Escaping India & into Myanmar

Sneaking away from India, great food and thinning the motorcyclist population

 

India was a challenging experience, a good experience but most of us were ready to move on and excited to get into Myanmar. The country had in fact grown quite fond of us though and didn't want to let us go. Endless traffic jams full of overloaded trucks, the worst section of sealed road I’ve ever driven on and tight bridges with hairpin bend entrances that required a 20 point turn combined with the overtaking prowess of our truck made for a long and frustrating drive. What we planned to drive in 1 day, Shillong to Impale, took two 14 hour days and a lot of patients. To rub salt into the wound both nights we were unable to find accommodation due to all the hotels being full so had the pleasure of sleeping on the truck with bushcamping just not being possible. Despite India's crazy ex-girlfriend type affection we managed to slip out of town in the early hours of the morning, only to be discovered down the road in the form of 3 police checks within 400m, each one taking half an hour as they wrote out everybody's details by hand at each point. With a 4-5 hour exit on top India certainly used every trick in the book but we made it across and into Myanmar.

 

 

Hanging out on the railroads, as Indians do

Constant traffic



 

More great roads

The dangers of driving in India

 Our arrival into Myanmar was something special, not just because of the fact that we had been able to break the vice like grip of India but because we became the first overland truck to enter Myanmar from India. Our euphoria was short lived however when we smashed our front viewing window on a low hanging branch the next day, showering the people in front with broken glass. Fortunately no one was hurt and the windscreen has since been replaced.

 

 

 

 

A tight squeeze

Our entourage of followers we always manage to attract

Carlos cleaning up the broken window

Our first major stop in Myanmar was in Mandalay. I spent my time here eating great food, checking out the palace and eating more great food. I’m not much of a foodie but the cooking here is amazing as well as being cheap. From what I’ve heard most of South East Asia is going to be a holiday for my taste buds and Myanmar is the first course.

Mandalay Palace

 

 

 

From Mandalay we drove down to the World Heritage site of Bagan. Here we hired scooters and I rode around with Will and Ally all day checking out the temples. With around 2200 temples spread over 104 square km’s we never had far to ride between stops, picking our favourites and relishing the freedom of the bikes.

Hells Angels chapter has opened in Bagan

 

The temples of Bagan

Shwezigon temple

 

 

Our fun with motorcycles did not finish in Bagan with a local rider managing to take a corner far too wide, leaving a nice imprint of himself on the side of our truck just out of town. The rider and passenger came off at about 60km p/h and were extremely lucky to not go under the truck and get killed. 1 had some nasty grazes to his legs and wrists but it turned out they both worked at a nearby bone hospital so were able to continue on after the shock passed to get themselves checked up.

 

 

The Burmese countryside

 

After our little incident we continued on to Lake Inle, famous for its fishermen who fish with nets whilst rowing with their legs at the same time. The lake is central to their lifestyle, feeding both themselves with its fish and its economy with tourism. I hired a boat and guide for myself and spent half a day exploring the area, getting quite sunburnt in the process and enjoying more great food in the evenings. Next stop, Yangon.

Fisherman on Lake Inle

Their housing

A stilt village is not complete without a pub

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Sensory Overload

Nepal & India

After being in Tibet we were all very happy to arrive in Kathmandu. We stayed in the tourist district of Thamel which was really cool. Small alleys, trendy cafes, hippies with dreadlocks everywhere you looked; we were temporarily back on the tourist circuit. I got struck down with a fever on AFL Grand Final day of all days, forcing myself to a pub full of Aussies to try and watch the game but only lasting 10 minutes before I put myself back to bed.

This little piggy went to market

 

Who needs a windscreen?

 

 

From Kathmandu we drove the 200km to Pokhara which took about 9-10 hours. With a population slightly higher than that of Australia in such a small country and single lane windy roads through the hills it only took a slow or broken down truck to bring things to a halt. Once we arrived we had 4 nights to put up our feet and relax, with my feet being so high I was almost upside down, especially the first night when apparently I ended up on top of the pool table after an afternoon session with Will & Alli. I recovered well enough the next day to jump on a microlite flight which I have never done before and really enjoyed it, soaring above the city in a aircraft no bigger than my car.

My sturdy microlite

 

What do you do when your flight gets delayed?

