Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

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...

The road from Dharamsala to Chandigarh was flooded in 3 different places.  Not actually flooded really, more that the local river had just decided on a more practical route, as rivers do. Adam rode through them, fast. I strode through purposefully, up to my thighs in murky brown water.  I held my chin high and avoided all eye-contact.  It was embarrassing. By the evening I had nappy rash from the wet jeans. Chandigarh, it transpired, was very far away.  Not in terms of kilometres, which was a mere 270kms.  But in terms of sheer effort, and the time those little metres would take, it was far.  We arrived in the dark.  It was an unpleasant journey on massively congested roads.  India's consumption of cars has increased dramatically over the past 5 years, but funnily enough, all the money set aside for public use like roadbuilding gets diverted to politician's pockets to, say, buy more cars.  It was a Sunday, and apparently some...