Tag Archives: motorbikes

Testing the Ice

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AN ATTEMPT TO REACH THE RUSSIAN ARCTIC CIRCLE IN A 1993 URAL SIDECAR….

The beast…

There are two basic prerequisites for a motorbike trip: a motorbike and the ability to ride one. We had neither. Instead we had tweed, a tap-dancing comedian and an industrial dose of determination. And with little more than this potent cocktail of motorbike unsavvy, three of us were on a train from Yekaterinburg in Russia, heading north to the icy wastes of Surgut, an oil and gas town in the armpit of Siberia’s Polar Ural region.  Our mission: to buy an old Ural motorbike and sidecar and ride it 1000 miles up the River Ob  into the Arctic Circle.

As usual, it was Tom’s fault. Tom, founder of adventure anarchists The Adventurists, has a unique talent for coming up with ridiculous ideas. Ideas muttered absent-mindedly over a dog-eared map and a cup of tea in the company’s Bristol HQ. Ideas which either make people snort with outrage and reach for the Complaints Form, or sell their siblings and re-mortgage their house to take part in. Generally Tom’s mutterings end up as hugely successful events which raise mountains of cash for charity (The Mongol Rally, Rickshaw Run and Mototaxi Junket for example), but even I doubted whether he’d pushed the adventure envelope too far with the latest ‘Siberian idea’. Unlike the shiny new models, old Ural motorbikes aren’t known for their reliability, and temperatures in Siberia in mid-winter are cryogenically cold. It was a potentially lethal combination.

Undeterred by such lily-livered protestations, Tom, myself and Buddy, the aforementioned tap-dancing comedian, set off to Siberia in February to attempt the mission. On paper, none of us were exactly cut out for an Arctic motorbike adventure. Tom’s bike experience stretched to coaxing a recalcitrant mototaxi over the Peruvian Andes, Buddy’s to several hours on an antediluvian Ural in Mongolia and mine to passing my test in the UK six years previously and barely sitting on a bike since. What we did have however, was a joint pedigree in surviving outlandish escapades. Moreover, Tom, as well as having the determination of a charging buffalo, was a brilliant mechanic; Buddy a fearless idiot with a string of extreme TV presenting credits and myself; an ability to film what unfolded and hopefully rein-in the boy’s more extreme death-defying stunts. If we succeeded and returned intact, The Adventurists would launch a new event the following winter, The Ice Run. If we failed and lived to tell the tale, well, we’d just put it down to a jolly good adventure.

Our start point was Surgut, a mere dot on the vast ocean of Siberia. Founded 400 years ago as a fur trading outpost, the town has recently exploded to a population of 300,000 thanks to an oil and gas frenzy. Frozen for more than six months of the year and a mosquito infested swamp in summer, it’s hard to imagine a less hospitable environment. For our purposes, however, it was perfect; it being conveniently located on the banks of the Ob, our planned conduit to the Arctic. Furthermore, via the wonders of the Internet, we’d made contact with a group of bikers there who were keen to help us ‘crazy English people’. And since the main problem when we arrived in Surgut was a lack of bike, help was what we needed.

Roman and Alexei, our new Surgutian biker friends, were both ex-Spetsnaz giants of men who’d done several tours in Chechnya. They thought the whole venture was of the utmost hilarity, and soon word had spread through the whole Surgut biker community. Of particular entertainment to them was Buddy, the absolute antithesis of Russian machismo. Bespectacled, thin as a rasher of wind and permanently garbed in tweed, every one of their biker cronies who appeared in Roman’s bike shop to ogle us grabbed Buddy’s twig-like arms and collapsed into laughter. One of them, a  regional dirt bike champion, took great mirth in telling us how we’d either be eaten by wolves or freeze to death. “Would you like to come with us?” I asked him in jest, “Not for a million dollars” he replied, before letting out a gold-toothed cackle.

Despite their reservations, they did all they could to help, and two days later, we were the proud owners of a 1993, 650cc pale green Ural Tourist; bought for 30,000 roubles (£600) off a wild-eyed ex convict called Valody. Our bike had been manufactured a full decade before Ural underwent buyout and major transformation in 2003, and looked and sounded every inch as if it had fought in the battle of Stalingrad. It was perfect.

