Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  ‘Give me a minute, Bec.’ I was struggling to breathe.

  ‘Let’s go back down,’ Bec said.

  ‘No, we’ve committed ourselves. Just give me a minute.’

  Halfway up, I saw an old campsite – used tar drums and a flat space surrounded with rocks. Bec suggested that we camp there, but as we tried to construct our new tent – well, a large rainbow tarp strung over our upside down bikes like a lean-to, we both felt dizzy as the high altitude and the sun bit holes in our heads.

  ‘At this altitude, so near the pass, it’s dangerous to sleep here,’ but Bec had already half-constructed the tent. ‘We will have to go over the pass.’

  ‘But you don’t know how far it is.’

  ‘It’s one kilometre.’

  ‘The map could be wrong.’

  I took my pulse; it was going crazy. I felt a stabbing pain in my chest.

  ‘I DON’T FEEL WELL! I MUST GET DOWN FROM HERE!’

  ‘All right, all right!’

  We packed our bikes and pushed the bikes around the next bend and there it was: THE PASS!

  An altitude marker was covered in bedraggled but colourful prayer flags. The flags go by the Tibetan name of Lung Ta (wind horse) and are symbols of spiritual goodwill for those who erect them and for those who pass. (If the flags are hung on the wrong astrological date, however, they apparently have the opposite effect, so I hoped that whoever hung these ones hadn’t got their leap years mixed up.)

  Around a turn was the moment we had been waiting for – the descent!

  I thought the tar would simply fling off as we gained speed, but instead the wheels whipped the frame with their stone teeth. Our bikes chugged away, rattling themselves into nervous breakdowns until we arrived at the bottom of a small valley. The town of Gata, as it appeared on my map, was in reality one large, drab, dirty tent with rusty tar barrels scattered around it. Filthy road-builders oozed out and clumped over in their tarred-scuffed gumboots towards us.

  They weren’t the most welcome sight considering that we had fought their handiwork all afternoon, our tyres now resembling hairy Ferris wheels, not to mention being surrounded and whistled at by another group of workers earlier in the day. The men watched as we struggled with our bikes – throwing them upside down, flipping the tarp over, placing rocks at the ends of the tarp and anchoring the bikes with rope – and did not leave until we went inside our bike tent. Sometime later, a Tibetan man – shiny red cheeks, dark-bronze tan – sat outside our tent clutching a plastic bag.

  ‘Namaste!’ he said and broke into an elfin grin.

  ‘Namaste,’ I replied. He sat there grinning, rocking back and forth on his haunches. He muttered something, scraped the ground with his hand and then pointed to the mountains.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  He grinned again and then in a whisper vanished into the cold night.

  When I awoke the next morning, I looked around the tent: shoes were tied to spokes, clothes hung on pedals, and bags were scattered along the base of the tarp. The tent had worked extremely well. Except for one thing.

  ‘I’m wet,’ said a basket of gnarled blondeness.

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘No! Everything is wet,’ she snapped. Condensation had trickled all over Bec and her sleeping bag. I, on the other hand, was crispy dry, having enjoyed the airy apex of the tent, though a handlebar had kicked me in the ribs most of the night. Again I had slept badly, catching only a few hours between midnight and four a.m. Bec complained of a ringing headache.

  ‘Just as well we hadn’t camped up on that peak,’ I said cheerily (or was that smugly?).

  Rebecca growled.

  ‘Right!’ and I went off and made us lumpy porridge with honey for breakfast before setting about attacking the hardened tar with a screwdriver.

  ‘If there’s tar on that road, I don’t want to do it; I’m throwing the bike on a truck.’ Bec seethed, angry at the two hours it had taken to clear the tyres of tar. Once de-tarred, we set off … well, pushing the bikes up the potholed and rocky road.

  Halfway up, an Israeli couple in purple tie-dyed shirts and dreadlocks passed us on a farting and overloaded Enfield. The girl’s curly locks trailed behind her with the exhaust. She waved.

