A Beginner's Course

You're on a crumbling, pock-marked once paved road no more than ten feet wide. You hug the sand-covered and rock-strewn shoulder as a hulking relic of a bus whizzes past you, horn blaring in your ear. With a tight grip on the handlebars lest you fade right into the treacherously deep sand off the side of the road you notice a few key elements rapidly approaching.

That black mass just to your right slowly becomes a water buffalo, blithely ignorant that he represents a one ton obstacle that you must somehow avoid. The bicyclist with the conical hat and the load of bamboo trunks pedals leisurely along, and in the next five seconds you will decide whether you're better off hitting her or the water buffalo, because that bus is still somewhere just outside your peripheral vision.

As luck would have it the road disappears and you find yourself on a collection of jagged rocks interspersed with the occasional red brick. With no road to stay on you are free to take that leap of faith and drift right, hoping sweatily that your Minsk doesn't fail you now. You bounce along, free from the bus but not from the motor scooter pulling out from a side road and, of course, right in front of you.

Think fast: which one's the brake and which one's the clutch? You just down-shifted and then raced the engine and you're still gaining on him. What is that technique for braking most efficiently? Pump hand brake then foot brake but watch out for the tree trunk blocking the entire rock collection of a road. Swerve and gun it and hope for the best.

And then come the mountains.