Wolf in India

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sv-wolf
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Wolf in India

#1 Unread post by sv-wolf »

Reflections

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"The ride you are about to tackle is challenging at times but is not a test of skill - however it has defeated many experienced riders that got too cocky. India can be an unpredictable and at times dangerous place to ride but in terms of reward it is unparalleled - en route you can literally gauge your rexperiences by the minute. Many people have their lives entirely changed during the rally and it is fair to say that most of you will have at least your view on life changed by this trip."

"The Country
India. Indiaaaahhhh."

EnduroIndia Roadbook 2007

It is now three weeks since I got back from riding in India, and I still have an impression on my left and right forearms of the tight-fitting armour shirt I wore during the trip. Maybe…, I thought - maybe my skin is losing its elasticity. Maybe, I’m beginning to turn into an "old person". I did a quick calculation: in the year 2012, I would become eligible for a senior citizen bus pass. That scared me. Growing old was never in my game plan. I began to feel glad that I hadn't put off doing this trip for another year.

How many years of riding and travelling did I have left?

That wasn't an idea I was ready to confront right now, and probably not for some time to come. I was still getting over two terrible years of discovering what it is like, suddenly and unexpectedly, to run out of time.

OK, I decided. That's enough!

So I started to think about something else - about my next bike trip.

I'm at a crossroads in life. I have no ties, nothing to hold me down. I can do more or less anything I want - anything! What I want to do is to travel. I've had loads of thoughts about where I want to go and what I want to do. But wherever I go, whatever I do, it has to include a bike. These days, I can't imagine life without one.

In the last six months I've been doing some heavy fantasising about all the places I want to see. Right now, though, I just want to go back to India. I want to go on my own. And I want to go soon. I need to know if the 2000km journey I have just taken through its southern states - through its mountains, jungles, forests and towns - was real or just a dream. Because that what is seems like - a strange, impossible waking dream.

It wouldn't take much to go back. You can hire a Royal Enfield Bullet motorcyle in India for £7 a day. Petrol is dirt cheap. I know I could live very well on £80 a week. And, I've now got some familiarity with the place - well, at least, I think I have. India is huge, varied, beautiful, filthy, colourful and incomprehensible. It's everything that people say that it is. It’s overwhelming.

How familiar is that?

Earlier this year I flew a third the way round the world with 130 other bikers for eleven days of hard riding through some of the most spectacular scenery I've ever seen and on what must be some of the craziest roads on the planet. India is alien in an oddly comfortable sort of way. It has left me still struggling with a headful of confusing images. I don't suppose, though, that India could ever be put into order. It's not that sort of place.

To my European sense of geography the landscapes, the culture, the climate and the sheer variety of the sub-continent are too huge to be truly comprehensible. But, to an Englishman, India is also familiar: Indians drive on the left (more or less), English is widely spoken and understood, good curry restaurants are not difficult to find, there is an Indian grocer on ever street corner. Everyone understands cricket. It's just like home. And apart from all that, the fundamental preoccupations of Indians are no different from those of other people wherever they may be.

At first, I had some preconceptions to deal with. India looms large in the British imagination especially for someone of my generation. Whatever I might think of the empire now, India was part of my early consciousness - a vague part maybe, but still a part. When I was a kid, most British coins carried the abbreviated latin phrase, Ind Imp (emperor of India) around the king's head, news items about India were regularly broadcast by the BBC (much more frequently than news items about Europe), and I grew up reading exotic tales of the sub-continent in dozens of story books.

It's not surprising, then, that before I left England I had some very strange, half-unconscious notions of the place. I flew out of Heathrow with a mental image of India that was as exotic and mysterious as anything in a nineteenth-century picture book. I imagined a land that smelled of spice and twanged to the sound of sitars. I knew that Indian air would be a strange and mysterious thing to breathe. The country would be more fabulous, more colourful and more exotic than Europe in every way.

What I found was a bunch of people going about their daily business: riding their scoots; digging their fields; repairing their houses; raising their children; trying to make a few rupees – or ten million of them - by any means at their disposal. It wasn't so different to anywhere else I has been. Life in India is practical, dumb and routine. Its people are kept busy dealing with the very ordinary demands of material existence.

But, now that I'm back home and have seen the ordinary, everyday India with my own eyes, I still can't quite bring myself to believe in it. Yes, India is down-to-earth and familiar. But its familiarity highlights just how strangely different it is: Indians live by a complex set of values just like us, but they are very different values; they worship and pray to similarly bizarre gods, but they are different gods; they live a life governed mostly by habit, but their habits are very suprising to a Westerner.

And there is one difference above all others that distinguishes their lives from ours: Indian people have not lost their ability to be happy or to enjoy themselves. In England, that ability has declined noticeably in my lifetime. The more consumerist we become, the unhappier we get. You see a common emptiness reflected in people's faces as you pass them on the street. You see it in pubs and restaurants, in shops and offices and, worst of all, you see it in your own home. In India, things are different. In India there is always a smile. At any moment, in the most unexpected of circumstances, on the dustiest road, in the midst of the direst poverty, there is always the opportunity for a smile.

India is still an open-air, very public kind of place. Lives are lived out of doors, and you are never very far from the humm and buzz of communal existence. It's an earbashingly noisy place. (One in six human beings alive on this planet today is an Indian.) For people who have nothing - and often that is literally true - relationship is everything. Service to others is still a joy, and life, it seems, is worth the living.

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Two women from the village of Sanyasipura

As hard as I think about it, though, I'm still unable to explain how I really feel about the place. If I start to tell someone about my experience, I get very excited. But before too long I've run out of words and a sense of frustration and puzzlement sets in. I know what I feel, but the words which come out of my mouth make my journey sound like a trip down the road to the local chippie. And I guess that is the truth of the matter. India is both very ordinary and very extraordinary at the same time. The effect it had on me is similar to the effect my armour shirt is having on my arms. It has left a deep and lasting impression but for reasons that I can't explain.

Even though I still find the place a puzzle and am struggling to articulate my feelings about it, I'll have a go. And I suspect that what I write here will surprise me as much as it may anyone else.

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Everyone in India wants to have their phtograph taken

There is no real centre to this country, no real place to start describing it. It is beautiful beyond belief, disorganised, riotous, drab, colourful, naïve, sophisticated, innocent, shockingly corrupt, elevated, venal, bureaucratic, and vast. It has immense plains and high mountains, enormous rivers, forests and jungles. It has rice fields and rubber plantations. There are tea bushes and coffee bushes, spice groves and coconut trees, bullock carts, street vendors, elephants and tigers, ascetics and con-men, suffering and indifference, spiritual freedom and bonded slavery, mad truckers and holy cows.

