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The Ginger Ninjas on the move in Guadalajara, Mexico. Where buses and airplanes would provide the horsepower for other touring bands, the Ginger Ninjas go by bicycle. Photo courtesy of the Ginger Ninjas.

Since the era of Elvis and the Beach Boys, cars and motorcycles have been a prominent element in the world of rock and roll—as vehicles for drag racing, carrying the band to nightclubs and generally showing off.

But some bands ride bicycles. The Ginger Ninjas—a folk-funk band from Northern California—is now touring in southern Mexico, and they got there, along with their instruments, by pedaling. A fully off-grid band, the Ginger Ninjas even use a pedal-powered sound system while performing. They are one of several musical groups that have rejected the resource-intensive lifestyle of most touring bands and, instead, opted for a cleaner, simpler alternative.

“I don’t want to be in Chicago tonight, Boston tomorrow and Tokyo the next,” said guitarist and singer Kipchoge Spencer, the Ginger Ninjas’ frontman. “It’s too consumptive of resources. Plus, there’s a sort of egotism that I don’t care for—like, ‘The world needs to see me so much that I’ll use up the Earth’s resources just to make it happen.’”

Spencer, 39, says that as his band gains popularity, demand is growing for his music—which he labels “mind shaking love groove folk funk roots explosive international pedal-powered mountain music for a pleasant revolution.” The call to play live shows increasingly far and wide, even abroad, is also growing louder. It’s the dream of virtually any group of musicians, but it’s a force that Spencer and the Ginger Ninjas consistently choose to resist. Even playing in Portland, Oregon one night and Seattle the next—a piece of cake for the average airplane-supported rock band—is beyond reality for the Ginger Ninjas.

“That doesn’t work for us, so we say no to a lot of gigs,” Spencer said.

The band, formed in 2001, has traveled on fully pedal-powered bicycle tours six times now. Spencer, an avid cyclist almost all his life, first gave serious thought to a bike-powered tour in 2006, when he and several of his musicians rode bicycles from show to show during a tour of the Olympic Peninsula. A van and several cars carried their gear and roadies, but a year later the Ginger Ninjas went full throttle: They rigged trailers to their bikes and, each pulling between 100 and 200 pounds, rode from Lake Tahoe to Chiapas, Mexico. It was an 80-show tour, mostly played in Mexico, in which even the sound they made was pedal-powered; that is, they placed their bicycles onstage as stationary generators while fans took turns pedaling the bikes to power the custom-rigged sound system. Each year since, the four-piece band has toured, riding bicycles as far south as Guatemala in 2009 and traveling throughout Europe in 2010. To get there, they took a train to New York and a boat to Southampton, and then they moved for several months by bicycle and rail, playing 50 shows in England, Holland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, France and Spain. The group caught a boat home.

Of all the nations the group has visited, Mexico has treated the Ninjas most kindly.

“There’s certainly a warmth here,” Spencer said, speaking to me by phone from a town called Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City.

The culture is particularly welcoming to live music, too, he said: “Mexico has a great civic tradition and culture. You can just show up in a plaza, without planning or permits or permission, and start rocking to the people.”

Pedal power to the people: The Ginger Ninjas play for the residents of Morelia, Michoacan, as volunteer fans pedal stationary bikes to generate the sound system. Photo by Ulises Martinez.

While traveling, the Ginger Ninjas and their crew of supporters—including roadies, technicians, a masseuse and a cook—ride anywhere from 30 to 50 miles per day, spending months pedaling distances that most bands might cover by plane in three hours. The band brings camping gear and sleeps out roughly 50 percent of the time—almost never in campgrounds, almost always for free. Occasionally the band has encountered hostility. One evening as the sun grew low in the vineyard country near Santa Barbara, the band—growing anxious about where they would camp that night—hopped a barbed wire fence. Hauling their gear, they all managed to slip into the brush unseen—except for two stragglers, and as the pair lifted their bikes over the fence, a pickup truck arrived. The driver—the landowner—brandished a shotgun and ordered the group onward.

