After 'bikepacking' across Africa, Minnesota man eyes next continental trip in quest to bike all seven
Nathan Bowe of the Detroit Lakes Tribune interviews Ian
Last week I spoke with Nathan Bowe of the Detroit Lakes Tribune. Nathan did such a nice job writing the story that I wanted to share it here with you. It is behind a paywall, otherwise I could simply link to it. I hope that you enjoy.
DETROIT LAKES — Call him a glutton for punishment, but Ian Andersen has bicycled across three continents – Africa and North and South America — and he says he wants to bike across all seven. Yes, including Antarctica. Really.
Andersen, 31, is part of the Daggett clan. His mom is Polly Andersen, whose parents are Delta and Karen Daggett of Detroit Lakes.
Ian grew up in the Twin Cities, but spent a lot of time in the Frazee and Detroit Lakes area in the summertime.
His latest adventure was spending a year “bikepacking” across Africa, armed only with a small canister of pepper spray, a jackknife, and his de-escalation skills — the most valuable tool of all.
Andersen and his girlfriend, Sarah Rodriguez of Texas, started in Cape Town, South Africa, and rode up largely through nations along the east coast.
“The first time I asked her, she said ‘no' in no uncertain terms,” Ian said. Eventually she came around and decided to join him. But it was tough going. She had never been out of the country before and biking across Africa wasn’t exactly a pleasure trip.
“There were lots of problems, “ Andersen said. “Safety issues, dietary issues, nutritional issues — I can suffer through it; she’s kind of more balanced.”
They made it together through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania. They were nearby anyway, so they also took a cargo ship to see the island nation of Madagascar, stopping at the tiny Muslim island nation of Comoros on the way.
I overcame the hard part of it — getting up in the morning and getting on the bike, even though God-knows-what lies ahead in these parts.
“We loved Madagascar,” Andersen said, although there was a language barrier since French is the primary language there. For most of the trip, enough locals spoke English to make it easy to communicate, he said.
They had their first theft while camping in Comoros, where someone stole their six-pack of beer. Tourists can buy alcohol in Comoros, but residents can’t, making beer a hot commodity, he said.
On their African trip, they both got sick twice. “Like unbelievably sick,” Andersen said. “I think it was from kabob meat.”
That’s still not too bad, considering they drank the local water and ate the local food everywhere they went. The idea was to get their gut biomes adjusted to the local food and drink, and it largely worked.
He suspects E. coli or some such bug from unsanitary food prep caused their two major bouts of illness. “It was like 48 hours of hell,” he said. “We had antibiotics with us, but didn’t want to reset our stomach biomes, so we didn’t use it.”
For the most part, they felt safe during their travels. “We had a good introduction to Africa, especially South Africa – it has a very first-world feel,” he said. “Traffic was the worst issue,” he said.
To avoid the traffic, they took roads less traveled, which led to some interesting experiences in the rural areas.
They were menaced by an aggressive elephant at one point, which made a false charge, and also saw rhinos and other wildlife. A big hyena visited their campsite another time.
Those incidents were thankfully rare. The wild animals are usually found on or near preserves, Andersen said, though they talked to a surprising number of villagers along the way who had lost family members to elephant attacks. “It still happens,” he said.
The hyena showed up one morning when they were packing up camp to head out. “We saw it around and thought it was a dog. Thirty seconds later this huge hyena was in our camp,” Andersen said. “Luckily, he was more scared of us than we were of him – he ran away before I could even get a photo.”
Andersen had considered bringing a gun along for protection, but decided it would be a problem trying to take it from country to country. He decided to go with the little canister of pepper spray and the pocketknife, but he never tried to use either. “It worked out okay … not having any weapon or gun, I needed to de-escalate, and I was able to de-escalate.”
But by the time they got to Kenya, Sarah was ready to go home.
She had spent months with no access to regular showers, no access to food she liked, she missed home, and she had endured a few scary close-calls with people, as well as the wild animals. They parted ways and she flew home from Kenya. They are still together as a couple, and “she’s happy she did it, but never, ever again,” Andersen said.
