Claude Marthaler

One World, Different Realities

This article first appeared in the May 2022 issue of Adventure Cyclist magazine. 

It felt like another world, crisscrossing Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asian republics just a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was also the pre-digital era, before I reached Japan by winter 1996–1997. I’d been riding already for almost three years, with the deep impression that I could have gone forever. Time had somehow ceased to matter. Handwritten letters would punctuate the journey every three months. I would only discover all my pictures seven years after, once back in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2001, cycling meanwhile from Alaska to Tierre del Fuego, then through Africa, from Cape Town to Tangier.

I took only film, 36 exposures of Kodachrome 64 rolls with a single mechanical camera, the legendary and unbreakable Nikon FM2, equipped with two lenses, 24mm and 85mm. No zoom, no flash, just natural light. Simple and analog, like the bicycle itself. Each picture looks like a kind of matriochka, the Russian nesting doll. Pics of a forgotten world, documents from the Indian subcontinent and from Himalaya, as if the passage of time would improve their taste and intensity, like aged wine.

As I pushed the button of my camera, I felt sometimes that I had already known these people, visited these places. Looking at them today, they appear to me like a dream — Songwheels — reminding me of Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines, about the connection between Aboriginal Australian song and nomadic travel. Each day contains a life, each country a world, each person a destiny. The bicycle truly opens doors; it is a poem without breaks.  

 
Bike travel photo essay
India never sleeps. The Howrah Bridge, before the sunrise, linking Howrah and Kolkata, India. One million pedestrians cross it each and every day!
Claude Marthaler

Bike travel photo essay
“Guest is God,” say the Indians. Invited for breakfast in a school where we slept. Madhya Pradesh, 2006.
Nathalie Pellegrinelli

Bike travel photo essay
A family of Uyghurs in eastern Turkestan-Xinjiang, China, 1995.
Claude Marthaler

Bike travel photo essay
A Tibetan dance festival under control of Chinese soldiers. Litang, Tibet, 1996.
Claude Marthaler

Bike travel photo essay
An emblematic image, wheels within wheels. Nicknamed Ruedas (wheels), a Spanish friend of mine fixing his inner tube. Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, 1998.
Claude Marthaler

Bike travel photo essay
The pure joy of living. Tibetan kids in Sichuan, China, 1996.
Claude Marthaler

bike travel photo essay
Two Khampas in Litang, eastern Tibet, 1996.
Claude Marthaler

bike travel photo essay
Ukraine, spring 1994. To make up for the shortage, a Ukrainian family goes regularly to Russia to buy gasoline. Mixed with water or diesel, it’s commonly resold on the black market.
Claude Marthaler

bike travel photo essay
Ten days trekking with two young monks and their horses through Ladakh-Zanskar, Jammu, and Kashmir, India, 1989. The Indian army is now building a road linking Padum to Leh.
Claude Marthaler

bike travel photo essay
Riding through the Suusamyr Valley, Kyrgyzstan, in winter 1994, nicknamed the Siberia of Central Asia. One of the coldest winters I experienced on two wheels.
Claude Marthaler
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