  It was only nine a.m. yet the sun was already cutting through my wet sarong, glaring off the mountains and giving us sharp headaches. It took us another two hours to climb this monster, but once over the peak, we sailed down through an amazing narrow gorge of honeycomb walls, swirling rocks and towering tufts that rose out of the sandy slopes like gods. It was truly magnificent and it was at times like these, as a sense of euphoria washed through, that I felt all the pain and struggle had been well worth it.

  That evening we stayed at Pang, another tented city. Foreigners sat around the impromptu courtyard, propped up in plastic chairs, while the drivers of goods-carrying trucks dozed in their cabins, legs poking out of windows.

  Bec and I stayed in a large tent with a parachute roof. The tent was owned by a Nepalese family who tended to their guests, cooked chow mein over a kerosene stove, sold potato chips and chai, and issued bedding. The family made enough money, according to 18–year-old Jangpur, to last them through the Nepalese winter, and they would return to Kathmandu once the season ended in September. Her 12-year-old sister, Sampa, helped with the chores, but most of the time she entertained us.

  ‘Natural gas, no problem!’ she said, then lifted her leg, pointed her finger like a gun and made a farting noise with her mouth. We all laughed.

  ‘See what you’ve done!’ Bec laughed. ‘Teaching kids bad jokes.’

  The joke was a hand-me-down from my father and I was happy to see it cross cultural borders. It was funnier still when Sampa repeated the routine, shooting foreigners in the middle of the night as they staggered off the bus in search of hot drink.

  As darkness consumed the ragged cliffs, Bec and I watched the night sky; it was clear as glass. Holding hands, we went back inside the communal tent, and under the covers, began making love. Everyone was sound asleep … we thought. It was only after we had finished that we realised that Jangpur’s mother had been there the whole time, happily watching us from the corner while she knitted a baby’s jumper!

  The last of the arduous climbs was the Tanglang La Pass (5328 metres), the highest of all passes on this highway. It was only 20 kilometres from Pang, and by the late afternoon we were over this scary beast’s rocky head. We stopped, posed and took photographs.

  This pass had been an important trading route for trans-Himalayan traders for centuries, connecting it with Tibet and the rest of China. We took in the incredible snow-capped view and took some photos before bouncing and bounding down the other side on a rewarding 30 kilometre descent.

  The road zigzagged into an expansive green plateau. In the distance, nomads herded their goats, the odd truck disturbing them as they crossed the road. Terraced crops of barley and mustard, Tibetan manis (a long wall of rocks painted with ancient scriptures and prayers), and large white bell-like stupas flashed by us.

  I turned to see Bec some way behind me, checking something near the chain. I stopped by another roadside tent, filled with weary travellers. Their Jeep had collided with a truck and they were now adamant about flying back to Manali.

  Bec glided in.

  ‘Something’s wrong. The pedals keep moving.’

  She pushed the pedals and the rear cogs spun. However, the back wheel ignored it.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ I said, bewildered. Something quite complex had gone wrong inside the free-hub and I had no simple answers.

  ‘Guess we won’t be cycling together again,’ said Bec, smiling weakly.

  We managed to get a lift on a goods-carrying truck, our usual traffic foe. A jockey roped our bikes on top of the truck’s cargo.

  ‘What’s in the truck?’ Bec asked the driver as we lurched slowly up a hill.

  ‘Semen,’ he replied.

  ‘Semen?’

  ‘Yes, semen.’ />
  ‘Whose is it? King Kong’s?’ laughed Bec.

  ‘Are they medical supplies?’ I asked, trying to decipher what he was really trying to say.

  ‘No, um, horse … horse …’

  ‘Horse!’ Bec squealed. ‘Jesus! Imagine the size of its balls!’

  ‘No! … living … inside.’

  ‘Oh! House!’ The penny dropped. ‘Cement! It’s cement!’

  ‘Yes, semen,’ the driver said, shaking his head at our raucous laughter, while the truck strained under its heavy load, creaking and rattling through the dark mountains towards Leh.

  20

  LEH – MANALI – DHARAMSALA

  July

  ‘Man was not like how we know him now,’ said Antony, over a plate of quiche. ‘He was 30 feet high and made of jelly.’

  ‘Jelly?’ I replied, trying to remain straight-faced.

