home site map world children recent cooking dutch german react

Cycling around the world in 40 months.



We wore out 53 tyres, had 1317 punctures on our two long journeys "Around the world". For us, Nelly and Henny, the bicycle remained the favourite means of transport to get to know other peoples and countries. So after the two long journeys we made many more journeys, among other things once again to India and later on to Ceylon with our daughter, who was 4 years old then on the back of the bike. I, Nelly Barelds, have put our experiences on paper (and now digital). It is personal travelogue in episodes written by an enthusiastic lover of cycling, nature and the unknown. It are short impressions. the whole story would cover thousands of pages.
When we came back home in the Netherlands in 1969, we were asked what we thought of the unfair distribution of prosperity in the world. Our answer to this was: "We think that development aid is not very useful, give these countries the possibility of exporting freely to prosperous countries, increasing in this way their own prosperity, after which they have solve the other social problems themselves. If we don't do that they will come here and take the prosperity.
The latter is now happening. We did however, believe that the whole worlds could not become as rich as we are and so we had to make a step down, so that the others could become more prosperous. It seemed to us ecologically not possible that the whole world could have a prosperity similar to the west.
To this Henny said: "If all the Chinese are going to drive cars there will be no longer oxygen left for us!" Alas, they still try it.


World around (nl) Cycling with children Recent tours Cooking on the way