Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  Zander proposed a bike trip to a deserted beach ‘only thirty clicks away’. I remembered Das Boot, the wonderful German film about a U-boat that survives everything from depth charges to ruptured pressure hull on an Atlantic hunting trip. As the boat chugs serenely into Brest, its home port, sun shining, mission accomplished, with the crew on deck celebrating, the submarine is wiped out by an RAF bomb. No one voiced it, but we all felt that one more outing on our brave Bullets could be throwing providence one offering too many in the way of temptation.

  Instead I spent the last morning drinking mojitos at the Rock On Cafe, ‘Where You Rock’ on Ozran Beach between Little Vagator and Anjuna. The beach was busy. Half the population of Moscow was there. Every rock and stretch of white breaking-surf sand was peopled with near-naked pairs of Russian girls being photographed, bodies entwined in sapphic poses, by pot-bellied Russians with extending lenses. I sat entranced trying to catch the action on the zoom of my inadequate little Panasonic.

  India and Zander’s mystery tour had been grand. I, who lived a life of five-star spoiltness in England, had spent two weeks in conditions that would at times have made an eighteen-year-old backpacker blanch. Our standard meal was vegetable curry on a banana leaf and dosas cooked on a hot stone in a tiny roadside shacklet with a tin cup of chai – hot, syrupy, milky tea. Yet for the first time I had survived a trip to India without Delhi belly.

  As I sat sipping my cocktail, a newly bought wooden-chunk bracelet adorned with tantric signs on my wrist, looking at a cow chewing contentedly at the edge of the surf, I thought back over the longest 3,000 kilometres I had ever travelled and knew there was only one thing to say.

  ‘Om.’

  31

  Vroom Vroom

  Zander’s Extreme Bike Tour around south India was, in retrospect, extreme. Extremely dangerous. I had been calmed into a sense of security by the other bike trips I had made, trips where you did not find a cow in the middle of the motorway acting as a traffic-calming device, trips where buses and tuk-tuks did not come at you as if you owed them money, and trips where you did not find yourself following a man with titanium limbs around blind hairpins with a 1,000-foot drop half a foot away on your right.

  My first big trip had been the London to Istanbul odyssey on the Beast. Nothing would ever match that because I set off in ignorance of what lay ahead, never having ridden a motorbike before. If ever a trip represented a loss of virginity that was it. Some time elapsed following that before the next big bike journey. I had a succession of BMWs like the ones the police ride. I rode them around London, and big though they were they were adept at dodging in and out of the traffic. Being hampered by traffic jams was a thing of the past. I was free to scoot past lines of stationary cars. I took these bikes to Europe, twice across the Pyrenees to Spain, twice across the Alps and on to Italy, and many times to France, biker heaven, be it Brittany, Normandy, the Loire and the Atlantic coast, or Provence and the Côte d’Azur.

  Then I saw Motorcycle Diaries, the film of a 1952 bike trip made by two young Argentinian medical students, Ernesto and Alberto, who set off from Buenos Aires on a Norton 500, Il Poderoso – the Powerful One. They career laughing across the limitless Pampas, climb the Andes and cross the pass into Chile, make their way down to Valdivia on the Pacific and up the Chilean coast through the port of Valparaiso and on through the desert to Peru, where they are going to work in a leper colony. Il Poderoso gives out long before they get there; the second half of the trip is done by hitching.

  By the time they get back to Argentina, having visited Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela on the way, Ernesto and Alberto have been radicalised by seeing the inequalities of South America where the poor are little better than serfs. Ernesto takes himself off to Cuba to join Fidel Castro who is hiding out in the Sierra Madre and conducting guerrilla operations against the dictator Batista. Castro always called Ernesto by his nickname, Che, che being Argentinian Spanish for ‘mate’. Soon everyone else did too.

  I watched the film with my pulse racing. What a thing to do. I lay in bed that night, my brain going round and round and thinking about their journey. Why couldn’t I do that? No, seriously. But I didn’t speak Spanish and I knew nothing of motorbike mechanics . . . A few days later I had found Rentamoto in Buenos Aires on the Internet and arranged to rent a 1,200 cc BMW GS Adventure, the same giant steel-panniered off-road bike that Ewan McGregor had been riding round the world.