  ‘Yes, he was around the time of the dinosaurs. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.’

  I could only imagine giant jelly men sploshing and slipping over themselves, trying to take on Tyrannosaurus Rex, chunks of their jelly heads bitten off. I wanted to say, ‘You mean to say the world was run by confectionery?’ but I stopped myself; there was some sense about Antony (unlike crazy Harold Weinerman) even if what he had just said sounded completely insane.

  Apart from dropping acid while skydiving, Antony had led a rather sensible, sane life throughout his 59 years. He had been a paratrooper with the British army based in Nepal and Burma, a marketing manager for General Motors in New York, and a media man for Fox.

  But now he was ‘living vertically’, as he put it, having given up the hard drive of horizontal living – the acquirers, the movers and shakers, the spiritually bankrupt, the morally dark and destructive. Instead of moving stock reports, he was now moving subtle energies with his enigmatic girlfriend, Ljuba, a 52-year-old former nuclear physicist from Russia, now a clairvoyant and miraculous healer of the rich. She was in Russia waiting for money to ‘arrive’.

  We had met Antony at the Avista rooftop café in Leh while Bec and I wrote on separate tables, trying to scrawl some space away from each other.

  ‘If you don’t work out the connection between your father getting his cancer and the tendonitis in your arms, then you’ll have this condition for the rest of your life. Believe me. It’s the way that the universe is telling you that writing this book is not for you,’ and with that he left, the wind lapping at his trousers as he walked down the market square, leaving me with questions.

  Bec and I went for a walk up to the derelict Leh Palace that sat over a granite ridge above the town. Built in the 16th century by Buddhist kings, the palace bears a resemblance to its medieval Tibetan cousin, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, and the Royal Ladakhi family lived here in this nine-storey building until the 1940s. And you could see why – the place was falling apart. Rotting beams and cracked mud flaked in the wind and into its gloomy depths.

  Leh was a harsh place, and as prayer flags flapped above us, we could see vast tracts of desert meet the snow-capped mountains. Clouds of dust billowed through the town, causing townspeople and tourists to quickly hide in shops or doorways or behind trees.

  Tourism had doubled the size of the town since the 1970s, and Kashmiri traders, unable to get a hold of that illustrious tourist dollar in their own territory, splayed their wares in makeshift shops and tents by the road, selling Kashmiri jumpers, carpets, curios and hashish. Tibetan women walked around the markets selling trinkets and jewellery, and some passed Buddhist stupas in a clockwise direction, mimicking what was believed to be the passage of planets in order to ward off evil spirits. Travellers congregated in groups, flitting from restaurant to restaurant, bookshop to bookshop, German bakery to German bakery. Some took treks up into the mountains. They were laughing, smiling, happy.

  Bec and I sat. Not saying a word.

  ***

  A week later, we clambered into Dharamsala then to McLeodganj, Bec’s broken bike bouncing around on the roof of the bus like a corpse.

  It was here that the Dalai Lama took up residence in 1960 after fleeing Chinese persecution in Tibet. These days he gave discourses on Buddhism to spiritual tourists who not only stood in line for hours to hear his lectures but flitted in and out of bookshops.

  I went into one.

  It was well-stocked with prayer wheels, mandalas, postcards and numerous books on Buddhism, of course, and self-help. One book I came across was called Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illness and the Metaphysical Way to Overcome Them by Louise Hay. It was a guide to using affirmations to cure ailments. I did have to wonder if Ms Hay was having a laugh. For example, a urinary infection was, apparently, caused by feeling ‘pissed off’, the solution for haemorrhoids was ‘to let go’, and gaining confidence in your testicles was to affirm that it was ‘safe to be a man’.

  Dervla Murphy had stayed in this town for six months, convalescing from a terrible bout of dysentery and away from the summer heat of Delhi. It was up here, after writing Full Tilt, that she managed to pen another book, Tibetan Footholds. During her stay, Dervla cared for Tibetan children at a school, while their parents were off building the long, winding roads to Mussoorie that Bec and I had sailed over, bumping and cursing their now-crumbling state.

