So, just how big an EWU fan is Dave Zack? Well, enough so that when we e-mailed this Eastern alum ('70 - BA) in South Africa to ask how his round-the-world bicycle trip was going, his first response was: ñDid my Eagles win the Big Sky title in basketball? I think I'm more excited about that than flooding in Cape Town.î

Zack, a Spokane public relations executive, is one of 250 bicyclists currently riding around the world under the auspices of the Odyssey 2000 organization, headquartered in Seattle. They began their trek by pedaling down Colorado Blvd. on January 1, 2000, during Southern California's Rose Parade, and will end the journey by riding in the 2001 parade.

Zack and his wife Pam first heard about the trip in the spring of 1995. "We had taken a few bicycle vacations and had loved them but this was something else," says Zack. He recalls putting down the newspaper to finish breakfast, then his wife picking it up and reading the same article. A few minutes later they were talking seriously about making the trip.

But it was not cheap and would require that they sell their business and cars, rent their home and make arrangements for day-to-day matters to be taken care of in their absence. The trip was planned with great care, notes Zack.

"The route is excellent," he says. "Countries were chosen for ridability and political soundness. Winter months will be spent in the Southern Hemisphere, summer months to the north of the equator."

The bicyclists have already visited Baja California, Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Quebec. This summer will take them to France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. During the fall they travel to Australia, Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Finally, they will travel during the winter in New Zealand, Hawaii then to San Diego, where they will make the final ride to Pasadena to be in the 2001 Rose Parade.

Samples from Dave Zack's Diaries:

Well, here we are in La Paz, Baja California Sur. It's January 18th, 85 degrees, sunny, and the best part is that we have four days in a row off our bicycles.

To say that this is what we expected would be naive. This past 17 days has been Boot Camp. Some are even calling it the Baja death march. But let me explain. The tour organizers stated very plainly in their literature that we would be averaging 77 miles a day for an average of 5 days a week. Now all that's true but they failed to mention that for the first couple of weeks, sunset is about 5 p.m. and we will be climbing a little over 45,000 feet as we cross, recross, and cross again the same mountain range that runs straight down the spine of the Baja.

Our daily existence has pretty much been get up about 5:30 a.m. to the musical sounds of a zipper serenade of sleeping bags, tent zips, nylon against nylon and then a flashlight parade to the porta-potties.

You now have about an hour to get fresh water for the days ride, dressed, packed up, breakfast, your daily route guide (your new bible if you want to live long and prosper in the desert) and hit the road.

Our next goal is to get to the mid-day checkpoint by noonday. This is a trick because of all the stops you must make along the way to peel layers of clothing off because the day started in near freezing temperatures and by noon we're approaching 100.

This country is beautiful and terrifying. Desolate mountains, cactus, sand, rock and little else. We can go for 40 or 50 miles without seeing another living thing. It gives you a lot of time to think about your own mortality.

The final goal is to make it to camp before dark. Most of the time we make it. When we don't, it's a very long night of waiting for the dreaded "sag" wagon (nobody likes to be called a sissy!), setting up your tent in the dark, eating what's left, and taking your chances that the portable showers are still up and working.

Our evening entertainment so far has been washing your riding shorts, shirt and socks for the three day rotation schedule, getting out tomorrow's riding gear so you can dress quickly in the dark, and falling into an alternate state of coma and confused wakefulness followed by more coma.

If this all sounds awful. It's not. This is our Boot Camp. A slap in the face to awaken us to our new life. It's already beginning to dawn on us that our priorities have changed dramatically. Makeup, world news, television, driving, even what day of the week it is have no meaning . Instead we are vitally concerned about toilets, paper for the toilets, food, water, cuts, bruises, flashlight batteries, and having enough daylight.

Hello and Greetings from Panama City, Panama.

I had my first close encounter of the semi kind the day before yesterday. Riding into a strong headwind, up a long, never-ending grade in steamy-hot tropical Panama (100+, 80% humidity), my peripheral vision starts sending me a warning that something is very wrong. What's wrong is a semi truck and trailer that is closer than reaching distance and closing in on me as he passes. All I could do was keep the bike moving towards roads end and braking slowly until he was by. He did miss me but it was so close that his backdraft almost finished the job. It took me a little while to get myself mentally whole again and peddling plus a word of encouragement from a fellow rider behind me that thought it was pretty neat that he didn't have to notify next of kin. For the most part, the traffic has been terrific. They do a lot of honking, but that's the Latin way. It's usually a greeting, encouragement, or just to let you know they are behind you (like you couldn't hear them coming at you anyway).

