Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (15 page)

‘What happened?’ I asked a Nepalese man wearing oversized glasses and standing at the edge of a torn embankment. He was a dot in the crowd of hundreds who were clambering around the wreckage, some ten metres below.

‘A motorbike was coming this way, the bus was overtaking, and the bike hit the front,’ he pointed under the bus. ‘There. You can see the dead people.’

The impact of the head-on collision had caused the bus to shimmy off the road down a steep embankment and gouge a deep brown scar into a flooded paddy field. The bus lay on its side, the lip sipping the muddy water around it like a stranded fish.

Next to the bus, a body had been covered with a woollen blanket, as if to warm it up. Though the external damage to the bus was minor, six people died in the crash when the seats crumpled into
rib-cracking
dominoes, their weak seat-mountings breaking loose in the collision.

Fifty metres from the bus lay a red motorcycle helmet, upturned and half-filled with brown water, a solitary island in the muddy pond. The helmet’s owner laid some 100 metres away on his twisted back, head upturned, staring at nothing. Blood trickled from his mouth, across his forehead and over his spiky black hair. He must not have had time to even look surprised as his body took the brunt of the bus’s full force when it took the corner. The impact had knocked both his shoes off, revealing pilled blue socks, one with a hole in it.

Yet, his injuries, like the bus’s, appeared to be somewhat superficial; a mangled lip was the only mark that showed he had kissed death at all. Miraculously, his passenger survived and was now in the midst of being driven, just as madly as the bus that had dislodged him from his seat, to a hospital in Pokhara, a town Bec and I had just come from.

Our three weeks of trekking done, we had taken the bus for Kathmandu, screeching through the mad, winding hills when it suddenly halted and became part of a long line of vehicles. Despite no wreckage blocking the road, no one could move on until the police arrived. We had been there for an hour already.

Local vendors selling popcorn, beans and coconut soon took advantage of the calamity. Restaurant shacks were filled with bored, hot customers fanning themselves in the two o’clock heat as they sipped
chai
, clumped
dahl bhat
into their hands and fingered it into their mouths, or chewed tobacco. The excitement and horror of the crash had apparently left them with a gnawing appetite.

The bus driver was nowhere to be seen, having legged it over the hill in fear for his life. As is the custom in Nepal, if a driver causes bodily harm to his fellow passengers or pedestrians, they have every right to beat him to death. This begs the question of why, if you were a bus driver with 40 people sitting behind you who might just want to beat you to death for any traffic discrepancy, wouldn’t you just drive a little bit more safely?

This obvious truism was something I wished to impart now via the medium of a clenched fist to our driver. Despite the horrors we had all just seen, he was, now that the police had arrived and cleared the traffic, already wildly taking on blind corners, the back wheels struggling to stay on the road as trucks intent on obliterating us swerved out of the way at the last second. The worst of it was when our bus and another of the same company cut off a rogue taxi that had failed to give way to them. Arrowing him into the middle of the road, they stopped traffic in both directions. The bus drivers both leapt out and took turns yelling and shaking their fists at the taxi driver, who shrank into his leather seat, then under the dashboard.

‘It is far safer,’ I said to Bec as we passed yet another crashed bus, its body disintegrating into a rock cutting, ‘to ride a bicycle.’

Relieved with our safe arrival in Kathmandu, I was soon struck with a horrible realisation that I’d be most likely be going back on a Nepali bus again: my visa was about to expire.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bec.

‘Well, I don’t want to take a bus. It’s at least three days’ ride …’

I dashed off to a money changer and made an illegal transaction (well for Nepal) – I changed Nepali rupees for some hard American cash.

‘You’re going to bribe them?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with an arrogant wave of my hand. ‘This country is skanky with it.’

Two days later, at the border …

‘Your visa has expired.’

I blinked at the grey, weary eyes of the Nepalese immigration official.

‘Today is the 13th May. You entered on the 13th March. Sixty days only.’

