Thursday 12 February 2009

4500 - 5400 miles: Lahore to Mumbai

We had the shits within 24hrs of being in the city but we had a great time in Lahore and stayed a week. A city of 7 million people, there was no electricity or water for half the time, it was horrendously polluted, so much so that at times it felt hard to breathe and I developed a painful sore throat. Everywhere there was chaos, noise and filth - we could hardly walk on the pavements for the turds. Women were almost absent from whole districts creating a strange male dominated society with odd scenes such as ice cream parlours full of grown men eating brightly coloured desserts. The bazaars of the old city were still medieval and magical; as we squeezed through the narrow dirty streets, overhung by cables stealing the intermittent electricity, past auto rickshaws, bicycles and motorbikes and thousands of people, the street vendors amongst the filth were chopping off the head of a fish or a chicken, blood spurting onto passers-by.


The handful of travellers in the city were staying at the Regale Inn, amongst them several other cyclists and we enjoyed swapping tales of stone throwing children, unpaved roads and scary dogs. The Regale also takes guests to see sufi drumming, dancing and worship on Thursday nights - which consists of well over 1,000 Pakistani men and boys literally crammed into the compound of a famous sufi's mausoleum and getting completely stoned out of their heads on cannabis while two brothers drummed fantastically for hours on huge drums hung around their necks. For our own protection we were seated in an alcove of the shrine to witness what was one of the most otherworldly events I have seen in my life.

We left the city via the Grand Trunk Road which was lined on both sides with thousands of goats, sheep, cows and camels for several miles. Many of the animals were painted or decorated and canvas covers had been temporarily erected to give them shade. It was an incredible spectacle that seemed like it had been played out for centuries - animals being sold for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, when they would be slaughtered to commemorate the prophet Ibrahim's readiness to obey God, even to the point of sacrificing his son.

It was only 20 miles to the India/Pakistan border and we followed in Michael Palin's Himalaya series footsteps and stayed the night to watch the famous Wagah Border closing ceremony which was great fun - and with added spice as the two countries fronted up following the Mumbai terror attacks. We cheered for Pakistan - although we had only been there a short while we thought the country was an amazing experience and were it not for the security situation we would have loved to have spent more time there.

Our first taste of Indian bureaucracy was the two hours of form filling for endless customs and immigration officers to get into the country - though none of our bags was even looked at. It was another easy 20 miles to Amritsar. We had left the muslim world after four months and the head caps and white shalwar khameez of the Pakistanis gave way to the brightly coloured turbans and saris of the Sikhs. We visited the famous Golden Temple several days in a row it was such a beautiful, peaceful and fascinating place, thronged with thousands of Sikh pilgrims. Like most Indian cities Amritsar was dirty, noisy and polluted and in addition a power shortage means no electricity during the day so businesses were running petrol powered generators adding to the din. Still nursing our Lahore colds we pedalled south out of the city through the chaotic Indian "wacky racers" traffic of rickshaws, bicycles, motorbikes, autorickshaws, cars, trucks, carts, cows, dogs and pedestrians all going in all directions at the same time - it was an amazing sensual overload - and out into the paddy fields of the Punjab.


Something I hadn't considered before we set off was that as the world around us has slowly become more exotic so we have become more exotic to the world around us. We set out to see the world, we hadn't counted on the world wanting to see us! It seems that cycle tourists are fairly rare outside Europe so we have become used to curious people staring, waving or yelling at us, but I don't think anything could have prepared us for our first week in rural India.

Every time we stopped in a village or town we drew crowds of males who just stood staring at us, there were rarely less than 20 people, sometimes over 50. (The women and girls were too busy cooking, cleaning, washing, collecting and carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads, collecting water, working in the fields, on construction sites or at crafts and bearing, having and rearing countless children). The crowds would stand motionless watching us do whatever inane thing we were doing - having a drink, buying some food, eating a snack - and no-one spoke english or was too shy to try. It was unnerving and freaked me out. There were times when people were running towards us before we had even come to a stop so we changed our minds and kept cycling. Even on the move we couldn't escape them - Indians would be pulling up alongside on motorbikes or in cars, even a school bus full of children to stare at the James & Tracey freak show (i will admit that we probably do look a bit ridiculous compared to our surroundings).


