PLOUHERAN - A vélo de Bretagne en Iran

Discover the graphic novel about the great journey ! I travelled 15,000 kilometers, alone on my bicycle through the mountains and deserts of Europe and the Middle East, from Plouër to Tehran... and now, I'm working on a graphic novel about this trip. The book is written in French, but could very soon be translated in English ! If you dream of travelling the silk roads, but you don't feel like leaving your couch, this book is made for you. It's a great adventure story, an insatiable quest for the East with a capital E, full of funny anecdotes and historical facts that will drastically increase your smalltalk skills. But it is also a practical book, which will teach you how to get invited for dinner at a strangers' home or how to drain bicycle brakes with olive oil. Wait, what is this about ? February 2021, in the middle of the lockdown (Covid pandemic, rings a bell ?), I left the small village of Plouër sur Rance (in Brittany, north-west of France, I'm surprised nobody knows) to ride my bike towards Tehran. Well of course, when you live completely West of the Old Continent, can you imagine anything more exotic than its eastern borders ? I had to go and see for myself. I brought my mom's old box of watercolors (careful, my mom is young and cool), some paper samples and Birkenstocks, as I longed to play the part of the bohemian artist. On the way, I started sketching and writing little cartoons for my friends and family, to tell them about the life on the road. Thus was born the idea of the graphic novel PLOUHERAN, a travel book, in the tradition of the Bildungsroman, and above all, after many unusual encounters on the way, a great friendship story. The great adventure One morning, I left my house (it's technically my mom and dad's, but I refer to it as MY house) and started off towards Iran. There comes a day where the fear of not leaving is greater than the fear of leaving (and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the type of sentence that makes it plain and clear why I will need a professional translation for the book). The first nights alone in the mountains, I was trembling, clutching my pocket knife and pepper spray in my fists. But eventually, you get used to it. From bivouacs in the snowy forests of the mysterious Massif Central, to dark nights in abandoned caravanserais, via the rooftops of Venice and the high passes of the Caucasus, the reader will discover the backstage of this nomadic year on the Silk Road - or Silk Roads, I stand with Peter Frankopan. A friendship story As I escaped lockdowns on deserted roads, resting my small bruised body on hard and icy grounds, in forests haunted by terrifying echoes, I failed to imagine that I would meet people on the road. Friends are the salt of life, people who carried my food, my water, lent me their camping chairs, protected me from the dangerous Kangals at night in the desert. This story is a tribute to those beautiful encounters. A Bildungsroman Along the way, from the extraordinary evenings on the banks of the Euphrates to the moments of self-doubt alone and isolated in the mountains, I am also drawing (!) a coming-of-age tale. To a certain extent of course, because I'm aware I'm still young. Why leave, if we miss our family and friends and don't even know where we are going? What pulls us towards the horizon, the next forest, the next pass, the next sea? PLOUHERAN is also a book about the power of attraction held by the roads and the East, the fascination for all the myths around the silk roads... it's a journey in the footsteps of legendary characters: Jason and his Argonauts, Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Ella Maillart and Annemarie Schwarzenbach. What is the book like ? Well. PLOUHERAN is written in French. Maybe thanks to this crowdfunding I'll be able to afford a translation and a printed edition in English. In its French version, PLOUHERAN is a big baby of 288 pages, weighing no less than 1,2 kg... - 248 pages of comics and cartoons in black and white - 32 pages with beautiful watercolors in color - 8 pages of maps, prefaces, afterword, bibliography, and acknowledgements! This beautiful book (let's not be afraid of words) is printed on 120gr/m2 OFFSET paper, meaning it is soft and velvety, it is very pleasant to turn the pages. The soft cover, in color, is printed on 300gr/m2 OFFSET paper. Who am I ? My name is Isabel, I'm 25 years old, and I grew up in Brittany, by the sea. Well... on the banks of the Rance, an estuary famous for its legendary beauty. Before I spent my life drawing in a poorly heated attic listening to Starmania (very good French musical, but I sometimes go for the Phantom of the Opera, depending on the mood), I graduated from law school and was destined to become president of the US of A. Now that I rode my bike across Europe and the Middle East alone, I have new, more ambitious and universal goals: to write a graphic novel.