In 78 days, he saw everything from lush green forests to searing hot deserts, breathtaking coastlines and mountain faces, with nothing but a bike, some tools, minimal water and food provisions, and a change of clothes. University senior Greg Krupa challenged himself to bike 4,000 miles from Eugene, Ore., to Zacapa, Guatemala.
Krupa didn’t do this on a whim, though. His journey by bike from June 19 to Sept. 7 was for Riding for ROMP, a fundraiser for the Range of Motion Project, which provides prosthetics for amputees in developing countries. Krupa collected $25,000 in his efforts for ROMP.
Krupa’s journey took three distinct parts: From Eugene to San Diego, Calif., then from Tijuana, Mexico, down along Baja California and the Mexican Pacific Coast, and then onwards crossing the Guatemalan border and reaching the ROMP center in Zacapa, Guatemala.
“There were so many different people who helped us along the way,” Krupa said. “Each day that we arrived in new place, people were anticipating our arrival.”
He decided to raise money for the cause after working with two Range of Motion Project clinics in Guatemala and Ecuador, which provided impoverished towns with access to health care.
“What better way than to bike from the first world where most of the financing comes from to the actual clinic itself in Guatemala?” Krupa said.
Joining Krupa on his journey was Pat Mathay, a recent University of Kansas graduate. Mathay and Krupa met while doing relief work in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans.
Krupa and Mathay meticulously planned their route along the Pacific, marking where they would stay and calling hotels ahead of time. Many times, hotel management gave Krupa and Mathay a free room once they discovered the duo’s purpose for visiting. However, planning ahead for every town was impossible the closer that Krupa and Mathay got to their destination in Zacapa because the towns were so small.
Because their journey was mapped out, people would greet and even ride with Krupa and Mathay.
“We had a few amputee cyclists who met up with us,” Krupa said. “Actually a few amputees (who) weren’t even cyclists saw what we were doing and wanted to join, and even though they would only ride for a very small portion of it, some of their stories are pretty amazing and compelling and it really meant a lot to them, and it inspired us.”
Krupa said that the U.S. leg of the journey was the easiest.
“We had access to all of the supplies that we needed,” he said. “And there was always access to food and water. We never felt like we were in serious danger.”
Krupa and Mathay walked through the U.S.-Mexico boarder at Tijuana, and then biked as hard as they could out of the city to make their journey down Baja California.
“Tijuana is everything that you hear it is,” Krupa said. “It’s dangerous, and it’s dirty, and there is no real way to bike through it comfortably. It’s a city full of traffic. There was smog everywhere.”
Mathay and Krupa ended up biking 1,000 miles through the Baja California peninsula, a desert with temperatures exceeding more than 120 degrees each day. To beat the heat, the team would start biking at 4 a.m. and then stop for the day at 10:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. before the heat became too dangerous. They would rest and wait for the heat to go down before continuing on to their destination.
“(Baja California) is actually one of the most unexplored and uninhabited peninsulas in the world,” Krupa said. “There were stretches where there was literally nothing. It sounds cliche, but ‘middle of nowhere’ meant nothing to me before going to Baja. That is the middle of nowhere. There is nothing. Each day was pretty difficult, pretty daunting.”
After riding for 15 days through Baja California, Krupa and Mathay took a ferry from La Paz to Mazatlan. From there, they continued their journey south hugging the Mexican coastline. Their ride through Mexico was marked with torrential rains, which Mexican President Felipe Calderon called the worst rainy season on record. These rain storms would also mark their journey in Guatemala as well. Krupa and Mathay would see sinkholes and hear of devastating mudflows causing hundreds of casualties in places they had passed only days before.
“We were hitting tropical storms that were dumping inches and inches of rain every couple of hours,” Krupa said. “There were times that we were biking through these small towns that were so flooded that as we peddled, our footstrokes would actually submerge into water.”
Despite the hardships that the road presented Krupa and Mathay throughout their 78-day-long journey, the kindness of the communities they came across touched the bikers’ lives.
“(The Mexican people) are the warmest people on the face of the planet,” Krupa said. “We had more Good Samaritans help us in Mexico than we did on our entire trip. People went out of their way, hours at a time even, to help us on our way.”
In fact, some of the worst run-ins that Krupa and Mathay had with people were in the U.S.
While riding through California, Krupa, Mathay and four other men who were cycling from Eugene, Ore., to San Francisco, were on a stretch of highway, when a truck drove up beside them, and the passenger leaned out of the window and started to scream obscenities at the men.
“Obviously we felt threatened. I mean, a car is a weapon,” Krupa said. “We all got off of our bikes and formed a circle after and went ‘Really? What just happened?’ And the funny thing is that we actually felt more bad for the guy than got angry.”
When Krupa and Mathay finally cycled their way into Guatemala, they were joined by Krupa’s brother, Dave, by vehicle, who followed the two closely the rest of the way through the country until the cyclists found their way to the ROMP clinic in Zacapa.
Once they reached the ROMP clinic on Sept. 7, Krupa and Mathay worked in the clinic for a week before returning by plane back to the U.S.
Dave Krupa is himself an amputee, and helped start ROMP in 2005 with fellow prosthetist Eric Neufeld.
“Pat and (Greg) took the initiative, and the money (they raised) will go a long way towards efforts in Guatemala,” Neufeld said. “(Krupa) is amazing. He got very little help from anyone.”
Of course, Krupa’s mother, Mary Anne, had some misgivings about the journey when he initially proposed it. But she found herself supporting the trip once Krupa and Dave convinced her that it was safe and for a great cause.
“I did question, even fought (the adventure), but it was because it fine-tuned (Krupa’s) determination and helped him resolve what he was doing and why he was doing it,” she said. “Life is a risk. It’s a matter of letting go.”
Now back in Eugene taking classes at the University, Krupa is adjusting to student life back in the U.S.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow that I’m not on my bike every day and that I’m not cresting a hill that the other side I haven’t seen before,” Krupa said. “That’s the hardest thing. It’s just that I miss that daily challenge, that daily adventure. Nothing I’ve done in my life has come to be as challenging as this.”
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Range of Motion Project inspires University student to ride bike to Guatemala
Daily Emerald
October 10, 2010
Nick Cote
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