Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  ‘Best to head north, out of the heat,’ I said then added, ‘I’m heading to Nepal if you want to come along.’

  He brightened immediately. ‘It is okay? I am not very fast.’

  Just as I was pointing to a suggested cycle route on the map, a purple splog exploded across south India. Another hit the breast of an Australian woman, Sharon.

  ‘Owwww!’ she clutched her chest.

  We jumped up from our chairs to see an Indian boy from an apartment roof above us waving and laughing before throwing another dyed-water bomb.

  ‘Right!’ I declared to everyone at the table. ‘It’s war!’

  With my posse in tow, which included me, Uros, and a young British lad, Ian, we set off to exact revenge. We clambered up the apartment, whisking from one hallway to the next until we reached the top. Half a dozen or so Indian men and boys were filling up buckets, making water bombs filled with dye, throwing them at each other, laughing, one holding another down while another poured the hose over him then smeared green paint over his face.

  ‘Let’s get ’em!’ I cried, and we set about wrenching the buckets and hoses from the locals, throwing ourselves into the water fight, laughing and sliding over each other on the wet tiles.

  Our victims gave it back as good as they got, and before too long we had joined sides, making water bombs and flinging them at the Ringo Guest House.

  ‘Bombs away!’ Ian shouted as we heard the water balloon popping onto the patio. Sharon got up from her hiding place and showered us with abuse.

  We cheered her back. ‘YOU LOVE IT!’

  Anyone walking below was of course fair game, copping a bucket of cold water from seven storeys up. Downstairs, neighbours were throwing more dye and water, and when we finally dared to go there, we were set upon, held down and had purple, green, red and blue smeared over our clothes and faces.

  ‘Happy Holi!’ they cheered, and a rotund man grabbed me in a bear hug. ‘Be happy, my friend. Here in India you are my guest. It is my duty to look after you,’ and then squeezed my spleen into mush.

  He dragged me by the wrist into his house and shovelled spoonfuls of chickpeas into my mouth, and then with the same spoon into Ian’s and Uros’s. Our host then plied us with more drink and then in a flourish we were led into another house and given plates of food: dahl, chutney, poppadums and rice.

  After a few chillum pipes and several glasses of scotch, we absconded back to the hotel as wet and very stoned multi-coloured bandits.

  ‘I’m not impressed with you lot,’ Sharon glared at us in her fresh clean clothes.

  ‘It’s okay. You’ll never see us again,’ smirked Ian. ‘And that is the joy of travel.’

  ***

  Early the next morning, feeling somewhat seedy, we took turns guarding our bikes outside the hotel while the others went back upstairs to retrieve the gear then pack for our 1200 kilometre trip to Kathmandu.

  ‘You have many things,’ Uros said, observing my six bags strewn along the wall. Uros had only two panniers, a handlebar bag, a tent and a sleeping bag. I had to remind myself that he had only come for the summer.

  He poked at my rear rack. ‘Aluminium. It will break,’ he said with glee. ‘Mine is steel. Very strong, and I can get it welded here.’

  ‘Yes, but mine is lighter!’

  ‘Yes, but mine is stronger!’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a much big-ger dork!’

  He laughed. We downed some curd and chai at a café then got on our bikes.

  ‘Remember, this is my first time, so I don’t know how far I can go today,’ Uros said. I don’t know why he was so nervous. After all, he had cycled through 20 kilometres of horrendous traffic from the airport.

  I placed the New Delhi map in the clear plastic on my handlebar bag and sorted out my bearings. We had to head due east towards the next major town, Moradabad, but would probably only go as far as Harpur, some 70 kilometres away. After that, and after a few more days of cycling, we hoped to enter Nepal at its most far west border, the town of Mahendranagar, before continuing along the Mahendra Highway and into the Terai – a region known for its once rich sal forest but also, I groaned, malaria.

  ‘You are more experienced. So you go first.’

  ‘Yes, yes I am!’ I said with slightly more arrogance than was necessary. ‘This is the way, Belvedere!’

  An hour later, I had both of us totally lost.

