Review of Noraly Schoenmaker's "Free Ride"

The difference between travel by car and travel by motorcycle is that in a car you watch a movie run by, whereas on a motorcycle you star in the movie. That was the sense I always had about exploring new places on motorcycle, back when I owned one.

Of course, when I say exploring new places, an adventurous spin for me was a trip by highway to Montreal then back home to New York City, which means that I was never in the same league as motorcycle blogger Noraly Schoenmaker. Her book Free Ride (2025) recounts her adventures motorcycling solo through some twenty-five countries across three continents in the span of nine months. Far from a rote travelogue, the book poignantly explores how the author turned personal tragedy into a positive force to bring culture and wonderment to millions of viewers and readers. Though the book is mostly apolitical, there are discernible Libertarian and feminist bents.

The story begins in Delhi, India, where Schoenmaker purchases a Royal Enfield Himalayan 400 off-roader in the Spring of 2019. She affectionately dubs the motorcycle “Basanti” after the heroine in the Bollywood blockbuster Sholay (1975). After a month of organizing documents, she plans to ride southeastwards into Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, then ship her bike to Oman. Thence she will ride northwards through the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, then visit Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Russia before heading westwards through Europe for her home in the Netherlands.

As should be clear to anyone now, such an itinerary is exceedingly ambitious, but motorcyclists will realize that it verges on the insane! Motorcycling is much more physiologically demanding than travel in a regular automobile. To subject oneself to such distances – and stark contrasts in conditions between Iran’s scorching Dasht-e Lut desert and Tajikistan’s Lake Karakul atop the frigid Pamir Mountains, and often off-road – had me involuntarily wincing as I flipped the pages.

True to form, Schoenmaker chronicles the trip by mileage rather than dates, so every chapter begins with her odometer’s reading prior to roll-off. Yet readers should expect no stale litany of destinations in distant countries. Schoenmaker shares with us the devastating heartbreak which induced her to abandon her relatively comfortable life as a geologist in a lucrative mining company. Of course, we can never outrun our grief, so as these exotic destinations flash by, the reader bears witness to fascinating internal dialogues through which Schoenmaker seeks the last reserves of spirit to go one mile further when everything is screaming at her to stop.

Schoenmaker talks politics only as necessary background information about certain places she visits. Thus, the reader understands that Turkmenistan’s capital of Ashgabat is kept immaculately white in color down to its vehicles not out of a collective desire for such, but because the country’s leader has a complex about his daddy who ran the country before him like a personal dollhouse. As Schoenmaker insightfully writes, “I knew that a regime was usually not representative of the population itself. Even in democracies, there are times when leaders are elected that leave you wondering how on earth they might have been chosen.” No Libertarian could say it better!

Free Ride is also marked by a fair streak of feminism. Not that misandrist third-wave sort which degrades men just to elevate women, but more like first-wave feminism, and subtle. Instead of sermonizing readers that women can be just as capable as men, we simply observe the reactions of women in places like Iran when a lone and fearless Dutch girl cruises by, showing the women that given the chance, they can do anything to which they put their minds.