‘No. Two months. The visa is for two months. It says there.’

‘You have to apply for a new visa. Fifty dollar US and one dollar US for each day over. Total fifty-two dollar US you have to pay.’

Time for Plan B.

‘I don’t have that much money on me. How about … I give you some money?’

‘No.’

‘Say,’ I reached inside my wallet, ‘ten dollars?’

‘I cannot.’

He was silent for a moment, flicking my passport, my life, in his hands. ‘You go to India without exit stamp. Okay?’

‘Sure.’ I went to pick up my passport, but he held onto it, causing me to trip.

‘Fifty-two dollar you have to pay. Fill out form …’

As he handed it to me, I protested again.

‘That’s so much money. How about … twenty dollars US I give you?’

‘No, no. New visa.’ This went on for some while but just when I was about to give up and start filling out a new visa form, he got up and said, ‘You stay here. My friend. He’s at hotel.’

An hour passed before the official returned with his smiling friend and ushered me into the office. The friend filled out the paperwork, writing my passport details in a book.

‘You arrived on the twenty-third.’

‘Right.’

‘Money. Twenty dollar,’ he said abruptly without looking up, and I counted out the one-dollar bills. With his pen, he did something that I could have easily done at my hotel – he scrawled over the date, replacing the 1 with a 2.

We cycled over the southern border of Nepal into the town of Rauxal in Bihar, India. Bec came to a wobbling stop as she tried to get used to her new bike laden with gear. Her bike had already done a marathon cycle, Narendra told me, having travelled over 9000 kilometres from Germany to Kathmandu and to make sure it would survive our trip, he replaced the cables and bearings, the whole deal costing $US200. Panniers were much harder to come by, but we eventually found an ambitious bag maker who, unlike others, did not wave us away into the rain.

Like my first day with Uros where I thought he wouldn’t mind cycling 184 kilometres in one day, for some reason I thought Bec, a novice at cycle touring, wouldn’t mind cycling up 30 kilometre long hills (the hills that Uros and I had struggled over) for days either.

What was I thinking?

We argued of course, and after one particularly tough day, she lay next to me shaking and crying, declaring she wasn’t going to cut this cycling malarkey.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I reassured her. ‘Wait ’til we get to India. It’s flat there and it’ll give you time to get your cycling legs. You’ll enjoy it then. Really.’

But it was me that would find this leg of the trip the most challenging.

‘India is spice,’ I said to Bec, catching the familiar smell of curries brewing and
chai
boiling, the fragrant noxiousness of kerosene burning, and the dark cloud of diesel from trucks. The assault on my senses reawakened my first memories of India. But these soon faded as the realities hit: the swarms of people, the rickshaw bells ringing like lost phones, the broken roads, the blaring of celebratory songs through huge speakers on broken wheelbarrows.

On the way in, we passed a sign on a battered government building: PREVENTITIVE CUM CONTROL SUPPLIES.

‘What is it? A hammer?’ I joked to Bec.

‘No, your personality!’ she teased.

As much as I loved being back in India, I was a bit nervous. I had heard that Bihar was the most lawless state in all of India, parts of it being run by Thakurs, a caste-based mafia. No one travelled on the roads at night. I had also heard that
dacoits
(bandits) flourished here, and that if they didn’t get you, the police would. I had been told a story of a foreign tourist relieved of all of his money by the police, then his car and finally, his clothes, as he encountered checkpoint after checkpoint.

On a bench seat down a steep set of stairs outside a building lay the immigration officer, a fat man wearing a singlet and shorts. His hippo belly hung over the side, rising up and down as he snored. An immigration journal next to him flapped in the silent breeze.

‘Welcome to India!’ I smiled at Bec as I minded the bikes, watching her while she went down the stairs and woke him. He sat up abruptly, wiped his eyes and, without concern for present company, hawked out his sinuses and spat a long stream of gooey mucus behind him into a room full of broken bricks.

