43,000km ride in the name of Cyprus

In July last year, 39-year-old Nikos Leontis boarded a ferry in Limassol on a Yamaha XMAX maxi-scooter, headed on a journey across Europe to continue all the way down south to South Africa.

Leontis arrived in Johannesburg at the beginning of March, his last pit stop before reaching his final destination of Cape Town.

In Johannesburg he has joined up with a number of friends and connected with the Cypriot diaspora. Born and raised in the US to a Cypriot mother and American father, Cyprus became Leontis’ home in 2016.

“We grew up in a Greek community in Seattle and Vancouver BC, but I would come to Cyprus every summer. I was involved with Nepomak, an international youth organisation that promotes Cyprus to the diaspora abroad,” he says. “I also kept connected to the island through my yiayia of course; she lived in Cyprus before she passed away”.

Once Leontis had moved to the island permanently, he worked online and began traveling and discovering the world for himself from his Limassol base.

“I travelled to Southeast Asia, to South America, through Europe, and started doing lots of volunteer work,” he explains. He now works for Workaway, a platform that builds a sharing community of global travellers who see the world while giving back to the places they visit. “I make video and social media content for them, but I also travel with them,” he says, “they connect local hosts and travellers and you can volunteer to do all kinds of things, from working in schools or associations to working in farms”.

Leontis began riding motorbikes in Vietnam and Thailand where he was bitten by the specific bug. “My plan was to ride from Thailand to Cyprus but Covid happened. There were also political issues in countries en route so I scrapped that plan for a while. When I decided to start again, I thought I would do it in the other direction,” he explains.

Wanting to connect with Africa, he chose to travel to South Africa as he has friends there. “I bought the motorbike in Cyprus because I wanted it to be meaningful and promote Cyprus. I also wanted to get to know the continent and the difference between the people in each country, but I didn’t realise the challenge I was getting into,” he adds referring to emotional, physical and financial challenges. “I got sick, I got robbed, you name it, everything, pretty much happened.”

His journey began with a woman reversing into his bike just a couple of hours before departure. “It was mostly cosmetic damage, but, you know, it’s a brand new bike. You don’t really want that. I literally had two hours to decide what to do, but I decided to go and eventually her insurance helped me out; I was able to fix everything just outside Athens.” And then the real journey started.

“The first place I went to was just outside Yanina in Greece. I went to volunteer in their summer arts and music festival. I helped run the festival with the local family… setting up things, doing yard work, taking photos and videos…”

From there he drove to North Macedonia, then through Kosovo and Montenegro, Croatia and up to Bosnia. “There I volunteered in a farm and did all kinds of construction work then crossed the border to Slovenia to an art residency and farm at its early stages so we were helping to build new houses.” In the north of Italy he volunteered in a 17th century villa where weddings take place on weekends. Next stops were France and Andorra, and onto Spain and Portugal. In a guest house in Portugal he was taught art and pottery making, and spent some time in a yoga retreat.

He then crossed into Morocco, his first step into Africa. Although the plan was to keep on volunteering until he reached South Africa, what he did changed once he reached Nigeria. “I volunteered mostly in English schools, with children’s and women’s associations. I helped out in Africa so much but it also starts getting challenging, because sometimes the line between volunteering and for profit gets blurred. The more south I went, the more it became about financial donations, which is which is fair, but it’s hard while you’re travelling,” explains Leontis. With no set plan, he would spent a month at a time in each place and then planned the next stages of his trip. “At the beginning I went very slow. But towards the end, I started passing through really fast, things started getting difficult, I started getting worn out and had a lot of safety issues.”

The start of his African trip was as equally hard. The ride out of Morocco was rough, with heavy winds and temperatures over 50. “I was just dehydrating. Even driving 100km an hour, I was still dehydrated. Eventually I got to Senegal, and Gambia,” which he describes as the best part of his trip.

In Gambia, Leontis helped the manager of a woman’s football team who had just opened a guest house, welcome her first guest. The guest, a young man from Czech was in a wheelchair who came for two nights, but he ended up staying for nearly two months.

“At the beginning of the trip, I was really questioning whether I was cut out for this. When I entered Senegal, where the borders are very corrupt, I had a lot of difficulty just crossing the border. But then I met these people in Gambia. I’m Cypriot, she’s [the guest house owner] a Muslim, her neighbour who also helped out is Nigerian, and I think the Czech boy was Jewish. All different people. And we were working together trying to find a positive resolution. It motivated me to keep going. In the times when things are quite negative and divided, it gave me a little more hope in the world in general.”

