From the desk of Extreme Trifle HQ (96 ft above sea level)
In mountaineering circles "Touching the Void" is
the stuff of legend. A story of man versus mountain and triumph over adversity.
Inspired by this epic achievement, Extreme Trifle took on the Himalayas in
their latest instalment of the Wrong Way Round series. Welcome to "Touching the
Cloth".
The
vehicles
On this occasion the team used locally sourced Royal Enfields from
Kashmir to tackle the world's highest roads. These machines are a fine example of British engineering,
unfortunately from a time when the finest examples of British engineering were
Morris Minors and Mousetrap.
Since then the Indians have improved the bike by adding
extras such as brakes but in reality they have only succeeded in polishing a
turd.
This was a controversial and much debated move away from our tried
and trusted Yamaha Townmates but due to Indian bureaucracy, by the time we'd have
shipped them to India and had them clear customs, plate tectonics would have
shifted the Himalayas to just north of Birmingham. So rent-a-heap it
was.
The route
From "base camp" in Manali we will headed north
to immediately start an ascent to 13,050 ft to the top of Rohtang La which
translated from Tibetan means "Pile of Corpses", which is nice. Shortly after we
realised we should have spent more time acclimatising as one by one we all
get the sort of headaches you only get when drinking a Slush Puppie too
fast.
To remedy this we made hasty descents down the other side
guaranteeing in the process that at least one of the group would forget that on an Enfield the gear
lever and rear brake lever are reversed resulting in what was supposed to be an
emergency stop, being a potential 4,000ft freefall to the valley floor in the wrong gear.
According to the
History Channel series "Ice
Road Truckers: Deadliest Roads" someone dies (or gets reincarnated) every 5
minutes on these roads. On that basis provided we stopped every 4 minutes we'd
manage to avoid avalanches, landslides, hypothermia, runaway buses and
being trampled by yaks.
Having conquered our first mountain pass the
journey then escalated up and down Bara Lacha La (16,040 ft), Lachulung La
(16,600 ft), Tanglang La (17,582 ft) before we took on the world's highest
motorable pass, Khardung La, at a whopping 18,380 ft. That's almost 1,000ft
higher than Everest Base camp. And then we'd be doing the difficult
bit.
Although Khardung La gets all the plaudits for being the highest,
Marsimik La is actually higher but because it is not considered "motorable" it
doesn't get a lot of mentions. We don't know what the Tibetan transalation for
Marismik La is but it's probably something like "considerably higher pile of
corpses than Rohtang La". Rumour has it that there is an even higher pass (Ooh
La La) but this has yet to be backed up by scientific measurement.
So off we set knowing that if we got lost and turned too
far left we'd end up on the front line between Indian and Pakistan or if we got lost
and turned too far right we'd end up in China to be sentenced to 10 years hard
labour for spying. Either scenario was at best inconvenient and guaranteed to
mean we'd miss our flight home.
So all in all it was the usual recipe for
failure. Bearing in mind that in Wrong Way Round Siberia, we fell slightly
short, well 13,000kms short actually after the Transnistrian government decided
to confiscate all our bikes and deport us. Wrong Way Round Sahara would have
gone slightly better if we hadn't picked the hottest month of the year to cross
the desert inevitably leading to dehydration, heat stroke and a week in hospital
for one of the crew with a colon infection after drinking contaminated water.
What could possibly go wrong..?
All the photos can be seen here 
on our
Facebook page. The video is in the editing suite and might emerge once we've finished editing Wrong Way Round Sahara.
