There were no bands and no cheering crowds to see them off. It was just an ordinary day in Essen, Germany, in the spring of 2006, when Mandy Helmis and Benjamin "Benny" Jacob climbed onto their laden tandem bicycle and set off on the long road to the east.
Not just the east, mind you. They were chasing a dream to ride a tandem bicycle around the world, or at least to New Zealand. After that, Africa and then the Americas.
A few thousand kilometres later, they met a fellow traveller on the road. He looked at them and then at the bike, onto which they had strapped almost everything they owned, and said, "I think you are not travelling. You are living on a bicycle."
"Maybe he was right," Benny wrote to me in an e-mail some months later. "We were nomads. But we also had a sort of rhythm in everyday life, time for ourselves and to live in the moment. In Germany sometimes I felt that I don't really live."
They moved steadily across Europe, along the Danube and through the Balkans into Turkey. They cranked across strange Cappadocia and then pedalled over Turkey's high country into Iran. They cycled into India and battled the traffic and sapping heat on the Great Indian Plain. The temperature on the plains spiked at 48°C.
"Cycling through the extended Ganges river plains was just unbearable," said Mandy. "Once we started cycling at 1am, and often we stopped to have a break between 9am and 5pm." From India they took the steep and high Karakoram Highway from Pakistan and rode onto the empty and freezing Tibetan Plateau.
Until Tibet, their journey was more or less trouble free.
"We were detained twice," Benny said, "once after trekking in a forbidden area for tourists, and again when trying to leave Lhasa by bike during the riots".
As detentions go, it was pretty low-key. They were locked up in a hotel. Sometimes their captors took them to dinner. When the violence petered out, they were sent on their way, taking the long way around to Laos and Cambodia.
They spent two months exploring Thailand and Cambodia before heading south to Malaysia and Singapore. In Sumatra the odometer clicked over to 30 000km, all of it measured in sweat and aching muscles.
By then, they had shed much of the useless baggage everyday people carry about with them. Their needs had been pared down to whatever the tandem could carry. A long journey by bicycle will do that. There is time to think, to notice the small things - a following wind, or a landscape slipping past at a meditative pace.
There were some surprises. "In the countries where I thought I would see black, I saw white and the other way around," Mandy said. "In the most 'terroristic' countries - Iran and Pakistan - we experienced some of the biggest hospitality."
Travellers who are used to it will say that the slower you move, the safer you are. On a bicycle, 100km is a good day's travel. Moving at that pace means meeting people on the road and getting a feeling for what lies ahead, whether trouble or a warm welcome.
"People in general were never hostile towards us," said Benny. "Mostly they gave us much more than we expected. In Turkey, we just asked for some lawn to camp, and we were invited into the house for food and given a place to sleep. It was the same in Iran."
By the end of 2008, after 730 days on the road, they broke with tradition and flew to Australia. Funds were low and they needed work. In February, Mandy learnt she was pregnant. And that was it - the journey was over. For the time being.
They are back in Germany now, with a three-month old daughter. It will be a while before the Hase Pino tyres thrum on some faraway road again, but they will, some day. That's the thing with dreams - you can never, ever crush them.
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'You're not travelling. You are living on a bicycle'
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