His interest in giving back while travelling came from his time working in finance. “It’s all about the difference that you make and the people you meet. The most important thing is that when I go to a place, I can tell you a million stories that I probably could never tell if I had travelled as a tourist. Giving back, what you receive, getting involved, having people remember you when you leave and you remember all their names, the things you did, it just makes going to a place much more fulfilling and meaningful than just checking into a hotel and checking it off a list. I can’t see another way to travel after doing it like this,” he says.

From Gambia onwards, Leontis followed the coast but also found volunteering opportunities drying up. “I also hit the rainy season. I was in such a hurry to escape the winter in Europe that I ran right into the rain in West Africa.” He drove on though, through Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia. “This was the most challenging part of the trip for the vehicle,” he says. “But when I got to Liberia, I met an American expat who gave me his flat for three weeks in exchange for pet sitting. it was a perfect timing, having somewhere to relax for a bit and wait out the rain, I sat around with a cute puppy for a few weeks, until I carried on.”

This was followed by journeying through Ivory Coast to Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. “Nigeria is where I had most of my problems and in Lagos. But the thing is that from very negative experiences, I also got a lot of positive. I ended up making all these connections with people, a local motorcycle group in Nigeria who took me in and helped me get back on my feet after operating without a phone. I ended up getting invited to a lot of different things that never would have happened. It changed my outlook. Sometimes negative things happen, but positives happen as a result. This kind of became my theme of the trip: not to be so upset every time something goes wrong, because we don’t know what comes next.”

The trip has changed him. “The most impactful way it has changed me is depending on people more. I’m a very independent person. I’ve only ever let my father and brother to help me with things. Living in Europe is not so difficult. Living in Southeast Asia is very easy. But in Africa, there’s a real sense of community. You need others to do things. You can’t do things entirely on your own, even buying something in the shop. A lot of these countries are French speaking, and it was so difficult to navigate, I was really out of my comfort zone. I volunteer so I give at least the same back, if not more. It humbled me to be able to say it’s okay to let other people help you. Maybe my temper came out a little bit more too,” he laughs.

Leontis left Nigeria on Christmas Eve after meeting all sorts of people traversing the continent in various different ways. From Nigeria to Cameroon he had to travel with a military convoy, which took his passport until they parted ways. From here he passed into Senegal, Congo, Angola, Namibia and Botswana before finally reached Johannesburg, and having spent more than €2,500 on visas.

“With all the challenges, I was also getting tired and wanting to come to the end of the trip. I’ve got a lot of friends in Johannesburg and Cape Town. There’s a huge Greek Cypriot community and they were excited for me to finally get there and welcome me.”

In Johannesburg Leontis stayed with a Cypriot family and was invited to an event organised in his honour by the local Orthodox Church. “I went from survival to being safe with people I know, and they’re feeding me like Cypriots feed you and taking the time to reflect on things.”

His arrival in Cape Town saw him plant a Cyprus flag there after which he will make his way back to the island.

“I wanted to make this trip about Cyprus. That’s why I bought my bike in Cyprus and rode it with Cyprus plates, used my Cyprus passport all the way. I wanted to raise awareness about Cyprus, because a lot of times people don’t really know where it is, or any of its history. It made for a lot of interesting conversations along the way.”

And many anecdotes. “At many borders I had to translate the name of Cyprus into their language, I had to show them on the map. In Ghana, a man looked at my passport and told me that when he was studying abroad his professor was Cypriot. He was the nicest man to him. He even hosted him in his house and helped him with financial things when he was travelling back home to Ghana. Because of that, I think they actually made it easier for me and I managed to get in. Ghana is kind of like a roadblock for crossing.

“When I was crossing Mauritania, quite a conservative country, they have checkpoints every 10km. When I gave them my Cypriot passport and they saw the first page with Aphrodite’s silhouette, they thought I put it there, like a sticker or something. I had to explain to them that it’s a symbol of my country. And they didn’t like it. That was the one time Cyprus didn’t help me!”

Meeting people from all different cultures was a highlight of his trip. “Each country has a million different subcultures and ethnic groups. Sometimes I would tell them about Cyprus, they would look on the map, and say, ‘Oh! You’re basically in Africa’. They liked that and accepted it once they saw how close it is… Cyprus was a big part of my journey, because it helped me. People looked at me differently than a British or American Westerner.”

As for the future, Leontis thinks there’s many ways to live. “After my father passed away, I felt I wanted to be more family oriented. But my sister’s done the work for us. She’s got five kids now, so we’re quite busy with her. At the moment, I kind of like what I’m doing, but obviously everything you do in life is sacrificing one thing to get another.”