– ODO- 12379 – 12536km
– Location- Sitarganj, Uttarakhand, India
– Weather- 18-33 Clear with head wind
It’s been a long and dusty highway for my last full day riding in India, saddling the border of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Sections of unfinished highway cause huge traffic jams of trucks which I weave through. Their exhaust spin up dust devils in the verge. I’m feeling tired of India after the 5 months. The constant attention and bad bad driving most. Today a bus started to pull in on me in the slow motion traffic and I exploded at the conductor. “Come on!”, he leaned out the door and replied in Hindi. We both cracked a smile.
The reason I’m a little cranky today is down to YouTube. I’ve been splashing out on £6 hotels to escape the attention. But when I’m in the bright lights of the room (there’s no such thing as mood lighting here), and with a great 4G connection I ended up in a rat hole. I started on political news about Brexit. Some comedy sketches gave way to paragliding videos. Then from RC plane crashes I found my self watching an hour long GoPro near death compilation of flying, skating and bike accidents with an extra order of skiers caught in avalanches. All the things that make you never what to leave the house. Then I was laying there at 10pm all amped up and not able to sleep.
I began the journey with a real digital detox component. I’ve found in the past if I spend a few weeks traveling I look forward to time on the laptop so much and I enjoy work even more. I would set my out of office on my email, turn my phone on airplane mode and be without the internet for the full month. As I’ve settled into working on the road the line between riding and working has blurred. As a freelancer, clients don’t know if they need me until the week or two before. That means I can either arrive at a new destination and spend the first week twiddling my thumbs, or I can take emails and the odd call from the road. I’ve gradually started to accept and send work messages on the road and that’s opened the flood gates to everything else. The fast 4G here doesn’t help. Tonight I’ll try to stick to my book instead.
