One of the advantages of the kickstand of the bike is that you're able to sunbathe - I've even fallen asleep on it - or you can watch the stars in the clear, cloudless sky. There's darkness all around, I feel the horizon somewhere far in front of me, where two equally dark worlds meet - the dwellings of falcons and the desert mice. Silence. There's only a gentle breeze singing around my ears and foretelling the oncoming cold. And the distant noise of an aeroplane - third in the line of blinking lights - that is getting lost somewhere far on the left, under the rising Orion. Where is it headed? Where are all the crews on another routine journey flying to, where did they take off from, are they munching on their sandwiches and sipping their coffee yet? Syrian, Indian, Royal Jordanian... Emirates? The Casio points 115° from the true north. Baghdad? No, not that. Tehran? Madinatu Kuwait? It's getting chilly. There goes another silver bird above me.I start the engine, turn on the lights and try to find traces of a vehicle on the packed-down dirt surface. I won't let myself be carried away by the “towards the sun, towards Jamaica” navigation again. It was too tiring when I was in the middle of nowhere with a malfunctioning GPS and had to climb enormous rocks again, because I was following the sun towards Damascus. Night was falling on the cold rocks and I was in the middle of the desert hills and was clueless as to how I was going to get back to civilization.
Let's go back a while. On Friday I was going to make a 200 km circle through the desert from Damascus, but I kept stumbling upon military bases while trying to get to the deserted world – once it was tank bases with covered iron beasts, then air-bases with large concrete vaults, inside of which the birds are kept safe from the bombs of the southwest neighbours (it was probably a good lesson when they destroyed the entire Egyptian air force while still on the ground, in 1967, if I'm not mistaken). There was some off-road, but it was more a search of the road than actual navigated driving. The day ended with some soldiers that kindly stopped me on the side of the road, invited me for tee (it was much welcome), wanted to know about Slovenia and the bike and incidentally inspected my driving licence. Very smooth! They actually asked for the passport, but I denied having it and said I left it in town. You can somehow get around without the driving licence - the only thing less useful here is the identity card - but the passport is a different story. And these same soldiers, enthusiastic about the digital speedometer and all the lights on the dashboard finally told me where there's no army.
Saturday.
The Syrian petrol works like a rocket! I screw the fuel tank cap back on and leave the last petrol station before the sandbox with 10 extra kilos of weight. The GPS is pointing directly towards the first waypoint of the route that I roughly entered inside its memory back home. The rocky desert starts, the machine is mostly in third and fourth gear, the speed is ranging from 40 to 80 km/h because of frequent artificial canals. Driving through man-influenced areas is the worst. Natural dry river beds can be seen from far away, while a narrow, but deep electricity, telephone or water canal can surprise you when you're just a couple of meters away. That's when I only manage to say »shiii..« or »fuuu...«, more often there’s no time at all, not even to shift to lower gear, the right wrist only pulls the gas lever all the way and I hope I'll make it. And over and over again I am surprised and delighted by the capabilities of the KTM in the field. The shallow basins are the most pleasant. You're rocked a little, the shock-absorbers compress and then follows a slight jump over the edge, just enough to make the back wheel spin in the air a bit. What's nice in the desert is that you can choose between the track that had been used before - which is pretty rational in the vicinity of human, exactly because of the surprise elements along the road like concrete barriersalong wadis (dry river beds), or roadside shafts on the three-metre highway verges, that have NO LIDS - and the complete absence of tracks, when you only follow the GPS arrow. It's also nice that you can test the grasp of the tyres and you can generally let off steam in the curves, because you know you can always straighten up with no harm done and continue “off the road”, or in worst case scenario you'll be thrown on the flat ground and not into a tree, an abyss or another vehicle. And third gear is followed by fourth and then fifth. The speedometer sometimes even reaches 100 km/h. You don’t pay much attention to the rocks in front of you, since you hardly even feel them at that speed, the bike jerks a little, but nothing more than that. Your eyes gaze ahead, you're only focused on the direction of the road. When you're not standing up, you're sitting almost on the tank, to unburden the back wheel and make it slide better through the curves.