Flying above Pokhara

 

 

Along with the traffic problems in Nepal they also have major electricity shortages. Every day for hours at a time the power would be out, businesses being forced to use generators to keep themselves open. Its sad to see such a basic utility not provided and along with the crippling traffic congestion makes me realise what a lucky country I live in.

The view from town

About 30 paragliders sailing on the jetstreams

Lake Phewa

 

 

A short drive day took us down to Chitwan National Park with the major drawcard here being the elephants. Most of us went for a ride on them around the park and then visited the breeding centre the next morning. The conditions they were kept was below par however and they were chained up each night and did not look comfortable when we were there. I would not recommend it if you find yourself in Nepal in the future.

Going for our elephant ride

 

 

We crossed the border a couple of days later and upon my arrival to India I already had a case of Delhi belly so I felt that I had a head start. My first meal was just a couple of samosas from a roadside stand and it almost blew my head off. The smell, the taste and the noise of India was there to greet us right on the border and I can see how some people get quite overwhelmed by it. We spent our first night in the nondescript city of Siliguri as we heard the road up to Darjeeling was too tight for our truck and would have to arrange 4WD’s the next morning. 2½ hours of hairpin bends with hundreds of these 4WD taxis jostling for position made for a really fun and scenic drive. The English tea junkies on the trip made the most of their stay here but its the drive back down that I will remember most from my trip to Darjeeling.

Tea plantations near Darjeeling

 

One of the many hairpin bends

Mexican standoff

 

Unfortunately halfway down we came to a traffic jam and after asking some locals discovered that a 16 year old student had been hit and killed by a truck, the driver decamping on foot. All the schools in the district had got together and were protesting, marching up and down the road screaming justice. The driver had probably made the wise decision of running off as it was most likely he would not have survived if the mob and the victims family got a hold of him. After 6 hours we got through and spent another night in Siliguri.

 

Poacher lookout in Manas NP

Ranger patrol in the park

Sunset looking out over Bhutan

 

 

Manas National Park was next on our itinerary and is where we have just left, right on the India/Bhutan border. We went on an afternoon safari hoping to see a Bengal tiger or a rhino but both evaded us, instead seeing some elephants, a monitor lizard and a wild pig. At $20 you could probably say we got our moneys worth. We are now making our way east to become the first overland truck to enter Burma from India, in just 10 weeks I will be landing back on home soil.

 

 

 

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The curse of Tibet

Yes, another police check please

What a fortnight. Tough and challenging yet so rewarding. Whatever could have gone wrong in Tibet did go wrong but we persevered and I now found myself in Kathmandu with the hardest part of the trip behind us. This update contains a lot of pictures, I just couldn't bring myself to not include them all. Our fortnight started leaving the city of Golmud, the beginning of the most scenic and most challenging section to build of the railway that goes up to Lhasa. Just a few hours after leaving we drove into a blizzard and came to a halt at a bridge where a truck has lost control and found itself precariously hanging over the edge. Another truck had tried to drive around on a dirt road and got itself bogged leaving no way around. About 3-4 hours later a digger and some determined truckers got the bogged truck out and we made our way through.

Our police escort for this section of the trip

The truck that was blocking the road

and the other truck that got bogged trying to go around

Both bogged trucks + our truck + the Lhasa train in the background

Truckers and the digger pulling at the same time 

Finally getting through

This part of the trip was by far the hardest and most demanding. The hold-up with the truck above left us running late and along with the slow roads a long way from Lhasa. Will our driver did an epic shift and drove us until 2am to catch up on lost time. The camps that we did along here were bordering on 0° overnight and we were constantly at an average altitude of 4000m, camping consecutively at 4700m and 4800m. Police checks were every 100km or so and they enforced a 50km p/h speed limit between checkpoints making the going all the more slow. We tackled the highest pass and the highest place I've ever been when we crossed the Tanggula pass at 5231m. A lot of people were beginning to get sick including myself and spirits were fairly low.

One of the many prayer flags erected atop the high pass's

The scenery was stunning and worth the hard work

James and Mel

Tanggula pass

Part of the Qinghai-Tibet railway

We eventually reached Lhasa cold and weary but soon after a hot shower and a good sleep we were all in a good mood again. This did not last long however when we found out that the road to Everest base camp was closed as it was being re-surfaced. It was to be the highlight of our time in Tibet and so we started looking at alternatives. In the meantime we had the chance to visit some monastery's in the capital. We visited Jokhang temple in the morning which was very busy with pilgrims paying their respect and some of the group went to the Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama which dominates the skyline.