The terrain in Central America was never intended for bicycles. It's not just the roads, it's the mountains and the weather. Our first day from San Jose was a 100 mile day over something called the "Mountain of Death." I'm not making this up – that's the English translation for it. Over 40 miles of climbing 7500'. Those who actually rode it began in rain, climbed through the cloud layer into sunshine and then into fog. There is a 24 mile descent through fog with a wind chill factor that is close to zero. I'm still amazed no one died up there. Pam and I hired a taxi today because we refuse to ride over anything with the name of "death" in it. Good decision.

Hola from San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina.

Our ride through Chile is rewarding. This is a beautiful country with gracious people. Santiago is a progressive city and it is huge. The streets are so crowded that it is hard to walk together and yet we are told that since this is the middle of summer, about half the city's population is on vacation.

Chile is a very long, narrow country bordered on the west by the Pacific and the east by the Andes mountains. We will be riding south from Santiago mainly on Ruta 5, the main highway of Chile. It is sometimes narrow, sometimes 4-lane freeway, sometimes without shoulder, always crowded, and continually under construction. One constant thing I have noticed about all of Mexico, Central and South America is that nearly every car, bus and truck runs on diesel fuel and everyone needs a tune-up.

The countryside and weather south from Santiago for the first week or so remind me of central California. We are in wine country and they grow nearly everything else here too.

As we get further south, it is getting cooler, wetter and now it seems more like western Washington and Oregon. This is beef country and we get our first real day of riding in a driving rain. We make it through in fine shape but decide that riding straight through the Andes in rainy weather may not be all that much fun so here we are in Bariloche, Argentina.

Monday we leave for South Africa. I have mixed feelings about leaving all this luxury, but I can't wait to visit our first country where we don't have to worry about big dogs jumping out of the bushes at us (just big cats).

Hi all and greetings from East London, South Africa.

Our flight out of Bariloche, Argentina was an adventure all by itself. If you'll recall, Bariloche is that beautiful little resort town up in the Andes. I have no idea what altitude it sits at but it's high. So high that a 747 has never taken off or landed at their airport...until we did it. Our tour organizer decided that a 747 was going to be the only option for getting us, our baggage, our bikes, and all their gear on one plane but finding a 747 to charter is no easy task. Enter the Crown Prince of Qatar (one of the United Emirates). The Prince not only personally owns six 747's, but is also the pilot and specializes in high altitude, short runway take offs. He heard about us and wanted to be a part of our adventure and we took him up on it. So Bariloche has seen their first 747 land and take off from their airport, we found a plane that will hold us all and our gear, and we now know that you can burn rubber in a 747 from a dead stop.

An interesting side note to the Prince's involvement is that he has extended an invitation for all of us to visit his country as his guests on our air transfer from Europe to the Olympic Games in Sydney and we're going to take him up on his offer. We are still figuring out what will have to come off the agenda but it's probably going to be Russia.

South Africa continues to be an enigma for me. I really had no preconceived ideas about what to expect but it wasn't this.

Landing in Johannesburg and clearing customs was a snap and the ride to our hotel in the suburbs of J-berg pleasurable but a few nasty things began to pop up here and there. Continual warnings from everyone we met about staying away from downtown because it is so dangerous. Fences and gates topped with barbed wire almost everywhere you look, security guards armed with automatic weapons even at gas stations, this country is an armed camp against itself.

Johannesburg and Durban were the worst (four of our group were either mugged or involved in a near shooting in Durban in separate incidents), and we are riding in larger groups for additional security. If all this sounds awful, it is. But South Africa is the country I love most so far.

It is a land of absolute opposites. Ninety percent black but nearly all the wealth is white controlled. Forty percent unemployment but there is a huge East Indian population here imported as laborers. Kruger National Park is the largest game preserve on earth (about the same size as Massachusetts) yet the AIDS epidemic threatens to halve the population over the next 20 years.

Everything here seems so primal, so vibrant, so hopeless. We spent a magic evening in a very small village named Dullstrom camping in a light rain, muddy, wet, discouraged, and considering if we even wanted to leave our tent for the quarter-mile walk down a muddy lane to dinner in town when the sound of children laughing and then singing brought us out of our tents and into a large shed with tin roof where an African children's choir had gathered to entertain us. Kids from five or six years old up to young adults danced and sang for us while the rain came down. Haunting African harmonies so beautiful they brought tears to my eyes and those gorgeous children. And yet they were singing about how they wanted the sexual, mental and physical abuse of children to stop. It tore my heart out.