And in Guatemala the Ninjas were robbed at gunpoint.

“We lost five bikes,” Spencer told me.

“That must have been devastating,” I replied. “What did you do? I mean, five bikes?”

“Five bucks,” Spencer repeated.

Ah.

In addition to making music, Spencer wants people to understand that relying entirely on bicycles and public transportation (airplanes not included) is a viable means of living—even as a traveling band.

“I believe the bicycle is one of the best, if not the coolest, machines ever invented,” Spencer said. “Part of what we do is show people how capable bikes are, and part of my vision is that (riding a bicycle from California to Mexico) is something almost anyone can do. That’s part of what we want people to see.”

He meanwhile has little faith in cars and the culture we’ve built to sustain them. Car culture “is part of the broader picture of our twisted priorities and twisted development patterns,” he said. “It’s a cultural design that will fall in on itself in not too long. It’s doomed, and it’s dooming us.”

The band’s current tour is a short one—just 20 concerts or so—and by June, Spencer needs to be back in San Francisco to assist with running the upcoming Bicycle Music Festival, a day-long event on June 23 featuring a handful of pedal-powered groups, hundreds of fans and a bike for every person. The Ginger Ninjas spent several months riding to Mexico, and to come home the group is taking a bus—which runs on veggie oil.

The Ginger Ninjas aren’t alone in employing pedal power to move and make noise. SHAKE YOUR PEACE!, a San Francisco-based folk-rock band, is currently on a relatively short Bay Area tour, rolling on muscle-powered bicycle wheels. Another San Francisco musician, Paul Freedman, goes by the stage name of Fossil Fool: The Bike Rapper and, like his comrades in the community of pedal-powered musicians, he shirks cars and embraces bicycles and public transportation. Jan Repka is another of the community, though the native of the Czech Republic usually pedals and plays around Europe. And near Istanbul in 2009, I met two Polish men carrying guitars and a drum and playing Polish folk music as they cycled around the world. They said they would be rocking—and rolling—for years.

And even if rock and roll can’t change the world, some musicians believe just maybe the bicycle can.

Bikes on a Bus: The veggie-oil powered vehicle that carries the Ginger Ninjas, their assistants and their gear when it's time to go home. Photo courtesy of courtesy Xtracycle Inc.

U2 was here—and so were thousands of fans who managed to find the remote Mojave Desert location of the very Joshua tree depicted in the photo series accompanying U2's 1987 album. The tree has died and now lies in brittle bits and pieces. Photo by Steve Hall.

Satellite views of the Earth plus the advent of digital photography and remote communication technology have rendered virtually no place on the planet unexplored—or unseen, anyway. To be an explorer in the old days was a legitimate and noble occupation, but traveling today is much less about first-time discovery than it is about rediscovery. But there is a particular thrill in going where certain others have gone before, to walk where they walked and to know that their eyes, too, played across the very landscape before you. So forget the world’s last lingering corners of wilderness for a moment, or the last unsettled islands, and consider these special sites of interest where writers, artists, musicians and heroes once walked:

The toppled Joshua tree. On a cold December day in 1986, the biggest budding rock band of the time—a group of young Irishmen known as U2—walked into the Mojave desert with photographer Anton Corbijn, posed before a lanky-limbed Joshua tree and created one of the most famous rock and roll image galleries, portrayed on the album sleeve of U2′s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. The images spurred a quiet pilgrimage of followers seeking to locate the Joshua tree—the Joshua tree, that is, the one shown on the album. The site is located near Death Valley, and presumably the first U2 fan to locate the place found it by following the skyline seen in the famed black and white photographs. Today, the tree itself lies fallen and broken, while a shrine and plaque, a variety of stone-based artwork and four stone circles indicating where each U2 band member once stood still give visitors a chilling sense of rediscovery.

