A bicycle journey continued…
Rose at about 8am. The Israelis were having mechanical problems – faulty fuel pipes, wobbly handlebars and a puncture. Alex and I decided that the hitch biking idea was such a good one that we thought we should really carry it over for another day. He managed to track down a driver, who looked a bit suspicious to me – a thin, weasel-like character with a face that said “don’t believe a word I say”. He had an accomplice who appeared to be an affable simpleton. We loaded the bikes onto the roof of the truck, and were quickly ushered inside. We then convinced ourselves that the bikes were being quietly unloaded into another truck so a stealth mission was undertaken to check. They were still attached…
The bridge out of Pang towards the Lachalang La had unfortunately collapsed. There was a queue of trucks waiting next to the fairly fast flowing river, and two trucks were in the river and not moving anywhere fast. After some unintelligible conversation with the others, our driver took a run up and managed to get through. It was at least three feet deep, and quite a lot of the river managed to find its way up through the dashboard. Quite impressive, though we didn’t tell him that.
The road up to the top was long, bumpy and quite treacherous. After a number of stomach churning manoeuvres we finally made it. By this point we had decided that the driver and his dumb accomplice were serious chancers and up to no good. They had started off agreeing to our fairly paltry offer of payment, but as we had risen higher up the pass they had started to make comments about how great it was of them to give us a lift. I reluctantly gave the driver 400rs, and Alex gave his mate 50. They drove off in a cloud of dust.
According to my intel, we would drop from the Lachalang La to Whisky Nullah, and then climb about 50m to the Naleeka Pass, before dropping down the Gata Loops to Sarchu. The dropping down to Whisky Nullah was fine, but the “50m climb” turned into 400m or so of total hell on Earth – knackered road, very steep, very hot, bursting lungs, and lots of trucks passing which seemed to be emitting something akin to VX. Oh, and there was a savage wind as we got nearer the top. When we made it we tucked into our packed lunch of chappatis and dhal, which resulted in a different but equally unwelcome savage wind. The decent was great fun though – very fast, thanks to our methane afterburners. The Gata Loops are a series of 21 huge (and I do mean huge) hairpins. There were rocky, sandy trails cutting come of the corners, which we decided to venture down. It was thus that we overtook the Israeli bikers. We didn’t just cruise past – we tore past them at incredible speed. We both thought this extremely impressive.
However, at the bottom the road levelled out and then started to gently climb. This was somewhat unexpected, as I was expecting the downhill to take us all the way to Sarchu. On we pushed nevertheless. The bikers overtook us. The sun started to go down. Still a long way to go. I started to feel the pain – all I could do was try to keep some sort of rhythm and let my oxygen-deprived imagination conjure up something pleasantly erotic. Alex (who had spent weeks in the army being subjected to similarly unpleasant night marches) seemed to be feeling ok, judging by his shit jokes.
At about 10km to go we started pushing as it was a bit too dark to ride. Then we decided to try riding again. And then, again, we decided against this course of action. We got slower and slower. Or rather, I got slower and slower…
Eventually we stumbled into Sarchu. We found the tent that the Israelis were staying in, and there was an adjoining shed into which we crawled inside with the bikes. Executive Suite #2. No en-suite, but the air conditioning was working overtime. I could barely function, so we called room service and then arranged the bedroom. The manager looked blank when we asked for an alarm call, a copy of the Guardian and continental breakfast with fresh grapefruit juice and a pair of Illy espressos. He won’t be getting any AA rosettes methinks…