Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  A number of entries cursed Blackburn pack-racks, which frequently broke. This made Uros smile. ‘These are the same as yours!’

  ‘Shuddup, fuckface!’ Ah, we had become firm friends!

  Interestingly enough, I came across an entry by a friend of mine, Krista, who had passed through this very hotel some years ago. She had cycled from Melbourne, up through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India and through to here. She hadn’t been having a good time of it, lonely as the road was for her thus far.

  Ah, the next day, day of rest. I sat in a gazebo and wrote furiously for the whole morning. I ordered a pot of tea, pancakes, poached eggs on toast, a cup of coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Uros busied himself by trying to find an Internet café. When he returned and looked at our bill, he said with dour accusation, ‘You eat a lot.’

  ‘I’m making up for the crap we’ve had to eat for the past two weeks. Besides, tomorrow is a big day and I thought I’d get in early.’

  The Tribhuvan Highway (popularly called The Rajpath) was the first highway to connect Kathmandu with the rest of Nepal and India. My guidebook suggested we tackle the 150 kilometre distance from Kathmandu so that we could enjoy the 60 kilometre descent from the 2322 metre pass. That’s fine for those coming from Kathmandu, but, as we were heading to Kathmandu, it meant a full day of relentless climbing.

  ‘It is like Everest,’ Uros moaned, sketching up an altitude profile with his ruler with the skill and efficiency of his upcoming career as an engineer.

  And so, the next morning we were up at five a.m. and as it was still dark, I led the way with my head torch. At this hour, locals were already walking along the quiet road. It moved into a stiffer climb, out from a gorge. We cycled slowly, conscious of not exhausting ourselves, while behind us a thin grey line – the road we had traversed – followed the river, a good 500 metres down. Mid-morning, we stopped at a little roadside shack, where an old man and his rather attractive daughter cooked us two boiled eggs for breakfast.

  ‘I marry you?’ I joked. She laughed then hacked her sinuses out.

  ‘Doctors without Borders, Cyclists without Manners!’ I shot out a fart that echoed down the valley. They all laughed.

  Ah, farting. The unrecognised international language. Take that Esperanto!

  We ate samosas while I lectured Uros on the benefits of nibblies instead of large meals when trying to keep energy levels up, then stuffed two boiled eggs in my mouth and kept them there in my cheeks while we cycled. I looked like a bullfrog with mumps. I slipped into my Marlon Brando impersonation from The Godfather.

  ‘I gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He sleeps with the fishes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sonny! Never tell anyone what you’re thinking.’

  ‘What is this?’ he laughed. I tried to explain but … all was lost in the translation as they say.

  Up and up we went, leaving the grey, cataract haze of Nepal’s hot season. The sun peeped through, a few feet above the ridge, and we felt the heat strike our skin. Above us on near-vertical hills, women were busy chopping down the last remaining bits of trees for firewood, the rustle of dead bush revealing their whereabouts, while grubby children – faces caked with sticky stripes of snot – ran alongside our bikes in a grating chorus of ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’

  We both tried to ignore them until Uros, the cool Slovenian rock, split in two.

  ‘Shut up!’ he snapped at one of them. But the child kept at it until he could run with us no longer.

  If we weren’t racing away from kids, we were racing away from each other. It had become apparent that Uros and I were caught in an undisclosed race to be ‘King of the Mountain’.

  I must admit that I had started it. I had led most of the morning, leaving Uros way down the mountain, struggling with every turn, his dripping face looking up to see me smiling back at him as I crammed my mouth with chocolate. Just as he neared, heaving and wheezing, his red face imploring me to rest, I would say, ‘Uros! You made it! Let’s keep going while you’ve got your momentum!’ and then jump back on my bike, tear ahead of him and repeat the whole routine again, his curses chasing after me.

  But as the day wore on, my quick spurts got the better of me, and I stopped on a turn in some shade, sweat dripping off my helmet and onto my sunglasses, when Uros tore past, leaving me with the sound of his steady panting. When I caught up to him, he was resting on a big rock, splashing water over his hat from his aluminium water thermos.