The Slaughtered Lamb pub. “I vote we go back to The Slaughtered Lamb.” So said Jack Goodman, played by Griffin Dunne, to his friend David Kessler in the 1981 horror cult classic An American Werewolf in London. Two young American men, students on vacation, were walking on the cold, wild moors of Northern England not far from a fictional village called East Proctor. The pair had just left the town’s spooky village pub, The Slaughtered Lamb, where a bizarre cast of locals sent the Americans packing with crazy talk suggesting monsters and witchcraft. But some distance out of the town, piercing half-man howls echoed through the fog and scared Jack and David back again toward the pub—but a werewolf got them first. Jack was killed, and David, played by David Naughton, was rendered a once-per-month monster whose own days would soon end after a bloody rampage in the streets of London. Today, the village of Crickadarn, Wales, which portrayed East Proctor, remains a vaguely known source of attraction for traveling film buffs. If you go, stick to the road, keep clear of the moors and take some good pics—and perhaps post driving directions in the comment box below. Heads up: The interior of The Slaughtered Lamb is actually in The Black Swan, a pub in Ockham, Surrey, in case you should want a pint.

Cephalonia, home island of Odysseus. Just which Aegean waters Homer’s hero stirred and which Greek islands he passed as he voyaged home from Troy may be unclear, but we may know just where Odysseus landed at the journey’s end, the island he called home. Named Ithaca in The Odyssey, the home island of Odysseus is believed to be that now called Cephalonia, off Greece’s west coast, as described in Smithsonian in 2006. An amateur scholar named Robert Bittlestone made this claim after studying translations of Homer’s narration and touring possible islands in Greece, surveying the landscapes and imagining just where was the likeliest abode of Odysseus. The modern-day island of Ithaca seems not to be the old Ithaca—but on Cephalonia, Bittlestone believes he can even trace the footsteps of Odysseus from the moment he came ashore at Phorcys Bay to the hut of the benevolent swineherd to—at last—the cone-shaped hill called Kastelli, where Odysseus’ wife Penelope and their son Telemachus endured for years the hounding of suitors and drunkards—men who died in a bloody, skull-crashing fight when Odysseus finally walked through his door. Should you go to Cephalonia, bring along a pair of binoculars and a copy of the Odyssey, perhaps the truest guidebook there is to this lesser-known Greek island.

Cephalonia, off of western Greece, might be the island where Odysseus—or his real-life prototype—lived. Photo courtesy of Flickr user The Photo Factory by Christel Egberts.

Fairbanks City Bus 142. The broken-down bus in which a young man lived his final days in Alaska in 1992 has become an attraction for back-country visitors in recent years. Made famous by Jon Krakauer in his 1995 book Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, who took up the alias Alexander Supertramp, has been the subject of scorn, sympathy and admiration. He came to the interior Alaskan bush country with idealistic visions of living off the land in a place void of human contact and government control—but things didn’t go well. Though he had a rifle, he failed to feed himself adequately, and after more than 100 days in the wild, he died of starvation inside the retired Fairbanks city bus. McCandless’ tribe of followers exploded in numbers following the 2007 movie adaptation of Krakauer’s book, and today many—too many, perhaps—visit the bus each summer and fall, posing for photos exactly as McCandless did, signing their names inside the bus and taking pieces away. Locals have begun to consider the defunct vehicle an attractive nuisance. Though the bus has long served as a campsite for local hunters, there has been talk of removing it from the bush. Go see this piece of junk while you can.

Steinbeck Country. It’s sunburned, desolate and populated by pigs and cougars—and everywhere you go in the hill country of California’s Monterey and San Benito Counties, you are likely to be viewing the same wild country that inspired the writing of John Steinbeck. While you have a sure bet at mingling with the ghosts of Steinbeck’s past at tourist hubs like Cannery Row, the real excitement lies farther afield—where one might explore the scrubby back country and ask of suspect homesteads, trees and road crossings: “Was Steinbeck here?” Eight years ago while exploring California on a long bicycle tour, this very question came to me, along with a strange and eerie feeling in my gut, when I came upon a lonely intersection in Monterey County, far from any stores or farms or gas stations. I was riding northward on Peach Tree Road, parallel to and east of the Salinas Valley, and came to the junction with Long Valley Road, which led deep into the hill country to the west. I instantly recalled Steinbeck’s The Long Valley and felt with certainty that the author had walked up this road in its unpaved days, through these dry expanses of classic California oak and scrub, absorbing impressions of the land that would later move him to write. But in the lonely hills of Steinbeck Country, fiction overlays reality, and whether here once was a god unknown, or a red pony, or a man named Adam Trask—who really knows but the writer who invented them all?

