Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  Then I saw a group of horses trudging along in the distance. They were up on the snow, naturally the horses could not have got any grip on the road of ice. The horsemen spotted me and pulled me onto the snow bank. The horse track went away from the road, cut a wide arc around it, across a snow-filled basin. I trudged along in the horse tracks. The landscape was exuberant and I stopped to take pictures as the sun came out with blinding force. In the distance, a caravan of pack-horses was dwarfed by a massive peak of snow, ice, and rock. Here was a paradox: Zoji La was stunning yet dangerous. One half of me wanted to stay and look longer, bewitched by this icy domain, but the other half told me to hurry on before the sun climbed higher and loosened the snow.

  The River Sings, Do Return, Do Return

  —Slogan on roadside marker, Srinagar-Leh road, noted by Darla Hillard, “Road Warriors of the Zoji La”

  The pack-horses were bringing sacks of food across this bridge of snow to trucks waiting near Gumri. As they went along, they dropped vegetables here and there, so I could tell if I was on the right track by following a stray tomato, carrot, or pea-pod in the snow. And horse-droppings. I could only hope I wouldn’t fall into a crevasse or a sinkhole. The occasional rough burial site, marked by a pile of clothes, sped me along my way. A few years back, the pass claimed several hundred lives. Toward autumn, a truck had broken down on the pass, backing up traffic behind it; an unseasonably early snowstorm struck the hapless trucks, and the occupants froze to death. It was not till the following summer that road-crews were able to dig the trucks out of the snow.

  By late morning I was over the worst of it—an Indian traveler helped me to climb over the last bank of snow, and back onto the roadway. I turned for a last look, then took off. Around a bend, I left the desert plateau of Ladakh behind me. Just like that. The transition was abrupt and complete—and most bizarre. And there was an exhilarating set of hairpin bends down into the Vale of Kashmir. It was as if the gods had spilled green paint over the landscape—spruce and pine trees, lush meadows, alpine vistas, cool breeze. The precarious road I was traveling on had been blasted out of a mountain-side. I raced down the switchbacks—down, down, down to the alpine resort of Sonamarg. From Sonamarg, it was fifty miles of glorious downhill to Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir. I whooped and hollered all the way down, startling Kashmiri shepherds and their sheep.…

  On the map of Srinagar, I had scribbled some notes: houseboats, bombs, ice cream, Glocken. I was to experience all of those things. Srinagar, being ten degrees cooler than places like Delhi, has long been a summer retreat; however, there is no respite from the greed of Kashmiri merchants. They buzz around, droning the same old spiel: My friend, I have houseboat, you come see. Cheap. You want a carpet? I have excellent carpet. Have tea at my shop. No need to buy, just look.

  At the Glocken Bakery I had a temporary cultural relapse, went berserk, and devoured four apple pies in a row. A traveler I met at the Glocken showed me one of the newest sights of Srinagar: around the corner, along the Bund, was a urinal that had just been blown up. A Kashmiri separatist group had picked this harmless target as a warning, setting off a bomb after midnight when no one was around. The manager of the houseboat I stayed on told me there was no trouble in Kashmir. When pressed—when I told him about the urinal on the Bund—he said “Well, we are having a few bombs, but only small bombs.” A cycle tour through the dusty, squalid, old town sector revealed a different story: soldiers in full riot gear with shields, Sten guns and 303s. I passed a heavily sandbagged police station that had a blue paddy wagon and a fire engine outside with steel mesh across the windows.

  Srinagar was like a powder keg—ready to go up at any second. I got out quickly, headed for the next destination—Dharamsala. In early June I cycled through the foothills of northwest India, through pinewood forests. I hitched a ride on the open back of a truck for a hair-raising ride through Jawahar Tunnel, which bored two miles through a mountain-side. Then I carried on cycling past the hill resorts of Patnitop and Batote, and dropped down to stony plains with cactus shrubs. I stopped at small lodges for the night, or got myself invited in as a guest at Public Works Department buildings, which had been set up for traveling VIPs and engineers. The weather see-sawed from thunderstorm cool to searing hot. When the sun came out, the road turned to hot, sticky tar. Road workers with black umbrellas and watering cans full of pitch were mending holes one by one in the awful heat. What a hellish job!

