Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

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...

  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 ...