Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  He stood outside the bakery, admiring the reflection of his newly bought safari hat – park ranger style.

  ‘I ride to the bus station and take the bus back to Butwal, then I cycle to Varanasi.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ my sphincter clenched. ‘Butt-well.’

  He gave me a hug. ‘I learn a lot from you. You are a good friend.’

  He swung his leg over his bike and waved as he pedalled through the near-empty streets, before the turn of a building consumed him. I had enjoyed our travels together and was going to miss him.xvii

  It was now time to meet up with Bec, so I took a taxi to the airport and stood for some time among the anxious crowd huddled outside the arrivals doors. An hour passed and I was beginning to wonder if Bec was going to arrive at all. Did I have the right day, the right time, and the right flight? Soon, a trickle of Westerners came through the doors. I then saw, at the end of this long line, a blonde mop of hair searching this way and that. An electric shock ran through me at seeing her.

  ‘Bec!’

  She looked beautiful, eyes blue and skin lightly tanned. She dropped her luggage and ran up.

  ‘My baby!’

  We kissed passionately while shy Nepalese looked on, curious at such public displays of affection.

  ‘God, I’ve missed you!’ we both said, then smiled and laughed at each other.

  I grabbed her backpack and we walked hand in hand in search of a taxi back to Kathmandu city.

  In our hotel room, I popped a bottle of champagne I had chilled (you can get anything in Kathmandu!) and poured us a glass each. We clinked glasses, kissed and lay on the bed, her telling me of her awful flight on Air Dhaka. It sounded like some kind of bad American sitcom. There had been a fight and men had jumped over seats, punching their antagonists, insulting each other’s wives. The air stewards did nothing to restrain them, so common were these mile-high stoushes.

  It was heaven to finally be in her arms after four months apart. As we lay on the bed and kissed, drinking each other in she said, ‘Russ, you know how you said you’d always love me?

  ‘Yes, darling. Of course!’

  ‘And that if I ever had anything to tell you, you’d understand?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And if for whatever reason our plans changed, that would always be okay with you?’

  I looked up. ‘Er … y-y-yes.’

  ‘Well … I want to cycle with you!’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I said, “I want to cycle with you”. All the way to Beijing!’

  ‘Oh, um …’ my voice began to break. ‘I thought you just wanted to hike Nepal for a month and then off to Europe.’

  ‘Yeah. But … well, can I?’

  Where was the ‘Oh, I only want to travel with you for a month. I want to travel on my own. I want to experience the world my way’ deal? This was a surprise!

  But why was I being like this? Wasn’t this what I wanted, to be with the woman I loved? Hadn’t I talked her into this very idea in the first place?

  Perhaps I had enjoyed my independence just a little too much, and maybe this romantic adventure with Bec wasn’t just a gallop around the Himalayas anymore, it was something else: COMMITMENT!

  But looking into those dazzling blue eyes I weakened: ‘Ssssurre. It’ll be … it’ll be … great!’

  ***

  The Annapurna Circuit, a trekking route on the Tibetan Plateau of the Himalayas, was extremely popular: 16 000 visitors trekked it per yearxviii– yet ironically their very presence contributes to the loss of the environment. Forests have been cleared to make way for guesthouses, bridges, and for Westerners’ needs: fuel to cook their food and heat their showers. (It takes 1.5 kilograms of wood to heat a Westerner’s shower; this amount would supply a Nepalese family’s needs for a week.) Nepalese women now travel up to four hours at a time to collect firewood.

  Bec and I did our best not to impact on the environment – no showers, meals by kerosene stoves – and we took our own canteen bottles rather than buying them and contributing to the growing rubbish that dots the trekking trail.

  After we dumped our heavy packs and sat down at a teahouse, we heard a strange tapping sound. I turned around to see trekkers wrapped up in bright Gortex jackets and gloves, clacking up the rocky path with ski poles. They reminded me of the machines from HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds and looked just as alien when passed by a Nepalese porter wearing thongs and carrying a fridge.

  One of the Gortex crowd, a smiling German, stopped to catch his breath.

  ‘The ski poles,’ I asked, ‘are you expecting snow, like, soon?’

