The first time I rode a proper motorbike on a public road was in 1996 in Nepal. Faced with a day’s hiking to go from Dhulikhel to Panauti and see a Buddhist temple in the Himalayan foothills, Jenny and I decided to get smart and hire a motorbike. That should reduce our day trip to a mere couple of hours, then we could go and look at other interesting things in the afternoon.

I didn’t have my driving license on me, but such formalities would not prevent the shifty hotel proprietor from parting me from a nominal fee (nominal to me, probably two days’ pay to him), which got me a pukka motorbike (the sort that goes buka buka buk rather than yim! yim!) and a crash helmet. Indians and Nepalis were getting very safety-conscious by then — the driver of a motorbike nearly always wore a crash helmet, even if there weren’t enough helmets to extend to the wife sat on the back with a basket of chickens in her arms and the baby strapped to her back, and the two sons sitting on the handlebars.

I got on the bike and the guy asked me if I had ridden one before. Having got thoroughly into the swing of Asian style communication by then, I gave him a confident “yes”, by which I meant I’d read about how the clutch and gears worked, and had ridden a kiddie bike at a fair a decade ago. After a first couple of mix-ups, instinctively treating the clutch as if it were a brake and watching the owner mentally say goodbye to his beloved, I managed a lap of the hotel’s rocky carpark, took on my pillion and headed off down the hill.

We were travelling by Nepal’s vaunted Arniko Highway, roughly equivalent in social terms to our M1, but in physical terms a lot like the B1224 between Bickerton and Bilton-in-Ainsty, only without the road markings. First, we had to pick our way down the hillside road, which was essentially scree, and onto the flat land below, where the roads were mostly baked red clay earth.

After a brief spell on the highway, we turned left avoiding a homicidal jeep and started down a much tougher road of large pebbles laid in clay toward the temple. It was not long after the monsoon, and the clay had turned to what potters call “slip”. And we did.

After some time motocrossing like this, we eventually came to what may with understatement be called a “tyre rut” in the road. With no sane means of getting the motorbike through, we decided to leave the bike by the road and walk the rest of the way.

We had about a litre of water between us, and two hours later we were casting about us for a place to get a bottle. (You really don’t want to drink the non-bottled stuff over there). We turned down offers of local fruit from villagers, though now I think that was stupid. We bore the amusement of the local sherpas with dignity “yes! come! this easy way!” as we toiled, and they ran, up the steep, eroded hillside, we with our daypacks and they with steel milk churns held with a band at the forehead. We met a friendly TV repair man, hiking for most of the day to fix a set in a mountain village. His pay was nrs50 a day, or about 90p.

When we reached Namobuddha temple, we found that the milk churns had contained, among other things, bottles of Coke. In that economy, bottles win over cans because they can be returned, keeping the price down to that of the contents. We had already seen vendors getting extremely nervous when we walked away with our bottles, not knowing we planned to return with the empties. A bottle of Coke cost typically nrs12. I imagine the deposit on the bottle was probably the same again.

We declined to buy “Thums Up” water because of its bitter taste and because Jenny had seen a sign for “Star” on one of the villages at the bottom of the hill. So we rested, then returned the way we had come. Pink, panting and sweaty, we arrived at the shop to discover it sold Star Beer, not Star Water. So we pinkly and sweatily panted our way back to the bike.

Once aboard, the wind in our hair somewhat restored our energy. Despite by now being purple-skinned and drenched in sweat with flies in her teeth, Jenny still drew wolf-whistles from the locals as we putted through their villages.

Finally we got back to the foot of the mountain our hotel was on. The schools were turning out, and a stream of uniformed children was making its way up the path. Jenny jumped off, I think to arrange the next day’s bus, and I went to return the bike. I got a lot of strange looks from the kids as I accelerated past them up the hillside. I figured it was the usual reaction to a pale skin in the more rural areas of Nepal. After being forced to bunny-hop a couple of fairly deep ruts in the path, and more pointing and sniggering by the children, I remembered the previous day’s journey to the hotel. It had been on foot, up the deeply eroded path-cum-streambed-cum-fissure that I was on now, rather than the wide, scree-topped road that joined it at the top and bottom.

Fortunately the helmet was a full-face one, and in any case my face was already red from the heat. After moto-crossing my way back to the bottom of the hill, I returned by the right path. Jenny had spotted my mistake right away, but her warnings were inaudible in the helmet.