If you Google the distance between Amsterdam and Singapore, you find it’s 10,486 kilometers. If you’re American, you dig in further to find it’s 6,526 miles. But that’s by air. More or less a straight line. If you’re on bike between those two touchpoints, there’s a bit more to it.
We can proudly state that we’ve taken the old two-wheeler to the post office in the center of town and even to the supermarket on occasion or two before discovering that plastic grocery bags swaying from handlebars tend to rip and tragically spill beer bottles on pavement.
The point is, Martijn Doolaard rode his bike for one year, traveling from Amsterdam to Singapore to write and shoot photos for One Year on a Bike: From Amsterdam to Singapore.
Glance at a map. Even if you have a large computer screen you’ll see that the starting point is almost off the screen to your upper left and the island of Singapore nearly falls off your screen to the right. You’ve got oceans and seas and mountains and lots of borders in between. You also have the entire width of Iran, which Doolaard describes as having “an intimate hosting culture and community.” Not what you expected, is it?
And that’s the thing about this book. It’s 368 pages of photos and descriptions of the people and experiences found along the way. Doolaard calls it “slow travel,” the art of warmly engaging with new landscapes and cultures.
You might never take such a trip – or perhaps even make it to the post office – but you’re invited to vicariously experience an exotic new world lived on a bike seat, one slow, experience-inviting day at a time.