  ‘Ah! Ze poles give me balance,’ he said. ‘And zey transfer ze veight onto ze arms by as much as 25 per cent, which gives more energy for ze trekking.’

  I wished I had poles! Though I don’t know why they did. These trekkers had porters carrying all their gear, leaving them to carry only a sandwich, a bottle of water and a smile. And, no wonder – it was incredibly beautiful here with the snow-capped peaks looking down on vast open valleys.

  They continued on, each trying to jump in front of the other. It became apparent that the trekkers were in some kind of competition, taking the name ‘Circuit’ quite literally, leaping and practically running up eroded hills and cliffs. I’m sure we were lapped several times. As we sat around tables at tea–houses, Herculean stories abounded.

  For instance, there was a British traveller who had jogged around the circuit, even up the fatal 5416 metre Thorung La pass through snow, mud and loose slate in a mere ten days. Then, there was a German couple that had apparently done it in seven days. When I mentioned this startling factoid to a middle-aged Israeli couple, they erupted with glee, the husband slamming his fist down on the table, scaring everyone in the guesthouse.

  ‘THAT WAS OUR SON!’ they shouted.

  ‘No, actually, it was two Germans who—’

  ‘AH, OUR SON! YOU HEARD ABOUT HIM TOO, YES?’

  ‘No, actually, it was two Germans who—’

  ‘YES! HE JUST GOT OUT OF THE ARMY!’ They looked at each other, smiles so big and bright that I almost had to put my sunglasses on, their chests pumped up like blimps.

  ‘HE WAS VERY FIT! HE GOT UP AT FOUR A.M. EVERY DAY!’

  ‘NO, IT WAS 3.30 A.M.!’ his wife corrected him.

  ‘NO! IT WAS FOUR A.M.! IT WAS ARMY TIME!’ Once they had argued out this important detail, they resumed.

  ‘YES, HE GOT UP … EARLY. HE WALKED TWELVE HOURS A DAY, SOMETIMES AT NIGHT. HE SAID IT WAS BEAUTIFUL! THE MOON SHINING!’

  ‘But these Germans, two of them, they did it in seven—’

  ‘AH! HE SAID IT WAS HARD, IT WAS GOOD, BUT HE’D NEVER DO IT AGAIN!’ He ended the story with another thump of his meaty fist on the wooden table, spilling our tea. Silence filled the tiny teahouse and a fierce wind picked up outside, whistling cheerily to itself through the gaps in the wall.

  ‘Your son,’ I wanted to say to them. ‘Was he German with multiple personalities?’

  Such impatience to complete the Annapurnas in the shortest possible time would some day become a reality. A road going right around the Annapurnas was currently underway so that one day you’d be able to drive the entire 250 kilometre circuit in a matter of days.

  Though I could see the benefits for the local people (access to towns, medical services, schools) I could also see how it would ruin local economies for porters and the like. Traffic – like it has done everywhere around the world – would bring with it noise, pollution, rubbish and accidents. The joy of taking your time trekking, being present, feeling part of the incredible landscape, would evaporate in the need for speed.xix

  Anyway, Bec and I managed to avoid getting swept up in Le Mans trekking, and instead got swept up in each other. We walked slowly together, holding hands, getting to know each other once more, having slow breakfasts and making love in the afternoons while the rain and harsh winds pelted at our door.

  One day she said something that cast doubt on the possi
bility of us at all.

  ‘Everyone was telling me before I left that I was mad to have a relationship at my age. That I should, while I’m travelling at least, have lots of sexual experiences. But you know I don’t want to have all those cheap experiences like you had.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say they were cheap!’

  ‘What? You don’t regret any of it?’

  ‘Why should I?’ I smiled broadly, then kicking the rest of the sentence into the gravel, ‘I was young, good looking, I had charisma! I had fun!’

  She was silent, kicking the gravel back at my shoes, then stopped.

  ‘I wish I had had all those experiences!’ she said, then trudged ahead, sulking.

  How could I blame her? She was 23 and I was 32. The difference in our ages had often led to a difference of opinion.

  Oh, dear. Oh, dear indeed!

