Hey everyone, I’m Sebastien !

After having lived in Europe, Africa and Asia, the biggest challenge of my life will start in March 2025: hiking from Mexico to Canada through the great natural spaces of the American West, over nearly 6000 kilometers (3722.228 miles, I have to get used to American style !). My journey will include the Arizona Trail, some sections of the Hayduke Trail, the American Discovery Trail and the Continental Divide Trail. It surpasses anything I’ve done before. I’m looking forward to it!

“Is it to escape reality that you keep traveling ?”

How many times have I heard this question? As if reality, in its ordinary form, had to submit to the accumulation of urgencies, norms, conventions and other demands of the contemporary world that take away the pleasure of being oneself. Now, like many French people, I love cheese with a baguette and a glass of wine, I grumble, I’m a sore loser, I dress in Decathlon sportswear and I have an accent that’s recognizable a mile away. But we all have our contradictions, don’t we?

The French writer Georges Picard once said: “I travel as I dream, as I imagine, as I think, through a mobility that responds to a need for lightness”. As I walk around the world, another dimension of reality opens up to me, made up of a mosaic of places, encounters, discoveries and adventures, all those emotions that give me the feeling of being passionately alive (remind me of that phrase the time it rains three days in a row and all my stuff gets soaked!).

“I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away”… You’ve got it ? It’s Nelly Furtado !! (I’m such a boomer !)

“Draw me a sheep”

I remember hiking in the province of Kerry, in south-west Ireland. It was famous, among other things, for its rolling, wet, wild lands, whose milky spring mist only vanishes when the offshore wind announces the end of the day – and our arrival at the pub! One day on a cold stage through the Blackvalley mountains, a small sheep appeared before my eyes. He was different from all those I’d met up to that point: he wandered across the green moors, solitary, looking delighted to be away from his flock down in the valley. His adventurous spirit had led him off the beaten track, as if he had the appeased will to lose himself in the landscape, simply, without worry or complication. As in Saint-Exupery’s book “The Little Prince”, was the sheep that day trying to invite me to trace my own path with him, to imagine what lies beyond appearances (and mountains)? I always think of that little sheep, so creative, so free, on every one of my journeys – a real travel companion!

Try to find the sheep !

Somehow, I see hiking as a game, as a conversation with the child I was, talking about our moments of panache and recklessness: “Did you marvel today?”. Great journeys are often preceded by books, films, reports or testimonies that convey to us the desire for elsewhere, for discovery, those images that crystallize in our memory. My childhood dreams were nourished by the adventures of the comic strips Tintin or Lucky Luke, that “poor lonely cowboy” who swallowed up the grandiose landscapes of the Far West to capture bandits of all kinds… Much later, the books of Cheryl Strayed (“Wild”) or Jon Krakauer (“Into the Wild”) gave concrete meaning to my youthful dreams: yes, it’s possible to hike these places that resonate with me, and the paths exist – you just have to combine the maps! This endless imagination has given me wings, guided my thoughts and readings over the last few years, the search for documentation, exchanges with those who already know the places… Now, all the conditions are in place to attempt the adventure!

Chronicles of a colurful wanderer

Sociologist David Le Breton sums up the journey in three dimensions of time: first we dream it, then we do it, and then we remember it, we tell about it. The journey thus lives within us and is shared with others.

In April 2024, I was working for an NGO in Cambodia, providing education for girls in vulnerable situations. During the school vacations, I decided to set off by mountain bike up the Mekong River from Phnom Penh to Laos, a journey of almost 370 miles. It was an incredibly rich adventure. One sweltering day, over 45 degrees (Celsius, so 113°F), I had already been hearing the din of a motorcycle for several miles, with the unpleasant impression that it was following me. I’d been looking for an hour for a way to cross the riverbank by dugout canoe and find a pleasant place to spend the night, when the motorcycle came up to me, overtook me and stopped dead in front of me. The driver, a man of about my age, got off and, seeing my tired face, asked me: “Sir, do you like energy?”

“But I didn’t order on Uber Eats !”

His question was truly destabilizing! In a disconcerted voice, I heard myself reply: “Yes, I guess…”. Then, with a broad smile, he got back on his motorbike and headed back the way he’d come. I was surprised to see him return ten minutes later, handing me a bag of oranges, some ice cubes and cans of energy drink, accompanied by a “Sir, sir, this is energy!” He’d gone all the way to a village market to offer me something to quench my thirst! I was really touched by his kindness. Sitting in the shade of a makeshift parasol, we enjoyed our oranges with the curious children around us, and went over the world again – sometimes in English, mixed with the three Khmer words I knew, the rest by mime and drawing on the ground: a real Pictionary board game! It was only two days later, when I reached the town of Steung Treng, in northern Cambodia, that I saw my fellow again: he was waiting for me with some monks and teachers of the public school, all of whom invited me to go up on the temple stage to tell the locals about my trek, as they had come to attend the Khmer New Year festivities! They had so many questions, they wanted to know everything… Some of them had never been to places I’ve visited less than a hundred kilometers from home! We spent a long time talking together.

“And now, who wants to know how I lost my glove ?”

So I’m starting this blog to share with you the trekking experiences I’ve had or have yet to have, and to bear witness to such moments of humanity, which sometimes appear on the trail as breakaways from reality.