Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  ‘I’m starting to get worried,’ Uros said, turning to me. ‘You say to me this safari is safe.’

  ‘It is,’ I reassured him. ‘Mundi, we are doing this in a Jeep, aren’t we?’

  ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ he laughed. ‘Too expensive. We go on foot.’

  Uros and I blanched.

  ‘What are you going to give us to protect ourselves?’ I asked.

  ‘A stick and a packed lunch,’ he smiled.

  ‘How are we supposed to protect ourselves with that!?’ my voice shot up. ‘Throw the lunch then while it’s eating it whack on the head?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Nothing can happen,’ Mundi smiled, then said as if offering a guarantee on a set of steak knives, ‘After all, I am your guide!’

  The next morning we waited by a waterhole. There were two others in our group, a lovely New Zealand couple, student doctors Mark and Anne. The air was thick and hot with the smell of sal trees burning in the midday heat.

  Sal trees – tall, big-leafed, and gnarled – were found along India’s Deccan plateau and as far as Assam and Burma. Buddhists and Hindus worship them because, it was claimed, Buddha attained enlightenment among them. However, as Uros and myself had seen before the national park, encroaching agriculture and illegal logging had reduced what was once a lush area to scattered lonely patches, all the way to the darker blue-browns of the Himalayas.

  Mundi, in his green fatigues and a floppy hat, climbed a tree and scanned the forest with a pair of battered binoculars while a younger guide sat above him on a higher branch. Uros sat in the shade with binoculars around his neck, head to the trees, looking desperate for a cigarette to fall into his mouth.

  ‘Where are they?’ he huffed.

  We had been here for four hours and had had no sight of a tiger so far. And not surprisingly either, thanks to poachers and illegal loggers destroying their habitat. There were now less than a hundred breeding tigers in Bardia National Park.

  Just as I was dozing, head resting on a log, langur monkeys started barking somewhere above us.

  ‘Tiger!’ Mundi whispered hoarsely. ‘The monkey. He go crazy when tiger is near.’

  Behind us, elephants roared and trumpeted. Their keepers whacked their hides with sticks as they snaked along a tiny track.

  It was deathly quiet. The hairs on my neck stood up. Uros was ghost-white. He handed me the binoculars. I scanned the forest and saw something orange move.

  ‘There!’ I whispered. ‘Straight ahead.’

  But when I tried to re-focus, it was gone.

  We waited another hour before Mundi suggested we try another waterhole, as we had most likely scared the tiger away.

  ‘We scared the tiger?’

  Mundi said he felt guilty that he hadn’t shown us a tiger and promised to show us something at least worthy of some danger.

  ‘Up ahead are rhino. Grass very long. I go first.’ He looked at us hard. ‘If I see rhino I will say “RUN UP TREE!” So you must RUN UP TREE! No ifs or buts.’

  Mundi pushed on, trudging knee-deep across a small river, and on to the other side. Anorexic trees, their trunks as wide as my forearm, dotted the plains. Mundi and his young scout disappeared into the long grass and we followed cautiously after them.

  ‘Ah, I bet we see nothing again!’ Uros sighed, his back pressed with sweat, binoculars bouncing around him. We walked for some time when all of a sudden we heard:

  ‘RUN UP TREE!’ Mundi was running towards us, pointing upwards. ‘RUN UP TREE! NO IFS OR BUTS!’

  Everyone ran up a tree, everyone including Mundi (who got up his first, I must point out), everyone … except me!

  Because the trees were quite thin they kept breaking! Or others limped over like forgotten carrots in a fridge crisper.

  ‘STOP FUCKING AROUND!’ Uros yelled at me. ‘THEY’RE COMING!’

  Finally, I found a tree with some girth and frantically latched onto dry branches that snapped as I tried to pull myself up, scratching my legs, grazing my head and snagging my shirt. My hiking boots stripped at the bark.

  ‘HURRY!’ the guide yelled again.

  Fear shot me up the trunk, which swung from side to side like a rubber stick, taking the sudden weight. I heard a crack.

  ‘Shit!’

  From my vantage point I could see two pale grey rhinos, some 30 metres away, charging in. They stopped, looked around, snorted loudly to catch wafts of our scent before charging again and repeating the process. Later, I asked Mundi why they charged only three times.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe …’ he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Maybe they can’t count to four!’

