“The ride was hard but breathtakingly beautiful with crossing high passes and surrounded by mountains, screaming gibbons in the jungle, and with a rich and diverse cultural life in the villages.
I took two long boat rides on these rivers with the bike on board and rested in small villages tucked away deep in the Laotian jungle. It was a magical experience”
9 June 2012/A good sketch on terrible paper. The pigment just soaked through it.
That gives it a special quality but the buckling of the paper caused annoying issues/HaLong Bay, Vietnam//Watercolour, gouache//
Ride into the Mirror//
On Stumpjumper and Trekky through South East Asia
[Stage One]
Sketches & Stories
Ride into the Mirror is a visual journey, written in two parts, of a solo bike ride of 16.000 kilometres through Asia and North America in 2012.
Part one covers the Asian leg of the trip, part two the Northern American stages.
This long journey had a high standard as the sketches and stories in this book will show, but it was also plagued by frequent breakdowns and consequently the adjustments of the itinerary. Just outside Bangkok, Thailand, Geert’s old and trusted ‘Stumpjumper’ bike started wobbling and with tears in his eyes, he discovered that its frame had cracked. After returning to Bangkok he had only one option and that was to buy a new bike. He continued his journey on his new ‘Trekky’ through the remaining part of the Asia stretch and after resting in the Netherlands, he continued riding from Boston to Los Angeles in the United States.
