There are no words for how fantastic it was to sit on a bike after so many months of fighting on the floating ice at the North Pole. In life, things never turn out as you expect them to, so instead of standing in Greenland, I ended up in Canada and Nunavut.
The bikes that Audi was to deliver were not ready yet, and since I was not supposed to start until June with the bike, there I was with no food, fuel, equipment to cross Nunavut, or bike. I tried to find ways with skis and kayaks but realized that it was not wise to start this without any knowledge of the area and no equipment. So, what now?
I had two choices: end the expedition or find solutions. I thought about a book I was working on, “Mistakes and Other Good Decisions,” and I remembered how learning from other explorers’ problems became knowledge to me. So, I decided to find solutions instead. I took a plane down to Canada, bought a bike, and then found a person to take me up to the absolute border of where I could start biking: Tuktuyaktuk in Nunavut.
The way down Canada was beautiful, but the bike was bad, and I developed more problems with my knee. In Vancouver, I met up with my friend Carl Robert, who biked with me all the way across the USA, Mexico, Central America, and Colombia. Along the way, many friends like Martyn and Göran followed us, which was probably the expedition’s best part.
We had a support car that helped us with filming, but it didn’t meet us until we came to Guatemala. The driver, Nash, was a fantastic help many times during these months.
It’s complicated to explain nine months of biking in a short text, but during this leg, I experienced everything you could possibly imagine: a wounded knee, dog attacks, black bears, 42 days of rain, broken roads, snakes, snow storms, trucks, and deserts. I even ended up in a hospital in Mexico because of the sun.
