Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

A camal stands across theYamuna river from the Taj Mahal.
(underlined text is a hyper-link to Wikipedia)

The Taj Mahal - one of the classic views of the monument which was built as a mausoleum for the favourite wife of the Mughal Emperor Shāh Jahān. We arrived at 6am to see the sun rise and to get some pictures before the crowds built up.

Us outside the Taj Mahal. Have you seen enough picture of it yet?!

To see more pictures click here to go to our Flickr photo gallery


Whilst in Agra, as well as the Taj Mahal, we visited a number of the other famous sites including Itmad-Ud-Daulah's Tomb, which is sometimes called the baby Taj, Agra Fort (which we saw from the outside only) and we took a trip out to Fatehpur Sikri (pictured) which is a whole town built by the Mughal emperor Akbar only to be abandoned shortly after completion due to a lack of water in the area!

We traveled to Agra by train with Laurent and Anders. Laurent is pictured here outside Fatelpur Sikri petting puppies (a favourite past-time of his - he also pets sacred cows and goats). We will be leaving Laurent and Anders behind in Delhi as they need to wait for parts and repairs to be performed on their bikes. We hope to see them again in the south of the country over the Christmas period.

Entry by Tom

Delhi, India - 13,188 miles from London

Our Indian mobile numbers: Peter: +91 99 15363918 ; Tom: +91 99 15363922


A monk spins the prayer wheels in Mcloed Ganj, India, the home of the 14th Dali Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

To see more pictures click here to go to our Flickr photo gallery

We crossed into India after spending a four days in Lahore, the city known as the cultural capital of Pakistan. As well as visiting the usual tourist sites and the India / Pakistan border closing ceremony we were privileged to go to a Sufi spiritual event where drummers played hypnotically until 2am, huge amounts of dope was smoked and Sufi dancers spun around to the tribal sounding beat. Even though we smoked no dope, the whole thing was pretty mesmerising and a facinating insight into the cultural side of this strain of the muslim religion.

Crossing into India we were blatantly aware that we were joining the tourist trail after many months off it. I personally welcomed this change finding it comforting to be around Westerners and English speaking Indians after so long in places where the language barrier had meant that we were often in a state of confusion about what was going on around us. Also, not only were we crossing over into the largest democracy in the world, we were entering the first democracy that we had been in since Russia (back in August). In the border town of Amritsar we joined hundreds of tourists and thousands of Sikhs who were walking around the Golden Temple. Entrance to the temple and the museum is totally free and, if you are hungry, we discovered that you can eat there for free too! After a day in Amristar we made our way up to Mcloed Ganj in the foothills of the Himalayas. The town proved to be quite a cool tourist hang out with lots of vegetarian cafes, places offering yoga and Tibetan cookery courses and a handful of Dennis Hopper hippy types wondering around in bare feet. It is of course the home of the Dali Lama who we saw very briefly when he passed us in a car.

A Sikh man bathing in the pool which surrounds The Goldern Temple in Amritsar, India

We were joined in Mcloed Ganj by two bikers, Laurent from Switzerland and Anders from Denmark. We had first met them in Almaty, Kazakhstan and then again at the camp site in Islamabad where Anders had kindly helped to fix my brakes and side boxes after the accident I had on the Karakorum Highway. We decided to ride together for a while, and this was to be the first time on the trip where we had traveled with anyone else. We set off from Mcloed Ganj and headed for Kalka where we planned to get the narrow gauge train up the steep climb to Shimla, a hill station originally established by the British. We estimated the ride to Kalka would only take a day, but as a result of slow road which twisted through the hillsides we had to break the journey halfway and continue the next day.


Robin, a round the world cyclist, getting ready to clear customs at the Pakistan / India border.

We arrived in Kalka on the afternoon on the second day and spent much of that afternoon buying tickets for the train, an unbelievably arduous process. We bordered the train at 5.30 am the following morning and made the 5 hour 90 km ascent. It was raining in Shimla and due to the altitude we found ourselves wandering around the main shopping street looking at the British architecture in the clouds. If the clouds had been sea mist it would have been just like a wet weekend in Scarborough up there, made even more surreal by the presence of monkeys and large numbers of Indians. After a very expensive gin and tonic (incidentally we hadn't had a drink for quite a few weeks due to the ban on alcohol in Pakistan) at a very impressive hotel, we boarded the train for the 5 hour decent. Yesterday morning we left Kalka and made the surprisingly easy ride to Delhi where we pitched up at a very cheap guest house (about two pounds a night) with prison cell like rooms, but a nice atmosphere and cricket constantly showing on the television. My first impressions of Delhi are that it much less polluted than I had expected and much more developed and ordered with an impressive metro system which is in the process of being extending to the suburbs. I think I was expecting Delhi to be more like Lahore, but these are boom times in India and things seem to be very different here compared to Pakistan.

_______________________


A stripped down truck at a truck painting yard in Rawaipindi (the city adjoining Islamabad), Pakistan. Trucks (usually old Bedford trucks) in Pakistan are very elaborately decorated inside and out with such things as brightly painted murals, coloured lights, clinking chains and spinning flowers. The cab doors are even replaced with hand crafted wooden doors.


Chinese rally drivers taking pictures of the bike with over-sized cameras outside Indian customs on the Pakistan / India border. We had seen the same rally drivers in Kashgar, China.


Stirring up the crowds at the India / Pakistan border closing ceremony.


The entrance to Lahore Fort, from inside the complex.


A "river" in Lahore, Pakistan, a very dirty and polluted city.



