Globe Gallivanting- motorbiking across the world

The next day we were invited to an English class celebration by the river bank. We met many young men keen to practise their English (some even more keen to try practising it on me).  The group included a very mature and bright 13yr old girl, the only woman there, and amazing in her bravery.  I wouldn’t have done it at that age, especially as she shyly hid behind her dupatta to tell me she hated it when all the men of Gilgit looked at her.    She spoke to me about a car accident they had had a couple of days previously on the cliff edge when their car had stalled, and said that Allah forgave them for it so it was not bad.  I asked her favourite subject and she said Islamic Studies, where they are taught the stories from the Koran in Urdu.  (They did not learn Arabic, meaning they learnt the Koran’s prayers by rote.)   I asked her for a story from her Islamic Studies class, and she told me of Fahuveen.  Fahuveen was a young man of who...

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...

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.      ...