I can’t get over the cows. Cows, of course, are sacred to Hindus and are allowed to wander about wherever they want. They house the souls of human ancestors and must not be harmed. I knew all this before I went, but until I saw them moving through the city streets like some strange law of nature, eating rubbish from the gutters or food from the stalls, or munching at the floral garlands on my bike… until I saw them, I did not really understand.

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Cows just loved the garlands of flowers which decorated our bikes.

The reverence Hindus show for these slow, docile beasts is a constant reminder of everything we busy Westerners have lost. Think of the most ingrained rules of our civilisation, our values and conventions, our most powerful institutions. Think of property, money, law, justice, labour, precedence, hierarchy, status, power, force, government. The great sleepy-eyed beasts know nothing of these things. Their lives are governed by a peaceable anarchy of the soul, wholly unidiverted by human rules or institutions.

They wander through private human gardens; they hold up human traffic; and they poo in human streets. They make their meditative way down busy thoroughfares through seas of smoothly parting traffic. They eat fruit from a vendor's stall, and the vendor appears not to notice. The whole of the country adapts itself to their smallest acts. Each time you see a cow in India you also see the normal rules and habits of human society momentarily suspended. By being what they are and by doing what they do, cows crack open the moulds of social convention. They liberate the mind. They give us a glimpse into a world of social freedom that we can hardly imagine. I can't really explain. You have to see this happening for yourself.

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Molem. A dusty truck stop village in Goa state.

My first impressions of India were simple and immediate: it was hot, dusty, dirty, paranoid and poor. And all that hit me before I’d cleared Immigration at Goa airport.

Going through Immigration was an special experience in itself. The moment I stepped into line a young woman approached in an elegant sari and handed me a form. To my list of first impressions I now added, ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘confusing.’ I’ve never travelled anywhere before where I was required to fill in so many forms to so little apparent purpose, or where those forms were checked so many times by so many frosty-faced men and women in military-style uniforms.

And maybe they were the military. Goa airport, the main entry point to one of India’s prime tourist destinations, also appears to double as some sort of military base. Row upon row of helicopters and planes in camouflage colours lined the exceptionally long runway. And there were signs everywhere saying ‘No Photographs.’ Not that there was much you would want to take a picture of. The airport terminal was shabby and run-down. It's wood panelling was dessicated by the heat. The Baggage Reclaim carousel wheezed alarmingly. The air conditioning rattled.

I collected my luggage and queued at a Bureau de Change next to the carousel. It is illegal to export Rupees out of India so you have to change your money once you are inside the country. As I stood in line, another word spontaneously added itself to my growing list of adjectives. The word was, 'bizarre.' Watching the transactions taking place ahead of me, I began to realise that though the bureau had run out of large denomination notes, it was still breezily doing business.

The company I had travelled with had recommended that we could live very well on £300 for two weeks. So that's what people in front of me were asking to change - £300 each. In return for their English money, the bureau was handing out bundles of 10 Rupee notes. Ten Rupees is worth something less than 10p (or a little more than a US dime). I'll leave it to you to work out how many 10 Rupee notes you would get for £300 ($450). The money came in big blocks of banknotes about the dimension and colour of a standard house brick, close-wrapped in polythene and, just for good measure, held together with a huge staple driven through the centre. A queue of confused looking Brits were leaving the airport laden with so many bricks they could probably add a sizeable extension to Government House in New Delhi.

Fortunately, before I got to the window, an excited looking man burst into the back of the booth brandishing a box containing a new supply of notes. Well, perhaps it was fortunate. Perhaps not. In exchange for my £300 I was handed a more reasonably sized wad of 1000 rupee notes (worth about £12.00 each) and a selection of smaller deonominations. This proved to be something of a problem later as many shopkeepers in the more rural areas were struck dumb at the mere sight of such vast sums of money.

At the airport exit, a pair of military guys were collecting the final counterfoils from the oddly functionless forms we had filled in earlier. It was a strange job for heavily muscled, armed guards in sharp khaki kit and army berets. Their uniforms and neatly clipped moustaches bristled with importance and just a little menace. They stood, wooden and erect, like a line of sentinels guarding the gates to another world. And beyond them lay a different India, a different fragment of this hugely fragmented country. It was neither stiff nor bureaucratic but utterly chaotic! Beyond the doorway, eager young lads in floppy airport uniforms fought each other to help us to get our luggage to the waiting buses. EnduroIndia staff hovered around the entrance giving the same advice to each of us as we passed. “The busses are up on your left," they said, "Don’t let go of your luggage.”

I was bleary-eyed from 48 hours without sleep, a 14-hour flight, and a strange in-flight dinner. I was feeling too tired, too grouchy and far too ana to feel appreciative of all this sudden hyperactive confusion. So I just did as I was told. I clung blindly to my trolley (as did my three bickering helpers) and attempted to steer my own course towards the busses.

Fortunately, the wildly different directions in which my arguing helpers were attempting to steer my luggage trolley cancelled each other out and I managed to keep a straight course without too much difficulty. The moment we arrived, the three lads ceased their argument and their faces lit up with three brilliant smiles of success. Without even glancing in my direction, they turned on their heels and hurried off without another word to bestow their services on another ignorant and helpless traveller.

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Uncertainty at Goa airport. The guy in brown, by the way is 'Ben' who only took his motorcycle test
a month before flying out to India. And until he arrived he hadn't ridden since.


Later, I learned to appreciate the very real and highly spirited nature of the Indian desire to help. And I came to see all this kindness-induced chaos as a symbol for the way this extraordinary country manages to function. For function it does, but not by any Western logic. At a purely selfish level, I hope it never changes. It is all part of the joy and mayhem of the place. It’s fun, it works, and it is (usually) very good natured - until it isn't. And then you have to watch out. Swim with it, and the Indian way of doing things is actually far less stressful than the mechanically ordered systems we have in The West. But you must flow with the current. Fight it, and this continent will chew you up and spit you out like a load of old cardamon pods. Its way of doing things is inimitably its own, and it is as remorseless and irreversible as the waters of the Ganges.
Last edited by sv-wolf on Tue Jul 15, 2014 11:56 pm, edited 50 times in total.
Hud

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blues2cruise
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#2 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Excellent tale of your first day. The pics of the locals are good, too. Did you happen to inquire what the red splotch is on a couple of the young men? The other two don't have it.
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#3 Unread post by Scoutmedic »

:nicethread: :kewl:

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#4 Unread post by noodlenoggin »

Ahhh, the "India Blog." I've been waiting...

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#5 Unread post by sv-wolf »

blues2cruise wrote: Did you happen to inquire what the red splotch is on a couple of the young men? The other two don't have it.
Hiya Blues

Yes I did enquire - from several people and got some confusingly different answers (this is India) so I did some reading up on it as well. That clarified things a little bit, but only a bit. It's very complex.