  Before I could put my foot down to rest, he was gone, leaving me breathless with exasperation.

  The road became rough, disintegrating into patchy scabs and so steep in places that my front wheel, though loaded with 12 kilograms’ worth of baggage, lurched upwards over the bumps. I was forced to walk the bike.

  When I caught up to Uros again, he was having a smoke and munching on a samosa by a stream. When he saw me he quickly got on his bike.

  ‘Wait!’

  ‘What is it?’ he stopped.

  ‘We need water,’ I said.

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes! Absolutely!’ I got out a collapsible water bladder from my pack, filled it up from a small stream above us and gave it to him.

  ‘You want me to carry it?’ he protested.

  ‘Why, of course. You have less stuff and I have nowhere to put it.’

  He begrudgingly packed it.

  This will slow him down … excellent, Smithers!

  But if anything, it made the bastard go faster! When I did see him again, his bike was leaning up against a battered sign that read ‘2480 metres’. We had reached the very top, 60 kilometres after we started.

  Uros was changing his sweaty shirt for a dry one. He threw on a fleece.

  ‘This is the most physical thing I have ever done’, he erupted as I took a photograph of him. I imagined that, somewhere in Slovenia, his mother was proud of him.

  We cycled a little way down the mountain to the town of Daman and stayed the night in a small guesthouse, me regaling Uros with stories about all the jobs I’ve been fired from, notably from the film industry.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Uros motioned, clasping a beer. ‘And this is just a guess, my friend, but perhaps you shouldn’t tell the producers to go fuck themselves.’

  ‘Ya think?’

  ***

  Rising early, the morning air bracing our souls, we bumped, braked and jarred over the rough tarred road to the town of Phalsong for mid-morning breakfast, up another climb and eventually down to Naubise.

  Naubise intersected with Govinda’s ‘flat Mugling route’, and, just as I had thought, it was a nightmare of trucks and buses racing each other around blind corners. And it wasn’t flat. There was yet another towering hill in front of us. We stopped at a shack for lunch.

  ‘Let’s see your racks,’ Uros said eagerly. He bent down by my bike and shot up, triumphant. ‘Ah! They are broken!’

  Sure enough, the rear strut had broken from its weld.

  ‘Ha-ha! I tell you, steel is better. You cannot fix this now!’ Uros laughed loudly.

  I smiled back. ‘Oh, really?’

  I pulled out my pencil-case full of spares – cables, patches, screws, nuts, clips, brake pads, tape – and found an adjustable hose ring. I bent the ring around the broken weld and screwed it together.

  ‘Fixed,’ I said, returning an even more triumphant grin.

  ‘But it will not last …’ He pulled at the strut, but it was as immovable as the welded one.

  I had been advised to be prepared for such a thing. I hadn’t told Uros because I wanted to enjoy this moment when it arrived. When I explained this to him, laughing of course, he scowled, ‘You are a very, very bad man!’

  Climbing out of Naubise, sweating through the sticky afternoon heat, we made the last pass by late afternoon and, with relief, screamed down the valley into Kathmandu, a basin of blue smoke, green paddy fields and decrepit three-storey buildings. We followed t
he choking traffic of trucks, buses, motorbikes and three-wheeled belching taxis.

  We headed for Thamel because it was there, my guidebook told me, I could get anything to eat from around the world. Now, this may sound trite or may seem like I am denying myself the authentic traveller’s experience, but, quite frankly, I had had just about enough of dahl bhat (it was, as its name suggested, dull). My Western tongue had been spoilt. I yearned for steak even though I was predominately vegetarian; I wanted beer but I preferred wine; I could devour spaghetti though lasagne might do; I craved chocolate cake or a donut; something savoury, something with punch.

  We took a bell-shaped room in the Cosy Corner Lodge.

  ‘We must celebrate!’ I said to Uros, elated, happy, complete as I dried myself from the shower.

  ‘Yes! We must party!’ he replied.