  My diet consisted mainly of fresh mangoes—the only food available that wasn’t booby-trapped with chilies. “Only a little chili,” the man at a roadside stand reassured me, motioning to cauldrons of food. Oh yeah? Tell me about it—the last dish just about blew my head off. Stopping in the shade to peel a mango, I looked up to see the doleful eyes of a huge Brahmin bull staring at me. So I surrendered the skins, and the bull promptly vacuumed them off the highway.

  Travel is a kind of sensory deprivation. There’s always something you crave—cheese, chocolate, or, on the Indian plains, water. It’s not ordinary tap water you crave, but a glass of sparkling-clear, cold mineral water from the French Alps with a slice of lime. In northwest India the choice was between bad colas or mango drinks. I say bad colas because most were carcinogenic—they had cancer-causing additives. Some fizzy drinks were rumored to be used as birth-control devices—used in a douche after the fact. I’d taken to mixing mango drinks with tonic water. I’d order ten mango drinks at a roadside stand, plus tonic water—and for theatrical effect, open all of them. Suspense—a great crowd gathered, gape-mouthed. I consumed two on the spot, and poured the contents of four in one water-bottle and four in another.

  The hill station of Dharamsala became home to the Dalai Lama and his followers when they fled the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959. Today it remains his residence and the seat of his government-in-exile. The community has a Tibetan ambiance and a school with an excellent library for studying Tibetan culture.

  —JO’R and LH

  Farther down the road, after a long stop in Dharamsala, I cycled on to the Punjab—where the crowds got bigger and more wide-eyed. And the traffic got worse. Trucks careened down the road straight at me, forcing me to pitch myself into the shoulder of the road. Pairs of overtaking trucks even deprived me of the shoulder and made me dive for my life. Here and there an upturned truck or smashed-up car would loom up, left where it lay at the roadside—a kind of monument warning the living to slow down. Those signs up in Ladakh had been right on: Indian drivers were maniacs. Bizarre roadside signs still continued: one advertised medical services, depicting the bearded face of a Punjabi doctor—turban, stethoscope around the neck—and, in English, the caption: Sex, Urine, Skin, Stone, Piles.

  The highway traffic was thick with horn-happy truck-drivers, the heat oppressive, and the scenery dull, but the Punjabis were a friendly lot, most likely because the place had been closed for the previous five years. Nobody was asking for pens, and the road was sealed, smooth, and flat. The only sign of trouble was the odd checkpoint, where soldiers scoured buses and trucks—presumably for terrorist weapons. My thirst was incredible: I worked my way through an entire fridge-full of mango drinks and bad colas by noon. At each wayside stop, doing my one-man “rehydrating theater” act, I was surrounded by Sikhs who chattered excitedly over the bicycle, squeezed the tires, and played with the derailer.

  I clocked up a hundred miles by nightfall, struggling through to Batala, a sizable town full of chaotic traffic. The noise-level threw me off-kilter—horns blaring, people shouting, radios squawking. I got to see plenty of Batala, circling the place three times looking for a guesthouse. Everybody had a different story—even when I was standing ten feet away from the place (no sign out front, windows boarded up) people pointed in five different directions. Finally the guesthouse manager spotted me, and hauled me around the back into a courtyard. Things got better after that—an air-conditioned dining-room in the guesthouse served a fine order of chicken tandoori with nan, vegetables, glasses of lemon soda
, and bottles of Thunderbolt Lager. Beer was the only thing that could quench my thirst.

  In the early morning, Batala looked like a battlefield. It was all quiet after the upheavals of the previous day’s traffic and commerce. The streets were deserted, piles of garbage smoldered, crows and mangy dogs picked over the garbage, a few beggars rose from the ashes. It was another of those bombed-out looking Indian cities of the plains, with piles of bricks, sand, rubble, car parts, and garbage lining the main drag, shells of storefronts, and dust, and smoky fires. Splashes of color miraculously appeared as the markets stirred to life—bright red tomatoes, the pale orange of mangoes, and the striking blues, reds, and yellows of the turbans of Sikh vendors.

