Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

We raced down Darjeeling hill quickly. The horrid road at the bottom was busy. There were flat tea estates everywhere, bright green with little tea bushes, all grown to the same height. There was no one around though, so we snuck in and took tea photos. The road carried on and on until we officially arrived in the Middle of Nowhere, otherwise known as Jalpadwara National Park. We spent the night in a great little hotel with giant tiger photos on the walls, and met some friendly army officers who asked what caste we were. It was a hard one to reply to.   The ride across Assam saw us stop for tea in a side-of-the-road shack. As we were sat busily consuming rasgullai, there was an earthquake. The whole place shook, and we watched the bike bounce up and down in a ferocious manner. Everyone ran outside to stare at the roof but nothing collapsed. Everyone else seemed a lot calmer than I did. Later we discovered there had been 6 earthquakes in the last 6 weeks. We troop...

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...