  I tried pulling out my camera but nearly lost my footing completely.

  They came nearer, stopped again and sniffed the air.

  It was at this point I realised why rhinos have such bad eyesight. It’s because they’re a bit cross-eyed. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, with that big fuck-off horn in the middle of your face, always distracting you, always there! No wonder they’re almost extinct. Probably always banging into things, knocking each other out, trying to mate with their double vision.xiv

  The larger of the two rhinos looked around suspiciously, and then huffed as if to say, ‘They’re up in the trees again, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yep,’ replied his smaller friend, digging the ground with its foot.

  ‘Wanna stand under that Australian?’

  ‘How do you know he’s Australian?’

  ‘I can smell the Blundstone boots from here.’

  ‘Oh. What do New Zealanders smell like?’

  It took a large breath and grunted. ‘Disappointment’.

  We were only free of the rhinos when one of them got distracted by something really important. ‘Look, Albert! A butterfly! Let’s chase it!’

  And off they went bashing diagonally through the long grass and small trees.

  ***

  Leaving Bardi National Park a few days later we cycled to the windy town of Butwal. Pronounced Butt-well, our arrival couldn’t have been any timelier as I had developed, ahem, a scorching case of haemorrhoids.

  ‘Butt-not-so-well,’ I grimaced at Uros, clutching the area in question. He was in his own haemorrhoid mood – face taut, a blue vein bulging out of his temple. He demanded to know where a hotel was and when I told him I knew as much as he did, he popped and deflated there in front of me, limp and lifeless. We were two-thirds of the way to Kathmandu and the 100 kilometre days were taking their toll.

  At a medicine shop (or, rather, a wooden shack with dusty pills spilling over benches), I tried to explain my delicate condition to a small Nepalese man.

  ‘Haemorrhoids!’ I pointed like one of those ‘Eat at Joe’s’ neon signs, arm going back like a piston to my rear. He stared glumly then fetched a box of laxatives.

  ‘No, no!’ I handed them back. He swapped it for another box – suppositories.

  ‘No! Um …’ He gave me a piece of paper and pen. I wrote out in big block letters like you do on a tax form: H-A-E-M-O-R-R-H-O-I-D-S. He took it and gave it to a well-dressed man and his well-dressed wife standing at the far end of the counter.

  ‘Haemorrhoids!’ the well-dressed man erupted as if he had just won bingo.

  ‘Yes.’ I said quietly, not wanting the whole world to know. It turned out that the well-dressed man was a doctor.

  He uttered an explanation to the pharmacist whose eyes lit up immediately and jumped to the back of the shop. He returned eagerly with a tube of cream with an extra-long nozzle. It looked like an enormous dart.

  The doctor explained how I was to … er … to apply the remedy by making lots of upward movements as if stabbing an imaginary villain to death.

  ‘Anything else I can help you with?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Uros said. ‘Do you have any Vaseline?’

  ‘No, Uros, no!’ I wanted to say. ‘You’re giving the doctor ideas! Me with my sore arse and you wanting lubricant!’

  Fortunately, the doctor didn’t have such a
base mind as mine and procured the Vaseline.

  ***

  ‘It’s seven o’clock.’ Uros opened the door the next morning. A fearful wind had struck up overnight and dark clouds hung over the gorge-cradled town. Lightning crackled and I caught a glimpse of it forking into the mountains. Uros turned, said nothing, flopped back into bed and threw the covers over himself. I followed his lead, curling up under the blankets. I hadn’t wanted to cycle and had been thinking of all kinds of excuses not to. And so we hid from the day … well almost.

  ‘I need a bell for my bicycle,’ Uros told me as we battled the bluster of Butwal’s foul afternoon winds. ‘Like yours.’

  ‘Believe me, Uros. There’s no going back. Once you’ve got that thing on there, every Indian in the country will ring it night and day.’

  ‘But everyone moves when you ring the bell.’

  ‘That’s because I’m also yelling.’

