Motorcycle diaries
Some of you might know that I’ve been passionate about learning to ride large motorcycles for a while and have been taking a DAS course at Pro Bike. While I’ve not yet managed to pass my test (that’s another story), I am determined and today more inspired than ever by an email from my friend Pascal who has just completed a ride from southern France to Beijing and back.
I'm not one to ordinarily make private correspondence public, but this email from Pascal, who travelled on his BMW GS from France to Beijing and back without support or a TV crew, is too inspiring not to share. Pascal, whose first language is French, writes:
Hi Andy,
I came back about a month ago after more than 32,000 km on the road. That was an amazing experience: long distance and short time.
I had extreme temperature: about forty-five degrees in Greece and Turkey with a peak of fifty-two degrees one afternoon in the Turkmenistan desert. Some days after in the Tian Shan mountains - that is at the Kisghystan/China border where the altutude is everaging 3500 metres for more or less 1500 km we had minus two degress or minus three degrees at night with nothing above five degress during the days. The wind coming from Siberia above the mountains was terribly strong: a hard time to ride on dirt road.
Crossing China from west to east was not real problem exept for road directions when everything is written in Chinese with no accurate road maps. On the other hand, huge traffic jams are common any time and anywhere, no courtesy, no rules, reckless driving is the only rule . Finding gazoline was easy.
On the return trip, crossing the Gobi desert in Mongolia has been a dream (three days for 700 km of sand and mud, using the compass or following electric poles for direction) and crossing Siberia a nightmare: bad road, bad weather, lots af corrupt police men.
Well this is it.
Pascal
That puts struggling to make CSS work across browsers into perspective.