Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  About Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

  “Congratulations,” said Dr Chawla. “You are having the malaria.”

  And so begins Russell McGilton’s comic adventure as he attempts to cycle from Bombay to Beijing in the quest of writing his travel opus.

  Pedalling furiously for China, McGilton’s tour de force rides the audience through an honest handlebar view on the absurdities and fragile wonders of travel from the saddle. He rides, he falls, he gets chased by wild dogs, eats things he shouldn’t, battles tropical hallucinations and finds himself at the hands of the curious Dr Chawla.

  Not quite the Lonely Planet guide to sun and sex.

  Table of Contents

  About Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

  MELBOURNE – BOMBAY/MUMBAI

  BOMBAY/MUMBAI

  MUMBAI – NASIK

  AURANGABAD – KHANDWA

  KHANDWA

  KHANDWA – UDAIPUR

  UDAIPUR

  UDAIPUR – JODHPUR

  JAISALMER

  PUSHKAR

  DELHI – BUTWAL (NEPAL)

  NARAYANGADH – KATHMANDU

  ANNAPURNA CIRCUIT

  NEPAL – INDIA

  INDIA – DECCAN PLAINS – LUCKNOW

  LUCKNOW – RISHIKESH

  RISHIKESH

  SHIMLA – KINNAUR REGION

  MANALI – LEH

  LEH – MANALI – DHARAMSALA

  DHARAMKOT

  DHARAMSALA – AMRITSAR

  AMRITSAR – ISLAMABAD

  AMRITSAR – HONG KONG – YANGSHUO

  GUILIN – KUNMING

  DALI – LIJIANG

  LIJIANG – ZHONGDIAN (SHANGRI-LA)

  ZHONGDIAN – XIANGCHENG

  XIANGCHENG – SANTWAY – LITANG

  XINDUQIAO – KANGDING

  KANGDING – CHENGDU

  THE GREAT WALL – BEIJING

  FORBIDDEN CITY

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Cycle Tips for Sub-Continental India and China

  Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle Show

  Endnotes

  About Russell McGilton

  ​Copyright

  In loving memory of my father – may you still play the golden Hammond – and Krista Bernard, cycle adventurer and inspiration to many

  Prologue

  ‘Congratulations,’ grinned Dr Chawla as he handed me my blood test result. ‘You are having the malaria.’

  ‘Malaria?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ He smiled again as he slouched back in his chair and scratched his crotch. ‘Wonderful.’

  ‘Tell me, Doctor,’ I said, wiping sweat from my eye, ‘is this the kind of malaria that goes to your brain … and then kills you?’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ he said and, just before I could breathe a sigh of relief, ‘not yet.’

  I tried to relax as my head slowly slid off my shoulders. Here I was in the middle of rural India, miles from anywhere while some deadly malaria strain coursed through my veins.

  ‘Do many people die from this around here?’

  ‘Yes, many!’ He smiled brightly, then flipped me over a squeaky hospital bed and whacked a needle in my bum.

  It was at this moment, with my face jammed against a stained pillowcase and a prick rammed in my rear, that I wondered how I got here, why I came here and why I wasn’t at home stuffing my face with chocolate biscuits and watching erotic Spanish movies on SBS: ‘Me golpearon con un burro, Victor!’i

  There were numerous reasons, but one in particular that had pushed me over the edge and onto a plane. You see, some months prior to my feverish dilemma, my father had died. I inherited money and wanted to do something responsible with it, such as get a mortgage. This, of course, meant getting a steady job, something more permanent than my recent endeavours: a cameo on Neighbours and then, upping my range, a job as a silhouette in a commercial. (I was fired because my bald head was, to quote the director, ‘too shiny’.)

  My writing, on the other hand, was gaining much better traction with numerous articles published in newspapers and magazines. So I decided to knuckle down and get a job as a journalist.

