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| Two bikes, Two cities, 1200 kilometers, One goal: change the world by teaching kids to read |
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| Camp - Tents, Guesthouses and Thermal Gear |
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| Ah, the smell of a clean tent. It's not a smell we got to enjoy for very long, as the tent and guest houses became our shelter during the Ride. In Kathmandu, at the start of the ride, Lhakpa rented us one of his own tents. He set it up with his daughter in his garden and showed it to us. I tried to pay attention to how he did it, and even offered to lend a hand, but, really, I was pretty useless and this was not a good sign for things to come. |
| The tent was a cozy place. Nicolas was on the right (facing in) and I was on the left. Our bags would be on either side of us. Our dirty clothes either outside or suspended above us, depending on the weather. We had a couple of small lights, as well as our head lamps, to give the place a nice glow. We had sleeping mats under our bags and usually slept almost fully clothed due to the cold. |
| I have no idea how polar explorers or other adventurers who spent years in the middle of nowhere did it. How do you deal with the boredom? Actually, I can't remember ever being bored. To kill the time in the evenings, we played a lot of cards. Like our sprint after the end of every ride, our card games got quite competitive. |
| By the way, if you're interested in what the average Tibeten lived in, here is an example of one of the typical houses. You can just see, in the lower middle of the page, our yellow tent sticking out. We set up here - in the owner's forecourt - to get shelter from the wind. |
| On the road, when we did have to set the tent up, we* would set it up in a grove, or against rocks, or in whatever cover we could find to protect the tent from a) the wind and b) everybody and their mother who wanted to watch us. * Actually, we didn't set up the tent. Pemba and Tenzing watched Nicolas and I attempt to set up the tent on the first night, realised we were hopeless and set about doing it themselves from then on. Despite the fact that Lhakpa forget to pack one of the poles, and another was broken, the guys improvised with string and such and had our tent posted every night for us. We were too tired anyway, and I can tell you, had we been forced to set the tent up ourselves, we probably would have ended up sleeping in our bags in the open. |
| When not staying in tents, we stayed in guesthouses. Guesthouses were little more than tents with hard walls, as they had no heat, erratic lighting, dirt floors, rats, broken windows and lots of cold. But they were fun and always had a central room with a big furnace and lots of food (ok, lots of butter tea and rice and yak). Here, Nicolas uses the 'Bathroom.' To wash, we would use the hot water intended for tea. As you can see, he's got all his thermal gear on...even though we're inside. |
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| Sometimes we stayed in other people's tents. At Mt. Everest Base Camp, we did not have a permit to erect our own tent, so we stayed in the 'Everest Tea House', shown here. Couldn't get the door open in the middle of the night to answer the call of nature... |
| And, in Nepal, we stayed at the 'Borderlands', which is just about 35k from the Tibeten border, but a world apart. As you can see, Nicolas has no thermals at all around. |