Many memories have faded, but some moments from the trip are as vivid as they were when I was in India. I still see prayer flags, in primary and secondary colors, trampled in the snow outside of monasteries, and I still hear three monks chanting in harmony on a cold and dusty evening as a red sun tucked away behind the Himalayas.

I still see the fleas jumping between stray dogs as I drank tea in a big, canvas roadside tent, sat on a dirty carpeted slab that my host slept on, and I will never stop thinking about the night at our camp on the edge of Pangong Lake a convergence point of Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan borders where we ate paneer, smoked cigarettes, sat in lawn chairs, and stared up at the Milky Way, thick in the foreground of the night sky, dramatically full and dazzlingly rich, forcing each and every one of us to existentially ponder our places in this world. 

My fondest memory of the trip is when I went the wrong way on the world’s highest motorable road, Khardungla. At the 5,600-meter peak, I stopped to take a picture with a yellow concrete marker that declared I had traveled higher than all other humans below me, but after after few minutes of very slowly choking on the thinner air, I became lightheaded, decided to leave before the rest of my group, and rode down the far side of the mountain, not knowing that we had to go back the way we’d come.

The descent from Khardungla’s peak was one of the best motorcycle rides of my life, because for the first time in years I was feeling completely confident and sure of myself, and it showed through my deft riding style. I managed the Bullet up the side of a sheer rock wall on the inside of a turn to get around a traffic jam, I aired the bike off every boulder in my path, and I slipped every corner like I was fighting for the podium in MotoGP. 

Then I came to a military outpost with a Chinese flag and had no idea what to do, so I parked in a small snow-covered pullout and waited an hour before someone came, called me an idiot, and told me to turn around to head back up, over, and down the mountain. It was a mistake worth making, because it meant more time riding on one of the world’s most wonderful roads, though I did run out of fuel and was forced to coast in neutral most of the way back down the mountain.

All of these hilariously unreal, wonderfully joyous memories, brought back to the forefront of my mind simply because I found a forgotten t-shirt tucked away in the corner of my closet. Moto Himalaya affected me deeply, and by the end of those eight days my body felt like my worn-in bullet. It was trying, both physically and emotionally, but it was well worth the discomfort an experience so vast and moving that you cannot fully appreciate it unless you go and do it yourself.

Maybe next year I will make it back to Ladakh for a ten-year anniversary ride to make new memories to accompany the old ones, and maybe while I am there I can find a less tacky t-shirt as a keepsake.