We did get some amusement from Indian cyclists though. As we passed swiftly along we would overtake the local cyclists pootling along on their rusting, black steel, no gear Hero bicycles. A few minutes later we would start to hear squeaking/creaking noises that indicated an Indian bicycle in hot pursuit. The squeaking would get closer and closer until they were in our slipstream where they would remain noisily until they neared their destination, whereupon they would cycle past, pedalling madly, for a close look before turning off, sweating and panting with a big smile on their faces. It was a scene that was played out in exactly the same way countless times every day - I confess that in moments of boredom we sometimes sped up to amuse ourselves.


I am not exaggerating when I say that Indians were taking more photos of us than we were of India (the curse of mobile phones). It was like being famous but with none of the perks. Tracey though has been the unwitting star of the show - something made clear when a motorbike passed us and pulled over ahead to get another look; Tracey cycled past them and they drove off after her for another look before I even got there!

It was a flat landscape of bright green paddyfields and tree lined roads. The winter sun was warm and the skies were blue. It would have been tranquil and perfect cycling were it not for "horn ok please". One of the most infuriating Indian idiosyncrasies is that no-one uses rear view mirrors (and in fairness camel/cow carts don't have any) so if you want to overtake you have to blast your horn so that the vehicle/cycle/cart/pedestrian/stray cow you are about to pass does not swerve out and cause an accident (all Indian trucks have "horn ok please" painted on the rear of their trailers). In short, every vehicle that passes us blasts their horn at close range. In cities the din of horns is almost unbearable and we have noticed autorickshaw drivers wearing earplugs! We quickly went in search of the quietest roads we could find.


The Punjab countryside was intensively farmed and the only uncultivated land was housing some of India's millions so we slept mainly in cheap hotels in small towns but often felt imprisoned, too tired to leave the hotel and face the curious staring crowds. After 5 days of flat, flat, flat we reached a slight undulation which was the start of the Great Thar Desert and the paddyfields and Sikhs were replaced by desert scrub, camel carts and the wrapped turbans and superb moustaches of Rajastan. We were sad to leave the Sikhs - I have always found them to be welcoming, honest and dignified people.

We camped in the desert and woke to a thunderstorm that turned into a day of constant rain. Cycling along with plastic bags over my shoes I contemplated how it could be that in a desert in the dry season, where it barely rains in the monsoon it was pissing down. After 50 miles we arrived very wet, in the small town of Lunkaransar where the unpaved roads had turned to slippery mud and the power was out. There was only one place to stay and on the day before my birthday I found myself squashing cockroaches in the bathroom by torchlight. Next day the rain had stopped and with a backwind we cycled a swift 43 miles to Bikaner and for a birthday treat Tracey paid for a night of luxury and we stayed in the maharajah of Bikaner's palace - it was bliss.


We decided to do the next leg of our journey by camel. Our bikes were strapped onto the back of a camel cart which contained all of our bags, 7 days supplies of food for us, 3 camel men and 3 camels and the cooking and camping gear. Tracey and I rode a camel each and the third camel pulled the cart which the camel men sat on. It was a fantastic journey and one of the highlights of the trip so far. After the noise of the road it was so peaceful to plod slowly along through the silence of the desert, the only sounds the bells on the camels, occasional bird song and the chatter of the camel men. For us it was also luxury - the men cooked us tasty breakfast, lunch and dinner, we had an A-frame tent with clean sheets and lots of blankets for the cold nights and a bowl of warm water for washing each morning. We were served lunch on a blanket in the shade of a tree and at camp there were stools, a table and a campfire to keep warm while watching the fantastic starry sky. It would have been romantic were it not for the constant farting of the camels!


