RIDING INDIA'S DANGEROUS ROADS (Himalayan Motorcycle Road Trip Ep4)

Very fast morning this morning. Found out at breakfast that we're leaving an hour earlier. Apparently there's some road work ahead. Showed you yesterday what road work means here. So it's going to take us a lot longer to get where we're going. That's totally fine. It's what we signed up for. The only sad thing on today is I'm going to have to wait till tomorrow to decorate Bob's bike. Sad. Okay guys there's a couple of important ones for today. The chances of rock falls is pretty much every day. It's constant. So you really do not want to be stopping next to a big cliff. You know stand there and mess around and take some time and take photos and stuff like that. If there's something really spectacular and it's really safe and you can get off the road away from the cliff, stop and take a quick photo. But try your best to just move through. Let's just get through and out of that area as far and safely as possible. Okay. I'm gonna miss going and coming up this road. This is some of the nicest pavement we'd have the entire time. You can smell the trees. It smells like camping in Michigan or something. It feels very homey. There's a lot of nice turns. We're always better coming back up at the end of the day than going down in the beginning when everybody's feeling a little bit rusty. Well we got through the road construction which is obviously really nice because in addition to the road construction there was warning of falling rocks. Nobody got taken out by a boulder from the sky. Now up ahead we have a checkpoint in a little while and apparently those guys don't screw around so all cameras have to go away. All cameras. All right, just like that we're through the checkpoint. We gotta go, we gotta go. Just like that, here we go again. Now I can get some footy of Bob though. Look at him up there. Look how good he's doing. Oh no, this might be the bad one. This one's going to take a little bit longer than the previous ones we stopped at today. Of course Bob's joking about hopping on the sticks up there in the machine, taking control. Get up there, see if they need some help. All right, go time. Go, go, go. I like how some of the signs say bro. It sounds really friendly. I'm hiding behind a car right now because it felt like you were driving Michigan in the middle of summer. Just all road work. We only ended up waiting maybe half an hour, 45 minutes. When they open up, just go, go, go. Push through, push. Stop for lunch, scenic views of course. That's always the order of the day. Check this out. Some of the places we end up for lunch are a little more rusted than the others. The good news is the food's finally getting spicy, which I really like. Yeah, those lunch noodles were perfect. We only have a little while to go now until we get camped for the night. He said when we get up by the camp, we'll see marmots, Himalayan marmots. That's what I've been waiting for, and they like come up to you. Yeah, and so if you got like an apple or anything like that, you can just feed them and touch them. They're real friendly. I can't even keep track anymore. This is either number five or six. Lots of road improvements going on. It's going to be really nice next year. One of the guys in this group has this awesome Garmin device that was really specific on maps. Right behind me that way is Tabasco. We're so close right now over to China. They finally got all the rock out of the way though, and traffic's starting to come through here, so it's like the beginning of Mario Kart. Everybody's just ready to hit that throttle. These roads just keep getting more and more absurd. I think I say this every time we get to where we're staying for the night, but oh my god, we all made it somehow. We could have rode the bikes up here. Oh, glamp it up. All right, we're doing a bit of glamping tonight. We're intense. I mean, look around at this place. Insane. Let's see what this tent looks like. Oh, this is a shoes off joint. This is no boots in the tent. Oh, look at it. Look how perfect that is. All right, no boots in the tent. Well, you found your bed. I'm almost in it. How cute would you say that is in there? That's a 10. It doesn't go any higher. I just hope it gets cooler. I think it's going to get really cool. I'm going under there. That's cooler. Go. Did you drink water? Oh, that's a good guy. All right. I got it, Tim. Thanks. We got Carlsberg's inbound. Would I lie to you? No. It's amazing. Every new place we go to is my favorite. Oh, my God. Look at this. I can't. How blessed can we be? How lucky. I'll pay you when we get somewhere. Yeah. I tried two different rustic opening methods that didn't work. I'll try to use your teeth. Thank you, sir. Before we absolutely trash the place, as we tend to do, it's just a cute little tent. So cute. Boom and boom and motivational words. Never give up. Oh, okay. There's the bathroom sitch. It's a bucket shower. We're going to have hot water for the next hour, apparently, and then again in the morning. Look at that. A little wash basin. That's me. And a proper turlet. Okay, that's it. That's the whole tent. Never give up. I see. It's motivational words. How's this altitude? Tiring. How are you for breathing? I'm fine right now. I just really want to shower. I'm so covered in grit. We're going to go do that. All right. Sweet. I get first. Come here. Look at these guys. Look at them. It just makes me miss Pepper. Bye, buddy. I keep coming back to this whole tour has gotten us. Places that I never would have been able to on my own. And I hate to keep repeating it ad nauseum, but I mean this place. And then, of course, what goes hand in hand with that. Like my camera right now is on five percent. My phone's almost dead. The drone's out of batteries. I don't know when we're going to get power next because it already went out. It just got to plan ahead for this sort of thing. What I'm trying to say is there might not be a lot more footage to come. They've got the generator on right now. I'm ferociously charging everything as fast as possible over in this little corner. There's just so much to point a camera at here. Last thing for tonight. I'm sure we're going to tuck in early. It's going to get really cold here. I am going to show you the little eating quarter kitchen thing because it's just really cool. I'm getting ready in my tent for the evening. I have some work to do, which is funny because just the juxtaposition against like pulling all these SD cards off of all the cameras, put it on the computer hard drive, and like meanwhile you're surrounded by just this ancient