Private Air New York

www.privateairny.com Private Air | Winter 2020/2021 90 POSTCARD MOTORCYCLE DIARIES Three magnificent places to ride RUTA 40 The longest road in Argentina (5,300km) winds from Rio Gallegos in the south to the border with Bolivia, parallel to the Andes and through 20 national parks. LHASA TO KASHGAR The most impressive section of this 3,000km route from Tibet to China is the pass at Dang, with views across to the Himalayas, and Mount Everest looming before you. CAPE TOWN CIRCUIT A 1,690km road trip that starts along the rugged coast and then turns north towards Addo National Park. Keep your camera handy, you might spot some big game. The longest journey by motorbike in a single country (India) is 38,239km. It took Manigandan Manjunathan 98 days area started shaking, including the mountains that surrounded the lake. We all just looked at each other with a look of 'What do we do?'. Even if we'd wanted to get off the ice, we couldn't, because the banks were so steep. ere was nothing we could do, so we just went to sleep and hoped that any aftershocks wouldn't take us under. When we woke the next morning we could see that there were cracks in the ice and that water had seeped through. We didn't hang around. Camping on a frozen lake was something I'd never done before. We should have had something called ice-screws to secure the tents down, but we didn't and had to improvise. e winds were incredibly bad during the night, so we'd basically held the tent down with the bike. We had some good kit, though: inflatable mattresses, -40˚C sleeping bags and an arctic tent. What was strange was having a fire on the lake. We would grab wood from the forests at the edge, build a base out of it, put more wood on top, add some fuel from the bike and set it alight. Because the ice is up to metre thick, it didn't melt through. e lake is so big it's almost like a sea, and they have what they call 'ride-ups', which are like tectonic plates on the ice that are always moving and colliding. When they hit each other it forms a ridge, and whenever we came across one of these we'd have to stop, build a little ramp out of snow and ice and then take a running jump over it with the bike at full throttle. It took two-and-a-bit weeks to circumnavigate the lake and it was absolutely exhausting. e feedback I gave to the adventure company was that people would need proper kit but it was certainly good fun. I'd been smiling all the way round. e next thing I want do is in Africa. I can't say more at the moment, but it'll be a big one. I've done a few countries over there, but for me it really is the untouched continent. I can't wait to explore it. mpadventureacademy.com MATT PRIOR Adventurer Matt Prior, 31, is a former RAF pilot now running his own adventure academy, where he throws intrepid travellers in at the deep end to give them a taste of a real-life expedition. But when he signed up for a recent voyage to one of Russia's least hospitable corners, it was Prior's turn to play guinea pig

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