© 2026 by STORYTELLUS
MAGICAL
There is a quote he often returns to, from the Argentine filmmaker Fernando Birri. Someone once asked Birri what utopia is for. He answered: "Utopia is on the horizon. I walk two steps, it takes two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking."
This is where you have to start to understand this man. Not someone who reached a destination. Someone who understood, earlier than most, that the destination is not the point. The point is the journey. The point is being truly alive inside every single step.
He was born in Rosario, Argentina. When he was young, he lost both his parents, his mother at 41, his father at 40. These things change your life completely, he says. And in that change, instead of closing in, something opened up. A desire to move, to discover, to not stand still waiting for life to pass him by.
At 22 he left for Europe: Spain, Italy, Rome, then the United Kingdom. Ten years away from home. It was during one of his returns to Rosario, in 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of the killing of Che Guevara and a group of guerrillas, that something clicked inside him. He started reading. The Cuban revolution, Eduardo Galeano, Bolívar, Latin American unity. Stories of men who had chosen to set themselves in motion for something larger than themselves.
The first bicycle journey was through Latin America: from Rosario all the way to Mexico, then Cuba, where they stayed at the home of Alberto Granado, Che Guevara's companion on the motorcycle trip chronicled in The Motorcycle Diaries. A week of conversations about history, revolution, Latin American identity. That stay left a mark. Then Bolivia, working with indigenous and farming communities in the region where Che and a group of guerrillas were killed. Projects alongside local communities. Back to Argentina, studies, work. But the dream had not died, it was only getting ready.
During that time he fell in love. He met Silvia, they were together for two years. They fell for each other, but the dream of travelling the world was stronger. The round-the-world trip had begun with his companion Marcelo, but in Luanda, Angola, Marcelo decided to end the journey and return to Argentina. Favio chose to continue alone. What had started as a shared adventure was becoming something entirely his own, a way of life, a way of being in the world.
On January 4th, 2015, he loaded his bicycle on Oroño Boulevard, in Rosario. Many people had come to see him off. Friends, family. There was joy, and that quiet melancholy of someone who knows they are about to leave something behind. He knew the day he was leaving. He did not know when it would end.
To make that journey he had ended a relationship, seen less of his friends and family, rented out his home, left a job that was not the job of his life but that paid the bills. Everything you leave behind weighs something, even when you know it is the right choice. But life, he says, was already showing him the way.
"The best thing, as Buddhism teaches, is to stop having desires and expectations, because they never bring you to a true sense of fullness. The best thing is to let go, not to worry too much about what you will find along the road, and to enjoy it."
The bicycle is called La Estrella, the star. The name comes from an Argentine folk song about a star that guides you along the road, that travels with you, that never leaves. It is a feminine word in Spanish, and that matters to him: the star is a companion, a light, something that accompanies without demanding. La Estrella is not a vehicle. It is a partner. He talks to her. He tells her about the roads. On certain nights he looks at her standing still beside him and feels that he is never truly alone.
The journey, he repeats often, is never individual, it is collective. In the bags of memory travel many people: those who donated something to repair the bike, those who offered a place to sleep, those who sewed something, those who cooked, those who stopped along the road and shared a moment. Without them, those kilometres would not exist.
Malaria came four times in total, twice in Venezuela and Sierra Maestra, twice in Africa. The parasite enters the blood through the mosquito bite, and when you return to your shelter the crisis begins: shivering, fever at forty-one, forty-two degrees. You feel terrible. The body shakes. It is very sad, he says. In Angola he had met an Argentine doctor from Rosario who explained how to recognise the symptoms in time. "Many people mistake them for a cold. If you don't get treatment, you can end up very badly off. By the time you are in hospital, it is already serious."
In Venezuela, his platelet count dropped to 26,000; once it reaches 16,000, you start to bleed to death. For 26 hours he fought with his body. He held on. He got back on the bike as soon as he could, because the road was waiting and there was still so much ahead.
One day in Venezuela, May 20th, a truck hit him. He was on the side of the road, his companion a few metres ahead. The vehicle did not brake. He heard the noise, instinctively swerved. The truck clipped him and he ended up on the roadside, not in the middle of the lane. He was wearing his helmet, as always. He touched his head. He said: I'm okay. His friend came back white as a sheet, he too was pale. They both were. No, I'm okay, he said, but I have pain here. He was taken to hospital. One week of rest, the doctor said. He waited the bare minimum and left again.
