Was the goal as many interesting sites as possible? or RTW as fast/efficiently as possible?
Haha, the goal was definitely not as fast/efficiently as possible.
I think the goal is to measure our trip not in terms of mileage or # of countries visited, but by the stories we could tell about the places we've visited.
In North America, the culture is pretty homogenous, so the riding was pretty much the focus, so long riding days were standard. But once we got south of Mexico, we slowed right down to appreciate the sights and the people and the food.
I got that sense of the "shoe on the other foot" when we were riding through New Zealand and we met a bunch of local riders on a day-ride. They asked us where we were headed, and were surprised it was only a couple of hundred kms away. Their day-ride was over 800 kms for the day. But they lived there, so weren't really stopping to appreciate their own country.
A few years ago, we calculated our average mileage. It was 18 kms/day. You could have walked around the world faster than we rode.
However this included our non-riding days, and we hunkered down for weeks to months at a time to recuperate. Avg mileage for a riding day was about 200 kms/day.
Im curious what factors/criteria determined weather or not you visited a country, for instance, you guys went to mexico but not iraq?
Both are dangerous
Mainly we rely on feet-on-the-ground, up-to-date information from travelers who have come from the area we want to visit.
In 2014, we were in northern Colombia getting ready to cross over into Venezuela, when we met backpackers who had just come from there. They told us that although there were protests and riots in Caracas, the rural areas were peaceful. We don't really venture into the big cities, so this suited us just fine. The only issue for them was the food and fuel shortages, which is why they crossed the border into Colombia. So we didn't end up going to VZ not because it was dangerous, but because of the food and fuel situation.
I think most people write-off an entire country as dangerous because of what happens in large cities or certain areas which are affected by conflict or drug activity. Mexico is such a large country, but the problem areas are the border towns and other narco-controlled areas where the product travels north to the US. This is the reason we journeyed through MX through the Baja California peninsula, which IMO is about as safe as urban SoCal. Even when we were in areas with heavy narco-activity, like Durango, the conflict is between gangs and police. Generally tourists are safe from such violence as long as you are not interfering with the drug trade in any way.
There was a story of an American motorcycle traveler who was killed by narcos about the same time we were there. He was deep into one cartel's territory and the narcos mistook him for a mule for a rival gang and was executed as such.
I think violence specifically against tourists is a separate category and it's something that we focus on. It's one of the reasons why we didn't ride into Tunisia in 2015, because it was so soon after the mass shooting at a tourist resort that was targeting foreign nationals. Same reason why we were wary about riding into Mexico City because of the tourist kidnappings as well. But we had a local guide who hosted us and escorted us around, so that helped mitigate the danger in our minds.
But you also have to take a look at the sheer statistics of tourists visiting a country and the chances of violence happening. Mexico routinely gets over 10 million tourists a year. If you factor out any drug-related violence, how many of those 10M tourists suffered any kind of violence? Factor out large cities as well which we don't visit, and the numbers dwindle into statistical insignificance.
I think it's just a natural reaction to tend towards alarmism.
In 2002, the company I worked for held their annual meeting at their corporate HQ in Boston. All of the non-UK European employees abstained from attending citing a fear of the SARS pandemic. By the end of 2002, there was only a total of 27 cases of SARS in the US and 0 deaths. This in a country of 320M people...