Valody and his former charge

Roman and Alexei didn’t agree. To us it was the old Ural was an icon, its almost unchanged 1940’s design -based on the BMW R71- a thing of great beauty. To them it was outdated, clunky Communist technology, a symbol of Soviet failure. Why not a nice reliable Honda? We imagined speeding across the snowy tundra to the glorious put-put of a Soviet single-cylinder, goggles flying in the Arctic wind. Roman and Alexei imagined us freezing to death, after having burnt every last inch of our Ural to try and keep warm. Hopefully our vision would prove the more accurate.

Since our rusty steed had been languishing in Valody’s sub-zero garage for a while, there were a few modifications to be done before the journey North. New soft profile, nobbly winter tyres were bought, an Odyssey battery – capable of working down to -80 – was fitted, heated handlebar grips were connected and snowmobile oil was poured into the engine to stop it freezing. We also bought special snowmobile facemasks, local felt valenki boots and an all-in-one down oversuit designed for oil workers to build pipelines in temperatures as low as -60. Dubbed ‘the fat suit’ by Tom, this would be worn by the driver, who’d get the brunt of the bone-chilling Siberian wind.

Just before we left, Roman and Alexei announced that we would be escorted for the first few days by their good friend Vasily. Not only were they concerned about bears, wolves and bandits, but it was due to be -40 the following week, the sort of cold that causes frostbite and hypothermia within minutes, a silent killer with no mercy. Before we had a chance to resist Vasily appeared: with piercing blue eyes, wrestler’s shoulders and a wicked laugh, he didn’t look like the sort of man you disagreed with. “No problem, I have two guns” said Vasily in heavily accented English, pointing to his brand new Land Cruiser, his eyes twinkling mischievously. Whether we liked it or not, Vasily was going to escort us, and that was that. While he was with us, I would film and alternate between car and bike, and once he left, the three of us would squeeze onto the bike – jerry cans, sleeping bags and all.

With the mercury at -32 we finally set off for Salekhard, waving goodbye to a small crowd of worried looking bikers.  And to the amazement of our Russian entourage, the Ural made it the first 200 miles in a single ten hour schlep, with only one minor breakdown.

The real adventure started as we turned north from Khanty-Mansisk, steering off the icy tarmac onto our first zimnik – winter road. Carved out of the packed snow and ice by mammoth snow-ploughs, these zimniks are the lifeblood of Siberia in winter. Without any actual roads between here and Salekhard; zimniks and the mighty Ob are the only transport routes available to the remote villages that dot the region.

Oh the joy of hitting the snow! As far as the eye could see was a blinding blanket of white, broken only by the odd silver birch copse. The bike skidded and bumped along, her new tyres gripping the packed snow with remarkable effect, her tractor-like engine rudely shattering the stillness. Fortunately, there hadn’t been a heavy snowfall recently so the surface was hard and relatively smooth, and we were propelled across the frozen tundra at a steady 30 mp/h. Heavy snow could spell trouble further north, where the zimniks were rarely cleared by snowploughs and we would easily get stuck, but for now we were in luck. Our only encounters were with the odd Soviet-era snowmobile and a handful of lumbering oil and gas trucks.

That night we stayed with some hunting friends of Vasily’s in Kidrovia, a village on the banks of the frozen Ob. According to his friends, Roman and Nadia, we were the first foreigners ever to visit Kidrovia, and we spent the night downing vodka and eating fabulous local fish, cheese and bread. Roman, a dark-eyed Tartar, had served in the Soviet Army in Mongolia, but Nadia had never met a foreigner before, and spent the evening excitedly holding my hand and stuffing us with more and more food. Like our friends in Surgut and our companion Vasily, these were people who we’d never met, yet whose kindness towards us was fathomless.