  Try as I might, ten months later I had been turned down by every newspaper, magazine, website, zine and pamphlet publisher in the country. But just as I was flirting with the possibility of becoming a stringerii (‘Ah! The civil war in Sudan looks nice …’), I received a call from the Age newspaper. They wanted me to come in for an interview. This was miraculous in itself; I had sat an exam for that very privilege and was sure I had failed.

  I groomed myself in the art of interviewing. I read all the books. I role-played with friends. I even sought professional advice from a careers counsellor. I was going to crack this baby.

  But, as I was about to learn, no matter how well I prepared myself, no matter how badly I wanted to change the course of my life in that year of 2000, fate sometimes just decides to have her way with you.

  ‘Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re in a time machine,’ said Colin, a serious man with a bald, freckly head amid a panel of tight HR suits. He had been a newspaperman for 20 years and had the paper cuts to prove it. ‘You can go anywhere you like, at any time you like. Whom would you interview?’

  My career counsellor, concerned at my habit of blurting out whatever was on my mind, had advised me to ‘pause and marshal my thoughts’. But old habits die hard.

  ‘William Burroughs.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause he shot his wife in the head.’

  The panel of interviewers raised their eyebrows one after the other like a Mexican wave.

  ‘Why else would you interview him?’ Colin pressed.

  ‘Er … he was into some pretty wild drugs. Not that I’m into that kind of thing!’ (A damned lie.) ‘It’s just that … he wrote about the most amazing things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Oh, well he wrote this story about baboons taking over the US senate and fucking all the senators in the – stop! Brain! Stop!

  ‘He used to cut up narratives, I mean, from books, and create a new story.’

  ‘Any other reason?’

  My mind went blank. Well, not quite. ‘Er …’cause he was into little boys?’

  Oh, Christ! What must they be thinking? That I’m a wife-shooting, drug-taking paedophile?

  Colin and the suits shifted in their chairs.

  ‘Now, we don’t normally do this, but we made an exception for you.’ He pulled out my exam paper.

  Exception? What exception?

  ‘Looking at the questionnaire, it seems that you don’t know very much.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You got less than a third of the questions right.’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ I stammered. ‘I mean … it’s just that … it’s just that I don’t know the answers to those questions!’

  ‘Do you think it is important that a journalist should know a lot of things?’

  ‘Well … yes. Yes, of course.’

  ‘Let’s move on.’ Colin flipped over the exam paper. ‘The writing component. Now tell me. In your defence from the prosecution, namely us, how would you defend yourself from the very obvious mistake in your story?’

  I swallowed. ‘Mistake?’

  ‘Yes. In your story from the police report you have put the number of the crack house as 32 Audrey Street when it is quite clearly number 23 Audrey Street on the fact page.’

  He showed me my horrid blunder.

  ‘How do you defend yourself against such an inexcusable mistake? A mistake that could have had us sued by the people at 32 Audrey Street if this story went to print.’

  ‘You see,’ a revelation struck me, ‘under your code of ethics yo
u wouldn’t have been allowed to print the address of the victim.’

  ‘Then why did you put it in your story?!’ Colin and the suits chorused.

  ‘Ah, that’s because I didn’t know about the code of ethics before the exam!’ I said, throwing a triumphant smile. They didn’t smile back.

  ***

  Later that evening

  ‘Anyway,’ I said to Alan, a good friend of mine, splashing puddles of red wine around his house, ‘what was wrong with my answers?’

  ‘Well aren’t journalists supposed to be able to argue a point? You know, present a lively discussion?’

  ‘Oh, Alan, I don’t know how to argue. I mean, I’m an actor —’

  ‘Sooo, you’re an actor now?’

  ‘Look. What did they expect?’

  ‘A journalist,’ he sighed heavily, letting the conversation deflate him. ‘So what are you going to do?’

  At this moment, the memory of my father’s death seemed to squeeze the knee of my mortality just a little tighter, asking ever so impatiently, ‘What exactly are you doing with your life?’

