Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  I am spoilt and used to staying in five-star hotels. On this trip we would be staying in two-star hotels. I had looked some of them up on TripAdvisor. The features the hotels we were booked in had in common were an abundance of sewage, little of it going down the right hole, and cockroaches the size of rats. Here’s what TripAdvisor reviewers had to say about the Royal Retreat in Munnar, a tea town up in the Western Ghats, where we would spend our first night on the road.

  Mr Ankur Tewari: ‘The biggest problem which I faced in the hotel was of fooding. The food quality is very poor. Most of the time the service is not available. Even the menu items are also not available. So if you want to stay make sure you eat out.’ Coimbatore Sam had this to say: ‘It was an awful trip in my life ever . . . Which was run by totally unprofessional people . . . I started facing problem since I checked in. It’s absolutely an worst trip and I never suggest this hotel and absolutely not for honeymoon couples. Please stay away . . .’

  Outside our Cochin hotel were seven shiny Enfield Bullets, a 1956 English bike still made in India, its advertising tag line, ‘Built like a gun, goes like a bullet’ – presumably because it exploded frequently. I was told we had ‘full Indian insurance’. ‘What does that cover?’ I asked. ‘Oh, $150 of damage to the bike.’ ‘And what about if I run someone over?’ ‘Ah, that’s a cash transaction,’ said Zander. He added that if you ran someone over in a village, you didn’t stop because if you did the village people would beat you to death. And if there was an accident it was important to settle the matter in cash before the police turned up as bribing the police was far more expensive than buying off the person you had hit.

  Cochin was lovely, all fishing nets, crumbling churches and Dutch forts, but we had business to do and little time for sightseeing. We were introduced to the other ‘extreme bikers’. We were seven in all. I was curious as to what our companions would be like. Ravers? Biker babes? Karma seekers? Ganja-istas? No. We had Bill, Ian and Charles, three lads from Newcastle, who had, I suspect, spent many a Friday night out-talking Yorkshiremen in the pub, and two blokes from Derby, Terry and Dave, both ex-army. Terry was a fruit and veg man while Dave drove the high-speed train to London. They were almost as old as Robert and me.

  Our leader and the founder of Extreme Bike Tours, Zander Combe, a forty-ish Englishman with a ponytail, I took an instant liking to when I learned he had been expelled from Radley for misbehaviour with women. He had been based for the last sixteen years in Anjuna Beach, Goa’s Hippy Valley, the place that made the world safe for ganja in the 1960s and our final destination on this trip. Team mechanic was Vijay, a gentle, smiling Goan and the only person who understood our bikes.

  The Mighty Bullets

  We were taught how to ride them. Unlike a normal bike, the Bullet’s gear pedal was on the right, where you normally found the brake, and to change gear you had to click the gear pedal down, not up. And there was a false neutral between each gear. The result was that when you wanted to do an emergency stop because of a fast-looming holy cow you stamped on the gear lever, which is where years of biking had told you the brake was, which promptly changed you up from third to the false neutral between third and fourth, while the bike sailed on at undiminished speed.

  ‘The bikes are like women,’ Zander had told us. ‘Treat them gently but with firmness, and they’ll do anything you want.’ Zander was unmarried.

  Starting required pushing the kick-start gently down while pressing the decompression lever, at which the ammeter dial went to the left a bit; then you pushed the kick-start down a bit further and the dial centred, at which brief but critical moment you let the kick-start come up and then quickly, gently but firmly kicked the starter down. After doing this ten times the bike was silent and the heat inside your helmet and your reinforced ventilation-proof biker jacket had built to Chernobyl levels. Vijay would then shimmy up, give the starter a nonchalant prod with his left foot, and the bike would roar into action. What a noise. The Bullet had none of the vulgar gargle of a Harley or the scream of a Ducati, it was the deep-throated ta pocketa pocketa of a civilised English engine which had spent a life in the tropic Indian sun.

  We went on a fifteen-kilometre ride through Cochin traffic to get used to the bikes. ‘Only one thing is vital,’ said Zander. ‘The horn.’ We were to sound it at all times. And if the horn broke we were to stop immediately and await Vijay, as we would be invisible without a horn on an Indian road.

