India: summer 2018

August 17th to september 11th was spent in India, riding from Delhi and the Manali-Leh highway. I put my bike together in the airport and rode to the hotel where I was staying, at 1am. The first thing to notice is that Delhi is incredibly hot, even at night. It only takes about 5 minutes walking outside to be covered in sweat.

Day two I went to see the red fort, and Jama mosque, as well as a famous Sikh temple

While wandering through this bazaar I had my phone pick pocketed so I bought a cheap smartphone:

I also had someone throw animal feces on my shoes with the intention of getting me to pay his friend 50 rupees to clean it, so that was a fun day in India. Too bad for him my shoes are waterproof and I don't care, so I didn't pay him. Anyway a few days later my shoes were in 2 feet of mud in a pool sized puddle on an unpaved road so they got mildly cleaner.

The next day I wandered around Delhi on my bike, seeing other sites further away.

The security theater at these tourist sites is hilarious since they cared more that you weren't wearing shoes than anything else. I walked into all of these places (through a metal detector) with a pocket knife and was never stopped. Also, I wore the same pair of socks for three weeks without washing them so the jokes on them thinking that I wasn't getting the mosque or temple dirty.

The next day I had a driver take me to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, which I didn't find that impressive. It looks exactly like all the photos you see of it.

Agra fort also looks exactly like the red fort. Some parts have been restored, but not all of it. After that, I was excited to leave Delhi and start my way north. The first day I ended up with heat exhaustion even after a day of spending long breaks very often I still threw up around 7pm. I managed to encounter some locals who invited me to sit outside with them in front of their fan and then they led me to a local roadside cafe that had AC where I spent the night. After that I switched to the same schedule as I had riding in the desert previously. Between noon and four it was too hot and humid to ride so I would take long lunch breaks. I also started on backroads but switched to the highway since I could ride in the scooter lane safe enough and the road was way better.

Being a white person in India, this happened every time I stopped for more than 30 seconds:

I also had about 30 different people take selfies with me, sometimes without asking.

After 4 days I made it to shimla, which is about 2000m up. The warm air from the valleys rose to the town creating what seemed like a perpetual fog.

One interesting bit about Indian buildings is that most of them built on the side of mountains have one or two livable floors at street level, with the rest entirely unfinished.

Three days later I was in Manali and ready to start the road I actually came to India for.

This campaign is not working. Indian drivers honk at literally anything. By far the worst drivers I have ever seen. I wore earplugs any time I was within 50 feet of a road because I didn't want to lose my hearing from people honking directly in my ear every 10 seconds. Even as a pedestrian you're not safe.

I was taking it fairly slow to start since I was worried about the altitude, so I climbed from the 2000m of Manali to the first stop along Rhotang pass at Marhi at 3000m and stopped biking around 1pm and read a book on my phone. I managed to make friends with the stray dogs there just by petting one for 30 seconds. There are a lot of stray dogs in India that are fed out of pity, but I don't think anything else is done for them. A lot end up with broken legs and they spend all day sleeping. Just petting one briefly was enough to have three of them follow me around town all day, sleep outside my tent, and follow me a few miles up the pass the next day.





Day two was up and over Rohtang pass, the first of five at 4000m. A lot of tourists come here and a few locals sell food near the summit. I didn't know that corn is grown in India and is commonly roasted over coals, and then they dip a lime wedge in salt and rub it on the ear and sell it for 40 cents. It was sold on the side of the road commonly and was one of my favorite snacks and I bought one here. I'd been told Indians typically quote prices as about twice what they're willing to accept and I found that they're very quick to lower it. I asked the guy selling them how much it was and he answered 30 rupees. I'd paid 15 a few days earlier at Shimla  so I just turned around and he instantly lowered it to 20, so I agreed. A similar thing happened to me in a gift shop in Manali that even had a sign saying all prices are as listed.







That night was spent in a Keylong hotel after I met and rode with an aussie cyclist after coming down the pass. Day three was riding to zing zing bar where along the way I encountered the only real surprise on the trip. I had expected Patseo to have some facilities but it was basically a military camp and a locked hotel. The hotel had a well so I refilled water with that. Zing Zing Bar itself was a small roadside cafe camp split into two parts about 5km from each other where I had dinner and spent the night.







Leaving In the morning it was another climb up Baralacha La pass at 4900m



And then it was a nice descent to Sarchu. However, before that there was a long section of road that was just rocks covering a river of glacial runoff that had no bridge over it. I had been warned about this and was cautious but still tried to ride through it. It turned out to be about 2 feet deep in places and moving fast, so this is the last photo my camera took before I got knocked over and soaked all of my gear:



After the river broke all my electronics, I rode the remaining hour or so to sarchu and dried everything out and spent the night. Sarchu is basically a shanty town of nothing but sheet metal buildings. It was then a days ride to pang, up and over the gata loops and two other passes. In pang I met two Italian cyclists, one of which was riding a Brompton and he complained that he had to walk down most of the passes because the unpaved roads were too much for his small tires. Meanwhile I was flying down them as fast as I could. From Pang the road climbs for a few km and then slowly descends across a beautiful plain sitting between two mountain ranges. I saw a bunch of herders with several hundred goats walking them across the grass. Not having a camera or any reason to stop, I made better time, and made it up and over taglang pass and then descended 2000m to upshi where I met another group of cyclists and spent the night. From there I made my way to Leh where I had a decent idea of where to go but with no map and what I thought was the right direction was up a huge hill I stopped at the first hostel I found. Turns out I was right and the way to the tourist section of town was up a huge hill. I made my way there and bought my second Indian phone and got my bearings. I got to Leh about 3 days earlier than expected so I decided to go to Nubra valley with the extra time. I had to buy a permit to get there and I left early in the morning. I left 80% of my gear at the hostel and it still took me about 6 hours to climb what is the highest point I've ever been on, at about 5300m which is the same height as Everest base camp, and it was exhausting:





It opens up to one of the most incredible valleys I've ever seen.









