On a Bike Across Europe For Peace
Wonderful People in the Whole Wide World
It's about 26 years since I went on a Bicycle Tour of Europe, with my friend Aisola Ravi Shankar. This tour demanded hectic, wide-ranging preparations for about a year and culminated in a 9-month-long journey across 13 countries. Dedicated to World Peace and Understanding, the tour took us close to thousands of people in the cities and small towns and villages of Europe, and enabled us to mutually share many things about India and their respective countries. We pulled it off on an incredible budget of just $350 on each of us, lived 270 days each full of excitement, desperation, anxiety, discovery and fulfilment, and had a fantastic media coverage right through, with over 45 newspapers interviewing us.
More than the places, it's those people that I met who have made it all a wonderfully memorable experience for me. I hope to meet many of them again either through the Internet or perhaps when I travel yet again across Europe. It would be a fulfilment of a dream indeed!