Photo supplied by Thomas Brayak Riders from around the world participate in Janak Mistry’s guided tour through the Himalayas, mostly on dual-sport Royal Enfields.

GROOS — This September, brothers Thomas (“Tom”) and Terry Brayak, originally from Hyde, Mich., completed a motorcycle tour through the Himalayas, the tallest mountain range in the world.

Speaking with the Daily Press on Monday in the home he shares with his wife, Mitzi, Tom said that this was something he’d wanted to do for a while. He had been to Kashmir — far north on the Indian subcontinent, on the edge of the Himalayan range — while in the Peace Corps in the 1970s and knew how beautiful the whole region was. Around a decade ago, he began to hear acclaim from people who had driven between Manali and Leh, which was the first leg of the motorcycle expedition.

A friend in India, Ronald Sequeira, told Tom about a tour he had gone on — “Jack & Jill – The Moto Expedition Co.” led by Janak Mistry — in the Himalayas, which lie between Eurasia and the subcontinent and include the highest peaks on Earth.

Intrigued, Tom spoke with Mistry to get the details. By around March of 2023, he said, it was confirmed that the trip could be arranged. Along with Sequeira and a few others, Tom and Terry signed up for the expedition and sent a down payment.

Until recently, the bulk of Tom’s motorcycle experience had been in his youth, between the ages of about 17 and 21, when he had been active in motocross.

Terry, on the other hand, has done a few endurance rides, in addition to trips around the Upper Peninsula. A couple times now, he has ridden from the Upper Peninsula through Canada to the eastern maritime provinces and back through the United States by way of Maine.

In preparation for the Himalayan trip, both brothers rode the Lake Superior Circle Tour in August, Terry on a Honda Gold Wing, Tom on a BMW R1200.

A total of eight riders participating in the expedition — not including organizer Mistry — flew from various parts of the globe to gather in Chandigarh, a city in the north of India at the base of the Himalayan mountains. On Sept. 7, 2023, vans carried the group farther north — and higher — to Manali, a town situated at approximately 6,600 feet above sea level, where they would pick up the first set of motorcycle rentals.

Monsoon season in North India often lasts into September. The Brayaks and their fellow travellers were fortunate to stay mostly dry during their two-week trip, but the roads bore evidence of weather-inflicted mayhem.

“Because of all these rains, they had all kinds of landslides and stuff covering the road, and it only opened up two days before our trip, actually,” Tom said.

Photographs taken through the window of the van en route to Manali showed a mess of heavy equipment — excavators and bulldozers, which clearly had been in place to complete road work — on a mountain pass, battered, crushed, and wedged between and under monstrous boulders that had been sent down the slopes in a recent storm.

The entirety of the following day, Sept. 8, was spent in Manali to help the riders acclimate to the elevation and the rented bikes, all of which were the first dual-sport model from Royal Enfield, appropriately called the Himalayan. Just one rider, a German man living in India, had brought his own Ducati.

From the 9th to 11th, the eight bikers — led by Mistry and followed by a truck prepared for possible accidents — made their way to Leh, one of the joint capitals of Ladakh, a disputed region that borders Tibet. Because of licensing differences in that area, the riders switched to a different set of motorcycles — still Royal Enfield Himalayans — from a different provider.

“(Mistry) was very well organized,” said Terry. “He has lots of connections. It would’ve been difficult to do that on your own. … There were a number of checkpoints, so we had to have all our passports, visa, and then he had to get permits to go through these places, so he had that all taken care of.” Additionally, Terry said, Mistry warned the participants not to exert themselves at altitude, made sure not to dawdle at the highest points, and shared cautionary tales of people who had failed to heed his advice. No one on the Brayaks’ trip ended up going down or falling ill.

Tom said that he chatted with the man in Ladakh who owned the second motorcycle rental business, and learned that during the winter — when roads become impassable and motorcycling isn’t an option — the same man takes people on tours to see snow leopards, which come down from the higher elevations.

“The scenery was fantastic all the way,” Tom said. “This is higher than anything in the Rockies. … It just goes on and on.”