  A short month later, Spike* and I were barrelling across Che’s pampas, plains which I had expected to be as boring as the American Midwest but which turned out to be a place of impossible beauty. The road undulated under a sky the light blue of the Argentinian flag as it curved through marshy salt pans flecked with egrets, ducks and black-necked swans, and on through county-sized fields of fluffy-tailed pampas grass flickering in the brilliant sun. Hawks, harriers and eagles hovered along the edge of the road. I saw an eagle snatch a dove in full flight. There were the times floating at a cruising speed of just under 90 mph across the limitless pampas, Chuck Berry on the iPod, a blue sky bigger than any I had ever seen, and the Andes a smudge on the horizon, when I felt nothing could touch me.

  Spike and I left the plains behind, spent Christmas Day with friends in the Andes, and on Boxing Day, following in Che Guevara’s tyre treads, survived seventy kilometres of rip-rap – iron-hard corrugated mud that can shake anything but the strongest bike to shreds – and crossed the Bariloche Pass into Chile, passing down to the Pacific and the roaring sea lions of Valdivia. We followed Che to Valparaiso with its sherbet-yellow houses, Madonna-lipstick-purple cathedrals and Oxford-blue and paisley-orange schools. We left Valpo just in time to avoid the annual New Year’s Eve massacre, when the students get drunk, dance the samba and throw each other into the icy harbour.

  The road to Chile

  Here we parted from Che. He went north to the Atacama Desert, while Spike and I headed east and made our hairpin way up the Andes towards its highest crossing, Portillo Pass, 11,000 feet above sea level, a bare-cliffed place of heart-stopping wildness and grandeur where the screaming wind all but lifts your bike into the void and vegetation is a stranger, mountains a million years older than the Alps.

  Three days later, a continent twice-crossed, as Europe had been on my virgin bike ride, Spike and I were nosing our way once more into the outskirts of Buenos Aires through fields forked with lightning from a summer storm of terrifying strength. I was feeling a combination of exhilaration at the enormousness of where the faithful bike had taken me, relief that some higher power had brought me back safe after the challenges of the Argentinian roads – few moments in the past two weeks had passed when I had not been conscious of the hair’s breadth of a wandering cow or careless truck driver that separated me from quadriplegia – melancholy that the trip was as much history now as was the ride of Che and Il Poderoso, and heaviness that it was time to get back to being a grown-up.

  Non-bikeys don’t realise how physical biking is, quite unlike driving a car. Steering is done with the weight, as in skiing, not by turning a wheel as in a car. You slow for a corner, pick the best line, being careful not to trespass over the mid-line for a left-hand bend as you do not want to be decapitated by an oncoming bus as you lean into it, throw your inside knee out to lead you into the turn and bank the bike – the sharper the turn, the steeper the bank – and then as you go into the turn and just as the weight of the slowing bike is coming close to making it fall, you wind the throttle up to pour on power, and the bike starts to move back to the vertical as the centrifugal force of the added power pushes it upright and back towards the outside of the bend. And as soon as you come out of the bend out goes the other knee, and you are picking your line for the next corner, the bike rising and falling for corner after corner, much like a slalom skier throws her weight from left leg to right as she flips through the poles. After a few minutes of a long swooping run through the Andes the adrenalin is pumping so hard you are gasping. The rhythm of a high mountain road turns
makes you feel that heaven is just one hill away as you throw half a ton of screaming machine into bend after bend.

  Part of the intoxication comes from the knowledge that if you pick the wrong line going into a bend because you have underestimated its sharpness you do not have the option of braking halfway round – as you do in a car. Hitting the brakes on a sharp bend would throw the bike upright and send you straight ahead and off the road. All you can do if a corner unexpectedly tightens into itself is to force the bike even further over on its ear and pray it too will tighten into the turn.

  Then, two years later, South America and Zander’s Enfield adventure both behind me, I was in a London restaurant and an ethereal Japanese waitress was slipping a plate of sashimi in front of me with a graceful dip, and it hit me.

  Japan. Of course.

