RIP Bikewanderer

[Svengali]

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9QGPBTf1Yys&t=21s

[Peruvian]

I watched a ton of his vids when I was layed up with the virus in March 2020. He was such a great story teller, videographer, and adventurer. I’m very saddened to hear about his death.

[altasnob]

Iohan Gueorguiev, ‘Bike Wanderer’ of the Wilderness, Dies at 33

He gained a following online for his lyrical appreciation of the open road while biking through remote landscapes and braving extreme conditions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/t...smid=url-share

[Whiteroom_Guardian]

Ahh fuck. I loved all his videos. The sections through the heart of Mexico were incredible. RIP

[dannynoonan]

Another appreciation in the wapo, pretty big exposure for Mr Gueorguiev:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...see-the-world/

Opinion: A man, his bicycle and an incredible gift to the world



Iohan Gueorguiev in 2020. (Matt Bardeen)

Opinion by David Von Drehle

Columnist

Today at 4:17 p.m. EDT

One measure of a great human soul is that it matters not when you make its acquaintance. Two hundred years after his last symphony is not too late to meet Beethoven. Nor will it ever be too late to encounter Wilma Rudolph or Maria Tallchief. Et cetera.

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I told myself this while getting to know Iohan Gueorguiev, a pilgrim on two wheels whose soulful films have been an oasis on YouTube since 2014 — unbeknown to me. I wish I had met him sooner, but seven years late is not so tardy that he doesn’t touch my heart.

Calling himself the Bike Wanderer, Gueorguiev pitched his one-man tent atop the frozen Arctic sea one night, then set off the next morning on his two-wheeler to ride the spine of the Americas, from north to south. He recorded his passage with a GoPro camera; he was a natural cinematographer. Early in his odyssey, he captured an exchange with a truck driver who stopped him on the ice sheet that passes for a highway far above the Arctic Circle. The driver asked where Gueorguiev was going.

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“Argentina,” the steady peddler replied.

“On your bike?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, man — I love you!” said the driver, and the viewer understands completely as the lonely figure rides slowly on.

Gueorguiev displayed his handwritten manifesto on his handlebars: “I want to see the world. Follow a map to its edges and keep going. Forgo the plans. Trust my instincts. Let curiosity be my guide. I want to change hemispheres. Sleep with unfamiliar stars. And let the journey unfold before me.”

The Bulgarian immigrant to Canada wound up making dozens of films as he rode his bike across the years; across tens of thousands of mostly empty miles; across ice fields and sun-baked deserts. Narrating with dry wit in a near-whisper, he rides through white-out blizzards, driving rains, desperate heat. The film series is titled “See the World” — and that’s exactly what he does, unflinchingly.

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What we never see is Gueorguiev discouraged. In one filmed segment, he covers day after day between two little towns, gradually exhausting what food he could carry across a long stretch of snowy mountains. Despite the hardship, he’s cheerful that the bitter cold means less spoilage: “It’s really nice to be biking in a fridge!”

Entering Panama, he recalls a cycling website that dismissed the entire country as a disappointment. And so it seems as he struggles up a steep and broken trail, sometimes riding, sometimes carrying his bike and supplies, toward the top of Panama’s tallest volcano. Suddenly, he is singing in his gentle voice: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …” At the summit, he looks down on a world vanished beneath a froth of clouds, on the surface of which the sun, from a heaven of almost painful blue, paints gold, red and iron streaks.

From this vantage on the isthmus, “they say you can see both the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean on a clear day,” Gueorguiev narrates. Perhaps he made the painful trek hoping for that view. But his genius lay in his ability to allow the reality to be enough. “For now,” he concludes, “the ocean of clouds is just fine.”

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After a dangerous, dismal trip through the forbidding beauty of the Arctic, the cyclist tries to explain himself. “Somebody asked me: Why am I doing this? I couldn’t come up with an answer. … But I love every kilometer of it. The highs and the lows. The sunshine and the storm. The solitude, the unknown and the absurdity of it all.” He told himself “that things will always work out in the end.” Though he allowed that “maybe one day they won’t.”

“Until then,” he continued, “my goal is to see the world.

“My motivation: the kindness of strangers and the beauty of the wild.

“And my home is on the open road.”

I met him through his recent New York Times obituary. It said that Iohan Gueorguiev died by apparent suicide in late summer. He was 33. Word of the loss moved slowly, as if on two wheels. As if through thick mud. As if across snowfields grabbing at fat tires, relentlessly.

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A mystery. To one whose only knowledge of him is his self-published record, the ending is inconceivable. This great soul never gave up on a journey. I wonder if the cycling had been his way of keeping himself going all along, until things stopped working out.