Three Days Behind on Homework

A Vespa ET3 Primavera was built in 1976 for Italian city streets: short hops to the market, a scarf on the handlebars, nothing that would trouble a two-stroke engine designed for stop-start traffic. It was not built to cross Sumatra, or the width of China, or the Pamir Highway. Mario Gabrieli knows this. He is doing it anyway, with his 11-year-old son Leonardo riding pillion, on a route that runs from Sydney to Trieste and, if the visas cooperate, ends this October.

They call the trip I Due Caschi: The Two Helmets. At the Vespa's cruising speed of 40 to 50 kph, there is a lot of time to talk. There is also, as it turns out, a lot of time to become each other. "Some days, just to laugh a bit, Leonardo becomes me and I become Leonardo," Mario says. "We say the things that we hear the other one say all day." Leonardo's version of his father, apparently, comes out during homework enforcement. "Sometimes it gets a little scary," Leonardo says of his dad. "When I get three days behind on my homework, it turns into someone else."

Why a Vespa, of all things

Mario has owned Vespas his whole life, and his reasoning for choosing one for a multi-continent overland trip is less about suitability than about relationship. "It's such an iconic vehicle," he says. "It's not designed to do an overland journey like this. But I think if you manage to do it, you really conquer the journey. It's like an old motorbike, something that you know, something that you can hear every single sound of. And you know what it is. It's a special relation, I think every motorcycle rider has with their motorbike, and I just have that relation with the Vespa."

Leonardo has known the machine for a lot less time and sees it more plainly. "It's just like an everyday-use city motorbike," he says. "But we're pushing it to go all the way to Italy. And I think it's super cool and super crazy."

The choice has consequences the pair budget for daily. Two-stroke engines need two-stroke oil, and two-stroke oil is not something every fuel stop between Sydney and Trieste stocks or recognizes. "Funny enough, you always think you're going to find it, and then you spend a day trying to find somewhere that understands what you're asking for." Mario says. He carries a 2.5-litre spare petrol tank and prefers synthetic two-stroke oil over mineral when he can get it, because mineral oil leaves residue on the piston under the kind of sustained load the Vespa was never engineered for. The rest of the kit is minimal by design: a tent, sleeping mats and bags, a compact tool roll, spare parts for the repairs he already knows he will have to make himself, and two t-shirts and one pair of pants each. Leonardo has worn the same sandals for about four months.

The idea started on a smaller road

The written account Mario submitted before the interview traces the whole undertaking back to a single ride, two years earlier, on the Mae Hong Son Loop in northern Thailand, between Chiang Mai and Pai. Seven hundred and sixty-two turns, by the official count. "Leonardo didn't complain once," Mario wrote. "He was curious about everything. The people, the traffic, the small problems you solve along the way. That's when I realised we could probably go further." Life in Sydney, he added, had gotten busy in the way that makes a person start asking what memories they actually want with their kid. Riding to Trieste, on the bike he already knew how to fix, was the answer he landed on.

A day on the road, and the homework that comes with it

At the time of the interview, in a small town near Kunming, China, the routine was settled: up around eight or nine, roughly 150 kilometres of riding, a noodle place for dinner, then Leonardo's homework before sleep. China's road network complicates the math. The national roads, one step down from the highway, roughly double the time of any given trip. "On the highway, a journey is three hours," Mario says. "And on the B-road it's seven and a half." They take the B-roads anyway. "At least you get to see other sides of the country," Mario says, and Leonardo, who has been logging tea plantations terraced into mountainsides like staircases, is not complaining.

Leonardo's schooling runs largely through a travel journal, and the journal doubles as a research assignment. Whatever the day hands them, they look into it that evening. In Indonesia, where the family stayed for a full month, that meant learning about Ramadan alongside the people observing it around them. In Thailand, it meant chasing down why free-roaming white roosters seemed to be everywhere. The answer, once they dug into it, involved a young king who won a cockfight before he took the throne, after which the rooster became a fixture of the landscape. It is not the kind of thing a normal classroom covers. Leonardo's own account of the mechanical side of his education is more modest: "The mechanics section is easy," he says. "You just hold the fuel pump."

