Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle

by Russell McGilton

  ‘They’ve done me fine, thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Nooo! They’re not thick enough,’ she pulled a grimace then plucked her ear. ‘No traction, luv. Walls too thin. Should have ones like mine!’

  Two Indian men came up and stared; one carried a plastic bag containing two Coke bottles. She turned around to them and poked the bag.

  ‘Shouldn’t drink that stuff, mate. Too much sugar. Bad for the teeth.’ She opened her gob and tapped her gnarly nicotine-stained pegs. She turned back to us.

  ‘So. Fancy a cup of tea?’

  Our wily friend introduced herself as Toni. She had been coming to India since 1996, living in Goa for most of it and spending time cycling around the south.

  ‘This is a waste of time up here. Karnataka! Karnataka! That’s where it’s all at, man,’ she said, slurping her chai while we huddled out of the cold in a tin shed posing as a chai shop.

  She talked us out of going any further.

  ‘The road’s ’orrible, the people are worse, and I stayed in the only guesthouse in Puh, aptly named, I think, because it’s a shitehole, with big rats running over my feet and a fucking Indian who stared at me all night. Besides, the road’s gone. Well, I mean the bridge. You have to go up and up and up this switchback road that’s gravelly and potholed.’

  She poked her ear again and scraped out a small ball of wax.

  ‘Anyway. Who wants to see indifferent Buddhist monks floating around a monastery? I don’t get on with Buddhists. Hindus are my thing, man, not this austere silence shite. People go on about “Oh, Tibetans wanting to free Tibet”, but they don’t want to go back. It’s an inhospitable place. I got as far as Nako, right near the border. They were a right bunch of wankers, rude as all fuck, like those Israelis!’

  She rubbed her face.

  ‘I keep putting sun block on but keep getting burnt on my nose. Why aren’t you burnt?’

  ‘‘Cause we’ve got helmets with a visor.’

  ‘Ooh, you don’t need that!’

  Toni soon left us, waggling her unbearable lightness of being up the hill. Convinced that it was just as horrible as Toni had told us we went in search of a truck to hitch back to Shimla.

  Over a rattling suspension bridge, past a weigh-station of diesel trucks and buses we cycled, through the dust and rock while the Sutlej River threatened to burst its fragile banks.

  Ahead of us, a man on an old bike, carrying nothing more than a cheap green knapsack over his shoulders, stopped.

  ‘You’re the first cyclists I’ve seen since leaving Delhi,’ he faltered in a Gregory Peck drawl. Toby was from Michigan, his hair was grey and he wore thick glasses. He must have been at least in his late 50s.

  ‘Hey, you’re carryin’ a lot of stuff there, now ain’t ya?’

  And then I realised that I was in the midst of what touring cyclists do to one another when they first meet: they behave like dogs. ‘Hmm! What’s that you’ve got there? Sniff, sniff, sniff. What are you carrying? Which tyres do you have? Which gears? Sniff, sniff, sniff.’

  He rocked his bike to the side, an old thing with large shock absorbers that looked like they had been stolen from a Polish tractor.

  ‘I got this lock. It’s not much,’ he said, pointing to a piece of wire with a padlock, ‘but at least it’s light. I guess if they want to take it, they’d have to cut it’.

  And they could – with a toenail clipper.

  ‘I made this bag myself.’ It looked like it. Thread hung out everywhere.

  ‘Have you lost your shoelaces?’ I asked. He was wearing black office shoes with no trace of lace.

  ‘Oh, they seem to fit me okay without ’em. Keeps the weight down.’ He pointed to the rear wheel. ‘I took the front derailleur off. Also to cut down on weight.’

  ‘How do you change gears?’

  ‘Well, I gotta stop and pull the chain over the larger cog.’

  I wondered what Toni would make of him. ‘You don’t need that bag. That’s waaaay too much. You don’t even need that … that wheel. Just the ’andlebars and imagination, mate. That’s all!’

  Toby rattled off his travel stories, telling us what the road was like even though we told him three times that we had already come from there. Then, with a small puff, he was on his way, his creaking bike carrying him up an arduous, lonely road.

