“For the animals shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complicated than ours, they move finished and completed, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings, they are other nations - caught with ourselves in a net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” Henry Beston The cycle out of Jaipur was really not bad, we even met another Indian Cyclist on a very old road bike, and it was [View Full Entry]

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We were really tired and down when we set off from towards Jaipur. The early mornings at Bharatpur had taken their toll, combined with feeling low about the state of the planet and to top it all Robin was suffering the effects of a dodgy samosa. Still we loaded up and set off anticipating the benefits of some cycling for our bodies and states of mind, unfortunately these never materialised. The road was being “four-laned” and so road works dogged us the entire way to Jaipur. The surface was rough and bumpy; every other vehicle seemed to have a claxon which [View Full Entry]

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We set off from Agra after first stopping off at the Post Office to register a complaint about stuff going missing from the parcel we had collected when we arrived. I don’t know why we thought it was important to do this as I’m certain it will make no difference to anything, but we felt we should report it all the same. The ride out of Agra was manic but better then the ride in as we managed to stay on main roads and out of the bazaars. We did have to cross several railway level crossings, however, which provide an [View Full Entry]

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Eggs, beans and chips arrive at our table in the small and crowed café. We ravenously tuck in needing to replace the excessive calorie use of the previous day from our record length cycle into the city. The faces around us in are mostly European with a few eastern Asian, Black and Indian faces too. We hungrily order a second plate of greasy breakfast and study our fellow diners. There is a good amount of hippy “Indian” clothing being worn and a fair few cockney accents cutting across the city noise coming in from the street. We figure that we could [View Full Entry]

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Our mission in Islamabad was to get our Indian visa. Islamabad is a very strange city; it is completely planned and very green. There is relatively little noise (for a Pakistani city) and also very little soul to the place. We had planned to go to Peshawar whilst we waited for the Indian visas but ended up staying in Islamabad for the whole week. It’s a good place to totally relax and I was trying to get my MSR stove sorted out again!! Robin was recovering from his swollen ankle and then we both got stomach bugs! Still life under the [View Full Entry]

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Most of our dreams of Pakistan had involved finally getting up north to the giants of the Karakorum Range. Here the mighty Indus rushes out of the Himalaya and Pakistan has 3 different huge mountain ranges meeting; the Karakorum, Hindu Kush and Himalaya. It really is one of the highest places on earth and many of the world’s largest glaciers adorn the peaks. Jolt, crash shudder…this was how I awoke to see my first glimpse of Pakistan’s Northern Areas, this was not really part of my dream. We were on a coach and the fact that I had been asleep at [View Full Entry]

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We finally left the hotel 10 days after arriving in Multan, recovered from the harrowing experience with the police and buoyed by our success at managing to cycle the section we had been forced to miss. The police had, however, left a nasty surprise with the hotel staff who physically tried to prevent us from leaving the hotel. Apparently they had instruction to call the police should we leave, in order to ensure we had an escort again!!. We phoned the police ourselves to report that the hotel staff were holding us hostage, but they just laughed at us. We then [View Full Entry]

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We had finally reached the Indus plain, we were really looking forward to our first glimpse of the mighty Indus and our crossing into ‘India’; well the geographical and ecological India if not the political one. It took a long time though to descend on to the still dusty plain, where was all the lush green farmland? Eventually we found quite a big truck stop and ordered some vegetable curry and daal. Whilst we were eating a police van pulled up. They wanted us to go in their van as it was a dangerous area. Not again we thought. In our [View Full Entry]

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We planned to spend 3-4 days in Quetta resting and servicing the bikes before pushing on. But we were exhausted after crossing the desert and 3 days passed quickly without us doing anything much other than lazing around watching satellite TV, eating lots of cheap curry and being baffled by the oddities of Pakistani politics in the daily newspapers. Reading back over the last blog I realise I gave Quetta a pretty bad press. Not that this was totally undeserved mind, but more to do with the fact that I was fed up writing by that point. There are few real [View Full Entry]

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It is now 11am and already unbearably hot. We have just left the border village of Mirjave after stopping for a cold juice and failing to find a money changer. We have no police escort as we decided to ignore the commands of the Iranian army at the checkpoint as we left Zahedan earlier this morning. We have cycled nearly 100km through the desert, thankfully without encountering any of the “terrorists” the soldiers seemed so paranoid about. As we reach the main road again for the last short haul to the Pakistan border we perceive an almighty commotion on the road [View Full Entry]

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