It's an ancient symbol, probably at least 4,000 years old. It is called a Tilak, though strictly speaking only when worn by a man. When a woman wears it, it is usually called a Tilakam or a Bindi. (It has several other names as well)

In Hindu thought a woman is married to her husband, but her husband is married only to a god. How patriarchal can you get! But actually this is an idea that was once very common in Christian thought as well. I remember coming across a passage somewhere in a poem by John Milton (author of 'Paradise Lost') which goes something like: "He for god, she for god in him" which expresses a similar idea.

If a woman wears a red tilakam it means she is married. If she wears a black one it means she is still single. If a man wears a tilak (usually red or orange), it can have a whole variety of subtle meanings but broadly it is a symbol of his devotion to a god. This is what it means on these young guys.

But it's also used on all sorts of ritual occasions. It can be placed on the forhead as a sign of blessing, or as a greeting. All Hindu ceremonies apparently begin with the placing of a Tilak topped off by a few grains of rice. I saw it everywhere. I was given one on several occasions.

From what I read, I suspect you could devote a whole life to the scholarly research of the thing.
Hud

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#6 Unread post by sv-wolf »

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"We start the rally in Goa as it allows a gentle introduction to India and has good infrastructure that enables us to get going in style with proper backing from Government and Police etc. Don't be fooled by this developed tourist haven though, it is not representative of the trip and very soon we enter a totally different world...Today [Goa] is known for its hedonistic party scene, paradise beaches and beautiful food. We love it. Enjoy!"
EnduroIndia Roadbook 2007

While we were standing around the two locked busses like a bunch of lemons wondering what the hell to do next, a stubby little truck backed up beside us. It was painted battleship grey. It didn’t have any identifying markings on it except for the name of its owner, ‘Vijay,’ stencilled across the top of the windscreen. In true Indian fashion, the cab was decorated with garlands, stars and pots of plastic flowers. As the truck came to a halt a bunch of skinny young Indian guys appeared out of nowhere. They all started shouting at one another and grabbing our luggage like a pack of demented ninjas.

Within seconds they were slinging cases up onto the back of the truck. I looked around for reassurance but everyone seemed just as confused as I was. After a moment, the guy beside me shrugged and said, “Might as well go with it. If the luggage gets ripped off then at least we are all in the same boat.” I wasn’t exactly convinced by his chilled-out wisdom, but right then I didn’t have an alternative suggestion to make. All I could do was stare. I did try asking one of the Indian guys what was going on but either he didn’t speak English or he didn’t want to. Over in one corner a skinny ninja and an Enduro were fighting over a suitcase. The organisers were nowhere to be seen. It was at this early stage in the trip that we got our first hint that communication was not one of their priorities.

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Two ninjas carefully arrange our luggage in the back of their truck

As it turned out, the truck and the ninjas were all part of the arrangements. It is just that no-one thought to tell us. And looking back on it later I felt a bit embarrassed about my knee-jerk suspicions. The truth is, India is not a nation of thieves. Property crime exists, but it is not common at street level. It was all part of my Westerner’s ingrained prejudice about non-Western cultures. The Indian guys though, had a ball, giggling to each other at our attempts to hang on to our luggage.

From the outside, the hired bus that was to take us from the airport to our first hotel looked like a conventional, reasonably modern vehicle. And that impression persisted for several complacent minutes until the driver arrived and I got to climb on board. Yikes! That was my first serious culture shock.

The inside of the bus had a very particular kind of beaten-up look that I'd already seen in the airport’s ‘arrivals lounge’. It was shabby, broken down and faintly dirty. But it was not a Western kind of shabbiness. There was a kind of cheerfulness to it, and a dried-up, dusty look that I put down to the climate. The sides of the bus, its roof and floor were entirely bare. At the front was a clock. Not the usual unobtrusive, built-in kind of clock that you expect to find on a bus, but an ordinary, round-faced, household clock roughly nailed to the back of the driver’s cab.

‘Ordinary,’ however, is not the right word to describe it. Two familiar images adorned its face. To the left, was the head of the crucified Christ, complete with dripping blood and crown of thorns. To the right, a doleful Virgin in a traditional blue and white gown (which made her look like some kind of opening seed-pod) was casting her eyes mournfully up to heaven. It was just the sort of thing to put you into a good mood for your holiday! The artwork was typical Catholic kitch – soft-focussed and very sentimental, the sort of thing I had grown up with as a child, and which to this day gives me a funny, queasy feeling in my stomach whenever I see it.

The ‘air conditioning’ was something else entirely. Nailed loosely to three corners of the coach on rough wooden mounts were three ordinary office fans. Each hung downwards slightly at an odd angle - more the result of gravity than engineering - and each was plugged into an ordinary domestic electrical socket fixed to the wall nearby. I found a seat well away from a pair of bare electrical wires that were dangling from one of the sockets. I pulled back the grimy curtains to let in some light. But the glass in the window beside me was cracked and had been partly faced over with a broken bit of plywood. So, OK, I thought. OK! This is interesting. I leant back and tried to take it all in while everyone was getting settled.

“Welcome to India,” I thought.
“Hey listen,” India shouted back, “you’re not in poncey England now!”
That was true!. I’d come to this place with a head full of images. In my mind I had conjoured up the grand sweep of Indian culture but I hadn’t known what to expect from the inside of an Indian bus. All I knew was that I hadn’t stepped out onto the exotic, stage-set I’d vaguely imagined.

The inside of the bus was very unexpected (Well, what had I expected?) Distant memories of long, tedious train journeys and sleepless ferry crossings began to go through my head. Suddenly, I was back in the 1950s. I was on one of our annual family holidays to visit my aunts in rural Ireland.

Ireland, in those days was poor and drab - and very, very alien to a small boy who had only ever known the uniformity of post-war Britain. Now, nine thousand miles away and fifty years on, I was experiencing the same sense of foreignness and the same vague feeling of physical insecurity that I had felt then. The dirty, broken-down Indian bus and my aunt’s dirty broken-down furniture seemed all of a piece - so different to my fresh, orderly, English home And to make my situation stranger still, everything I saw now had taken on that special kind of hallucinatory clarity that comes from long lack of sleep. Outlines seemed exceptionally sharp (except my own); colours appeared washed-out, almost translucent; and the world outside my own thoughts was no more solid than a thin membrane stretched taut across my eyes. I was all conflicted inside. I was enjoying this, and I wasn’t.

Go with it, I thought defensively. No point in trying to understand it now.

As the bus drove off, the gears crunched, the engine wheezed and my seat seemed to take on a life of its own. I looked up at the clock. It was still only half-past-eight in the morning. It would be 10 am by the time we completed the drive to the hotel in Kavalossum. Then we’d have the whole day to ourselves, to sleep and relax. It took just the merest thought of sleep for my muscles to twich free. They let go so suddenly they seemed almost to take on a life of their own. I had no idea how tense I had been holding myself till then. I hate long journeys. I’ve never been good at sitting still.