  I would later hear from other cyclists that Toby would make it to where we had failed, touring onwards around the dry, inhospitable Spiti Desert, the potholed roads, the landslides, on to Manali, up to Leh and then over the highest highway in the world, the Khardung La (5578 metres). All in the space of three weeks and covering more than 2000 kilometres!

  ‘The next cyclist we meet will be riding a unicycle,’ I said to Bec, speaking of the laws of diminishing odds.

  ‘And wearing only a G-string made out of dental floss,’ she smirked.

  ***

  Back in Shimla restlessness returned, uninvited as always.

  For some reason, we got along better when we were moving and we didn’t have to deal with each other. Bec and I fought, as we had done more and more over the past month. Largely, I blame myself for our ructions. I wanted to travel on my own. But I was stuck with the worry of what would happen to Bec, alone with her bike in India surrounded by men. I felt responsible and I resented it. I became moody, horrible and difficult to be around. A right bastard.

  ‘I want to do my own trip,’ Bec finally said, but when I agreed that she should, tears fell from her eyes. Unlike the promises I made in Melbourne about making love in balmy monsoonal heat while it rained outside, instead, we sat on opposite ends of the bed, gripped in our private storms.

  Bec looked out from our hotel room window over the bruised sky of the Kullu Valley.

  ‘I just don’t know where to go.’

  19

  MANALI – LEH

  July

  The mist wet our eyelashes and made us look like clowns. We had climbed the 30 kilometre road through the vast, changing landscape of lush green hills towards the barren terrain of the Rohtang Pass (3978 metres).

  Despite leaving half our luggage in Manali it was still a tough ride. The road was muddy, narrow and slippery. Sporadic streams of four-wheel drives, tourist buses and trucks passed us, leaving us to cling on to what space was left of the road.

  I was in a foul mood. To my wounded pridexx, Rebecca was way ahead of me, effortlessly going up and up and up like a motorbike, disappearing in and out of the clouds. She waited for me by a stream, not showing any fatigue whatsoever.

  ‘Oh, this is sooooo beautiful, Russ! It’s so great to be able to sit here and take in the view.’

  ‘Yeah, right!’

  ‘How much further?

  ‘Another five ks.’

  ‘Oh!’ she said brightly, ‘is that all?’

  And off she went, helium it seemed, in her tyres. I grunted and followed after her, up another switchback, past a stream until we finally reached the settlement of Marhi – a weary collection of tented blue tarp restaurants bubbling big pots of dahl, chick peas and rice.

  We were heading up to the town of Leh in the Kingdom of Ladakh, the north-eastern region of Jammu-Kashmir, a distance of 473 kilometres from Manali.

  Set in a high-altitude desert between the Karakoram and Himalayan ranges, Leh is only accessible during the warmer months of the year; the pass was, well, impassable in heavy snow. The highway to the town was one of the highest in the world (5328 metres) and offered spectacular scenery: from the lush green hills out of Manali to the jagged, snow-capped mountain ranges as the road headed through a lunar landscape, a vast plateau towards Tibet. It was here that a variety of Tibetan sub-groups had lived in virtual isolation from Chinese and Indian influence.

  However, enticing as all of this was, it was dangerous. Only a week ago, an Austrian cyclist had died on a 2500 metre pass. There were also frequent rockslides.

  Bec and I were still together … for now. We would continue as a couple until we went in our different
directions: Bec, low on funds, would go to Taiwan to teach English, while I would start a Vipassana Meditation course at a retreat near Dharamasala.

  Our biggest obstacle of this trip was that we didn’t have a tent, as I’d ditched the other one after The Night of the Slow Drips. The other issue was that distances between towns were at least 70 kilometres and, with an average of 5 kilometres an hour uphill, it was more than likely to take us most of the day just to squeeze 30 ks out. Then, of course, there was the issue of scarcity of water. To address these issues we bought a big tarp to put over the bikes to act as a tent and bought extra bottles, filling up in towns as much as we could.

  Now in Marhi we ordered up big – veggie soup, dahl, fried rice, gobi mutter and coffee. The dahl was hearty, warm and just the thing we needed after a cold ride as we contemplated a wet cold night under our tarp. An Israeli with hair like spider legs and quite cheekily cooking up his own meal in the restaurant with his friends, told us of a bunked room – the waiters’ quarters – that was available.