  We were still in New Delhi, having been swung in the wrong direction by those damned roundabouts. Through a number of wrong streets, building sites and the back of the Mogul Red Fort, I eventually got us over a bridge and onto a double laned road, Highway 24. We coughed and wheezed through the soupy haze, the first I had seen since arriving in Dehli. Apart from this particularly polluted day, New Delhi’s air had improved dramatically since a Supreme Court order decried that all auto-rickshaws, taxis and buses be converted to gas or CNG as it was known here.xii

  As the highway narrowed to one lane, trucks and buses came towards us in the opposite direction, running us off into the dirt as they passed approaching traffic.

  Uros shook his fist at them as they missed him by inches. I laughed, seeing now what I must have looked like all these months.

  The built-up, drab estates of Delhi fell behind us as the urban greyness gave over to green rice paddies and wheat fields. We passed small villages, their houses made from straw and mud, children playing in the dirt with sticks, women pumping water into large silver pots and carrying them on their heads as they walked past ten-foot high dome structures under palm trees: cow pats, meticulously stacked and shaped, and used as fuel for cooking.

  ‘Maybe it is from one very big cow,’ Uros mused. He didn’t say much, and I don’t know whether it was because he had only a moderate grasp of English, was out of breath, or just wasn’t talkative.

  On a vast, flat field, wallahs laid out huge white sheets in the sun as a rusty goods train, as long as the horizon, grumbled through the heat.

  By mid-morning we had outdone ourselves, having reached Harpur in a few hours. We stopped for lunch at a dhaba shack plastered with blue Pepsi signs. Under one, a reassuring tag line read: NO ADDED FRUIT, ADDED FLAVOUR. Inspired by the liberal use of chemicals and none of that dreaded natural fruit stuff, Uros ordered a bottle.

  ‘No Pepsi,’ the waiter replied. We returned a befuddled stare. The restaurant was walled with so much Pepsi signage that there was no space for anything else. Their reaction was like us going into McDonald’s and asking them for a Whopper.

  Instead, we ordered brown curried eggs and chai. When we had rested for half an hour we got on our bikes only to discover that Uros had a flat rear tyre.

  ‘Ah! My first day and I get puncture!’

  He was mortified that his first day was not perfect.

  ‘Ah! You need the I.R.A.!’

  I explained my invented acronym as he rolled his bike over to a puncture repairer – but it was lost on him. In this short time, a crowd of 20 men stood around – close, poking at the gears, at our bags and at us.

  ‘What are they staring at?’ Uros scowled.

  ‘They are thinking,’ I put on an Indian accent, ‘you are the movie star!’

  This too was also lost on him. But not on the puncture wallah who could not hide his annoyance.

  ‘These are crazy people!’

  We continued out of the stench of Hapur, a horrible industrial place, to enjoy a growing rarity in India, a forest, before it became a soft green memory as it disappeared from our gaze, dissolving into chemical factories, sugar cane mills and brick kilns.

  Brick kilns were a disturbing sight, and not just for the thick, dirty plumes of smoke bellowing out of them. We watched ten-year-old boys in ragged shirts and shorts haul bricks onto trucks.

  Child labour in India, despite efforts to end it, flourishes. According to a Human Rights report (‘The Small Hands of Slavery – bonded child labour in India’), of the 250 million children working in hazardous conditions around the world, a
lmost half work in India – the highest number in the world. Though moves are afoot to end such work practices, local as well as international companies continue to exploit children for profit. So much for corporate responsibility, the bastards.

  By the time we reached the small town of Garh Mukteshwar it was only one p.m. and we had topped 110 kilometres. It felt like nothing.

  I told Uros I was going to find a doctor.

  ‘You are not so good?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s just that they usually speak English, and that way we can find out where a hotel is.’

  I found a doctor under a Red Cross sign in a crowded clinic. He told me that there were no hotels in this town and advised us to go back onto the highway. We did, and found ourselves trapped in a gridlock of bicycles, motorbikes, trucks and cars at a railway crossing. A train slinked past, taking forever it seemed, and I started to feel claustrophobic in the fumes and the heat while the metal clank of train wheels passed over the gaps in the track. Traffic crowded so heavily on both sides that when the gates opened no one could pass. Everyone pushed, shoved, beeped and yelled until the chaos eventually subsided.

