Cycles of a Traveler: True Tales of Voyage, Discovery, and Synchronicity

Sometimes it really is about the journey. In Cycles of a Traveler, Joe Diomede shows us how important that journey can be. His book covers his journeys on motorcycle and bicycle throughout wide swatches of the world, and the philosophical journeys that matched the physical ones. The journeys cover a good part of the known world, from the United States to Canada, from Japan to Russia, By book’s end, it seems that he has covered anywhere that a road can be found.

The travels themselves take a back seat to people he meets on the road. He encounters a lot of gorgeous geography, from the Rockies to the Chinese countryside. There are maps included to show where he cycled, but it is the photographs of those he meets that accentuate the travels. It makes for an interesting travelogue through cultures rather than landscapes. This sets the book apart from most travelogues; it’s the people and how they are similar that really makes the book interesting, including those he decides not to travel with.

The journey into the mystery of the mundane is what this book is about. Through his travels, Diomede is able to disconnect from the unimportant differences of people and look at the similarities. It is those similarities that are fascinating, especially when he goes to lands other than the United States and Canada. Although he encounters different levels of technology and different landscapes, he is able to find the common threads, showing us that we are not really all that different after all, and that we should focus on the commonalities. This book is a great travelogue, but an even better road map of the human soul.