It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  I started calling around.

  'Hello, do you speak English?'

  'Yes, some…'

  'Did you have a Western man admitted last night?'

  'Yes, what name?'

  'Leigh.'

  'Lee?'

  'Yes, Leigh.'

  'OK, how is that spelt?'

  'L-E-I-G-H.'

  'Le-yggy?'

  'No, Leigh.'

  'Leggy?'

  'No – Leigh.'

  'Ahh let me check.'

  Ten minutes of noise followed, but I could make out the occasional, 'Le-gigigy… Leeeee.'

  'No, we have no man called Leggy here.'

  'Are you sure?'

  'Oh yes, sir.'

  'Completely sure?'

  'Yes sir, very. This is the Mumbai Hospital for Women.'

  It had now been almost 24 hours since we had seen him and my animosity was long forgotten. We reasoned that since he had hardly any money he couldn't have gone out partying and the more time that passed the more nervous we both got. My mind was racing through possibilities. Could he have had enough of it all and got a flight home? Could he have been in an accident? Worse yet could he have been robbed or attacked and left in a gutter somewhere? I tried to think logically about how we could track him down but my thoughts jumped through all sorts of scenarios – would we be able to or even want to continue the trip without him? What would I say at his funeral?

  Leigh Purnell – self-taught mechanic and master of roadside repairs who travelled around the world eating nothing other than burgers and chips. A true friend who would even share his bed with a leaking dysentery patient.

  I took the phone and dialled the next hospital.

  It was about two in the afternoon when Leigh strolled in along the veneered, peeling corridor with an inane grin and a nonchalant, 'Hullo,' our argument the previous morning seemingly forgotten.

  Paul wasn't quite so relaxed.

  'WHERE THE FUCK HAVE YOU FUCKING BEEN?'

  'I went out drinking, chill.'

  'DRINKING? DRINKING! WITH WHAT FUCKING MONEY?'

  I – understandably, I think, after the 24 hours we'd had – was annoyed.

  The relief that he wasn't lying dead in a drain and the anger that he had been so irresponsible – combined with the fact that I had spent the past three days relocating my insides to my outside – manifested themselves in lots of loud noises and swear words.

  'I had the kitty card on me,' he explained sheepishly, as a sizable crowd of Nigerian labourers peered out of their door at us.

  The kitty was our shared emergency expedition funds, for times of real need and certainly not to be used for a day-long bender. This was the last straw.

  'KITTY MONEY!' Paul exploded with rage and leapt at Leigh, fists in the air, venting all the nervous fury he had built up over the past few sleepless nights. Leigh was totally unprepared for this physical onslaught and looked shell-shocked as Paul flailed his arms at him. I jumped between them and soon managed to separate them, and sent Paul to calm down in another room while I explained to Leigh how we had spent the previous 24 hours and he told me his side of events. After weeks of being ill, bad driving and our huge bust-up he'd had enough and gone for a walk around the city to clear his head and try to process everything that had gone wrong recently. Craving some company that wasn't me or Paul he'd met a group of backpackers and was having a couple of drinks when the monsoon hit, rendering the flooded streets nigh on impossible to traverse and cutting off power in the hotel bar they were trapped in until the day.

  It was the biggest argument of the trip so far and the first time any of us had ever actually come to blows. India had really taken its toll on us.

  CHAPTER 31

  BOND, HINDI BOND

  Luckily after so long on the road together we had developed a kind of sibling-like attitude to arguments, where all it takes is a quick apology and half an hour apart and the rift is forgotten. In Paul's case the argument had blown over in the time it took for another of his still-all-too-frequent toilet breaks.

  The following day, we were driving to the airport to pick up my girlfriend Katie who was coming out to join us on holiday for a couple of weeks. It was great timing as I was just starting to feel mildly human again after my bout of dysentery. However, after driving for hours in the muggy downpour, we were lost again and had to stop for directions. In my experience, Indians are almost always incredibly friendly and desperate to help – even if they haven't a clue what you're asking them to help with or the answer to your question. Requests for directions are always met with a beaming smile and a head wobble.

  The wobble is a very Indian thing and quite hard to describe. Sometimes it's a clear sideways tilting of the head on either side; sometimes it's an almost undetectable inclination. I'm not 100 per cent sure on its meaning, but by now I'd seen it being used to imply 'Yes', 'No', 'OK', 'Maybe', 'Fine' and, most common of all, 'I'm sorry, I genuinely have no idea what you just said to me, but I'll make it up to you by wobbling my head!'

  After two months apart, I had been expecting a dramatic, romantic reunion with my girlfriend. She appeared out of the arrivals gate and I felt a rush of joy at seeing her familiar face for the first time in what felt like forever. I beamed as she walked up to us.

  'You're so skinny…' she said, staring at me in horror, 'and you look so ill!'

  'I love you, too,' I mumbled.

  The first thing we did with our new passenger was to sign on for a typical tourist trap – a 'become a Western extra in a Bollywood film' experience. We were to feature in a nightclub scene for the upcoming blockbuster Agent Vinod – less of a typical all-singing, all-dancing Bollywood love story and more of a 'Bond, Hindi Bond' angle.

