Famo Adventure Motorcycling Guide

Imagine you’ve lived in your small, dusty desert city all of your life, taking out the trash, shopping at the markets, maybe running a small camel butchery. Two kilometres from the town centre there sits the old town, a citadel, a majestic arg built 2500 years ago by your great ancestors. The citadel was the original incarnation of your modern town, consisting of a massive fortress overlooking the maze of rabbit-warrens and dens that comprised the living quarters and workplaces of the people.

The foundations of your modernized city were laid not many more than 150 years ago. Contrast this with the arg that was home to the people in your area for over two thousand years; offering more civilized shelter and many more trade opportunities than a standard caravan serai, it also played an important role in the lives of merchants and travellers as they passed along the ancient Silk Road route towards whatever their fortune may have been.

Today, both the ancient and modern cities of Bam look like war-ravaged places in the throes of being rebuilt. On the 26th of December 2003 an earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale flattened 70% of the modern city and killed 52,000 people. The destruction caused by the earthquake is still being overcome four years later; however it seems unlikely that the efforts to restore the old city will ever return it to its past glory.

Destruction of the Citadel “Arg e Bam”

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As I made my way out of the deserts and fuel uncertainties of Sistan and Baluchestan and passed into the outskirts of Bam, it’s date-palms blowing in the lazy desert winds, I set my heart on finding the guesthouse that I’d been hearing about over the past couple of weeks from sand-battered, east-bound travelers. It was on my mind that I wanted to meet the man in charge, Akbar, to see what kind of stories he had to tell. After realising the roads on the map bore very minor resemblance to the actual town layout, I pulled over to ask a local man where Akbar’s guesthouse was and he replied with a jovial “Akbar is is here, I am Akbar, pleased to meet you, would you like a room?” In some mysterious way it felt like he knew I would arrive at that time, as though a magical desert wind carried news to him of the approach of a strange-looking traveler on a ridiculous motorcycle. Mystical tales aside though, I suppose if your house is a rest stop for travelers in the desert, you spend a lot of time standing outside waiting for people to come along.

Akbar was very friendly, somewhat quirky and thoughtful. He has seen a lot in his lifetime, including the destruction of his guesthouse and the death of some people very close to him. Nevertheless, his positive outlook on life breaks through and you start to believe that it will only be a year before the whole town is rebuilt and everything is back to normal. There are big plans for a new three-storey guesthouse on the land next to the current establishment, and it appears that new techniques are being implemented to ensure the structure will withstand earthquakes; something that Akbar asserted was of the utmost importance. His attitude towards the old citadel of Bam was sad, but hopeful that the team rebuilding the site will have some success with the project, considering the tiny amount of architectural documentation they have to work with.

I stayed in Bam for a few nights and worked on coming to grips with the modernity and downright normality of Iranian people and their lifestyle. I’d walk into town, sit down at a local kebab place, have a great dinner and walk home past the ice-cream stalls. It was hard to imagine I was in the middle of a Persian desert. Unfortunately though, after a few days I had to pack up and leave my little oasis of Bam. Next stop, Shiraz, for some authentic Iranian wine!

My first night in Iran was spent sleeping off the day’s hair-raising activities in my very neat hotel room. It’s hard to describe how welcome a hot shower is after weeks under the cold tap, but rest-assured I gave myself a good scrubbing and came out looking like… a traveller.

The next morning broke with sunshine and the realisation that I’d have to get on my bike again and ride off into the desert towards Bam. I packed up and went for a walk into town, pretty much putting off the inevitable business of riding for as long as possible, until my checkout time came and I had to grab my bike and go. As I was leaving town, I decided to stop for lunch at a local kebab shop, and went in to make an attempt at ordering, to the amusement of the kid behind the counter. I ended up with about 5 pieces of bread and three kebab sticks, two whole tomatoes and a plate of onion. Sound. Just as I was about to pay, a young guy in a shalwar kameez came in and offered to pay for my food. I said no about ten times and eventually gave in. It turns out he was an army guy on a break from his duties.

He said it was stupid to try and ride to Bam at midday and that I should stay at his place tonight and he’d get some mates around for a party. We ended up cruising around town for a couple of hours, then went back to the flat and listened to music and chatted about the differences between what we see on the news in the west and the real Iran. It was a good night and his mates were all hilarious. They spoke about how many girlfriends they had and taught me a couple of pickup lines in Farsi, like “salaam kosh kele” means hey beautiful!

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This fella was a crackup, I’m not sure where they learn these moves.

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My friend ready for work and me looking worse for wear. Time to get riding!

Zahedan to Bam

Wow, did I underestimate the difficulty of this stretch of road or what? It cuts through a desert called the Dash-e Lut, a 480km by 320km expanse of nothing, pretty much abiotic (no life) and boasts record surface temperatures of up to 71 degrees celsius… That’s seriously hot! It’s sandy, full of massive ergs (huge, wind-blown dunes) and liable to swallow you up in a sinkhole or underground trench if you feel the need to explore it. Luckily enough they built a nice tar road all the way through to Bam…

The general feeling when riding through a desert like the Dasht-e Lut is that if anything goes wrong, and you get stuck there, you’ll last maybe a day in the sun without water (sorry, no shade provided). Riding seems to feel like you’re heading straight into a salon-grade hairdryer, sans diffuser, with no rest-stops or petrol stations along the way. I hit a couple of sandstorms, the shearing gusts dropping, hitting then dropping away again, making a nightmare out of trying to keep the bike up. I stopped twice, got off and crouched down behind it until the sand stopped stinging.

The first incident on this stretch occurred about 30km after the desert section. I came across an oasis across the road from an army base, the wildlife consisting of a few date palms and a French cyclist stretched out beneath, looking very overheated. He’d ridden from Bam early that morning and made it to the only piece of shade. I happily gave him most of the food my mates in Zahedan had packed for me and half of the water I was carrying, not so risky because I only had 100km further to get to shelter and a shop. He told me that someone from the army barracks had come out and given him a bottle of water when they saw him arrive, for which he was very grateful. He asked me what the conditions of the stretch I’d just ridden were like and I shook my head and looked at him. The only advice I had, and it was left-over from the UK cyclist, Craig Foster, who I traveled with in outback Australia, was to do it in two goes of 50km each, one starting at about 7pm and another at 4am. He wouldn’t want to have been stuck there during the day without any trees. I rode on hoping he’d make it through alive and suddenly wishing I’d given him more water.

The second incident was a very close call. I hit reserve without a town, or a sign to a town in sight. I had a vague hunch that it was about another 20km to the first village. I freaked out because my reserve-tap range is only 23km. For anyone who doesn’t know how it works, there’s a tap on the side of the bike that you turn to “on” when you fill the bike up with petrol. When you run out of petrol, you switch the tap to “reserve” and then you know there’s maybe about 4 litres left in the tank to get you to a petrol station, kind of like a very primitive fuel gauge that doesn’t really inspire much confidence when you hit the warning level in the Iranian desert. I stopped a couple of times in high head-wind conditions to ensure the bike didn’t labor and use up too much precious fuel. I kept my speed to an average of about 60km/h and kept my eyes peeled for a town on the horizon.

The thing with mirages is this: it doesn’t look like anything specific really, it just looks like it might be something, maybe a group of houses way off in the distance and to the left, then as you approach it you veer off to the right and realise it was nothing, or a rocky hill… You add your hope to the hills and your mind sees a Co-op!

24km later, nothing in sight, fearing the worst, wondering how far I could push it if it ran dry, I crested a bend and rode straight into a village. Yaaay for organisation I was so keen to get petrol I asked a man to take me to the station immediately, but he laughed and indicated that I needed to relax, so I went into the little shop, bought a drink and had a great chat with the young kid in there, who kept saying Mark Bosnich to me and laughing and then introduced me to his even younger apprentice, who he called a monkey and delegated the duties of monkey noises to. The younger child gladly obliged and ran around the shop like a monkey until they both collapsed with laughter. By that time I had cooled down so I went and filled up the tank, thanked the monkey boys with a “ah, but mark viduka…” and rode to Bam.

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On to Bam!!

The Taftan border was a killer, a busload of Pakistani tourists having arrived at the immigration office about five minutes before I arrived. I waited almost an hour until one of the young guys in the line suggested I push in because I was a foreigner. Looking around at the people in the line, they all seemed to encourage me forward so I walked through and was stamped out within minutes. It was lucky because the massive sand storms I’d experienced along the stretch towards the border looked to me to be very rain-filled and aggressive on the Iranian side. I crossed into Iran with very little hassle and made my way to the customs and immigration building to have my bike and myself sworn into the country.

The first thing I noticed, after the small spits of rain landing on me as I headed towards the customs centre, was the change back to Western clothes for the Iranian officials. There wasn’t a Shalwa Kameez in sight. The second thing I noticed was that I could see the face of the woman who checked me into immigration. There wasn’t a Burka to be seen either. A ‘burka’ covers the whole face except for eyes, this woman was wearing a ‘chador’, which in Farsi literally means tent. So it was a head-to-toe black covering, but I could see the quizzical expressions on the woman’s face when I tried to ask her some questions in English… the next thing I noticed of course was that, unlike Pakistan, Iranian people don’t speak much English. I’d have to say the funniest thing I noticed was the MASSIVE bag of firecrackers behind the customs clearance desk… It looks like some Pakistani kids won’t be having their birthdays celebrated as loudly as they’d have wished this year, and an Iranian customs official will seriously be getting the party started hahaha… party…what party??

