Walter Astrada wanted to go on a motorcycle trip and take photographs around the world. He didn’t have much money. He didn’t have a motorcycle.

One more thing: He didn’t even know how to ride a motorcycle.

Yet right around now, Mr. Astrada should be in Myanmar, about eight months since he left his home base in Barcelona, Spain, on Athena, his Royal Enfield motorcycle laden with clothes, supplies and camera gear. He has gone over the Pyrenees, into Turkey, up to Vladivostok, Russia, over to South Korea (by ferry) and, most recently, India (by plane).

There have been mechanical failures, unexpected delays and bureaucratic nightmares, not to mention the Korean hotel vending machine he thought sold soda, but actually dispensed sex toys. Yet, during a phone interview last week, Mr. Astrada sounded upbeat about how his impulsive decision one day while covering Haiti’s cholera outbreak in 2010 has gotten him halfway around the world, where he goes out taking pictures for himself, not some assignment editor.

“I don’t think you have to think a lot about it,” he said by phone from a small town in India near the Myanmar border. “If you think too much, in the end you’ll never do it. I wanted to go around the world, and I thought I could do it by motorcycle.”

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To hear him tell it – with enough feeling to make deskbound editors long to toss off the shackles of meetings and budgets – his journey wasn’t about taking time to think, but making time to experience.

With almost 20 years as a photojournalist, Mr. Astrada has covered everything from Haiti’s earthquake or conflict in Africa, to longer projects on violence against women or people living with multiple sclerosis. As a news photographer, he was used to rituals of blowing into town, covering the breaking story and leaving.

While that may be good for news, it’s the kind of grind that hardly leaves little time to get to know a place. This time, he wanted the freedom to explore and do street photography.

“I had lost sight of what I had before, to go out with my camera and make pictures of whatever caught my attention, without thinking of any specific reportage,” he said. “Working with news agencies, especially once the news is over, many times we forget there is daily life that continues in these places. In some ways this idea was to complete the other part of what you never get to cover when you do news.”

Figuring out that he wanted to travel light and be as self-sufficient as possible, he settled on going by motorcycle, a Royal Enfield built in India, first learning how to ride one at a driving school in Spain. In keeping with his theme of self-sufficiency, he enrolled in a motorcycle repair class — he used to be an airplane mechanic, so he’s handy with tools and motors — because he figured he might be in some remote places. That proved the case when a spring broke while he was on a deserted road to Uzbekistan.

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Mr. Astrada figured out a route and decided his first major stretch would be from Spain to Vladivostok, a trip that would take him from May through October (when the weather would make it tortuous to continue). To finance the journey, he would offer prints from along the way, which he posted on his website along with regular blog entries, as well as photographic workshops.

One truth at the root of The Journey is something essential: the lure of the road, the ability to stop and go as one pleases — of course, making accommodations for bureaucrats, the police and border crossings. Some places he wanted to see — like Florence, for Michelangelo’s masterpieces — while others would have to wait; his Iranian visa came through too late, since he had to get to Vladivostok by October.

If he found a place was to his liking, he might stay longer than planned, which is what happened in Tbilisi, Georgia.

“The plan is there is no plan,” he said. “I adapted as I went along. That is the beauty of going by motorcycle.”

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But another important aspect of his trek speaks to the universality of the human experience, for better or worse. Cellphones turn up in the unlikeliest places, he noted, as did traffic that could rival New York’s.

“When I got to Ulan Bator, it was like being on Fifth Avenue in a traffic jam,” he said of the Mongolian capital. “We have this idea in our heads — the tourist idea — that people continue to live as they did in a previous era, when in reality the world has evolved. The idea of this trip is to see how similar we are, as well as how we have differences. In truth, television and movies have influenced so much. In the end, all the globalization of technology and the economy means a lot of things are similar.”

For now, Mr. Astrada is going to base himself in Southeast Asia for about a year, giving workshops and being able to take on assignments. After that, his plan is to go to North America and, he hopes, Latin America. And for all his traveling, he has come up with one project he feels he must do: a deep look at Argentina, the homeland in which he has not lived for some 19 years.

But those plans can wait.

“This trip has made me enjoy taking pictures more,” he said. “I like the excitement of being somewhere without the pressure to make pictures and being able to share life in a different way, to see what people do every day.”

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Continue to follow Mr. Astrada’s journey here.

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