  We went to La Dolce Vita Restaurant across the road, which (as its name suggested) had black-and-white photographs from the famous Fellini film plastered across the walls. We ordered up: a big steak, chips and a bottle of Australian red wine (you can get anything in Kathmandu!).

  ‘Cheers!’ We clinked glasses and drank.

  ‘We must really drink tonight!’ Uros said excitedly.

  ‘Absolutely, my friend! Let’s hit the town, go to a nightclub, dance and get absolutely right royally drunk!’

  ‘Yes!’ We clinked glasses noisily again and downed another glass.

  Half an hour later, we were back at our hotel, face-down in our fat pillows, snoring loudly and very much dead to the world while the street, rowdy with travellers, celebrated for us.

  ***

  I stared at the naked woman. Her legs were wrenched back near her ears in an impossible yoga position. Yet, despite this extreme pelvic flooring, she wore a somewhat comical smile.

  This gnarled wooden form on the strut of the Jagannarayan Temple – located in Dunbar Square in a part of south-eastern Kathmandu known as Patan – was supposed to be erotic art, but rather than thinking of soft pleasures, I could only imagine splinters.

  On another strut, a couple indulged in a ‘comfortable from behind’ position and, unlike their gymnastic neighbour, shared a deer-in-headlights expression. Other carvings were more adventurous and bestial: supplicants rogered by smiling donkeys, large-breasted women masturbating wide-eyed men, and couples copulating with wild abandon, their ecstasy frozen in chiselled gapes.

  There was no clear explanation for the explicit carvings (perhaps revenge from an underpaid contractor?), but I did hear one interesting story. Apparently the Goddess of Lightning, a virgin who was shy despite being able to fry a pine tree in the blink of an eye, was scared off by the lewd manoeuvres crawling up the struts of these ancient temples. Similarly, in Cathedrals of the West, hidden away in the dark corners of arches were also carvings of devilish indulgences.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon like two schoolboys, clicking and snapping our cameras at anything with a smooth lump or bulge.

  ‘Where are the carvings of fucking?’ Uros scrutinised the other side of the temple. ‘Ah! Here! More fucking here, Russell! More fucking!’

  ‘Where? Where?’

  Two Nepalese men looked on with a smear of disdain at our slobbering performance and continued with their work of erecting a huge red banner across a temple. Chairs and microphones were being set up below, and when the banner unfurled, I realised that we were in the midst of something that had been on my mind before we left for Nepal.

  ‘I think there is no more fucking left,’ Uros said with a heavy air of disappointment. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Maoists.’

  On the flag above us, the hammer and sickle rippled in the breeze.

  Early on in 1996, the radical left of the dissolved Communist government, the Communist Party of Nepal, led an insurrection aimed at abolishing the monarchy and establishing a people’s republic based on a multi-party capitalist democracy. The party was made up mostly of students, oppressed lower-caste Nepalese and farmers. They wanted the most basic of requirements, such as clean water in rural areas, health and medicine for everyone, cheap access to seeds and fertiliser, land ownership, equality for women, and an end to the caste system and the monopoly of foreign capital.

  Their movement had originally started off with peaceful protests, but when the government didn’t respond, the party took up arms against state institutions, police, soldiers and individuals in mid-west Nepal.

  I wondered what this meeting was about and, more importantly, what the Maoists would do next.

  The following morning our bikes needed a tune, so from Durbar Square we went in search of the Annapurna Bike Shop, which had been recommended in the bike journal at the Avocado Hotel.

  God only knows how we would find it. All I knew was that it was near the Ason Chowk, and from there we would have to ask for directions. Kathmandu had grown out of a series of town squares and streets, fusing into one another, and as a result no specific addresses were evident. When we did arrive at Ason Chowk, I asked at a shop lined with antique gym equipment. A closer inspection revealed them to be Chinese interpretations of mountain bikes – oversized shock absorbers, chunky steel frames, flimsy vinyl seats. The bike industry in the West was definitely safe from these things taking over the market.xv

  From inside the shop, a small man with a limp took us down a side street and into a small, signless room the size of a closet. It was filled with dusty rims, tyres, assorted parts, old bikes caked with more dust, and a very long and blue tandem called ‘Friday’, which we would later learn had been left behind by two Peace Corps volunteers.

