Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

  The next morning saw us head towards Skardu, after a jump-start from the noise-makers.      We stopped briefly at a chai stand for an informative and friendly chat with a family from Karachi.  We swapped conspiracy stories about 9/11 and discussed Zeitgeist.  They answered the marmot question- this was a National Park for bears.  Bears like trout.  And marmots.     We photographed the bridge that was featured on all tourist posters across Pakistan, and were pleased we had made it.      At Satpara Lake we ate fish and chips courtesy of Peter.  It was excellent, and made up for not catching any. They were damming the lake.  Jack looked pleased.  The roads around Skardu were a bit scary, even with our now frankly vast experience of road conditions.  We went through a river, and then wound round mountains, stuck to the side like those things that slide down windows… Yaqoob miraculously squeezed us thro...

  We rode by jeep up to the Deosai plains and Skardu.  It was a long, long journey. The scenery was, as always, incredible.  The roads were, as always, bloody awful. The Deosai plains are at an altitude of 4000 meters.  The villages had nomads with giant herds of various creatures flocking about, and strange herders on horseback.   I have never been to Mongolia, but according to Jack it was very similar.     The villages up there are covered in 10 foot blankets of snow for two thirds of the year.  It was an unbelievable sort of place. Everyone looked very hardy, like they’d been carved out of wood.     In the back of the jeep the conversations were animated- Peter the anarchist told outrageous conspiracy stories, talking a mile a minute and waving his hands around.  Jack cut in occasionally with a question about dams.  Brock tried to keep everyone serene. Our friendly driver Yaqoob with his amazing hat took...

The way down to Gilgit was fairly uneventful, and a lot faster than the way up.  Just as we were getting there, there was an enormous truck that had fallen through the road and was stuck, half on the road and half off, with steel cables all over the ground.      There was no way round. The trucks had amassed a few miles back.  We had to turn back for an hour to the next bridge.  We arrived to find the Karimabad gang already in situ.  We spent another pleasant evening chatting, and found an English guy riding an old Aussie postie bike called Dot Cotton from Australia to the UK.  We went trout-fishing.  In Pakistan.  It pleased me greatly.     A shabby old jeep took five of us, with only three rods and two hooks.  We had adventure in our hearts and the smell of grilled fish in our noses…. We didn’t catch one bleeding fish the whole time.   The actual fishing was very relaxed though, despite the strange numbers of Pak...

  The next day saw the Germans head off towards the Khunjerab border to look at China.  We bucked the trend for a bit of anti-social alone time, and headed off to find the walnut cake.  Karimabad was only a couple of hours down the road.  We found the cake.  We ate the cake.  We fell in love with the cake, the café, and the town. It was perfect in every way so we found a hotel and stayed the night. We met a great Lahori guy in the café.  He told us how his whole family thought he was mad for being there as it was so dangerous, and then laughed.  We clicked. Our hotel was amazing, with sunflowers and apricot trees, and a goat we fed.      We met some fellow hotel-dwellers, and spent a pleasant evening gabbing over a big communal meal.   We found a Brock, a young Aussie mechanic who was on a 2 year trip round the world.  There was a Peter, an old hippie anarchist; a lanky guy with bizarrely loud Homer Simpson patterned...

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 ...

The next day we headed for Gilgit.   I was still unwell and weak, and had a horrible hysterical moment of lying collapsed in the dust by the side of the road, trying to force down 3 strawberry cakes just to have something in my stomach.    I have never met a cake I didn’t like, but this was similar to being force-fed polystyrene wrapped in cotton wool. The roads were really not roads now.  They were mostly rock-strewn dirt tracks wedged tightly against massive cliff-drops.  We bounced along and didn’t look down.  Me and God renewed our occasional acquaintance.   The Indus river churned impressively below us, looking like it wanted feeding.       We found a restaurant with real food, and I was so pleased I ordered two of everything.  Sadly my stomach had shrunk.  I still ate until I physically could not stuff any more in, but it was less than I would normally have for a snack. The German, prone to periods of rapid accelerati...