Passed Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and other Balkan countries on a tricycle and reached South Africa!

Kino Yves is one of those people you see once on your feed, and then suddenly he appears everywhere. An electric tricycle, an endless journey through Europe and Africa, and the feeling that you are watching someone’s life project unfold in real time.

Behind the name stands Yves de Preux, a French traveler who at the age of 26 started his first big trip around the world, then spent seven years working at sea. Around the age of 35 he decided to quit his job, write a book about his wanderings, and start a YouTube channel to record the adventures that were coming.

His current project began in France in early 2022. He took an electric recumbent tricycle, a few bags, a tent, and cameras, and slowly started descending from Europe toward Africa. His idea was simple but crazy in practice: to travel slowly, meet people, sleep wherever he ended up, learn languages and local culture, and turn all of it into a video diary.

Heading south, he passed through a long list of European countries, including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other Balkan nations.

 

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In Slovenia, he enjoyed the mountain roads of Mangart, visited the Krn Lake and Bled, and then continued through Ljubljana on his way toward Croatia.

In Croatia, he was followed by a mix of war history and strange situations. He rode across Petrova gora, visited Slunj, explored the abandoned Zeljava air base, and even spent one night sleeping in a cemetery to avoid mine fields.

Entering Bosnia and Herzegovina was not completely smooth. He had a fall from the tricycle but quickly felt the atmosphere of the Balkans. He drank rakija, visited Jajce and Travnik, discovered local cuisine, and filmed the streets of Sarajevo.

In Serbia a completely different story opened for him, a story of villages and hosts. On his channel, you can see scenes from real Serbian villages, hospitality where people invite him to their table, offer him rakija, take him to the monasteries Sopoćani and Studenica, and turn an ordinary lunch into a small village feast.

After the Balkans, his route turns into a huge snake winding through the Middle East and Africa. From Switzerland and Italy, through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, then Kosovo and North Macedonia, followed by Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Iraq, and Jordan all the way to Africa, where he enters through Egypt. From there, he continues through Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia, and finally South Africa.

 

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His travel philosophy is to be slow. He often says that his goal is for this trip to become a kind of doctorate in geography, history, and culture, earned literally with his own body on the road. He sleeps in a tent, sometimes stays in ten-dollar rooms, eats where the locals eat, learns their customs and languages, and often spends days with the same family or group of people to truly get to know them.

Of course, it is not all romantic. He has been robbed, ended up in police stations, asked for bribes, stopped and questioned several times for filming. In Tanzania, he slept in the wilderness, in Botswana, he had a close encounter with an irritated elephant by the road, and there is also the constant problem of charging the tricycle battery and repairing it in countries where service simply does not exist.

In South Africa, he reached one of his major goals, arriving in Cape Town and then continuing to Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point of the African continent. After more than 19.000 kilometers on the tricycle, he wrote that the feeling was unreal because he managed to cross the entire African continent on an electric tricycle.

But his story does not end there. In recent months, he has been posting videos and updates from different parts of South Africa, from the Garden Route to small towns in the Karoo region where locals constantly stop him, greet him, and offer him food and accommodation. He mentions in his posts that he plans to go from South Africa through Lesotho and Mozambique, then continue toward Zimbabwe and then toward West Africa on his return to Europe.

As a content creator he has become a real sensation. His YouTube channel has more than 320,000 subscribers. His Facebook page has around 140,000 followers, his Instagram profile tens of thousands, and he is very active on TikTok, where he regularly posts short clips from the road. These short formats, in just a few seconds, show the unexpected kindness of a truck driver, a spontaneous street dance, or a conversation with a police officer in the middle of nowhere, making him a perfect character for viral posts.

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His tricycle has become a recognizable symbol of a journey that is both physically demanding and emotionally rich. It is a recumbent electric tricycle that gives him stability and comfort but forces him to be exposed to wind, rain, sun, mosquitoes, and dust. He deliberately gave up the comfort of a car because he wanted, as he says, to experience the world more slowly and more deeply while also reducing his carbon footprint.

Alongside his videos, Yves has written a book about his earlier travels, and he has also launched his own small shop with shirts, mugs, pillows, and other items inspired by his journey. It is a way to monetize his content but also to allow his community to turn their support into something tangible.

If all of this is summed up, the story of Kino Yves and his tricycle is the story of a man who decided to look at the world from fifty centimeters above the asphalt, at a speed at which most people barely ride a bicycle in the city. He has crossed half the world, and today, on the roads of South Africa, he is followed by hundreds of thousands of people on social media, especially on TikTok. All of this simply because one day he sat on a tricycle and decided to see the world slowly.

Respect Yves. We are following your journey.