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Sitting in a South Jakarta cafe in gray parachute pants, a cotton shirt that highlighted his burnished tan, and talismans around his neck, Alvaro Neil looked evry inch a wandering traveler. He is certainly no ordinary tourist.

The Spaniard is better known as Biciclown (a blend of bicycle and clown), for the simple reason that he travels the world by bike offering free clown shows. Neil arrived in Sumatra in June on the Indonesian leg of his Miles of Smiles Around the World journey, and he finally cycled into Jakarta on Tuesday.

It all began on a wintry November day in 2004 in Oviedo, northern Spain, when Neil hopped on his touring bike and set off for Africa. In the 1,711 days he has since spent on the road, the 42-year-old former notary has clocked up 65,096 kilometers. He has also suffered four bouts of malaria, gone through three touring bicycles and performed 50 shows for more than 16,000 people worldwide. Having covered the African continent and most of Asia, Indonesia is his 54th country.

Alvaro cycles an average distance of 1,500 km a month, and stays in each country for up to two months, giving him ample time to get to know it.

“With the bicycle, you go slowly. The food changes slowly, the language, everything,” he said.

Pushing 80 kilograms of bicycle and luggage across terrain ranging from dune country to roads slick from ice is challenging.

“When I’m cycling, I’m not a clown. It is very serious. A small mistake and you can die,” he said, gesturing to a picture of himself, a lone cyclist in a desolate place.

“I’m a cyclist, an adventure man. I’m alone. But here,” he said, pointing to another photograph of himself, this time performing before a crowd of beaming African children, “I’m not a cyclist. I’m just trying to amuse people.”

When he is not donning his red clown nose, Neil shares tales of his wanderings.

“I’ve seen things people will never see, things you cannot buy,” he said.

He managed to wheedle his way through Bhutan immigration without paying the daily fee travelers are charged, and became the first cyclist to ride through the country solo.

It was also in Bhutan that he convinced a Spanish-speaking lama to bless his third bicycle, which he called Karma thereafter.

And in Mauritania, Neil performed in the desert to a segregated Muslim crowd.

“There were the men, boys, small girls, women, old women. Just like in the supermarket — milk, coffee, tea. It was so unnatural,” Neil said.

“For me, clowning is about mixing all together, laughing.”

Neil’s project in fact began long before his world tour. In 2001, he gave up his job and cycled through South America for a year and a half. Tales of his Latin American adventures were compiled in “Miles of Smiles Around the World” — one of three books chronicling his travels.

“When I came back [to Spain], I decided this is what I want to do. I want to cycle all my life,” he said.

Neil’s aim is to cover all five continents, visit more than 100 countries, and travel more than 100,000 km by bike.

Neil believes he embarked on Miles of Smiles at just the right time.

His mother, however, was less than pleased about her son leaving a good job behind him.

“She said to me, ‘you won’t be able to do it.’ My mother said I’m not the kind of man who travels around the world and has to deal with mosquitoes,” Neil said.

For anyone thinking of following in his footsteps, Neil does not recommend Ethiopia, “where the kids throw stones at you,” nor India, “where the cars will kill you.”

He said he was thankful for his ability to make people laugh without uttering a single word.

“I don’t talk in my show. And I can make different ages of people and different social classes laugh. The poor, the rich, they all laugh at the same time, because of the same thing. They become equal,” he said.

Sixty percent of funding for the Miles of Smiles project comes out of Neil’s own pocket and only 20 percent from sponsors. But upon hearing the cyclist’s stories, strangers are inclined to open their hearts and homes to him.

While in a cafe in South Africa, Neil got to talking with a local woman. Once she heard his story, she gave him the keys to her house.

“I will be working until the evening but you can stay there, she told me,” Neil said.

While in Zimbabwe, a man lent him his car so he could drive around a national park. It was only after Neil had returned the vehicle to him that the man asked, “do you have a license to drive?”

In Jakarta, Neil stayed over at a new friend’s place found through a Web site (www.warmshowers.org ) that offers traveling cyclists hot showers and a place to sleep. “People help me a lot. People who don’t know me invite me for a place to sleep, for food. Life is good to me. So I try to make people who are suffering happy. ”

On Sunday, Neil will perform a one-hour show in Kertamukti, Banten, for more than 300 people who were displaced by the Situ Gintung dam disaster in March.

Following his sojourn in Jakarta, Neil will head for East Timor, then Sulawesi, and plans to spend the festive season in the Philippines. From there, he will travel to Australia and New Zealand, and jump to North America past Asia.

Neil said the one thing that would make him abandon his tour would be the love of a good woman and to start a family.

“But,” he said, “as I’m on the road for many years, it becomes more difficult. Every year the woman has to be more beautiful and nicer because the trip is so nice that this woman must be like a model, from inside and outside. So when I meet a girl, if I like her, the first question I ask is — do you know how to ride a bicycle? Because I don’t think I’d give up my life, it’s too rich to give up. If I meet a woman, I will ask her to come with me.

“This is my life. My bicycle is my home, the world is my garden. Why not come with me? I think this is a good life,” Neil said.


Two Men on Long Journeys End Up on the Same Jakarta Path

Riding through Peru, Alvaro Neil came across a man pushing a stroller. Jean Béliveau was walking around the world to promote his project, called Peace and Non-Violence for the Profit of the Children of the World (www.wwwalk.org).  Béliveau’s mission will take 11 years to complete — a journey he began in August 2000. “We just talked, half an hour, under the sun. I felt like I’d met a brother,” Neil said.

That was seven years ago. Last week, en route to Jakarta, he saw Béliveau on the road again, recognizing the stroller. “He had changed his route somehow,” Neil said. “He said Alvaro. This was someone I met seven years ago, never talked with him again, never e-mailed. Never. And he called me by my name, after seven years, after we only talked for half an hour. It was emotional.”

When they met in Peru, they were heading in opposite directions. Now, in 2009, they found each other traveling in the same direction.
Neil said the chance meeting made the car crash he was involved in this year worth it. “I told him when I met him, meeting you today was the best gift I’ve had this year,”  Neil said.

“The world is so big if you stay at home, but it is so small when you go out.”