Another stop, a bit further along
to pay the road tax (5rps for motor-
bikes = 10c Australian). The traffic
had cleared allowing me to practice
changing gears through the corners
rather than just lugging it along using
the clutch. These Enfield’s had the
gearchange and rear brake on the
opposite side to what is considered
normal.
We were forced to stop again as
Chandra had trouble with his bike.
The choke mechanism on the carbu-
rettor had come loose; the thread al-
most stripped requiring repairs using
some silver cigarette paper wrapping
… makeshift thread tape. When not
out riding, Chandra is a helicopter
engineer, a few comments were
thrown around about how he repairs
helicopters.
As we headed off , I spotted a
distance marker to Pokhara (one
of infrequent signs in English) and
realised that we had only covered
about 80 kilometres. I was feeling
more confident on the open road and
starting to enjoy myself, able to look
around as we were cruising along.
Then it happened …
About 100 metres away, a large ful-
ly laden Tata truck, coming towards
us ran wide on a corner and rolled
onto its side, throwing bags of flour
TRAVERSE 75
and sundry everywhere. The road in
front of me disappeared in a cloud of
dust, I took evasive action and came
to a panic stop.
The other guys all pulled up.
Before we were able to render assis-
tance, local villagers swarmed over
the cabin and extracted the three
occupants, all appearing not too
badly hurt, but have lost a bit of skin
from rolling around in the cabin.
There are no seatbelts over here! One
of them has a head wound and with
blood flowing everywhere it looked
nasty.
Coincidentally, an ambulance tak-
ing another patient to hospital pulled