Blackout, bikes and an adventure ahead!

Bye electricity! I am sitting here behind my little computer, writing to you from a room covered in darkness using a headlight to be able to look around at least bit. Rain has been pouring down all day. Not rain like I know from Belgium, but rain like the end of days has arrived. Rain that gets you soaked till your underwear within a minute. Rain like rain should be during the monsoon, only this time the real monsoon season should already have passed. As this is India this goes hand in hand with the obligatory blackout. A whole town without electricity. A world covered in darkness. Not an orange sky, no lights pouring from the windows, no rapid solution. Only small lights pupping up in the midst of the dark from peoples phones, candles placed on the tables, headlights from a vehicle passing by and torches lighting the way ahead. Life continuous at a slower pace. It has it charms. Of course it limits your plans for the evening, but at the same time it provides time to just do nothing, talk, write, laugh and relax.

If all goes well, including the return of some electricity, our bikes will be fully ready by Monday so we will be able to hit the road on Tuesday. It is exiting and scary at the same time, but I suppose this is always the case when you take a leap towards the unknown. How many kilometers will we feel comfortable to ride each day? Will we easily find a place to stay every night? How long shall we stay at places? What if the bike decides to break down in the middle of nowhere? Do we always get up early in the morning to take advantage of the cooler mornings? What if I am not able to cope with my lack of riding experience? What if things are much more tiring that first expected? All little questions that will gradually get an answer along the way, but for the moment they still buzz around in my mind. A dream doesn’t become reality without a little doubt, a smile and a small push in the right direction. Dreaming is also getting lost, adapting, having patience and finding another way to reach your goal. This is also how this journey started. Did we find our dream bikes? No, not really, if we had the money we would for sure have chosen for the Royal Enfield, but did we find good bikes? Well, the only correct answer to that is, we hope so! A Yamaha FZ and a Honda Unicorn. Two lovely bikes that are wonderful to ride amidst the Indian traffic and easily blend in with the bikes used locally. After buying the bikes we sadly quickly learned that the Honda Unicorn was burning oil while riding. We had three options: fixing the engine, buying a new engine or simply buying a whole new bike. After a lot of discussions, doubts, frustrations and disappointment we chose for the first option as people could still easily cheat us with the latter two. This would cost us quite some money that actually wasn’t worth spending on such a bike, but after riding the bike it feels like a fine investment in the journey ahead. Anyhow, we should not complain as we still end up with two fixed bikes for a price of 600€ and are about to take the first steps of our great adventure.