Inside This Artist's 15,730-Mile Bike Trip From Norway To South Africa

Sitting in traffic on the back of an electric scooter in Bali, graphic artist Annabelle Golden was feeling restless. She and her boyfriend, photographer Alex Ohtea, had been traveling and working freelance out of Airbnbs and vans around the globe for months, and though she’d seen countless sights, she was longing for something more. Stuck behind a sea of vehicles, an idea bubbled up: “Wouldn’t it be really cool to bike around the world?”

Easier said than done. Though she was an avid traveler, Golden’s only prior bikepacking experience was a two-week stint on the EuroVelo 6 route through Austria. In high school, she liked watching Jay Alvarez and Alexis Ren’s adventure vlogs, and in college, she biked around campus at Tulane and while studying abroad in Amsterdam — but that was it. Pedaling thousands of miles would be a stretch, to say the least.

“The most expensive bike I ever owned was $200, and I thought that was crazy in college. Now my helmet is more than $200, which is funny,” she says. “This trip was just a full-send thing, a full surrender to the idea.”

In April 2024, after 10 months of planning, Golden and Ohtea set out on the first leg of their trip: a 15,730-mile ride from Tromsø, Norway (roughly 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle), to Cape Town, South Africa.

“At some point, you’re going to be old and you can look back on your life and you will either have biked around the world or not,” the 27-year-old New York native says. “Wouldn’t it be so cool if we had?”

When the pair first started digging through vlogs and travel books to map out their route, they noticed a glaring omission in the adventure cycling community: The Guinness World Records’ criteria to bike around the world requires traveling 18,000 miles in one direction.

“I would never call anyone who’s biked 18,000 miles a cheater, but to say you biked around the world and have never touched Africa or South America feels kind of crazy,” she says.

That was the motivating factor for their route, which took them through 27 countries in Europe and the western portion of Africa. They stayed mostly at inexpensive hotels, occasionally camped, and found groceries where they could — though getting enough protein was often a challenge.

“One day in Guinea we happened upon a gas station that had beef jerky, and we bought all of it,” she says. “The next day we were doing a pretty big day, but I blinked and we were two-thirds done. I was like, ‘Why is today so easy?’ And then I realized: It’s because we ate.”

Throughout the 798-day journey, funded by her earnings as an artist and social media creator, Golden recorded, edited, and posted daily vlogs, reaching more than 115K TikTok followers in the process. Her loyal audience watched her content turn from reindeer on glacial fjords to camels in the Sahara. When she and Ohtea, 34, finally arrived at Cape Town’s waterfront on July 19, some viewers congratulated their “close personal friends” Annabelle and Alex, as they put it. Others “cried their eyes out.”

“It was so motivating knowing that there were people who weren’t just following to see me make it to Cape Town, but were following to see where I got that night,” she says. “When good things would happen on the road, I would be excited to share because I knew everyone would be excited. And when bad things would happen, sharing helped soften the blow.’”

In October, the pair will set out on their next leg, biking from Amsterdam to Tokyo. Below, Bustle catches up with Golden as she takes some much-needed time off in Cape Town.

How are you feeling after finishing this first part of the journey?

It hasn’t sunk in yet that we’re done. It’s weird how different our day-to-day is. When my parents visited us here, it started to rain. It was so crazy to just say, “Oh, OK, we’ll take an Uber to dinner. It’s no big deal.”

You self-described as a beginner biker before this journey. How did you prepare physically?

My goal before leaving was to get in the best shape possible to make the first days not miserable. In Norway, we’d do 30 miles a day, and I remember one day where I was literally in tears going up a mountain. Now we can do significantly more distance and elevation in harder climates just by virtue of doing it every day.

How did you physically sustain yourselves through all that cardio in the heat?

It was tough. In Cameroon, Alex developed gout. A lot of bikepackers get it because you sweat out all this moisture, which means you don’t pee as much and you get this buildup of uric acid. To fix it you have to replenish your salts, so we bought a bag of salt and literally dipped our fingers in and licked them.

We were staying with these two Americans who had found me on Instagram, and they were like, “That's f*cking disgusting.” So he gave us a half-empty bag of liquid IVs in all the leftover flavors he didn’t like, and we were like, “Wow, this is literally gold.”

What was the most unexpected part of your journey?

One day in Guinea, we wound up at a Chinese hotel. In a lot of parts of Africa, there are Chinese infrastructure projects going on, and there are entire villages with hotels and stores [for the workers]. They’re functionally Chinese, so they only use yuan, you just see red lanterns and gates. We’d been passing through what was basically a food desert and were planning to have peanut butter and bananas for dinner, but here they had tea, ramen, rice, and fun snacks. A guy noticed me and Alex eyeing his dinner, and he just went into the store and got some for us. It looked like a bowl of noodles, but it ended up being a self-heating Szechuan peppercorn rice dish. It was futuristic. We were so happy.

The hotel ended up being $400, so we ended up camping. But I was like, “What do you mean, I’m in rural Guinea? A Chinese man just gave me the fanciest ramen I’ve ever seen, and now I’m eating it outside by iPhone candlelight.”

What’s your next route?

We’ll start in Amsterdam, and then there’s an all-you-can-eat ribs restaurant in Belgium that Alex has literally been thinking about this entire trip, so we’ll go south specifically for that. Then we’ll go southeast. To get to Asia without going through Russia and Iran, we’ll take a ferry from Türkiye to Kazakhstan.

My FYP was all about you finishing your journey. How has it felt to have this kind of support?

I can’t even begin to describe what it’s like to get the comment “You’ve inspired me to buy a bike.” It’s so special.

Also, the first time I was recognized was when we were crossing into Senegal. The Mauritanian border security guard looks at me, and he goes, “TikTok,” then opens the gate and lets us through.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.