Laurent (left) and Anders (right) at the campsite in Islamabad. Anders's bike, which he was repairing at the time, is pictured.


A polite notice outside KFC in Lahore, where incidentally all the staff are deaf and you have to order using a "point it" menu.

Written by Tom

Islamabad, Pakistan - 12,415 miles from London

A view from the Karakoram Highway which the Karakorum, Hindu Cush and Himalaya mountain ranges all cross at various points

Our journey from Kashgar in China to Pakistan's capital Islamabad along the Karakoram Highway was a five day ride through some of the most amazing scenery we have seen so far. We reached the Chinese/Pakistani border with relative ease: the Chinese part of the Karakoram Highway was a superb new road and our Chinese guide (a Chinese law requirement!) meant that we had no problems with the Mandarin only road signs.

A view from China of the mountain range over which the Kunjerab Pass crosses

The actual border is the 4665 metre Kunjerab Pass which we had heard was the highest road pass in the world, although we have since been corrected in this misassumption the highest road pass being on one of the roads to Lhasa. We had been expecting to face problems with snow on the road given the time of year we were travelling the Karakoram Highway, but up until the border we had been pleasantly surprised by the fact that the roads were snow free and easy to ride. However, when we got to the Pakistani border itself the situation immediately changed and we were greeted by a cheery Pakistani policeman who told us that the snow covered road we could see stretching way out in front of us only lasted for five kilometres (or so, maybe, perhaps, possibly). Tom, in particular, found the first kilometre of this road very tough and owing to his bike's road tyres he was having to work very hard keeping his bike from slipping everytime he tried to move. That said, no matter how hard he tried he just couldn't help his bike falling periodically and since I had to help him pick up his bike (our bikes are not light!) everytime it fell this made our progress very stop/start.

Tom has trouble with the snow just after we have crossed the Kunjerab Pass

Things suddenly got worse for us when, on one of the occasions I had been helping Tom with his bike, I remembered I had stupidly left my ignition on. Normally this would not have been a problem, but since it was so cold on the pass I had my heated grips on and when I got back to my bike I found that this had drained the battery to the extent that my bike wouldn't start. Repeated attempts at trying to bump start my bike failed and quickly noting that this road was not the busiest in the world (two cars passed us in an hour and a half) we decided to head down the mountain to get out of the snow line hoping we would be more likely to get some sort of help there.

Minutes before I find I have a flat battery I was contemplating how far we have to ride to get to the Pakistani customs post at Sost (also the first settlement we were going to get to Pakistan)

After six hours of alternately pushing (oddly we quite often found ourselves having push my bike downhill - work that one out if you can because I have no idea why that was!), trying to bump start and freewheeling the bike we found ourselves at a small police checkpost a mere fifteen kilometres from the Kunjerab Pass. We were exahusted and we are both eternally grateful to the fantastic guys at there who gave us a place next to their roaring coal stove, hot, sweet tea, bread and a bed each for the night. As an aside we passed this, our first night in Paksitan, as illegal immigrants as we had made so little progress that we had not even made it to the Pakistani customs post way down the valley in Sost.

The morning after the night before Tom poses with some of the the police (and a random Chinese road engineer) who put us up for the night after we'd finally pushed my bike out of the snow line and down the mountain

The next morning we managed to get my bike started after Tom came up with the great idea of using copper wire to drip charge the battery in my bike. Our initial problem of where to get copper wire four and a half thousand metres up a mountain was quickly solved by one of the policemen who cut a section of cable out of some nearby telephone wires handily running right next to the police hut. It later emerged that the wires had come down in a storm a while ago and so we weren't actually cutting off all means of communications between the police hut and the outside world! Leaving the police post we carried on down the Karakoram Highway reaching Sost and the Palistani customs post just before lunch. The customs were a breeze and, once we had found someone not having tea or taking an early lunch who was able to stamp us into the country, we carried on our way with no-one seeming to care that we had been illegally there for a day already.

Some of the amazing secenery we saw from the Karakoram Highway

From Sost we spent three days travelling down the Karakoram Highway stopping at the picturesque town of Karimabad with its abandoned and crumbling fort looming high in the hills, the busy but otherwise uninteresting town of Giligit, the small town of Besham in the heart of Pakistan's infamous North West Frontier Province an area famous for fiercely independent tribes, colonial era intrigue and, in the modern day, for rumours of hidden Taliban strongholds and finally toward the end of the Karakoram Highway the British built hill station of Abbotabad. The only hiccup on the only journey was when Tom hit a pretty large pot hole at forty and took to the skies for five or six feet; the resulting crash left him a bit battered and with brakes that were not fully functioning. Thanfully he could still continue and now we are in Islamabad we will try and sort the problem out and get the brakes back to normal before we tempt fate any further and continue.

Besham first thing in the morning - we'd been up early looking for the gun shop we had been told was in town, but at that time of the day we only found food, the gun shop wasn't open until later

A modified Bedford lorry with a flat tyre

It was around Abbotabad and on the road from there to Paksitan's purpose built capital of Islamabad that we had our first taste of just how bad we can expect riding the bikes to be in India. Overtaking (and undertaking!) at every opportunity (blind bends or not), tailgating, total disregard for any rules of the road and ancient British built Bedford lorries painted lurid colours and sporting a whole range of decorations, stickers and tassles, but belching black diesel fumes and causing huge tailbacks all give a taste of the bustle, energy and simple downright craziness of the Indian subcontinent.

Written by Peter

Children on their way to school in Besham