There is not a second that passes where I don’t hear the sound of a car/truck/bus/push bike/tuk tuk/tractor/motorbike horn… All day long… My throat feels swollen and sore from inhaling so much dust/smoke and pollution… I bounce from loving the place to hating everything (which usually corresponds with the amount of traffic we are tackling at the time) and every day we are debating if we are doing the right thing by traveling around India on a motorbike or if it’s the absolutely most ridiculous stupid thing ever.

If the people were rude and the food was bad, this would be a total nightmare. Thankfully it isn’t hot yet so we don’t have that against us either!

We’re still trying to work out if travelling through this traffic on terrible roads and risking our lives everyday is worth it. Today it took us an hour to pass about 5kms worth of trucks and buses that had come to a stand still for reasons we still can’t work out. This involved riding in between trucks, off the side of the road going in both directions, riding head on into trucks and riding in fields along the side of the road. We have so many close calls with buses and trucks driving at us and animals crossing in our path it makes for very stressful days! Having to ride off the road to avoid being hit is a daily occurrence. Poor Dean 😔

edit

it’s been a bit of a mind game so far, it seems that either we’re in dense slow moving traffic, it’s dusty, loud and generally horrible, or we’re on a quiet 4 lane divided road.  So either we’re hating it, or it’s quite easy, there’s not much in between.  On the congested narrow road, after an hour (including ten near misses and half a dozen exit stage lefts to avoid oncoming traffic), I’m hating it.  But then inexplicably the narrow crappy road turns into a 4 lane highway and off we go at 90km/hr, now able to remain mostly on the road, even when things come at us in the wrong direction.  This lasts anywhere between 5mins and an hour, then, as randomly as it began, the 4 lane highway turns back into a narrow dusty road, and after 5 mins I’m back to wondering what the hell we’re doing here…  Hopefully we get a bit more consistency soon!

a bit of today’s helmet intercom dialogue…

S “i need to get out of these warm clothes” (it was really hot in amongst all the trucks)

D “I need to get out of this country…”

S “I want to go home 🙁 ”

Standard daily traffic

At the end of these hard days we end up in a dusty town where we (Betsy) attracts a massive crowd (today the crowd created a traffic jam which got the police involved and the local media along) and it’s almost impossible to find a drink to calm the nerves.

A few of Betsy’s admirers

Thankfully every town is very lively so it’s always nice to walk around and take in the chaos and try random plates of food.

Another very long day ahead of us tomorrow… We are just preying we are on a dual lane highway…. that doesn’t end abruptly and turn in to a single track dirt road at a seconds notice 😁