“Perhaps if more people did what Iohan did, this would be a better world,” muses Jeffrey D. His fans, most of whom were cubicle rats resigned to making do with the odd weekend gravel ride, regarded him as almost holy, his life a validation that freedom and happiness really can be found in shirking all responsibility and plans, to just live in the moment. Let curiosity be my guide.” He appeared to be simple and pure.
“Follow a map to its edges and keep going. Iohan kept a detailed blog, and a mantra he taped to his handlebar bag distills its essence. He shot with such care that as you watch the time-lapse sequence, you can almost feel the cold stillness of the dry land in your bones. When he visited the Puna de Atacama, an arid high plateau in Argentina, he stayed up all night to track the arc of the stars across the dark night sky. His narration is understated and wry, so that when he finds himself chatting to an indifferent beef cow in rural Colombia, he tries to sell the animal on meat eating, saying, “Everybody loves burgers.” But even in their funniest moments, his films never dissolve into lark, for Iohan was at heart a mystic intent on showing us that life is huge, the possibilities endless. His work is expert, involving strategically placed tripods, a thoroughly loved Mavic Mini drone, a GoPro 7, and a Sony superzoom bridge camera. Iohan taught himself cinematography after studying the documentaries of German filmmaker Werner Herzog. “No, no, no, no,” he tells the donkey as we get our first look at the high red buttes surrounding him, and the wispy white clouds in the blue sky. One episode, set in northern Argentina, opens with footage of an aggrieved, braying donkey trotting out of high grass onto a dusty red road, spoiling to charge. In nearly every one of the 40 episodes he released, there’s a moment when he’s plaintively cooing to a stray animal. If Iohan were even a little bit aggro about the whole thing-if he were inclined toward neon-bright spandex and chest-thumping Strava posts-he surely would have stirred some jealousy and spite among his nearly 100,000 YouTube followers.
He communed with bison in Wyoming, got frisked by cops at the Mexican border, crossed the Darién Gap with his bike in a kayak, and then moved on toward the salt plains of Bolivia. The endearing, soft-spoken star of his own wildly popular YouTube channel, See the World, Iohan spent most of six years-2014 to 2020-tracing a circuitous path south from the frozen hinterlands of the Canadian Arctic toward, but never quite reaching, the southern tip of Argentina.Ĭalling himself the Bike Wanderer, he slithered over ice roads in the Arctic on a fat bike whose frame bags were laden with camping and camera gear. We all need to get away sometimes, and Iohan Gueorguiev got, arguably, more escape time than perhaps any other cyclist on earth.