  On our way to the highway we caught sight of a hotel, and not just an ordinary hotel but the Happy Tourist Hotel. It boasted a sign that read ‘service with a smile’. I went inside and saw the manager who looked at me glumly, no smile in sight.

  ‘A room. Double. How much?’’

  ‘Two hundred and seventy-five.’

  ‘Can I look?’

  We went off silently, still no smiles forthcoming. He showed me a modest, dull room. I agreed to take it. Uros, happy as a puppy, wheeled his bike in. I followed, unclipping pannier straps. Uros fell onto the bed.

  ‘Ah! At last.’

  The manager came back into the room, no knock at all, and announced, ‘This room, three hundred and seventy-five.’

  ‘You said “Two hundred and seventy-five”.’

  ‘No, no. I take you to other room.’

  I followed him into another room, which was smaller and duller than the first. I hazarded that he was playing for extra cash.

  ‘No. I don’t want this room. You say “two seventy-five” not “three seventy-five.’

  ‘No. This room, three seventy-five.’

  ‘We’ll go, then.’

  ‘Okay, you go.’

  He left. I looked at Uros. He was spread out like a bed quilt, eyes beginning to close.

  ‘He’ll change his mind when we cycle up the driveway,’ I said, absolutely sure of myself.

  Uros’s eyes split open and he groaned, reluctantly gathering himself up. He packed his things without a word and we wheeled our bikes past reception. I waited for the ‘Okay, okay, two seventy-five,’ from the sullen manager but nothing came. I made a loud coughing noise, pretending to adjust the gears. Nothing.

  ‘Bugger him,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

  He yawned. ‘Okay, I guess.’

  ‘We can make Moradabad easy,’ I said with mad optimism. ‘It’s only 60 kilometres. We’ll be there in three hours. It’s only two o’clock. We could make it there by six.’

  However …

  Four hours and 184 kilometres later, we arrived at Moradabad, utterly shattered and coughing up dark phlegm from the clouds of diesel exhaust puffed into our faces. It was dark, and for the next hour we were blinded by the high beam of trucks and for contrast, near misses with local cyclists who tore out of the darkness like wraiths. When we found a hotel, we hauled our bikes up two flights of long stairs, heaving with exhaustion.

  ‘How much is it for a room?’ I asked breathlessly, dark spittle around my mouth, streaks of filth across my face as if I had been run over by a convoy of trucks.

  ‘Four hundred and seventy-five rupees,’ replied the manager with a dark toothless smile.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I exchanged a defeated glance with Uros. ‘That sounds about right …’

  We showered then collapsed on our beds, aching. Every minor movement seemed a colossal effort. I was summoned to fill out numerous hotel forms, leaving Uros to trying to make sense of The Smurfs jabbering in Hindi on the television. One question on the arrival form nearly gave me an aneurysm: ‘If left Indian, when’?

  When I returned, Uros, corpse-like, croaked up. ‘You said to me we only do 50 kilometres today …’ He trailed off and fell asleep, and soon I was with him in an achy unconsciousness.

  During the night, I had a slight fever and reached out for my drink bottle only to grab something warm and meaty.

  ‘AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!’ I screamed.

  ‘AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!’ came another scream.

  It was Uros’s hand, also reaching out for his bottle of water! We lay there laughing like boys on a scout camp.

  ***

  In the morning, we were stiff as ironing boards as we roused our way out of Moradabad, a crowded town full of blue ruin. I couldn’t stand the smell, the feeling of sandpaper in my lungs, opening me up for cancer or something else horrid and terminal.

  ‘Let’s do not so much,’ Uros said tonelessly through a mask of tiredness.

  ‘Kichha is only 70 kilometres away,’ I said. ‘Should be there by two.’

  Up ahead we happened upon a crowd staring into a pond. A TATA goods-carrying truck had overturned and lay half-submerged. It seemed lucky that anyone had made it out alive, but the driver was standing by the edge laughing and gesticulating the story to an eager crowd. A rainbow slick of fuel floated on the pond like a visual aroma.