  The ride was a qualified success. We stalled frequently and found ourselves stationary in the middle of scrambles of traffic, all using their horns at us. Each of us would then gently but firmly depress the kick-start while trying to watch the ammeter dial as the sweat cascaded in rivulets down the inside of our helmet visor. After a bit my bike did begin to exhibit its Katherine Hepburn qualities and glided along throatily ta-pocketing while I changed from third to fourth with no neutral in between, the coconut palms flashed by and the fragrance of Cochin’s sewer-canals was left behind.

  I was glad to get back to our hotel, a teetotal establishment, have a long shower, put on my new Cochin linen trousers and saunter off with Zander and Vijay to the Brunton Boatyard, a five-star hotel, where we sat on the terrace by the sea, watched the fishing boats set out on the evening tide and rehydrated with a number of the most delicious mojitos I had ever tasted.

  We then set off. After a day on the road from Cochin to Munnar I had learned Indian hand signals. Well, hand signal. There was only one. A brown hand would come out of the driver’s window and flap lazily in a Wildean manner. This meant one of seven things:

  1.Please overtake; the road is clear.

  2.A cement truck is hurtling towards us; you will be killed if you pull out.

  3.I am about to turn right.

  4.I am about to turn left.

  5.I’m hot and bored and feel like flapping a limp-wristed arm out of the window.

  6.Look, children, there’s Auntie’s house.

  7.I have just picked my nose.

  Now that I knew all this, driving was much safer.

  Misty Munnar with its lakes, tea plantations and forests with canopies 200 feet high was left behind, and we swooped down to Madurai in the hot and dusty plains. The road from Munnar was a biker’s dream, curve after tightening curve gliding through the mist-shrouded mountains, but the road was narrow and the Indian buses filled it from edge to edge. Dodging the buses was tricky and required a detour into the dirt while avoiding the ditch. B.A. Bill, ex-747-pilot, didn’t. The bus forced him into the ditch, his bike whip-tailed, and poor B.A. Bill was flat on his face in the road.

  Half an hour later Bill and bike were repaired by Vijay’s wizardry, and we sailed on till Charles, another of the Newcastle lads, caught a patch of sand on a hairpin and he was off. Little serious damage, and on we went.

  We hit the plains and accelerated, now doing 80 kph (Indian kph are like dog years – multiply by two for normal equivalent), an unheard-of speed. Robert was Easy-Ridering along just ahead of me – the gum trees were whistling by, buffaloes tossing their heads, tuk-tuks keeping clear as seven mighty Enfields bulleted along – when he hit a reverse-camber patch on a high-speed bend, the bike fishtailed violently and I watched in slow-motion horror as the bike skidded on to its side and went down on top of him and came to rest in the ditch. I skidded to a halt and rushed back. Robert was motionless under the bike. I sat him up gently and he croaked unconvincingly, ‘I’m OK.’

  Before he could say anything else, platoons of Tamils appeared from the undergrowth and started fighting over which bit of Robert they would administer first aid to. Legs and arms were seized and worked up and down; Robert’s head was rotated and wobbled. I fought them off, and we found that Robert was bruised but functioning apart from possible cracked ribs. Zander gave him powerful ‘muscle relaxants’ from the first aid bag and promised Goan medicinal ‘herbs’ if that didn’t work. Robert’s bike was hammered back into rideable shape by Vijay and we cruised on with Vijay, clad in flip-flops and
flappy shirt, on the bike and poor, sore Robert in the support van.

  When we arrived in Madurai, Robert was gasping with pain whenever he raised his right arm. He and I, escorted by Shirath, went off to a hospital. Madurai had hospitals where normal cities had bars. Its stupendous temple made it a place of pilgrimage, and what more natural than after a trip to the temple but that you should have your spine fixed at Dr Ram’s Spinal Intervention Clinic or your boobs boobed at the Sunny Days Cosmetic Surgery Centre.

  We however headed for the Apollo. This was one of a chain of private hospitals throughout India. A central casting doctor in spotless whites sat Robert on a bed, pushed and pulled his arms, listened gravely through the stethoscope, asked four or five questions, said, ‘Probably a rib fracture.’ Twenty minutes later, after an X-ray and a consultation with an even more senior doctor in spotless whites, Robert was sent on his way with some strapping and the knowledge that over time his rib would mend. Riding a motorbike would delay that process by weeks. All this cost the equivalent of eleven pounds including the X-ray. Robert took the powerful painkillers they gave him and ignored the advice about not riding a motorbike.