Indonesia's welcome, and Sumatra's toll

Two moments from Indonesia, in Mario's telling, sit at opposite ends of what the trip can produce. In Surabaya, hundreds of Vespa riders turned out to escort them into the city, one small, decades-old scooter briefly absorbed into a convoy of its own kind. In Jakarta, at a spot Mario calls SAKRAL, they found what he describes as a second family and, somewhere along the way, ended up on the local nightly news. It is the kind of welcome that only exists because a Vespa, unlike most overland rigs, reads instantly as one of the tribe wherever a Vespa culture already exists.

Sumatra did not extend the same courtesy. "It's just, the roads are just bits of road," Mario says. "The rest is broken holes. And the way the traffic moves depends on where the holes are. If a truck is coming and on this side of the road there are holes, it's coming into your side. And then you've got to get out of the way, because you are the smallest one of the two." About 2,000 kilometres of the island are like that. To make a ferry connection to Malaysia, the two of them rode five straight days with no rest days, eight to ten hours in the saddle each day, in roughly 40-degree heat. The crossing itself took seven hours, during which Leonardo was seasick four times. Mario's summary of watching his son get through it doubles as the closest thing he offers to a thesis statement for the whole trip: "After that, I looked at Leonardo, and knew he can do it. No problem."

What is actually hard about this

Ask Mario what the difficult part of the trip is, and he does not point to the riding. "The riding, of course, because I had the Vespa all my life, I can fix it," he says. "I'm in tune with my vehicle. So riding and fixing and petrol and oil, it is a challenge, but it's part of the fun. It's part of you pushing yourself to do it." Paperwork is a different category entirely. "Now I have to apply for the visa three weeks ahead," he says. "You have to stop for a day just to do that. It becomes almost like an office job. But it is part of the journey."

That office job has real stakes ahead. The route north from Kunming leads toward the Pamir Highway, one of the trip's marquee sections, and beyond that into a Caucasus crossing that is not yet settled. Mario's preferred plan puts the Vespa on a ferry across the Caspian Sea into Azerbaijan, but he is unsure the port can currently handle it after reports, by his account, of a bombing there the previous month. A visa for Russia is the backup, routed through Uzbekistan, with its own risk: he has heard the Russia-Georgia border can close without warning. None of it can be solved by riding harder. It has to be solved with forms, timing, and patience, which Mario, by his own admission, finds harder than any pothole.

What the road has changed

Asked whether the trip has changed his relationship with his son, Mario answers slowly, working it out as he goes. "I think for me the way it really changes is that I can see Leonardo adapting to new places and new cultures, but as well growing into this adventure and embracing it," he says. "You can really see the changes in his personality. So I start to gain a travel friend more than a son." He is careful to frame the lesson as transferable, not exclusive to a continent-crossing scooter trip. "You don't have to necessarily do a big trip like this," he says. "I definitely recommend it to any father, to take their son out for a camping weekend or an adventure, whatever the adventure might be. It just builds a passage where you pass some knowledge to your son, during those moments where you're bonding in a different way. A bit of stress and a bit of fear does bring out another layer. And as a father, if you are with them in that moment, you can really help them face it, and understand how to overcome it."

His advice to anyone considering their own version of this trip is blunt about the Vespa specifically. "If it's your first time and you're not so sure, get yourself a big bike, something you know will get you to the end," he says. "You never know if it's going to break down, or something's going to go wrong. For a first trip, don't choose a Vespa, because you need a bit of guts to do it." Leonardo's advice skips the caveats. "I think my advice would be: do it," he says. "If you've got the opportunity, or just create the opportunity, take a week and do it. Grab it and go for the ride, because it gives you something you don't expect. In that moment, you really see things differently, and only the road can give you that."