They started in January of 2023, and Sarah went home in August. “I pushed on solo,” Andersen said.
He was relieved not to have to worry about her safety anymore, but missed the companionship and the shared experiences. “There were highs and lows to it,” he said.
But it was a good thing she left in the end, because she missed the “complete suffer-fest” that was northern Kenya and Ethiopia. There he was more scared than he had been anywhere else on the three continents — even Central America, where he had his cellphone stolen and a gun pulled on him.
Two young men herding cattle in northern Kenya demanded money and water from him. Andersen didn’t have any water to spare, and their increasingly aggressive behavior led him to make a run for it on his bike, peddling hard and fast to get away from them, while they threw rocks and sticks, and he braced for a sharp pain in his back. “I thought this kid was going to spear me — they use their spears every day to protect livestock from predators,” he said.
In retrospect, he said, “I don’t want to bash on them, it was my choice to be there,” but it felt way too close to a near-death experience, and he said it was the closest he came to giving up the journey. “I most wanted to quit after that,” he said.
The next day, he said, “I overcame the hard part of it — getting up in the morning and getting on the bike, even though God-knows-what lies ahead in these parts.”
Ethiopia turned out to be a surprising mixture of good and bad experiences. “There were very nice people and very mean people too,” he said. “People were either super nice to me or super aggressive. It was very strange and scary — people throwing garbage, trying to spear me, I got whacked on the back one time with a shepherd’s stick as I rode by.”
But the food was really good in Ethiopia and food and good hotels were very inexpensive. “It was $4 or $5 for a nice hotel room,” he said, and officials there were content, when necessary, with a $5 bribe — though Andersen tried to avoid bribes as much as possible throughout his trip.
In the end, he persevered and finished his bikepacking trip in Egypt in December of 2023.
Andersen is now planning for a bike trip across Australia, which he plans to start in a few months. He let his Instagram followers choose the continent for his next adventure. He has 50,000 followers on all social media, and was happy the Instagram voters chose Australia — although part of him was hoping they would choose Antarctica so he would have to tackle it next, and "get it out of the way," he said with a laugh.
He said he will use a bike with 5-inch snow tires for Antarctica and will go during the summertime there, which is still quite cold. The problem with Antarctica is there is no food to be found along the way, which means either pulling a sled or figuring something else out.
Andersen started his point-to-point crossing of continents after being inspired by Bret Andersen, his paternal uncle, who set a record in 1986 for the longest continuous bike ride, traversing North and South America from the Arctic Ocean to the southern tip of Argentina.
“That’s what got me going on it, my uncle — he had lots of cool stories,” Andersen said.
In 2016-2017, he followed his uncle’s blueprint and made the trip himself. “He was a good mentor for me. I talked to him a lot about the logistics of the trip,” Andersen said.
Andersen pays for all his trips himself, with money socked away from long hours of work. “I put as much as I could into savings for a lot of years,” he said. “I saved up enough to keep on going.”
He dreams of following the way of Minnesota explorers like his uncle, Will Steger, and others. “That’s what I’m hoping to do,” he said.
Andersen writes and makes videos about bikepacking adventures and planning, and can be found on Substack, and other social media under @ridewithian.
By Nathan Bowe
Bowe covers the Becker County Board and the court system for the Tribune, and handles the opinion pages for the Tribune and Focus. As news editor of both papers, he is the go-to contact person for readers and the general public: breaking or hard news tips, story ideas, questions and general feedback should be directed to him.
Awesome article, huge props to sarah and i really feel that your story of biking Africa should be more well known. Maybe a book! Biking Africa is such a touching human story. People always say humans live in a “shared reality” but do we? does an American biking Africa actually create a shared reality? You learn so much from meeting people they way you did. Even if it’s just a hi and bye.
Such a fun story - it becomes more apparent how fortunate we were, that you were able to avoid being caught up in some real physical harm and more.