Cycling Around the World2020-2023

Director
Snežana Radojičić

Actors

Snežana Radojičić
People from all over the world

One woman’s bicycle touring across the entire American continent, on a route called Panamerica, from Patagonia to Alaska.
When I was little, I dreamt of becoming a writer. I was sure that I would spend my life in some isolated hut on the mountain, writing fiction and going down among the people only once in a while when I publish a new book. That is why I graduated from the Faculty of Philology, wrote reviews and stories, and even won the famous Matica srpska (the oldest Serbian language institution) First Book competition, with a manuscript of the short story “While Souls Wandered.” Ten years later, I published a collection of stories “PS – Personal Stories”, published by Serbian publishing house Narodna knjiga.
But I didn’t retreat to a hut. I worked as a teacher of Serbian language and literature, as a lecturer in a multimedia company, as a real estate salesman, as a salesman and then an insurance manager, as a salesman of everything and anything, and again as a lecturer for magazines and several publishing houses, changing in total fifteen jobs. In my early forties, I suddenly asked myself – What has happened to my dreams? Why didn’t I become a writer? How did I get lost in a system of which I never wanted to be a part? What happened that life dragged me into something completely different from what I dreamed? It was 2011 when I sold everything I had, except a small apartment in Belgrade, and set off on the biggest adventure of my life: cycling around the world. I traveled with a daily budget of five euros, slept in a tent, cooked on a burner. I climbed the Himalayas by bike and crossed the Gobi Desert. I reached Siberia in the North, Japan in the East, and Timor in the South. I covered 56,000 km of cycling, 1,000 km walking, and visited 42 countries. On the eighth anniversary of the beginning of my biggest life adventure, I bought a one-way ticket to Latin America, with a flight scheduled for the last day of 2019. I jumped into the unknown; without funds in my account, depending on the renting of my small apartment, selling my books, subscriptions to my blog. I started again to live on the road, sleep in a tent, not knowing what is ten meters in front of me, nor what will happen in the next five minutes. It is a real adventure, in which you feel alive every moment, in which every minute only you and no one else manages your life, that you make decisions, that you choose. That is a powerful feeling, the price of which is the renunciation of certainty and comfort.
“The way I chose to live is certainly not easy, but it is valuable to me, and it fulfills me. I believe that the books I write will leave a mark. I did not manage to get rich, I have no savings, and I try to survive every day like most people. However, I am happy and rich in friends and experiences. After all these years, I don’t think I could live any differently.”