We are back in India. Just in the middle of the Indian travel classic – paradisely colorful Rajasthan. Tomorrow we will set foot in the Taj Mahal, and it’s high time to tell you about the second stage of our journey around the world. Get to know our dilemmas when choosing a further route and doubts of life on the road.
We froze our journey for 3 months by arriving in Poland. Had extensive plans to rest in the comfort of our own home, take care of travel formalities and plan our further route. We only had time to perform on a few of the most urgent tasks. The route preparations for the following weeks had to be done in Delhi. As well as very general assumptions of what’s possible, destinations and plan for further travel.
Traveling the world by motorcycle, despite its obvious advantages, has many limitations that do not exist when you move by plane without your own vehicle. Land borders are sometimes closed – as in Azerbaijan or Myanmar. The weather can effectively make riding difficult because it is difficult to move during the monsoon season in an area prone to landslides, or to ride at a temperature of 45 degrees. The seasons are changing and that’s it. You must ensure the validity of your documents and the deadlines for your stay in a given country. There are a lot of smaller things that make a trip lasting several years much more difficult to plan than shorter trips, even months long.
Shall we continue east? Shall we visit Central Asia and slowly return home with our vehicles?
The first option was to travel to Nepal and send the motorcycles by air to Thailand due to the closed borders of Myanmar. Then Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, after only the islands: Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines.
The second option – go further east and visit China, which we have never been to, and try to get to another continent. This option turned out to be too expensive for us to even consider.
Third – return home through Central Asia. Get to know the “-stans”, the most beautiful and least visited part of the Silk Road by land. And then do thorough research and sensible plan for the next big travels – China, Mongolia, or the islands of Southeast Asia. Perhaps vehicles bought locally, rather than brought from Poland, would be more suited to local conditions. Perhaps we should break travels in episodes shorter than a dozen or so months.
We are most inclined to the option of taking our time returning back home. Vast spaces of central Eurasia and an abundance of off-road routes attract us more than crowded countries in the South. The mix of post-Soviet and tribal Asian rhetoric adds flavor to this part of the trip.
But we wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t complicate this return a bit. How and why?
India has a special place in our hearts. For both of us, India was the first country outside the Western culture that we visited. We have known India since 2004. Then we returned here several times backpacking, slowly discovering various less popular regions such as Sikkim, Andamans, or Arunachal Pradesh. Each time we discovered something new, admired it, got angry at the “expect unexpected” and returned home even more in love with India.
We will take advantage of the fact that we have our motorcycles here and enjoy every corner of India. Or rather, what is Indian and what mingles with India. Pakistan is already explored. We will go through Nepal, Bangladesh and circumnavigate the Indian subcontinent. It won’t be an easy ride. The temperature in southern India already exceeds 30 degrees at the beginning of February. In a few months it will be over 40.
Then we will have Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan. We will attempt to enter Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, which are considered almost impossible to visit on your own motorcycle. Perhaps we will add a transit through Russia to Georgia and slowly reach Europe. Probably in winter.
The journey will take many months again. And this time we didn’t plan it in detail. Not only because we didn’t have time for it, but also because of the changing border situation in Eurasia. Further sections of the route will be built along the way.
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