Claude Marthaler returned to his home town of Geneva on June 16, 2001, after spending seven years and three months cycling around the world. He covered 60 countries throughout Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa, and pedalled some 122,000km. Between May 1999 and April 2001, he rode 29,000km through 22 African countries. Ten days after returning home, he sent us these reflections on Africa.

I was like a salmon coming back to my roots, light like Ulysses, but heavily loaded with emotions. During the last four months' riding through Morocco, mourning the approaching end of my journey, I resisted Europe even while it attracted me like a magnet. The journey had certainly purified me, developed my instinct. I experienced the earth with my breath and wheels, and will forever think of people first with my heart and my nose, no longer just with my mind and eyes.

Physically more than mentally, my body had swallowed the world's climatic, topographical, geological and culinary diversity. My soul reacted like a sensual seismograph. I had lived a true love-story, made love with a whole planet. I had eaten road, bicycle, travel, life till satiety. There was no room for any regret.

Now I am composed of fragments of truth; my inner world is parcelled out, drifted like tectonic plates. My wheels drew an invisible hieroglyph on the earth's surface: my form of expression. Even though the world had impregnated me, I was not sure of always having understood it. I need time to digest it, to write it. But one thing is sure: the bike's frame was a wide-angle lens, almost a fish-eye, offering a panoramic vision of the world - far more realistic than the filtered media one.

After a week, a traveller can write an article; after a month, a book. But after a seven-year worldwide cycle, I am afraid to reduce or simplify the world - in a word, to betray it. My friendly bike, my yak, which ignores frontiers, is certainly wiser than me: he remains confidently silent. Moreover, my limited language - if not language itself - could never translate a "sweated experience" of the world: irrational, ungraspable, unknown.

Of the four continents my wheels crossed, Africa has been the last and most disconcerting. It is climatically and humanly so contrasting that it contains everything and is contrary. In its turn, Europe, where everything is granted, appeared to me after this long "time jump" like an exotic land: uncertain and artificial. Any trail in Africa is a link, a meeting point between people, where greetings are part of the path itself. But after I crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, the highway was literally a human desert, throwing me into sudden compulsory solitude. No hands to shake any more, just vehicle doors; no more dust or humidity to be dealt with, but an invisible smoke, a perceptible noise, to rob my health with total impunity.

In Madrid, as I asked people for directions, they needed some time to switch from their mobile phones, their newspapers, their self-bubbles to realise that I simply needed their help. I started to wonder who was the more real, the more present among us. So many times had my bike been described as a "space-ship", yet in banks, post offices and train stations, people seemed more automatons than employees. The divorce between nature and culture was total here. I started to realise how much Africa had given to me - in human terms.

The "Centaur" I have been, carrying my own world, but also pictures to show when invited - a silent way of enlarging and sharing a representation of the planet. But how to explain snow to a Mauritanian? A sandstorm to a European? While crossing the infinite flatness of the Sahel, for example, old men, on seeing a picture taken in Ecuador with clouds covering the ground and volcanoes emerging like islands, asked me if there was not a magical trick: only God was above clouds. Another picture showing a Sri-Lankan domesticated elephant being washed brought reactions such as "Is he dead? His ivory is still there!"

Africans' rhythms came from the shade, or rather from the sun and the absence of electricity. They seem lethargic by day and awakened by night, often by music, around a fire. Africans are deeply connected with the place of their origins. In the Giallo language, they say: "white - the man who never stops". With comparatively little planning, my bike and my health allowed me to cross Africa; even so, my plans were huge compared to those of an African's daily lifestyle. Even with a bike, to Westerners a symbol of slowness, I was always "from a better economic place", by birth, by skin. What the hell's a white man doing riding his bike in 45 degrees of heat? What for? Alone?

Africa is probably the only continent where differences are so concretely marked by skin colour and where skin is so symbolic in our mutual appreciations and representations. Regardless of time or money, a reciprocal inferiority/superiority complex almost automatically interferes in our relationships, certainly in touristic or NGO approaches. Perhaps only art or music transcend this unavoidable chasm.

We Europeans often think ourselves clever for recycling everything, but to Africans there's no choice. "How to survive" is the question. In Europe, where man doesn't have any predators other than himself, where food is no longer in question, our interest is focused not on how to survive, but "why?".

In seven years, my hometown Geneva has become irreversibly cosmopolitan. In the first week back home, I spoke to more Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans than Swiss Nationals. If for them Switzerland represented an Eden, a refuge or a terminus, to me it was simply the land of my childhood, my parents, my friends, my culture. The pedalled world tour became a tender tour of worlds. Ignorance, not kilometres, represents the true distance between people. And Africa, which is almost an extended family, has a contagious sense of hospitality in its blood. With no hesitation, it is my turn to give.

After two years in Africa, something insidiously chemical has happened inside me: the warmth of Africans has infused me from the bottom of my pedals to my mind. Furthermore, Africa requires time to be appreciated and, like a dead star, has an unknown, long-term, friendly irradiating effect. But as always, the last word is to my yak: I will soon be back in Africa, invited to take part in the first Panafrican Bicycle Conference (Pabic) in November.

Claude is currently sorting out 17,000 colour slides and some 20 notebooks, while looking for a publisher for his Songwheels book project. Email: ; website: www.redfish.com/yak

Pabic: November 2001 in Jinja, Uganda. Contact:

Published in Travel Africa Edition Seventeen: Autumn 2001.Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)