  14

  NEPAL – INDIA

  May

  ‘What happened?’ I asked a Nepalese man wearing oversized glasses and standing at the edge of a torn embankment. He was a dot in the crowd of hundreds who were clambering around the wreckage, some ten metres below.

  ‘A motorbike was coming this way, the bus was overtaking, and the bike hit the front,’ he pointed under the bus. ‘There. You can see the dead people.’

  The impact of the head-on collision had caused the bus to shimmy off the road down a steep embankment and gouge a deep brown scar into a flooded paddy field. The bus lay on its side, the lip sipping the muddy water around it like a stranded fish.

  Next to the bus, a body had been covered with a woollen blanket, as if to warm it up. Though the external damage to the bus was minor, six people died in the crash when the seats crumpled into rib-cracking dominoes, their weak seat-mountings breaking loose in the collision.

  Fifty metres from the bus lay a red motorcycle helmet, upturned and half-filled with brown water, a solitary island in the muddy pond. The helmet’s owner laid some 100 metres away on his twisted back, head upturned, staring at nothing. Blood trickled from his mouth, across his forehead and over his spiky black hair. He must not have had time to even look surprised as his body took the brunt of the bus’s full force when it took the corner. The impact had knocked both his shoes off, revealing pilled blue socks, one with a hole in it.

  Yet, his injuries, like the bus’s, appeared to be somewhat superficial; a mangled lip was the only mark that showed he had kissed death at all. Miraculously, his passenger survived and was now in the midst of being driven, just as madly as the bus that had dislodged him from his seat, to a hospital in Pokhara, a town Bec and I had just come from.

  Our three weeks of trekking done, we had taken the bus for Kathmandu, screeching through the mad, winding hills when it suddenly halted and became part of a long line of vehicles. Despite no wreckage blocking the road, no one could move on until the police arrived. We had been there for an hour already.

  Local vendors selling popcorn, beans and coconut soon took advantage of the calamity. Restaurant shacks were filled with bored, hot customers fanning themselves in the two o’clock heat as they sipped chai, clumped dahl bhat into their hands and fingered it into their mouths, or chewed tobacco. The excitement and horror of the crash had apparently left them with a gnawing appetite.

  The bus driver was nowhere to be seen, having legged it over the hill in fear for his life. As is the custom in Nepal, if a driver causes bodily harm to his fellow passengers or pedestrians, they have every right to beat him to death. This begs the question of why, if you were a bus driver with 40 people sitting behind you who might just want to beat you to death for any traffic discrepancy, wouldn’t you just drive a little bit more safely?

  This obvious truism was something I wished to impart now via the medium of a clenched fist to our driver. Despite the horrors we had all just seen, he was, now that the police had arrived and cleared the traffic, already wildly taking on blind corners, the back wheels struggling to stay on the road as trucks intent on obliterating us swerved out of the way at the last second. The worst of it was when our bus and another of the same company cut off a rogue taxi that had failed to give way to them. Arrowing him into the middle of the road, they stopped traffic in both directions. The bus drivers both leapt out and took turns yelling and shaking their fists at the taxi driver, who shrank into his leather seat, then under the dashboard.

  ‘It is far safer,’ I said to Bec as we passed yet another crashed bus, its body disintegrating into a rock cutting, ‘to ride a bicycle.’

  ***

  Relieved with our safe arrival in Kathmandu, I was soon struck with a horrible realisation that I’d be most likely be going back on a Nepali bus again: my visa was about to expire.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bec.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to take a bus. It’s at least three days’ ride …’

  I dashed off to a money changer and made an illegal transaction (well for Nepal) – I changed Nepali rupees for some hard American cash.

  ‘You’re going to bribe them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said with an arrogant wave of my hand. ‘This country is skanky with it.’

  Two days later, at the border …

  ‘Your visa has expired.’

  I blinked at the grey, weary eyes of the Nepalese immigration official.

  ‘Today is the 13th May. You entered on the 13th March. Sixty days only.’

  ‘No. Two months. The visa is for two months. It says there.’

  ‘You have to apply for a new visa. Fifty dollar US and one dollar US for each day over. Total fifty-two dollar US you have to pay.’

