Caman The Enjaiment #2

The wild landscape of the More plains.

The road through the plains. The first long straight stretches we rode through in weeks… and also the last for some time to come.

The Pang valley. A very steep descent to the floor of this canyon, and we’re in Pang.

The Pang valley, looking South.

Just after the above snap was taken, my bike gave its only major problem throughout the entire trip. When I started the bike, I noticed a substantial difference in the exhaust note. Leakage, from the manifold clamp. I assumed that my silencer gasket had blown, since there was also a considerable amount of oil leakage from around the clamp.

The others had all gone ahead, and I needed to catch up with them, as Prashi is the expert on these things. I was a little scared to start the bike, and since it was all downhill to Pang, I just rolled down in neutral, with the engine off. A very stupid thing to do, but 23 hair-pin bends later, I got down to the Pang military camp all right.

We discovered that the problem was much worse than I’d thought. The left bend pipe neck was cut! It had started because the thread had worn out on the holding bolt of the silencer. This caused it to become loose and induce a lot of vibration in the silencer and bend pipe. After much panic, argument, flaring tempers, etc., we managed to jam the neck in hard enough to hold. Ideally, it should have been welded, but hey…

It seemed like my problem was gone away, but it would come back to haunt me later. And like how…