In this short documentary, McKenzie Barney brings the viewer along as she bikepacks through five continents. She films her experiences, often as a solo traveler, and her spontaneous, minimalist lifestyle on the road.
She started in Ho Chi Minh, with “only the clothes on [her] back,” picking up a used bike and pointing it north. When she reached Hanoi weeks later, Barney marveled at having crossed a country under her own power. She wanted to go bigger, cross a continent.
So she went to Istanbul, heading north again through 11 countries. One continent wasn’t enough. Meeting up with her partner Jim, they set out from Cairo, Egypt. South this time, all the way to Cape Town. This is where we really join Barney, as she begins filming the journey, telling, as she says, the story “she never meant to tell.”
Politics intervenes
Crossing into Sudan, their first experiences of the Sahara are intensely hot but pleasant, with friendly people and periodic stops at roadside cafeterias for rest and tea. But when they reach Khartoum, they arrive in the wake of the 2021 military coup, which prevented the planned handover to a civilian leader and interrupted the country’s ongoing transition to democracy. Mass protests and violent reprisals rocked the city, much of which shut down.
As soon as the airport reopens, Barney and Joe fly into Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There, too, ongoing civil war threatens to interrupt their cycling journey, and they take a bus to the Kenyan border.
Her emphasis on braving foreign political turmoil and war can be a tad tacky. It seems to do a disservice to the biking film, as if a global bicycling adventure were not enough, and thrill needed to be added by emphasizing how the bicyclist was almost adjacent to danger. Once in Kenya, though, focus returns to her actual experiences.
Barney and Joe cycling in Kenya. Photo: Screenshot
World tour, solo
They bike towards the equator, leaving savannah for cloud forest. With the southern hemisphere comes the Masai Mara nature reserve, then the elevation changes of Tanzania. Countries flow into another, marked by changing road conditions, shifting landscapes, and periodic breaks for the particularly striking.
By the time they reach Cape Town, they’re exhausted. But Barney feels a “deep inner calling to continue on two wheels.” Soon she’s picking up the camera again in New Zealand, riding the length of the South Island, and then crossing the Australian continent. The hard push and constant headwinds, she says, only make her want to take on the next project.
Crossing Australia in 30 days, Barney says, was “brutal.”
The film matches the pace of her frenetic world tour, jumping right to South America. From the white expanse of salt flats in Bolivia to 4,000m saddles in Peru, she is often far from people, trying to balance preparation and spontaneity. In nature, outside of the confines and the security of urban normalcy, “this is where I feel the most safe as a woman alone.”