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As the bus trundled through the half-built, semi-urban landscape near the airport, all overgrown with concrete and vegetation, sunlight flashed brilliantly across the inside of the bus. One of these flashes caught the glass of the grotesquely pious clock on the bus wall. The Virgin seemed to wince a little. “The bus goes doesn’t it?” she said, glaring at me for a moment, “Sit back, relax, and don’t be so tight arsed.”

Oh grief! I’d only been in India an hour and I’d already had my first religious experience!

My brain was pretending to be out of control. It was having fun playing little games with me. I needed some sleep - badly. But there was no chance of sleeping yet. So, I did what the bad-tempered, pasty-faced Virgin had suggested. I settled back and tried to relax. And as I relaxed, I started to giggle inside like a kid. It was then that I realised that I was going to enjoy India - very much.

The airport lies on the outskirts of Vasco da Gama, (or just ‘Vasco’), the capital city of the Indian state of Goa. The city is named after the first European known to have visited these shores by sea. Vasco was Portuguese. And for centuries after his arrival, Goa remained part of the Portuguese Empire. The Portuguese hung on tenaciously to their tiny Goan colony right through the period of the British Raj and refused to give it up even after the rest of India had won its independence in 1947. It remained in Portuguese hands until 1953 when Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, lost patience and sent in the troops. Exit the Portuguese.

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Never having been part of the British Empire, Goa is one of the few parts of India that does not understand the rules of cricket - though extensive coverage of the game on Doordoshan, the state TV network, is slowly changing that. Portuguese influence is everwhere, you find it in the larger colonial-style buildings, in the food and in the religion. The buildings have been left to decay, but one-third of the population is still resolutely Catholic (courtesy of The Inquisition).

The bus rattled and grunted onwards towards the hotel, past numerous churches, mostly small, sometimes standing beside Hindu temples or Islamic mosques. There were frequent wayside shrines, some simple, some very ornate. It wasn’t always easy to tell which were Hindu ones and which were Christian. Religion here is gaudy and colourful and, according to my guide book, very relaxed. Hindu and Christian communities often have joint celebrations. But then, in this country, people often practice more than one religion at a time. Promiscuity is not limited to the flesh.

The Catholics are not the only Christians here. There are members of the Syrian Church, the Coptic Church and various Protestant denominations as well. There are also the native Nestorians who established their own unique brand of Christianity on India’s Malabar coast in the first century AD even before the Western Church had established itself in Europe.

I tried to start a conversation with the guy who’d taken the seat next to mine a couple of times, but it didn’t go anywhere. We were both too knackered to talk much, so we settled down to watch India going by. Occasionally, fields opened up on either side of us, but for much of the journey, it was the elegant palm forests that came sweeping down to the roadside. And from time to time, up beyond the forests, on the near horizon, we caught sight of the Ghat Mountains. These were to be our rocky companions throughout most of the trip.

The sudden, very flat fields were filled with a lush green grass. Many had huge signboards in the middle of them some with seductive ‘For Sale’ notices on them. Others bore proclamations that some new development of holiday homes would soon be arriving to fill up this space. Occasionally we passed paddy fields. Some were full of water and already planted with rice; others were still dry - for the ‘winter’ perhaps?

As we left the main 'highway' and rumbled onto the rural back roads of India, we passed by dozens of tiny villages, But these were unlike any villages I had ever seen in England or Europe. They were collections of plain concrete bungalows strung out on either side of us and painted in bright, dry colours. Each family home was squeezed into a gap between a half-dozen palm trees and seemed to belong to the roadside forest. The forest seemed hardly disturbed at all by their presence. Around the bungalows their were vigorous signs of routine domestic life everywhere: washing was hanging out to dry, hens clucked around under the trees, children played among them and an animal or two was stabled or tethered in the shade.

Wherever there were people, the road was lined with street vendors selling tea or hot food, or coconut milk. Some vendors had large metal crushing machines, hand operated, with spinning flywheels, that squeezed the juice out of sugar palms which they sold to passers-by as a drink. The stalls were put together with whatever materials had come to hand, old bits of wood, a few broken bricks, bamboo, woven palm leaves. They were crammed side-by-side into a narrow space between the forest and the road. Some of the stalls were on wheels.

We passed by a few small towns, each with maybe a couple of side streets that ran off through the fields or into the forest towards the morning sun, or, on the other side, down towards the coast and the endless tourist beaches. Shops were crammed closely together along the main road. Even the smaller ones were often hung with huge and elaborate signboards, with commercially painted artwork in bright colours. Everything in India is decorated. The writing on the signboards was often in English. And everywhere there were jumbles of overhead telephone wires – a real pain whenever you wanted to take photographs. Many of the buildings we saw were made from concrete (‘Pucca built’), but many had been constructed out of the local bricks. You see piles of these large, roughly shaped bricks everywhere, stacked up against people’s walls, on building sites, or just teetering at the side of the road.

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Goa and beaches go together (photo courtesy of Julia)

The thick, bright-red earth of this part of lowland India makes good bricks. It is dug out of the fields. It is hand-moulded and left out in the sun to bake. There’s no need for a kiln here. The good red earth and the blazing sun is all you need. Nothing escapes the tender mercies of the sun in this part of tropical India. Right now, it was early-morning, deep in the Goan ‘winter’ and already the temperature was rising. It’s not just the bricks that the sun bakes here, but everything, especially the people. They move slowly, and with minimal effort. Even the elephant dung left on the roads hardens in the heat and becomes as solid as concrete – so I was informed.

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I got kinda fascinated by these bricks. Maybe it is because my dad was in the building trade

Out in the morning sun, digging ditches along the side of the road with pick axes and shovels were dozens of women labourers. They were small, wiry women mainly. They wore calf-length saris in startling colours, wound tightly around their bodies, not loose and flowing. Their shovels were throwing up banks of red soil. We were to see this red earth almost everywhere in lowland Southern India. Some of it, six weeks after returning home, is still clinging tenaciously to my bike boots in the form of a fine red dust. I’m reluctant to clean them.

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Garlands of flowers for everyone on our arrival at the first hotel

The Old Anchor Hotel in the town of Kavalossum looked as though it belonged to another world. And in one sense it did. It was one of Goa’s big ‘Hotels’ catering for tourists, often Westerners, attracted there by the state’s great line of golden beaches. The main reception area was shaped whimsically like a gigantic Noah’s Ark, with a ship’s sloping sides and tiered ‘decks’ above. I dropped my head as I stepped off the bus to allow a young Indian woman to place a garland of flowers over my head and around my neck - a traditional welcome. Beside the entrance was a table covered with glasses of sugar cane juice. I could get to like this stuff.