town. But anyways, it's cold outside. Getting colder and then it just started to drizzle. It's gonna be a freezing night. It's gonna be survival mode. Contrast that with I have Ant-Man playing on my computer right now so the computer stays awake so that I can run all the USB chargers off of it and get everything charged up for tomorrow. Stupid. At night there's always something to do here. Somebody to go hang out with. We've been doing like fires at night or just, you know, a bottle of whiskey, couple beers, hang out, tell stories. Tonight the rain's kind of putting a damper on things. So I'm just hanging out in my tent. And then I thought it'd just be maybe interesting to somebody out there what that kind of looks like because when you're filming everything there has to be a process. Like I'm still working here, which sounds ridiculous. This is a dream vacation. But because I'm filming it, there does have to be a little strategy behind everything because like internet is not always there. Power's not always there. And just the amount of filming I'm doing. If I'm not data dumping, pulling all the SD cards, throwing them on the hard drive, kind of taking a look at what you filmed. Case say like camera's not working right and you can't tell when you're using it. Maybe the audio is bad and you didn't notice that the mic's messed up. Little stuff like that. Like you need to review your footage every day. That helps so that you don't get a week worth of garbage. At worst case scenario you have a day worth of garbage and you can fix it the next day. Silly as this sounds, charging everything is a major pain in the butt. Like coming back and just, it's just a mess always. It's a tangle of wires. There's a ton of stuff to charge. I have the drone, the Sony RX100, two GoPros. I've got the GH5 but I'm barely using it so it barely needs a charge. But when it doesn't need a charge it takes a really long time. Finally, it is freezing time. Sure I already mentioned that. So I have two beds. Oh yeah, by the way, Bob and I stopped splitting a room. I'm just terrible with sleeping. Getting to sleep and waking up really easy. So since we're out very rural India, the places are very affordable. So it's like, what's the point? I stay up later than him. He wakes up earlier than me. It was not working. So this is much better this way. But I can also strip the second bed of all the blankies and I'm going to make super bed on one of these little twin beds. Okay, that should work. The amount of cameras I brought, like I said, is ridiculous on this trip. So I just kind of want to go through things, say what is working, what isn't. First off, got two Hero 7s. I usually hate GoPros. Finny does too. She hates them because the audio is terrible. And when you try to use them inside in any sort of low light, even though they're supposed to work decent in low light, it always looks just terrible. It's yeah, I hate them because they freeze up all the time. Somehow, I don't know, maybe because I'm shooting for shorter periods of time. They've been working really well. They haven't been freezing up or locking up like they typically do. I'm pretty happy with them right now. I have my one on the stick so I can take it off, film like side view, low stuff. Just, I don't know, stuff you would do with the selfie stick. Then the helmet cam. I mean, a lot of the times I have two hands on the handlebars. It's just very intense riding. So the most you can do is click it on really quick and just keep driving. Problem is that's not very dynamic footage that gets boring really quick. Even if in the moment you're thinking it looks so amazing, like whatever is that interesting thing you're looking at. It's just very monotonous and very boring to look at. So I keep that in mind when I'm recording that, hey, I'm probably going to use about 1% of what I've recorded here. But this stuff I've recorded is good. I'm really happy. Helps eliminate that feeling that you're missing, uh, capturing something. I also brought this big old dog. It's the GH5. It's got a telephoto on it in case we see any wild animals. I, I brought this with solely to be able to super zoom onto just animals we might see. The reality of it is that the camera bag that I'm carrying on the back of my motorcycle, it is taking such a beating. The motorcycle is moving so much on these gravel roads that I stopped carrying the camera because I'm worried I'm going to break the lens and or the camera body. So I can use it to get some b-roll when we roll into camps at night. But besides that, it's pretty much just a brick that I'm lugging around at this point. Finally, we have Chappy the drone. As I brought him here, I'm still thinking he might not make it out of here. The rules, again, are a little iffy on drones in India. It hasn't been an issue so far. And man, there have been some epic things to drone. The primary thing that holds me back is one, you don't want to fly near military or military bases. And two, it gets so windy in the mountains. It's just, you can't put him up. He just can't handle that sort of wind. But I, I am glad I brought this. I'm also glad that I didn't bring the Mavic 2 Pro that we just bought because I wouldn't want that bouncing around in the backpack this whole time. It would just be beat. But meanwhile, this thing, I don't care about throwing it in the bag and letting it bounce around a little bit. The only thing is the props have gotten a little bent. They're just cheapo plastic props. I have a bunch of extra props, so it's not that big of a deal. But you can't store the drone in the bag like how all the marketing material shows nice and easy in one of the camera pockets. Because, yeah, it bends down the blades. And then you can tell, like, it's just, it's not flying the same when you take off. Just one little bent prop really messes with it. Finally, what I'm filming on now is the RX100 Mark VII. Sure, I'm going to do a review video for just the rest of us. There's tons of review videos online already about people using it that are going very spec heavy. I mean, at the most basic level, Finny and I wanted a pocket-sized camera that shot 4K, 30 frames per second, and had an external mic jack. And this thing is just kickin' butt. If anything, the problem is very small battery. But hey, just buy a bunch of batteries. And really, like, the buttons are small. It's giving me an issue. It's so small of a camera body that it's difficult to hold onto. But I can fit it nicely in my pocket, which is the whole point. There's a bunch of strengths and just a few drawbacks. But really, I think we found our favorite camera.