The Build Up...

Was it the grizzled German I met in Udaipur in 1992, newly arrived on his dust caked Honda from Iran and Pakistan that inspired this trip? Or finding by chance Chris Scotts' "Desert Biking" tucked in between Lonely Planets in a book shop in Edinburgh? Or numerous Christmas days watching Steve McQueen making a dash for the Swiss border while Gordon Jackson and Dicky Attenborough got pinched on the bus? Either that or I just got bored. I've found boredom to be a great motivator!
The two pre-war Rileys I grew up with gave me a love of all things oily and the postscript of the aforementioned trip to India was shelling out for an imported Royal Enfield Bullet 350 which I almost killed in a ditch on the Trollstigvien in Norway. (It survived though and is now waiting to be stripped down and reinvented as a cafe racer!) A climbing trip to Chamonix after leaving school started the whole travel thing. One day the two things would have to come together!
Moto trip number one was a trip to Morocco in my Citroen AX. Fantastic experience! My romantic, T.E.Lawrence inspired dreams of desert adventure did n't include a bout of catastrophic diarrhea coinciding with a remote desert breakdown, but well, I'm not sure it would have been less discomfiting, or catastrophic for that matter, had it happened in busy metropolitan centre.
Number two was a trans-european dash to Slovenia in the same AX with my mate Neil. Apart from breaking down 3 miles from my Edinburgh flat (disintigrating rear brake shoe), a trouble free trip filled with mountains, Zlatorog beer and excessive amounts of camping gear.
Number three was my first on a bike, and...er... well, lets just say two bad earth connections, dodgy CB points, a rapidly expiring drive chain and a spectacular crash into a four foot ditch resulting in flying home sans bike (all in six days!) are perhaps not the glue that holds together the classic joy filled holiday. Although, actually, in retrospect, I had fun!
So, I bought a new bike and started planning the big one. Enough mucking about, do it properly. Hopefully this one will go relatively smoothly! I'm certainly better prepared than usual. The photo above is me practicing in the Lammermuirs. Just part of the huge amount of preparation this trip requires (I thought this would be more interesting than a pic of me applying for a visa), but I get the feeling the preparation will really start when I swing my leg over the XT on the 11th of February...