There are many other literary journeys, sites to see and paths to follow:

Jack Kerouac‘s route in On the Road. Kerouac disguised many of his real-life characters with clever pseudonyms in On the Road, yet travelers and journalists seem to have pinned down where he went, drank, ate and slept, from San Luis Obispo to Colorado to New York.

The pond and cabin of Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden days.

The Overlook Hotel of The Shining. Film director Stanley Kubrick relied on multiple locations, including a set in England, for shooting his 1980 horror hit, but for a face-to-face, head-on look at the hotel that swallowed up the Torrance family for a long, frightening winter, head straight to the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

The Abbey Road crossing in London as seen on the Beatles album. Should you go, take three long-haired friends, set up a camera and don’t forget the most important part: One of you must walk barefoot.

The Fairbanks city bus in which Chris McCandless died of starvation in 1992 has become a tourist attraction. This photo was taken in 2011. Photo by Dave Korn.

King Juan Carlos, at right, stands with his guide from Rann Safaris as his dead Botswanan elephant lies propped against a tree.

The king of Spain visited Botswana recently, and on the famous savanna, teeming with animals familiar from the picture books we read as youths, King Juan Carlos shot and killed an elephant.

When I heard about the king’s outing, I decided to learn a little more about Botswana’s laws governing the protection—or lack thereof—of Africa’s most famous creatures. It turns out that many of them can be lawfully killed for those who buy the privilege. According to the website of Rann Safaris, the hunting outfit that guided King Carlos (who happens to be the honorary president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund) it takes $6,000 to shoot a leopard. For $1,200, you can shoot a crocodile. For the pleasure of killing a hyena, you must turn over only $500. For a rhino, sorry, you’ll have to visit South Africa. But if you’re content to shoot an ostrich, stay on in Botswana, where the permits will run you $550. Short on cash? Then there’s always baboons, which go for a paltry $200 a pop. And to shoot the greatest land animal on the planet, the one that lives in matriarchal herds and mourns somberly when a family member dies, the one that’s been targeted by tusk-seeking machine gunners for decades and which you’d think should be a protected species—to shoot an African elephant, you’ll need to pay $19,000. It’s a princely sum, but nothing for a king.

The world is full of opportunities to shoot at its mightiest creatures, whether they’re good to eat or not, and here are just several animals that some of us would love to see and photograph—and that some people just want on the rec room wall.

Sharks. There’s nothing politically correct about shark fin soup, but an annual killing contest goes on in Martha’s Vineyard, where hundreds of sport fishermen gather every July to compete in the Annual Oak Bluffs Monster Shark Tournament. The event’s website states that 98 percent of sharks caught in the derby are released (a change from prior years), but there are prize incentives to bring the largest fish in to the dock, where crowds gather expectantly to see dead and bloody “monsters” hoisted at the weigh station. Last year, the biggest sharks landed and killed included 630-pound and 538-pound thresher sharks, a 495-pound porbeagle and a 278-pound mako. In 2005 a fisherman took a tiger shark weighing 1,191 pounds.

Big cats. The African lion has declined in numbers from possibly 100,000 in the early 1990s to a current population estimated to be as low as 16,000 individuals. Yet hunting of this vulnerable species is legal in parts of Africa. By some reports, in fact, the number of lions killed by licensed trophy hunters each year is on the rise. In California, cougar hunting was banned in 1990—so when a member of the state’s Fish and Game Commission got the urge to kill one this January, he went to Idaho, where hunting the cats is legal. The hunter, Dan Richards, posed gleefully with the cougar in his arms, sparking an explosion of anger among animal rights activists and trophy hunting critics. The controversy centered on the question of whether a man charged with, among other things, protecting cougars in one state should go and hunt them in another. Richards pointed out that he and his friends ate cougar the evening after the hunt—an excuse often voiced by trophy hunters. If you want to put food on the table, shoot a rabbit or a deer—but please, not a top predator.

