B Spoke Bicycle Works

Where has your bicycle taken you?

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Heinz Stücke has died at his home in Hövelhof, the German town he left in November 1962 and returned to only after fifty years on the road. He was 86.

Stücke set out at 22 with a three-speed bicycle, roughly $300 in his pocket, and no particular route. He came back having ridden more than 648,000 kilometres across 196 countries and 86 territories. He believed he had visited every country on Earth when he reached the Seychelles in 1996. He kept going for another sixteen years anyway, because the arrival, when it finally came, had felt smaller than the road.

He funded the journey by selling photocopied booklets of his own photographs at post offices in Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Tokyo and Sydney. He wrote for German newspapers. He shot the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. He survived a truck collision in the Atacama, a shooting in Zambia, and an assault outside Cape Town that broke his teeth. Both of his parents died while he was somewhere else.

In his last years he was bedridden in the house at Hövelhof, surrounded by maps, letters and the marked-up flag board he carried through every border crossing. Visitors said he still spoke about the road as though he were on it.

He was the working-class kid who turned a factory-town restlessness into the longest continuous bicycle journey ever recorded. The map was his home.

📷 Heinz Stücke