Most people assume a solo circumnavigation requires a sailboat or an airplane. Erden Eruç used a rowboat, a bicycle, a pair of hiking boots, and a kayak. On July 10, 2007, he pushed off from Bodega Bay, California, in a 23-foot rowboat named *Cutty Sark*. His plan was to row across the Pacific to Australia, then cycle, walk, and kayak across continents and oceans until he returned to his starting point using nothing but human power. The journey would take him five years, two months, and twenty-three days.
Eruç, a Turkish-born engineer and management consultant, was not the first to circle the globe by human power. That record belongs to a team. His goal was to be the first to do it completely alone, under a strict set of rules he called the "Six Summits Project," which included climbing the highest peak on each continent he crossed. His progress was methodical and brutally slow. The first ocean crossing, from California to Papua New Guinea, took 312 days of rowing. He averaged about 30 miles per day on the water, subject to currents, storms, and sheer physical depletion.
The endeavor was an exercise in logistical obsession and solitude. He carried all his food, desalinated seawater, and communicated via satellite phone. He was chased by pirates in the Indian Ocean and weathered a typhoon. On land, he cycled across the United States and Turkey, and trekked through the Himalayas. The project was largely self-funded and documented on a sparse website. It received scant media attention compared to sponsored sailing or ballooning voyages.
Eruç completed his journey on July 21, 2012, in Bodega Bay. He had traveled 41,196 miles. His achievement redefines the concept of exploration in an age of mechanization. It was a private, almost philosophical quest that tested the absolute limits of human endurance and will. It proved that the globe could still be orbited by the ancient application of muscle and sinew, one stroke, one pedal, one step at a time.