  The five of us were sent to wardrobe for our attire, emerging one by one to hysterical laughter. Leigh in Versace and a nob-end hat, Johno looking strangely smart and me in skinny jeans, a Samuel L. Jackson cap and the most god-awful fake Ed Hardy T-shirt with a diamanté tiger on it. We looked like a bad teenage dance troupe about to appear at the local village fete – featuring on the bill somewhere between the raffle and the 'Dog most like its owner' competition. Katie emerged in a delightfully short skirt. After filming the same scene where we bopped away in the background for the hundredth time, we finished up at 2 a.m., exhausted but 500 rupees each – about a fiver – richer.

  It was the first honest day's work we'd done in six months.

  Katie's luggage consisted almost exclusively of spare parts. It was our first delivery since Turkey and Hannah was in desperate need of a new cooling fan and a few other vital pieces needed for the hot drive across India and into the Himalayas.

  The next section of driving was one of the hardest of the trip. We knew the 1,100-mile slog up towards Varanasi and the Nepalese border in five days was going to be tough, but none of us anticipated exactly how bad the road would be. I had studied a map on the wall of the hotel before we left and seen a large road, National Highway 7, labelled as 'North–South Corridor', which almost exactly connected us to where we needed to go. 'If this is a major connecting road that's marked thickly on the map,' I reasoned, 'then it must be in fairly good shape.'

  I couldn't have been more wrong.

  The builders couldn't have made a worse road if they tried: large stretches of potholes slowed our progress and the heavy bumps battered Hannah's already ailing chassis and bodywork. To make things worse, frequent tollbooths actually asked us to pay for using these abominations. For the most part the drive was a crawl of intense concentration through the myriad hazards in the pouring rain and steaming heat. But the breakfast, lunch and dinner stops at the tiny roadside cafes, lines of bubbling pots of curry stacked outside, allowed us to experience more of one of India's great offerings: the tasty, plentiful and cheap food.

  We often drove for more than 12 hours a day, from dawn until dusk. Road signs were sporadic, as were roads. Occasionally ten miles or so of brand new, smooth road would appear, but as soon as there was the
slightest incline, decline, requirement for bends, junction or jungle, the road would give up. All that remained where a road should have been were gaps between dense jungles that resembled the no-man's-land at the Somme, only not quite as smooth.

  We had an average speed of 20 mph and those five days were some of the most uncomfortable of the entire trip. It wasn't too much of a burden for the lads and me, but Katie only had a few weeks off from her intensive final-year studies to become a doctor and this was supposed to be her holiday. We arrived at Varanasi at sundown, and collapsed in front of a steaming plate of butter chicken, happy to have got there and looking forward to a day off from driving.

  Katie and I wandered the streets to discover the holiest of Hindu cities. Varanasi is a city on the holy Ganga (Ganges) River, and it's the place where the Hindu dead are burned, their ashes spread into the river. It is also the perfect microcosm of India's ability to warm your heart and turn your stomach at the same time. Nestled among smouldering funeral pyres with charred limbs protruding at grotesque angles, we watched an eldest son dress his father's body in bright, expensive cloth and carefully build a fire around him, liberally spreading it with spices and flowers in a sombre ceremonial manner. Amazing temples line the banks, their bright gold and orange contrasting with the dull brown of the river. As children ran, bathed and swam right next to the sewage outlet, the corpse of a sheep became caught on a boat's anchor a few metres away while a 'baba' holy man watched over in a meditative state from the bank.

  We hopped on a boat at dawn and watched the sun rise over the city as throngs of devoted men, women and children came to bathe themselves in the holy waters.

  But again we had to move; after all the delays, the Indian visas we had been granted back in the UK before the expedition started only had three days remaining on them and we had to make the 200 miles to Nepal before they expired. We drove all day along the same kinds of roads and got to within a few hours of the border, eventually holing up in a mosquito- and bed-bug-ridden 'hotel' when it got too dark to drive – India was the one place we stuck steadfastly to our no-night-driving rule. We all felt physically drained from our time in India, and after being overcharged one time too many for our meal in the hotel, we agreed we were thoroughly ready to leave. To be fair, we hadn't really seen India at its best, so we resolved to return one day to give it another chance.

  We left as the sun rose. For once the temperature was pleasant and it had stopped raining. A cool, low mist snuck between bushy outcrops and rough pastures as their lumbering bovine residents began to move for the day. The dawn chorus of a hundred different kinds of birds singing as one provided nature's soundtrack to the sight of whole families – mothers hitching up their saris, old men crouching their knees to breaking point and kids, naked as the day they were born, doing their bit to ensure the side of the road was fertilised. We were being treated to a rare insight into the rural Indian morning routine as we counted 35 people squatting, each with a small pot of water, on the road within less than two miles.

  Passing the border without too much trouble, the road suddenly changed: it became paved and started winding through the Himalayan foothills, where we encountered something we had not seen since Europe. As we came up behind a slow moving truck, he pulled over to the side to let us overtake. He didn't have a problem with his truck, he didn't need to stop, he was just letting us pass because he was a nice guy.