Pilgrims praying outside Jokhang Temple

Jokhang Temple

Potala Palace

All clean and refreshed we left Lhasa for our final string of bush camps. The road up to the Kamba-la pass was fantastic and the views on both sides were stunning as you can see below. A little further along the road we got some happy snaps of the Nojin Kangtsang glacier which is slowly retreating back up the mountain due to global warming.

One side of the Kamba-la pass

Yamdrok-tso Lake

and the view from the top

Nojin Kangtsang glacier

An old fort atop the hill in Gyangze

We made it to Tingri where some of the group had organised for a private 4wd to take them up to Everest base camp on an secondary road that we could not get the truck up. The price was bordering on extortionate however so I decided not to join and would do a scenic flight out of Kathmandu instead. Once they returned we made the descent down from the Tibetan plateau that we had been freezing ourselves on for the last week, down towards Nepal. The drive from a small town called Nyalam where we had lunch to the border town of Kodari is quite simply the most stunning drive I have ever been on. The pictures here do not do it justice. We squeezed our truck through the queue of trucks that lined the skinny road and got to the border 30 minutes after they had closed. A night sleeping on the truck was enforced but a nearby bar made it bearable. We crossed the border the next morning and made our way to Borderlands, a camp site with showers and huts in the hills before Kathmandu. At a lower altitude and with warmer humid weather spirits were back up and some of us partook in bungee jumping and canyon swinging, even the oldies.

The descent from the Tibetan plateau

Zhangmuzhen, the Chinese border town

The friendship bridge, joining Tibet and Nepal
 

 

A bolder that slid down into our campsite before we got there and crushed a hut

My 3rd bungee for the trip



12km down the road was the obstacle that had been causing us many sleepless nights. Before I even joined the trip a massive landslide occurred in a village along the only road between Tibet and Nepal. The entire village was buried, the river below blocked and up to 400 people were killed. We had been getting constant updates along the way as to when and if the road would be reopened. Due to a dispute between the government and a landowner the government had not repaired it or built a new road. The truckers who all depend on the road for business between Nepal and China had actually pooled their money, got in some diggers and graders and built a new road through the landslide which was finished less than a week before we arrived. Being at the end of the wet season the road was a mud bath, tight hairpin bends and very steep inclines. We were warned that our 12m truck would not make it, that only 9m trucks had been successful so far. Determined to get the truck through our driver Will decided to chance it and we made our way down.

We arrived in the afternoon only to find out that today the traffic was driving south to north, towards Tibet. Tomorrow traffic would be allowed to go in our direction. After a bit of negotiation we jumped the queue to the front and actually managed to get up the first section and around a tight bend only to be blocked by a bus and the first few drops of rain for the evening. We spent the night sleeping on the truck again tucked away on the edge of a cliff. During the night it poured and turned what was a reasonably dry mud road into a hellhole. We started up at 5:30 and made it 100m until we got to the hardest section of the road, an uphill tight hairpin bend that had been churned up overnight by trucks coming down in the rain. It took 2-3 hours of digging, sand matting and pushing and it was finally the use of a tractor that made all the difference, pulling us up a section that the truck just could not get up by herself. We then joined another queue of trucks waiting for some roadwork to be finished before we got off the mountain around lunch time but with the huge line of trucks it wasn't until well into the afternoon that we cleared the mess and drove south to Kathmandu.

The tractor pulling us up the hardest part



Getting very close to the edge

A view of where the village used to stand

Mud, mud, mud

4 nights in Kathmandu has been a welcome relief. Most of the camping for the trip is behind us with the rest to be mostly in hotels, hostels and guesthouses. The trip end point has also been changed now due to all of our delays and it has been agreed we will finish in Bali instead of Sydney on the 21st of December. My body must have realised this is the case and has crashed with fever, leaving me bedridden for the past 2 days. Fortunately I managed to hop on an Everest scenic flight before then, seeing the mighty Sagarmāthā rising above the clouds. It was a short flight but I'm very happy I got to see it in the end

The drive into Kathmandu

The roof of the world

Mt Everest in all its glory

 

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