So, all formalities finished, I walked back out to my bike and realised that the sky had turned a very ominous, menacing, mordor-like shade of black… I rode to the gate, ready to leave the compound when a man came out yelling and waving for me to stop. Fear of guns kicked in and I pulled over. The very friendly man explained to me using hand gestures that if I wanted to go from Mirjaveh (the Iranian border town) to Zahedan (First Big Town), I’d need an escort, for my own safety against the hoardes of villains and vagabonds hiding in the still-Baluch areas of eastern Iran. I thought “no worries”, until of course a fresh-looking soldier of about 17 turned up without a gun and expected me to let him on the back of my bike, keeping in mind the dark lord and his black, billowing clouds overhead!! I said “um, no.” He indicated that it wasn’t a problem and hopped inside a trayback ute that drove up to the gate after some radio communications. We headed out together, and in about 5km arrived at a military check-post. I’m talking middle-of-the-desert boom-gate, with an army contingent of about 10 men, all wearing desert camouflage and hezbollah-style checkered headscarfs to sheild their faces from the super-strong-wind-carrying-sand-into-the-eyes weather. The leader of the unit came up to me and said very forcefully, but in a friendly kind of way, that I’d have to let the soldier escort jump on the back of my bike. When I think back on it, I’m sure the young guy only wanted a ride home for the weekend and I was only really against the idea because of the impending storm. One very interesting thing to note about the Iranian military is that service is compulsory, and many guys aren’t very keen on being there. I asked the soldier if he would like protective gear but he shook his head… This time it was me giving the patronising “it’s your funeral” look.

Approximately one minute after leaving the checkpoint, we were hit by a hailstorm of epic proportions. I had no idea that a bike was capable of actually staying upright in wind and water like this. The roads were wonderful, which was a small blessing, because I could barely see the oncoming traffic from 10m away, and we were being blown sideways maybe 2 or 3 metres by the wind. Seriously dangerous stuff! I tried to make myself as big as possible to protect the soldier guy behind me, because he had absolutely no protective clothing on, and I began to curse the shits for putting me in the position of putting someone else in danger. We rode for about 30km in the rain and hail until we saw a sign for a mosque, the soldier waved me towards it and we headed into the compound to be greeted by another army unit using the mosque as a base. I’m unsure why they have such a heavy military presence in that area, maybe for border security, but at that point I didn’t care and was just happy to be out of the rain, even if it meant an hour of being the new joke of the military unit hehe. They were really nice guys actually, I couldn’t get through to them though the fact that even though they did beat us to the world cup in 1998, where were they now?

The following lines sum up succintly the sentiments that Pakistan and Iran have for Australia.

Pakistan: “Oooh, Australia! Cricket World Cup champions, Matthew Hayden is a master blaster… and a very handsome man!”
Iran: “Hahaha Australia! World Cup 1998, we beat you. Mark Bosnich! Mark Bosnich! hahahaha!!!”

So my army escort chickened out for the rest of the ride to Zahedan and I was instead escorted by the man in charge of the unit I was currently with. I asked him if he wanted a helmet and he said no… 10km down the road he asked me for the helmet! You get that in countries where the motorcycle capacity is not allowed to exceed 150cc. At least he had a pistol.

When I finally arrived in Zahedan, I accepted another escort from a local police dude on a scooter, who took me around to find a hotel. It seemed that all of the rain I’d ridden through had hit Zahedan really badly and the streets seemed to be covered in a bit of undrained water. As we rode down one street to get to another part of town, there appeared to be a traffic jam, and the water was up to the windows of some cars in the street. Fearing for the bikes, we turned around and went down the next street, but we’d been down this street before and now there were cars in water up to the roof. The water was RISING! At this point I started getting very nervous and the policeman seemed to be frantically trying to find a way out of the city centre. We rode past a few houses that had crumbled due to the rain and eventually squeezed through some traffic and found ourselves back on higher ground. I later heard that the storm was the worst in 10 years and they hadn’t seen hail in those parts of Iran since then either. Luckily I found a good place to stay (and very cheap) for my first night in Iran.

Everything looked so clean, the hotel room was spic and span, the buildings well kept, the lawns trimmed and the public spaces devoid of horrible piles of garbage. My first impressions of Iran were mixed somewhere between my exasperation with the lunatic authorities giving me dangerous escorts, the tumultuous weather and the really beautiful and well-kept architecture. Underlying all of this was a sense of friendliness from everyone I met, even the madman hezbollah-styled guys at the military posts.

From Islamabad, I rode only to get to Iran, and expected it to take me about four or five days through different conditions, with route decisions based on the attitudes of the local authorities. I had to organise enough cash to get me to the border, and through Iran to Turkey, because there are really no cash machines that accept Australian cards in Iran, or the desert areas of Baluchistan for that matter.

I took out about 2000 rupees and 750 EU and headed south to Multan, then west through Dera Ghazi Khan. An official at a boom-gate told me I wasn’t allowed to ride the stretch beyond his boom-gate and that I’d have to take an alternative route south to Shikarpur and then back up north through Jacobabad to Quetta, which looked on the map to be about 150km extra… I wasn’t happy so I put on the face that got me into trouble by the army in Laos “I don’t understand you, and I don’t want to turn around”. After maybe 15 minutes of waving me away his colleague let me through with a “it’s your funeral” look on his face.

Baluchi police officers – is that John Cleese??

I passed through the boom-gate and headed west towards Loralai, with a police escort provided to me by the Baluchistan authorities. The first escort I received was from a cool old guy on a scooter with snazzy sunnies. I could hardly keep up with his little 90cc postie bike as he flew around the mountain bends. It was novel to have protection, but I don’t think we could have done much in an ambush… at best I could have pulled a “throw sand in the eyes” move, being in the desert and all.

Plenty of sand to throw… A wicked sand storm on the way to the Iranian border

So this was the beginning of a few days of extremely non-sensical escorts and some mighty strange police characters. At one checkpost the police chief (a guy of about 20 wearing clip-up Adidas pants) told me that I’d be murdered for sure, then did that thing where he’d laugh as though he was joking, then put on a serious face again and say “No, you will be murdered.” I pretended to have large bollocks and told him I didn’t care because they’ve probably all got muskets or something and couldn’t hit me from three paces.

Some kids at a tea stop (mud house) between Dera Ghazi Khan and Quetta

An old Baluchi man

The town I “shoulda” stayed in that night was Loralai, however I decided to push on to Quetta. About 5 minutes after the decision it started getting dark and I knew if I was out after dark that I would “definitely” stand a good chance of being murdered. I tried a new tactic and rode up to the police station in Sanjawi and said “Excuse me please kind police officers, I am looking for a hotel.” To which they responded “No problems, you can stay here!!” Well, that was great except that the police chief took a liking to me and took me fruit picking, showed me fashion TV and then asked me to sleep in his room. I politely declined and put my tent up in the police grounds. The next day I left VERY quickly, although they tried to give me a police escort again and had me bailed up in the next towns police station for an hour.

Children playing in a small town on the way to the border

I spent about 10 minutes in Quetta, where a man suggested that Osama was actually in Pakistan and not Afghanistan, and that he was living in Quetta if I must know… I didn’t want to know so moved on

The stretch between sunny Quetta and the sunny Iranian border was sunny and hot to say the least. I rode through dry, dusty towns and police checkpoints, accepting tea from officials until I came to Dunbaldin, the One Good Town before the Iranian border. I was hot and dusty, after riding through a dust-storm or twelve, so decided my trick of riding up to the police station was in order. Oh, did I forgot to mention that I’d nearly run out of money and had enough for fuel to just get me to the border, the main reason why I wasn’t staying in hotels. The police station experience here was much better, and the good folks cooked me dinner and let me stay on the ramparts with the rest of the company. It was amazing sleeping under the stars on the ramparts of a police base in the wilds of Southern Pakistan, and I’d consider it one of my best experiences of the trip.

Tea shop owners cooking up some food

The next day was basically more sandstorms until the border to…. guess where

Cheap fuel retailers on the Pakistan side of the border

Peshawar to Dir and the Lowari Pass

Okay, so I guess you’re supposed to fill your blog with pictures of people riding off into the distance, chasing a setting sun, sweeping through a river of fog, being chased by elephants or langurs or whatever nestles in the jungles of the parts of the world you’re cruisin’ through. My wildlife contact has been quite limited, and not really up for a chase, mainly yaks and goats. I have a new respect for goats and how they, and what they (or who they) choose to stand on. Yaks be nimble and yaks be quick, two new animal facts that I can slickly represent in a nursery rhyme form…

Pakistan!! below is Billy, chasing the sunset.

We left Peshawar in search of quiet back roads and chose a path through the Lowari pass, a mountainous traverse that would take us up to Chitral, and Sor-Laspur, the jumping off point for the highest polo ground in the world- Shandur Top!!

