Jason Lewis became the first people to circumnavigate the earth by using just human power. He started off the journey with his friend Stevie Smith, who dropped out in Hawaii. Jason carried on alone.
Self-study activity:
Watch this three-minute BBC video clip and say if the statements below are true or false.
The activity is suitable for Intermedio 2 students.
1 It took Jason thirty years to complete the journey.
2 All the means of transport he used had pedals.
3 It took them a bit more than three months to cross the Atlantic.
4 Jason was run over by a vehicle during the trip.
5 One of the reason why Jason kept going was because of the huge support he got.
6 After twenty days pedalling in the Doldrums he hadn't made any progress whatsover.
7 The locals in the Salomon Islands couldn't believe the boat didn't have an engine.
You can check the answers and read the transcript below.
My name is Jason Lewis and I’m the first person to circumnavigate the world using just human power. People have rode across oceans and people have bicycled across continents, but no one had yet connected a continuous journey all the way around the world just using the power of their own body.
It took me thirteen years. We would bicycle across the continents, inline skate, walk, and across the oceans we would use a specially-designed pedal boat, we would kayak, so any means of non-motorised non-wind assisted transport, it was just the human body.
Calling all stations. This is pedal boat loch shore.
We struck out into the Atlantic in this tiny little boat, the support boat went back and land slipped beneath the horizon, only then did I really, I think, appreciate what it was that I had got myself into. Five thousand miles it ended up taking 111 days a little over three months.
It does take a tremendous amount of effort to not really get the dream off the ground but also then to keep on going. Sometimes I mean I was run over by an 82 year old drunk driver with cataracts in Colorado, for example. You know, that was a huge trip ender right there. But it is important to finish what you start and I think the more I got into this and the more people that were behind it the more people that were living and travelling by vicariously through the website or we had hundreds of schools following online. It just became almost like a part of me. The expedition became me and I became the expedition and it just seemed really important to finish it.
One of the lowest points of the whole expedition was pedalling for two and a half weeks on the spot in the Doldrums. So I would pedal for 18, 19 sometimes 20 hours a day, find out that I was back where I had started from the previous morning. And after a day of this, I was pretty depressed. After a week, it, you know, I was tearing my hair out and after two and a half weeks I just curled up in the bottom of the boat and I just gave up, I just, I cried, I just felt like I could not keep pedalling when I wasn’t going anywhere.
I would never have gone to the Salomon Islands, for example. We pedaled in there and the locals came up in their dug-out canoes. It was just a completely surreal experience, both for ourselves, pedalling in there, but also I think for the locals seeing this pedal-powered boat, you know, they were looking for the engine, where’s the engine?, no engine. And we lifted off the pedal unit, oh it’s a bicycle, and it just blew their minds.
Pretty much anyone could do this trip. I think that’s the thing that appealed to me was just so beautifully simple, and it was one of those adventures, one of those journeys that just have to be done.
Key:
1F 2F 3T 4T 5T 6F 7T
