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Man completes 25,000-mile bike ride

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Slide show: Rick Gunn reflects on his 25,000-mile bike ride through a world we shouldn’t fear.
Rick GunnThree years ago, Rick Gunn rode his bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in a heavy fog, pedaled down into San Francisco, took a ferry to Vallejo and turned east. From there, he crossed America, then Europe, Asia and Oceania in a 25,000-mile ride that ended Saturday back where the trip started.

At the end of this very long ride, Gunn has learned that the rest of the world is not something to fear. In detailed accounts of his travels posted online, there is an unfettered joy and unrelenting optimism in what Gunn sees. The journey has made Gunn, a former Castro Valley resident, a devout pacifist and left him with an abiding love for humanity.

The most dangerous place, Gunn says, is here at home in America.

“I’ve had more aggressive things happen to me here and more threats physically…than I’ve had anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I believe that people have an idea that the world is a really dangerous place when in fact it’s extremely safe.”

Still, he recounts moments that almost ended his trip, such as a breakdown high on the Tibetan plateau, halfway between Kashgar and Lhasa, that left Gunn stranded for four hours.

“That was potentially life-threatening because the weather’s wicked up there,” he said. Other cyclists have died on that road. He paced as the temperature dropped, until he found a footlong strand of bailing wire strong enough to hold his bike together.

“That piece of wire saved my (expletive) in Tibet,” he said Saturday, pointing to a spot on his beat-up bike frame, where the wire is still attached. “I was stranded on the side of the road, and the only reason I was able to continue is that I found that piece of wire. In Tibet, there’s not a bicycle shop for 1,200 miles.”

Twenty years ago, Gunn’s mother, dying of cancer, tried to take a last trip to Europe. She never made it. Arriving in London, she immediately fell ill and had to return home. She passed away a short while later.

Even with that motivation, it took Gunn another two decades to set out. He’d traveled extensively, but not on the trip he wanted. He worked as a photojournalist for 14 years, most recently at the Nevada Appeal in Reno.

“The hardest part of the whole trip was just getting out of the driveway,” he said. “The realization took place on my 4,000th commute, during my 14th year as a small-town daily newspaper photographer,” Gunn wrote in his second blog entry. “For nearly a decade-and-a-half I was paid below-average wages to record history through the lens of camera, shooting nearly a million photographs. Following each day, my photographs appeared on the sheets of recycled paper that the better part of 15,000 souls complained about on a daily basis.”

The daily grind of tragedy and banality was getting to him.

“Something deep inside me was saying that there was something more to my photographic capabilities than the visual documentation of lackluster events that repeated themselves seasonally ad nauseum. Christmas bake sales, service club check passings, first babies of the year, senior volunteers of the week, groundbreakings, ribbon-cuttings, pets of the week, dimly lit high school sports events and local government meetings — the meat and potatoes of my job,” he wrote.

So he quit.

On July 1, 2005, he crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cold and foggy. He and Matt Haverty, a friend of 25 years, rode through the city, took the ferry to Vallejo, then turned east toward Sacramento.

At the end of the journey, his back to the ocean, Gunn is still processing everything he saw. “I’m still unfolding the whole story in my mind,” he said. He is hesitant to pick a favorite place, though in conversation he drifts back to the Silk Road: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Western China.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, about to mount his bike and recross the Golden Gate. “This human family out there wants to see their brothers and sisters. They want to come and meet you.”

Photo by Ray Chavez, Bay Area News Group. This story originally ran in the Hayward Daily Review.


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