  For some time I’d been harbouring the idea of writing a travel book and rather than let that ship sit in dock and sink (like my father who never accomplished what he wanted) I was going to make it set sail.

  So looking for inspiration I found myself in the travel section of my local library, perusing through a rather obscure book entitled Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy.

  Murphy was a stout Irishwoman with a head the size of a bar fridgeiii, who in 1963 cycled from Dunkirk to Delhi. She endured one of Europe’s worst winters, was attacked by wolves in Yugoslavia, travelled through Pakistan’s baking 50-degree heat, copped a gutful of dysentery, and was forced to shoot at bike thieves in Iran.

  It sounded just the ticket for me!

  Of course, I didn’t exactly want to suffer those kind of travails, but what struck me was that the bike provided a conduit for stories, unusual stories, stories that you weren’t likely to get as a backpacker where you’re subjected to the tyranny of bus and train schedules, tourist touts, that inevitably lead to a sameness of experience.

  I had, however, had the brief joy of cycle touring with Al through New Zealand. We were unfit, flabby and so under-prepared and swore never to travel with each other again (actually, I think we just swore). But what we both liked was that you got time to enjoy the environment more, smell it, feel it, unlike the countless Maui Campervans and tourist buses that rushed from town to hotel, hotel to town.

  Dervla’s stories set my imagination in motion. The question was: where to go?

  Of late I had been under the spell from travellers’ stories of the Sub-Indian continent and India soon seduced me with promises of exotic desert nights, ancient architecture, colourful tribes, renegade hippies, yoga and Bollywood movies. I wanted to taste her spices, feel her dust and her rain.

  As for China, I heard things were changing quickly there. Foreigners no longer had to take a guide with them, and more of the country was becoming accessible. With a bike, the possibilities of unrestricted travel (except in Tibet) made China just that bit more enticing. The more I thought about it, the more I really liked the idea of being lost in a foreign culture: I wanted to be confused by Chinese street signs, eat things that questioned my better judgement, and be that weigoren stumbling through backstreet markets lost to it all as the soft lilts of Mandarin swirled around me.

  So late one night, flipping through an old high school atlas and admiring the well-rounded contours of the Himalayas flowing into India and China, an idea hit me: if Dervla cycled from Dunkirk to Delhi, then why not … Bombay to Beijing?

  I set out a pile of matchsticks like a trail of ants across the atlas and came up with an exact distance of …

  Well, approximately 10 000 kilometres. If I cycled 55 kilometres each day, I would be able to complete the trip in eight months (with tea breaks, maybe ten). It would be a doddle!

  ‘Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle … what a great title for a book!’

  Except there was one big problem with that.

  1

  MELBOURNE – BOMBAY/MUMBAI

  January, 2001

  I have never liked flying, and I was about to never like it even more. At 35 000 feet, this became abundantly obvious.

  ‘You are cycling from Bombay to Beijing?’ asked a rotund Indian man sitting next to me while Denzel Washington flashed across a small television screen above us in football gear. His name was Deejay and though his name might suggest something in the hip music world, he was in fact an IT consultant living in Sydney.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But why? We have trains and buses there. Much easier for you, I think.’

  ‘Well, you see, cycling lets you delve into the lives of people you wouldn’t normally meet. You get to be one with the landscape, letting it wash over you.’

  He snorted. ‘To be with the common man?’

  ‘Well, that’s part of it. I’m writing a book and I thought Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle would be an excellent title.’

  ‘Ah, the alliteration.’

  ‘Precisely. The bum-de-bum, bum-de-bum sound,’ I said, thumping my hand on each ‘b’ to stress the point.

  ‘Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle!’ He laughed, then sipped his tea thoughtfully. ‘Only …’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Bombay, my friend, is not Bombay anymore.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This is the old name. It is now Mumbai.’

