Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (18 page)

‘Are you talking nonsense again, Vinnie?’ It was Arti. She put her hand on his shoulder and eyed me. ‘He is out of step, stupid boy. We love him … well, most of us!’ she laughed.

Vinnie’s face twisted. He adjusted a large bangle around his wrist, known as a
kara
.

‘You are Sikh,’ I asked, ‘but you don’t wear a turban?’

‘That is because Arti cut off all my hair!’

Arti smiled. ‘Yes, we are all Sikhs but we do not bother with this turban business.’

‘Does that cause problems with other Sikhs?’

‘I don’t care if it does. We are who we are,’ she disappeared to get herself more tea. Ah, another class unto themselves, a bubble floating above the heads of the masses.

Rebecca, pale with tiredness, yawned.

‘I’ll let you rest,’ Vinnie got up. ‘Tomorrow, I could give you a lift in my pick-up truck to Shimla if you like.’

Later that night in the one-man tent, we lay together with hardly an inch to turn. It was hard enough when I had last tried it on my own in the desert of Rajasthan crammed with pannier bags around my ears. Now, we could barely move. Bec was hot, her body burning up with exhaustion. It began to rain lightly.

‘Ah, how nice,’ I whispered to Bec and we cuddled closer. Soon those light drops became heavy balls of water bouncing on the tent. This prompted me to recall bumping into a couple on the Annapurna Circuit who erupted with the oddest of coincidences.

‘I know the guy that sold you that tent and feels bad about it.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, there was a recall on it. Apparently it fails.’

‘Fails? Like how? Does it burst into flames? What?’

‘Dunno.’ They went back to stuffing their faces with apple pie.

I soon felt the ‘fail’.

‘There’s water leaking in here!’ Bec said it as if it were my fault. ‘All down the side.’

I splashed my toes in a growing puddle. The tent channelled water along the seams regardless of how I adjusted the guy ropes.

It rained. All night. And we were wet. All night. All night long. We didn’t sleep a wink. When we crawled into the dawn, a puffy face beamed down into our soggy tent. ‘So, how about that lift to Shimla?’

We all squashed inside the ute, bikes and bags loaded in the back, Vinnie excusing himself as he searched between my legs for the gearstick.

‘Hey, that’s not the gear stick!’ I joked. Vinnie laughed. Bec rolled her eyes.

After the 20 kilometre windy drive up to Shimla, Vinnie arranged a room for us at the YMCA, a rambling old hotel overlooking the Himalayan valleys of Himachal Pradesh. Our room was large, and we draped our wet things everywhere we could: over the mantelpiece, the window skirting, light fittings; we spread the wet tent under the bed. The room soon stank like a wet dog.

In the afternoon, Vinnie took us on a tour of Shimla (named after the god Shamla Devi). Set amongst pine and oak trees and located at over 2000 metres, it was by far the most British looking of cities I’d seen in India. Tudor-styled buildings, like the Shimla Town Hall, were common while The Gaiety Theatre (which still held plays) was more of a Gothic design. Not surprisingly, Shimla had once been the capital of India, or, rather, the summer capital for the British Raj since 1864.

Every year trainloads of civil servants, soldiers and government officials would transfer their families and offices to the cooler, greener hills from the unbearable swelter of Calcutta. Now, bungalows and mansions for India’s nouveau riche dotted the valley as well as numerous cafés, restaurants, cinemas and shops.

On the Mall, we passed a sign at an intersection which read ‘Scandal Corner’.

‘Why is it called Scandal Corner?’

‘Because people come here to gossip.’

‘About what?’

‘Anything and everything. That is why it is called “gossip”!’

Actually, it had more to do with the fact that Shimla had once had a reputation for adultery. Many unattached soldiers (and women) during the British Raj would come to Shimla to escape the heat – and instead found torrid affairs. Thus Scandal Corner was a catch up point (though I found it odd that the council had wanted to advertise the fact).

I noticed a family of rhesus monkeys on a nearby stone wall, grooming each other for fleas.

‘Don’t look at the monkeys!’ Vinnie warned. ‘They’ll attack you. They’re pests. They should have them taken away for animal experiments.’

‘What!’ Bec lit up. ‘You seriously want these monkeys harmed?’

‘They are a nuisance. They steal things, tear your clothes, spread rabies.’

‘Oh!’ Bec huffed and stormed off ahead of us.

‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Hanuman is your monkey god.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you revere Hanuman.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you say that most Indians hate monkeys.’

‘Yes.’

‘So why do you revere a monkey as a god if you hate monkeys?’