  A stout, silent man named Narendra took hold of our bikes. He trued our wheels, tuned our brakes and showed me how to install a new cassette (a ‘cassette’ it is not, as I first thought, an audio tape. In bicycle parlance it is the cluster of multiple sized cogs on the rear hub of the bike that allows different gear ratios. These often wear out and can cause the chain to slip).

  ‘We’ve cycled 1300 kilometres all the way from Delhi,’ I said, puffing out my chest. Not looking up from greasing the brakes he handed me dog-eared copies of news clippings about a Portuguese–Swiss couple cycling some 14 000 kilometres into China, about a French cyclist tortured in Bosnia, and about a Canadian couple in their seventh year of cycling the world. No wonder Narendra didn’t seem impressed.

  As we were leaving, I bumped into a giant trying to climb into the closet. A six-foot American woman, Pru, crouched over and in one lunge had her Hero mountain bike inside.

  ‘Hi!’ came a big southern American drawl.

  She told us she was commencing a two-year study on child nutrition then smiled. I was mesmerised. She had more gums than teeth.

  ‘Bill Gates is sponsoring it,’ she said.

  ‘What? Your teeth?’ I said without thinking, and then quickly got on my bike, trying to escape my embarrassment.

  ***

  The Maoists had been planning something the day that Uros and I had seen them in Durbar Square. A general strike had been called across the country – shopkeepers were forced to close their stores, everyone had to remain indoors, no one was permitted to drive, and no vehicles (including buses and taxis) were allowed on the roads.

  This had robbed me of my usual delight of watching Nepali life: rickshaw drivers play-fighting, smiling and laughing; shop owners throwing things at each other – continuing a daily game; and children, though ragged and poor, laughed and hugged each other. Somehow they were all able to remain happy despite their adversity.

  News of the strike weighed heavily on Uros. He had planned to leave the next day and now lay out on the bed ill, thinking through the consequences of what ‘those Maoists’ might do.

  ‘I don’t want to be here another three days,’ Uros groaned. We had already been here for a week and the traveller’s itch was eating him alive.

  A crease cracked his glum face as he searched the ceiling for an answer, hands under his head, glasses askew.

  ‘What am I going to do?
’

  ‘The same thing you’ve been doing for the past week – lying in bed.’

  ‘Yes, well. But I must get to India,’ he said, and then told me of his travel itinerary for the umpteenth time, though I never grew tired of hearing it.

  ‘I take the bus to the border, maybe cycle to Varanasi then Agra. Maybe a bus to Delhi. Then I take my plane to Bangkok and meet my … friend (he had ceased referring to Malitta as his girlfriend), then we cycle to Malaysia then to Australia and buy a motorcycle!’

  Simone, a German woman I had met in Delhi, walked into our room with a quiet bump on the door and, to put Uros at ease, said, ‘You know, the Maoists just killed thirty-five policemen!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes! And they take 25 hostages!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Dolpa.’

  He looked to me for an answer. ‘How will I get my bus?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘You know, it’s like waiting for a typhoon,’ I said, recalling a night in Taiwan some years ago while trees crashed around us in the dark and for added effect, high on LSD. ‘Just waiting for the storm to arrive. People stocking up on food, hiding in their houses. How exciting!’

  ‘Ah, yes, we should go for a drink tonight,’ Simone said in her singsong Frankfurt accent.

  ‘Uros?’

  ‘What?’ His eyes had barely left the ceiling.

  ‘Want to come for a drink?’

  He looked even paler than usual, his long hair latching onto pillows and walls.

  ‘No,’ he said darkly like Marvin the Paranoid Androidxvi. ‘I think I will lie here and think about the Maoists.’

  13

  ANNAPURNA CIRCUIT

  April

  Uros did leave the next day, taking his luggage and angst with him. Not that he really had reason to worry – the Maoists conveniently called off their strike earlier that morning.