The bike had clearly enjoyed her stay in Kidrovia too, for in the morning no amount of pushing, swearing and new spark plugs could cajole her to start. Tom, normally able to fix any mechanical glitch, was flummoxed, as was the increasingly drunk crowd of burly men who appeared to lend a hand. The problem turned out to be the ignition timing, and it wasn’t until the shadows began to lengthen and the bike had been pulled apart that the engine finally choked into life. At least the delay had given us a chance to explore the village, with its wooden houses, onion-domed church and frozen fishing boats. We’d even been given a tour of the local school, where we’d been paraded on stage like exotic animals, Buddy entertaining everyone with juggling, dancing and jumping in the snow. There’s a saying that ‘laughter is the shortest distance between people’ and having Buddy with us, always making people laugh, was a constant asset: everyone should travel with their own personal comedian.

Vasily and his wife Anna

The next morning, under a cloudless winter sky, we said goodbye to Vasily and our hosts. Vasily’s eyes filled with tears as we hugged goodbye, and we promised to meet again. Nadia pressed hand-knitted gloves and freshly baked apple cake into our hands and Roman enveloped us in bear-like hugs. From now on we were on our own. With Tom driving, Buddy folded into the sidecar  and me pillion, we set off north, skimming for a while over the smooth surface of the Ob. Fuel was going to be scarce from here on, so as well as sleeping bags, a tent, a stove, food, filming equipment, a spare tyre and toolkit, we also had a 15 litre jerry can filled with petrol. Since the Ural had a less than 100 km range, and official petrol stations didn’t exist between here and Salekhard, we were counting on being able to buy black market fuel in villages along our route.

We were now around 500 miles from Salekhard, but with so much time lost finding and fixing the bike, being able to get there before our flight home was looking increasingly unlikely. Tom was absolutely determined we would make it however, and that day we drove long into the night. Although the temperature was hovering around a fairly clement -20, the wind chill was brutal, and keeping warm our primary concern. The driver, aided by the fat suit, heated handlebars and the windshield, faired best, whilst the unfortunate soul in the sidecar came off worst. Being in the sidecar was like being stuffed into a steel coffin and one’s feet, wedged into the nosecone, rapidly froze. Tom, much to the chagrin of Buddy and I, even complained of being too hot on occasions whilst driving – such was the physical strain of steering the Ural and her load over the bumps and bends of the ice road. Every two hours we’d stop, swap positions, ram a chocolate bar down our throats and force ourselves to run up and down until we could feel our fingers and toes, checking each other’s faces for the tell-tale waxiness of frostnip. Generally at these stops the bike would break down, and we’d lose another twenty minutes changing spark plugs and pushing her until she started again.

Buddy and a Russian friend

The cold aside, what a feeling it was to ride through the Siberian night under that glittering star-lit vault. Snow and ice as far as we could see. The sky so all encompassing it was as if we were swimming in a sea of stars. No sound except the growling engine of the Ural. Rarely have I felt so infinitesimally small in this world, and it was one of those experiences which will be etched in my mind for ever.

At Nizhny Novykary, a tiny settlement on the Ob, we finally gave in to the fact we weren’t going to make it to the Arctic Circle. Our flight home from Moscow was in two days and the only way we were going to make it was to turn around and get a train from Priobe, a town a day’s ride south. Salekhard was a mere 300 miles away, but with the bike developing more problems every day (one of the floats in the carburettor had now developed a leak), it was sadly out of our reach. Without doubt though, The Ice Run was possible. If we could make it this far with so little preparation, such an old Ural and with three of us on a bike, then better prepared teams would definitely be able to do it next year. We’d have to leave the elation of getting to Salekhard to them.

As we turned the bike round and steered her south, an old man who had been watching us curiously flagged us down and pressed an enormous frozen fish into our hands as a gift, wishing us good luck. So touched were we at the man’s kind gesture that we carried that fish all the way back to Yekaterinburg. What a strange sight we must have been; three foreigners and a large fish heading into the sunset  on an old Ural.

Tom snowboarding on the frozen River Ob

How can you take part?

The Ice Run takes place again between 9-22 February 2013. The price per bike (two people) is £2500 and this includes test driving and training at the legendary Ural factory in Siberia, launch and finish parties, and of course the use of one of The Adventurists’ fleet of pimped Urals.

To find out more and sign up see www.theadventurists.com.

This article first appeared in Motorcycle Monthly. To read more like this please see www.motorcyclemonthly.co.uk. Thanks to The Adventurists for the use of some of their photographs.