We passed through small villages and lonely farmsteads of round mud buildings with thatched roofs and there was no electricity or running water, brightly dressed women carried firewood and water on their heads - it was a landscape that you would associate more with Africa than India. We rode through fields of harvested millet, desert scrub and sand dunes with herds of small wild antelope and the occasional indian fox. Many of the tribal people were living on the margins of what desert land can support, though in a few places irrigation brought splashes of bright green. We camped wherever we happened to be when the sun started to set.

For two people with saddle sore arses it was a questionable venture to set out on and I got a bum blister on day one. We were sore for a few days but eventually got the hang of it. On Christmas Day we got the camel men to decorate the camels with tinsel we had brought with us and we had veg curry, lentil dahl, rice and chapatis for Xmas lunch. We got quite attached to the camels and got to know their different personalities - we named them Binky (the female and Tracey's ride), Sniffy (so called for his ability to smell out female camels and inflate his mouth palette as his mating call) and Lippy (after his inability to control his drooping lower lip). Each of the camels was owned and looked after by each of the camel men. We were both sad to reach the village of Keechin after a week and to have to say goodbye - we also felt a little bad that it would take the camel men 5 days to travel back to their families in Bikaner.


We cycled a short distance to the town of Phalodi and gave ourselves a Christmas treat and stayed in the Lal Niwas Heritage Hotel, a beautiful restored haveli (old decorative merchants house). It took us 2 days to cycle to the blue city of Jodphur. Village children begged for "one pen" as we passed, signalling that we had reached the touristy part of Rajastan. We really liked Jodphur. It has an amazing fort and palace perched on a clifflike plateaux above the city, whose buildings are painted pale blue and langur monkeys leap from roof to roof across the narrow streets of the old city. Our guesthouse had a rooftop terrace with a fantastic 360 degree view of the city. We were also really thrilled to meet up again with Annette, Joerg and Elmar, three Germans travelling from Munich to Sydney by motorbike - who we had first met in Turkey. We spent a great New Year with them at an Indian NYE party and Tracey and Annette got dressed up like the locals. Check out the photos on their blog http://weltreise-aje-der-weg-ist-das-ziel.blogspot.com/2009/01/bollywood-silvester-bollywood-new-years.html


From Jodphur we made a 200 mile detour east by bus to Jaipur to collect a parcel my parents had sent there and to have a look around for a few days, though I had been there on holiday 5 years before. The highlight was a trip to a huge wedding cake styled cinema to see the latest Bollywood release which was a fantastic cultural experience. I couldn't help smiling at the din made by the audience - Indians must be the loudest people on the planet.

We returned to Jodphur and cycled south. Having been cycling East - South-East almost continuously since leaving home we found cycling south in India into the low winter sun somewhat dazzling and also resulted in a silly sunglasses tan. Tracey bought a sun-visor to help but now everyone thinks we are Americans.

We were still in a dry desert-like landscape and I enjoyed seeing wild antelope, black buck and blue bull roaming in crop fields alongside domesticated animals. In this area they are protected by the Bishnoi tribe who have strong environmental principles - I couldn't help but think that here was a model for conservation in an increasingly crowded world.


The tyres on our cycles are designed by Schwalbe to be puncture resistant - Tracey's pass a "drawing pin test". We have not found them to be exactly puncture proof but in 5,000 miles across some rough terrain we had only 5 punctures between us. We decided to camp in some desert scrub one night and by the time we had pushed the bikes to a secluded spot the acacia thorns had given us 13 punctures that we spent the whole evening fixing - and we had to carry the bikes back to the road next morning.