We spoke to many (and when I say many, I mean probably 20 or so) people about the state of the Lowari pass and Shandur top. You see, these passes are both about 3500m high (the tallest mountain in Australia is 2100m) and at the time of year we were there (early May) it wasn’t a certainty that the roads would be completely clear of snow and ice. We kept our ear to the ground in Peshawar and Dir, and asked at every opportunity whether we’d make it through. The answers were disconcertingly bipolar, with policemen and civillians both giving us whatever answers popped into their head. Descriptions containing “certain death” were mixed with phrases such as “what are you worried about, you’re on a bike”, leaving us with enough confusion to decide to give it a go: about a 50/50 chance that the roads would be open. We’d just have to be prepared to turn around if the going got too tough.

The first town after Peshawar was Dir, and we stayed one night to rest for the next-day attack. Billy and I discovered a pocketknife-manufacturing cottage-industry (yes, a couple of steps down from the assault rifle cottage-industry described in the last post), and ended up going out to the shops four or five times to buy just “one more” knife because they were so great for souvenirs.

Refuelling before heading up the Lowari pass

Just a quiet note on mountain passes in remote, developing parts of the world. The towns on the higher side of the pass are only accessible by vehicle after the snow melts, so they often don’t get food or supplies (other than what they produce themselves) for a large chunk of the year. The roads regularly become covered in snow and ice, and when the snow melts, the roads are often covered by fast-flowing rivers of ice-cold water. The first few weeks after the passes open, the roads are jam packed with traffic i.e. huge trucks carrying provisions like flour, cows, and Kinder Suprise. The roads are often destroyed by the ice, and landslides carry trees, power lines, trucks, cars and motorcycles into whatever parts of the world people never care to venture. It’s all very dangerous and exciting stuff.

The first day was the Lowari pass, 3118m high, a single road from Dir to Chitral winding it’s dirt way through kilometre upon kilometre of hair-raising terrain.

Billy and I Waiting for Traffic (photo by Trish)

The traffic was horrendous, all these trucks are taking food and supplies to the Chitralis, who have been eating snow for months. It wasn’t uncommon to be stuck behind a truck for half an hour, breathing diesel fumes and making dangerous attempts at overtaking on the cliff side of the hill. In all fairness the trucks were usually friendly enough to wave us by in a clear spot, but we’d just fly past and encounter another truck in half a kilometer.

Having a stab at the river crossing. The helmet was removed to maximise visibility of the riverbed. You have to walk through the crossing first, to discover the shallowest path, then ride carefully through, paddling the bike with your feet down on either side. This first crossing was the hardest because the shallowest path was made from a narrow bridge of concrete, about 1 foot under. On either side of the bridge there were drops of about two feet, enough to tip the bike over and cause big engine problems (water sucked in through the exhaust pipe, freezing temperatures cracking the engine casings etc.) We all got through okay, Billy first, then me, then Billy on Trish’s bike.

Problems…

This river crossing was a bit more difficult because it descends and goes around a corner. Billy is chasing Trish, who unfortunately dropped the bike as she was approaching the water’s edge. There was no damage to the bike, and the actual crossing went without a hitch.

I photographed these two men at a traffic jam caused by a road accident in which there was one fatality. The guy was carried through on a bed and placed into a van heading back down the hill to Dir. Many people were crying and one man removed his hat when the bed passed. Not good for the nerves.

The traffic conditions at the road blockages were pretty crazy, the trucks tended to push forward and fill up both lanes in both directions, so it took hours to clear the bottleneck. Often a jeep carrying passengers would come up behind us and beep the horn until we moved ahead into the tiniest little gap. We came to a traffic jam after riding over the pass and discovered a truck had snapped it’s front axle into two pieces while trying to steer around a hairpin corner. The truck was filling the corner completely and there was no possible way to squeeze through. Billy and I grabbed some shovels and picks and started digging a new road through the corner and some men jumped in to help. There were lots of people standing around staring and lots of people giving orders, but the little team we had going managed to build a new road in about half an hour and we were granted the honour of first ones through.

We finally descended out of the pass, not actually having experienced or seen much apart from some snow and trucks. We rode into Chitral and met the police superintendent, who welcomed us and asked us if we needed any help with anything. We said that we were interested to know whether or not the Shandur pass was open, and if we rode north, could we make it to Gilgit. He told us that the pass was closed… but might be open in a couple of days, something about a pass-clearing bulldozer waiting to be fixed. We stayed a couple more nights in Chitral and asked a few more people. Some foreign tourists had walked over the pass and were telling stories of 2m deep snow on the roads, not a good sign. In the end we decided that the disappointment of coming this far without giving it a go would be too hard to bear, so we decided to go for it. Besides, the thought of riding back over the Lowari pass brought us all out in a big, red rash.

Sor Laspur and Shandur Top

The road from Chitral to the Shandur pass was completely clear of traffic, probably due to the ominous sign that was the broken-down bulldozer we passed as we left the village. We had the most beautiful, empty, peaceful ride and started to really feel like we were on the right way to conquering the pass. We asked at a few small villages if Shandur top was accessible, and were once again given no idea as to the true condition of the roads.

Seriously mad scenery

We bought fuel at a junction to the large town just before the final jump off point and then headed into Sor Laspur, the tiny village at the foot of the pass.

Sor Laspur Main Street

Kiddies in Sor Laspur gawking at Billy’s BMW

The first action Billy and I took when we arrived was ride to ride up the pass and actually look and see how bad the roads actually were. It was only 23km to Shandur top, with plenty of daylight remaining. We headed up through about 5km of minor pebbleslides until we arrived at the first blockage. We’d heard rumours of two avalanches that had blocked the road, and the one we were looking at was reportedly the worst. What we came across was a true-blue avalanche, crossing the road in two spots, with each section covering between 10 and 20 metres of the road. Not too bad. Billy and I pushed Trish’s bike across both sections, which proved very tough and dangerous. Trying to control a motorcycle on ice is difficult, even if only pushing the machine, so we agreed some digging would be needed to make the slides flat enough to get Billy’s BMW and my Kawasaki across. The estimate was that it would take about an hour for us to dig out 30m of snow….

To be absolutely certain that we’d found the worst patch, Billy rode Trish’s bike the rest of the way up to Shandur top and reported that our first avalanche was indeed the worst and once we were through, we could make it all the way up. On the way back, we found a little injured lamb and Billy slung it over the bike and we took it back down to the village, who were very happy to have it back in time for dinner preparations… joking!

When we arrived back, and had delivered the lamb to it’s rightful owner, Trish told us that while we’d been away, the Sor Laspur social committee had decided to hold a meeting to decide whether or not they would head up to the landslide the next day and help us dig out the pass. We were chuffed and not a little bit honoured that the town elders were deliberating over our needs.

The next day we woke at about 7:30am and realised a team from the town were already up there and digging. Billy, Trish and I decided we’d stay another night and help out as best we could to get the pass open, so we rode up and grabbed some shovels (to the amusement of the townsfolk, who could actually use shovels).

Phew!

This 4WD came through from the other side while we were digging. We pushed it through and it was the first vehicle of the year over the pass from Gilgit side to Sor Laspur. We took heart at this and kept digging, hoping we’d be the first bikes through.

Sor Laspur Social Committee and Pass Digging Team

We made it through, on the bikes, after 8 hours of work. Billy and my estimate was somewhat off, thinking we could do it with three people in one hour, in the end we had half the town and a support team (one man making chai tea all day while we were digging!!!)

Looking back towards Sor Laspur

Pakistan is so amazingly picturesque.

Shandur Top

The top of the Shandur pass is flat and approximately 10km across, consisting of a lake, a (mud) shop selling chai tea… and a polo ground with stadium seating and a huge campsite for the thousands of Pakistanis that come from either side of the pass every year in July to experience the tournament between Chitral and Gilgit. The game is huge in the northern areas (bigger than cricket) and all the talk is about their favourite polo stars and who will win in the coming tournament. The lake was half covered in ice and the buildings were deserted, but the views were amazing and it felt like it would be an absolutely amazing place to be during summer.

Huttage at the top of the pass

The Road to Gilgit

We headed on to Gilgit, about 100km from the Shandur top, and met some Pakistani men fishing for trout in the river. They told us that many years before, when the English were occupying the country, they filled the Shandur lake with trout and now it offers some of the best fishing in the area.

Trout fishing in Pakistan

We came across another landslide about 2m high across the road. Luckily there was a bog on one side instead of a cliff, so we could push the bikes through and onto Gilgit.

A seemingly dosile Northern Pakistan Yak

The river carving out an avalanche

Cheeky kids on the road to Gilgit

Crazy looking hut on the road form Shandur Pass to Gilgit

Gilgit to Kunjerab Top and the Chinese Border

Gilgit was a great little spot to stay and ready ourselves for the trip up to the Chinese border. It also gave us excellent access to Skardu, which was quite a log and twisting 250km ride due east from Gilgit over unsealed roads, and unfortunately when we arrived, we were told that we’d never make it across the Doesai plains due to three deep river crossings. We had planned to ride due north anyway, to hit the Chinese border for a look, and conquer the last but definitely not least of the hunge mountain passes: Kunjerab (4300m).