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Hanging around at the hotel

The Hotel was really a complex of chalets arranged around a lawn and swimming pool. It looked attractive from the outside, but the rooms inside were shabby and worn. The paintwork had been slapped onto the walls without much care and the ‘kitchen’ was just a boxy space full of very old, chipped or rusty cabinets. There was no stove. The chalets had the same dried-up, makeshift feel about them that I had experienced at the airport and on the bus. It was intriguing and very welcome. But I was excited now and still couldn’t sleep.

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The river at the back of the hotel

The hotel lawns swept away from the chalets down towards a wide river, quite small by Indian standards. I sat out on the wall for a while watching the river go by, trying to catch up with myself. Out on the lawn, behind me, a young, good-looking European guy was giving yoga lessons to a crowd of adoring women. What a job! Spiritual enlightenment is in the very air, here in India. Every time I went past the spot over the next couple of days, there he was, sitting in lotus postion or doing cat posture with a different group of admirers.

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A notice inside the hotel room. Your guess is as good as mine, but I suspect permission would involve the exchange of Rupees

The word soon got around that the bikes had already arrived and were lined up in the ‘Parc Ferme’ across the road from the hotel entrance. I walked across with Pip, my roommate to get my first eyeful. And there they were, the Enfields - What a sight! - one-hundred-and-fifty of them arranged in rows across the field, all gleaming black bodywork and gold piping. and there, on the tanks, were the glowing gold and silver Enfield Badges. Each bike was 350ccs and 17bhp of sheer beauty. They looked gorgeous.

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Just some of the Enfield Bullets parked up opposite the hotel

Several of the mechanics were walking among the bikes, identifying each one and sticking a label onto the airbox casing. I went hunting for mine. Each label carried the following ominous information: the rider’s name, blood group, emergency contact telephone number, home address and age! A coloured ribbon was tied to the bar behind each pillion. Mine was pink. I was a member of ‘Team Pink.’ Pip, who I think was a blue, cracked the first ‘Pink’ joke of the trip. And it went on from there. Oh Well! The advantage of being a skinny and introverted beta male, long since past the testosterone age, is that life has lost most of its earnestness and just seems pretty ridiculous (or ridiculously funny) most of the time nowadays. I embraced my pinkness with a smile.

For the rest of the day there was little to do but get to know the other Enduros, eat and sit around drinking Kingfisher lager (if our experience was anything to go by, this is the only kind of beer it was possible to buy in Southern India.) Some of us went down to the beach, but I didn’t bother. I’ve never seen any point of lying around on beaches. But it was a lazy day.

In the evening we had an outdoor meal which would set the pattern of all the outdoor evening meals to come: a wide selection of curries – and several elaborate and spicy variants of the same. Then, at eight o’clock we gathered around the stage on the lawn for our ‘meet the team’ intro, followed by a session with our individual team leader. Jamie was my team leader: He was Leader of the Pinks. I never took to Jamie. He was struggling a bit himself, I think. Defended. A pleasant enough guy, if you could get anywhere near him. We didn’t have a lot in common. And that was fine.

The intro consisted of Simon (Mr Enduro himself) telling us for the umpteenth time what a fabulous time we were going to have. This was followed by introductions from the mechanics, the medical teams, the team leaders, the accommodation wallahs, the photographers, and Simon’s cousin, Gemma. Apart from Simon and his four buddies who were full time paid members of the Enduro organisation, everyone else was a volunteer. They came along to help out and in return they got an all-expenses-paid holiday. Several of them had been coming every year since near the beginning of EnduroIndia in 2002 – lucky bastards!

And after that it was time to get to bed. Getting to sleep has never been a problem for me once I hit the pillow. Normally, I can sleep through anything. And that ability has never served me as well as it did that first night in India. I was sharing a chalet with Pip and Brian. Pip and I were in one room and Brian was next-door. Pip was a really interesting guy but a world-class snorer. He could have snored for Europe all on his own. Some people have a whole repertory of grunts and whooofles and roars and pops, when they snore, but not Pip. Pip’s snores were monolithic, pure unadulterated columns of reverberating air that rose up to his nasal cavities and resonated there like tiny Himalayan avalanches in an echo chamber. I had a Dictaphone with me and switched it on for a while before going to sleep to catch the wonder of it all. I considered telling him that he ought to see his doctor about it. It is now well established that, over the years, snoring at that level of intensity can cause brain damage. I chickened out. I concluded that sooner or later a partner would insist that he do something about it. I don’t think Brian in the next room slept at all that night.

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Last edited by sv-wolf on Sun May 27, 2007 12:44 am, edited 20 times in total.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
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SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

blues2cruise
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#7 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Ya had to make me laugh, didn't ya? :laughing: Ouch.

Good story. :)
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sv-wolf
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#8 Unread post by sv-wolf »

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“20 Feb: Today is the warm up day, travelling with the team leaders we will take our first ride in India and this gives you an easy intro to the traffic and the bike itself.”
Itinerary – From The Enduroindia Roadbook 2007

"Whaaaat!!!! Driving? It's a f***ing nuthouse out there!"
Gary

Yep, driving in India is a crazy experience. But that was not what was bothering me first thing this morning. (Though it would later). Everything is made more difficult in India by the rule about not drinking the water. Only the bottled water is safe - supposedly. So even cleaning your teeth in the morning is a hassle, because you have to remember - you HAVE to remember - not to rinse your teeth with water from the tap, and that is not easy when you are trying to keep up with EnduroIndia’s morning timetable. Up at seven o’clock. Pack cases. Down to breakfast. Queue for breakfast. Eat breakfast (naturally pausing between mouthfuls to socialise a little with your new-found fellow Enduros). Digest breakfast. Get into bike gear. Arrange food and other supplies in tank bag (not forgetting a roll of toilet paper – essential item). Organise maps. Organize water. Get to the bikes for eight o’clock, ready for morning briefings and the off.

Curried breakfast was a new experience. It consisted of Sambhar – cooked vegetables in a watery curry sauce - all mopped up with idli - little white cakes made out of steamed rice and lentil flour. Interesting! After breakfast it was packing. I had remembered to buy loads of bottled water from the hotel bar the previous night to take with me. Single-handedly getting the water into my brand new Camelback water carrier (a water container in the form of a rucksack with a drinking tube attached) for the first time took a bit of working ou, though. The new off-roading kit all seemed to fit pretty well. (I hadn’t worn it all together before.) Camera –check. Wallet -check. First aid kit – check. All OK. Confidence – now where the hell did I leave that!

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Breakfast, EnduroIndia style

So, this was it – our first ride on the Enfield. I hurried over to the field opposite the hotel where the bikes were lined up (last as usual). Then came the worrying bit. Working out which was the bike’s front end was manageable, but the rest was not so easy. I’ve got to admit it - I was really nervous. It has been years since I’ve had to kick start a bike and, besides, there were a lot of other things about the this little beauty that needed thinking about.