  ‘Oh … but I must have one, Russell!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ I said and pointed to a bicycle stall. Uros fumbled among an assortment of bells fastened on a rail; some were as big as a satellite dish, others too flexible in their construction to withstand a day of hard ringing. He decided on the loudest. Happy with his purchase, Uros almost skipped back to the hotel, where he spent the next hour trying to attach the bell to his bike. His pride and joy quickly turned on him.

  ‘Bloody bell!’ he muttered as he moved it again, trying to find a place where his handlebar bag would not ruin the finely tuned clanging resonance. After a while, he found the spot and stood up triumphantly.

  ‘My new bell!’ he beamed and rang it again.

  The next day as we rode through the cool morning, Uros finally got a chance to use his bell as an old woman hobbled across the road with a load of wood on her back. He flicked the bell but all that came out was the sound of a cricket caught in a jar.

  ‘They sell me shit!’

  ‘You can go back and get a refund,’ I teased. It was a good 30 kilometres back to Butwal. ‘I’ll waiiiiiiit!’

  He scowled and we continued on, fading into the heady heat of the Terai.

  12

  NARAYANGADH – KATHMANDU

  March

  Nepal is flat. I don’t care what anyone tells you. It is flat. FLAT! FLAT! FLAT! Those mountains you keep hearing about are FLAT! Believe me, as I believed the Nepalese when they told me this, as I, in puddles of sweat, heaving and wheezing, walked deliriously with a glass of chai in my hand, spilling most of it down my arm as I waved to where I had just come from, down there, in that mist called a deep valley.

  ‘Yes, flat! You go Mugling. Bicycle, no problem,’ Govinda assured us. We were just short of Narayangadh, a crossroad town that fed traffic from India up into Kathmandu through two routes. ‘You not take the Hetauda way. Very hill. Oh! Too much!’

  Govinda was a Nepalese farmer who had kindly let us stay the night in his house after we had brazenly knocked on his door and asked if we could camp on his lawn. The light was fading and the buses seemed to be getting bigger at every near miss. After the town watched us put up our tents, Govinda invited us to stay in his house.

  Appreciative as we were, there was a price for Govinda’s generous hospitality. For most of the night, Govinda pestered me to get him a visa for Australia, and he made us stay in a room where unimaginable things crawled across our faces, both of us bolting upright in the night shouting, ‘What was that? Just what the hell was that?!’

  Govinda’s plump wife and his mother made us chicken, spicy vegetables and dahl bhat (lentils and rice). The family – they had three small children – watched us eat before beginning their own meals.

  Afterwards, I entertained the kids by drawing cartoons while Govinda tried to teach me Nepalese numbers, tapping my knee every time he drew a numeral. He showed me a photograph of his parents; they had lived in Japan for some time, a world away from the mud huts and small towns of Nepal.

  Two weeks had passed us by since we had left Delhi. To avoid the heat, which was growing interminable, we spent our mornings cycling and our afternoons lying on bench seats in mud hut restaurants until the heat had given up.

  Despite less traffic in Nepal, we had seen more accidents here than anywhere else on the trip: buses overturned on corners and down ravines, or horrid head-on collisions on perfectly flat, wide roads.

  Perhaps the high number of accidents had to do with the way Nepalese vehicles were slapped together rather than constructed. I had seen buses hurtling along, barely able to stay on the road, their chassis skewing off in one direction and the undercarriage in another, as they took turns suicidally fast, occupants bouncing along inside, hair and clothes flapping around them.

  As a cyclist, I had absolutely no idea where to throw myself when one of these strange aberrations of the road came bearing down on me – I opted for closing my eyes, gritting my teeth and repeating, ‘You’ll get through! You’ll get through!’

  And it wasn’t just trucks that looked for fatalities. The day before, we passed a pile of rags lying on the road in the shade of a tree. An orange TATA truck blared past it and rags flew up to reveal an immobile lump – a body.

  We parked our bikes and reverently inspected it.

  ‘Is she dead?’ Uros asked. We saw no sign of injury, though it wouldn’t be long until she would be squashed by a careening bus.

  ‘Namaste?’ I asked, and the figure stirred and looked up. It was a woman. Her hair was cropped short, her dress was dark with filth and red sores dotted her brown legs.

  ‘Hello? Namaste?’

  She barked then rolled over. A bus approached in the distance, tooting. I grabbed her arm, trying to pull her off the road.