 

 

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Battling the Bosphorus

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 NAVIGATING ISTANBUL’S GOLDEN HORN BRIDGE ON A HONDA C90

On a 3000-mile trip around the Black Sea by Honda C90, we had to cross the terrifying Golden Horn bridge across the famous Bosphorus. Navigating this in a lorry is bad enough. Attempting it by C90 is tantamount to a game of two-wheeled Russian Roulette….

The Bosphorus is an extraordinary sliver of water. At only 700 metres wide at its narrowest point, it may be just a slip of a thing, but as the natural, geographical barrier between the two great continents of Europe and Asia, and as the only sea passage between the Black Sea and the warm waters of the Mediterranean beyond, it’s been of key strategic and commercial importance since the 5th century BC. Two of the world’s most powerful empires were ruled from here: Constantine the Great founded his new capital, Constantinople, on its shores in 330 AD, and the triumphant Ottomans ruled an empire from here that stretched as far as Ethiopia, Zanzibar (as Zenci and bahr, this means sea of black people in old Turkish) and Hungary. Its importance has persisted into modern times. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877, the Crimean War of the 1850s and Churchill’s ghastly Gallipoli campaign of 1915 all arose out of desires to control the Bosphorus. And today it is the world’s narrowest strait used for international shipping, a vital conduit for the Central Asian and Russian oil industry. A staggering 2.9 million barrels of oil pass through it every day, around 3% of the world’s total daily consumption, and in a single year  55,000 ships will navigate this narrow channel.

A boat by the Bosphorus

Yet the Bosphorus really wasn’t designed for such a starring role. The job should have been given to a much wider, less capricious body of water, not this one, with its treacherous currents and dainty waist. As long ago as the 3rd century AD Apollonius Rhodius wrote of Jason and the Argonauts struggle to row their vessel through these torrid narrows, and countless ancient seafarers met their watery deaths here. In 1680 a wily young Italian called Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli discovered why the channel had been the nemesis of so many a sailor. Having heard rumours from local Turkish fisherman of strange currents in the straits, he discovered, by experiments with a weighted line, that while the main torrent of the Sea ran out towards the Sea of Marmara and Mediterranean beyond, there was a second, deeper current that ran into the Black Sea from the Mediterranean. His Eureka moment not only explained why it was such a notoriously difficult body of water to navigate, but also why the shoreline of the Sea wasn’t sinking, despite its constant outflow to the Sea of Marmara.

It doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to work out that the combination of narrow, unpredictable waters and  a ceaseless procession of 200,000 tonne oil tankers isn’t a good one. Throw into the mix a city of 11 million inhabitants and it’s a disaster waiting to happen. The very slenderest point of the straits is in the heart of Istanbul, and it’s through here that hundreds of ships carrying thousands of tonnes of oil, gas and other goods pass daily. So far the Turks have been lucky, and none of the handful of incidents that occur each year have turned into major disasters. To the uninvolved observer, some even have a hint of black comedy about them. I read one story of a wealthy Istanbul gentleman receiving a phone call when he was at a dinner party one evening, informing him that a ship had crashed into the front of his waterfront mansion. He got up from the table and excused himself to his hosts, explaining, “I’m afraid I must go home, there is a ship in my kitchen.”  A ship in someone’s kitchen is one thing, an oil tanker quite another, and in April 2011 the Turkish Prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced plans to build a $10 billion ’Istanbul canal’, which will enable tankers to bypass the Bosphorus. Hopefully  the project will avoid any ‘there’s half an oil tanker in my kitchen’ type incidents, something Istanbul and it’s citizens could do without.

Since we were on two-wheels, the one thing we wouldn’t encounter was oil tankers. But it was nevertheless a knee-quakingly terrifying prospect. 180,000 thousand vehicles a day flood over the the eight-lane Bosphorus bridge linking Europe and Asia, that’s 7,500 every single hour. All of them larger than a Honda C90. As we joined the pan-continental dash cars, lorries, buses and vans screamed past us, cutting in and out of lanes haphazardly, apparently impervious to each other, jostling to get to the toll-gates as fast as unsafely possible. Already feeling somewhat shaken by the maelstrom of traffic, we pulled up to the toll-gate, the 1500m suspension bridge stretching into Asia before us.

