the World in 18 Years. When he was a teenager, Walter Stolle got a crazy idea. “I decided,” he recalls, “that I would make the longest journey ever on a bike.” He did. It covered 400,000 miles—the equivalent of 16 trips around the world—took him to 159 countries and lasted 18 years.

Why did I start cycling? Why did I decide to travel around the world and why did I not stop? These are the questions that I have been asked most often since I started to travel around the world by bicycle almost 50 years ago. I was 20 when I decided to take a bicycle trip, searching for adventure and with the desire to discover the world. That trip lasted two years. When I returned to my hometown in Germany, I realized that I didn't especially like my work and I wondered why I had to spend the rest of my life doing something that did not really interest me. Then I realized that I was much more interested in discovering the world.