The bikes parked just before Pasu, heading towards Kunjerab

The ride up to Sost in the upper Hunza valley took us to the jumping off point for our trip to the Chinese border. We rode for a full day and passed some incredible scenery around the town of Pasu. Massive cliffs and valleys carved out by millions of years of snowmelt were striking, and the town welcomed us with a huge stone message. We carried on to Sost in the Upper Hunza Valley, Billy bought some cheap Chinese imitation Columbia shoes at one of the little stalls in the town. We we were getting close to China because of all the trinkety crap you could buy in Sost.

Billy befriending some local goats heading to China

The trip to the border was approximately 27km through National Park land. We didn’t have to leave our passports at the immigration shelter near the boom gate leaving Sost, but we did need to check in and leave our details. Maybe it was because at that time of year we were the only tourists who would be going up and coming back, so it wasn’t a big problem for us to take our passports without being stamped out of the country.

The only traffic we passed on the way up to the border was a utility carrying some goats and about three Chinese tourist busses. The overwhelming feeling of desertion on the Korakoram Highway made us wonder whether we were in the off season, or maybe that the trade across this once-grand highway was in decline. From the reports of Danny and Adam, two English overlanders we met in Chiang Mai, the highway was packed the year before so I think it was a seasonal issue.

The park rangers

We entered Kunjerab National Park and payed the rangers the official price of about $6 each. They were incredibly jovial, I think because it was their first meeting with foreigners since winter had let up. They cooked us Chai tea, as is the custom over all of Pakistan when you have a guest or traveller in your home. Billy made a promise to bring the guys back some wine when they returned in three months time.

An inquisitive Yak

Riding a motorcycle up to the top of the world is indescribable, every corner is a gasp and I spent as much time standing up and looking behind me as I did looking in front, not a lot of time was spent with my eyes on the road. It was difficult to comprehend the vastness and beauty of everything I looked at.

Kunjerab in the background

Signs in English, Chinese and Russian

Messing about on top of the pass

We spent an hour up on the top of the pass, but the weather started to look like it was turning sour, so we decided it would be best to head back to Sost. Besides, it was bloody freezing and because of the altitude, we couldn’t do much more than walk around, and when we tried to have a snowball fight Billy and I almost fainted.

We passed Sost and stayed just north of Pasu, at a tiny hostel that cost me next to nothing (70 rupees so about $1). The next day we did some trekking to a couple of rope bridges, and met some of the local Pasu townsfolk.

5 star accommodation – check out the huge cliff behind the hotel!

An old, ramshackle suspension bridge in Pasu

Some village girls in Pasu

We all headed back to Gilgit and I prepared to ride south. This was the moment that I was to split up with Billy and Trish, and it was really sad. They’d been my traveling companions for about three months, so it was like losing some of my family. We said a teary goodbye and I rode off back down the Korakoram Highway to Islamabad to begin the next stage of my journey… Southern Pakistan and Iran!!!

I’m trying to think back to all I’d heard about Pakistan before entering the country. I suppose I have to go all the way back to my early childhood days watching cricket and hearing the name Imran Khan repeatedly on Wide World of Sports… and The Late Show (I made love to her like a tiiiiiger). The Pakistan display at World Expo ‘88 is lost in my memory and I think it may have been one of the pavilions my parents used to pretend to fall asleep in, the Pakistan expo budget extending only to a VHS cassette tape of primary industry production and, misguidedly enough, comfy chairs.

My mind then springs forward to news of the dispute between Pakistan and its neighbour India over the territory of Kashmir, and the acquisition by both countries of nuclear weapons. My final memory was that of riots in the streets after September 11, 2001 as president Pervez Musharaf voiced his support for George W. Bush in the global fight against terrorism, angering millions of Pakistanis who believed that their president had sold out to the west.

An interesting point to make is that this pre-conceived image of Pakistan has for some time been illuminated by the glow of a comment I read in Ted Simon’s book Jupiter’s Travels, where he describes The country as a relaxing respite after spending some months in India. That sounded good, India was nuts and I needed a respite.

So Pakistan loomed on the horizon as a black hole full of some pretty fanatical and war-affected people who are supposedly not as crazy as Indians, but just like Indians, can name every fast bowler and “master-blaster” that Australia has ever produced. Sounds good eh? But first a disclaimer:

Pakistan Disclaimer

This blog contains images that some people may find offensive. There are areas of Pakistan designated “tribal”, that do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Pakistan government due to their warring nature and proximity to war-affected Afghanistan. I was lucky enough to spend some time in the town of Sarakhot, Swat Valley, and witness the making and sales of firearms that are undoubtedly exported to all kinds of melees and skirmishes around the world. If you don’t think that you’ll be able to read about such naughty things, please skip this blog and read the next one about Iran, where firearms don’t play a large part in the day to day life of the people. Please be assured that I haven’t joined Al-Qaeda and I don’t support terrorism in any form, I do however find cottage industries incredibly fascinating, be it bee-keeping, quilting or manufacturing AK-47s.

Goodby India

As I rode towards the Wagga border at 10km/hr the last of the Indian touts swarmed at me saying

“You want Pepsi?”
“No thanks”
“You want Sprite?”
“No thanks”
“You want Coke?”
“No thanks”
“You want beer? Beer! Last beer until Turkey”
“Oooh! Beer! Hmmm, nah thanks, it’s still morning and I have to ride to Islamabad.”
OH WHAT A MISTAKE!!!!!!!! (I shoulda stocked up)

Islamabad

I crossed the border successfully and in no time was cruisin’ up the highway to Islamabad. The first time I stopped at a petrol station, a man came in and asked me a few questions. When I told him where I was from, his face lit up and he ended up buying me some juice and an iceblock, took me out to meet his kids in the car and offered to take me back to his house and have his wife cook me dinner… What on earth??? I respectfully declined and rode off shaking my head in disbelief. I’d just spent months in countries where people would talk for hours to graft some cash, or use that one word “bakshish” and expect you to go “hmmm, okay, I can’t really see what service you’ve performed but here’s some money just because you said bakshish…” and now I was confronted with genuine kindness and a desire to help my situation… what was this Pakistan place all about?

I rode on towards Islamabad and realised my battery was failing badly. Every time I’d stop the bike, it would complain seriously about starting. My fuse had blown again, I had no headlight, and the trouble needed to change it (remove bags, panniers, top-box, seat) was too much to worry about at the time. I rode on and by about 5:30pm realised I wouldn’t make Islamabad before dark, a frightening prospect given the number of trucks on the road. Have you ever scolded yourself for being lazy? I think the words that went through my mind were “If I had changed the fuse earlier, I wouldn’t be an invisible blob in the middle of this damn mess of high-beams and whizzing masses of metal” live and learn Damo…

Arriving at the Islamabad Tourist Campground at about 9pm to heartfelt greetings from Billy and Trish, was I glad to see them!!! There’s something really good about discovering a small ‘family’ while on the road, especially when you can go for weeks without having a proper conversation in English. We exchanged stories about what we’d seen since we split apart in southern Nepal and we began to lament the lack of beer.

Oh, did I mention that Islamabad has a tourist campground!! You wouldn’t believe it but a proper, leafy, facilitated campground like any that you’d see in Australia or Europe, except surrounded by a massive fence enshrouded with vines, not to mention the presence of maybe 15 soldiers for protection. I was tired, worn out after the long (380km) ride mixed with the border crossing, so I jumped into my tent to go to sleep and what did I hear? Thunder! It was starting to rain, no worries, a bit of rain never hurt anyone. I shut my eyes, breathed a sigh, and then… “AAAAALLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH” WOW!!! What the h*ll was that, it seemed that the imam at the local mosque was putting on a midnight performance. His voice would move from wailing the most intricate harmonies to growling the harshest-sounding religious readings I’d ever heard. I couldn’t understand any of it, but it sounded like he was amassing an army to invade the tents of all newly-arrived motorcycle-riding foreigners… I don’t know how but I slowly drifted off to sleep and awoke the next morning to find I’d been invaded by nothing more than a bunch of mozzies and a few mini-spiders…

The first plan on the agenda in Islamabad was organising a replacement debit card and trying to find a new battery for the bike. Billy, Trish and I headed to the market area and were given the typical run-around by the wallahs. The best way to make something happen in India or Pakistan is to suggest that it is not possible, as long as you phrase the question like “Hello, the battery for my large motorcycle is broken and I need to find a new one in Islamabad, but I don’t think this is possible?” you will almost always be rewarded with the reponse “No, possible.” The person who has just assured you that it is possible generally has no idea specifically what it is you want, they’ve basically just made a verbal agreement to try as hard as possible to organise what the silly westerner wants, even if it requires begging, borrowing, stealing or use of the phrase “No, it fits, look!” WHALLOP!!

Battery successfully whalloped into the bike.

I arranged a new debit card with the National Bank in Australia by telephone “Hello, I have lost my debit card and need a replacement in 4 days, but I don not think this is possible…” reponse “damn right it’s not possible, four days?? You’re dreamin’ mate, whats Pakistan like, isn’t that place like dangerous or somethin’???”

Shah Faisal Mosque, Islamabad

Peshawar

We decided to head west to the border town of Peshawar and take a trip out to the Khyber pass and maybe gun town if possible, depending on the stability of the tribal areas.

