Bassam Tarazi - Borders, Bandits, and Baby Wipes: A Big Adventure in a Tiny Car

Advance Praise for Borders, Bandits, and Baby Wipes

A hilarious, tireless, and courageous look into what it is to be a modern-day explorer on the adventure of a lifetime. Bassam has an uncanny ability to put you right there in the moment with him, as if you were sitting shotgun.Michael Kirtley, National Geographic , Time , Newsweek

Bassam Tarazis real-life adventure ignites the explorer in all of us by showing us parts of the world most of us havent even dreamed of seeing, and parts of ourselves were dying to discover.Ben Polansky, co-founder of Matador Network

Wow! I couldnt put it down. Bassam Tarazi has given us an incredible, riveting adventure with a unique human insight.

Derek Sivers, author of Anything You Want , founder of CD Baby

What a ride! With entrepreneurial spirit, a philosophers mind and the wit of a comic, Bassam Tarazi delivers a mighty jolt of global immersion and adventure.Beri Meric, founder & CEO of IVY, The Social University

A pure pleasure to read. Tarazi has written an ode to the explorer that reminds us why we travel in the first place. He illuminates all the beauty, frustration, wisdom and bonding that comes with trading our comfort zones for the inside of a rickety car in a foreign land.Antonio Neves, author of 50 Ways to Excel in Your First Job (And in Life)

Bassam Tarazi takes the reader on a page-turning adventure few will ever get to experience in one lifetime, let alone many.Matt Stabile, founder of The Expeditioner

Bassam pushes the boundaries of what you think you know about our world, cultures and adventureand leaves you wide-eyed and invigorated by his experiences.Katie Quinn, video journalist, creator of qkatie

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-68261-481-5

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-482-2

Borders, Bandits, and Baby Wipes

A Big Adventure in a Tiny Car

2017 by Bassam Tarazi

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Christian Bentulan

Map images provided by Google Maps. Google, Inc.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

For Brooke and Greg

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

Thomas Hobbes

Table of Contents

2:32 p.m., Kazak h Russian Border near Shemonaika, Kazakhstan,
August 11, 2014

Are you a spy? he repeated, without a crumb of sarcasm.

I looked down, pursed my lips, and snuck a laugh out of my nostrils. It wasnt that I didnt take him seriously; it was that Id never been held to such international acclaim. I looked up at the 6-foot 2-inch, square-jawed Russian colonel flanked by two guards who, thankfully, had their machine guns pointed at the ground. The upper reaches of my unkempt beard crept far too high on my cheekbones for any modern sense of grooming, the mane on my head looked like a forgotten mangrove forest, and in between these oceans of hair was the patch of face I peered out from. The only weapon I toted was exhausted endurance.

If I were a secret agent, I had not been allocated the same wardrobe perks as James Bond. I wore Caribbean-blue, tattered flip-flops. A portion of my right big toenail was severed, and the rest of my nails were in dire need of a clipping. There were so many layers of dirt caked on my legs, insects could have fossilized in the fur. I had been wearing the same pair of hiking shorts for twenty-two days. My obnoxiously bright red shirt displayed an obscure illustration of a Mongolian warlordperhaps Genghis Khanwith two Westerners in leather hats and the kind of goggles Chuck Yeager must have worn trying to break a land speed record, and the words Mongol Rally written in big letters.

I guess the colonels question was a fair one since at that mo-ment, my similarly attired cohorts Brooke and Greg were standing with us over an open silver box the size of a carry-on bag that could fit into a planes overhead compartment. The box looked like a nuclear football, or something else a high-ranking cartel member might handcuff to his wrist while escorted by armed guards. Inside, cradled in black Styrofoam and surrounded by wires, giant batteries, a tiny camera, and a joystick, was a drone. This box had been confiscated from the back of our bumper sticker-plastered midget cara 1997 Daihatsu Move. Its rear door remained open, displaying an assortment of duffels, packs, clothing, and goodness knows what else, looking more like a vagrants overflowing shopping cart than a vehicle that had transported us from London to this inhospitable Russian border.

I might as well mention that the drone was indeed mine, and that, for reasons separate from that fact, Brooke and Greg were not on speaking terms with each other. Theyd had a heated spat regarding driving tactics as we were leaving Kazakhstan two hours earlier. You knowthe kind of drama that can erupt after 7,000 miles together, cooped up in a 42-horsepower coffin-on-wheels, with functional attributes so limited they didnt even include basic air conditioning.

I looked around at the scenery for a minute. If I hadnt known where I was, I would have guessed New England: soft rolling hills, lush green trees shadowing us on every side, and sunflowers earning their name in the summer splendor.

Sir?

The Russian-accented query reminded me of my actual whereabouts despite the visual similarities with the northeastern United States. Once again, we were going to need some border wizardry to slalom out of this mess.

Exactly how did we end up filthy, famished, frightened, and detained at the Russian border in the middle of a vehicular odyssey taking us one-third of the way around the planet?

Ill take responsibility for that.

Lets start from the beginning

A License to Roam

As the youngest of three siblings and the only American-born child of a Palestinian father and a Dutch mother, I was never sheltered from the outside world because my family was from the outside world. During World War II, my moms dad fought the Nazis barehanded and survived years in a workers camp in Poland. In 1948, when my father was three years old, his family fled Palestine when it was partitioned to create Israel. My dad often reminisced about getting his PhD in Soviet-controlled Romania where the walls had ears during the late 1960s. There were more storiesabout how my parents met in a Swiss mountain town, or how my brother and sister had to huddle under the dashboard of a car or in an empty bathtub to stay safe from gunfire in Beirut in the mid-1970s.