Night is drawing in, his headlight is broken, a blizzard is imminent and he has no place to stay. Okay then…
When Dutchman Paul van Hooff set out to ride his 1975 Moto Guzzi V7 from Amsterdam to Tokyo he had no idea he’d meet up with fellow adventurist Spaniard Jose Ruiz, on the road. Or that the two of them would be marooned on an Armenian mountain top…
THE KARPAN HIGHWAY was rolling up and down. Sometimes we rode over tarmac, but mostly over snow. At 2500 metres above sea level the clouds were so low it felt like I could pull them out of the sky. We passed a military convoy. Soldiers dressed in green camouflage stamped their feet to get warm, AK-47S on their backs. I waved at them, but nobody returned the greeting. I ploughed the Guzzi through the snow at 15mph, when I heard a sudden muffled sound behind me. I checked my mirror. Fuck, Jose was lying next to his motorbike. And he wasn’t moving. I parked the Guzzi and sprinted over. By the time I reached him he’d started to pull himself up. ‘Everything okay?’ I asked. Jose made the OK sign with his thumb and index finger. ‘Todo bien.’ He stretched his leg a couple of times and then helped me pull his 1987 BMW K75 back onto its wheels. With so much luggage the thing weighed a ton. The back indicator on the left-hand side had snapped off and was hanging by two wires. It was not the first time today he’d taken a tumble like that. His BMW had more ground clearance than my Moto Guzzi, so he sat higher in the saddle, which made it harder for his feet to reach the floor. The V7 is a low motorbike and, should things start to go wrong, easy to correct. For Jose, taking a fall was dodgy. He wasn’t insured for anything – if he were to break something the hospital visit could ruin him financially. But the same went for me. Money was tight for both of us, but we were used to not being insured. Jose swung his leg over the saddle then gestured with two fingers. ‘If I ever break my leg, you will shoot me dead. Okay?’ We rode in the dark, on tarmac, me in the lead. The wind chased the snow ahead of me, driving it into many shapes and forms. In the Guzzi’s headlight it was a mesmerizing sight. Then suddenly, without warning, it went pitch black. The Guzzi’s headlight had given in. I pulled over to the side of the road and gave the top of the light a few hard slams. Sometimes that worked. This time the
‘We’d been fearless from the moment we reached the top of the mountain. We took it as a given that we were riding through snow, near freezing to death’
darkness remained. The ice cold wind felt like it was cutting right through my bones and I was ready to call it a night – there was no point thoroughly checking the wiring here and now. My fingers and toes were throbbing from the cold. Jose came and stood next to me. ‘We will look for a place to sleep somewhere around here’, he yelled above the howling wind. ‘Follow me.’ I shivered as I released the clutch and stuck close behind Jose. The blind leading the blind for sure, I grinned. Jose’s front and rear lights were the only beacons in this dark, cold, snowy night. A dog crossed the road. I felt sorry for the animal. Entirely alone, at this altitude, in this cold. Jose pulled over next to a dilapidated concrete wash house. We decided to spend the night there. Jose opened up his visor. ‘Did you see that wolf?’ He yelled. It had started snowing again. Hard. We parked our bikes at the side of the road. The wash house was a shambles. The walls and roof had caved in, so the wind blew the snow into the empty space. Only in the far left corner did we manage to find some shelter. We built a small fire from branches we picked off a bush. I took my boots off and held my feet above the flames. Steam rose from my socks. Jose prepared our meal. That is to say he boiled some pasta on his gas burner. We both had some leftover bread as well. I used my Pelican suitcase as a seat. Several things in my kit had a double function – my tank bag wrapped inside my leather jacket was my pillow. And whenever it wasn’t snowing or raining the bike’s tarpaulin acted as a ground cover for my tent. Jose passed on the pasta. It tasted of nothing. The bread was hard and hurt my gums. I encouraged the fire with a stick, but it didn’t do much good. I gazed ahead. The snow came down like a curtain. Jose glanced at his phone. ‘It is minus 24.’ I found the ease with which we had managed to adjust to these extreme circumstances heroic. We’d been fearless from the moment we had reached the top of the mountain. Immune. We took it as a given that we were riding through the snow at severe altitude, in the middle of nowhere, near freezing to death. We both knew there was only one emergency exit: the border crossing at Norduz.
