Night, darkness, a wide dark strap of asphalt with no lines in front of me, the cruise control set at a 100 km/h, the end-outline marker lamps of the trailer in my mirrors. High beam lights in front, it is half past three. What is that in the distance? Is everything ok? The sleepless nights, all the worrying over the malfunctions, and the long night ride across the Turkish-Syrian border have left me feeling a little drowsy. Shit!!! The road is ending!!! All of a sudden I find myself in front of two-meter piles of gravel across the entire width of the »highroad«. No sign, no lights, no warning. And there I am, with the cruise control set at a 100 and the trailer behind me, going directly towards them! For the third time in my life the engine died on me because of braking but at least we survived. Time to take a nap.I was starting to boil in the bed inside the car because of the warmth of the sun shining through the curtains. Let’s go, time to get up. Ahmad, the owner of the roadside restaurant, invited me for breakfast. And helped me unload the KTM. J My first taste of Syria. Let's see what they've got here.
I bit into a rocky terrain, in the middle of some villages, but the rocks were just big enough to make me seriously worried about the machine (and myself) when I was going fast, and when I was going slowly it was more like climbing from one rock to another. I was changing from first to second gear and it wasn't a pleasure ride at all. It was the kind of journey where you pant, shift from one side to the other, the engine is heating up, the ventilator is working and in half an hour you’ve hardly made any progress. I'd probably enjoy driving through mud more. However, the winding village roads were more pleasant. A couple of times I came rushing over a slope and saw a shepherdess with a flock of panic-stricken sheep that tried to flee to both sides of the road (I didn't hit any, Lina). Every now and then I rushed through a curve and saw a mini bus in front of me that was in no hurry at all to move back at least to the middle of the road (the driver probably read about mass, velocity and force deriving from them) and so I decided the motorbike will truly have to wait until the real rocky desert around Damascus (at weekends) and the late December delights in Wadi Rum in the south of Jordan.
I arrived to Damascus. 700 m of altitude, yesterday, on 22nd November, it was snowing and during my morning ride to class, in a not-yet-dense traffic, Mount Qasijun above the city was still white. Brrr.
Driving here is a particular experience. It's not as extreme as in Cairo but still Damascus is one of the rare cities in whose traffic I dear not write SMS messages while driving. The events are too unpredictable. Jumping the line, impatience, there's cars in five to six columns in a four lane road driving 90 km/h in the middle of the city. There’s not much practical use of neither indicators nor high beams. Aggressive driving is the most effective solution, even when somebody is trying to get in front of you from your right side, hit the gas, hump the horn, let the guy in the Isuzu see you, and hope he'll brake. The main difference with Cairo is that here they check their mirrors. If youaim at their rear with speed and determination they'll (probably) let you pass. In Cairo they don't care about what's behind them. You could walk on your eyelashes and impregnate their entire family and they still wouldn’t change their minds. And when you resign yourself to it, you accept the rules of the game. Here it's different. It’s unpredictable.
Today I almost crashed into a bus. It was big and yellow and it had a chimney with a little roof on its rear side. For the first time in my life I saw a vehicle with not a single (at least) rear light working. Not even one! Just try to write an SMS while wading through the city traffic jam! I'll talk more about traffic later, for now let me also tell you that I almost burnt the KTM today. I came home (yesterday I finally found an apartment, one with a garden for the Adventure and the trailer) and slightly moved the locked handlebar. There was white smoke pouring out from under the tank and it started crackling. I was rocketed to the car to get the extinguisher! When I came back, it was all over (I mean the smoke stopped spreading, the bike was still in clouds). The reason: Back home I pulled the GPS cable to the handlebar without a fuse (through the tubing, thank god) directly from the battery. When I locked the bike yesterday, I pinched through the cable. Today a slight move was enough to make it singe.
Translation from Slovenian:
Maja Simeonov