Episode 173: Leonie Katekar

A Solo Cycle Tour Through South America

When We’re Not Afraid: Leonie Katekar’s 12,000km Solo Ride Through South America

Almost two years ago a listener named Steven Tober emailed me and said, in no uncertain terms, that there was a dead set legend I needed to interview. He was right. Leonie Katekar is not easy to pin down for a chat because she is almost always somewhere off doing something extraordinary, and getting our schedules to align took us the better part of a year and a half. When it finally happened, it happened in the best way possible. I found myself in Bright, rode my bike out to Leonie’s home in the nearby hamlet of Wandiligong, and sat down across from her in her garden with Australian birdsong surrounding us. A perfect place for a recording session!

Who Is Leonie Katekar?

Leonie grew up in Canberra, a kid who rode her Malvin Star bike up and down the hill in her street until the streetlights came on. She spent years in Darwin working in indigenous health, built a career and raised her kids. She describes herself not as a mountain biker or a road cyclist but as a commuter. She uses her bike to get places. And at some point, that led her to wonder whether she could use it to get somewhere really, really far away.

The Question Behind the Trip

In the years before the journey, Leonie found herself at a point of life many will recognise. Her kids were growing up and not needing her in the same way anymore. Her career had been long and meaningful but that chapter was closing. She knew she needed to open a new one, but she didn’t quite know how. She and a friend had been joking about a bus tour that would take you from Alaska to Antarctica for 75,000 American dollars over 18 months, and they had a good cackle about how ridiculous that was, to even think of going that distance on a bus. Not to mention the obscene amount of money it would cost. But what about doing the journey in a different way? Not on a bus but instead on a bicycle.

The question Leonie set for herself was simple and enormous at the same time. What would you do if you were not afraid? The trip, 12,000 kilometres from Guatemala to Ushuaia on a loaded Surly Troll she named Gitana (Spanish for Gypsy, after the dog she was missing desperately back home), was her attempt to find out.

I should point out that Leonie didn’t originally plan to do this trip alone. There was a couple in Melbourne who were going to come along with a support vehicle. She did a little trial trip to New Zealand with them and they decided they were out. By this point Leonie had already taken time off work, told everyone she was going, and lined up fundraising for the Fight Cancer Foundation. Leonie decided she was going to go regardless and if that meant doing the journey solo, then so be it.

Day One: Not an Auspicious Start

Guatemala welcomed Leonie with heat, humidity, and a first day that she describes as a litany of rookie errors. She forgot to pump the tyres up after deflating them for the flight. She didn’t put sunscreen on. She barely drank any water. She didn’t stop for lunch. She got lost and had to rely on a stranger to point her back in the right direction. By late afternoon Leonie was pushing her loaded bike up a hill with 10 kilometres still to go, looking visibly cooked, when a local pulled over, lifted the whole bike and panniers into the back of his ute, and drove her the rest of the way.

Day one. Not even halfway through the day. Her first rescue of three. The next morning she pumped the tyres, filled the water bottles, and set off again. Despite the drama that had unfolded the day before, Leonie continued on and took the rest of her trip in her stride.

Life on the Road

In Central America Leonie found herself getting up at 4:30am and being on the road by first light, so that she could finish the riding before the heat became unbearable. It meant second breakfast somewhere along the route, morning tea, and ideally pulling into town in time for the almuerzo, the big communal lunch that in South America is the social centrepiece of the day.

Leonie discovered that she could almost always find a tiny place in the smallest of towns, packed with locals eating a huge bowl of soup followed by meat and rice and a guava juice. If she wasn’t there by 2pm, she was going without so she learnt to adjust her schedule accordingly.

The Central American stretch was green, hilly, humid, and very different from what was coming. By the time she hit South America, the landscape transformed constantly and dramatically. Mountains stacking up behind mountains. The rainforest on one side of a pass and the desert on the other. Peru and its 4,000 and 5,000 metre roads, rocky and gravelly and barely used, terrifying going up and genuinely scary coming down. Patagonia had the worst winds she had ever experienced. Winds which Leonie says are in a category all of their own, and which literally blew her off her bike more than once until a stranger in a ute pulled over and told her firmly it was time to get in. Another rescue!

There were dogs with a pack mentality that needed breaking with a sonic deterrent. There were sandstorms in Argentinian deserts where Leonie took shelter in an abandoned house which were ominously filled with the remains of dead goats which had seemingly done the same! Leonie also had to navigate through the uncertainty of the Chilean civil war that shut the border she was planning to cross. This sent her on a long detour through the harsh, bone-dry rain shadow side of the Andes.

Leonie told me how in Central America staying at the fire stations where the bomberos let cyclists camp in the yard was a life saver. They also always wanted to have a chat. One of the border crossings between Argentina and Chile involved a surreal stretch of hike-a-bike over a mountain pass that involved unloading the panniers, and then running a loaded bike through creeks. Leonie navigated all this in the excellent company of two other women she met by chance on the ferry ride.

The Moment the Cobwebs Cleared

About three months in, Leonie arrived in a small Peruvian town after riding over two 4,000-metre passes in a single day. She pulled in exhausted, went to find somewhere to eat, and then noticed that all the anxiety about whether she could do this and the low level noise about logistics and distances and what might go wrong, had just dissolved. It was at that point that Leonie realised she was indeed going to be able to make it all the way to Ushuaia.

Without the fear and doubts in her head, she started wondering what people normally think about when they ride. Spoiler: it was mostly the wind, and where it was coming from!

Traveling Solo as a Woman

People had a lot of opinions about whether Leonie should be doing this solo, as a woman, through Central and South America. Like many previous guests have told me before, Leonie found that in reality the situation on the ground was almost entirely different from the warnings. South America, she was told by people who knew it well, is a matriarchal society in many ways. And what she experienced reflected this. People were curious and friendly, kids were fascinated by her bike and the adults wanted to know where she was from and where she was going. Nicaragua, which came with all manner of travel advisories, was peaceful and beautiful and the people were warm. It pays to seperate the politics from the people which are often two completely different things.

The Ripple Effect at Home

Leonie’s four kids were at various stages of finishing school and starting their own lives when she left on what she called her ‘gap year’. She told her daughters who were in Year 12 that motherhood was over, she was going to South America, and they would need to deal with life by themselves.

She didn’t see it happening while she was away. But when she came home and they all sat down together again, the relationship had definitely transformed. Her kids had followed her journey on Facebook and their friends had followed it too. It allowed them to see Leonie first as a person, and not just a mother. For Leonie that meant coming home to a household where nobody expected her to fill the fridge, clean the house or make dinner, because they had figured out how to do it themselves. She describes it as one of the best things the trip ever gave her.

The End of the Journey

Leonie arrived in Ushuaia seven months after she started, got herself some new cycling clothes to replace the threadbare ones she’d been wearing, and then immediately boarded a small expedition boat to Antarctica. She watched penguin colonies and followed killer whales in zodiacs and listened to scientific talks every night. She acknowldges that doing this provided her with a’ soft landing’ between the end of the adventure and getting back on a plane to Australia.

Since finishing the journey Leonie has turned her experience into a book titled ‘When We’re Not Afraid’. It’s available through her website at leoniekatekar.com, and if you go direct you get a signed copy.

That journey through South America is certainly not the last adventurous one she will be taking. Later this year Leonie has planned to go Morocco in May and then cycle the Trans Dinarica route in the Balkans in September. When she isn’t riding her bike in stunning places, she runs a thriving bridge club. She is, in every sense, living the next chapter on her own terms, and it is a genuinely good chapter to be witnessing.

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