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Far-Eastern journalist and extreme athlete Vlad Nikitenko has recently traveled more than 5,039 kilometers through China on his bike, with 3,574 kilometers of this distance done in hunger.

Nikitenko considers himself to be the inventor of a new extreme sport – “Hunrider,” named from the English words ‘hungry’ and ‘rider.’ Beginning in 2004, he made a number of bike rides on the following routes: Moscow - St. Petersburg; Blagoveshchensk - Khabarovsk - Vladivostok; Blagoveshchensk - Harbin – Beijing - Guangzhou - Shanghai - Qingdao - Beijing.

This year he traveled from Blagoveshchensk through the Chinese cities of Harbin, Changchun, Shenyang and Port Artur (Lushun), and the Russian city of Slavyanka, ending his trip in Vladivostok.

He traveled more than 5,039 kilometers through China.

A good portion of the distance – 3,574 kilometers – he did in hunger, dividing it into two periods of fast, one for 11 days, the other for 22 days. He insists that these long periods of fast are not harmful, otherwise he would not do them.

“I see my main task at this point as adding to my arsenal, from the experience from people of extreme professions, the way to harmlessly enter into starvation and exit from it,” Nikitenko shared.

He says that the longest amount of time he has fasted has been 56 days, and the longest period of fasting during intensive physical training was for 39 days, during which he traveled 4,444 kilometers from Weihai to Shanghai.

Nikitenko says that he prefers to ride across China than Russia because the roads are better in China, and because of the differing attitudes of law-enforcement officials. During his trip from Blagoveshchensk to Vladivostok he showed his passport three times and only once in China, upon entering the country.

“I love to photograph places that I pass and historical and cultural sites that I visit. In China I come across historical and cultural objects a minimum of once a day, but in Russia to reach densely populated places, I have to spend the same amount of money as I spent in my whole trip across three [Chinese] provinces.”