  Through the web I found Japan Bike Rentals. They turned out to be run by Jonathan, an Aussie who lived in Tokyo. He agreed to rent me a BMW 1200 RT, the exact twin of one of my bikes in London. Better yet, he could devise an itinerary which he would load on a satnav, and he would book me into hotels along the way. I said I wanted to go off track and spend nights in ryokans, country inns in fishing villages and up mountains, which I had read up about. Jonathan plotted a trip around south Japan, about which I knew as much as I did about Mars. I’d been to Tokyo twice, for a day each time, but never ventured outside the centre. I didn’t speak a syllable of Japanese and I couldn’t use chopsticks.

  A day after I landed in Tokyo the rented BMW – or Beemer-san as I had already christened my bike – and I were lost in a ferry port. The good news was that there were lots of port signs; not so good was that not one was in English. A ferry port marshal suddenly leaped from behind a giant truck waving the kind of light baton that five-year-olds favour for birthday parties. He ran ahead of the bike. Everyone in Japan ran everywhere.

  Waiting to board I noted the bike was almost blown off its stand by the screaming wind. This did not look good for the ferry-boaters about to spend nineteen hours in the open Pacific. I had a ‘special cabin’ on the top deck. Everyone else, male and female, was in a giant deck-wide hamster cage on the deck below. We tootled off into the dark down Tokyo Bay past Yokohama. Just as I finished the picnic I had bought earlier in Tokyo we left the shelter of the bay and nosed out into the open Pacific. The boat reared like a startled horse. Everything flew everywhere – salad on the walls, salami on the sheets. If this was not a typhoon it was its best friend.

  Within fifteen minutes waves were crashing green against my window five decks up. I lay on my bed gripping the sides. Walking about was literally impossible. For the first two hours I was terrified as I was sure we would sink, but by and by I realised that Japanese boats were built to withstand tsunamis. The madness went on for fifteen hours until we found the shelter of Tokushima Roads. And funnily enough, when I’d got over the fear, being confined to bed for fourteen hours was strangely relaxing. And by some miracle I never felt sick. At last, drained but grateful, we disembarked at Tokushima on Japan’s southernmost big island of Shikoku. Despite the typhoon, we were only two minutes late.

  After the ferry Beemer-san and I had four hours through twisty mountain roads, mist, bursts of sun, vertiginous gorges, pine forests and everywhere the froth of cherry blossom. Next day, brilliant sun, tiny roads dodging pagoda temples, an hour following a wild river through valleys and fields, and later skirting Provençal beaches with umbrella pines and hawks overhead.

  Before dinner, my first night after the ferry, I had my first Japanese bath. The hotel staff, who seemed to regard me in an affectionate way as a giant pink joke, had found an outsize kimono. Wearing this and slippers, I nervously made my way to the baths led by a giggling girl. There were three Japanese men inside squatting on tiny stools like sumo wrestlers. I threw off my kimono and joined them, all four of us naked. Lonely Planet had told me that you must scrub yourself for at least fifteen minutes before presuming to enter a public bath. Baths were for relaxation, not washing. Desperate not to give offence, I sluiced and soaped and sprayed. Finally, after fifteen minutes of sluicery, I joined the three men in the large communal bath. They ignored me. Perhaps I was too pink and strange to contemplate.

  Half an hour later I was back in my room, pink as a valentine and ready for dinner, of which the highlight was two monster fish heads, one cooked, one raw.

  Southern Japan is a combination of Corsica and Scotland, a place of wildness, jagged hills and pines. The high point was a night in the Takafue ryokan on the slopes of the mighty Mount Aso-San, a grumbling and far from extinct volcano whose bubbling crater I was going to circumnavigate the next day. Ryokans are places of luxurious simplicity. You sleep on a mat on the floor; you have your own private onsen – a rock-carved outdoor bath – and teams of smiling maidens bring you thirteen courses of kaiseki, a traditional Japanese dinner.

  At the Takafue ryokan I went to bed feeling like a god. I woke next morning with the realisation that a far more powerful god, the Japanese forest and mountain deity, was bent on revenge. I opened the blinds to a monsoon. And a thunderstorm. And a banshee wind. And cold. It was a day to bring a smile to the face of Lady Macbeth.

  By 9 a.m. I had put on rain gear, five layers of clothes, and trudged up the hill to Beemer-san, where five smiling maidens under gaily-coloured paper umbrellas gave me the kind of farewell the banzai boys in the white scarves used to get as they prepared to fly their Zeros into US aircraft carriers.