  Nearly every day I’d seen a wrecked vehicle of one kind or another. Most of this is attributed to trucks and two-wheelers, drunk driving being the major cause. Perhaps this is why the driver of this mashed truck couldn’t seem to care less.

  We continued on, climbed a hill and as we coasted down it, Uros explained the Slovenian national anthem called ‘Zdravljica’.

  ‘There is this writer, France Prešeren. He is in love with this rich woman and she not want him, so he write a song about her and it become our song. It is a drinking song.’

  ‘Now that’s my kinda national anthem!’

  He burst into an uplifting rendition. I was hooked, and by the end of the day we were singing joyously through villages, scaring water buffalo and inciting ragged children to chase us with stones.

  Kichha turned out to be just like Moradabad – a pool of pollution, traffic, beeping taxis, samosa stalls and decrepit buildings. It was five o’clock and we had covered 92 kilometres.

  ‘You said 70 kilometres!’ Uros accused me then stopped his bike. ‘Ah, a puncture. Again! Second time in two days.’

  Within seconds, Rent-A-Crowd swamped him like a dark cloak, and all I could hear were his muffled cries becoming fainter, ‘What are you looking at? It is only a puncture! What do you want? Russell! Russell! What do they want? WHAT DO THEY WANT?’

  ***

  Kathmandu is actually lower latitude-wise than most people think. I had it firmly plucked somewhere in the heavens, an unattainable Shangri-La, lost in a mist of mountains, way north and away from the heat. The reality is that it is actually lower than New Delhi, thus, as we cycled through the treeless humid farmlands of sub-tropical Terai, oppressively hot. None of which impressed Uros.

  ‘In Delhi you said going this way would be getting colder, not hotter.’ He wiped a huge drop off sweat out of his eye.

  I tried to look incredulous. ‘Did I say that?’

  Hard to believe how the weather had changed since we crossed the border some days ago, bracing ourselves as the wind blew through us, the rain spraying our faces and bare legs. It was liked we had suddenly opened and closed a door into a new world, for even the traffic disappeared and along with it, the stares and the crowds.

  The Nepalese just seemed to be too concerned with their own existence than with us: cycling to work, heating up chai, carrying heavy baskets of wood roped over their foreheads while women in their red saris drowned in waves of green tendrils of yellow fields, disappearing momentarily as they bent over to pick
up their babies.

  The only attention we received was from children who ran after us in their red uniforms yelling ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ but then ran away when I pulled out my camera.

  ‘I don’t know if I want to cycle India again. Here, this is little. I like this,’ Uros pointed to the greenness, the hills, the quietness. ‘I don’t like India with all the trucks and bad roads.’

  However, Uros, like myself, whether we liked it or not, would cycle India again.

  ***

  We were now on the edges of the Bardia National Park and following a battered Jeep driven by Mundi, the manager of the Racy Shade Hotel, on the suggestion of a Belgian woman, Anit, who had insisted that it was the ‘best in the park’. (The fact that Mundi was her boyfriend had of course not influenced her recommendation at all.)

  I had heard that we could catch a glimpse of tigers, and Mundi had promised us as such, and included a day’s rafting.

  An hour later the Jeep stopped outside a collection of simple but pleasant mud huts with a garden and an outside dining area. The Racy Shade Hotel had no electricity, so kerosene lamps waiting by our door lit the night in dim quiet glows.

  We took a small but cool mud hut. It was surprisingly comfortable and clean, and boasted new mosquito nets on the bed heads. We showered, then headed to the open dining area and ordered a meal. A group of young French women noisily sat down around us as we ate. They played ‘Saint Germaine’ on a tiny Walkman with tiny speakers, and passed joints around while hanging off their Nepalese lovers – guides, Jeep drivers and hotel staff. It was like one big love in.

  Mundi gave us the lowdown on the safari.

  ‘This is tiger you are going to see,’ he said with a big feline smile, ‘Is not pussycat. Okay? Do everything your guide say. Also very danger, is rhino. Very fast. If you get in the way of the rhino it will be the full stop for you! Hahahah!’