Terry said, “It kept changing. The geography of the mountains … mile after mile, it was different. Some areas, we went for hours and it was nothing but huge boulders — some as big as a house — scattered up to the road. Being a former owner of a former gravel plant, that was kind of interesting to see how the rocks are.” (Tom and Terry Brayak ran Bichler Gravel and Concrete until selling the business in 2018.)

The terrain in the mountains, as one might imagine, is hazardous in more ways than one. Tom shared GoPro footage to help convey the scene.

In each video, a slope rose on one side of the road and fell away on the other. Other mountains, some capped with snow, were visible in multiple directions. In some clips, it was possible to make out vehicles on the same face of the same mountain, as the road wrapped treacherously back and forth in its upward climb.

“A lot of times, it was so beautiful, but it was really hard to even take your eyes off the road to look at it very much because there’s so many hazards on the road, and there’s rocks on the road a lot of the time, lots of just arbitrary rock,” said Tom, and to his point, there was a volleyball-sized hunk that had shaken loose from the mountain and tumbled to rest on a stretch of paved road that was otherwise mostly clear. Tom said he was in second gear most of the ride and “rarely” got above 40 mph.

“You’re on these really winding roads,” he said, “and you’re going up and up, steeply up and steeply down.”

In almost two solid weeks of daily riding, Tom said they only encountered a flat straightaway where they could kick the bikes up into the highest gear once. “And that was maybe for like a half an hour. Otherwise, it was always kind of an arduous, curvy thing,” Tom said.

Without warning, the road changed from paved to rock. Some areas were full of muddy puddles that appeared to be about six inches deep, judging from the bike ahead, which sped through water halfway up the wheel and whose rider stood up on the pegs and would have gotten very wet if he hadn’t been clad in full gear. There was no choice for the following biker but to do the same.

“I’ve done motocross before, so rough road wasn’t such a big thing,” said Tom. “We had to get used to our bikes some, too, because these are all — you know, it’s not the bike you’re familiar with, obviously, until you ride it for a few days. And after a few days, everything was very comfortable as far as the bike is concerned.”

The lack of visibility was a major concern because there were rarely straightaways. Each winding stretch of road inevitably wrapped around yet another bend, the unforgiving mountainside a wall obscuring from view whatever potential dangers might lurk beyond.

“You never knew what was around a corner,” said Terry. “There could be a rock in the road, could be a truck, could be a cow!” He chuckled. “It could be a really sharp corner. You never knew.”

Tom explained, “A very large part of the time, there was only one lane. So if you met a truck, the truck — it’s bigger than a motorcycle, so the truck stays on the road, and you go off to the side.” Such was the general protocol for oncoming traffic, but as Tom pointed out, “They don’t follow a lot of rules like we do here.”

For Tom and Terry, the most difficult part wasn’t adapting to the elevation (around 18,000 feet at Khardung La), operating controls in the cold, or maneuvering an unfamiliar two-wheeled machine up rough and sloppy terrain.

“I think adjusting to the traffic is harder,” said Tom. “Some of these drivers in India are kind of crazy. … It’s unpredictable; that’s the hard thing. Some person is gonna let you pass them by, and another one isn’t going to, and another person is going to come from behind and pass a whole bunch of people when they can’t see anything ahead.” As an afterthought, he added, “Driving on the left side of the road is another thing.”

Leh, at roughly 11,500 feet, was the group’s base camp for the majority of the expedition, beginning with their arrival on Sept. 11. For the next eight days, the group made excusions out from Leh. Some, like the journey to the confluence of the Indus and Zanskar Rivers, were day trips, while others were longer — the route to and from Turtuk made for a four-day round trip.

One highlight of which both brothers independently spoke highly was Pangong Tso Lake, which is the highest salwater lake in the world.

“The deep color of the water, and the mountains around it — the snow-capped mountains… That was a beautiful area,” Terry said.

On Sept. 20, the group parted ways, flying from Leh to Delhi or Mumbai and then their final destinations, home, where they shared new stories from faraway lands.

“It was challenging; it was inspirational,” said Tom. “A once in a lifetime trip.”

Terry said, “It was just awesome.”