Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

We rode for eight hours or so.  Five of those hours were trying to leave Bangkok.  I was chief navigator, which is probably the main reason.  A few people have subtly suggested I couldn't find my way out of a sack.  But honestly, it really didn't help that motorbikes aren't allowed on any of the highways, and the only roads straight out of Bangkok are highways.  Bikes have to meander down little zigzag roads to go the same route, and there's billions of the buggers.   We bought 3 maps. We could see the roads on the maps, we just couldn't see them in real life.  A huge number of people tried to help us.  Once when we stopped, one man drew us his own map and explained it fully (in thai), while another girl phoned a friend so she could explain in English where to go.  Everyone was amazingly patient, except for us.  Personally I was chewing my own face off with frustration.  The roads were huge, and there were police everywhere. ...

  We left Gilgit as planned.  The massive problem with the bike turned out to be the starter motor.  It was a good job we had Brock the mechanic to help, and a mechanic scraped the carbon off some important bit, and it was all go again.  In England they would have just replaced the starter motor completely.  Here, anything is possible.  With Manfred purring happily again, we bombed it down the hill.  There were no major hiccups, and it all went a lot easier the second time.    We bounced over the same holes and through the same rivers, and whizzed through checkpoints with made up visa numbers and silly occupations like ‘gymnast’ and ‘dictator’.     We raced all the way through to Besham.  We stopped for lunch in Dasu.  We met a guide, who advised us against staying in Besham & Batagram because of the Swat Valley fanatics.  He mimed a giant beard, to explain.   (The Swat Valley has its transport hub ...

The next day we were due to leave for Passu, a 3 hour drive away.   It took us 8 hours.  The place was full of JCB s, excavating vast chunks out of the mountains to widen the road.   The ‘culvert construction’ diversions continued, mostly into mud.     We only fell in once, when we were going through a river and hit an underwater boulder.  There was no disaster though, I jumped off and pushed the bike back up, and we carried on.         We stopped for watermelon and mango juice at a roadside shack, by a bubbling brook that the drinks were kept cold in.       The route was stunning.  Every time you turned a corner it got more incredible, with massive mountain vistas.  There were huge chunks of snow and ice.  There was an enormous glacier in the distance.     The water rushing everywhere meant there were fruit orchards and grassy meadows.   The restaurant was perched high on a rock in ...

We rode past the nice-looking campsite and onwards- 150km in the wrong direction based on a border crossing on our map that didn’t actually exist. The towns got smaller and smaller. We stopped and asked a burly army officer how to cross into Bulgaria. He looked very surprised when he eventually understood, and sent us back exactly the way we came. We stopped at a disco garage for strong coffee to buzz us back towards the Bulgarian border. Bulgaria awaits. The border had a brilliant soviet-style ‘Republic of Bulgaria’ sign, and we passed the now-defunct ‘Disinfection Bay’ without anyone trying to hose us down with anything. Everyone was whizzing through without showing anything, so we got stopped and asked for our passports. some communist-looking flats in the rain. The crossing was great though, and the bit of Bulgaria we arrived into was excellent, with very shabby little villages, and Lada cars everywhere, and dodgy-looking huddles of young men at roadside bars. We changed some mon...

We headed off towards the main roads, with our new desire to visit Halkidiki driving us forward. We rode down the first prong of Halkidiki and immediately ran out of petrol. Just made it on reserve to the petrol station though- our luck was really in that day what with bears and all. We spotted our first snake, about a meter long, but with its head squashed as though someone had run it over on purpose. The prong was fairly pretty, but possibly not quite as beautiful as expected. We rode through a strange deserted tourist resort with a few rich Greeks eating over-priced fish in a beach-side restaurant- one place had a fish dish for 65 Euro. We got sneered at for only ordering coffee, and the coffee itself was undrinkable, with the grains lurking in the bottom. It was possible a very refined way to drink coffee, but I am of the Nescafe school, and I took a gulp and had to discreetly spit. It transpired we weren’t going to be able to afford restaurant food in Greece either, and we fou...

snow-topped mountains in Greece? We arrived into Igoumenitsa at 6am. It was freezing and an icy mist gathered about our ears. We were a bit fed up, but the scenery was at least impressively Greek from the outset. There was no-one else on the roads and we felt like Adventurers, and stopped to make coffee by the road-side. A French woman pulled up in a Renault (what else?), and gesticulated bizarrely at Adam. We rode on. The mountains were stunning, with the mist still swirling, and lots of pine trees and craggy rocks. We stopped to make lunch in one of the prettiest logging sites I have ever seen, and fell asleep on a convenient log and got covered in tree sap. It was a good snooze though and we needed it after the bloody ferry experience. lunch and a snooze... There were lakes with salt-flats and marshland and we resolved to wild-camp. see, quite nice isn't it? We looked around for ages for a good spot, following little dirt tracks to nowhere and having to heave the bike back ...

We rode across from Sorrento to Bari the next day, via Matera. The plan was to catch the Bari to Igoumenitsa (Italy to Greece) ferry overnight. It was a 17-hour car-ferry with cabins for the posher passengers, and for us smegs a few scattered seats. There was trepidation, oh yes. We set off on the fast and boring motorway. Adam picked up a German in a service station doing a big group tour on a boring-looking bus, and he chatted for while. I think he thought we were a bit mad when he discovered what we were up to though, and he left fairly promptly, though his bus did keep passing us and honking, so possibly he’d informed the driver. We stopped for lunch at a non-descript garage where there was nothing at all non-meat on offer except one sorry-looking, slightly congealed apricot tart. I ate it. Obviously. The barwoman was out-Italianing the Italians with her loudness and banging about of cutlery, and one old guy got so worried he actually left without getting anything at all. We ran aw...