At the end of each stage, there is a routine: finding a safe place to sleep, doing some stretching, having a shower, eating and socialising with people whenever possible, and then sleeping. That way, body and mind stay in good shape. A Chilean man called Juan, whom he met in Argentina, treated him with acupressure and practically saved him, enabling him to continue pursuing his passion. Western medicine had diagnosed him as unfit for long-distance cycling. Juan helped him recover, a human miracle. The journey continued.
"On a scale from one to ten, tell me the pain level, if it is above a certain threshold, you need to stop and rest. The body talks to you. You have to learn to listen."
And over time he learned. At first the challenge was kilometres, always more, always further. Then he understood that the real challenge was to stay well, to not push himself into injury, to enjoy every stretch of road. What does it matter if you arrive in one day or three? The main thing is to be there, present, on that bicycle.
In Sierra Leone they crossed the border into Guinea Conakry by boat and found themselves in the territory of a tribe. For some of the villagers it was the first time they had seen two white people on bicycles, their incredulous expressions made their curiosity unmistakable. They were escorted as if in a procession, all the way to the chief. Favio arrived suffering from malaria, and the chief offered them a place in the community's small school. They stayed there for several days until he had recovered; the local women prepared traditional meals for them at the chief's house.
In the Sahara the water ran out. Empty bottles, no house in sight. He started flagging down cars and trucks along the road. Someone stopped. Someone offered water. As always, he says, in the end you find a way. He has no medical insurance. He travels without a safety net. But he is not afraid.
"Many times, when something happens, someone always appears to help you. Human beings help each other. It always happens, if you are open."
He comes from a Catholic background, and that part of him has not gone away. He calls them angels. Not in the strictly religious sense, but in the deepest human sense: people who arrive at exactly the right moment, who see you, who give you precisely what you need without your having asked.
He is not alone on this journey. Along the road people join the path, even without pedalling. Someone sends a message saying they have become "hooked" on the story of the bicycle. Someone donates five euros. Someone cooks a meal. It is like a chain, he says. Everything is connected to humanity, it is all one.
Vietnam was the hardest moment, not physically, but emotionally. He had a 30-day visa. He tried to cross into Cambodia one day before it expired, as he always does. At the border they told him no: with that visa he could not exit there. They pointed him to another crossing, toward Laos, 140 kilometres away.
He pedalled for 2 days to reach the border. By the time he arrived, the visa had expired. The officials told him he needed a Laos visa, he replied that the Laos visa is obtained on arrival, at the border. They would not let him through. A policeman drove him to the bus station and bought him food for the journey. Even in that chaos, he says, someone was kind.
The border with Cambodia was 64 kilometres away. He assembled his bike and rode there. They turned him away again: a missing immigration document. He turned back. Night had fallen. He found accommodation. In the morning he went to the immigration office to pay the overstay fine, they told him fines are paid only at the airport. That he could not cross by land at all. He had to fly. He called the Argentine embassy, then the Spanish one. Nobody could do anything. He bought a plane ticket. He spent Christmas in Vietnam, not knowing if he would make it out.
"I made a mistake, I overstayed my visa. I recognised that. But I was not a criminal, and they should not have treated me like one. I asked Buddha, in this life and the next, never to bring me back to Vietnam."
But even that was a test, not a problem. That is the difference that matters, in your head. If you call it a problem, you freeze. If you call it a test, you find the motivation to face it and move forward.
He does not listen to music while riding. Nothing in his ears, no podcasts. Silence is part of the journey. On a bicycle, the mind turns problems 360 degrees, you see angles you would never see sitting at a desk. Many people ask him: but don't you suffer, cycling like that? As if that were the hard part. He always gives the same answer: the best part is precisely when I am pedalling. When you are doing what you love, everything else, the visas, the money, the food, the shelter, everything that happens along the way, is part of the journey. But the heart of it is there, on those pedals. That is beyond question.
If you are not fit, yes, you will suffer. But when you are, you experience it in a completely different way. And people are more open to you when they see you arrive by bicycle. It is as if you have earned something. Many people stop along the road, offer something to drink, something to eat, ask for a photo, smile at you. He does not always speak their language. But there is a universal language, he says: the smile, the silence, the gaze. These are idioms that need no translation. They are an expression of love, of human contact.