Jose asked me if I’d ever endured anything like this on a motorbike before. I told him about my ride to Deadhorse in Alaska. That came close. But the difference was the suffering only lasted a few hours. In fact during my travels throughout the Americas I was often boiling hot rather than freezing cold. ‘I’ll have the cold any day,’ Jose said. ‘You can dress against the cold. If I had left in the spring, I would have ridden through Iran in summertime. Over 50 degrees. That would kill you.’ August 2005. I rode the Guzzi through a desert in Baja, California/mexico during the hottest month of the year. It was 52 degrees, and there was not a breeze. I made a mistake by spending too much time taking photos in the middle of the day. I got sunstroke. I only just made it to a small restaurant, 20 miles ahead where I passed out. The owner dragged my overheated body into the shadows, tossed two buckets of ice cold water over me and gave me some salt tablets. Seated on a bench well out of the sun I drank water like it was my last. Two litres later I started feeling a bit better so I stuck an extra bottle by my side and resumed my journey. ‘Most people would hate to do what you do,’ Jose said. ‘Riding your Guzzi to Japan like this, in the middle of winter, at 52 years of age.’ I told him I had no choice. The trip was important to me, and the book I would write about it too. I wasn’t exactly working on some little tourist guide. ‘What keeps you in the saddle?’ Jose asked me. ‘Unbridled curiosity for the unexpected,’ I said. ‘I don’t prepare, I make no appointments and I don’t book hostels. Actually, that isn’t true. I do book hostels but only when I know, for a fact, how that day is going to end. I mean, I have to absolutely know that I’ll be getting across that border. By making a last minute choice to go to Iran I gave my journey an unexpected twist. I let the day’s circumstances and delusions lead me. Insecurities and unknowns during travel are addictive to me.’ ‘And if you don’t manage to cross the border?’ Jose asked… ‘I’ll be well fucked,’ I replied. Jose laughed. I asked him the counter question. What drove my friend? ‘The final years in Spain were futile,’ he sighed. ‘I worked my ass off just to pay my bills. The same shitty job every day, and I had nothing to show for it. After I met Raquel, my new girlfriend, my Russian ex used our son Pepe just to get at me. She wouldn’t let me see him anymore. It drove me nuts. If I’d have stayed in Spain any longer I would have started doing drugs. Do you fancy a cuppa tea?’ I thought of Roxana. We had fought endlessly. We had wished the most terrible things upon each other, but she would never stop me from seeing my little guys. Sure, she’d threatened me with the prospect, out of pure desperation. But it only went as far as that. She knew Santiago and Sebastian needed me. Jose heated some water on the burner. Damn shame we weren’t carrying any vodka. It was certainly the right sort of night for it – drinking ourselves into oblivion in that freezing cold wash house. Thankfully the wind had died down and it wasn’t snowing as heavily anymore either. I put the final twigs on the fire. Jose passed the tea. We touched mugs. From out of nowhere he had become one of my best friends, one of those you blindly trust, and vice versa. Had we been shoulder to shoulder in the trenches, the enemy would not have passed. Suddenly we heard howling in the distance. ‘Dogs,’ I said. ‘Wolves,’ said Jose. It was silent briefly, then
‘Damn shame we weren’t carrying any vodka. It was certainly the right sort of night for it – drinking ourselves into oblivion in that freezing cold wash house’
we heard it again. Long howling cries, three in a row. The morning after the night before in the wash house we reached a sign: Iran border, 37 kilometres. We did a dance of joy in the slushy snow and embraced each other. This road sign had been our aim, our point of focus, for days. ‘Well done, old man,’ Jose teased. An Armenian truck pulled over with a hissing sound. Pointing at my shoes, the driver asked whether everything was okay. Earlier that day I had taped plastic bags around my boots to protect against the cold. The grey tape gave a rather hopeless first impression. Grinning, we both gave him the thumbs up and quickly took the opportunity to scab a fag. After our night in the wash house we had slogged on through snow for another two days, the roads rough and punctuated with many tight curves. To get more warmth we both slept in Jose’s tent. He chivalrously offered me his field bed while he slept on
‘Just as suddenly as the road had turned into snow, we found ourselves riding on tarmancdagain’
the cold, hard floor. That morning we had been woken by a military patrol made up of four soldiers. After studying our passports they left us to it, shaking their heads in disbelief. We both took the fact that we had managed almost 250 miles unscathed, without any frozen limbs, as a minor miracle. I rubbed the Guzzi’s petrol tank encouragingly. Gus was covered in icicles and the front brake was completely stuck, dirt from the road and the cold from the sky having done its worst. Consequently the rear brake functioned minimally, and I mostly braked on the engine. Aside from that Gus had not let up. The same went for Jose’s BMW. The road started to descend, brown stains appearing every so often in the white landscape. We were approaching the Aras: the river that separates Armenia from Iran. And just as suddenly as the road had turned into snow, we found ourselves riding on tarmac again. For the first time in days I was able to change up, third then fourth gear. Despite our higher speed the cold-as-steel feeling in my chest made way for what appeared to be warmth. Jose zigzagged ahead of me. Not much later, when we laid eyes on the Aras, he stood up on his foot supports, looked towards Iran like some warlord and punched his fist in the air.
» Paul’s first book, Man in the Saddle, is now available on Amazon. Bike would like to thank Paul for this exclusive extract. Happy reading…