Why, I wonder, would someone unicycle? Furthermore, why would someone ride down a 5.5 on a unicycle–a new sport called municycling?
www.youtube.com. Then, on top of that, why municycle from Lhasa, Tibet to Kathmandu, Nepal like some one-wheeled Carmen Sandiego circus sideshow? Well, that is exactly what “no-hands, dare-devil” Steve Colligan likes to do for fun (needless to say, Steve is a Brit; indeed municycling was invented by the English). At least he’s leveraging his national heritage of inanity for some good—his aim is to use his knobbed wheel to raise money for a school in Nepal (how, no one knows).
Since it might be hard to envision this odd pastime, indeed even to imagine the plausibility of doing it up and down hills, let alone around the largest hill in the world, I recommend traveling through cyberspace to his website www.unicyclesteve.com.
Some of the images on unicyclesteve.com are so powerful I was compelled by the moon and stars to interpret my own captions. See if you can deduce which ones match up:
“Look how interested these people are in the foreign municycling man on his funny little wheel! How benevolent he is!” “Oops–watch out for that baby in a bucket.”
“Unicycling is a bit like dancing. Dancing over snow, ice, cobblestones, dung piles. It takes that… je ne sais quoi. What I mean is, you need a real sensitive touch, like when I need to go turbo style and bust through a serac in the Khumbu icefall, or when I hopscotch deftly down village stairs, all the while soaking in the scenery of children and goats. It’s about balance and finesse, slowing down–or kicking it into high gear. My unicycle is both my dance partner and my belay partner.”
Good luck and Godspeed to the one-tyre man in Tibet!