Free Ride

Noraly Schoenmaker, a Dutch geologist-turned-traveler, emerged from the wreckage of her personal life after uncovering her long-term partner's affair with a coworker. She found their complete message history saved on his computer, and the discovery cost her the relationship, her home, and her sense of self. When her employer at a dredging company refused to provide a salary letter that would let her keep the house and hinted she might be confined to work in the Netherlands, she quit, sold everything she owned, and flew to India.

The memoir opens in medias res during the spring of 2019, with Noraly stranded on a mountainside in northern Iran. Heavy flooding, the worst the country had seen in 70 years, had destroyed a bridge she needed to cross. In her attempt to ride back up a series of steep hairpin bends, she burned the clutch plates of her Royal Enfield Himalayan motorcycle, which she had named Basanti. She abandoned the immobilized bike and walked uphill for an hour in rigid motorcycle boots until she reached an elderly Iranian couple, Shams Ali and Sakineh, whose compassion moved her to tears. With help from their grandsons and local shepherds, the group pushed Basanti to safety in total darkness.

The narrative rewinds to September 2018, tracing how Noraly arrived at this point. After the breakup, she flew to India and trekked through the Himalayas before impulsively renting a Royal Enfield motorcycle in the town of Manali from a shop owner named Pankaj. She had ridden only city streets in the Netherlands and had no off-road experience. Her first day proved harrowing: she crashed crossing a mountain stream and struggled alone to lift the heavy bike. She pressed on, riding 1,800 miles through Ladakh and the Zanskar Valley, where the unpaved roads became the only thing that could interrupt intrusive memories of her betrayal, forcing her fully into the present.

At a lavish Kashmiri wedding in Srinagar, she met Irfan Achmad, a distant relative of the bride, who offered to register a motorcycle in his name so she, a tourist barred from Indian vehicle registration, could own one. She bought a Royal Enfield Himalayan, named it Basanti after the heroine of the famous Indian film Sholay, and spent a month in Delhi learning basic repairs from Satnam, a mechanic, while waiting for registration documents. She also secured a Carnet de Passage, a temporary import document that required a large cash deposit guaranteeing she would return the motorcycle to India. Recognizing that video might succeed where her fledgling travel blog had failed, she launched a YouTube channel called Itchy Boots.

She set off from Delhi toward Malaysia, riding east through India and into Myanmar with a guided group of international motorcyclists, making her first international border crossing on her own bike. She bonded with an Austrian couple, Claudia and Peter, who became her first real motorcycling friends. Arriving in Kuala Lumpur, she realized her plan to ride from India to Southeast Asia had actually worked. She also reached a YouTube milestone qualifying her for ad revenue. Studying a map in her hotel room, she decided to ship Basanti to Oman and continue through Central Asia, doubling the journey's length.

In Oman, while the cargo plane carrying Basanti was delayed by two weeks, she took off-road instruction from Peter Middleton of Oryx Adventures, learning skills she describes as mantras she still uses years later. When the motorcycle finally arrived, customs could not process it because "motorcycle" did not exist as a category in their system. Her hotel owner resolved the impasse with a phone call, revealing that he owned the airport.

From the United Arab Emirates, she took a ferry to Bandar Abbas, Iran, where her preconceptions about the country quickly dissolved. Riding through the Zagros Mountains, she found green valleys and sweeping rivers instead of the bone-dry desert she had expected. Iranians welcomed her everywhere with tea, meals, and unsolicited police escorts, and she began to see a purpose in her journey beyond personal adventure: showing viewers a side of the world often obscured by stories of conflict. Yet in Esfahan, relentless street harassment from young men drove her back to her hostel, and she left the city without seeing any sights. The narrative then circles back to the events of the prologue: After the clutch failure in the Alborz Mountains, Noraly limped along at 20 miles an hour until a local mechanic named Hamed diagnosed the burned clutch plates. She produced a spare clutch assembly she had carried from Delhi, and Hamed installed it on his day off, refusing payment.

Crossing into Turkmenistan, she removed her hijab and felt a surge of freedom after four weeks of mandatory head covering. The country presented a surreal authoritarian landscape: the capital, Ashgabat, was built entirely of white marble, only white cars were permitted on its streets, and citizens swept the highway with brooms. She slept beside the Darvaza Crater, a 230-foot-wide sinkhole accidentally created by Soviet geologists in 1971 that has burned continuously for over 50 years. In Uzbekistan, she explored Silk Road cities like Khiva and Samarkand before crossing into Tajikistan, where the mountains she had longed for finally appeared.

In Dushanbe, Tajikistan's capital, she waited for the only trusted mechanic, Aziz, who discovered worn steering head bearings but assured her she could complete the Pamir Highway, a legendary 750-mile route reaching altitudes above 15,000 feet. The Pamir section forms the memoir's emotional and physical climax. She rode for days along the Afghan border through the Wakhan Valley, passing tiny villages and meeting Ganesha, a 20-year-old Singaporean traveling overland to university in Montreal. She decided against crossing into Afghanistan, deterred not by local danger but by severe online threats from far-right commenters on her videos.

Climbing out of the Wakhan Valley on loose gravel, she endured extreme cold at altitudes exceeding 15,000 feet with inadequate summer-weight gloves that left her fingers numb. On corrugated roads that hammered her spine, she cried out that she wanted to go home, then realized with fury she was longing for a home that no longer existed. A young Pamiri couple took her in and fed her by a woodstove. Amid the suffering, she felt "utterly alive in a way I never had before" (227) and grasped what solo travel truly meant: being genuinely alone with no safety net.

Crossing the 11-mile no-man's-land between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan through icy mud and snow, she entered Kyrgyzstan and collapsed in relief. She refused to return Basanti to India as originally required, forfeiting her Carnet de Passage deposit, and decided to ride all the way home to the Netherlands to keep her motorcycle permanently.

The final stretch tested her differently. The 2,175 miles of Kazakh steppe deepened her loneliness to a breaking point as intrusive memories resurfaced, particularly a framed photograph her ex had placed in their living room of himself with his affair partner. She transited Russia in a week, crossed into Georgia through the Greater Caucasus, and moved through Armenia, Türkiye, Greece, and the Balkans, spending less time in each country as riding homeward drained the anticipation that had once propelled her. Yet her heartbreak was finally fading. She realized her instincts about the affair had been right all along and reclaimed trust in her own intuition.

Her family waited at the Belgium-Netherlands border. She hugged her mother, father, and little niece, finding it surreal to speak Dutch on the street again. Basanti, bought for less than $2,400 in Delhi, had carried her 22,370 miles across 25 countries in nine months. But Noraly did not tell her parents what was truly on her mind: This was only the beginning. A new route had already formed in her head, a motorcycle ride from Patagonia to Alaska.