Cows at the beach… Unbelievable.

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 😔

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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 😁

betsy is in there somewhere!

Just pulled into a town called Burdwan, I went to look for a room and returned to find over 100 people crowding around the bike… No kidding, total chaos, the traffic was stopped, media turned people up and tried to interview us complete with video cameras!!
Finally got the room, parked the bike downstairs and was asked for picture after picture, someone even asked for my autograph!!  Hilarious 🙂
An entertaining end to an otherwise tough day, traffic here is not much fun.  Ten days straight riding, we’re due for a rest soon.
More later xoxo

So how is it??

Well… we crossed the border expecting suicidal traffic, congestion, polluition and staring people who make you feel uncomfortable.  What we’ve found is most of that, but also some surprises.

cows… everywhere.

We’re still in the far east of India, the part that’s surrounded by Bhutan on top, Myanmar to the east, and Bangladesh to the west.  So we dont really feel like we’re in India just yet, which is dumb, because obviously we are, but it somehow doesnt ‘feel’ like it.

For the first few days we were in the mountains, where there is a mix of regular Indian (???) and Hill tribe ethnicity, the Indians look like… Indians, but the hill tribe people look more Mongol.  Either way, everyone is really friendly, interested, helpful and very honest.  No dodgy scams at the border, no overcharging for food or drinks, just really nice people.

these tricycles are also everywhere.

Everywhere we stop we get a crowd of something like 50 people gathered to look at Betsy, I’m not sure she’s ever gotten so much attention before – I think Sal is a little jealous 😉   They have KTM’s that are actually made in India for sale here too, in shiny new orange showrooms, so everyone knows what a KTM is, they just havent ever seen one as big before.

“yes it’s the same as the Duke we have here…”

“the 200 duke?”

“yes, what is this one?”

“950”

“my god! it’s nearly 5x bigger, Oh My God!!”  you need to imagine the accent 🙂

We keep having kids on motorbikes follow us for kilometers taking pictures and video, I wheelied away from one bike and the kids were so excited they could barely speak…

“that thing you do with the front in the sky, please do again, i like very much your bike!!”

so many people staring!

We entered India in Manipur state (a dry state), and the next region had a ban on alcohol for the last and first days of the month (guess when we arrived?), so tonight’s beer was my first for five days, which may be a record, consequently I’m quite sleepy now so will keep this shortish.

The traffic is not as bad as I expected, but still pretty bad.  Being run off the road is a regularity, cars/trucks/motorbikes/bicycles/cows/people going the wrong way on dual carriage road is also quite normal (i’m serious, imagine cows on the expressway… unbelievable!), alhtough I’m just pleased there is some dual carriage road!!

Cows are literally everywhere.  As are goats, people and dogs.  At this stage it’s quite manageable though, we’re not hating the roads yet, which is good as we have another 8,000km to get through here 🙂

Petrol is 1.30 a litre, we’re paying about $20 a night for a room, and 20c-$1 for a plate of street food, or $3 for a curry in a restaurant.  The food is really heavy though, lots of deep fried stuff and obviously curry, but also momo’s (dumplings) which is a nice healthy break.

tired now, over and out xoxo

PS we also saw some elephants, 6 actually!  I stopped to take a pic and they crossed the road to see us, quite scary!  (and also 2 rhinocerous  off in the distance)

these are the actual elephants we saw 🙂

it was a long way off, but still visible, pretty cool huh!