Riding brand-new vintage Royal Enfields, Geoff Hill and companion start a journey of a life-time.
It ws 48C, one degree above the temperature at which aerosol cans spontaneously explode. In the past week, 1,359 Indians had died from the heat. I sat on the saddle of my Royal Enfield looking out into the maelstrom that is Delhi traffic, and realised three things simultaneously:
I had ridden only 30 miles on a motorbike since I'd done my test three years before. I was 7,000 miles from home and sitting on the only way of getting there. And maybe sanity had something going for it after all.
Still, on the bright side, at least I had Patrick Minne, the world-famous Franco-Belgian motorcycle mechanic, beside me on another of the machines built by Royal Enfield in Madras from 1949 until 1955, when the Indians took over the licence and still produce them today.
We'd bought our brand-new vintage motorbikes for £865 (€1,366) each from Nanna's, a garage in a Delhi slum. On the wall as we counted out the money, the girl on the spark plug calendar wore a full length sari and an expression of syrupy coyness which suggested that, for the appropriate fee, she might cover you in warm yoghurt and beat you gently with a poppadom.
I looked at M Minne, and he looked at me. "Fancy an expedition, old chap?" I said. "Splendid idea," he said. Two days later we crossed into Pakistan, bumping along what looked like a dried up river bed, choking on the dust of everything from lumbering bullock carts to gaudily painted vintage Bedford trucks, like tarts on wheels.
That night we checked into a Lahore hotel surrounded by armed guards, and went out for a Chinese with our contact in the city, the splendidly named Wing Commander Butt. Discussing the rest of the journey through Pakistan, from Lahore through Quetta to the Iranian border, his eyes widened in horror, and he choked on his won-ton noodle soup with extra chilli sauce.
"No, no," he insisted, "you must not even consider going from Quetta to the Iranian border by road at the moment. It is much too dangerous."
We arrived in Quetta on a Monday. The regional capital of Baluchistan and home of feudal warlords which make the province the kidnapping capital of the country, it was a one-horse town until they kidnapped the horse. Unfortunately they had also kidnapped the Tuesday train to the Iranian border. Like Shergar and double-breasted jackets, it had vanished as if it never existed.
We booked into a hotel quaintly called The New Lourdes - presumably the bandits had stolen the old one - dined on a surly chicken, and went to bed. Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Nigel Langdon, a 28-year-old irrigation engineer from Sheffield.
"Are you the chaps with the Enfields?" he asked. "I'm restoring an old Triumph Thunderbird I bought from a tribal warlord, then I'm going to ride it home. I'll be over in five minutes."
He arrived in a Toyota pick-up, stuck on a tape of what I learnt from M Minne was a mix of intelligent house and ambient techno, and we drove off in search of a pizza parlour on Jinnah Street.
"The Tuesday train?" said Nigel as we skidded to a halt and Paddy slid to the floor in a blizzard of irrigation memos. "That won't be here until at least Friday." I settled back in my seat. It was going to be a long week.
First of a four-part series
NEXT WEEK: On the road through Iran