Introduction

 

In the year 2005 I had an accident during my cycling tour in Tibet. I fell and broke the collarbone and had to end the trip that should have lasted 6 weeks after only 12 days. Ever since I had tried to come back to the region and finish what I had started.
In 2006 and 2007 I couldn't make it due to obligations at home and at work and in 2008 riots broke up in Tibet and the Chinese closed the region. For 2008 I figured out a substitute tour that included some of the world's top cycling destinations: the Pamir Highway and the Karakorum Highway. The more I looked at the itinerary the more this tour seemed an ideal one: breath-taking mountain scenery, rather good roads with little traffic, poor but friendly people willing to share what little they had with a stranger, a cultural kaleidoscope spanning 5 countries. If it were a woman, I'd call it "famme fatale". But it's just a tour, so I'll let it be: "le tour fatale".