We stayed in the Peshawar Youth Hostel, an incredibly difficult to find place in a town west of Peshawar on the border of the tribal area and the khyber bazaar. The building was in the art-deco style and cared-for by a kind old gentleman with a crazy laugh and penchant for talking to himself. We were the only guests, something we came to experience a lot, usually explained away by the words “since September 11, 2001″. Guess what? The YHA card works at the Peshawar Youth Hostel and Trish had hers, Billy and I had to pay double the first night!!

Youth Hostel with our crazy old caretaker!!

We spent a couple of days organising the trips to the Khyber pass and gun town. Exploring the streets of Peshawar was eye-opening and I came to see more of that side of Pakistan, the unlimited hospitality. We were invited into the “shop” of an Afghani man and taken upstairs into a small room filled with old, dusty junk. I immediately noticed the wall covered in beautiful dresses deteriorating into trash after their 25 years of existance. I felt like Pip come to visit Miss Havisham in Satis House! The man explained the dresses were worn by Afghani women before Russia invaded. He showed me a selection of Russian knives and various other antiques removed from Russian soldiers during the war. It all seemed a bit sad, this ageing ex-mujaheddin soldier locked up in his stuffy room making unsuccessful attempts to sell me Bin Laden propaghanda. We scooted and went exploring the town further.

Everyone we ran into was incredibly curious and eager to know about our journey and what we thought of Pakistan. Peshawar really is the home of hospitality and we had our breakfast bought for us by a Pakistani man who had lived in Australia for 30 years but had returned to Peshawar to put his daughters through university. He was ripe with stories and explained how he arrived in Australia illegally, went to work over many years and finally became a citizen with legal residency status. He said that the decision to move back to Pakistan was his daughters’ and they chose to study in Pakistan for moral reasons.

Billy shopping for “tools” i.e. ex-dental equipment… ew!

The fresh banana shakes and apple juices made by this street vendor were fantastic! Once again someone in the store bought our drinks for us.

The local onion boy

A cart selling cold drinks and cordial

The locals buy all of their cooking ingredients from the street markets, this vendor is selling spices. The large orange pile of dust is maybe saffron??

An Afghan boy selling tea

This Peshawar mosque was bombed a week after we left the town, killing 15 people. Two days before, a hotel was targeted by a suicide bomber, killing a guard. The Sunni bombers were targeting Shia muslims during a celebration of the martyrdom of Mohammed’s grandson.

Meanwhile this boy shaves ice off a big block to make slushies!!

The use of child labour in Pakistan is very common. This young boy sews decoration onto a “traditional” dress with expert precision. One can only imagine what his hands and eyes will be like when he’s 20. Until the Pakistan government cracks down and enforces child labour laws, this will keep happening.

An Afghan couple from Kabul in Peshawar for a break. The woman is covered from head to foot, in the middle of summer!! There were two couples, but when I asked the other woman for a photo she responded “I don’t know, probably not” because her husband had left for a walk. I can’t understand these men and why they make their women hide. The situation for women in Pakistan is horrible, especially the Northwest Frontier Provinces around Peshawar, where a man can be killed for looking at a woman’s eyes for too long. There is such a vast contrast between the incredible hospitality shown by Pakistani people, and the horrible oppression of its women, sometimes knowing what to feel is difficult.

And a typical Peshawari bus

The Khyber Pass, Afghan Border

The Khyber Pass is famous for both the saying “up the Khyber Pass”, which everyone knows is rhyming slang for up the bottom, and as the wild-west, gunslinging, bandit-prone frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Billy, Trish and I decided to catch a pickup truck out through the tribal areas to the border town of Landikotal to catch a glimpse of Afghanistan. It took a couple of days organisation and a hundred trips around Peshawar in taxis to finally have the permission, guard and vehicle to make the journey.

In the end the trip wasn’t really that spectacular. The scenery was stark and uninviting and despite the interesting remnants of banditry and fortifications from past wars, the rollercoaster-trained pickup driver and clinically insane guard detracted from the journey somewhat.

A view out of the back of the pickup towards a large fortified home / barracks. We couldn’t really tell what these buildings were and the guard was in no mental state to explain.

The actual pass looking back down into Pakistan.

On the way to the pass a group of schoolkids gathered to demonstrate against the lack of education funding. They threw rocks on the road and blocked our path. The driver and guard wouldn’t let us go in case it turned sour, but after 15 minutes the kids dispersed and we passed through, ducking under a few hurled stones.

This picture was taken on the Pakistan side of the khyber bazaar. The eastern side is policed by Pakistani military and the western (Afghan) side by the tribal chiefs. Needless to say on the good side you buy whitegoods, torches and I even bought a multimeter for my toolkit. On the “bad” side you buy guns, guns and more guns. These fellows worked at the stalls selling whitegoods. Half and half Pakistani and Afghan refugee. One man asked me why I had brown hair and a red beard!!!

Kid gets a lift into Hayatabad from the bazaar.

Sakhakot, Swat Valley – Gun Town

In Peshawar we made enquiries about some of the surrounding tribal towns that have a cottage industry in gun manufacturing. The officials explained to us that the town Darra Adam Khel was definitely out of bounds to foreigners due to recent flare-ups and banditry. It was suggested that if we went there, we could lose our bikes or worse. We were about to give up on the idea when we met a guide at the Greens hotel called Reza. We organised to head to the town of Sakhakot the next day.

Reza was an influential man, explaining his closeness to the local tribal chiefs and explaining that he regularly takes people from National Geographic, UN and CNN etc. out to the local tribal towns. It’s important to have a good guide for these areas.

Unfortunately the day we arrived was a Friday and most of the shops were closed. We were introduced to a couple of brothers with arms shops across the road from each other. They usually deal in AK47s and other assault rifles, however showed us examples of baretta handguns and even their homegrown, touristic “pen gun” that you can take home for $2. Trying to bring one back would be unspeakably stupid so we just smiled and nodded.

Anyway, the deal with these towns is that they make exact replicas of original handguns and rifles using the most basic hand and machining tools. They’ll take a billet of aluminium and using a milling machine will make it look like a firearm. Then they take their hand tools and file, scribe, cut and shape all of the internal mechanisms to turn them into working firearms. Reportedly it takes about a month for them to copy any handgun or rifle and then a week to make each copy after they’ve got all of the templates finished. These towns pump out hundreds of guns a week, which are then sold into places like India, Afghanistan etc.

This man shapes pieces for AK47s.

Putting some touches on a handgun.

The arms dealers, with walls covered in AK47 assault rifles.

Shooting the rifle at the dirt was fun for a go, but I’m still a gun-hater and always will be. I’d prefer to see these people putting their incredible talents to better use like making guitars or something. More wars should be waged with smouldering licks and thumping riffs instead of weapons.

Can you believe this scene, the man’s daughters look on while he goes to work hand-crafting firearms, picture by Billy Gibson

Just like every other town, the kids go to school, joke around and become incredibly curious whenever foreigners arrive. I love engaging them in stupid conversation about cricketers.

So much more to come in Part II, stay tuned for Nature in Pakistan!!!

Wow, sorry it’s been such a long time since an update, I’ve been having trouble finding a reliable internet connection that will allow me to upload my photos. This post describes my move from Thailand to Nepal and most of my Indian journey.

Our Friendly Suksawadee Guesthouse Staff

I spent ages waiting in Bangkok for the flight arrangements to go through, we used the company called Trans Air Cargo and our contact was Kittima. The trouble I went through to get my bike out of the country was monumental. I had to do two loops to the border and back, one from Chiang Mai to Chiang Khong to pick up the Thai customs temporary import form (after telling me at the border I didn’t need it, the customs office in Bangkok said it was mandatory to leave Thailand), the other border run was for a visa extension, because I found out the shipping would take longer to organise than the time I had left on my 30 day visa. That ended up being a 500km round trip to Cambodia, phew!!

Hmmm, cooking up some ginger chicken….

The paperwork for the shipping took three weeks, and we basically spent the entire time cruising around Bangkok in cabs to such places as the tool shop and the Trans Air Cargo building. Then every night we’d have a couple of long-necks, go for a meal at the regular restaurant, Billy became obsessed with ginger chicken, and afterwards head back to the guesthouse after stopping at the seven eleven for a Cornetto. I put on 6kg!!! Note, this was a good thing because I’d lost quite a bit of weight after being ill in Cambodia and just eating noodles in my breaks while travelling around on the bike.

Hmmm, burning up some ginger chicken….

Billy, Trish and I shipped the bikes to Kathmandu on Friday the 23rd March and flew on Monday the 26th. Tuesday was a public holiday so we had to wait until Wednesday to take the bikes out of the Nepal cargo bay. This involved standing around for 4 hours as we watched the cargo area fill up with mounds and mounds of junk that people were collecting. The forklift driver had no idea about how to place items orderly and we were dreading the moment the bikes came out, stacked three-high on the forklift. Fortunately he only decided to fit two on at once and they were safely driven out into the parking lot. By this time we’d had about 5 helpers. The helper, the brother of the helper, the friend of the brother of the helper, and the guy who was from exports that we were told we could trust, but his English skills were limited to the few words required for exporting items from the country, and we were dealing with imports… We got the bikes together and Billy organised the negotiations. He played hardball on the helper and his brother, halving the asking price. We still payed a decent amount of Baksheesh, but really a pittance if you convert it into Aussie dollars. It was so good to get the bikes out of the crates and back into rolling form.

