Delhi receives everyone the same way, even in May. A city of immense sensory overload, it’s a wild melange of chaotic ancient history and modern big-city energy, tied together with ear-splitting volume and astounding heat. In a wall of 42°C air, Chris Akrigg and I begin a feverish journey toward the roof of India – a strange pairing of a British bicycle champion discovering a new way to see the world, and a Singaporean with a desk job and a severe motorcycle habit.

Pro MTB legend Chris Akrigg is famous for a superhuman ability to seemingly ride literally any bicycle up any wall, but for him this is fresh territory. While he’s long ridden motorcycles – his background is in motorcycle trials – this is his first time in India, his first time on high-altitude roads, his first long distance motorcycle adventure. And for yours truly, Cherie Tan? I have always prioritised curiosity first, and skill second. A less glamorous formula, perhaps, but a surprisingly durable one.

Different lives, different riding histories and different instincts converge in the same alien, frantic city, then point themselves towards the same road out of the chaos. North.

May is an interesting time to arrive in Himachal Pradesh: the mountains are still negotiating with the seasons and they’re not remotely interested in our schedule.

But the lower valleys are moving again, even if winter hasn’t entirely given up. Cafes are open; bikes are being loaded; people are setting off. But further north, the high country still carries winter on its shoulders. Snow sits above the road, meltwater cuts across it, and a pass can seem open while feeling very temporary.

May makes the Himalayas feel exactly as ADV often does: shifting, beautiful, demanding, and still just within reach.

In Manali, the market is at full tilt as we muscle our way through pilgrims, traders, trucks, motorcycles, and the unspoken principle that any available gap is a lane.

Then we leave it behind. The Atal tunnel swallows us beneath the Pir Panjal range, then spits us out into a colder, barer world where the road narrows and glacial peaks hold court.

Keylong is the largest town of the Lahaul district, which sounds a bit more impressive than the 250 houses that it actually is. The air is so thin – and the light so fractured by altitude – that colours saturate faster, shadows go much colder and deeper, and golden hour is compressed.

What sort of people live here, on the edge of the map? Here are the Bhote, a people who carry Tibet in their name and faith, a culture shaped by isolation and extremes. At nearby Shashur monastery, this elevation is less about geography and more about proximity to the sacred.

But no matter where you are, or how strange the world seems, you can always find similarities with people. You don’t need a common language to understand the joy in a child’s laugh; they are delighted to chase a ball on the streets, and we are delighted to glimpse through this window into their world.

Pangi valley sits at the bottom of a gorge cut by the Chenab River, through one of the most seismically active corridors in India. The road can make you feel very small and temporary – carved out of the cliff, the only way in or out, two-way traffic sharing space with public buses and goat herders, unpaved and without guardrails, barely 4m wide at points.

Under normal conditions it takes 10 hours to cover 127km.

But today there is a landslide. Traffic builds up on either side waiting for the rock blasters to work, and there’s no telling when – or if – we’ll get through. We end up sharing biscuits and tea in the rain with a trucker who has been waiting longer than us and seems unbothered. Eventually the road opens and we ride the rest of it by moonlight.

Killar is the administrative heart of Pangi Valley and operates on its own timetable. Electricity, lights and heaters run from 10pm to 5am only, a minor horror we discover at the tail end of a long, cold, rain-soaked night ride.

From a window in Killar, on a clear morning, you are looking at two great ribs of the Himalayas. To the north, the Zanskar range. To the south, the Pir Panjal.

We make base here and prepare to push for Saach Pass in the morning, weather depending. Officially, the pass is still closed. Naturally, this makes everyone more interested.

Much of the Saach Pass stills lies under winter, and it doesn’t officially open until June.

Here, above 14,000 ft, the smallest things exhaust you: bending down for a dropped glove, zipping a jacket up to the chin, a short laugh. We stop for tea and pull hits off an oxygen canister like it's the most ordinary thing in the world – because up here, it is.

Snow walls rise on either side of the track, taller than the bikes, and the road narrows to a single tyre's width of packed ice and rocks. Altitude strips the whole journey back to its hard essentials - you stop thinking about the trip and start thinking only about the next hundred metres.

We ride as far as sense and snow allow, before we finally admit defeat and turn around. The Saach Pass will still be here next month, next year, entirely indifferent to whether we made it through today.

The descent unspools faster than the climb did. We retrace it all: Killar's rooftop views, the Pangi cliff road we'd already survived once, Keylong's compressed golden hour, the Atal Tunnel spitting us back out into warmer air on the other side.

By the time Manali's market noise reaches us again, it sounds like perspective. Not every road gets ridden all the way to the end. Like the Saach Pass, some of them just get respected properly, which turns out to be its own kind of arrival.

The world doesn’t always cooperate, but you go anyway - and that is often where the best stories begin.