And the journey teaches you that everything is built millimetre by millimetre. You discover, slowly, that it is possible, you build a mental structure, and you realise that a bicycle and a human being can cover an extraordinary number of kilometres.
Along the way, Buddhism became more than a philosophy. It became a way of being in the world. The concept of impermanence, that nothing lasts, that clinging to things causes suffering, that even that clinging is impermanent, helped him let go. Relationships that end, friendships lost along the road, plans that change. He learned to greet each of these not as a loss but as an evolution.
The Dalai Lama, he often quotes, says there are only two days in the year when nothing can be done: one is called yesterday, and the other is called tomorrow. The future does not exist. The only real thing is now. For this reason he does not listen to music while riding. For this reason, when he is washing the dishes, he is washing the dishes, and not thinking about what he will do tomorrow. For this reason, during this interview, he is completely here. Because if your energy goes elsewhere, you are not really anywhere.
He has learned an exercise, from a neuroscience book, that he practices every evening and every morning. In the evening, before sleeping, he thinks of three good things that happened to him that day. It does not matter how small. Three things. He goes to sleep with those. The brain, he explains, is wired in survival mode, it is always scanning for danger, predicting bad things that might happen. Slow breathing brings it back to presence, to calm. "Everything is under control. You are safe." In the morning, he repeats the gesture: breath, gratitude, begin.
He does not call himself a teacher. He says it often, almost like a refrain: I am in the process. What he shares are the lessons he gathered along the way, some still being worked through, some already lived. He passes them on not as teachings, but as honest accounts of a road still being travelled.
In Vientiane, Laos, he met Sebastian, a Venezuelan who works remotely as a coach for people who want to live this kind of life. Sebastian suggested the Ikigai: a Japanese method for discovering your life's purpose through four overlapping circles, what you are passionate about, what you are good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. When the four circles meet, that is your reason for being.
For him the centre is clear: the bicycle, sport, Buddhism, travel. And around this he is building something concrete, a project for a sports ecosystem comprising an app, a website, a native chat feature, a community, security, social support and environmental initiatives. A digital companion for those who travel or train, designed to be simple, ecological, and built step by step.
He is about to turn 60, August 31st. Buddhism has taught him to prepare even for death, not with fear, but with awareness. He wants to leave something behind. Not for ego. For contribution. He will approach it the way he has always approached the bicycle: one pedal stroke at a time.
If you ask him to describe this journey in a single word, he answers without hesitation: magical. Magical.
Not because it was all beautiful. Not because he did not suffer, or feel afraid, or want to give up at certain moments. But because every single thing, the malaria, the truck in Venezuela, Vietnam, the Sahara with empty bottles, the closed borders, the long climbs under the blazing sun, made sense. It built something inside him that no office, no routine, no safety net could ever have built.
Many people ask him: did you ever think about quitting? About saying enough, it's over, stop?
No. Not in any deep sense. Because to quit, you would have to forget what came before. And he knows very well what came before: a relationship ended in order to leave, friends and family seen less and less, a home rented out, a job abandoned. Everything left behind for something he was not yet certain where it would take him.
But life was already pointing the way. And he had learned to listen.
He is not afraid of dying on the side of a road. He is afraid of living without truly living. The routine, work, home, work, home, that is what frightens him. The idea of reaching the end without having pedalled, without having crossed a river in the jungle, without having slept under the stars, without having looked into the eyes of someone he shared no words with but everything necessary.
"I am the architect of my own life. And the best part, always, is when I am pedalling."
For anyone reading these pages who feels something stir inside, a longing, a postponed dream, a horizon that has been waiting, this story is not an invitation to do exactly what he did. Not all of us are called to cycle around the world.
But all of us are called to something. All of us have a horizon waiting. And the horizon, we now know, never gets closer, it shifts every time we move toward it. But that is precisely why it is worth walking.
Or pedalling.
PHOTO GALLERY
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Favio has cycled around the world for 11 years. Now he is building something bigger, a sports ecosystem comprising an app, a website, a native chat feature, a community, security, social support and environmental initiatives. Support his project on Ko-Fi and help make it real.
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