  Time for Plan B.

  ‘I don’t have that much money on me. How about … I give you some money?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Say,’ I reached inside my wallet, ‘ten dollars?’

  ‘I cannot.’

  He was silent for a moment, flicking my passport, my life, in his hands. ‘You go to India without exit stamp. Okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ I went to pick up my passport, but he held onto it, causing me to trip.

  ‘Fifty-two dollar you have to pay. Fill out form …’

  As he handed it to me, I protested again.

  ‘That’s so much money. How about … twenty dollars US I give you?’

  ‘No, no. New visa.’ This went on for some while but just when I was about to give up and start filling out a new visa form, he got up and said, ‘You stay here. My friend. He’s at hotel.’

  An hour passed before the official returned with his smiling friend and ushered me into the office. The friend filled out the paperwork, writing my passport details in a book.

  ‘You arrived on the twenty-third.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Money. Twenty dollar,’ he said abruptly without looking up, and I counted out the one-dollar bills. With his pen, he did something that I could have easily done at my hotel – he scrawled over the date, replacing the 1 with a 2.

  We cycled over the southern border of Nepal into the town of Rauxal in Bihar, India. Bec came to a wobbling stop as she tried to get used to her new bike laden with gear. Her bike had already done a marathon cycle, Narendra told me, having travelled over 9000 kilometres from Germany to Kathmandu and to make sure it would survive our trip, he replaced the cables and bearings, the whole deal costing $US200. Panniers were much harder to come by, but we eventually found an ambitious bag maker who, unlike others, did not wave us away into the rain.

  Like my first day with Uros where I thought he wouldn’t mind cycling 184 kilometres in one day, for some reason I thought Bec, a novice at cycle touring, wouldn’t mind cycling up 30 kilometre long hills (the hills that Uros and I had struggled over) for days either.

  What was I thinking?

  We argued of course, and after one particularly tough day, she lay next to me shaking and crying, declaring she wasn’t going to cut this cycling malarkey.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I reassured her. ‘Wait ’til we get to India. It’s flat there and it’
ll give you time to get your cycling legs. You’ll enjoy it then. Really.’

  But it was me that would find this leg of the trip the most challenging.

  ‘India is spice,’ I said to Bec, catching the familiar smell of curries brewing and chai boiling, the fragrant noxiousness of kerosene burning, and the dark cloud of diesel from trucks. The assault on my senses reawakened my first memories of India. But these soon faded as the realities hit: the swarms of people, the rickshaw bells ringing like lost phones, the broken roads, the blaring of celebratory songs through huge speakers on broken wheelbarrows.

  On the way in, we passed a sign on a battered government building: PREVENTITIVE CUM CONTROL SUPPLIES.

  ‘What is it? A hammer?’ I joked to Bec.

  ‘No, your personality!’ she teased.

  As much as I loved being back in India, I was a bit nervous. I had heard that Bihar was the most lawless state in all of India, parts of it being run by Thakurs, a caste-based mafia. No one travelled on the roads at night. I had also heard that dacoits (bandits) flourished here, and that if they didn’t get you, the police would. I had been told a story of a foreign tourist relieved of all of his money by the police, then his car and finally, his clothes, as he encountered checkpoint after checkpoint.

  On a bench seat down a steep set of stairs outside a building lay the immigration officer, a fat man wearing a singlet and shorts. His hippo belly hung over the side, rising up and down as he snored. An immigration journal next to him flapped in the silent breeze.

  ‘Welcome to India!’ I smiled at Bec as I minded the bikes, watching her while she went down the stairs and woke him. He sat up abruptly, wiped his eyes and, without concern for present company, hawked out his sinuses and spat a long stream of gooey mucus behind him into a room full of broken bricks.

  As if for contrast in this scene, another immigration official in a grey safari suit and a white beard came and sat beside this fat, unshaven slob, delicately smoking a tiny cigarette and sipping a small glass of chai.

  Bec returned and I went down to fill out my passport details while she went up the stairs to mind the bikes. The old man looked up at the crowd that had swarmed around Bec within seconds.