  Thirty-seven years later, McLeodganj bustled with traffic, snared at junctions to Dharamsala. Beggars seemed more prolific here than anywhere else in India and were stationed at every corner, hotel entrance, market and newspaper stand. One old woman in particular wailed incessantly in a deep, cackling voice as we passed her –‘Pleeeasse, Sir. Moneeey, to eeeat!’ – every morning, despite us giving her money only moments before.

  We could not ignore it, the lepers with no fingers or legs, Western guilt getting caught in our throats. How could we possibly end the plight of not just one individual but also thousands?

  We walked up to the town of Dharamkot, then up a short, steep, slippery road, to the Vipassana Meditation Retreat. The course was starting, and this was our last day together.

  We stood outside the retreat among the tall pine trees, the monsoonal rains having briefly stopped, giving us a respite for our farewell.

  Bec cried as I hugged her for the last time, her tears wetting my shirt and my cheeks.

  ‘Does this mean we’re splitting up?’ she asked. ‘I mean, not just from travelling but … from us?’

  I didn’t know what to say. The past week had been good, having taken the bus down to New Delhi to enjoy romantic evenings together, and fine dining (like Pizza Hut where you had to book, line up and be seated by the maitre d’). I felt horrible leaving her like this.

  ‘No.’

  We kissed for the last time. Then she left, the whoosh, whoosh of her trousers following her descent back to the cloudy wet hills of McLeodganj, leaving me with guilty thoughts.

  21

  DHARAMKOT

  August

  ‘Staaaarrrt agaiiin … staaaaarrrrt agaiiin! Start at the top of the head, going from head to feet, from feet to head, part by part, piece by piece, observing every sensation upon the body … anicca, anicca … everything changes. Understand the importance of impermanence.’

  The basso profondo voice of Vipassana guru SN Goenka boomed through the speakers from an audiotape. I tried to get comfortable, propped up amid a mountain of pillows, struggling once again with the lotus position, my left leg having gone completely numb. I looked at the clock on the wall of the Dharma Hall. Ten past four – in the morning. It was the fifth day of the Vipassana course, and from four in the morning until nine at night, I had been sitting here trying to meditate, going piece by piece then going to pieces while the same wretched thoughts kept poking my third eye:

  This is insane. I’m soooooo bored! When’s breakfast? How many hours left until I can leave? Who’s that swine who keeps grunting behind me? ‘SPC Baked Beans and Spaghetti, for hungry little—’ SHUT IT! Damned TV commercial. Mmm. That girl in the back row has really nice breasts …
When’s breakfast?

  I wasn’t supposed to, but I opened my eyes and looked around the hall. Forty other foreigners sat around me, eyes shut and as still as Buddha statues. All I could hear were the in and out of breaths from other meditators like we were all in one big womb.

  It should’ve been a peaceful experience, all this quietness was driving me crazy. It was so frustrating, so tedious, so … sexually arousing! I really had to stop myself from jumping up and screaming, ‘Come on everyone! LET’S FUCK!’

  I had done Vipassana courses before, some eight years ago, and somehow I had conveniently forgotten the hell that I had gone through. But now it all came back. It was a disaster. Half of the group left. One meditator had snapped and tried to ninja the teacher during a group meditation before running out to the car park screaming, ‘I’M THE GINGERBREAD MAN, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN!’

  What the hell was I doing here? I had been desperate for some kind of peace, but now I wondered whether a big joint would have sufficed.

  For ten days I was here to learn once again the fundamental teachings of Vipassana, which are based on the teachings of Siddhartha Guatama, who advocated meditation as a basis of attaining enlightenment. As legend had it, Guatama sat himself under a pipal tree at dusk determined not to move until he had attained Supreme Enlightenment. By dawn, having fought his inner demons (and probably a numb knee to say the least), he arose as the Self-Awakened One, Buddha.

  For the first three days we had learnt anapana, which meant observing the breath around the nostrils. By the third day my nostrils were like wind tunnels and I could hear them (and everyone else’s) blowing through my ears. Next, vipassana, a method whereby we sensed every part of our bodies by the square inch – a pulse here, an itch there, any kind of sensation, up and down the body.