Two friends, two bicycles, four years and three months of road.
From the south-eastern border of Iran, east and around the world, and home.
The Journey
How it began.
A boy who was told to stretch his legs no further than his rug.
Hassan Alizadeh and Amir Hossein Ahmadi were children during the war with Iraq, with few pleasures beyond games in the street and an hour a day of children’s television. It was enough. Cartoon travellers with rucksacks set them spinning a globe of their own, and wherever it stopped they packed an imaginary bag.
When he told his father he meant to see the world, his father answered with a proverb: stretch your legs no further than your rug. Under his breath the son said he would rather make the rug longer. That sentence became the journey.
The Journey in Numbers
What four years and three months on a bicycle adds up to.
The Route
43 countries, in the order he rode them.
The ride began at the south-eastern border in the late summer of 2000 and finished at Astara on 6 December 2004. The road below carries more stamps than forty-three: Iran and Sweden are on it twice, once each way, and the United Kingdom appears as the four nations he rode through. The sea and air crossings between continents are not counted in the 64,000 kilometres.
Scroll, and the wheel rides the road with you.
Iran
Pakistan
India
Bangladesh
Malaysia
Singapore
Indonesia
Japan
Canada
United States
England
Scotland
Southern Ireland
Wales
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Estonia
South Korea
Australia
New Zealand
Chile
Argentina
Uruguay
Brazil
South Africa
Botswana
Spain
Portugal
Andorra
France
Monaco
Italy
Switzerland
Belgium
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Germany
Denmark
Liechtenstein
Austria
Greece
Turkey
Georgia
Azerbaijan
The Coin Rule
How two people ride together for four years and three months without falling out.
People asked them constantly. The answer was a coin. At every fork, every argument and every dead end, they tossed it and obeyed it, and they held to that so strictly that, as he puts it, there was not a crack in it for a hair to slip through.
Even when the coin was wrong, even when it led them into trouble, neither of them objected. Over the years it became a law. The important principle, he writes, is not whether a law is clever. It is that you keep it.
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