  I gulped my scotch, spilling it down my chin. ‘Oh, sure. Right. I know. It’s just that in my guidebook it’s got “Mumbai slash Bombay”. I mean, doesn’t everyone still refer to it as Bombay? You know, when I was in Ho Chi Minh City the locals kept calling it Saigon. Or Myanmar still being referred to as Burma. You know, one and the same … interchangeable … well, aren’t they?’

  ‘No, no. It is Mumbai.’ He grinned then put on his headphones and went back to watching Denzel teach white boys how to tackle.

  ‘Mumbai …’ I said to myself. ‘Mumbai to Beijing by …’ I looked out at the escaping Australian desert, suddenly wanting to retrieve it.

  ‘Shit!’

  ***

  The next morning I woke to the sound of the phone ringing.

  ‘Good morning, sir. Breakfast? Budda toast, omelette, chai. Vhot are you vanting?’

  ‘Could I please have the buttered toast, chai, omelette … jam?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He hung up.

  I opened the drapes. The sun was out, warming the run-down and mildewed buildings opposite, their window ledges chalked with pigeon shit. Dusty rainwater pipes ran this way and that like some alien mechanical creeper while a large yellow sheet, hung out to dry, tongued its way down a wall.

  This was the daylight squalor I had imagined as I bounced around Mumbai’s traffic the previous night.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ the taxi driver had said, swerving out of the way of a doorless bus. ‘Much traffic bumping. No good here in India. Many bad peoples driving without permission.’

  I was in Colaba, a narrow peninsula of Mumbai bubbling with hotels, tourists, markets and restaurants by the sea. Under the morning sun, ragged men, dark as the rubbish around them, shovelled clumps of brown muck onto wagons pulled by water buffalo while business men briskly marched past, skipping over holes in the pavement as their leather briefcases pumped them towards towering office buildings. Women delicately tiptoed around a beggar sitting by a gift store, their gold and red saris floating around the women as if they were walking under water. Meanwhile, inside my hotel, a child exhausted itself into convulsive, tearful retches.

  Mumbai sounded big, and with good reason. Over 16 million people liveiv, work and breathe in this colliding metropolis. It has the biggest film industry in the world, more millionaires than New York, and a port that handles half of India’s foreign trade. Workers from Assam, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and even as far away as Nepal come here to make it big in this collective maelstrom, d
oing any work they can find. Many are unlucky and find themselves in one of the largest street slums of India, if not the world.

  I turned on the air-conditioner and looked at the mess that had taken over my room: a Trek mountain bike: four panniers (bike bags), a handlebar bag and a medium-sized backpack. A total weight (bike included) of 43 kilogramsv. While Dervla Murphy carried only a small kitbag of clothes, a handgun and a dash of courage, I felt it prudent to pack for the worst.

  Just as I was considering all this the door burst open.

  A porter, sweating in the humidity, charged in with breakfast, and put it on the table. This would be a common experience for me in India – staff walking in on me without a knock catching me in all sorts of undress not to mention compromising situations.

  ‘Welcome to Bombay, sir.’

  ‘Bombay? I thought it was called Mumbai?’

  He smiled. ‘As you like.’

  Deejay had been wrong, it seemed (or just winding me up). As I would find out later, Indians were still using the name Bombay quite liberally: taxi drivers asked where in Bombay I wanted to go to, students eagerly asked for my impressions of Bombay, restaurant owners praised Bombay epicure, hotel managers requested information on the duration of my stay in Bombay, and the local film industry was still referred to as Bollywood, not Mollywood.

  Perhaps the new name hadn’t been embraced for political reasons. In 1996, Bombay’s name was changed to Mumbai after pressure on the Indian government from the ultra-right-wing Shivsena party, led by the prickly Bal Thackery. The name change was aimed at repelling legacies of India’s past colonisation and encroaching Westernisation. British names had been written over with Indian ones – street names, places and features of the city that lent reference to the Raj.