Add a new risk to motorcycling

Seems death of motorcyclists in India is even more dangerous than one would imagine.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/sto...-getting-tangled-in-manjha-1581587-2019-08-16

Seems there have been so many deaths to riders by errant kites. Apparently it is quite the fashion to use glass or metal embedded in the strings to cut other nearby kites' strings. These of course tend to slit throats if a rider becomes entangled while cruising past. These deaths continue to happen years after a law was passed to ban the cutting strings.

In my day it was lawn darts that were the dangerous toy to have.

I’ve ridden a motorbike in India. It felt the most dangerous motorcycle thing I’d ever done, by a long way. Watching it on TV looks bad, but it’s 100 times worse in reality.

And that was without seeing any kites!

Never again.

Wow... who'd a thunk it?? I've never been there but I'll take your word for it Nigel that it's not something I'm missing out on.

I think you might (only might) be ok if you go with a Bona Fide outfit on an organised tour on known safe (relatively speaking) roads.

We just hired two bikes in Chennai, hit the road, and rode down the coastal road on the Bay of Bengal.

Glad to have done it, but I probably had 10 years worth of ‘moments’ (read: near death experiences) on that one trip...

There was an article on Facebook a few days ago about a guy who copped head injuries from crashing a motor scooter in Bali. A few years ago, I stayed with a rellie in London who had an au pair. As I arrived she left for Bali. Within the next few days she died in a bike crash there. It seems that many Australians visit Bali and get severely injured or die in motorcycle accidents. It might be that they ride there without helmets ? One of my friends raced in Indonesia and copped a head injury - he got himself onto a plane and came home to Australia, despite the risks - to avoid being operated on in one of their hospitals.

Many don’t have travel insurance or if they do it doesn’t cover riding without a helmet. Seen many heartbreaking stories of families trying to raise money to cover enormous and ongoing medical expenses in Bali, Thailand etc.

It's odd...I started riding while I was in India for 3 years, and I'm far more scared riding back in the US. At least in India the [lack of] rules is well-known and there's an order of things in which bikes are, at least, part of the norm...and there are few rules stopping me from taking action to put myself in a safe place. In the US, I'm concerned about the driver going 55-85 mph while texting and putting on makeup at the same time and not at all habituated to the presence of bikes, while I'm constrained by traffic rules.

Of course, the slower pace of local Indian traffic helps, but the open highways there can be insanely deadly as well.