Welcome on the Petit Bout du Monde project web site !

When writing these lines, we feel like having the heart squeezed. This trip brought us a lot. We have learnt to become a little bit more human and also not so mistrustful. All the people we met on our way made us appreciate their culture. We learnt a lot about the history of all these countries we went through and thus we have been able to think about its influence on the society like it is nowadays. We hope we brought something to these Chinese fishermen, to the Mongolian herdsmen, to all these people who stopped us in the streets to know about who we were and where we were coming from. All these moments we shared with them are carved in our memories. We will never forget these moments of solidarity we experienced during the first part of our trip, the people who helped the six crazy French people who were travelling from Paris to Moscow with two bicycles and an old van. We still have before our eyes these colourful temples, the pagodas of the Forbidden City, the rocks of China's Great Wall, the Mongolian gers and the Russian cupolas. The trip of a lifetime ! Thanks to those who believed in us !

Tuesday, July 2000, the 11th, we are now ready to go for two months of intense emotion, binding sportive exploits and cultural discoveries. Ten months of heavy preparations led us to this day, but how did we end up here ?

Thanks to common interests for traveling, sport, nature and foreign cultures, two of us decided last September to launch this adventure... Few months latter, we were forming a team of six students from the Universities of Technology of Compiègne and Troyes. Hold by our schools, we have organised this trip meticulously : research for contacts and accommodations on the way to Moscow, diverse bookings, sportive training, administrative procedures and research of humanitarian and social association in order to complete the following program,