“Do you speak English?” said Marley, my boyfriend, to the man in the tiny booth.

“Yah – 50 Lira” he shouted back.

“What? 50 Lira each bike? exclaimed Marley.

“Yah – 50 Lira one bike”

“No way! What a rip off, that can’t be right”. I squawked in protest. 50 Lira was around £20, which seemed an extortionate fee for such a short crossing. We were definitely being had. The altercation quickly escalated, with the booth troll stubbornly insisting on the inflated fee, and Marley equally stubbornly insisting we didn’t have 100 Lira between us to pay the toll. Behind us an irate queue of traffic was mounting, and three corpulent men in a white van behind us began to shout impatiently out of their window. After a five minute impasse Marley used up the last shred of his patience and yelled, “Oh fuck it, just go.” And go I did. I yanked on my steed’s throttle and bolted out of the gate as fast as its limited cc would allow, the noise of our accelerating bikes instantly accompanied by ear-splitting alarms. Not daring to look back, we fled across the bridge, pinned to the inside barrier by howling lorries, expecting to be arrested at any minute. Despite our surfeit of hi-vis, the other drivers hardly seemed to notice our presence, swerving at the last minute to avoid running us into the sides and whistling past our heads at terrifyingly close proximity. It was 1500 m of my life I hoped I never have to repeat.

At the first opportunity after the bridge we turned off the motorway and stopped at a cafe for reviving cups of tea. Marley’s blue eyes looked double their usual size and he sat and ate a large plum in stunned silence. “Fuck me” I said, “We’re lucky to be alive”. The sweat was pouring off both of us and I was past caring where we were going to camp for the night, I just wanted to get as far away from that horrible bridge as possible. “Shall we just get the ferry to Russia now?” I suggested, half-jokingly. The sun was now sinking rapidly in the sky and whatever we did we needed to do it soon. We’d promised each other we wouldn’t drive at night, which meant we had another hour at most to find a good camping spot.

Within  a few miles of the cafe we were winding along a deserted road through pine scented woods, the Black Sea glinting through the trees far below us. What a relief to be away from that madness, to have made it across without loss of limb or life. But our relief was short-lived. Suddenly, out of nowhere, appeared dogs. Not just one or two dogs, but hundreds of dogs. Hungry, feral looking beasts of all shapes and descriptions. They seemed to wake up when they heard the buzzing of our engines, appearing from the darkness of the woods to snarl and snap at our legs and wheels, and chase us along the road. “Just keep going!” I could hear Marley shouting behind me, “Don’t stop, just ride straight through them.” Easier said than done when you’ve got packs of hungry dogs trying to savage your legs. Amidst all the chaos, barking and swerving I noticed something odd: all the dogs had numbered green tags in their ears. Even more strangely, when we were in Istanbul last year Marley and I had both commented on the notable absence of stray dogs (and homeless people) in the city. As bizarre as it was, the only logical suggestion for all these dogs being here, in the woods that surrounded the capital, was that they had been purposefully rounded up, tagged and dumped here, out of the sight of the several million tourists who visited each year. Perhaps there were also colonies of ragged tramps living in these same woods, tagged and removed like the dogs that now snarled at our heels. As we rounded one corner I caught whiff of a noisome stench  and saw one particularly sorry looking canine crouching over the rotting carcass of a vast wild boar.

Wild boars, ravenous dogs and extreme exhaustion effectively quashed our desire to camp and two very tired bikers staggered into the Seref Hotel in Sile late that night. Our promise not to ride in the dark had been overruled by the desire not to be eaten by dogs, and we’d ridden the last hour, wide-eyed, well after the last streaks of dusk had melted from the sky. Our hotel was perched on the shore of the Sea, and a bright full moon lay over the water. It was a perfect sort of night for sitting gazing over the Sea and as we sat and drained  the last of our whisky miniatures on the balcony of our luxury ‘camping’ spot, I thought about the last few days. Tiring, and at times terrifying as the moped safari was proving to be, it was also every bit as enlivening, exhilarating, beautiful and stimulating as I ever could have imagined. Riding the bikes, smelling the country as we trundled along, feeling the wind slicing through my helmet and seeing the world change before our eyes was utterly wonderful. With the benefit of hindsight and whisky I mused that I’d rather be riding over the Bosphorus bridge any day than sitting in an office back at home

This is an extract from a planned book about our journey around the Black Sea which, for various reasons, never got beyond the initial stages.