The bikes coming out on their crates, seriously thought they’d try to fit three on there.

Billy, Damo and The Helper

the bike is back!!!

Two hurdles we had to overcome in Nepal were the Pakistan visas and the almost complete unavailability of petrol. We scored this great taxi driver, who took us all around Kathmandu for a couple of days and we picked up our visas and bought black market petrol off our taxi-driver guide. All good to go, we headed off west to Pokhara.

Is there a trick to it??

Buying from the local popcorn Wallah.

After staying in Pokhara for three days and deciding not to do the ABC walk (or coca-cola trek as they say), we headed off south I said farewell to Billy and Trish just before I hit the border to Uttar Pradesh, India. I think the border town of Sonauli was a good introduction to the craziness of India, with trucks lined up for 4km waiting to cross the border. I checked into a seedy guesthouse and put my head down to sleep and refresh before my border crossing the following morning.

Wow, what to say about India, and Uttar Pradesh! Where to start?? Well, I witnessed nearly every single cliche that I’d heard about the country on my first day. In the first 10 minutes of crossing the border, I nearly died riding into a group of people who walked out in front of me on the road. What were they carrying? A corpse! It was a funeral procession!! In the next hour I passed a car crash. I approached from behind and saw a man stumbling about all over the road absolutely covered in blood. He was in a daze and as I passed the wreckage, I realised he must have flown through the windscreen. The car that hit him had the drive-train hanging down from under the car, so I don’t know if that caused the accident, but there was a large, angry mob surrounding the still-healthy driver and one of the mob had him by the front of the shirt and was shaking him violently back and forth like a rag doll. He had a look of pure terror on his face and I immediately felt sorry for him, and at the same time very keen to vacate the scene.

About 30 minutes later I was approached by some POT (Parallel Oncoming Traffic) and there was an old guy on a pushbike to my left weaving madly. I beeped my horn to alert him I was approaching from behind and he rode off the side of the road and promptly flew over the handlebars of his bike, which landed in front of, and was promptly run over by, my bike. I stopped (slowed down) and watched him to ensure he wasn’t injured. He jumped up, ran along beside his bike and jumped back on it. Crazy.

Behind some Parallel Oncoming Traffic!!

So my first night in India was spent in the town of Gorakpur. I stopped at a cafe in the town and this man came up to me, introduced himself and his son, and invited me back to his house for lunch. I thought he seemed like a reasonable chap so I followed him home. The place was bedecked with obscene and faded kitsch and he proudly told me his wife’s hobby was interior decoration. I smiled and nodded. He fixed me some food and pushed his wife out of the room, then started asking me seriously uncomfortable questions. Not before he made me promise to take a picture of all of us together and send it to him in the post. Okay mate. At this point I started wondering about India a little bit, it’s roads, villages, villagers etc. were all starting to seem a little nutty.

I headed outside of the crazy guys place and walked around the back of my bike to find…. One of my Chacos (sandals) sitting on the top of the right pannier. Oh NO!! I remembered taking them out to search for some stuff at the border, I must have left them there and ridden off. These were my favourite, I mean all-time favourite shoes. They stood by me through my whole trip, hikes in the outback, dancing in Darwin and the incredible sand-covered dancefloors of Koh Phangan, The mean streets of Thailand, all this not including the five years I owned them before I left. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! So day one in India became a day of fear, craziness and loss. This emotional rollercoaster defines India perfectly, you never know what is going to slip in and smack your head around.

First night in India – luxury!

I found a reasonably nice place to stay in Gorakpur and the next day headed down south to Varanasi. More crazy riding! The locals are pushbike mad and the bikes weave dramatically from side to side with each pedal. The busses are crazy and drive at speeds that imply the drivers give no damn about their passengers… Strangely, the trucks drive a lot slower and seem to care about their cargo. I have no idea how this works, anyway, Parallel Oncoming Traffic can be as menial as a car overtaking a bicycle, right up the madness scale to a bus overtaking a truck that is overtaking a truck. Survival means getting the hell off the road and hoping you don’t hit a *something*.

I hit Varanasi and the temperature was intense. I found a really nice hotel and stayed for 3 days, having felt the onset of some kind of sickness due to dodgy food/water. From waking up the first morning I felt awkward and lethargic, not really too keen to go out and see the sights. I went for a walk and found the Ghats where they bathe in the Ganges, very messy stuff. The water there is sooo filthy and you walk by and see kids just jumping in and spitting water about. I found a back alley with kids playing cricket and had a few bowls, full tosses as usual. Back at the hotel I had a kingfisher beer and it really didn’t mix well with the sickness so I went to bed and watched the World Cup.

Guys bathing in the Ganges

I met some Aussie guys and we decided to do a river cruise of the Ganga. We jumped in at the funeral ghat and watched as bodies were immolated into the atmophere for strange spiritual reasons, then tossed into the water. The scene at the funeral ghat is surprisingly grim, with piles of garbage and half-burnt funeral shrouds lying on the river-side. A stray dog might run down and grab some kind of grizzly souvenir from the mound of refuse while a melancholy cow stands nearby munching up last-night-curry from the dirty ground. As we pushed out to the centre, the boatman reached down into the river and scooped a handful of the putrid water into his mouth, swallowed and smiled at us, gushing “aaah, Ganga.”

The bathing Ghats.

The cruise went past about 10 bathing ghats, with kids swimming out to the boat splashing water. Whenever it looked like we’d be splashed, the three of us rushed to the opposite side of the boat, tipping it precariously off balance, to the fearfull screams of the boatman and the immense delight of the kids. A very scary and interesting ride to say the least. Afterwards we tried to find a temple to listen to authentic Indian music but ended up finding the “monkey temple” – a temple full of monkeys

The morning I was leaving Hotel Buddha in Varanasi, I met a lovely couple on an Indian Enfield bullet: An Israeli guy Smir, and a Spanish girl Paola. They hooked up a few months before and had decided to tour northern India on a motorcycle. Things had been going wrong with the Enfield since they’d bought it new in Delhi five days before and I helped Smir with a couple of problems by loaning him my toolkit. He suggested we ride together and I took them up on the offer. They were all about riding slowly and I was all about not getting killed.

Random man at a roadside stop.

Our first night stop was in Juanpur, which was a huge 38km from Varanasi towards Lucknow. We arrived early and Smir made comment of his suspension being too mushy. I suggested he increase his spring preload, which began a huge mission involving removing the two back springs and twisting the collar that tightens up the spring. The first spring went well, but the collar broke on the second due to some corrosion and lack of foresight from us (not lubing it up before twisting it, and leaving it in the hands of a boisterous Indian pseudo-mechanic). We tried everything to fix it including a vice, pliers, bender bars, breaker bars, breaker milkshakes and other local vices (namely beadies). None worked and so we were pointed to a dark little cave of a workshop, grease stains reaching out from the darkness creating the impression of a gaping mouth in the dusk-light. A couple of beady eyes blinked in the darkness and a grizzled old man with big hands slided out, grabbed the shock, grunted and quickly dismantled it, remantling and adjusting it in under 10 minutes. We thanked him with a 50 rupe note and he glided off, seemingly footless, into his now completely black cave. Smir and I looked at each other, shrugged, and went and put the bike back together.

The next day was a mammoth, leaving early we pushed on at the breakneck speed of 40km/hr the 250km to Lucknow. An uneventful day, mainly hot and chai-laden, we cruised in at 7pm as the dark encroached. We were running on instinct and questions to find our way into town and I sped off to ask directions. I stopped to wait for the other two to catch up and after maybe 15 minutes, realised something was wrong. A man stopped on his bike and I thought he was just being the usual nosy Uttar Pradeshian so waved him on, but he wagged his head and said “no, sir, your friends are back there, there is a problem”. Oh crap, hoping they were okay, I sped back and discovered they’d caught a bad case of flat tyre. By this time it was pitch black and we were surrounded by maybe 20 curious locals.

Some crazies on their Indian-flag debecked jalopy!

After testing the tyre for the state of flatness, we discovered it was shagged and made a plan to have it fixed. The locals were already on their mobiles to brothers, fathers, uncles, friends of uncles and Vishnu himself, so we decided Smir could look after the bike and tyres while Paola and I would go find a hotel to ensure a place to stay. We loaded all of their gear into a cycle rickshaw and headed off into the night. Following the cylce was harder than I’d expected for he actually knew how to ride in Indian city traffic. I ended up with scrapes, bumps, dints and a hoarse voice from shouting at all the crazy auto-rickshaws that pounded into me. We eventually got to where we thought we were going and discovered the cycleman had gotten us completely lost. Paola exercised her right to get frustrated and we ended up catching a ride back to a guesthouse, checked in and realised we still has Smir to find. It was two hours since we’d left him.