  ‘Move! You’ll be hit by the bus!’

  ‘Nah!’ She pulled her hand back, scowling. I grabbed it again. She sat bolt upright and yelled, her sudden energy startling me. The bus tooted and boomed past, missing her bare ankles by a few feet. I pulled at her again but with more force.

  ‘Come on! MOVE!’ She snapped her grip away and buried her face in her arms.

  ‘She wants to kill herself,’ Uros said. Another vehicle, an orange TATA truck, swung around the bend, tooting. I motioned it to slow down. Miraculously it did, and then stopped in front of the woman momentarily before driving around her. We stayed for the next hour trying to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. In the end we gave up, trying not to look back when another bus passed us.

  It was later that day that another traffic hazard erupted. Trying to cheat the blast of wind from a truck, I bent my head down, only to look up to see a water buffalo, scared by the truck, bucking and kicking towards me. I froze and coasted quietly towards it.

  I waited for impact, mouth agape; at the last second, with wild eyes, it switched direction and galloped across the road, down into a gully, tripping and crashing through small trees and paddy fields.

  So after saying our goodbyes to Govinda and his family, we rode the easy ten kilometre distance into Narayangadh. Over a breakfast of curd, jalebis (deep-fried treacle), masala omelette and a hot glass of chai, we discussed which way we would go, as I wasn’t convinced of Govinda’s Kathmandu via Mugling route. Instead I proposed going through the town of Hetauda and up a very hilly 60 kilometre climb.

  ‘There’s less traffic,’ I argued. ‘And the ride is supposed to be good, according to the guidebook.’

  ‘But it’s uphill 60 kilometres! The other is flat.’

  ‘Yes, but the Nepalese version of flat is hills! How many times have they told us it was flat when we’ve spent hours on a hill?’

  Outside, a calamity of buses hooted and braked. ‘And I don’t want to face that.’

  ‘But you are faster than me on hill.’

  ‘No, we get our energy at different times. You’re in the morning and I’m in the afternoon.’

  Which was true. I had my bursts of energy lying flat out on benches in mud hut restaurants, swatting flies off my knees with a dinner plate.

  So, w
e set off towards Hetauda through the heavy traffic; it eventually thinned out and we were soon among paddy fields, where farmers were up to their knees in mud, water buffalos ploughed through brown water, and women planted clumps of iridescent green rice like hair transplant surgeons on a giant balding scalp.

  Hetauda was a busy, noisy town and, like Narayangadh, it intersected highways to India and Kathmandu. We found solitude at the Avocado Hotel, which had bungalows set among a spacious garden for 500 Nepalese rupees per night. Uros baulked at the price.

  ‘Do you have a special rate for cyclists?’ he asked the manager.

  ‘Cyclists!’ the manager lit up. ‘Yes, for double, only 300 rupees!’

  We were in heaven. The room was moderately sized with an ensuite, and was quiet (well, except for the sound of someone snotting out their entire frontal lobe). It would be our first glorious long sleep since Bardia National Park.

  Showered and dressed, we plonked ourselves down in the restaurant. ‘I’m going to order a steak,’ I said to Uros, who was busy combing his long wavy locks, now free from his ponytail. He looked like a Renaissance aristocrat.

  My legs were killing me, as was my bottom from the bike seat. I ordered a beer, a plate of finger-chips, lassi, tandoori chicken (there was no steak!) and, unnecessarily, nan bread. Despite my exhaustion, I was in a good mood. The manager came over and dumped two notebooks on our table.

  ‘Cycle books.’

  I opened the dog-eared notebook to find a collection of stories from cyclists – German, Dutch, French, Australian, Welsh, Singaporean – who had cycled the world, but most messages were about Kathmandu. Someone had underscored entries with ‘wanker, tosser, bollocks’ at the horror stories of climbing the Tribhuvan Highway. One entry had me in hysterics:

  You think that ride was hard? You should try pogo-sticking. I’ve bounced non-stop from Paraguay on my 17-speed Cannondale super-spring Pogo-Tourer. No punctures for me, amigos. Next year I am unicycling to Yugoslavia. Tom Paddy from Swanbourne, UK – a little village in England famous for nothing, and Phil from Swanbourne, Australia – a little village in Tasmania famous for even less.