8 years on a boat and bike! Karlis Bardelis completed his trip around the world

In total, Bardelis spent 2898 days or seven years and 11 months on the journey. 46,326 kilometers by boat and 11,972 kilometers by bicycle.

On the first leg of the journey, he and his girlfriend Ginta Barkovskaya crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Namibia to Brazil in 142 days, and then, together with Linda Zuse, crossed South America in 101 days on a tandem bicycle.

Bardelis crossed the Pacific Ocean alone for two years, stopping at several islands along the way to wait for favorable weather conditions. In turn, during the journey across the Indian Ocean from Sri Lanka to the Maldives, Bardelis rowed with Dmitry Kiefer for nine days, and traveled alone for the remaining 163 days.

Arthur Skroder joined Bardelis on the challenging three-day ocean crossing from the Somalia-Kenya border to Kenya. The world tour ended with a solo bike ride across Africa from Kenya to Namibia.

“The feeling is unreal! The man who started this journey almost 8 years ago was a completely different person. 46,326 kilometers by boat and 11,972 kilometers by bicycle. Fortunately, I always focus only on the next day, and not on the thousands of kilometers that remain to be covered in the future,” Bardelis shared.

During this almost eight-year adventure, the traveler faced many difficulties and was also forced to endure a year and a half break due to Covid restrictions. A dangerous turn of events occurred when unexpectedly strong winds blew Karlis’s boat from its destination on a beach in Tanzania to the dangerous coast of Somalia. After Karlis’s successful escape from an unsafe country, the boat remained in Somalia and was returned only after long negotiations and ransom.

In turn, in the waters of the Pacific Ocean, Karlis was almost hit by a huge fishing vessel and the boat was attacked by sharks, and in the stormy waters of the Indian Ocean the boat capsized. During this trip, Karlis set six Guinness records, three of which can no longer be broken.

Together with Ginta Barkovskaya, they became the first team to row across the South Atlantic.

Karlis also became the first person to sail across the Pacific Ocean from South America to Asia and across the Indian Ocean from Asia to Africa, these facts are documented in the Guinness Book of Records.

“You would think that the most dangerous place on this journey was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but in fact I felt most vulnerable when my boat was 15 nautical miles from the shores of extremist-controlled Somalia,” Karlis says.

The boat that crossed three oceans is a 17-year-old plywood boat, and adventurer Karlis had never rowed before. To prepare for the trip, in 2014, he simply Googled the question “how to swim across the ocean?”

Karlis also used the latter stages of his world tour to raise funds for the charity Hospiss LV, which helps terminally ill patients at the end of their lives. Hospiss LV 2022 received the European Citizens’ Award for its pilot project to provide free hospice care. This project also showed the importance of seeking help and comfort even for terminally ill people who, for various reasons, are unable to receive hospice care at home. Our goal is to create the first hospice home in Latvia, where patients could spend the end of their lives with dignity.