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You just can't get enough of a good thing! Here's another photo of the wonderful Enfields

Yep, the Enfield has a number of interesting quirks and eccentricities. Like all pre-Japanese-era British bikes, the Indian-built Enfield has the gear change on the right-hand-side, not on the left. It has four gears: one up and three down. So its controls are not only back-to-front, but upside-down as well. Accompanying the bike’s four gears are four neutrals, which are all readily available, and can be accessed inadvertently at any time.

The front drum brake is next to non-existent. This means, you have to plan your stops well ahead. ( :shock: ) But the back brake (also a drum) is pretty damn good. Forget the rules of road riding in the West. I learned very quickly that it’s the back brake that is gonna save your hide. The single-cylinder, 350cc Enfield Bullet packs a meaty 17 bhp. And, despite what you may be thinking, that’s not to be sneered at. Let’s put this into perspective. Those 17 ponies make the Enfield just about the fastest, meanest thing on Indian roads. :twisted: There is nothing it can’t overtake, except another Enfield. The bike has a maximum speed of about 65mph. Run it anything above that and you are asking for trouble. (Cough! Umm! More on that later.)

So, let’s get going. Key in ignition. Search for the decompressor – that looks like it! Foot pressure on the kick-start - watch the amperage – OK! On with the decompressor and –

Kick!

Nothing! And a whole lot more of nothing! A faint hint of a whir of a piston – and that was all. I just kept trying - I couldn’t think of anything else to do. After about two minutes of this (it seemed like half-an-hour) an idea of genius occurred to me. I wondered if the bike had a fuel tap. And indeed it did. I sneakily hunched down and turned it on, noting gratefully that everybody else was too busy with their own machines to witness this event. No doubt I wasn’t the only one. So, back to the kick start. There was a little more response from the engine now, but not much. Three minutes later the field was roaring with engines – but not mine. After another minute of increasingly erratic decompressing and kicking, a faint panic had begun to set in, accompanied by muscle fatigue in my leg. And it was then that it occurred to me:

I’m not very good at this. ( :oops: )

And just as I was beginning to give up hope of ever leaving the field, there, floating out of the grey mist that was gathering before my eyes, came an angel in an orange tabard. It was ‘Sonny’. Sonny was my mechanic for the duration of the trip. With a polite Indian waggle of the head he took the bars of the Enfield out of my fevered hands, and then in one elegant, practiced movement flicked the decompressor, and gently kicked the bike into life. Hem! Thank you Sonny! (Gratitude combined with embarrassment is a difficult combination to handle.) Sonny nodded to me gravely (he was the only unsmiling Indian I met on my entire trip) and disappeared into the crowd of bikers to minister relief to some other suffering soul.

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Sonny. The nearest he ever managed to a smile.

I didn’t know what I was going to do if the engine died once we were out on the road. But right at that moment I didn’t care. At least I wasn’t going to be left behind. But my relief lasted just thirty seconds. The engine ticked over quietly, slowed – and then died. Oh! Bollocks! It was probably just cold and needed a little nurturing. Orf maybe the tick-over just needed to be adjusted. Determinedly, I tried again. Nothing! Why couldn’t I do this blasted thing?

Sonny had to come to my rescue twice more that morning before we left the field. But at least I‘d found the screw that adjusted the tick-over, so I was able to count one little triumph among all the morning’s failures. There was one problem though. In those first nervous teenage moments of fumbling around with the Enfield, I got confused and couldn’t work out which way the screw needed twisting. After that, I never did remember which way speeded it up and which slowed it down. It remained a frustration right to the end of the rally. But at least the bike was now warming up, and the engine was throbbing away happily. And my excitement began throbbing away happily too.

I now had time to relax and look round the field. The sight, and sound, of 150 Royal Enfields all grumbling away deliriously in a confined space was a joy. What a sight! What a noise! Some people think the Bullet is ugly, but I disagree. I’d already fallen in love with it the night before - especially with the gold badge on the black tank. But I never bonded properly with my own bike in the way that I imagined I would. Most of the bikes on the field were new, but there were a few, like mine, that had not been auctioned after last year’s tour and were being reused. I was disappointed not to have a new bike – one that was ‘all mine!’ (Sad?) In practical terms, having a couple of thousand km on the clock was an advantage. It meant that I didn’t have to run it in at 35mph for the first couple of days (a real bonus) and with the engine bedded down, the kick-start was not quite as lethal as on some of the new bikes – as others would discover, quite painfully, in the first few days of the rally.

All the bikes on the field were 350cc Bullets, except for two. These were 500s. One of these 500s belonged to Simon, the guy who owns the EnduroIndia company and who always leads the tour, and the other was specially provided for John. John, who was in his late 20s, was taking part with an artificial leg. Simon and his team had modified the 500cc bike for him so that all the controls were on the right hand side. This tells you a lot about the friendly and accommodating nature of the organisation. Its heart is very much in the right place. Riding pillion with John was Julia, his carer. Julia was in her fifties and as impressive and formidable a woman as you could hope to meet. I suspect Britain would never have lost the empire if Julia had been around at the time. It is probably women like Julia that kept it going for as long as it did. More on John and Julia later.

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John and his 500cc Bullet

But suddenly, Simon was shouting over the tops of the engines for everyone to switch off and gather round. I looked dubiously at the key in the ignition and reluctantly did as I was told. The morning briefing was mostly just about the day’s ride, but it was also the time when the winners of the previous day’s awards were announced and presented with their trophies. These awards were given by the Enduro Team in recognition of outstanding contributions to bar-room conversation the night before. There were generally three awards: the ‘Spirit of the Day’ award; the ‘Dick of the Day’ award; and the ‘Fiery Pants’ award. As this was only the first day, no-one yet had shown the required ‘spirit’ or the proper degree of ‘inflammation’. However, a first ‘Dick of the Day’ had already emerged.

This was Russell who had fallen asleep at Colombo airport while we were waiting for our transfer to Goa. He had missed the plane. Despite the flight being delayed by half-an-hour while the ground crew identified his luggage and took it out of the hold, Russell had slept on soundly in a warm and comfortable corner of the transfer lounge, oblivious of the confusion he was causing. But I can’t help thinking the award ought to have been a communal one. He must have had a lot of help missing the plane, as anything up to 129 other Enduros must have quietly tiptoed around him when the flight was announced.

The team managed to help him find him a couple of emergency airline tickets (he had to fly up to Bombay and then transfer and fly back down to Goa). Two flights and a long taxi ride managed to get him to the hotel just in time to kit up for the first day’s ride. His snooze in the airport lounge was the only sleep he had had for nearly 72 hours. From that moment on, Russell lost his name and was known thenceforth only as ‘Colombo’.

This first day was not really part of the rally; it was just a short ride (38km) round the local area to get used to the bike and to Indian roads and traffic conditions. We would be back at the hotel by late morning and then had the afternoon and evening to ourselves for more relaxing and the opportunity to get to know each other a bit better before the real riding began tomorrow.

