When I rode overland to Europe and back over nine months in 1978, I was the first Indian to travel to Europe on a motorcycle. Jagdish Kang, now a Punjab minister, had got as far as Turkey. The government allowed only $500 for a foreign trip. After four months of shuttling between ministries, I went to the then external affairs minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. His help got me just $200 extra from the Reserve Bank of India. He advised me to make arrangements abroad on my own.

Next I got the permit for my 250 cc Yezdi. I was joined by a friend, Preetinder Singh Jakhar. I got his paperwork done in four days. Each of us weighed 64 kg and our luggage was 84 kg. The bike had a carrying capacity of 120 kg but we made her take 210 kg! We had aluminium panier bags, stoves, sleeping bags, mattresses, tents, oil, tools and repair kit. We never had a breakdown but every 3,600 km we got a flat tyre. So we changed the tube every 3,000 km. We picked up Michelin tyres in England. They were round while our Dunlop ones were flat.

We couldn’t get Pakistani visas so I went to Kabul ahead of the bike. At breakfast on April 4, I saw soldiers on the street. There’d been a coup. Three days later, the airport reopened and I left.

In May, we returned to Kabul and drove to Kandahar. When we saw a milestone reading “Ghazni 0 km”. We stopped to see Mahmud of Ghazni’s home town, with houses underground. From Kandahar to Herat, it was 55? as we crossed the Desert of Death into Iran. Tehran was full of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, BMWs. We checked in at the Turkey border at 5 am because we wanted to cross Turkey quickly. We met two Italians in a 600 NSU and they agreed to pretend we were with them. I was fair so I walked with them to the hotel desk and we deposited one Italian passport for the group. Preet kept his helmet on and carried the panier bags through the lobby! We rode to Ankara on gravelled roads and saw Mt Ararat like a vision among the clouds.

Then we crossed the Bosphorus, the sea which separates Asia and Europe. The Bulgarian guard waved away my papers, looked at the bike and said “Indiano!”, and hugged us. European border crossings were easy. In Asia, it took up to four hours per person to cross. At the Iran border, they drilled a hole in the sole of my motocross boots!

In Austria, we used an autobahn for the first time. I got behind a truck that was going at 160 kph and got sucked into the slipstream and we were doing 160 kph too! In Vienna, at a self-service petrol pump, we had to ask how to use the futuristic-looking gadgets. We saw a subway, and paper bedsheets and pillow cases for the first time. Next was erstwhile Czechoslovakia, my bike’s homeland. It was August 15 and we phoned the Indian ambassador to wish him. He arranged a visit to the Jawa factory. Germany was more BMW bikes and autobahns. In Denmark, I had to ride leaning 45? into the wind. We crossed the North Sea to Sweden by ferry. I had an uncle in Gothenberg and we left our stuff on the bike outside his house all night. Throughout Europe, we were amazed at people’s honesty.

We rode down the Arctic Road from Oslo to the northeast tip of Europe ? North Cape (locally, Nordkapp), which is at 71? N. At times, the fjords would overrun the road, so we crossed by ferry and resumed riding where the road reappeared. We experienced constant daylight ? the sun would sink only till the horizon. We saw the fog where the warm water of the Gulf Stream meets the cold water. In Stockholm, we stayed in a youth hostel on an 18th-century battleship. In Copenhagen harbour, we saw a hovercraft.

S.P.S Garcha

We took a ferry from Luxembourg to Dover, saw England and Scotland, crossed by ferry from Dover to Calais, saw Paris and went to Switzerland and Italy. The roads in the Alps had mirrors on the bends to show oncoming traffic. From there on, we took the route we’d gone by.

It was now December. The British Petroleum campsite in Istanbul was empty but we met three couples ? in a 300 D Mercedes, on an 850 cc BMW Motoguzzi bike, and in a Combi VW van. Our convoy was joined by two Americans on 750 cc and 550 cc Hondas. In western Iran, an accident blocked the road. A blizzard began and we huddled in the van. The snow piled up till the windows. The bikes were completely covered. In the morning, one of the Hondas wouldn’t start so we loaded it into a truck carrying severed goat heads to Tebriz town. The Americans’ visas would expire the next day so they went to the US embassy. The officials told them to drive day and night and get out of the country before the visa expired. So we roared down roads, doing about 1,700 km in one-and-a-half days.

From Kabul, we flew to Amritsar. Driving from Amritsar to Chandigarh, it took a while getting used to the blaring horns back home!