The air is thick, damp and unbearably hot. Western junior Tyson Minck wipes the sweat from his brow and trudges along his on way to Santiago, Chile, bicycle in hand. Though his flat tire is in urgent need of repair, his optimism remains in full gear.

As a recipient of Fairhaven’s $15,000 Adventure Learning Grant, Minck is stretching his dollar and mind to the fullest potential in his journey, which he titled “The Bicycle’s Impact on South America: A Dyslexic Perspective.”

The Fairhaven College student is on a 10,000 mile-and-counting bike ride through South America. He lives on a budget ranging from $3 to $8 a day.

“Being extremely dyslexic, I have always used the bicycle to [alleviate] my frustrations with scholarly work,” he said in an e-mail from Guatemala. “While I was applying for the grant, I rode my BMX daily to maintain a cool head.”

Dyslexia is a learning disability manifested primarily in difficulty with reading and writing.

Minck was contacted through e-mail due to the high cost of calling the United States.

So far, he has ridden through Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador. He is currently in Antigua, Guatemala.

The original 10-month trip, which began in September 2007, has been extended in order for Minck to bike rather than fly home from South America. He expects to hit Bellingham at the end of February.

“It’s healthy for me and the earth, [provides] a different viewpoint from backpackers who use buses, and allows me to see things at a peaceful 5-15 miles an hour,” Minck said.

On his Japanese steel-frame 27-speed mountain bike, Minck cruises through tourist spots and sparsely populated cities, meeting people and noting the differences between their daily lives and life in the United States.

“The people who live on the roads that I pass on use a tiny fraction of the resources that Americans use,” he said.

“Their carbon footprint [is] the size of a baby’s, while ours is the size of Shaquille O´Neal.”
Fairhaven professor and coordinator of the grant program, Kathryn Anderson, said students must show a passionate interest and focus in their proposals.

She refers to this grant as the “hungry, tired, sick grant” because the journey does not come without hardship for those who tackle it.

“Their job is to do their best, be observant and [be] curious,” she said. “If you do that, you can’t fail.”

To train for the trip, Minck biked down the coast of Baja, Mexico. During the three-week ride, he crashed his bike and had to recuperate in a dirty hotel, he said.

“After that experience, I knew that I lacked sufficient education to deal with first-aid issues such as altitude, infections and concussion,” he said. “There was no way I was going to South America without this preparation.”

Minck is no stranger to cuts and bruises, his mom, Dian Minck, said.

A serious biking accident several years ago, in which she said he broke every bone in his face, completely changed his appearance after 13-hour reconstructive surgery. She said Minck landed on his face after being catapulted over the front handlebars of his BMX bike while doing dirt jumps. He didn’t suffer any brain damage and the accident didn’t deter him from his love of riding, she said.

“My life has always gone hand-in-hand with bikes,” Minck said.

The Georgia, Vt., native said he has patched more than 100 flat tires on his trip. He views this as just a part of the journey.

“I suspect that most people can relate to the frustrations of fixing a flat on the side of the road in the pouring rain or blistering sun,” he said. “I’ve done it so many times that it has become routine.”

Minck has lived with dyslexia since he was diagnosed in second grade, Dian Minck, Tyson's mother, said.

“It has always played a pivotal role in his understanding of people and being generous of other people [and] understanding that not everyone is alike,” she said.

Dian, who last saw her son in July 2007, said he brought a unique perspective to his interview in front of the grant program panel. He stopped the interview and brought in his lifelong friend, Mr. Einstein—his bike.

“That’s a great example of his humor and how important it is to him,” she said.

She said she was not afraid of how her son would handle the trip, since he has biked through Europe and been to

Germany several times. She said she was worried more about the cultures he would encounter.

His 23-year-old sister Emily Minck said she also didn’t have any doubts that her brother would physically be able to withstand the trip.

“He’s just very gung-ho,” she said. “It’s gotten him far actually.”

To keep himself entertained, Minck has taken up playing guitar, in a sense. He travels with a tin can on a stick with three fishing lines for string. He calls his makeshift guitar stupido basura guitaro, or stupid trash guitar.

“The kids love it, the rain doesn’t affect it and no one in their right mind is going to steal a tin can on a stick,” he said.

To keep himself company, Minck makes up songs in his head to pass the time.

“I think I have about eight different songs with silly little histories and morals mixed in,” he said.

His time has not been entirely solitary, however. Minck made friends with Carlos, a 53-year-old Argentinean, who toured with him through Peru and Ecuador for two months.

“We share many similar ideas on a happy, simple lifestyle, which made traveling by bike together very enjoyable,” Minck said.

Minck spends the majority of his nights camping after long days of riding over paved and dirt roads.

“I recently found it funny how routine a life can be even when I don’t know where I will sleep tomorrow night,” he said.

The biggest change the trip has brought the traveler so far is in his eating habits, he said. Before the trip, Minck was a vegetarian for 12 years. On the second day of his journey, he began eating meat due to the lack of vegetarian options.

“I felt forced to change,” he said.

The social and cultural impacts on the availability of food were too big to allow him to be picky, he said. The largest bulk of the $12,000 he has spent so far has gone toward food.

Seth Holton, who Minck calls his lifetime bike-riding buddy, visited Minck in Chile for a few weeks in January 2008.

Holton remembers hopping into rowboats on a nearby lake one night after a long day of biking, to catch the full moon. Suddenly, where the moon appeared over the ridge, it was as if daylight broke.

“How pretty the country is just makes you slow down and take your time and relax because there’s no sense rushing through all the things you’re seeing down there,” Holton said.

The pair grew up together in Vermont and have ridden through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California together. Minck’s trip was the perfect escape from winter, Holton said.

“I wasn’t really surprised,” he said. “He’s always up to something.”

Minck said he hopes to teach a Fairhaven course about bicycle repair and technological regression before he graduates next year with his concentration, titled, Human Impact on the Natural Environment: a Global Perspective, With a Focus on Bicycles.

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