One Tandem, Eighty Countries

BY KRISTA CARLSON

Photos courtesy of Peace Pedalers, www.peacepedalers.com

Motivation and a Message to the World

Climbing up grueling mountain passes in China to reach the edge of Tibet. Communicating with smiles and sign language for food and shelter. Picking up strangers on the back of a tandem bike and touring new terrain in the company of newfound friends. For eight years, this was Jamie Bianchini’s life.

Touring the world on a bike is a dream for many, but few ever really get to hit more than a few countries in their lifetime. Jamie is one of those few, having pedaled his way through more than eighty. Perhaps his success is because he wasn’t doing it just for himself. From the very beginning—now more than a decade ago—Jamie wanted to send the world a message.

“The original intention was to go around the world and demonstrate that we’re not all that different,” he explains. “You can cross language, cultural and religious barriers, a lot easier than people thought, with the spirit of play.”

He had his personal motivations too. “We had a mission, but our self-interests were first: To ride and play and travel and experience.” This meant indulging in local music and catching waves anywhere he could along the way. While the focus wasn’t 100% humanitarian, helping people to lower their fear of one another was an important objective.

“We both knew the world was not in as bad of a state and people were not as bad as so many people judged them to be,” Jaime recalls.

Last year Jamie spent his 39th birthday in Uganda, as the guest of honor at the Good Hope School’s second graduation ever. Four years earlier Bianchini had meet a young Ugandan man, Innocent. Innocent had been one of the several hundred guest riders who would travel with Jamie; his dream was to create a school for AIDS orphans.

“We had the most grueling ride ever,” he says of their 50 km trek. “Mud, falling, blood. A lot of rain—brutal. But we made it, which is a bit ironic because that’s what the path was to start the school. We had to go through a lot.”