We leave Gorakpur as soon as the curfew is lifted at 8.30 am and make the 100km ride to the border at Sonauli, a dusty Indian town complete with traffic jams caused by the trucks crossing the border, we later find that it is more congested than usual because of the Terai blockades.

Life in Goa is quite blissful and we spend three days at Palolem, just swimming, eating, and generally relaxing.

Finally we are back in action with a new iPAQ keyboard to write the blogs and we have a little catching up to do. Thanks so much to our friends Kath and Sean for scouring Australia to find it for us, then flying to Melbourne to pick it up and post it, hope you enjoyed yourselves. The lengths some people will go to so we do our blog homework. So now where were we last blog.....

Ahh yes, ......We leave Jaisalmer and it is off to Jodhpur, once again riding through the desert with its beautiful sand dunes and old forts. We are totally amazed that we even find Jodhpur as there are roadworks everywhere with no signs and the deviations are more reminiscent of driving across the Gulf roads in the Northern Territory (Australia). Bulldust, feet deep.

Disaster has struck, the letters z, x, a, s and e have died on the collapsible keyboard so you will have to be patient and forgive typos and worse than usual spelling in this blog as it will be a tedious process until we get a new keyboard, anyway here goes.

Well it's another day and another border crossing, Pakistani Customs are right outside the hotel so we venture over, they totally ignore us as they are far too busy going through a German Hippie/Yogi's luggage, scanning his walnut barrel as a potential bomb threat. Eventually they get us to bring our panniers in and start to go through them but quickly get bored with that and don't even check the tank bag or the tubes on the bike. Giving us the all clear they wave us on. We go to the next checkpoint and sign documents and then get to the last point where they tell us we don't have an immigration stamp to leave.

For those of you not familiar with the KKH (Karakoram Highway) here's a little bit of background.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistan and China jointly constructed a road across the mountains following a branch of the Silk Road from Kashgar to Islamabad via the 4730m Khunjerab Pass. It was only in 1986 the Khunjerab Pass was opened to travellers. This engineering feat was completed by approximately 15000 Pakistanis and 20000 Chinese. Conditions were hard and deaths on both sides were extremely high.