Dan Richards, of the California Fish and Game Commission, went out of state to shoot this Idaho mountain lion.

Bears. They reportedly taste vile if they’ve been feeding on salmon or marine mammals, but that doesn’t stop Alaskan hunters from killing brown bears. In fact, these animals usually aren’t eaten—just skinned and beheaded, as Alaska state law requires. Alaskan black bears, too, are often killed only for wall mounts. The state, to its credit, prohibits one from using the meat of a game animal for purposes other than human consumption, yet exceptions are generously granted to bear hunters, who can at certain times of the year (like during salmon runs) use a black bear’s flesh as pet food, fertilizer or bait. (For wolves and wolverines, the meat does not need to be used at all.) Elsewhere in the world, bear hunters sometimes participate in controversial “canned hunts“—such as the one in 2006 in which King Juan Carlos, our mighty elephant hunter, shot a tame, drunk Russian brown bear named Mitrofan, who was fed honey and vodka prior to being prodded into an open field, where the crowned noble had an easy shot. Even imperiled polar bears are still legally hunted for trophies.

Baboons. I’m almost reluctant to discuss this one, so similar are the animals to us and so grisly the nature of this hunt, but the fact that men and women shoot baboons for kicks needs recognition. Landowners consider baboons pests in some places and welcome trophy hunters, who often use bows to kill the primates. The animals are known to react dramatically when hit, and—much like a human might—a baboon will scream and holler as it tussles with the shaft protruding from its torso. Even hardened hunters reportedly grow queasy at the sight of a skewered baboon panicked with fear. If you have the stomach for it, look through this Google gallery of “baboon hunting” images, showing proud hunters with their trophy kills, or for some less graphic insight into the minds of the people who would kill baboons for the joy of it, read through this baboon hunting discussion. Here is a sample from the conversation: “Seems kinda twisted but given the chance I’d shoot one. Cool trophy.” And: “Good Luck, Hope ya get one. My next time back I’d like to kill one as well.” Someone get me a bucket.

Wolves. While this top predator reproduces relatively rapidly and can be naturally resilient to some level of persecution, sport hunting the gray wolf still stinks. To justify the hunt, wolf hunters describe the animals as having negative effects on deer and elk herds. In the Rocky Mountain states, where wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s, they are already being hunted again. Some wolves are baited into shooting range, others pursued via snowmobile, and in a few places wolves are shot from airplanes—like on the Kenai Peninsula, where a government predator control program is drawing fire from wolf allies. Wolf pelts, not the flesh, are the goal of the game, though cast members of the film The Grey reportedly ate wolf stew in order to prepare for a scene in which the actors, including Liam Neeson, would pretend to dine on wolf meat. Most of the cast vomited during their meal, donated by a local wolf trapper, though Neeson returned for seconds.

More top targets of the trophy hunter’s hit list:

Billfish. Anglers may eat sailfish sashimi or braised marlin, but let’s keep things real: These fish die for their swords.

And crocodiles for their hides.

And walrus for their tusks.

And hippopotamus for … honestly, I really can’t imagine.

This just in: King Juan Carlos has publicly apologized for killing his elephant. “I am very sorry,” he told the press on April 18. “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again.” Sure, now that he’s got his tusks.

These Northern California abalone divers have bagged their limits and are out of the water again safely. On some "ab" dives, tragic accidents happen. Photo courtesy of Flickr user ingridtaylar.

They’re clammy. They’re rubbery. They’re often deep-fried in vegetable oil. And though the red abalone of California was once a staple of dirt-cheap seafood shacks, this big slippery sea snail is today one of the most prized seafoods in the world.