To read more about this trip see www.blackc90.com

The C90′s resting after their exertions

Bombs and bikes: riding the real Ho Chi Minh Trail

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“You’ve got to ride a dirt bike like you’ve stolen it” said Digby through gritted teeth, as he accelerated through a particularly gnarly section, the wheels weaving between rocks, mud spraying up from the bike in all directions. All around us was deep Southeast Asian jungle, with no form of civilization for miles. If anything happened to us out here we were in trouble; the only thing to do was to hold on and enjoy the ride.

Less than a week before I’d been sitting in an office in London when my boss turned to me and asked; “How do you feel about a little trip to Lao next week?” A few days later I was on a plane to Bangkok, bags hastily packed, a slight sense of trepidation as to what the hell I had let myself in for.  My mission: to recce a 600 km section of the legendary Ho Chi Minh Trail for a TV programme I was producing.  And since the only two people who knew the Trail well enough to act as my guides were bikers, we’d be doing the trip by the glorious medium of two-wheels.

My boyfriend Marley was less than delighted about my latest task, ‘So, let me get this straight; you’re going to be spending a week riding a motorbike through the jungle, with your thighs wrapped around another man? I’m not the jealous type but…”

“Well, it is my job” I’d replied weakly, before heading East.

The other man was Digby Greenhalgh, the Australian head honcho of  Hanoi-based motorbike tour company Explore Indochina, a bike and Trail obsessive. We’d be joined by Don Duvall, equally bike and Trail obsessed. Don, dubbed The Midnight Mapper, has lived in Lao for 10 years and dedicated his life to mapping every single square inch of the country by GPS from the back of his trusty Honda XR400. 56, going on 20, and with a proclivity for frequent peals of laughter, Don’s cartographic retentiveness knows no bounds, and to date he has mapped more than 50,000 GPS points in Lao. I couldn’t have wished for two better people to be riding with.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail is arguably one of the greatest feats of military engineering in history, a Goliath of ingenuity and bloody determination. At its peak this 20,000 km transport network spread like a spider’s web through Vietnam, Lao and Cambodia; an indestructible labyrinth through which the North Vietnamese fed the war in the South. Without the Trail, there could have been no war, a fact which the Americans knew only too well. In a sustained eight year campaign to destroy it they flew 580,000 bombing missions, dropped over 2 million tonnes of ordinance on neutral Lao, denuded the jungle with chemicals and seeded clouds to induce rain and floods. At one point Nixon even mooted the notion of deploying nuclear weapons.

Amazingly, considering its importance, there are very few people today who know of the whereabouts of the remaining sections of Trail. Backpackers may ride a sanitized, tourist version of  the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, but only a smattering of devotees make it as far as the real Trail in Lao, many of these bikers. Much of the vast network of roads and tracks has simply been lost forever to the jungle, and most sections that do remain are heavily contaminated by UXO. Even today, almost 40 years after the last bomb was dropped, UXO is a deadly legacy of the war, and still kills around 200 people a year. Since our ride would be following some of the main arteries of the Trail, UXO was something we had to be very careful of – there would be no diving off into the jungle for a wee.

The three of us set off from the village of Nongchan, a scrappy border settlement in the shadow of the Truong Son mountains. This jungle-clad spine of karst peaks stretches for around 1000 km along the Vietnam-Lao border, and would be our companion for much of the ride south. Since I’d never ridden a dirt-bike before, and now wasn’t the time to start, I’d be riding pillion with Digby on a hired Kawasaki KLX 250, with Don solo on his Honda. As I poured myself into the non-existent gap between Digby and our tower of luggage, Don let out a whoop of laughter; “Jeeeesus, you two are going to have an interesting time, this ride is hard enough alone, let alone with two of you on that bike.” By the time I’d wedged myself in  there was barely room for a Higgs Boson.