  Not only are Indian distances and speeds like dog years, equivalent to at least double their value in the normal world, Zander had started to lie about them. When we finally reached the end of the boulder-strewn watercourse that passed for the Mudumalai Forest Reserve road after eleven draining hours, we had covered 310 kilometres of mountain hairpins (thirty-six of them winding down a precipice between Ootacamund, the famous ‘Snooty Ooty’ British hill station, and here), mentally disturbed traffic, roads closed by landslides, and random attacks by homicidal buses. Zander had promised us a journey of 200 kilometres. ‘Oh, was it really 300 clicks?’ said Zander, and I could swear he was adopting the Indian head nod. ‘I had no idea it was so far . . .’

  Talking of head nods, having mastered Indian traffic indications (the hand flap) I was now studying Indian personal intercourse. We had crossed from Kerala into Tamil Nadu, the heart of south India, home of the Tamils, the most bloody-minded people on earth after the Northern Irish (remember the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka), where the signs were written in indecipherable squirly-bits script and the locals refused to speak not only English but also Hindi so they did not have to lower themselves by communicating with outsiders. Consequently communication with lesser races (English, other Indians, Martians) was done by means of the Tamil head nod.

  Indians do of course tend to nod their heads like metronomes, but in Tamil Nadu it was the sole means of communication. If you asked a Tamil a question the head oscillated from left to right, picking up speed until it was almost a blur. The Tamil nod, often accompanied by a patronising smile as if to say what a stupid question, meant, ‘No, but it’s more fun if you think I’m saying yes.’ Some examples:

  1.Thank you for ordering a sweet lime soda. It will be here immediately despite the fact we have no soda and the last lime was used in the curry.

  2.Of course there are no knives and forks: what are your fingers for?

  3.All our ice is made from purified water.

  4.The hot water comes on at 6 p.m.

  5.The road to Ooty is straight ahead. (Zander had warned us that asking the way was fruitless as the answer was always a vigorous slicing gesture with the forearm pointing straight ahead.)

  Because from time to time we did need to communicate with the Tamils, Zander had captured one, Shirath, and hired him to drive the support van, which picked up fallen riders and bikes. Being a Tamil he refused to admit to speaking English, but luckily Vijay had discovered a common tongue with him although most of their conversation was done by head nodding vigorous enough to power a wind farm. Shirath’s main purpose was to leap out of the car in the event of an accident, negotiate a cash pay-off with the flattened Tamil and then drive off at speed before a policeman arrived and the villagers beat us to death.

  The Mudumalai Forest Reserve was splendid. After five days staying in hotels where the fooding had been vegetable curry on a banana leaf, the drinking a disaster (‘Sir,’ head nodding so fast it appeared ready to separate from the shoulders, ‘not having bar.’) and the loo paper a myth, it was wonderful to be in a place equipped with these luxuries. Better yet, before dinner a smiling man shimmied out of the jungle and positioned himself behind the bar with a cocktail shaker in his hand, the first man for five days who did not say, ‘Bless you,’ when you said, ‘Mojito’.

  The biking had everything. At its best, as you slalomed through sweeping bends under a canopy of mangoes, gum trees and acacias, seven bikes in full song making the noise a Harley would make if it had had a proper education, you could not imagine anything finer. At its worst, fighting to follow Zander and the five other bikes ahead of you, stay upright and not to stall in the maelstrom of Madurai traffic while tuk-tuks closed in on you like Messerschmitts from either side as you attempted to overtake a bus painted as the Juggernaut while another bus proclaiming itself to be under the command of Lord Ram came thundering towards you, you just said thank you as your Bullet somehow found a hole between you and the converging buses and popped out in time to see Zander heading off in the opposite direction.

  And then there were the adrenalin moments, such as on the 6,000-foot climb from the plains up to Ooty, when it seemed that every bus and lorry in the subcontinent had chosen to make the climb at the same time. You had the choice of going up at 5 kph choking on the exhaust of a lorry, or overtaking the bus that was overtaking the lorry as you entered a blind bend (there were few sighted bends on the road to Ooty) with a ditch on one side, a 1,000-foot drop on the other and a keen awareness that if a lorry was coming downhill only the Lord Vishnu could save you. Zander, as lead bike, normally waited till just before the blind bend before throwing his bike on to the wrong side of the road and accelerating fearlessly into the unseen. If you were riding third or fourth you followed – heart a-thump – as by that time the open and visible space ahead had shrunk to nothing. I felt every chamber of my heart fibrillating away every time we overtook.