‘Hmm,’ he thought for a moment. ‘I don’t get it either!’

At the Indian Coffee House, we sat among a crowded table of men wearing tweed jackets, smoking pipes and sipping coffee. Waiters flittered through the haze of smoke and thick laughter in their white uniforms and crimped crested caps. It didn’t look like much had changed since India’s independence. The posters were from the 1940s and most of the decor was from the same period. I liked the smell of the place – a lazy, relaxed smell harbouring dust and memories.

‘Things were much better when the British were here,’ Vinnie bemoaned again, then, looking around, I presumed for Arti, continued. ‘Things ran better. They had respect. They knew how to run the country. Not like Indians.’

‘But wouldn’t you prefer your own people ruling rather than a foreign power exploiting the country?’ I asked.

‘No! Most Indians would agree with me. The government is so corrupt. Nothing is maintained. Look at this place. It used to be a cantonment for the British Army. It is falling to pieces. People are selfish. They think only of themselves. Just look at the litter.’

Vinnie’s distaste for Indian rule was surprising to me. But it wasn’t just him. Even the YMCA manager chimed in, telling us, ‘the reason there is no hot water is that the Indians leave the hot water tap open!’

But it was spiritual leaders for whom Vinnie reserved a special distaste.

‘Gandhi was a Gujarati. He didn’t care what happened to us here in Himachal Pradesh. He was a spineless jellyfish. He concocted with Nehru to do away with the Muslims. We hate him in these parts.’

‘Oh. Then, what’s that doing here?’ I said, pointing to a picture of a benevolent Ghandi proudly hanging behind him.

Vinnie grimaced. ‘It is a relic.’

‘Hi! Where’re you going? Where’re you going?’

A thin woman, late 30s, wearing a yellow bandana, sunglasses and long shorts, slid her mountain bike to a halt in front of us.

We were in the Kinnaur region (which had only recently been opened up to tourists), where the western Himalayas connect India to Chinese-occupied Tibet. Already we had travelled for five days, hoping to get to Tobo, where there was supposed to be the
best-preserved
Indo–Tibetan art in the world, then to Manali. This was according to two excitable Australians we had met in Shimla. What they had failed to tell us about was the veritable building site we would have to cycle through to get there.

The Indian government and the World Bank had been building a hydroelectric dam for the past seven years, leaving a trail of gravel trucks, narrow dusty roads and cement factories. Colonies of French, Italian, British and German were perched and walled off next to shanty towns and decrepit villages. And now, with monsoonal rains turning the rocky banks to waterfalls of mud and eventually landslides, the chances of completing our circuit seemed slim. And dangerous. During the previous year, seven bridges had been swept away, and the year before that an entire town, Wangtu, had been destroyed. The Indians blamed the Chinese for the catastrophe, citing an extra release of dam water, somewhere up there, in those bare hills above us.

‘Have you come from Sangla? It’s a hike up there, isn’t it?’ Her English Midlands accent was thick and elastic in my ears. She looked at my bike.

‘Christ! You’re carrying a lot of gear. What’ve you got in there?’

‘Er …’

‘You should ride like me,’ she said and swung her head back in the direction of the two plump panniers on her bike. ‘I’ve been all through India with just this. That’s all you need. A pair of flip-flops, a shirt, a sleeping bag and a hammock. That’s it. Not all of THAT! Got any water?’

‘Let me see,’ said Bec and fumbled for her water bottle.

‘I’m so dehydrated! ’Ere. Know anything about bikes?’

‘Well, I’ll have a shot –’

‘Can you fix my front wheel? I had a bingle on the way down from Gangotri. An old guy with a mallet mashed it back into shape but I got a problem with one spoke. The thread’s hanging out.’

I began tightening the troublesome spoke.

‘I don’t bother carrying any tools myself. I let the Indians do it. They’re amazing with bikes. They can fix anything. Although …’ and then she went into great detail about how a number of bicycle mechanics had stripped the threads on her new pedal cranks, mashed a derailleur with an oversized chain link, and sold her tyres that exploded on braking.

‘When something breaks, I just get parts sent over. You don’t need all the latest crap, stuff you just don’t
NEED
.’ She threw another look at my bike.

‘Oh, I hate bicycle snobs, don’t you? This Irish knob says I’ve got to have Shimano XL speed whatsit, or a multi-tool that can flick heads off beers, or German tyres with the snake-belly double-ridge something-or-other—’ Her head snapped down at my wheels. ‘Ooh! Those tyres won’t stand up to this road!’

‘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.’