Unfeasibly Steep

Some thoughts about off-road, off-beat touring:

As our own riding interests have broadened, so too has the riding style of our tours. We still love *classic* touring along quiet backroads and empty dirt tracks. A life’s possessions pared down to a couple of panniers. Wandering through one village after the next, wrestling with the odd Tata transport truck and waving to crazy bus drivers. Sponging up a thousand sights and sounds; the deep sleep savoured after a long day on the road.

But more and more, we’re also getting a kick from riding the kind of tracks and trails for which you need a dedicated mountain bike and a decent set of knobblies. In Northern India, there’s a vast network of goat and donkey paths, much of which is rideable. We’ll admit that it can take a bit of effort to get to them and nail them – maybe they’re a bit rocky and gnarly, or bean-pole narrow and loose. Sometimes it’s a case of shouldering the bikes to hike out of a ravine at the end… Or, as we call this trail on our Spiti Epic trip, (see pic below) they’re just Unfeasibly Steep.

What we can promise you is that there’s nothing like them to infuse a real pioneering spirit to riding them in this part of the world. We’re working on some trips that involve Yak-support – real, live, hairy ones, not the model of Bob trailers – just so we can get to these kind of places.

At the end of the day, what we love about bikes of all ilks is how they get you to the true back of beyond; the real backcountry of the Indian Himalayas. Whether you like touring independently or fancy joining us in a group, there’s some wonderful places waiting to be explored.

Incidentally, if you like the idea of plummeting in altitude very, very quickly, then go and ride in the Sierra Nevadas, Spain, with the appropriately named Switchbacks. White knuckled riding that’s guaranteed to improve your riding…

Chandra: official mascot

Cara thinks I’m getting broody for a pooch.

This summer, we befriended Chandra, a mountain mongrel. Well, we fed him and sensibly, he hung around for more. We found him at Chandra Tal (after which he’s named), a high altitude lake on the edge of the Spiti Valley. A tough little fellow, he slept outside at 4200m curled up in a tight ball like a furry woodlice. He was an instant success with all the dog lovers on the tour, and even Cara relunctantly agreed there was something rather special about him. So it was with sorrow that we said our goodbyes when it was time to ride on.

But our paths were to cross once more. As luck would have it, we found Chandra lounging in the sun at an Indian dhaba – a truckstop – in the windswept settlement of Battal, a couple of weeks later on round 2 of our Spiti Epic trip. Perhaps lured by promise of more home cooked leftovers, he followed us back to the campsite, some 15km away. Everyone took to him, and over the next couple of days he trotted alongside us as we rode (cunningly shortcutting the switchbacks) or hopped in the jeep (and generally vomited en route) to meet us at the campsite.

At night, Chandra slept in the porch of our tent, out of the wind. Relative luxury. I’m a bit of a soft touch with dogs so I had to make the boundaries very clear, I was told. Tent Porch: Ok. Inner Tent: Bad. Apparently, dogs don’t understand ’special occasions’, like Christmas and Birthdays, so *no* meant *no*. Or at least, all except for the one night, when he drove us insane by barking for hours on end in the middle of nowhere (protecting us, he would have us believe). On this one occasion I was allowed (or rather, instructed) to invite him inside, where he soon fell fast asleep; allowing us to too.

His origins were something of an enigma. Someone said he was a shepard’s dog, but that the shepard had gone home for the winter and left him. It wasn’t long before I was contemplating the logistics of bringing him back to the UK. We inspected his teeth and admired the sheen of his coat. He was as fit as a fiddle, and at 20kg, he’d fit nicely into the wicker basket in my two wheeled bike trailer. Although there were a few ‘lookalikes’ in the area (he was a mongrel after all), none of the others had his gentle demeanour, his characterful scar across the nose or unusual half-docked tail. But as it turned out our driver, Phuntchok, offered to take him to his family home for the winter in Tabo, where he could live like a king in an orchard.

He was a good pooch, and we’ll miss him. Hopefully we’ll catch up next year. Who knows, maybe he’ll have sired some pups we can smuggle back in our Camelbaks…

Tell your friends! Custom-built tours…

Our aim is to put together well-researched tours that don’t cost a fortune, yet are adventurous, off-the-beaten track and have a chilled out vibe. As a small company, filling the trips is always our biggest challenge. So if you’re part of a cycling club, or have a group of like-minded friends, we can not only tailor make the tours to your requirements (by tweaking the distances or number of days), but offer a discount too.

We prefer not to go above a group size of 8, plus the two of us, which has worked well in the past. It’s a nice, sociable size without making too much of an impact wherever we go. Just give us a ring and we can discuss things.

Back from India, and our hike ‘n bike through the Pin Valley.

So, we made it back.While we get our heads down, update the site and work out next year’s schedule, here’s some pics from the last week in India, our self-appointed *holiday* to wrap up and celebrate the end of this season’s tours.Always on the hunt for new places to explore, we decided to hike’n'bike from the Buddhist Pin Valley, an offshoot of our regular haunt Spiti, into Hindu Kinnaur. Used for both trading and trekking, the route crosses the Great Himalayan range, close to the border with Tibet. We rode self-supported deep into the valley, until the jeep track petered out beyond the whitewashed, traditional village of Mud, then hired the services of a couple of ‘donkeymen’ and their herd to haul our Bob trailers, and sometimes bikes, over the 4900m pass (16 000ft).To a backdrop of 6500m sawtooth peaks, the journey showcased the transformation from bone dry, mineral speckled valleys – typical to this region – into green and lush alpine pastures, blanketed with elm forests and fed by glacial rivers. Less of it turned out to be rideable than we hoped, so we shouldered the bikes and scrambled around for up to 10km at a time…But what we could get our tyres round was stunning; sometimes fast and flowing, sometimes technical. And always very remote. Along the way, we camped in our minimalist £5 tarp we made locally, warmed ourselves around pungent, kerosene-doused donkey dung fires, bought bizarre but colourful potted plastic flowers, befriended a shepard’s hound for the day, and ate bowl after bowl of rice and dahl.Getting back involved a medley of transport: a 4 hour jeep ride (plus stops for tea), a 16 hour local night bus (£2.50, but it broke down), a 5 hour, sweaty and people-packed train ride (sitting next to the squat loos), and 12 hours on a plane (via immaculate Bahrain)…Whoah. Sometimes, it’s good to be home….

The pic above is the village of Mud, nestled in the sheer, mineral-rich walls of the Pin Valley. The one at the top of the post is of Cara, pulling our ever faithful Bob trailer, towards the camping pasture at Paldor. The one below is of Cara, tearing down some singletrack after the pass to, funnily enough, a beautiful camping spot known as Kara.

And this one is of me, crossing a rickety bridge that links the hamlet of Tailing to the main track that leads to Mud. The Pin River was a shade of milky turquoise, and very cold.

One night it was particularly chilly (this being October, at 4500m). Our ‘donkeymen’ guides, Dodje and Anchok, doused some pre-prepared, sun-dried donkey dung with kerosene and made us a fine fire. All our kit had a particular odour over the next few days, but it was worth it…