  We took it despite the state it was in – chopped brown cabbage in the corner, cigarette butts on the floor, assorted clothes and blankets strewn on beds. We hitched up on the top bunk together, Bec spreading her sarong over a wire cord across our bunk for privacy. Later, that night, needing a pee, I had to step over the waiters as they puffed and snored before eventually climbing out of a window and through muddy puddles in bare feet. As I relieved myself, I watched the fog settle over the black rocks and around the camp. It was eerily quiet and yet somehow wonderfully magical.

  In the morning, an overly exuberant Frenchman jumped around us taking photographs of our bikes, his camouflage pants whooshing around us like falling trees.

  ‘Wow! Zis is amazing! You really cycling up here? Man!’

  He was part of a French documentary team on a quest to find the burial site of Jesus Christ.

  ‘Er … aren’t you a little off … target?’

  ‘No, he died here in India. In Kashmir.’ Jesus, he believed, had come to India and learnt yogic breathing from a master that helped him survive his crucifixion.

  ‘There was no resurrection. He was always alive. We will find his grave!’

  He jumped into the back of the Jeep and was gone.

  We started slowly in the falling rain, and fortunately, by the time we get to the Rohtang Pass, the rain had cleared. In Tibetan it is called the Rohtang La and its literal meaning is ‘pile of corpses’ due to the high number of people who have perished trying to cross in it in bad weather.

  Today it was living up to its reputation: a cold and bitter wind shrieked up the valley bringing flakes of snow like dandruff and adding to our altitude headaches. This didn’t seem to put off day-trippers who were wrapped in rented yak skins like strange black wraiths while their photos were taken by relatives. Behind them tourist buses tore through the mud as they returned to Manali.

  We zoomed down a 15km descent to Khoksar and spent the night with the smell of unwashed potatoes that were piled to the ceiling in the next room.

  ***

  Before us, a clear blue sky stretched across from the snow-capped mountains down to a tumbling, rugged lunaresque landscape. It was a glorious day and we were literally jumping out of seats with the sheer joy of being in it.

  To celebrate, Bec had a novel suggestion.

  ‘Get your gear off!’

  I threw the bike off the road and behind the rocks, I stripped off. Bec stood ready with the camera and took pictures as I posed à la Priscilla Queen of the Desert, my sarong billowing behind me.

  ‘Now me!’ In a second Bec was also naked, her smooth white curves an erotic contrast to the sharp, jutting, rocks behind her. She danced among the waves of shimmering heat, skipping from rock to rock, arms flailing around, singing ‘I’M NAKED! NAA-AKED!’

  Putting the camera on self-timer, we posed together and waited for it to go off (the camera, I mean!). Just as the camera clicked, a truckload of Indian road-builders sailed past, then groaned to a halt, then began to reverse. We scampered for our clothes, struggling to get them on quickly – arms through this sleeve and that, shorts on backwards, one shoe on – before jumping on our bikes, skipping and slipping on the pedals.

  The truck snorted a dark cloud of disappointment and drove onwards, eventually eaten up by a massive rock as it turned.

  With a slight gradient in our favour, our tyres hummed on a straight road to Sarchu, one of the numerous tented cities that existed only during the warmer months. We could not enjoy this any other way but on bicycle, the air and the landscape washing through us, an electric feeling of being alive.

  In Sarchu (another collection of battered tents) we met two English lads, Harry and Keith, who had just rolled up on new 500cc Royal Enfield Bullet motorbikes. These were British motorbikes dating back to 1949 and their popularity in India had been signalled by the need to patrol their new neighbour, Pakistan. By 1955 a factory had been set up in Madras and, when the parent company ceased production, India Enfield continued to make them based on the old designs.

  Harry had had a collision with a truck, smashing his headlight. While he and Keith went about fixing the damage, an Indian man with a keenness for motorbikes stood behind them, watching their every move.

  ‘I have an Enfield too,’ he said to Harry before succumbing to what appeared to be either a terrible sinus condition aggravated by the dust or Tourette’s.

  ‘I rented one years ago from Manali up to the Rohtang Pass – SNORT! SNIFF! GRUNT! WOOF! – it was a wonderful feeling – SNIFF! GRUNT! – I fell in love with it instantly – WOOF!’

