Kathmandu to Pokhara



After a late night cobbling together the Bikes and re-packing our luggage we wake up in the international guest house finally meet everybody we’re going to ride with for the next week over breakfast. 


The view from the guesthouse window is splendid but the noisy cacophony of beeping horns is less so. With warnings about dysentery and other gut related ailments ringing in my ears from people who visited here 20 years ago I stick to the old staple of beans and a pancake and black tea. 

The bikes are loaded and strapped onto three 4x4 pickups and are dispatched by road  to Pokhara some 200km away.  As the journey can take between 6 and 12 hours driving, we are privileged to take a short 30 minute flight so we jump in a minibus and enjoy the madness of the Kathmandu morning rush hour. 


It’s curiously chaotic but it seems to work. Road markings are completely redundant, the difference between your lane and the oncoming traffic lane is very arbitrary and roundabout are bidirectional. It is absurd…but it seems to work by a process of gentle negotiation. There are no traffic lights and vehicles and pedestrians just keep going into and spare piece of road that lets them get closer to their destination. Elsewhere I’m sure that people would be screaming and waving fists while wearing out their horns. Here, people just keep moving forward till the vehicle in front gives way (or doesn’t) and then in turn they give way to people pushing in front sometimes too. 


A quick hop on a small airplane for an 30 minute hop across the foothills of the Himalayas. We see the massive peaks in the distance. We drop into a shiny new modern airport at Pokhara. After checking in to our hotel we get gently squiffy in a bar by the lakeside and wait for our bikes to arrive by road. Tomorrow, the adventure proper begins as we head north by 4x4 


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