Cycling against borders: From Amsterdam to Tokyo by bike

We meet the 25-year-old who is cycling from the Netherlands to Japan to protest against border violence. 

It was 17 months ago that Seb set off on his bike to cycle over 25,000 km (15,534 miles), all the way from Amsterdam to Japan, to raise money for migrant support charities and learn first-hand about the hostile realities of our world’s borders.

“Depending on where you are born, the world is either your oyster or it’s your prison,” Seb tells his Instagram audience whilst cycling past a range of Syrian hills. “I have a Dutch passport, which means I can go to 121 countries without a visa. If you’re Syrian, you can go to 6!” 

At a time where border violence is increasing while more and more people are on the move fleeing unliveable climates, both politically and ecologically, and while hostile, blameful narratives dominate western migration discourse, Seb’s journey is a gleaming light of determined, compassionate and productive resistance, one that refuses to accept our increasingly bleak, repressive and walled off world as being doomed and unchangeable.

Fundraising along the way, with sponsors donating a personalised amount per 100 km (62 miles) that he cycles, Seb has raised over €25,300 (£22,100) for MiGreat, a Dutch organisation fighting border violence, and No Name Kitchen, a grassroots activist group providing on-the-ground support for people crossing into the European Union (EU). 

Seb has also amassed an online community of 74,600 people who eagerly tune in on Instagram (@sebbiebikes) for his joyful, lively and informative video updates, his thoughtful book recommendations and his intricate blog posts that take us along with him on his cycling and learning journey.

Some of Seb’s Instagram posts to @sebbiebikes

After a crash (and a broken collarbone) during his second visit to Syria, Seb is back home in Amsterdam, healing, resting and preparing to get back out on the road in April.

He’ll resume his journey from Georgia, then enter Iran through Armenia, crossing into Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China before finishing his journey in Japan next year. 

I spoke to Seb back in November about his remarkable journey so far and, most importantly, why he is on it.

“I think the journey is a logical outcome of my political learning journey – my politicisation came from being at the centre of the Dutch radical climate movement for five years, [where] I slowly came to the realisation that that not only are the chances of mitigating ecological meltdown incredibly small, but that what I’m more afraid of than ecological meltdown itself, is the reaction to it,” he said.

“So I wanted to talk about migration and borders, because if the world is on fire, how do we respond to people being displaced?

“I wanted to learn, and what better way than through cycling the world, experiencing borders and seeing how they [differ] depending on where you are born and what body you carry.”

Bulgarian borders

After 114 days of cycling freely between European countries, enjoying the ease of movement that comes with EU membership, whilst reading, learning and building a theoretical understanding of borders along the way, Seb settled in Harmanli, a town in Southern Bulgaria close to the border with Türkiye, right at the edge of the EU.

Here he spent three months working with No Name Kitchen (NNK), one of the organisations he is fundraising for, to support people attempting to cross what Seb describes as the “impressively deadly, unimaginably expensive, outer edge of Fortress Europe.”

Seb spent time with people inside the Harmanli refugee camp, forming friendships that opened up spaces to understand what was going on inside the camps, whether that be clear violations of the law by authorities, conflicts or other struggles. He also joined NNK in on-the-ground rescue efforts.

“The philosophy was: we are here, with our passports and our resources, using that privilege. Comrade to comrade, person to person. Together, fighting borders. That was the ideal we strove for.”

Before diving into his time in Bulgaria in a detailed blogpost, Seb gave us a quick but vital refresher on border crossing and asylum seeking.

“Anyone has the right to ask for asylum – it seemed like a good idea after World War II – but, in most cases, when asking for asylum, you have to do that physically. If you seek asylum in Bulgaria, you have to physically be in Bulgaria (you can’t do it remotely over Zoom). But getting to Bulgaria to ask for that asylum is a tricky thing,” he explained.

“Suppose you’re a Syrian. You can’t take an airplane, because that requires a Schengen visa (basically impossible to get for you). With a ferry, you run into the same issue, train too, and bus as well. If you don’t have that Schengen visa stamped, you’re out. So, you’re left with one option: cross illegally.”