  ‘Uh huh,’ Harry said, attempting to unscrew the headlight casing.

  ‘I could get it up to 50 miles per hour.’

  ‘Right.’ The screwdriver slipped out of Harry’s hand.

  ‘SNIFF! WOOF!’

  Helmut, an Austrian cyclist in his 50s, was sharing a tent with the British lads. He was dressed in tights and a cycling shirt, and danced about the campsite like Peter Pan.

  ‘Ja, I came up from Srinagar to Leh. So many trucks! Army everywhere. I go upstairs 500 metres first day,’ he said, taking out a small notebook. ‘No, 550. My altimeter says I climb 1250 metres,’ he said proudly. He was carrying 35 kilograms on a touring bike (bigger wheels and heavier than a mountain bike) and dozens of water bottles fitted to the frame. ‘Ja! Because I neeeeeeed it!’

  The next day, we passed a sign: ‘21 loops’, indicating the number of switchbacks.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’ Rebecca complained.

  ‘We’ll take plenty of breaks. Don’t worry.’

  The only thing that lightened our mood was another one of those bizarre Indian traffic signs:

  I laughed so much I nearly crashed into it!

  ‘Hey, Bec. I bet TATA truck drivers must be thinking about that as they go hurtling over a cliff: “OH, SHIT! I’M GOING TO GET A TICKET!”’

  But nothing, it seemed, could lift her out of her exhaustion.

  But it wasn’t the climbing that was the most difficult part. Apart from having to dodge convoys of trucks and falling rocks, it was the heat that exhausted us faster than anything else. It fried everything – even the road.

  As I rested my bike against a cutting I noticed it shrinking before my eyes. It was sinking in a pool of tar. I quickly pulled it out. Up ahead, the road sweated; it was literally melting before us. We got back on our bikes and continued cycling, struggling with the soft tar, our tyres sounding as if they were rolling over Velcro, the road clutching at them, fighting for them to stop.

  Our wheels were soon layered with pebbles and small rocks that clung happily, waiting for their moment to puncture the tube. The snaking mess continued for several kilometres and we were forced to get off and push the bikes, the tar collecting so thickly on the tyres that it collided with the frame at each revolution. We had to stop frequently and tear off bits of soft tar and gravel before getting on and cycling again.

  By the afternoon, the heat continue
d to intensify, zapping through us and, with no shade, we both began to feel nauseous and light-headed. We gasped and stopped for breath every ten metres while ‘upstairs’ at 4500 metres. What’s more, our water was running out quickly, and our thirst impossible to quench in the dry air.

  But then the cavalry arrived. A convoy of 30 camouflaged Isuzu four-wheel drives stopped, each one sporting an Israeli flag and occupied by middle-aged men and women. Hands stretched from the vehicles, bearing gifts – water, food, crispy things, chocolate and even Scotch. We thanked them profusely.

  One of the Jeeps stopped and the driver, a young man, jumped out, smiled warmly but then recoiled with horror.

  ‘What?’ he said in his thick Israeli accent, pointing to the forks of my bike. ‘No shocks? What are you? Stupid!’

  ‘Yes, I’m absolutely crazy!’

  Our Israeli friend cocked a questioning eyebrow at me and jumped back in the Jeep and followed the rest of the yellow snaking convoy, disappearing over a hill.

  Later on, thinking that the next blind corner would reveal the pass, we were crushed to find more turns leading to a steady, unclimbable slope. I was hoping that this would unravel the road to a giddying descent into a cool, cool valley. But no. It wasn’t there.

  ‘Come and sit in the shade,’ Bec said, soothingly. Shade. Ah, there wasn’t much of that dark stuff about. I was feeling sick and said so to Bec. My eyes were punched up, my mouth was dry, and my lips were chafed and sore. I didn’t want to go on. There was another 5 kilometres to go – at least an hour. But we had to keep going.

  The bikes clack-clack-clacked as they carried the valley’s stones in the tar stuck to our tyres. A Jeep passed us and veered off up a rough dirt road. We followed up the loose gravel, heaving, slipping, trying to push the bikes up when I stopped, and flopped over the handlebars, crucified.