Buddhists really like putting temples on the highest point they can find





After a trip to Disket to see the monastery, it was another long day up and over khardung pass to get back to Leh. Interestingly they were holding a marathon along the same route I was taking that left around 3am so they had the road closed for the first half of the day. This meant I saw about 2 cars total until I got to the top around noon where I had some noodles and tea and then started down, which almost made this the best day in India except on the way down I started to see cars coming up, and the way down is filled with hairpin, blind, one way corners which I had to break hard for each time because the Indian solution to blind corners is not to slow down but to honk like an idiot to warn the person coming the other way. It is literally painted and signed on the road by the government to do this. A shop in Leh offers mountain bike rentals for about $15 where tehy'll drive you up to the top and you ride down and I definitely talked a few people out of doing it because it's not easy if you've never mountain biked before and it's incredibly dangerous because of these turns and drivers.

After this I hung out in Leh for a few days sightseeing

The tourist section of Leh:



I also took day trips to Shey and Stok to see the monasteries. On the way back from Shey I saw a group of kids with an upturned bike. One of them had a terrible single speed with a broken chain he was trying to fix. He had a screw where a pin should've been. After a few minutes I was able to get it back in and the chain on the crank but I think the screw probably came out again quickly.







All together I'd call the experience fun, the people friendly, the food great, and the mountains beautiful. If you have earplugs, India can be a wonderful place.

Eastern Europe - summer 2017

I just spent three weeks biking through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus. I flew into tallinn and put my bike together in the airport. As it turns out, the last time I put my bike together when I flew back from Alaska, I didn't put enough grease on the seatpost, so it is now stuck so they had to remove a lot of other stuff to fit the bike in the box and it took me a while to put everything back together.

The first two days were filled with minor heart attacks. When I went to the shop to pick up my bike before my flight, they first told me that it wasn't boxed because the seatpost is stuck, and then the mechanic said he had boxed it. Then there was tons of traffic on the way to jfk so I was later than I had hoped. Then the airline told me they were going to charge me $300 for luggage since I had two bags and the bike, but suggested I just buy a huge bag that fit everything for $40. I carried this huge bag with me the whole time because I figured it would save me money on the return flight, which it did. When I landed and took my bike out, at first I couldn't find a single screw for anything, until I saw they had all been placed back in the holes they were supposed to go in. Then, since they had taken the fork off, part of the headset was stuck on the stem meaning I wouldn't be able to properly attach it. It took me probably 10 minutes with pliers to remove it. Also, they had removed the rear rack and one of the screws was bent so I had to use a spare I had brought. A day later, after riding over cobblestones a lot, a different screw had fallen out, so I had to replace that.

When I finally got to the hostel I had booked in Tallinn, I dropped my gear and walked around old town.

The baltics are in an area where multiple christian sects have been popular and there are churches everywhere. The capitals all have orthodox, lutheran, and catholic churches, sometimes across the street from each other.

In the capitals, everything is in 3-4 languages and almost everyone speaks as many. Outside the capitals the countries are so rural that I didn't see many people, but everyone spoke russian or english.

Every single small town however had a church. Usually built in the 12-1400's. Most were locked but a few were open.

A big thing I noticed is that the baltics are almost entirely devoid of world war monuments. All the other countries I've been to in europe had tons of them, but the baltics mostly have monuments to their war of independence that immediately followed WWI. Also they were robbed of their independence in WWII and horribly oppressed by the soviets so they don't celebrate that, and in fact have museums about it.

In Riga it was essentially more of the same as Tallinn. Lots of churches and museums in the old town. Also near the airport there is a "museum" which is basically a bunch of decommissioned soviet aircraft sitting in a field.

I was also wandering around the bretheren cemetery and a random lady showed me the grave of the second president of latvia and his wife.

From Riga I went east to Daugavpils along the river. Along the way I stopped at Jekabpils where I went into a small church where the woman there gave me essentially a free private tour and it's the only orthodox church I've ever had permission to take photos in.

The larger cities have extensive light rail systems, that weren't separated from traffic, so it was funny to see trains stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks.

Lithuania was similar to the rest of the baltics.

I count close to 10 churches in this photo

Things changed pretty quickly when I got to Belarus.

It was the only country I needed a visa for, and the only one that doesn't use euros. Also a lot less people spoke english, but everyone speaks russian. Churches were still everywhere, and WWII and Lenin monuments started appearing. For as much as the baltics hate their treatment during the war, the Belorussians have celebrated theirs. WWII is in fact called "the great patriotic war" and they have monuments in a lot of towns. I stopped by a place called Stalin's line which had a ton of old soviet military vehicles and weapons.

And Minsk has the standard gigantic square with Lenin.

I spent time in Minsk in churches and museums, and I spent a day riding around looking for a bike shop with a box and packing it up to fly home.

The flight home that I had connected through Moscow, and they wouldn't let me on the plane because I didn't have a transit visa for Russia. I didn't think I needed one since the last time I connected through Novosibirsk I didn't but apparently there are special rules for Belarus. Since my Belorussian visa was going to expire that day I had to buy a ticket to kiev and spend the night there. Not a lot of airlines fly out of Minsk so my options were limited. That is now the second time I've left a country only hours before I would be deported.