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Entire families travel like this by bike or scoot

I don’t remember much of our first hour’s ride out of the field, except that, despite my best efforts with the throttle, the engine died on me again on a steep slope just five hundred yards from the hotel. Ye gods! I remember those minutes. My brain was a kaleidoscope of panicky misinformation. Where was the brake? Left or right? Where were the gears? Was I properly in neutral or just one of the tricky little fakes? (There was no light to tell me.) Why couldn’t I start the bloody engine? Oh yes… that’s why! Sweat started to pour out of my armpits. BUT AT LEAST I GOT THE BIKE TO FIRE UP ALL BY MYSELF! Hurrah! That meant I was not going to find myself stranded somewhere in some Indian village for the rest of my life living on chapattis and curried breakfasts.

I loved the little Goan country roads and the endless villages and their people. Indians are amazing. Adults would stand on street corners and wave and cheer and point out the way to us when we stopped to look at our maps, or when we started to make off in the wrong direction. Children lined up along the roads with hands out demanding high fives from every passing motorcyclist. When you have been high-fiving with kids at twenty mph all day long your hands get to become quite red and sore. It really hurts! But it was too much fun not to do it. The friendliness and enthusiasm of people everywhere buoyed us up. I haven’t felt as light hearted and free in spirit since I was an early teenager.

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We must have looked very odd to the villagers. Most of us had taken up EnduorIndia’s suggestion and were wearing off-roading gear. It is much cooler than leathers or Cordura in the Indian heat and provides adequate protection from the spills that were all but inevitable on a trip like this. In these first few days of riding, when most of our gear was brand new I kept thinking we must have looked as though we had just escaped from the set of a Sci-Fi film.

So, I got the bike started again, and from that moment of mastery, the Enfield grew on me like moss on a wall. It is a lovely bike and perfect for Indian conditions. It is not phased by potholed Indian roads or by Indian miles. It just rumbles along and can cope with practically anything. It handles beautifully and it needs to, to deal with the Indian traffic. Its distinctive grumble still reverberates inside my head whenever I think back on the trip. Lovely!

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The traffic though, was every bit as crazy as we had been led to expect. (Though, in fact, what we saw on this first day was really nothing to what we were to face later in the ride.) I’m told that until very recently, the driving test in India, required drivers to prove that they could start the engine, move the vehicle forward, swerve to the left, swerve to the right, and then do an emergency stop. That’s was it! And it shows on the roads. That’s what they do. Start, stop, swerve to the left, and swerve to the right. Apparently, the test has been changed, but I doubt that there will be any results for another generation at least.

The rule on Indian roads seems to be that you just do your own thing and it is everybody else’s responsibility to miss you. Everyone has right of way in India, it seems, except the person who is travelling straight down the road. If an Indian driver is in front of you and decides suddenly that he wants to turn right, he will swerve across the road without looking. If he is parked and wants to turn onto the road, he will pull out right in front of you knowing full well that there is no way you are going to miss him without taking serious avoiding action. But that’s your job, so you had better get on with it. The Indian pedestrian is just as bad. I’m told the rule here is that if you wish to cross the road on foot, you set out in your own time, looking neither left nor right, but keeping up a steady pace until you reach the other side. The steady pace is important. Because it means that any oncoming traffic will be able to judge where you will be by the time it reaches you. Only then can it take steps to miss you. If you freeze or suddenly hurry, you – and everybody else on the road - are in trouble. Indians have a crazy sort of discipline, I’ll give them that!

But nothing travels very fast on Indian roads (courtesy of a lack of cc’s and an abundance of potholes) so this all seems to work, up to a point. And I will admit all this hands-of-the-god stuff does slow the traffic down quite effectively. The amazing thing, to a Westerner, though, is that it is all carried on without the slightest hint of rancour or even competitiveness. If someone cuts you up, it is just because he wants to get ahead, and everyone accepts that without fuss.

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But what does it all mean? In the nineteenth century the British stiffened up their imperial resolve by developing a theory of racial essences. Some races, they believed, principally European ones (and most specifically the English, of course) had a superior racial essence which fitted them for empire and allowed them to ‘direct’ other races who were otherwise incapable of governing themselves in a civilised manner. (I have an old schoolfriend, a New Yorker, and a romantic Anglophile, who still believes this in a woolly headed, good-humoured sort of way.) Indians, of course, did not have a superior racial essence which meant they were only fit to be ruled by the British.

Despite all this, the governing Brits of the day, discovered that Indians were extremely good in the head department. Indian philosophy and mathematics in particular just stunned them. In consequence, they had a sneaking respect for the people of the sub-continent and their abilities. You can find odd references in nineteenth-century British literature to the quiet belief that Indians were much more intelligent than ‘us’. I spent the entire tour entertaining myself with the question of whether Indian road manners proved this to be abundantly true, or abundantly false. You can reason it both ways, if you think about it and observe it carefully. Mostly, this chaos seems to work, and once you get used to it, it all makes a crazy kind of sense. There are inevitably a lot of accidents, but it seems that it’s a price the Indians are willing to pay for this sort of crazy freedom. Is it lack of organisation, or just a different set of values?

Fortunately for British East India Company profits (in case any of you were concerned!) having a superior racial essence had nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is something, to this day, that the British are seriously suspicious of. We don’t like it very much. It’s actually something rather French, and therefore not very highly regarded.

Private cars are far and few between on Indian roads, and those that you do see, are of the flash variety, and kept in gleaming condition, more obviously symbols of status and wealth than a means to get you from A to B. By far the most numerous vehicles are motorbikes and scoots, mostly 50cc or 100cc jobs. Anything bigger than that becomes too expensive to run for most people. Bicycles are very common too. There are a lot of busses and trucks – a hell of a lot – and a fair number of vans and pickups. And Everywhere you see Tut-tut’s (motorised rickshaws). And then occasionally, you see cars, elephants and carts drawn by Brahma bulls.

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It is the larger vehicles you have to watch if you want to survive. On Indian roads, the more wheels you have, the more authority you have to claim right of way. On six wheels, you can sweep magisterially through the traffic, caring nothing for the small fry to left and right. On four wheels (or legs) you can treat bikes and scoots and bicycles with disdain. There are legal rules, of course (very similar to the British Highway Code), but these appear to be advisory only, as no-one takes any notice of them. The Indian government seems to have taken a fatalistic attitude to all this and produces a leaflet for foreign visitors which warns that any attempt to follow the rules of the road is extremely dangerous and may even be fatal. On an Indian road, a driver or rider’s main responsibility is to keep his eyes on the guy in front. Nothing else seems to matter (You can leave the guy behind to look after himself!)

But none of this legal stuff really matters anyway because the only policemen I saw the entire time I was there were occupied trying vainly and bad temperedly to direct the traffic at busy inner city junctions. And there are no speed cameras.

