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In 1962, a twenty-two-year-old factory worker left his hometown of Hövelhof, Germany on a bicycle with $300 in his pocket. Heinz Stücke would return to Hövelhof, fifty-two years, 196 countries, and 648,000 kilometers later.
Heinz’s home for five decades was a steel three-speed bicycle that carried him across the world multiple times, from camping next to the Great Wall of China to pushing his bike up 5,000-meter mountain passes in India. In the early 1980s, after two decades cycling the globe, Heinz decided that he wanted to visit every country in the world. He reached that milestone in 1996 when his bicycle rolled onto the islands of Seychelles.
📸: Heinz Stücke
Heinz was not a wealthy man and didn’t begin his journey with any formal financing. His greatest asset was the support of locals across the world who, without Heinz asking, felt compelled to give the curious German financial support. In 1963, Heinz found himself stranded in Ethiopia. He was invited to the Imperial Palace to meet Emperor Haile Selassie who gave him $500 to continue his journey.
A tent and camping stove were strapped to Heinz’s bicycle, although they didn’t get as much use as you’d think. People across the world consistently invited Heinz into their restaurants for a meal or into their homes to stay in their guest room or sofa. He repaid his hosts with his greatest asset: his stories. From being chased by a mob in Haiti to being chased by perhaps an equally angry mob of bees bathing in a river in Mozambique, Heinz had no shortage of tales from the road.
In the 1980s, Heinz began printing multilingual pamphlets that he would give to stupefied locals explaining the places he’d been, people he’d met, and why he was biking around the world (“to see what is around the next corner,” he’d often say). A London agency began distributing Heinz’s photographs and travel stories, providing another source of income.
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In 2014, Heinz returned to Hövelhof to a house the people of Hövelhof rented for him to set his bike down for the final time. But his journey wasn’t over; he was still traveling, only backwards. Heinz had over 100,000 photographs and numerous journals filled with handwritten travel stories. His project in retirement, until his death in 2026, was to digitize and archive his records from five decades of people met and roads cycled.
Heinz ended his journey with a real claim to be one of the best-traveled individuals on the planet. But this honor was never his goal, nor was speed or mileage. It was to go where his curiosity led him and to share with the world everything that he discovered around the next corner.
