class = “sc-cffd1e67-0 iQNQmc”>
Heinz Stücken now travels on four wheels instead of two. The bike, which took him around the world countless times over the decades, has long sat untouched in storage. Troubled by arthrosis in his hip, the 84-year-old shuffles around his apartment leaning on his walker as he shows visitors his work over 51 years, 648,000 kilometers of cycling and the 282 countries and territories he has visited. Few people have seen more of the world, let alone ridden a bike, than a German.
The rooms in his house already resemble a museum. Stücke meticulously preserved the items he collected on his trip, and over the years he sent them to his sister and father in his hometown of Hövelhof in Westphalia (where he now lives again). Frayed wallets, cracked bicycle tires and headgear damaged by sweat and weather hang neatly labeled on the wall next to her photographs. The slides fill several cabinets. Stücke estimates he took more than 100,000 photographs during his travels. It only printed on a small part.
Many of the slides will likely remain untouched until his death. “Too many photos, not enough time,” he mutters as he looks through his albums for photos. Where is the photo again showing him being injured after a Zimbabwean freedom fighter shot him in the foot? He’s not sure anymore. One of the lists he carefully kept sheds light on the matter. He quickly picks up the slide. Is this why he works so tirelessly on the treasure trove of material he has collected? Is it because he is aware that the flood of memories is slowly fading into an impenetrable mass of image fragments?
He wants to prevent this. “Now I’m trampling on all my memories,” says Stücke. Someone who sleeps in rainforests and deserts, on the Great Wall of China or at the foot of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro can barely sleep in a comfortable bed in the Hövelhofer.
To this day, Stücken is still regarded by some in his native Westphalia as a useless and perpetual vacationer. But he, of all people, spends his last days behind his desk. He sleeps three to four hours a night and spends 16 hours a day hunched over his supplies, which accumulate in boxes, crates and cabinets throughout the apartment.
When Heinz tells his anecdotes, he often does so in the present tense. It’s like it’s still in motion. However, his last journey takes him to the past. The journey began very soon, just a few streets away, in the early 1960s.
His parents’ house was once in Hövelhof. In November 1962, Heinz’s parts were finally left behind. The 22-year-old player wants to go to the Olympic Games in Tokyo by cycling. The world was different then: nuclear war was feared in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a wall had divided Berlin for a year. Pieces was also born into the German economic miracle. For a toolmaker, this means long days in the factory for a lifetime. “We did the same tasks for days. “It really is a terrible job,” he says.
Even today, people in the village tell a joke that his father told him that he should work when he grew up. From that moment on, the little 1.65-meter piece stopped growing.
The relationship between father and son is difficult. The father, who rose to the lower middle class from a family of landless hired labourers, refuses to let him get an education (“too expensive, too far”) and has little understanding of his son’s wanderlust due to his bike tours. This period, which initially lasts a few days, gradually gets longer. He toured around the Mediterranean in the late 1950s. In 1960, he crossed Central and South Asia, reached Sri Lanka and returned via Russia. Bitten by the travel bug.
“I didn’t set out with the idea of doing this for the rest of my life,” Stücke says today. On the contrary, he shifted to a vagabond life from 1962 onwards. She first crosses Africa with the participation of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, and then sets out for Brazil on a cargo ship. She missed the Games in Tokyo because her cycling progress was too slow. She really doesn’t care. He was greatly impressed by this wonderful stranger, whom he had only encountered in Karl May novels as a child.
From then on he continued to delay his return home. “I was constantly looking for reasons to spend more time on the road,” says Stücke. He was traveling through the rainforest in Ecuador when his mother died unexpectedly of asthma in 1966. Stücke did not receive the letter with the news of his death until a month later. “It was buried a long time ago,” says Stücke and continues. And at some point you don’t want to go back. “The journey had become the meaning of my life,” says Stücke. He would not see his hometown again until the spring of 2014.
Soon Stücker will begin to earn a living with the superlatives that characterize his journey. He prints brochures that he sells on the street, gives conferences, and magazines buy his photographs and stories. There is no internet, the world is still mysterious. For a while in the 1990s, he entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most traveled person.
There are also moments when it is tempting to go back and live a normal life: In 1977, he stands on the Kreuzlingen border and looks towards Germany with some sadness. It doesn’t cross the line. Otherwise, he fears, his journey to supremacy will come to an end. “If I had gone back to Hövelhof, I would no longer be able to sell my story and would have gone back to the factory,” says Stücke. After a while, while in London, he decides that returning home without visiting every country in the world is out of the question.
His thirst for records comes at a heavy price: A few months later, he sees his father for the last time. His family visits him in Arnhem, the Netherlands, near the German border. Twelve years later, in 1989, Stücke was traveling in China when he learned that his father had died. He’s not going home again.
Does he regret seeing his family so rarely? “There was something that gave me satisfaction. “This is much more important than a family,” says Stücke. But people definitely mattered to him. To this day, Heinz Stücken writes postcards to dozens of people around the world. For example, Mr. Lee lives in Hong Kong. The owner of a bicycle shop becomes one of his closest friends. Stücke stops by regularly and even receives financial support for his travels.
But things never went well in love. He mischievously talks about love affairs in bedrooms around the world. It almost gets even more so in one case: Zoya from Belarus. She had been in a long distance relationship with him for eight years. “He believed until the end that I was rich,” says Stücke. As he postpones his marriage for longer and longer and she realizes that she does not want to offer him much other than adventure stories, he leaves her for someone else. Pieces: “I was aware that, especially in poorer countries, people often come to me for financial purposes. You should be able to deal with it.
Still, loneliness doesn’t bother him. Even when his journey and with it his life purpose ended in 2014. In his mid-70s, he realized that his body’s ability to cope with this tension was gradually decreasing. And it seems to him that the world is becoming less and less kind to him. He survived countless accidents and was even involved in street fighting. But then this: In 2012, he wanted to return to Europe from South Africa on a cargo ship, but he was not allowed to do so. He cannot present a doctor’s certificate proving that he is fit to travel. The pieces decide that he is too old. He had cycled thousands of kilometers from Nairobi to Cape Town in the previous weeks and months. A few days later he was attacked and badly beaten on the street in Cape Town. Sufficient.
Hövelhof helps him everywhere in his search for a home for his retirement. The village he once ostentatiously turned his back on. The municipality gives him a rent-free apartment. In return, parts of his inventory will be released to the public. There is already a plan to build a museum, but its opening has been postponed. That’s no problem for Stück: “I’d rather have people come to my house than to go to a museum,” he says. And they do this almost every day.
The village has now become a small pilgrimage site for cycling enthusiasts. They all want to dive into his stories for a moment. And usually one question is enough and Stücke is somewhere in the world, far away from his retired existence in Hövelhof.
For example, in China, where he traveled extensively in the late 80s and early 90s. He attracts the attention of Chinese authorities because he frequently travels in areas closed to foreigners. In Tibet the pieces were finally collected; His bike, camera and film rolls are confiscated and he is deported from the country.
With the help of the German embassy, at least he gets his bike back. In Nepal, Stücke obtains a new passport and soon returns to China via Hong Kong. “In today’s digital world, such games will no longer be possible,” says Stücke.
These are stories from another time, when traveling by bike was still rare. But interest in him as a person remains uninterrupted. In addition to his 234-euro state pension, he also survives by selling a book his sponsor published years ago. A documentary film about his travels has already been released. A biography will be added next spring.
Fear of lower-middle-class life had once driven him away. He has now made peace with Hövelhof and its people, and at least he brings home nothing less than the whole world.
Source : Blick
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
