Let's get it done now - lets go!

…Now that we held the spare parts firmly in our hands, we beelined it back to Ahsa to start the maintenance process. The first roadblock was the national/religious holidays which lasted 3 to 10 days despite the official holiday being 1 day only. For 3 days none of the mechanics were reachable and we decided to go with the flow... well, we had to, anyway. We took the time to relax, review photos, and binge-watch Game of Thrones, a feat RidingKismet (a hardcore fan) is proud of after trying to convince IronChris for ages.

Ahmed’s brother, a godsent named Azyz, cleared out his calendar to help us achieve our goal of getting the motorcycle running and ready to shoot out of the Arabian Peninsula. The first stop was the workshop responsible for refurbishing the cylinder head. We handed him the damaged one together with a new valve cup and a fistful of shims to replace the valves and seats and make it work. Next was the cylinder workshop. As you may have noticed, engine related things don’t seem to be streamlined in Saudi Arabia and each workshop only manages one component of the engine, which meant darting from workshop to workshop, hoping the mechanics stuck to the deadline they told us (newsflash: they don’t).

Unfortunately for us, it turns out the cylinder barrel was too wide, or rather the new piston was too small, and no fitting barrels available…
Mafi mushkila, no problem: we received a call from the mechanic saying “We didn’t find the barrel you’re looking for, but we found one with the correct inner diameter and we will place that inside the existing barrel” So a barrel within a barrel. Maybe not the most ‘proper’ way of rehabilitating a bike, but we needed solutions and this seemed to be one. Furthermore, the man from the cylinder head shop took his sweet time (“noooooo…. I meant in the evening of the FOLLOWING day….”). When we got the head, the valves were still not tight as the fuel leak test showed. Take it back man, do it again please.

Finally, with our repaired engine components we spent a day assembling it. However, once again, there was a snag in our plan: When draining the oil to put some fresh one in, a not so small piece of metal was found at the magnetic draining screw…. Round at one side, it looked a bit like a fragment of that missing valve shim… That’s fucked!
The shim must have gotten loose, fallen down the cam chain into the gearbox, eaten and broken and ground by the wheels... And with the fragment being a quarter sized of the original shim, this meant there was atleast ¾ of the broken shims dispersed in the engine. And if one of them lodges itself inside the engine while riding this could spell disaster. High risk clusterfuck. Once again, our ride out was challenged. Before making a rash decision to abandon the bike, we sought advice from wiser minds, veteran motorcycle travellers and knowledgeable riders and we decided to just get it done. We would open the engine covers and flush the shit out of it with diesel, and most of the fragments were removed (the rest might be stardust). We poured in brand new oil, just to kick the engine, let it run for a few seconds and let it out – three times in a row. And it worked: The next day, a test ride was done and it did not explode! Seemed like we could go!

We spent our last night in Ahsa at the motorcycle club, where our bikes were parked, and enjoyed hanging out with the locals. Until another unpleasant news dropped: The Kuwaiti border is now closed, which meant our access to Europe crossing Kuwait -> Iraq -> Turkey was not possible. Why?

At this point, our exit plan became a ping pong game. To leave, to stay, to fly, to ride. With every decision whiplash, our stress levels and moods became erratic. But one thing was for sure, we wanted to get out. Riding if possible, and checking it out on our owns.
We had made it that far - how far could it go on?
Stubborn as ever, we decided to press ahead. Ridha from the Ahsa Bikers aided us in our decision, connecting us to bikers located along our route through Saudi, Kuwait, Iraq, all prepared to host and support us. This gave us a renewed sense of determination to make the fluid route back home.

And now: let’s kick it, let’s go, let’s get out of here!Read more