Further course of the Great Journey
Day: 337 Stage three. Travel days Australia, four years
Total kilometers:
6980 km
Temperature - Day (maximum):
12°-35° degrees, sun 25°-55°
Temperature - Night:
9°-20°
On tour – 18.04.2003
In the meantime, we have received inquiries from a number of readers about how we are progressing. That’s more than understandable, of course, because I’m also interested in how a story ends. I ask for your understanding for the delay.
Actually, now that we’ve reached the east coast and our Australian expedition has officially come to an end, I didn’t want to write another update. Tanja and I were too tired and exhausted to continue reporting. We urgently needed a rest. To be honest, I couldn’t bear to look at my computer for weeks on end, because over the last few years I had spent thousands of hours (about 24 hours a week) sitting in front of it in all kinds of extreme weather conditions to record our experiences and adventures for you, dear readers.
Live reporting is without doubt indescribably exhausting and time-consuming. On the other hand, I also enjoyed keeping in touch with our readers, because that way we were never alone, even in the darkest hours of our lives. It is not easy for me to explain, but through the contact with our Mother Earth, through the many conversations about the desert and her always helpful, fantastic and easily understandable answers to all my questions, a new understanding, a deeper knowledge and comprehension of many unanswered questions has opened up for me and also for Tanja. Many of our readers who have followed our expedition experiences know what I am talking about. What I would like to say with these few words is that we felt the connection to the many people who rejoiced with us over one success or another or even worried with us. In this way, we were not alone even in the greatest loneliness. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for this and for their many years of loyalty. In the last 12 months, we have had up to 10,000 visitors per month on our website. For me as a writer and adventurer, this huge number of visitors and the great interest is a tremendous success and pleasure. A thousand thanks.
Of course, we don’t want to say goodbye to you, dear readers. Our expeditions continue. The Red Earth Expedition is now complete, but our next project is already planned. As part of our “Great Journey”, the thirty-year expedition, we want to spend another 20 years exploring our troubled planet by land and sea, using standard means of transportation. We want to document them and capture them in pictures and film and archive them for posterity.
Our next trip is already planned. If everything goes as we imagine, we will cycle through the whole of Russia to the Chinese border and then through the whole of China to the Burmese border with specially prepared bicycles and a small trailer to go with them. We have more than 30,000 kilometers to go before we reach Burma. There we want to change to an elephant to be whisked away into the still partly untouched world of Asia and its lovable people.
So Tanja and I still get an enormous amount of pleasure from this strenuous and dangerous lifestyle, but on the other hand, this life is indescribably satisfying. Even if we don’t become millionaires and our materialistic possessions are severely limited, we are already millionaires. We are millionaires of experiences, adventures and stories that not only take us around the world, but also into the deepest depths of our own being. It is a wonderful world in which we live and we hope to portray a positive, adventurous, exciting and worthwhile life to people in these troubled, warlike and sometimes cruel times with our travels and experiences. With our reports, we hope to draw attention to our wonderful planet, which is worth protecting. To the many highly interesting peoples, their different cultures, religions, views and their habitats. We hope that our travel life contributes a little to a greater understanding of other opinions and views. We hope that it will help to bring the peace that we humans long for in the depths of our hearts. There is no question for us that this is possible. We just have to start by not constantly judging or condemning others, but by working on ourselves first. If we manage to change ourselves, we change our children. When we change our children, we change the future. Even if it will be difficult, we believe that this is possible, because in our experience nothing is impossible…
We hope that you, dear readers, will continue to do so. That they continue to accompany us on our travels. We are coming to Germany at the end of June. We will be interrupting our Great Journey there for a while to report on our Australian experiences in slide shows, films, magazine articles and possibly books. As we won’t be staying too long, our appearances are, as always, very limited. Nevertheless, we hope to get to know one or two of you personally.
We will try to announce the lectures on our website in advance.
Depending on our schedule, I will report on the rest of our travel experiences. Even if we don’t show any signs of life for a few weeks, I will keep you, dear readers, up to date on everything else at regular intervals.
A thousand thanks again
Denis Katzer & Tanja Hofmann