After leaving Lucknow I had a bad case of the Delhi Belly and had to leave Smir and Paola to their 40km/hr. Unfortunately I lost them, but we were headed in different directions anyway. I carried on to Ramnagar and spent a day at the Corbett Tiger Reserve. I jumped onto a tour that three Delhi boys had booked and managed to see a couple of Royal Bengal tigers off in the distance, such beautiful animals. Jim Corbett was a hunter who eventually decided that the tigers were better off alive than dead and became a big conservationist for the Indian people. He set up a massive reserve where maybe 20 tigers are roaming freely and hunting barking deer and other such tiger nibblies.

One of the guys from Delhi

After the Tiger Town I headed to Rishikesh, home of yoga and Sadhus etc. I was unimpressed with this town. An Aussie girl I met describes it perfectly: A place where people come to sell their religion. I think the Beatles song Across The Universe is having a go at all of the money-grubbing priests that try to fleece you: “Jai Guru Deva, Om… Nothing’s gonna change my world”. The place was full of begging Sadhus and yoga gurus offering full yoga couses for 5000 euro, I didn’t find myself but I did lose my credit card there. Karma dude. Then I headed on to the home of the Dalai Llama, Dharamsala. Again this town was a tourist mecca useful only really for its relaxed atmosphere.

Kids on the roadside.

The final stop on my tour of India was the Punjab/Pakistan border city Amritsar. I took a 100 rupe tour out to the border to see the crazy ceremony they perform every evening where the Pakistani and Indian border guards would strut and yell their might and on each side the spectators could jeer the other country. It was very funny and a little bit sad that the Indian spectator side was full and the Pakistan side sparse… Says a lot about the Indian sense of self importance and the Pakistani indifference to it. The Golden Temple was amazing and I managed to stay at the home of some Sikh guys and watch the world-cup final. It was here I discovered my credit card was missing, I had a flat battery and when I went to buy a perfect replacement, no card. I managed to recharge the existing battery and by the time I rode to the border it was closed. Horror day, but I managed to leave (with a sigh of relief) into Pakistan the very next day.

Golden Temple.

Border antics.

What to say about India… How do I sum up my opinion of this country of 1 billion people. In general, I didn’t like riding the roads because of the immense danger and disrespect for human life. Each day something would happen that would make me feel incredibly frustrated, often close to losing my temper, but also every day something would happen that would make me smile and be glad to be visiting. Every time I’d stop my bike, I’d attract maybe 30 or 40 villagers who would stare with docile eyes onto what they could only imagine to be a spaceship and some weird white alien-dude. I lost my temper many times, and laughed at the craziness of the people many times. I hate the way they worship cows, but let them wander diseased and hopeless around their cities. I don’t like the way they spit blood red pan-juice in public places and stairwells of hotels. I love the way they smile and greet you with that funny little sideways nod of the head and ask you if everything is okay with that one-word question “problem?”. You can break the language barrier by saying “I am from Ricky Ponting” and stop your bike to give the batting kids out in their street cricket games. I think I’ll head back to India one day, but maybe on a train and definitely with someone else so that I can use them as a respite from the swarming, full-on nature of the collective consciousness known as the Indian people.

Well, I think my slightly picture-of-self obsessed “What I Did In Bangkok” post was quite uninformative, so I’ll start again in Thailand. I spent maybe 7 days in Pai, and found a place selling amazing felafel!!

I met up with a mate of a mate, Chris Parker, who’s girlfriend Tom owns a sweet little bar that they wheel out every night called the Up 2 You bar.

So I spent a few days hanging out with Parkie and a girl from New Jersey I met, Talia.

We got into all kinds of sordid, over the counter, bucket drinking, cigarette smoking, crazy-eyed-guy-in-the-background nights on the Pai town.

Talia and I decided to go rockclimbing at Horse Head butresses near Chang Mai, where I met a cool pommy chick Jenny. Below the American guy is being shown how to tie in to the harnes with a figure-8 knot. Jenny is standing to the right in the shot, Talia on the left.

We did about 5 climbs ranging from (Australian system) a 17 to a 21. The last climb was a chimney, where you have to wedge yourself on either side of the walls to climb up. Below is a shot of me in mid traversal.

I spent maybe five nights in Chang Mai hanging out with Jenny and her mates. Through them I met Rachael and Tony, an ultra-ace pommy couple who I met up again with in Bangkok and went to Pat Pong road with. But anyway, the cool part was getting from Chang Mai back down to Bangkok!!!

So… I got a bit lost…. I decided to go back down to Bangkok following a section of the Thai Burmese border run (called the Mae Hong Son loop) and I was fine getting from Chiang Mai to Mae Sariang, where I spent a night watching Man U play Liverpool with 100 rowdy thai football followers, it was after I set off in the morning that things got a little strange.

After breakfast I asked a German guy who’d been staying at the guesthouse for 5 months (5 MONTHS!!!) what he thought of the road conditions from Mae Sariang down to Mae Sot. He told me, rather proudly, “Yeah I rode it, but it took me ages, heaps of dirt patches, a hard ride all round.” So I set of assuming the worst. The road was poorly signed, with no English translation, and I admit that I didn’t ask as many people as I should if I was heading in the right direction. I came to a national park area and relaxed, took a few shots with my vid camera and rode off thinking all was fine and I’d be in town in no time. Well, I didn’t twig that I was riding INTO a national park and that the dirt road was getting narrower and narrower because it was the wrong road. So I continued on my merry way for about 4 hours on the dirt and sand. I came across a couple of locals who had a flat tyre and I took out my mysterious metal box and inflated their tyres for them, they loved it! (note in the picture the conditions of the road… something seriously should have twigged)

Onwards through the jungle, an eye on the GPS “Yeah, I’m riding in the right general direction, no worries at all” over two river crossings, past a massive tree (below) and into a big Burmese refugee town with a deepish river and a rickety rope bridge blocking my path. At that point, after 5 hours down the (obviously) wrong road and with a big bunch of Burmese refugees staring at me, I eventually tracked down a villager who could speak English. They looked at the map for maybe 20 minutes, then I realised they had no idea what a map was or how to read it. The English speaker guy finally discovered where we were and told me that I’ve ridden too far west and that I needed to carry on, over the river for another 3 hours and then I’d be back to the town I started from that morning. d’oh!!!

I hopped on my bike, rode precariously across the river, and carried on for another hour until I reached a town called Laeku. Now this town must be an occasional stop on hill-tribe tours because they have a very rudimentary hut for visitors. The only problem was they hadn’t seen a tourist in ages… so they brought out their prettiest girl. Hahaha, this girl arrived completely covered in make-up and one girl who could speak English says “she can cook”. I politely turned her down and thought again of the sad pressures and opprotunities that tourism has inflicted on Thailand’s poor.

Not ready to go down without a fight, or let me go to bed without exploiting me, I get cornered by this guy who could speak some English and so I offered to buy a round of beer. The cheeky fellow is pictured below, he ended up getting maybe 5 rounds for the whole group out of me before the night was through. No worries though, it only ended up costing about $4 Aussie.

Below are some more pics of the Laeku party

Random, shop owner, wife of shop owner


Random onlooker, wife of shop owner


Best mate of cheeky guy who instigated the party


Cheeky guy, two random onlookers


Son and friend of shop owner and shop owner’s wife


Burmese cigarette


Their pet monkey, tied up

So, that was my trip down to Bangkok from Chiang Mai. I safely found my way back to the main road. The German guy had described something pretty horrible, I found it like a major highway after the trials of the national park. I’m actually glad I got lost because I had an ace time with the folks of Laeku. This area of Thailand would be a great place to explore further on a smaller bike, maybe a 250cc XR or something.

Woke up feeling seedy

Had mango and sticky rice with Billy, one half of Billy and Trish, two Aussies who are ALSO riding motorcycles around the world.

Went to Pat Pong rd and had a conversation with a bar girl. Perhaps gave her a shred of hope that not all western guys are arseholes when she asked if I “took” a Thai girlfriend and I answered no. She’s 19, has a 48 year old English boyfriend who comes out to see her for three months a year. We wonder why Thai people scowl at farang (foreigners) !

Went to the tool shop and bought a torque wrench for 300baht ($9). Used it to pull my bike apart and regrease the swingarm and rear suspension bearings.

Went to the tool shop again and bought some more tools.

Went to the tool shop again and sold the torque wrench back to the shop for 100baht!!

Bought some food off a street vendor!

Took my bike to Trans Air Cargo and had it fitted for a crate.

Tried to convince the crate builders not to be so enthusiastic. They tried to build it around my bike in 5 minutes. Very efficient though and worth the price.

Said goodbye to my dearly beloved as her shrinkwrapped body was whisked away.

Howdy! I’m alive and kicking in the northern Thai tourist mecca of Pai. I came out of the northern Laos border about 4 nights ago and have been looking for a place to relax. The whole Laos experience was amazing, and I’m so glad I went there as I had considered skipping it and just touring the north of Thailand. I met a lovely Dutch couple on a big motorbike just before going into Laos and an Aussie couple called Billy and Trish touring on a bike while in Laos. The Aussie couple are tops and I’ll probably ship my bike to Nepal with those guys instead of solo, just to cut down on the shipping cost.