Nongchan’s wooden shacks petered out into lush jungle, the morning mist hanging over jagged karst outcrops, the red dirt road cloggy from recent rain.  Bomb-craters punctuated the roadside, a reminder that during the war this area, the Ban Phanop valley, had been pummelled into oblivion by the US. Forced through a natural gap in the mountains from Vietnam, all southbound traffic on the Trail was funnelled through this valley, a fact the US knew  only too well. It was so heavily bombed one US pilot called it ‘the most God forsaken place on earth’. Looking at the dense, verdant jungle that flanked us as we rode, it was hard to imagine that forty years ago it would have looked like the surface of the moon.

The first village we came to was a single dusty street of ramshackle stilted houses. A gaggle of excitable, raggedly dressed children crowded around the two bikes, curious as to the identity of these newly arrived aliens in their midst. For people who rarely, if ever, had seen foreigners before, the sight of Don clad in head to toe Robocop-like armour must have been akin to ET walking into a pub in Somerset and ordering a pint of cider. But within seconds Don was laughing with the village chief and had the ever-expanding horde of children giggling happily.

The whole village was a living war museum, and as we wandered up the street Digby pointed out the countless bits of war ephemera converted for use in everyday life. Spring onions sprouted in rusty cluster bomb casings, women leaned against ladders made of aluminium fuel rods, boys paddled in canoes fashioned from fuel canisters and a chicken nested in a missile nose-cone. Outside the small wooden temple the faded wing of a US F-4 fighter leaned against a tree, children peering at us through a large hole in the metal.

Walking past one house we noticed two large 500 lb bombs lying under the steps; “I’m sure those are still live – look, they’ve still got the fuses on” said Digby, pointing to their shiny tips. No one seemed the remotest bit concerned though, and children’s bare feet ran past inches from the fuses. We later found out from an NGO that these two bombs were indeed live, and that the man who had found them was keeping them until he could sell them for scrap metal. It highlighted what terrible risks people here would take with UXO in order to sell the valuable scrap metal and put food on their family’s table.

Every village we rode through that day, and for much of our journey, bore the same scars of war. Cows wandered along the road wearing bells made of mortar fuses, houses were held up by cluster bomb casings and schoolyards were pockmarked with bomb-craters. Often red UXO-warning markers poked out of the dust next to houses, outside schools or on the edge of the dirt track. Yet these reminders of war seemed so incongruous with the children who waved and shouted ‘Sabadee!’ as we rode past, and the shy mothers smiling down at us from their huts.

Lao is a country of a thousand rivers, and as we rode south through Khammouane, Savannakhet, Saravan, Sekong, Attapeu and  Champassak provinces, we would cross what felt like a hundred of these. Methods of getting across these rivers varied, according to depth, width and how many people were watching. Generally it was a case of throttle-on-feet-up-and-ride, hoping we wouldn’t smack a large rock in the middle and get an ignominious ducking. Deeper crossings saw me being hoofed off, while Digby edged the bike across and I walked. If we were lucky there might be some sort of makeshift ‘bridge’ – a questionably stable structure made of bamboo or galvanised metal.

One river crossing was somewhat more perilous. This particular river was several hundred metres wide, and while trucks could just about drive, bikes had to make the short journey on an extremely narrow, very unstable wooden canoe, steered by a toothless old man wielding a single pole. Digby rode the bike on in front of me, the wheels wedged in the rut at the bottom of the canoe, his legs resting on the paper-thin sides for stability. “Just crouch down, sit behind me and don’t move” he said, not even daring to turn his head for fear of tipping us. I obeyed, hardly daring to breathe as the old man inched us across, so slowly that a large green lizard paddled past, eyeing us with a beady yellow eye. At one point we wobbled so violently I feared we’d be joining the lizard, and I could see Digby’s legs shaking with nerves. Once we reached the safety of the far bank we both laughed hysterically, watching as Don did the crossing with infuriating ease and gusto.

Tired, muddy, elated and in need of a Beer Lao, we rolled into Villabury at the end of the first day, 120 km on the clock. “You’re going to love tonight” Digby had said earlier, a glint of mischief in his eyes, “We’re staying at a tranny hotel.” I had visions of rolling up at a one-horse town in the jungle and finding a sequin-clad oasis of dancing ladyboys. Instead we were greeted by a rather corpulent, grumpy transvestite, whose short skirt revealed a pair of startlingly hairy legs. Nevertheless, it didn’t deter from the novelty of the situation, and the $8 rooms, cheap beer and fried rice were just what we needed.