Abalone is also the goal of one of the most dangerous recreational games in America. Abalone diving season kicked off in Northern California on April 1, and though no fatalities have yet been reported, well, let’s just knock on wood. Because since 1993, at least 54 people have lost their lives while pursuing abalone, including eight in 2008 and seven in 2007, and rare is the season in which at least one diver doesn’t perish in the cold and rough waters of the North Coast. Yet so fervent is the urge to get in the water and bag one’s daily limit of three abalone that many divers who have driven hours to get to their favorite spot only to find the sea surging and violent just brave the waves anyway. Sometimes they die. Kelp may be the greatest of hazards to the diver, who are prohibited from using SCUBA gear. This spectacular seaweed, so gentle in appearance and symbolic of the California coast, occurs in nasty thickets in many locations. Kelp may grow more than a foot per day, and in the summer sun during calm periods, kelp forests can burgeon seemingly out of control until the fronds layer the surface like a carpet. Underwater, the long, cord-like stipes hang ceiling to seafloor. Among the rocks at their base is where the abalone dwell. Some divers wait until a large storm rips these kelp plants from the seafloor, clearing the water, while most just deal with it—the sensation of long, rubbery cords of kelp sliding over one’s legs is familiar to any abalone diver. Many carry knives strapped to their lower leg to cut through the kelp should they become entangled. Ironically, divers have drowned when their knives become snagged on the kelp.

Other divers die of exhaustion or heart attacks, sometimes collapsing on the rocks after a particularly strenuous dive. Among the least of dangers is the great white shark—though the fear of being eaten is one of the most persistent and haunting. In 2004, a well-known diver in Mendocino County was decapitated by a shark in one swift attack. Though dozens of abalone hunters have died from other causes since, Randy Fry remains a name that Northern California divers speak with a tone of regret and unmistakable dread. Today, many divers, as well as kayakers and surfers, wear “Shark Shields,” a relatively new device that emits an electric field that may deter sharks as large as great whites.

So, what is all the fuss and excitement about? For many people, abalone means nothing more than an excuse to get wet in one of the world’s most beautiful underwater settings. For some divers, it’s a treasure hunt—all about locating the big snails and prying them out of their crevices and holes. For a few divers, eating abalone isn’t even the point—collecting them is. After sacking their limits an driving home, they hand out the snails to their friends. (I recently joked with one such diver that she might just hunt for rocks instead and leave the abalone, which may be decades old, to their peaceful business.)

For others, abalone hunting is an obsessive game of numbers. These dedicated trophy hunters will take nothing but “tens,” that is, abalone at least 10 inches wide. (The minimum legal size is seven inches.) So particular are “ten divers” about this hallowed but arbitrary dimension that they usually measure and record their catches down to the hundredth of an inch, with the difference between a 10.64- or 10.47-inch abalone being a worthy distinction. The shells they polish and display on walls, and there is even a website dedicated to the hunt for huge abalone called Abalone Ten. Large abs, as divers often call their quarry, often occupy dark crevices 20 feet or more beneath the surface, and one may wonder as shivers creep up the spine how many divers have drowned with their heads stuck in an underwater cave.

A red abalone in its natural habitat—unwittingly being pursued by some 35,000 divers. Photo courtesy of Flickr user NOAA Photo Library.

The snails, meanwhile, keep meekly minding their business. They slide slowly across the seafloor, seeking kelp scraps, their chief food source, by day and returning to cracks and caves by night, and little do they know of the storm that their existence stirs—a storm of economic activity, weekends spent camping, poaching busts and car chases, photo ops, celebrations and family feasts … and funerals.

By the numbers:

Of about 35,000 licensed abalone hunters in California, more than 50 have died in the past 20 years.

Of about 300,000 licensed hunters in California, 27 died in accidents from 1994 to 2009.

20: Fatal mountain lion attacks in North America since 1890, including 6 people in California.

934: Commercial fishermen killed in America between 1992 and 2007.

6,000 to 8,000: Estimated total number of mountain climber deaths on Mont Blanc.