Hanzelka and Zikmund

While waiting to graduate, they made detailed plans for travel, copying maps and studying their destinations from historical, meteorological, economic, and social perspectives.

[6] Initially, the government treated Hanzelka and Zikmund well; though most Czechs and Slovaks were barred from going abroad, the duo were allowed to publish the fruits of their travels because their descriptions were not seen as politically threatening.

[6] They were able to launch a second trip, running five and a half years continuously from 1959 to 1964,[3] taking them to Eastern Europe, Asia, and various Pacific islands[2] with two prototypes of the Tatra 805 truck.

[5] In Czechoslovakia, where the tight control of the Communist government made it impossible for most Czechs and Slovaks to travel out of the country, the works of Hanzelka and Zikmund offered a rare chance for vicarious escape into exotic climes.

[1][3] They became the best-selling writers of twentieth-century Eastern Europe; their books sold 6,525,000 copies in the Soviet Bloc and were translated into eleven languages.

[5] They became a national institution in the Czech lands, and were equally popular in Soviet Union, where the premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded of his aides that the three volumes of Hanzelka and Zikmund's Africa: Dreams and Reality be on his bedside table no matter where he went.

[5] Hanzelka and Zikmund shared the fate of other Czechoslovak dissidents in the post-Prague Spring era, living meagerly for 21 years in menial jobs until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

[2] He retired to a small farmhouse in the south of Bohemia, where he continued to write political criticism of government corruption, this time in the new atmosphere of free-market capitalism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

[5] In 2005, when an exhibition of 160 of their photographs was presented at the Old Royal Palace of the Prague Castle, Zikmund commented: "Jiří, my best friend in my life, he passed away two years ago, unfortunately.