Better to be lucky than good (now put your helmet on!)

There are various reasons why it’s a good idea to wear a cycle helmet:

1. You might screw up and fall off. Probably while trying to get your feet into your homemade Powergrips, or while looking up at a peak and wondering the best way up.

2. Someone else might screw up and plough into you. Though so far in the Indian Himalaya we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the courteous driving. Probably helps that most vehicles’ top speed is 30kph.

3. You might be cycling along the main Kinnaur highway and a fist sized rock falls off a 100m cliff above and smashes into the 2m of road between Pike 1 and Pike 2. Half a second either side and no helmet and one of you may be dead, or at the very least have a wound that smarts a bit. (Pike Snr assures us that if we’ve got the cliff height right the rock would’ve hit at 160kph, assuming negligible air resistance.)

A few days later on the old Hindustan-Tibet byway, a much larger rock flew over the road just in front of us. Not even Neil’s gargantuan La Paz ‘Bell-met’ would’ve stopped that one mushing him to a pulp. So while we’ll boost our chances of keeping our heads in vertical old Kinnnaur by wearing helmets, more importantly, as always, we’ll continue concentrating on being lucky rather than good.

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