Wrong Way Round - Himalaya

From the desk of Extreme Trifle HQ (96 ft above sea level)

In mountaineering circles "Touching the Void" is the stuff of legend. A story of man versus mountain and triumph over adversity. Inspired by this epic achievement, Extreme Trifle are taking on the Himalayas in their latest instalment of the Wrong Way Round series. Welcome to "Touching the Cloth".

The vehicles

On this occasion the team will be making their way to Kashmir to tackle the world's highest roads on 40 year old Royal Enfield motorcycles. These machines are a fine example of British engineering, unfortunately from a time when the finest examples of British engineering were Morris Minors and Mousetrap.

Since then the Indians have improved the bike by adding extras such as brakes but in reality they have only succeeded in polishing a turd.

This is a controversial and much debated move away from our tried and trusted Yamaha Townmates but due to Indian bureaucracy, by the time we've shipped them to India and had them clear customs, plate tectonics will have shifted the Himalayas to just north of Birmingham. So rent-a-heap it is.

The route

From "base camp" in Manali we will head north and immediately start an ascent to 13,050 ft to the top of Rohtang La which translated from Tibetan means "Pile of Corpses", which is nice. Shortly after we will realise we should have spent more time acclimatising as one by one we all get the sort of headaches you only get when drinking a Slush Puppie too fast.

To remedy this we will make a hasty descent down the other side which will guarantee that at least one of the group will forget that on an Enfield the gear lever and rear brake lever are reversed resulting in what was supposed to be an emergency stop, being a 4,000ft freefall to the valley floor in the wrong gear. But at least the headache will no longer be a concern.

According to the History Channel series "Ice Road Truckers: Deadliest Roads" someone dies (or gets reincarnated) every 5 minutes on these roads. On that basis providing we stop every 4 minutes we should be able to avoid avalanches, landslides, hypothermia, runaway buses or being trampled by yaks.

It has been compelling viewing watching 3 Alaskan truckers trying to enhance the image of Americans abroad by threatening to beat the crap out of every Indian they meet for having the audacity to drive like an Indian. Since we already drive like Indians there should be no such issues and instead we can concentrate on cultural harmonies such as helping remove wing mirrors from one anothers heads.

Having conquered our first mountain pass the journey will then escalate up and down Bara Lacha La (16,040 ft), Lachulung La (16,600 ft), Tanglang La (17,582 ft) before we take on the world's highest motorable pass, Khardung La, at a whopping 18,380 ft. That's almost 1,000ft higher than Everest Base camp. And then we'll be doing the difficult bit.

Although Khardung La gets all the plaudits for being the highest, Marsimik La is actually higher but because it is not considered "motorable" it doesn't get a lot of mentions. We don't know what the Tibetan transalation for Marismik La is but it's probably something like "considerably higher pile of corpses than Rohtang La". Rumour has it that there is an even higher pass (Ooh La La) but this has yet to be backed up by scientific measurement.

Still, the view of K2 from the top will be breathtaking which is apt since actually taking a breath at that altitude whilst tugging on a well deserved roll up will be an achievement in itself, assuming of course we don't get lost and turn too far left and end up on the front line between Indian and Pakistan or get lost and turn too far right and end up in China to be sentenced to 10 years hard labour for spying. Either scenario is at best inconvenient and guaranteed to mean we'll miss our flight home.

So all in all it's the usual recipe for failure. In the unlikely event we do make the summit then we'll be securing our place in history by setting a new world record for the highest ever pizza delivery. Now that will take some topping.