I see the concrete vaults in front of me again, I avoid them and head south to the salt lake. Of course we're not talking about a lake with yachts, boats and fishermen (this is for the young readers, others excuse my explanation), it's a perfectly flat surface covered with dry salty mud, which gets wet when it rains and can actually become a real shallow lake. In such periods it is visited by different sorts of birds, feeding on small crabs and similar. There's a ploughed track leading from the lake on land towards south to the air base. I pull the gas all the way, I can't stand anymore, so I hide behind the windscreen. I follow the arrow like I was on a rail, I try out some curves and the surface is holding up perfectly. In the distance I notice a different colour of surface – yellow is replaced by brown, further on and towards left there's water sparkling in the sun. I slow down and drive carefully on the brown spot. It holds. Of course, I avoid the water, but the bike starts swinging. Mud. Come on, hold on, get through this! I'm not afraid of quicksand here, but of course I am afraid of the unknown. I have no experience with mud on salty lakes and shifting of layers of different density. Alright, in the worst case you pull the GPS off the machine, pull yourself out to solid surface and watch how the Adventure is sinking forever. You need the GPS to show the customs officers where it sank so you don't have to export it anymore. My imagination works overtime but with a good measure of exaggeration. I'm back on the yellow, sun-burnt and cracked layers of solid mud.
It's so nice to stop, turn off the engine, take the helmet off and watch towards the low December afternoon sun, that's warming up the cold winter landscape. Dirt and rocks everywhere you look. No sound, no sight of anybody. You're completely dependent on an American that says there's 23 km to the next waypoint and a Yodeller that's supposed to get you there. And further on. I want to shoot a couple of photographs, but I'm shocked to realize I forgot the machine back home. Just as well. At least I won’t be a slave of photographing, choosing the right compositions and light-exposure, at least I won’t have to stop to take photographs. I felt relaxed, I stored the pictures in my memory.
An asphalted road appeared in front of me and I intended to drive alongside it for a while. But there was a ditch somewhere there as well, much shallower than many others that I had passed. I don't know what happened. I don't know whether I was standing up or sitting down, braking or accelerating, all of a sudden the KTM was in front of me and was lifting the desert dust while ploughing the ground. I was just behind it. It was in fourth gear, the last markings on the GPS, before the fuse burnt (finally I placed it!), showed 78 and 65 km/h. Of course I didn't have a spare fuse on me, so I was facing a dilemma one and a half hour before sunset, with 200 km ahead of me and a malfunctioning GPS (the batteries were low, plus every shock interrupted it and it kept switching off). Should I go for a mystery tour or head back? I decided to do the latter, since I would surely only get in trouble without the GPS in the night, without a sleeping bag and a tent (and I had to get back, because we wrote a test today). For a while I followed my own tracks, but it was unpleasant and dangerous, because on the way there I crossed some wadis in spots suitable for that direction but not the opposite one. So I turned somewhat to the north from the setting sun that was blinding me and entered an area of huge rocks, so big I was practically climbing over them, many of them were up to 10 inches high. It was tiresome and the engine was heating up. The sun set and I found myself in a labyrinth of hills, that the wind had blown the sand off,and what was left was an open stone quarry. My GPS doesn't work and I'm running out of time. I stop and helplessly climb on top of a nearby hill. All rocks! Everywhere I look, it's all hills covered with rocks! No way can I cross them! If I was there with my car, I'd probably start crying. I'd probably never get out of there. I turned around and chased the last beams of daylight with my lights off, while I was struggling over the rocks. Imagine driving in a river bed, not over gravel but rocks, about half the height of the wheels. Some of them are sharp, some are round. Helping yourself with your legs can only hurt. A couple of times the bike nearly drove away from under my butt. Without the help of the legs, the pressure on your arms is even bigger. After a bit more than half an hour of tumbling over rocks, I finally see the way out: a track. It's not much better, but at least I know it will get me somewhere, that it's been driven over before, and you can even shift to third and fourth gear on it.
And that's how I came to the spot where I gazed at the stars. Where the desert mice woke up and where the wind brought the cold of the night.
The bike surprised me. Yesterday it lived the hardest test so far and passed it upright (well, except for that one time). Engine guards intact, the fork and the rear swing arm w.p., the shock absorbers w.p., you can tell from the Pirellis that they've been busy, but without particularities. It covered 240 km, of which there was about 160 of terrain, and drank up some oil, but it deserved it.
Translation from Slovenian:
Maja Simeonov