The Barbarian World
Previously hikers or bikers have been slaughtered by locals
Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo (9 December 1974 – 31 March 2008), known as Pippa Bacca, was an Italian performance and feminist artist.
On 31 March 2008, Pippa Bacca disappeared in Gebze in Turkey during an international hitchhiking trip to promote world peace under the motto, "marriage between different peoples and nations".[1] Bacca and fellow artist Silvia Moro were symbolically wearing a wedding dress during their trek.[2] On 11 April 2008 the police arrested a man who later confessed to her murder and led the authorities to the discovery of her body.[2][3][4]
How a couple's dream trip ended in tragedy at the hands of Isis
A grainy mobile phone clip recorded by a driver shows what happened next: the men’s Daewoo sedan passes the cyclists and then makes a sharp U-turn. It doubles back and aims directly for the bikers, ramming into them and lurching over their fallen forms. In all, four people were killed: Austin, Geoghegan and cyclists from Switzerland and the Netherlands.Two days later, the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the Isis flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill “disbelievers”.
It was a worldview as diametrically opposed as imaginable to the one Austin and Geoghegan were trying to live by. Throughout their travels, the couple wrote a blog together and shared Instagram posts about the openheartedness they wanted to embody and the acts of kindness reciprocated by strangers.
“You get a feeling of wanting to give back, not just to this person who has welcomed a stranger into their home, but to the wider world,” Austin wrote. “You become someone who wants to welcome others into your home. You become a merchant in the gift economy.”