These illegal crossings are deadly. Simply put, if you deny people a safe route you force them into danger. To avoid the illegality of your journey, you must be invisible, hiding in forests to avoid being found.

If you are found, you risk “pushback” – a violation of international human rights law where border police deny due process and forcibly turn back migrants. These pushbacks often involve robbery of belongings, harsh beatings and in some cases, death. 

During his time in Bulgaria, Seb worked alongside the No Name Kitchen to prevent these pushbacks. Their team would attempt to reach groups of people before the police did, then use their European passports and white privilege to force the police to follow the law, in what Seb described as “the most high-stakes, morbid and deadly cat-and-mouse game between the border police and us.”

Alongside these pushback prevention missions and lifesaving search and rescue efforts, NNK works to support people on the move through essential aid distribution and health care provision for people excluded from public healthcare systems.

They also, however, work to directly oppose and fight the systems that create border violence, rather than accepting and normalising it as a natural part of our world (something many humanitarian organisations tend to do, intentionally or not).

No Name Kitchen does this by working hard to create long-term structural change, taking a watchdog-style role. By monitoring border violence, documenting abuse and investigating rights violations, they are able to raise social awareness and influence political decision-making. 

To do this, NNK have created an exhaustive and harrowing collection of border violence testimonies on their platform Bloody Borders.org, and has produced extensive advocacy reports on specific incidences and forms of border violence.

A recent report published by NNK titled “Frozen Lives: How Bulgarian authorities put the lives of people on the move at risk of death” tells the story of Ahmed Samra, a 17-year-old boy from Egypt whose frozen body Seb found in the Bulgarian forest. 

On December 27, 2024, Seb and the NNK team had been told that there were three boys in bad condition in a freezing, snowy forest. Attempting to reach the coordinates of the boys, Seb and the team were stopped by border police, who forced them to abandon their car and walk four hours to the nearest town. 

Prevented from reaching any of the boys that night, they returned the next day using a different route.

Walking for two hours through dense snow, they eventually found one of the boys, Ahmed Samra, who had frozen to death.

“He was [17] years old, and his body was completely frozen,” Seb reported on Instagram. Beside his body, “there were tracks from border guards who had been there with dogs – they had found him, but they had just left him to die.” The other two boys were later found by NNK, they had also frozen to death. 

“These boys froze, all three of them froze in the forest. They were killed. This is murder by the European Union. This is what the borders look like,” Seb said.

After three months with No Name Kitchen in Bulgaria, Seb got back on his bike to cross the very border that he had spent so long beside – it took him just 30 minutes. 

The ground zero of border technology

Cycling down through Türkiye, Seb caught a boat to Lebanon, where he spent time learning about Israeli violence against Lebanon and how inherently fundamental systems of border violence are to the fabric of the Israeli state and its brutal occupation of Palestine and repression of the Palestinian people.

“Being in Lebanon, you’re confronted with the Palestinian struggle and the violence inflicted by Israel daily. There’s destroyed buildings, exhibitions on Palestinian culture and resistance, but most evidently of all: Israel is actively seizing land in South-Lebanon and bombing South Beirut,” Seb wrote on his blog.

Interviewing Hajj Ramdan Karawan, a Palestinian senior who Seb met in Shatilah (a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut), Seb described on Instagram how Hajj’s story is tied to the same border violence he saw first-hand back in Bulgaria. 

At three-years-old, Hajj fled Jaffa (now Tel Aviv) with his family during the 1948 Nakba – the mass displacement and dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians by Zionist forces.

He has since lived in Lebanon for over 70 years, but like all Palestinians refugees in Lebanon, he has no residency status, severely limited working rights and no freedom of movement or ability to legally cross borders. 

Reflecting on his interview with Hajj, Seb commented on the deeply sinister thread that connects the displacement of people like Hajj with the imposed elimination of people’s freedom to move, observing that “it’s the same technologies displacing people and stopping them from seeking refuge.” 