That first morning of riding in India, we were given 16.4 km of country roads till we hit our first decent-sized town. Those 16 and a bit km were our first taste of Indian driving. It was ‘interesting’ at times, but the traffic was relatively light and slow, and our ordinary habits of self-preservation seemed enough to keep us alive. 16 km was just about long enough for me to start getting complacent. I felt cheated. I expected something much more dramatically awful than this. Sixteen km out we hit the outskirts of the aptly named town of Madgoa.

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My first lesson in the foolishness of complacency was the roundabout on the outskirts of town. It was not so much a traffic junction as a wild Darwinian experience - no rules remember. Only the fittest, the fastest and the nippiest were likely to survive. If you can squeeze a metre-wide bike into a space half that size, and weave your way through erratically moving traffic with less than an inch of room on either side of you then you stand a chance of coming out the other side intact. If not, then the god be with you!

Beyond the roundabout lay the town itself. Madgoa was a baptism of fire for me and many others. The traffic was madcap. And on top of that it provided me with any number of interesting personal challenges. Here’s a summary.
1. The traffic followed no discernable logic except that of ‘making progress by any means foul or fair.’ And there was a hell of a lot of it.
2. I couldn’t read the instructions on the route plan under the transparent cover of my tank bag, because I’d reached the bottom of the page, and with my lid on I couldn't bend my head far enough down to see it. I had no idea where I was meant to go.
3. I couldn’t get to the side of the road to stop and look at it because I was hemmed in by traffic.
4. I couldn’t see the plan clearly anyway without my reading glasses.
5. I was losing sight of the Enduros in front.
6. My engine kept threatening to die any minute because of the problem with the tick-over. At standstill, I was trying to operate the front brake lever while continuing to hold open the throttle.
7. The thought of having to kick-start my engine back into life in the middle of all this brought me out in a sweat.
8. I had drunk quite a lot the previous night. As I don’t normally drink I was still trying to deal with a vicious hangover.
9. In all the confusion, I kept going blank and couldn’t remember which side the gears were on or which gear was up or down.
10. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing.
11. I was getting cramp in both my hands.
12. I needed the loo, badly.

I don’t think I can be accused of exaggeration if I say that riding into Madgoa was not the most comfortable moment in my life - but in a strange way it was exhilarating. A small Indian lad on the pillion of a HeroHonda bike in front was entertaining himself by making faces at me because I had lost control of the gears momentarily and lurched towards his dad’s bike.

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At precisely17.40 km from the hotel according to both my tacho and my route plan, a fuel station appeared on my right. I fought my way across the oncoming traffic, found a loo, got into the queue and quietly collapsed.

For ten redeeming minutes I got to stand quietly waiting for petrol while I calmed myself down. After filling up, I fiddled with the tick over screw and then accosted one of the mechanics to give me a quick lesson in kick-starting the bike. Why couldn’t I do it? I used to manage all right on my BSA. The Mechanic, one of the Team Leaders and an Enduro all crowded around and gave me the benefit of their various experiences. They all had different (and contradictory) notions of how it should be done. After a heated discussion, they went off together discussing the matter among themselves and left me to get on with it. Gradually, though, I was getting the hang of it. It took me just two minutes this time.

I waited around at the garage for a while, waiting for some other Enduros to set off in from of me. The plan was to tag along behind them to make up for my inability to read the route plan. They fired up and pulled out. I followed, and immediately lost them in the traffic. At one moment I thought I saw a Bullet turning right round an ornamental garden ahead and blindly followed. It was a Bullet, but not one of ours. That left me going the wrong way in a one-way system that circumnavigated the entire town. It took me ten minutes to find my way back to Darwin’s roundabout, back past the garage and ready to try again.

Somehow, the fact of having survived two complete runs through the centre of Madgoa, had put a bit of focus back into me and my confidence was returning. (Either that or the hangover was wearing off and the bleariness was disappearing.) I sorted my plan-reading problem, navigated my way out of town and found myself bowling along an open road, between graceful palms and wide paddy fields. Great! I was actually relieved to be alone for a bit, even though I was still dubious about my ability to work our where I was going, because apart from the problem of reading the plan, it was laid out in a rather odd way. (And, as we all were soon to discover, it was seeded with the occasional ‘deliberate mistake’ just to keep us all on our toes.) I rode on happily for another 10 km before I caught up with some of the Enduros taking a break by the side of the road, and pulled over.

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A section of the routeplan. The first figure gives the number of kilometres travelled from the start of the day, the second gives the number of kilometres travelled since the last instruction. Good basic maths and an ability to multi-task are required. The process goes something like this: Thinks - "I started out with 247.2 km on the clock. The next turning is... let's see... (squinny down at routeplan) yeah, it's 38.6 km from the start - that's 247.2+38.6 which is err... um... roughly 286 km. The clock now reads 279.7 km. So allowing two km for taking the wrong road back there, I'll reach my turning in... dodo!!!!! Bloody truck! Where did that come from? OK! Calm down! OK! OK, hmmm! So, let's get this right! I started out with a bit over 247 km on the clock. Or was it 237 km? Aaarrgh...!

The rest of the ride as we rolled along together was relaxed and easy. Even the ferry crossing at 34 km posed little problem. When we arrived, the ferry was on the other side of the river so we had to wait. I turned the Enfield’s ignition off with a flourish to indicate to myself that I now had no concerns about my ability (eventually) to kickstart the bike back into life. Two young kids were trying valiantly to sell ice creams from boxes welded to the back of their bicycles. Several people kept out of the sun by huddling under a couple of Christian shrines made out of bathroom tiles. Someone discovered he had sprung an oil leak. There was always a mechanic on hand for any crisis and he fixed it temporarily by stuffing a bit of polythene into the hole which he found by the side of the road. The sun was shining through the leaves. People were taking photographs. It was a lovely day.

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A multi-purpose shrine made out of white bathroom tiles

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Roadside repairs

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The ferry crossing

The final section of the ride beyond the ferry was short and very straightforward. On getting back to the hotel I was relieved and pleased with myself – relieved that I had come through it unscarred, emotionally or physically, pleased because I was starting to get the hang of the bike, the roads, and India. Others were saying what a great day it had been as well. I didn't hear of any major incidents among the riders, which was good, though Mary had seen an Indian guy on a moped go down under a bus. Sobering!

Anyway, it was time for a shower and some heavy socialising.

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Last edited by sv-wolf on Sun Jul 22, 2007 12:00 am, edited 19 times in total.
Hud

“Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley

SV-Wolf's Bike Blog

blues2cruise
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#9 Unread post by blues2cruise »

Great entry...and pics, too. :)

roscowgo
Legendary 750
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#10 Unread post by roscowgo »

Must. Have. More. IndiaWolf.

:smilebunny: :hooray: :bounce2: :drool2:

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