Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

Our main reason for being in Nepal was the beautiful, wonderful, amazing tarmac road, a much better version of any found in Northern India.  So predictably Nepal went by in a bit of a blur- we’d been there before, and we didn’t feel the need to be touristy… In Kathmandu we sat smoking shishas, watching a trendy band play Jimi Hendrix covers to a packed bar.  Everyone sang along and clapped.  Some lads from Yorkshire turned up, and a shy German kid, and we sat and chatted rubbish about crocodiles and stampeding elephants in Zimbabwe.  I got steaming drunk on Romanov vodka, and woke up the next morning wondering where in the hell I was.  Thamel’s streets were still packed with up market trekking tourists, glittery souvenir shops and beggar-boys sniffing glue out of paper bags.  The restaurants were still too expensive for us.  But the salads now contained tofu and walnut, and there was a shiny new North Face branch on the main road. We left, recover...

We rode for miles towards Nepal, straight north. We ended up in Gorakhpur. If anyone ever offers you a free trip to Gorakhpur, decline. Even if you live in Slough. I’d been there before. I couldn’t remember anything about it, except that I didn’t like it much. Lost, we found a bridge where the traffic was stationary, and crossed it, swearing. Then we crossed it again, just to see if we had missed anything the first time. Eventually, we made it out of Gorakhpur, and found our way to Sonauli, the little border town. We spent a bug-eaten night of it, and made a border dash at 6am the next morning. ‘The border is a 24 hour border‘, but at times ‘you may have to go hunting for the officials’ the Lonely Planet explains. Adam was taken to hunt for the customs chief. The customs chief was in his apartment, taking a bath. Adam sat outside the bathroom while he sat in the bathtub, singing to the radio. He got the carnet signed by a chirpy man in a bath towel, an...

We spent a day in Lucknow, which gave us just long enough to visit ‘The Residency’, the scene of the Indian Mutiny in 1875. All 3000 of Lucknow’s British occupants and anyone else opposed to the Indian independence movement fled there and sheltered in the basements. 2000 of them perished. So many people died at once that they dug mass graves around the church. Then the church was blown to smithereens by cannons. There wasn’t as much left of the buildings as I had imagined- I had pictured a great Victorian house with a few bullet holes in it, dust covers over Victorian chaise longues like at Miss Haversham‘s. In fact it was less intact than many roman ruins I’ve seen. There were a lot of bullet holes though, so I got that bit right. The most interesting feature was the chipmunks. They had the run of the place, and peered at the tourists with distaste. Our ride to Varanasi was very wet. The rain started by ‘blattering‘, and quickly moved on to ‘bucketing‘, with ‘sheeting’ stra...