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.
Gareth gives us his take on the Everest experience while on the Roof of the World. Then it’s all the way back down, down, down into Nepal. For the adventurers this epic journey is fast coming to an end so what are their World by Bike plans from here? Photos of Mt. Everest
This once vast empire of 1,200,000 sq km has since the 1951 invasion by the Chinese been reduced to a XXX Autonomous Region and the rest of it has been absorbed into either the Sichuan or Qinghai provinces of China. China tolerates the religious choice of Tibetans but will not entertain any personifying of that […]
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 […]
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 – […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Pakistan turned out to be much more adventurous than Jo had planned. She hopes the incredible heat hasn’t affected Gareth’s brain, and just how do you get three motorbikes into a canoe? Across Attabad Lake
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 […]