The real crux of our ride was a 60 km section between Nong and Ta Oy; “the boonies” as the boys called it – dense jungle inhabited by remote tribes, elephants and the odd tiger. “No one’s ever ridden this section two-up” warned Digby, as we filled up at a petrol shack in Nong where part of a tank languished outside, “I’m not even sure it’s possible.” The ride was every bit as hard as Digby and Don had warned, a thrilling cocktail of river crossings, mud, rocks and steep hills, the tree canopy enveloping the track in a green womb. Only one hill managed to get the better of us, the bike sliding over in the mud, caking us both in a sticky layer of Trail dirt.

The few villages we did ride through in this area were home to some of Lao’s fifty different ethnic groups; animists who speak no Lao and have few ties with the central government. Pot-bellied pigs, skinny dogs and chickens scrapped in the dust, and no one seemed to be doing much. It was as if achievement was measured by who could do as little as possible, for as long as possible, in as much shade as possible. There were no schools, no temples, no electricity, and by the looks of the swollen stomachs of many of the children who ran after us, not enough food. It was so remote here we didn’t even pass the ubiquitous, overloaded mopeds, which frequently trundled past us during the rest of our ride, weighed down by anything from bananas to saucepans, logs and even live pigs. The only traffic we saw on this section was a handful of  women walking barefoot along the track, large bamboo tobacco bongs slung round their necks. Amazingly, two of them fled into the jungle in terror at the mere sight of us – evidence of the rarity of foreigners in these parts.

At Ta Oy we emerged from the crepuscular darkness of the jungle onto the packed dirt of a new road, a row of parked up diggers and width of which suggested this was destined to be a major highway. It was a bizarre juxtaposition to the remoteness of the jungle. Aching and adrenalized, we checked in to the only ‘hotel’ and celebrated our victory over the crux by getting utterly inebriated on Lao Lao, a potent local moonshine which should only be imbibed in the absence of anything else. Since Ta Oy was, as Digby so eloquently put it, ‘a shithole’ and our hotel was a plywood, mosquito infested dive, getting drunk was an exceptionally good idea.

The accommodation may not have been high luxury, but one of the many wonderful things about this ride was our ever evolving environment. We breezed along  sections of graded red dirt, spun through glutinous mud, sped along the occasional winding ribbon of tarmac and bumped over original Ho Chi Minh Trail cobblestones. And as we pushed south, the topography changed entirely, morphing from jungle to strange pine-clad plateaus, redolent of Greece or Turkey. At Chavan, a parched plateau used by the French as an airstrip in the Indochina War, we ate a picnic lunch in an old bomb-crater, then spent an exhilarating few hours trailing Don’s bike through the pines, leaves eddying up behind his wheels. Later that day the land changed again, the beautiful Bolaven plateau rising to our right, Truong Son mountains to our left, blue sky and ochre dirt completing the picture. Dipping down towards Attapeu as dusk fell, we passed the rusting hulk of a tank, abandoned in some distant battle, every ounce of removable metal stripped from it for scrap.

Our last stretch was 200 km of surprisingly smooth tarmac between Attapeu and Pakse, a final dash before I had to cross the border to Thailand and catch a flight home. The ride had been such a blast, and Digby and Don such excellent companions, I wasn’t relishing the thought of being catapulted back to the normality of an English winter. With barely a moment to spare before I had to leave for the airport, we skidded into Pakse, a backpacker haunt on the Mekong, and after a hasty goodbye to the boys it was all over. Much to the disgust of my neighbour on the long flight home, I hadn’t even had time to wash or change, and travelled the whole way to England covered in a thick layer of Trail mud. It was a strangely satisfying end to a truly marvellous adventure.

To join a small group ride down the Ho Chi Minh Trail contact Digby through www.exploreindochina.com. Prices depend on group size and length of the ride.

To buy Don’s marvellous map go to Laogpsmap.com. The map costs a bargainous $50.

This article first appeared in Motorcycle Monthly’s June edition.