As if for contrast in this scene, another immigration official in a grey safari suit and a white beard came and sat beside this fat, unshaven slob, delicately smoking a tiny cigarette and sipping a small glass of
chai
.

Bec returned and I went down to fill out my passport details while she went up the stairs to mind the bikes. The old man looked up at the crowd that had swarmed around Bec within seconds.

‘Is she your wife?’

‘Yes.’ I lied.

‘Hmm.’ He stared at the staring men. ‘She told me she was your girlfriend.’

A smile creased my face. ‘We like to think we’re married.’

‘Hmm. You go there. It is not good for her with all these men,’ he said. When I got to Bec, 20 or so dark faces were fixed on her and she had backed up against a wall like a cornered doe unsure where to jump.

It was oppressively hot, hotter than I had ever remembered India to be. It was May and the monsoon season was upon us. We baked as we stood in the heat amid the flies, the dust and the noise. Down an end of an alley we dodged rubbish until we arrived at the reception desk of the Ajanta Hotel.

A white man with a beard, an albino Indian, processed our details with an indifferent air about him. With some staff help, we lugged the bikes up the stairs and unloaded and wheeled them into the room. We stripped off immediately, freeing our bodies from our damp, hot clothes, showering every five minutes or so and splashing water over ourselves to survive the furnace heat of our room.

This heat did not abate even at nightfall and to make matters worse the ceiling fan had given up with the last blackout. We were forced to open the windows to the hallway, though only slightly, from where cool drafts of air could reach us.

I don’t know what possessed me, it was the last thing on my mind as we lay naked, our bodies glazed with sweat … but Bec looked so beautiful there and, yes, so lethargic and, well,
helpless
, that I thought it might be a good idea to, well … er … sort her out!

So, there we were in the throng of hot, sweaty passion, our quiet moans humming in each other’s ears, when I looked up into the eyes of another man (not the visage I’m used to when having sex, I can tell you!).

‘What the —!’ A fat, moustached man in a singlet scampered down the hallway. We shut the windows. Thinking that this was enough to send the slime away, we resumed, but more quietly.

However …

When I looked up sometime later, there he was again, having pushed the window open, staring like a naughty schoolboy.

‘YOU BASTARD!’

Again he scampered off. I got up and slammed the window shut again.

‘I feel sick,’ said Bec.

‘So do I.’

Unfortunately, sexual harassment would become a daily and ongoing nuisance in India, even when we least expected it.

As we rode along with an old man on quiet rural country road the next day he asked if Bec was my wife. When I told him she was my girlfriend he asked ‘So, you are having the sexual intercourse?’

Then as we rode out along past lagoons and palm trees, two men on squeaky Indian bicycles rode behind us, sniggering like schoolboys, then grabbed Bec on the behind. She screamed and I chased after them, caught up to one and rammed him off the road with my front pannier bags. He bounced and clattered onto the grass down an embankment.

Later that day in a small town, we happened upon some kind of festival in full swing. Pink-faced men staggering around the street carrying garish gods on podiums. When we arrived on our laden bikes, the town stopped and we were instantly mobbed by a mass of men. Police moved into the throng with big sticks, hitting a few to disperse the crowd.

A man made his way in between Bec and me and promptly accidentally-on-purpose poked Bec in the breast. I slammed him hard and he fell back. The crowd rose up, and for a split second I thought they were going to descend upon me, but instead they grabbed him and cuffed him about.

The worst was when Bec and I fought about her cycling alone, and when I did cycle off and stop up ahead, I turned around to see her some way behind me being hassled by two men on a motorbike. I dropped the bike and chased them, my cleats in my cycle shoes causing me to skip and trip along the asphalt like a drunk Fred Astaire. The cowards, seeing this madman tap dancing and barking all kinds of violence at them, zipped the motorbike around and tore off in the opposite direction.