He gave the example of Israel’s Hermes technology: “This drone [has been] used by Israel to displace people since 2008 across many occupied territories, and it’s the same drone that the EU buys to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea.”

Seb describes how Israeli technology is used to oppress people all across the world.

Writing for the Arab Center Washington DC, Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at CUNY and expert on immigration and border violence, elaborated on Seb’s point.

Talking about the role Israel plays in border violence worldwide, Gowayed described Palestine as being “ground zero” for the carceral and military technology that Israel creates, tests, and then markets to other states that seek to impose control over their borders. 

“Much of the technology set-up by Israel to blockade Gaza is the same used by the US government to violently repel unwanted migrants at the southern border, and [used] by many other countries, including NATO members, to control their territories.”

Gowayed also detailed other Israeli occupation technology being used inside other countries to monitor people and prevent their movement, describing this as “another form of bordering.”

An example she gives is Israeli facial recognition technology, developed and tested on Palestinians in the West Bank, that has been exported and used around the world.

Seb in his Palestinian Keffiyeh

After five weeks in Lebanon, and 41 weeks of cycling, Seb crossed into Syria – a place he would return to five months later on a detour prompted by the June 2025 US bombing of Iran that caused border closure. 

Syria is the sight of the world’s largest refugee crisis. Over 13 years of civil war, more than six million Syrians were forced to flee their homeland, with some seeking asylum in neighbouring countries and others travelling treacherously into Europe through dangerous routes, as Seb witnessed in Bulgaria. 

The historic fall of the Assad dictatorship in December 2024 saw an effective end to the civil war, and a reopening of the country’s borders to tourists, allowing Seb to enter and explore.

Seb’s photography from Damascus, Syria

As we heard earlier, the Syrian passport is notoriously one of the world’s weakest, with visa-less access limited to just six countries – a stark example of the unnatural and cruel disparities imposed upon people by borders.

When I asked which place stood out to Seb the most, his immediate answer was Syria (despite it being where he crashed on his second visit).

“I was so mesmerised by Syria,” Seb told me. 

In an Instagram video captioned “a loving ode to the Syrian people,” he tells us why, “The last time I was in Syria, I completely fell in love. Not with anyone in particular, but with Syrian people. You secured a spot in my heart, and so I had to come back.”

After describing the heartfelt, warm welcomes he received, Seb said, “I wish the rest of the world welcomed Syrians in their countries the same way that you welcome foreigners in yours.”

Continuing in the caption, he added: “The world is closed to some, and open to others. For Syrians, the world is inaccessible; for me, it’s a canvas for self-exploration. This saddens and enrages me in a profound way. The secret of the world is that we make it, and we can constantly remake it, and that’s what I try to do, in however small of a way.” 

Seb’s efforts have been far from small, from raising over €25,300 (£22,100) for No Name Kitchen and MiGreat, to his on-the-ground work, and the incredibly vast reach of his beautiful, thorough and thoughtful online storytelling, his impact has been huge and extremely admirable. 

Ending our conversation, Seb and I discussed why border violence and control should matter to those of us not on the move.  

Drawing on the idea of the ‘imperial boomerang‘, Seb commented that “the subjugation and control of people outside will always inevitably come home”, meaning if we don’t fight state-imposed mobility control abroad, it will eventually come back to affect us here at home.

We’re seeing exactly that right now in the US, where violent foreign policy towards migration outside the country is being turned inwards to hunt down and capture US citizens, even killing people in the process.

Despite worrying signs of a bleak future, Seb once again brings us back to the beauty of hopeful resistance:

“I think there’s almost nothing more meaningful than collectively fighting injustice. I don’t think I want to do anything different with my life. It’s the ultimate thing of meaning, to get together with other people, even in the face of great despair and very low odds, banding together and saying, no, we refuse to go under like this. I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing to do.”

To discover Seb’s journey and see it continue, follow @sebbiebikes on Instagram and visit his blog sebbiebikes.org, where you can dive into the map of his adventures and, of course, sign up to donate to the vital causes as his cycling resumes.

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All images courtesy of @sebbiebikes via Instagram.