Green Odyssey Takes Cyclist from Australia to Copenhagen. By Marc Preel, AFP, December 8, 2009. "After spending 16 months cycling 18,000 kilometres (11,180 miles) from Brisbane to Copenhagen, Kim Nguyen is taking part in the UN climate talks with a host of eyewitness accounts of the effects of global warming from his odyssey... On a worn map of the world that he used throughout his entire journey, Nguyen's finger traces the 22 countries he covered on his journey: East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, then eastern and central Europe before finally reaching Denmark... After seeing first-hand severe flooding in southeast Asia, the spreading of the Gobi desert in Mongolia and dried up riverbeds in northeastern China, his observations of the planet's woes pushed him to transform his adventure from a one-man affair into a joint action...
"So in each big city where he stopped, he decided to contact the local branches of environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth -- his sponsor -- to help out and create a network of people who followed his journey and collected his testimony of climate change around the world... When he arrived in Copenhagen on Sunday, some 60 cyclists followed him into the city centre. Yet Nguyen almost did not make it: three times he ended up in hospital... Twice he had to abandon his bicycle and board trains: once in China and once in Kazakhstan, both times because his visas were about to expire. Now in Copenhagen, he has a hectic schedule: he is taking part in an alternative climate forum and he is due to meet with some of the UN climate negotiators, including the Australian delegation."
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