A loaded touring bicycle propped on a sea wall above a bay, with mountains behind

Two memoirs.

In print and on Kindle.

Nice, France

The Books

64,000 Kilometres for Peace

Four years and three months on the road, across 5 continents, carrying one word. Between the crowded roads of India and a homecoming carried shoulder-high there is a Japan so orderly it felt like another planet, the furnace of Death Valley, a morning in a San Diego bicycle shop when the towers came down, a meeting at the United Nations, and a noon in Johannesburg that nearly ended it.

A book about borders: the ones drawn on maps, the ones defended in visa queues, and the ones people put up between one another. It is just as much about how reliably strangers took two exhausted cyclists in, fed them and sent them on.

KindleAmazon—Link to be added

From Pars to Petra on Two Wheels

The first journey, and the one that made the rest possible. In 1996 the two of them left Iran without telling anyone, rode through Turkey, Syria and Jordan to the rose-red city of Petra, and were stopped at the Saudi border by an intelligence officer who did not believe a word of it.

Younger, with almost no equipment and less experience, and funnier for it. It ends with two bicycles carried up Dorfak and Sabalan, and the reader knowing exactly what came next.

PaperbackAmazon—Link to be added

About the Editions

Made to be read, and to be kept.

Set for the page

6 by 9 inches, Book Antiqua, mirror margins, running heads and a proper contents.

Every photograph in place

The photographs sit where the author put them, with the numbered gallery at the back reproduced in full.

Translated from the Persian

Not relayed through a third language, and checked line by line against the source by a second reader.

The Author

Hassan Alizadeh

One of the first Iranians to ride around the world. He met Amir during military service, and they have ridden together ever since.

Born in Iran, and a child during the war with Iraq, he grew up on cartoons about travellers and a globe he spun in his imagination. Learning languages was the only part of school he took seriously, because a passport needed military service, and military service was where he met the friend he would ride with for the next 30 years.

Before leaving the country the pair rode the length of Iran and carried bicycles up Dorfak and Sabalan, the first ascent of Dorfak by bicycle anyone had made. Carrying the round-the-world ride from idea to finish took almost 15 years. A short documentary about it, Around the World for Peace, was shown at the Milan sports film festival and given a diploma of honour.

In His Own Words

Why he went.

“We have to learn never to forget how to dream. Education, a job, a house, a car and the rest are the basic needs and the basic rights of every one of us, but we must not let them make a sacrifice of our dreams.”

From the epilogue

Take the Road

The journey continues in the books.

Both books, in print and on Kindle.

311 pages and 114 photographs in the round-the-world memoir
The first journey, through Turkey, Syria and Jordan to Petra
Translated from the Persian, set in matching editions

Choose your copy

The Eiffel Tower, Paris — Paris, and a promise kept