“On my first outing I pedaled 36 km with absolute ease and in three hours. I did my calculations and I said to myself, if in one day I can pedal 60 km, in ten days I can do 600 and in a month 1800 and in so many days…. Wow!” This optimistic arithmetic is the one that Mónica “Monona” Romero (@minina.viajera on Instagram) He put it into practice and left. She was 54 years old, with a husband, four children, three grandchildren and a tremendous thirst to go around the world on a bicycle. Living adventures, getting to know other cultures and seeing them with curious but neutral eyes, without preconceptions, was a dream she had as a girl, encouraged by her father who took her fishing and hunting in her native Bahía Blanca. Her first major voyage was to the Middle East; Later she would do the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and soon a journey that began in Budapest and ended in Rome. But she needed a bigger challenge: Iran, India and Nepal would be her destinations. She cycled from Bikaner to Kathmandu, 3,800 km in 128 days. Her 60th birthday was celebrated in northern Brazil. “But I am never alone. I am with me. The mind never stops. I pay close attention to recurring thoughts, the people who appear in them and why. Traveling to get to know and live with other cultures gives us the opportunity to look at ourselves in the mirror of others, so different and so equal to us.says Monica.
News: In addition to your husband, your children and grandchildren, are your parents and siblings alive? What opinion do you have about his modus vivendi?
Monica Romero: My parents no longer live. My mother was the great obstacle for me to realize my dreams, until I was 50 years old, and I no longer cared about the opinion of others. I care about my husband and my children, the family I made and they support me. Because my husband was the first to travel for a long time because of the Antarctic campaigns where he works as a naval aviator. My children are very independent, that’s how I raised them. Unconsciously he was already preparing them for what was to come.
News: He said in different media: “From the moment that I am more than thirty days on the other side of the world, I begin to see that my culture is not very successful in many aspects.” What are you referring to?
Romero: Regarding female empowerment, I realized that we are not as liberated as we think. We carry on our shoulders the mandate to be sexy, undergo surgery to modify what is natural, be thin, not age and suffer to compete with each other. We believe that we are free, but we are conditioned by programming. Neither more nor less than in the East. And if we are very disobedient, they kill us. We have a very high rate of femicide in Latin America.
News: How to handle fears is one of the tools that he shares on his blog. What fears?
Romero: The fear of daring to dream, the fear of breaking the paradigm of what patriarchal society expects of us. Then all the social and cultural prejudices regarding security, the sexist violence on the other side of the world, which is no greater than on our own continent.
News: Where do you stay when you travel?
Rosemary: In temples, in yoga and meditation ashrams; I volunteer in missions and hostels. I make friends, I have families that have adopted me in various countries.
News: How do you solve your diet?
Rosemary: When I stay with families I eat everything they serve me. There were very few times that I rejected something. I eat a lot of street food, I love to try everything. Many times I have to camp and cook. In my blog I have a chapter about my food during bike rides.
News: He has commented that his luggage fits in four or five panniers. What does he carry in so little space?
Rosemary: Two spare changes of clothes, coat and rain gear. Hygiene elements, towel. Kitchen utensils and crockery, mini. Food for a whole day or two. Tent, sleeping bag and insulation to camp in a patio, in the worst case.
News: Do you regularly call your family?
Rosemary: We are permanently online. We have a WhatsApp group where we upload photos all the time. I also call them when I’m somewhere special. From the Taj Mahal I called my affections.
News: How is your life when you are not traveling?
Rosemary: When I’m not traveling I spend a lot of time dreaming, programming and working for the next one. I like to take care of my house, do yoga, meditate, clean as I learned in Buddhist monasteries and Hindu temples. Doing it consciously, chanting mantras… I discovered that it is a pleasant task.
News: Before traveling you worked. And actually?
Rosemary: She was an interior decorator and organized events. Now I do some informal jobs. I take care of pets, I sell things that I no longer use. I come back from each trip very minimalist, I get rid of the superfluous. I am very go-getter and enterprising.
News: Are your absences long?
Rosemary: Absence seems to me a very melodramatic and very relative term, which implies death or disappearance. I am online all the time and I only travel with the one-way ticket, which means that in case of an emergency I take a plane and return. We are independent and detached, a term that in our family is the opposite of loveless. With my husband we learned from the beginning to have a relationship with times and distances different from those of a common marriage.
News: What is your next trip and how are you organizing it?
Rosemary: My next trip is a notebook full of open chapters, a range of possibilities waiting for the Universe to open a door. I have there some pages dedicated to South American countries, something in Southeast Asia, Portugal, Morocco and something else in Africa. There’s also a foray into yachting and a promise to cycle across Europe with my eldest granddaughter.
News: If you didn’t live in Argentina, what other country would you live in?
Rosemary: I dream of living in a tropical country, where all year long I can walk in a bikini in the sun and take endless walks on the beach, like on my last trip to the Brazilian northeast. I don’t like winter and the vast majority of my trips were in the northern hemisphere summer. In a place like this, I dream of ending my days, having a little place on the beach that allows me to earn money and living right there.