  I thought, 'I'm going to like Nepal.'

  But nothing confirmed this more than the sign we passed that confirmed the end of India and its running theme:

  Welcome to Pokhara Region, Nepal.

  An Open-Defecation-Free Zone since 1995

  CHAPTER 32

  LEIGH'S LISTS

  We were all overjoyed to be in Nepal, where things appeared to be completely different from India: the roads were good, the people were tourist-friendly and seemed to take real pride in their surroundings, and best of all we could finally go for the steaks we had been salivating over since before we entered the largely beef-free state of India.

  In tranquil Pokhara we had a final team meal and some beers for our last night together for a week or so, then we each took off in our separate directions for a much-needed break from each other. Leigh was planning to rent a motorbike for a few days, Paul and Katie were going to find a hotel with room service and I had decided to go hiking around the Annapurna region.

  Towards the end of our minibreak, I had set off early to scale one of the mountains of the region. Woefully underprepared, however, I suffered the early signs of altitude sickness as I struggled my way up to the top of a mountain. Rushing back down again I caught a bus back into the city, which soon rounded a corner and swerved sharply to avoid a vehicle – a rather familiar taxi-shaped vehicle – haphazardly parked on the side of the road and missing a front wheel.

  It took a very stressed-looking Leigh a second to register who I was as I jumped down off the coasting bus, but once he did the relief on his face was incredible. He had spent the past three days welding, cleaning and rewiring Hannah but now another of the troublesome ball joints had broken apart causing the entire front wheel assembly to come loose. In a way we were extremely lucky it had happened here in the city and not earlier, on the tight mountain roads flanked by sheer drops hundreds of metres deep.

  With help from the assembled locals and some soldiers from a nearby army base, Leigh and I found a temporary fix for Hannah and took the short drive across the capital to meet up with Paul.

  As Katie and I arrived in Kathmandu a week before the lads, it was my job to track down a suitable hotel. It had to be cheap and it had to have some sort of parking where we could – literally – rebuild Hannah, again. Katie and I had had a wonderful week of relaxing in chai houses, and it was strange to wave her off at the airport and meet back up with the lads. But after regaling each other with our stories of Johno's altitude sickness and Leigh's fallout with the Pokhara mafia over a flat tyre on his motorbike, everything quickly fell back into place.

  By the time we got to Kathmandu, Hannah was in a terrible state. As well as the dodgy front wheel, which had literally fallen off, the black cab body had sheared away from the chassis, a suspension mount had snapped, we had an ant infestation, another ball joint was going and we had no headlights. Rust had crept into everything, causing many of the electrics to fail and our roof boxes – which were great at letting water in but less so at letting it leak out – were reservoir-esque.

  The sound system, however, was still banging… until Leigh discovered the source of the ant invasion was a colony in our subwoofer. We tried all the dubstep we could get our hands on, but it appears that not only can ants survive underwater for two weeks (true story), but they are also impervious to Skrillex. We even tried Johno's disturbingly extensive collection of Bonnie Tyler, but 1980s power ballads didn't have the same fumigation effect on ants as they do on a dance floor. The sub had to go.

  To nobody's surprise, we couldn't find spare parts for a London black cab in Nepal… so we made our own with low-grade metal and welding torches. For headlights, Leigh found a pair of similarly shaped motorbike lights and mounted them in the gaping holes where the old ones once lived.

  Johno's friend Matt flew in to join us for the next leg. He was an RAF fighter pilot who had been made redundant in the recent cuts and so flew straight out to meet us. We also had another useful pair of hands in Binay Lama: a friend of Katie's who was in the area and who was quite possibly the loveliest person in the entire world. He owned a tour company and used the profits to build schools and help the community back in his village in the remote mountains. We were also joined by another familiar face a day or two after Johno and Leigh arrived. There was a note on the door:

  I'm in room 201

  Love

  Craig

  Our favourite potty-mouthed Australian had made it to Nepal on his circuit of Central Asia. We were glad to note he had purchased a new T-shirt soon after he left us, but it didn't look like he ha
d changed it since.

  Meanwhile, Leigh had been preparing a list. Leigh's lists are a very serious thing. They contain everything that needs to be done to the car and even more that doesn't. Leigh is an incredibly talented mechanic and electrician, and pretty much the only member of the team who actually mattered. However, his prioritisation skills leave a lot to be desired. Johno and I – although very untalented mechanics – had become very talented at prioritising Leigh's lists. So when we'd find Leigh applying stickers to the roof rack when there was a host of essential complicated electronic work that only he was able to do, we'd gently encourage him to do those instead. This would then be followed by an argument where Leigh tried to persuade us that cutting out the outline of a sponsor sticker so that it looked prettier was more important than having headlights. Then Johno and I would pretend to take over the sticker-cutting (stopping as soon as Leigh looked away, of course), and Leigh would start working on the vital headlights and the list would gradually start to decrease.