  Droves of turbaned cyclists were moving along the dusty road, some carrying large brass pots filled with milk. The road was shaded by eucalyptus; farther out were rice paddies and haystacks. Closer to Amritsar, movie billboards appeared, such as: BEDROOM EYES—a sensuous mystery—FULL OF SEX.

  At Amritsar I joined the Grand Trunk Road. I’d spent the better part of two months in India, and yet managed to avoid India—Leh and Dharamsala were not “India.” They belonged to the high country—to Central Asia. India was the plains—heat, Hindus, monsoon. Amritsar didn’t seem like India either. It was Sikh, a synthesis of Hindu and Islamic influences, and militarism.

  The holiest shrine of Sikhism is the Golden Temple. At the entrance to the temple was an Indian army post with sandbags, checking all who entered for weapons. But inside it was tranquil, with cool marble walkways. The temple combined a sense of peace, grace, and beauty—a rectangle of double-storied structures enclosing a large sacred pool. To the center of the pool, connected by a marble causeway, was the main temple—burnished a true gold at sunset. Some nine hundred pounds of gold leaf were used to cover the temple exterior; on the interior, delicate frescoes and glasswork adorned the walls and lofty ceiling. The central cloister was a perfect acoustic chamber. I lingered here under elaborate tile work and swishing fans, taking in the hypnotic harmony of the singers who chanted hymns from the Sikh holy book, the Granth Sahib, backed up by men on drums and accordion-type instruments. I closed my eyes and let my mind empty itself. The music had the most relaxing effect. This was a bizarre feeling—I’d come here out of curiosity, as a traveler, but ended up blending in as a pilgrim at this sacred site.

  The Golden Temple Museum evoked a very different mood—it showed bloody portraits of Sikh martyrs—beheadings, scalpings, bodies broken on “the wheel,” babies cut into pieces or speared—but the displays stopped abruptly in 1978, with nothing on the Sikh militant attempts to establish an independent state of Khalistan, “Land of the Pure.” And nothing on the horrific sequence of events in 1984: the Indian army raid on the Golden Temple, the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and the mass killing of Sikhs in New Delhi as retribution.

  The next day, I set off along the Grand Trunk Road to Lahore. This section of the highway was four lanes, and hardly a truck in sight. But it was Sunday, and the strip was between borders. I remained apprehensive—was this introduction to the Grand Trunk a trick or treat?

  The Grand Trunk qualifies as the oldest highway in the world, one small section near Calcutta dates back to 1000 B.C. The handiwork of previous empire-builders was consolidated under the Moghul emperors in the sixteenth century—they forged a route of sixteen hundred miles, connecting Kabul with Calcutta. In the nineteenth century, the British upgraded it as a military supply route, metalling the road and planting trees along its length. The Grand Trunk was a stately, tree-lined corridor through the vastness of India—thronged with ox-carts and grain and cotton wagons. Pilgrims and traders, Hindu and Moslem, walked along in a festive mood, with march music supplied by the tom-tomming of drums; at night, travelers bought food from hawkers and swapped tales around campfires.

  In 1886, Thomas Stevens pronounced the Grand Trunk the finest highway in the world. Stevens was in a unique position to pass such judgment: his rear end was mounted on a penny-farthing. He was indulging in the first—and only—trip by penny-farthing around the world. By the late 1880s this contraption had been superseded by a diamond-framed, chain-driven machine, a forerunner of the bicycle in use today. The penny-farthing was heavy and awkward—and a fall from it could be disastrous. There were no tires (the wheels being hoops of metal), no gears, no chain—and most annoying of all, no roads. Stevens had to settle for railway tracks, horse-carriage tracks, or mule-paths. When the going got rough, he had to push the bike along, or have porters carry it. Compared to these tracks, a long, flat, sealed road like the Grand Trunk was a boon for riding. This was the India of the British Raj—and Stevens fully availed himself of British hospitality.

  It’s only a short ride from Amritsar to the Wagah border crossing into Pakistan. A blistering wind was blowing, and I was coated in sweat: the humidity was crippling. Herds of water-buffalo, Brahmin bulls, and black goats huddled in the shade of trees to escape the ferocious heat. In the no-man’s land between borders, the bank on the Indian side was closed; the one on the Pakistani side was open, but had no money according to the manager.

