Archive | Roof of the World

Roof of the World

Karachi to Kathmanadu

Riders: Gareth Morgan, Jo Morgan, Dave Wallace.
Motorcycles: Suzuki DR650
Distance: 6,000km
Countries: Pakistan, Tibet, and Nepal.
Trip description:

Pakistan Intro G and J from Gareth Morgan on Vimeo.

2014 and we’re back on the road, as our WorldbyBike caravan moves on from Karachi, Pakistan and we hope to finish the year in Chang Mai, Thailand. The first leg of 2014’s programme takes in Pakistan, Tibet, and Nepal. The biggest challenge will be altitude as we have many days riding up above 4,000 metres. This year we stick to the DR 650’s that we switched to last year riding in Siberia. We know they’re just the job for handling swollen waterways and recovering from drownings, let’s see how they handle serious altitude. We know the fuel injected Beemers handle that really well as we saw in the Andes. Highlights on this ride include a ride up to Everest Base Camp (Chinese side), the KKK highway of course, Kashgar, Lahsa and riding into Kathmandu again, something we last did in 2003. It promises to be a goodie.

The trip so far

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Blogs from the trip

Jo on yak

Road to Everest

It’s not that easy to get oxygen into your lungs at this altitude and the team find themselves on a road that leads to the highest place in the World. Remember that Jo’s latest adrenaline hobby in NZ is mountain climbing where she hopes to make it up all of the peaks over 3000m. She […]

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Yak poo

To the Source of the Mekong and the Yangzte

It’s nuts really, the sources of these most iconic of rivers lie just 340 kms apart as the crow flies, the Mekong rising on  Mt. Guozongmucha, and the Yangtze on Geladandong Mountain. As we ride from Golmud to Nakchu in Tibet we ride between the two mountains, from which spring the two greatest waterways of East Asia – […]

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Six Days in the Taklamakan Desert

It wasn’t our preference to ride the Taklamakan desert again, we’d already struggled through that on our Silk Road ride of 2005. But the Chinese refused us entry to Tibet from the northwest and insisted we could only enter along the northeast entry route. Given we’d just entered China from the south west via Pakistan […]

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Uighur Protest, by Malcolm Brown from WA

Into Chinese Turkestan

Goodbye Pakistan, hello Chinese Turkestan – at least that’s the alternative name for the vast Xinjiang westernmost province of China, home of the Uyghur people who historically had allegiance to Ghengis Khan’s Mongol Empire. But once the Manchu Qing dynasty got control of East Turkestan in the 18th Century it was all over, this area became […]

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The Magic of Kashgar

The Magic of Kashgar

Long one of the Silkroad’s most mystical locations – along with Samarkand and Bokhara in Uzbekistan, Kashgar, sitting in the far west of what is nowadays China is the junction between the east-west silkroad joining China to Europe and the north-south road from Urumqi to Kashmir (which we saw the remnants of in the north […]

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Jo & Gareth

The Chinese, Making Pakistan a Vassal State

Pakistan borders China’s western hinterland. Urumqi the capital of Xinjiang Autonomous Region is one of the world’s furthest and isolated cities from the sea. But China is changing all that. In a exercise in expanding influence that is reminiscent of “The Great Game” that this region saw in the late 19th century when Russia and Britain […]

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Jo & Gareth

Into the Mountains at Last

From Gilgit the climb to the Khundjerab Pass (4,800m) starts. We will take a few days to ensure we don’t get a repeat of the altitude sickness that dropped us that time in the Andes where we foolishly did 4,0O0m in one day. That’s the last thing we need given the lingering dehydration that the […]

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