  My satnav was programmed for the sights of Mount Aso and determined that I should see them, but to have followed its bidding would have sent me plummeting, fog-blind, over the caldera’s edge into the bubbling lava. I switched off the satnav. My only map was one of the whole of Japan, quite useless for navigation. Purely by chance I located an expressway and nosed on to it. I didn’t know where I was, but it had the wonderful words FUKUOKA 132 KMS on it.

  I was frozen, soaked and terrified. The wind blew the wind socks rigid and horizontal at motorway bridges, and then suddenly the gale would switch direction and hit from the other side. It was so strong that its force distorted the plastic of my helmet visor if I stuck my head far enough above the windscreen to see where I was going. My knowledge of physics was insufficient to work out how a bike, hit by a 100-kilometre-an-hour side wind, could stay upright. Why wasn’t I blown flat into the fast lane? Something to do with momentum because of speed? Did that mean I had to go as fast as possible just to stay upright? Every nerve and instinct was alive and working to keep the bike upright and straight ahead, trying not to tense too much, crouching for a smaller wind profile and ignoring the rain bullets penetrating my neck and my visor. The adrenalin pumped.

  I stopped for half an hour to regain my senses at a service area. I stripped off layers of clothes and got my most precious stuff out of the tank bag. Soaked, all soaked. Puzzled Japanese slurping noodles stopped to look at Pinko-san sorrowfully separating sodden 1,000-yen note from sodden 1,000-yen note while he munched a cold Japanese pastry.

  Back on the bike the satnav graciously pointed the way through the storm to the Fukuoka Grand Hyatt. Never had a hotel been so welcome. The rain had stopped and Fukuoka was a buzzy town. I was dry and tomorrow the sun would shine. Next morning I almost choked on my Fukuoka croissant when I saw the front page of the English-language Japan Times: FREAK STORM WREAKS CHAOS NATIONWIDE. MANY KILLED, AIRPLANES AND TRAINS DISRUPTED. ANA CANCELLED 83 FLIGHTS. TYPHOON-STRENGTH WINDS OF 143 KPH RECORDED.

  If I’d known what was in store I would have been mad not to have stayed put in the Takafue ryokan happily grunting in my bath while the storm raged outside, even if it did disrupt my itinerary. As it was, Beemer-san and I had set off into the maelstrom in cheerful ignorance. I was glad I had. I would not forget that day’s biking. Better to have travelled ignorantly and to have arrived than not to have travelled at all.

  Two days later, I found myself on the road to Hiroshima.

  Hiroshima . . .

  I had tried to stop myself th
inking about it in advance. Humankind’s biggest single act of violence against humankind. Executed at the order, not of a Hitler or a Genghis Khan, but a mild-mannered homespun haberdasher from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. What we gaijin remember of Hiroshima is the image of a mushroom cloud. Auschwitz, Pol Pot, 9/11 were terrible events in a catalogue of the massacres of the innocent, but Hiroshima was different. Hiroshima was the opening of a door to the end of our world. The dead were civilians, not combatants. Nevertheless I would try to arrive there with an open heart and an open mind to stand below the place where Enola Gay’s bombardier had pulled a lever to send Little Boy, as the USAF called the first A-bomb to be dropped in wrath, hurtling to earth, detonation and death.

  We puttered in through squally clouds, the tail end of the unseasonal typhoon that had behaved so badly two days earlier, and found not a monotone Armageddon but a city as cute, colourful, stylish and appealing as a Macbook Air. Young people were everywhere, shiny shops, a buzz in the air, laughter, courting couples, youth, fun, giggling. A torrent of positive energy. Good-looking, chic people.

  I was on the thirtieth floor of a stylish hotel. No tradesman’s entrance for the travel-worn biker. Beemer-san, now honourably road-stained, was parked immediately next to the main hotel entrance for the admiration of visitors. It was strange how in the country that made more motorbikes than everyone else put together there were so few bikers. Beemer-san and I were a rarity.

  I had a tea-time sake in the thirty-third-floor Sky Lounge and looked out to the south. Hiroshima is on the coast of Japan’s Inland Sea and has many rivers and canals running through it. Less than a mile away, in the arms of two rivers between the neat Toronto-style street grid of sparkling modern buildings, was the green and gravel of the Peace Park, the area over which the bomb went off.