  “Sorry we can only change $50,” he said. “We have not enough rupees. It is Sunday.” He paused for a while, studied me, and with a frown on his face, asked:

  “Why are you so thin?”

  “I have been cycling in the heat.”

  The man’s ears pricked up. He suddenly looked quite excited. He went to the door, stared at my bicycle and panniers, turned back, and his face broke into a broad smile.

  “You are riding a bicycle!” he cried, vigorously shaking my hand and slapping me on the back. “Welcome to Pakistan! Here—sit down! Aziz—bring the cycle-wallah some tea! You are riding a bicycle across Pakistan! You are a brave man! You are a hero! Please, sit down! You will change $100, $200, $500—what you want!”

  And thus I availed myself of Pakistani hospitality—and basked in the limelight of being one of the few fools to cross this border on a bike. But what did the bank manager mean by being a brave man to cross Pakistan by bicycle? Was he referring to feral animals? Rabid dogs? Highway bandits? Maniacal truck-drivers? What other road hazards did this new country hold? Pockets stuffed with bright-red one hundred-rupee notes and dirty-brown five-rupee notes, I set off to find out.…

  Michael Buckley is the author of Heartlands, a book about travels in the Tibetan world, from Bhutan to Ladakh and beyond. He is also the author of Tibet: the Bradt Travel Guide, and in addition to having cycled all over Asia and the Himalayas, he has been a long-time contributor to Travelers’ Tales.

  The sign at the foot of the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu had read: THIS ROAD CONTAINS SEVERAL HAIR-PIN BENDS AND STEEP GRADIENTS. YOU WILL HAVE TO STRAIN YOUR VEHICLE MUCH. My vehicle showed no signs of stress. I, on the other, hand was a virtual cycling fountain as sweat dripped from the end of my nose, my chin, my elbows and my fingertips. At one point the road was so steep that for forty-five agonizing minutes I was forced to stand while pedaling (They called these hills—the summit was at seven thousand feet). I found myself panting out camp tunes from my childhood to take my mind off my aching legs and the thirty-six switchbacks.

  As I struggled with hair-pin number twenty-two and my sanity, a passenger in a slowly passing truck called out. “Why you not take the bus?” On the verge of tears I screamed, “I DON’T KNOW!”

  Another eternal half hour passed with no summit in sight and I battled with the thought to give up. It would be so easy to get off my bike and wait for a ride. Then I began to hear the sounds of drums and instruments and through a clearing in the trees I saw a village perched on the side of the hill. They were celebrating the annual festival of the local God, Kalliamma. With new-found strength I sprinted to the top.

  Smiling faces and laughter greeted me and I was whisked off my bicycle to participate in a large circular dance. Women in saris and men in dhotis whirled around me. Two of the men grabbed my hands and coached me through the
steps. The local Brahmin priest walked up and gave me a big hug and the villagers cheered. I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been plunked down in the middle of a National Geographic special. My tutors must have seen my shaking legs begin to buckle, for they led me off to sit on the grass and brought me bananas and coconuts to eat.

  Surrounded by giggling children, I looked out at the valley below—the home of wild elephants and tigers—where I had begun my climb. A grin filled as much with exhaustion as exhilaration spread across my face as I once again knew what I have always known—the answer to why I didn’t take the bus.

  —Willie Weir, “Cycling India: Letters from the Road”

  My Wedding at the Ashram

  KATHLEEN CLARK

  What does she think of the “whole deal”? The author revisits a holy man to find out.

  I FIRST VISITED BABAJI IN INDIA IN 1979. MY LIFE WAS COMPLETELY changed. I didn’t know if it was Babaji or India that did it, but I returned from that trip with a shaved head and a heart completely open. I knew that I loved everyone deeply whether or not I could express it, and I knew that the “truth” was very vast and that each person had his own view of it but no one had it all. Even that is questionable, but it is all I can really have. If I hadn’t met Toby that might have been the end of it. Life completely transformed, and then it was back to business as usual trying to create a life in America.