We were cycling along small rural roads which at times were glorious and at others real ass breakers - Indian back roads are easily the worst surfaced of the trip so far. Our main problem though is that all the road signs are in hindi but our map is in english (it is a road atlas that the editor - the Surveyor General of India - admits contains many errors and he invites users to contact him with corrections. If we were to do so we would need to redraw most of the atlas!) - so at every junction we have to wait to flag someone down to ask them directions. As hardly anyone in rural India speaks english and we no hindi this in itself is not always straightforwards. It is also compounded by Indians preference to have a wild guess rather than to say they don't know. So we have to ask several people to make sure and we are often told different things - at times it feels like one of those game shows where 3 people tell a story and the contestant has to guess who is telling the truth. We get lost and regularly find ourselves cycling on roads that do not exist on our map, not really knowing where exactly we are - but we get there in the end and have a great time in the process.
After 4 days cycling from Jodphur we were ready to make our assault on Mount Abu, only the road up from the west on our map was in fact a pilgrims footpath up the side of a mountain so we had to detour 25 miles and then start the 14 mile ascent. The scenery was fantastic as the forested mountain rises straight out of the plain. In the evening light troupes of monkeys lined the road watching us sweating our way slowly to the top. Unfortunately we ran out of daylight and legs before we reached the summit and hitched a ride in the back of a truck for the final 3 miles to the hillstation resort at 1200 metres above sea level. It was really cold at night and even in our room we slept in woolly hat and longjohns. Two days later the descent down the mountain was great fun and we rode nearly 80 miles before finally finding a scrap of uncultivated field to pitch our tent in as it got dark. As the full-moon rose in the fields all around us Hindus started tuneless chanting, singing, banging and periodically howling at the moon - a pagan din that went on all night and terrified Tracey. If the Great Wall of China is visible from space then astronauts must be able to hear the billion people of India!

The following day we crossed into the "dry" and largely muslim state of Gujarat. The landscape flattened into desert which would eventually become an enormous salt plain - the Rann of Kutch, where we went on safari to see Asiatic Wild Ass and flamingos. Almost overnight we left the cool winter of northern Indian and met the heat and humidity of the south. At this point my friend Sean's imminent arrival in Mumbai on business interrupted our plans and we cut short our tour of Gujarat and made our way to Ahmenabad. While wandering a bazaar in the muslim part of this city I noticed Black Kites swooping down into a dingy narrow lane. The filthy, pungent street was awash with live and dead poultry and the various parts of in various states of decomposition in dirty wicker baskets for sale. Vendors were periodically tossing unwanted parts, such as chicken heads, into the street and the large birds of prey were flying down and picking them up. I got my camera out to try and capture the scene and a chicken-head thrower tried to help by tossing heads into the street near me - but the birds were too close and fast to photograph. The chicken-head thrower though had realised that if he threw the heads by my feet I was nearly knocked down by the birds and thus I found myself playing a bizarre game of kick the chicken heads as he lobbed them at me like a tennis ball machine and Black Kites swooped around my feet.

From Ahmenabad we caught the Gujarat Mail overnight train 300 miles south to Mumbai to meet Sean as we could not have cycled the distance in time. Miraculously our bikes emerged largely unscathed from the luggage coach and we ventured out into the muggy dawn of this city of 22 million people. I had imagined Mumbai to be like a nightmare union of Tehran, Lahore and Sau Paulo but as we cycled down the clean, wide, tree lined streets with civilised traffic I could not have been more wrong. The British left a legacy of colonial era buildings in the city but it seemed that their values of order have also persisted and it hardly felt like the India we had been cycling through. It was also surprisingly touristy given that there are not many sights.


It was really lovely to see a close friend after 8 months and Sean's legendary hospitality was in such contrast to our budget travel that I was almost overwhelmed eating cheddar cheese and Tracey was grinning from ear-to-ear at the sight of a dozen mini wine bottles.



It was the week-end of the Indian release of Slumdog Millionaire and the media was full of commentary on the movie and what it said about Mumbai and India, which made a change from the constant coverage of the Mumbai terror attacks and their aftermath, which the city seems as yet to come to terms with.

We said a sad farewell to Sean and laden down with goodies and new kit we caught the ferry from Mumbai harbour, 15 miles south across the bay to the village of Mandwa and the start of the Konkan Coast. The sun glistened on the Arabian Sea, it was hot and humid and there was not a cloud in the tropical sky.