Some ace kids at the Kouy Tiew (noodle soup) shop in Nong Khai

So, Southern Laos was pretty flat, a few hills here and there and Vientiane was a really good size, not too many tourists and very clean. They seem to be gentrifying the whole place and putting French style curbing and pavement in, a remnant of their colonial past. There is no garbage on the streets like in Cambodia and the people seem genuinely happy.

How now Lao cow!

I rode north to a town called Vang Vieng and stayed in an eco-lodge in my tent. The main attractions are a tube ride down the river and a large group of caves in the surrounding mountains. I went to this cave spot and a Laos guy comes up to me and offers me his services for $5, I said too expensive and he cut it down to $2. We walked to the first cave, which was about 10m deep and had a Buddha image in it. The second cave was amazing. It took about an hour to walk all the way in and ended up being about 1km deep, completely unlit. It ended in a stream and the guide stripped down ad jumped in so I did the same. It was a bit weird bathing in a stream 1km into a mountain with a Laos guy but hey, you only live once. I ended up paying him more money because he took time out of building a house to do the tour.

My cave guide Tat

There was an organic farm cafe nearby and I somehow got involved in an english teaching volunteer group. The little town ~200 people, had built a community centre out of mud bricks and the travellers staying at the organic farm would go and teach the kids how to speak english each evening from 5:30pm to 7:30. A Dutch guy, Bart, had been there for about 5 weeks and had written some songs “We all live in Ban pudding-dang” to the tune of yellow submarine was a massive hit.

Setting up school

Keen kids

So leaving the kids was a bit sad, they loved the bike and I took a few of the guys for a ride, one of them ended up screaming at me to stop cause he thought I was going to take him all the way to Vietnam haha.

Loving the bike

I tried cooking on an open fire, which turned out a bit messy. I think I used too much wood, so I kind of had a bonfire. A bit too much flame to boil water for instant noodles. The next night I made it small and within the confines of the pot that I was boiling, and it worked out much better. You can’t go past a good butane stove though!

Cooking dinner – bonfire behind the burner

I headed up north to a town called Luang Prabang and the roads were insane. Empty, well made but very high altitude and twisty. I think there may have been about 3000 bends between Vang Vieng and Luang Prabang, which made the 160km journey take about 4 hours. I averaged about 35 – 40km/hr the busses take 6 hours!!! Luang Prabang was pretty, heritage listed so unspoilt by modern brick monstrosities, but expensive and I wanted a traditional experience with camping etc. The Dutch motorcycle couple had suggested bush camping as a nice idea in Laos and I itended to try it out on my way to Phonsavan (back down south towards Vientiane and then East).

Bendy

The next day I set off quite late and reached about three quarters of the way to phonsavan. I was losing light so I decided to pitch my tent. After riding past about 4 or 5 “nah, not good enough” or “nah, too exposed” spots, I decided on a tiny cane field perched on a cliff just set back and sheltered from the road. I pitched my tent, collected some wood and sat waiting for the sun to go down. You have to realise that this was my first wild, bush-camping (non-campsite) attempt since leaving Brisbane and I was swallowing my fears of boogymen, spiders / snakes and muderers. As the sun went down and the darkness swallowed me, I built a campfire (bonfire) and sat warming my hands, noticing how black everything was outside the 2m radius of campfire light. The stars were shining and I tried to look for the southern cross for some home-country nostalgia. I heard a twig snap but I was in zen-state and I knew nothing was out there, what could there possibly be? I’d rationalised all the possibilities away except for one: men with guns. This was, after all, part of the special zone where some tourists had been killed in a hold-up 4 years before… Anyway, stamp fire out quickly, clean teeth, jump into tent and zip myself into sleeping bag (hood pulled tight with the drawstring). As I lay there, I heard this noise… Like a scraping sound, something trying to dig right beside my tent, it was even moving my head slightly. I was scared stiff and I lay really still, shut my eyes… and it stopped.. what the f#&k is that?? Some more investigation revealed it was the sound of my eyelashes scraping against the inside of my sleeping bag. What an idiot, there’s nothing out here! Well, I’d been thinking a lot about a certain someone for the last few days and I decided I needed to shift my attention onto something else. I started thinking about all my folk back home and in the UK. I thought about pretty much everyone I knew and had hung out with at some time, slowly drifting off to sleep with the memories in my head.

What’s that? I woke up with a start and looked at the clock. Midnight. Had I heard a noise? Was that a flash of light?? It was voices! In Laos! about three or four guys whispering near my tent. I hear this “whoaaaaaaaa!!!”, oh crap, they’ve seen the bike… More whispering. What am I going to do?? I roll over to make some noise and the voices go quiet. Shit! Stuff this, I’d better go make myself known instead of waiting for them to storm my little tent. I jump out of my sleeping bag, put on my shoes and slip out of the tent calling out “Sa bai dee” (Laos for hello). I hear this gruff voice reply in greeting and about seven guys come out of the bushes… all with AK47s. Hahaha, I KNEW they’d have guns! Score to Damoooo one – nill, jackpot!!! Oh shit, they’ve got GUNS! aaargh!

So the main guy starts indicating with hand signals that he didn’t want me sleeping in the cane field, and I was still struggling out of my sleep so I replied to him in English “Oh, you don’t want me here.” thinking he’d understand. He made the signals again and I replied in English again. Then he started yelling at me and waving his arms around and I knew I should probably do something quick so I went over and started packing my tent up. THE quickest I’ve ever done it, maybe 6 minutes in total from having the full site set up to having the complete kit on my bike. The guys all stood around me in a circle and each time I’d take something useless and western out of my tent, they’d all go “Ooooh, aaaah” and then laugh. The main guy put his gun down and put on my motorcycle jacket. I was like “oh noo, don’t touch that.. c’mon!” Luke Skywalker style to the inquisitive Yoda. They made me ride back to a checkpoint where a serious looking older man (all the other guys were under 20) said that I had to go to the next village, so I followed the truck to the town and they put me in the military barracks and told me to go to sleep. Big Man On Campus came and asked me questions and told me not to worry, I could sleep here safely. I lay down next to a soldier and tried to sleep…

Every hour someone would come in with a gun and make the chick-clack chick-chick noises that guns make when they’re being prepared to inflict death and I’m not sure if they were just trying not to wake me, but every time it happened, they’d shine their torch on me. So the words “execution style” kept going through my head.

The next morning started with roosters, the smell of wood burning and axe-chopping. It was then that I fully realised just how primitive these villages actually are. So everyoe waits around while Big Man wakes up, finds the local copper and they interrogate me. The Big Man asks me if I can speak Laos, in Laos. It was similar to that scene in The Great Escape when the Nazi commander says to Richard Attenbrough in English that he has really good German, to which Attenbrough replies “Thank you”, thereby blowing his cover. I didn’t fall for it. They ask me why I have two helmets, and am travelling solo, to which I replied that my companion used it in Malaysia, and she’d use it again in Spain… But for the moment she’s elsewhere. Didn’t sound very believable after I said it but I think they eventually got sick of my very good dumb-playing and let me go. Guys with guns don’t smile, and from this little experience I realise I don’t like guns even a little bit. One town with 100 people, 10 army guys and the most modern equipment in town was the weaponry. Unbelievable.

Some Hills

Hilly!

So I travelled on to Phonsavan and did a tour of the Plain of Jars, pretty much a big wide open plain strewn with ancient jars carved out of stone. The plain was scattered with mines from the Vietnam war and a specific path had been cleared for tourists to walk on by a mine clearing group called MAG. The Plain of Jars site seemed to be competing with the war points of interest e.g. Bomb crater from US bomb circa 1970. I felt more interested in the war memories than the jars. I met the Aussie couple Billy and Trish the morning I left and they suggested that I use their airwaybill to fly my bike to Nepal. This was really uplifting because it meant I could probably cut the cost of flying the bike by a third.

Plain of Jars

After Phonsavan I rode out west to Sam Neau and the Veng Sai. By this time I’d been in Laos about 10 days and I was really growing exhausted from the long long days on windy roads. I really wanted to find a phone to call Jacqueline too, but none of the towns seemed to have international dialing. I pushed on 6 hours to Sam Neau, went for a short ride to the War caves at Veng Sai in the morning and then rode another 6 hours to Vieng Thong for the night. It was on this stretch that I met Billy and Trish again. I rode another 6 or so hours the next day to UdomXai and finally found an international phone to call Jacq, but got cut off. I was starting to feel a bit sick of Laos, as great as it is, so I rode the next day to the border for an early-morning exit. The road alternated between brand new tarmac superhighway and incredibly bad development road. The worst stretch was about 2km of knee-deep, fine sand that had me fishtailing all over the place. It wasn’t pleasant and I spent some time swearing at the conditions. Murray knows what it’s like!

Wash me!

After a night on the Beer Lao, I crossed the border into Thailand feeling slightly worse for wear and happy to be on some flat roads again for a while. I made it to Pai and now I’m sitting back in this tourist town waiting to meet up with a friend of a friend. The next steps will be a ride to Chiang Mai, some bike maintenance and a flight to Nepal.

The last three weeks has been very mentally and physically draining. I’m getting the hang of just moving every single day for weeks on end, I’m loving it immensely, but it can be hard. It isn’t laugh a minute and to surrender a bit of manliness, I have cried a few nights along the way. All in all though I’m still having the time of my life.