  Before lunch in the reserve I walked around with Robin, the German Parsee camp botanist, who told me how, two weeks earlier, he and another camp worker had had to pull a cobra out of a hole in the wall of No. 4 bungalow (mine). Eight new check-ins had stood around holding their luggage while Robin and his co-worker attempted to get the snake, which had followed a frog into a hole and got stuck, out. Eventually they succeeded, and Robin’s mate was left holding a furious cobra by the tail while it attempted to climb up its own body to give it a platform for a strike, giving it a flick every few seconds to straighten it out. Robin meanwhile was holding a sack open, terrified the cobra would bite his hand as it was dropped in. The new arrivals stood round catatonic with horrified fascination. Finally the snake was bagged up and next day released into a distant part of the garden.

  I carefully checked the hole leading into my bathroom for wiggly things. ‘Please, not to worry,’ said Robin. ‘Cobra gone.’ ‘Phew. Thank heavens. Any other livestock in my room?’ ‘Nein, nein. Vell, just in der roof.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Only a flying snake. They flatten ze body and can glide a hundred metres on a good wind. But only mildly venomous.’

  For anyone like me who came of age in the 1960s, all Indian journeys end in Goa.

  After ten days of sweat, terror, adrenalin, excitement, exhilaration, pain (like most of us, I had a ‘Goa tattoo’ of red weals on both calves from being barbecued by a smoking Enfield exhaust pipe) and sheer hard work (eleven continuous hours from Mysore to Udipi left you drained), we were now on Agonda Beach. Ten palm-thatched huts with thick, soft mattresses (what joy after ten nights of hard boards and concrete platforms); a friendly bar crammed with substances forbidden in Tamil Nadu and Kerala: rum, whisky, vodka, even a case of Sula Indian Sauvignon Blanc; a kitchen turning out spice-marinated grilled fish, crab masala, fragrant coconutty curries; and, fifty feet from the huts, a mile of powdery white sand dotted with slender outriggered fishing boats.


  We were at the White Sands in Goa. We had survived everything Zander had thrown at us and had come to love our quirky old bikes, their funny false neutrals and strange decompression levers that you had to tickle if you wanted to start them. After ten days on the road I sat at midnight giggling like a nine-year-old under a beach palm having had one mojito too many and one puff too far of whatever it was that the rickshaw driver had sold us in Mysore. This was the world as we liked to think it had been in the 1960s but was it ever this good? Life here was at its simplest and best. It was twenty pounds a day for the White Sands and another six for the best seafood dinner you had ever eaten.

  I ripped off my clothes and threw myself into the sea followed by a stroll down the sand. Indians are naturally clean people and do not like to dirty their own doorsteps. It had soon become apparent why we needed to rechristen our night stop Turdle Beach. Every forty yards or so along the beach was a squatting Indian, pants around ankles, not dirtying his own doorstep in the beachfront village. Not a good place for an after-dinner walk in the dark.

  I had learned at dinner the night before that Zander had more steel in his body than bone. I was glad not to have known this earlier as I had been comforting myself over the 3,000 very Indian kilometres of our trip that if he had been risking his life on the subcontinent’s roads for sixteen years and was fine, then we should be too. If I’d known earlier that one forearm was titanium (a cow, which walked placidly away with hardly a moo after Zander had demolished his Enfield colliding with it), a foot was steel (a fast-moving palm tree), and various other bits were held together with pins and bolts after miscellaneous encounters with the flotsam and jetsam of the Indian road, I would have been even more terrified than I was.

  A day later we arrived safe and sound at the Joly Julie, a group of startlingly red and white bungalows in the forest a mile or so from hippy heaven – Anjuna Beach. I felt flat that the trip was over – no more reason for the adrenalin to pump – but apart from the Goa burn tattoos and a cricked back from the concrete mattresses, I had also seldom felt more content. Ganesh had delivered us safe.