Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

  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 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 morning we were expecting escorts, and there weren’t any, which cheered us.  We set off, and promptly lost the German. He was doing 80kph again.  Apparently he had somewhere to be.     The land was still beautifully green, with bee-keeper boxes dotting the sides of the roads.  We were rounding the bottom of the mountains, following the river.  We stopped at a check post, where a guard tried to surreptitiously hold my hand while showing me a poster of Switzerland.  It was odd. We were escorted for 15 minutes through the most dangerous part of Kohistan. It didn’t look any different to the rest, and nothing untoward happened.       The mountains were snowcapped, the light amazing, and the waterfalls suitably sploshing.     Shame about the road-  it disintegrated further, with streams flowing over it, and bits of road tumbled into the ravines below.  The pot-holes were truck sized.      ...

  We didn’t get attacked by any cheetahs.  There was a fairly horrendous attack of food poisoning though.  I woke in the pitchblack, covered in sweat and groaning with stomach pains.  I spent the next 6 hours until daylight making painful urgent excursions up the hillside with a headtorch on to deposit my Pringles in strategic locations.  Vomiting whilst wearing a headtorch is a bizarre experience… With daybreak, I started to deposit from the other end too, which got a lot more difficult as people started walking up and down the hill.  Then my legs gave way in the middle of the path, and I sat there pathetically, unable to stand, while Adam and the German slept on.   Eventually Adam got up and rescued me. They were quite sweet about it and barely mentioned the violent noises they’d been subjected to all night. I had a beautiful private moment of hilarity at about 7am, when I had made it up to truly spectacular spot to erm, deposit.  I squatte...