The intrepid motorcyclists of The Harsh Barge blog covered 20,000 km across Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, India and Nepal.
US bloggers Conner Morton and Tanner Ballengee describe their authentic rough and ready travel experience on their blog thusly “Never paid to sleep. Never washed white-T/jeans. Never shaved. No meat. No hotels. No bullshit.”
Their filthy once-white t-shirts were splatters with “grease, oil, gasoline, fruit juices, food, dirt from sleeping on the ground, splatter from riding behind huge trucks in the rain.”
“The jeans werent dirty, because on motorbikes riding in the rain it washes them for you. The T-shirts were disgusting though. It wasnt so much the smell, but the texture. They were….sticky.”
The duo also lived by a set of strict rules referred to as The 10 Commandments, which included never paying for a hotel or hostel, abstaining from eating meat completely and never, ever wasting a drop of beer.
Choosing not to pay to stay the night as they went, the travellers instead “squatted abandoned buildings, places of worship…camping, bus stops, couch surfing” and got sociable by “meeting locals and staying with them.”
Looking so bedraggled was a positive advantage when it came to dealing with corrupt police looking for bribes “When we say we don’t have money and have those shirts on…they believe us.”
The duo’s before-and-after photo was shared extensively on Reddit.
One half of the intrepid duo, Tanner Ballengee, has produced a photography book documenting the journey.
Reckon you’d have the guts to stick the grueling rules of the road?
Main image via The Harsh Barge blog
