Day Five Sat 28th Oct Chail - Rishikesh 320km
Mothballs. That's the over-riding smell I will take away from India. Mothballs. Not the smell of human sewage as we passed the villages. Not the smell of rotting dead animals by the roadside. Not the rank stench of the herds of goats we drove through. Not the divine smell of curries being cooked in the evening. Mothballs. On the clothes of the people on the Amritsar train, on the sheets of most of the hotels we've stayed in (another reason to be thankful for the sleeping bag liners!). Mothballs...
We could hear the mechanics working long into the night on the bikes. They really were absolute stars, repairing the bikes every night, bending them back into shape during the day... Everytime we stopped for fuel or tea they were checking over the Bullets and making sure that people had pulled their side stands up, turned the fuel tap off or on. Whenever I sat on the bike someone would appear next to me to ensure that it started OK. My side stand was bent so the bike tipped over further than anyone else's and sometimes I couldn't get it upright if we'd stopped on slightly sloping ground, but a mechanic would always appear to help me.
It was a very early and chilly start again. Our elegant hostess had greeted us last night in a lovely pale pink shalwar kameez (trouser and long shirt suit) with matching dupatta scarf, but at breakfast (admittedly 6.30am again) she appeared in a navy blue Addidas track suit and white knitted bobble hat! She still managed to look pretty good in it though!
We did more climbing up mountain roads through a lovely pine forest, which seemed so British and often reminded us of Dartmoor. Steve was a great hit with a bus of school children as he was giving out Harley badges and shaking hands as he drove past!
I was really looking forward to getting down to the plains again and I now realise that I have a serious psychological problem where foreign mountain roads are concerned (ask Jon about the hysterics in Crete). In the UK there does tend to be some sort of barrier to stop you falling off the edge, but go to Southern Europe and, if you're lucky, there'll be a square concrete block placed about a car's width apart – i.e. of no bloody use whatsoever! Well, Indian road safety works on the same principle. I have no problem with heights and loved the views once we'd stopped. I'd happily scampered up the hills to Dharamsala, then down them to Bir, I'd been slower on the high mountain road to the Kullu Valley but then I had just crashed the bike. But as we climbed up the mountains today I was getting more and more tense and increasingly cross that we were going UP rather than getting to the plains and got a bit sniffley. By the time we reached the summit my shoulders and arms had locked and I was completely stiff.
I stopped the bike, put my head on the petrol tank and cried. Not quiet little hideable sniffles, but loud hysterical shoulder shaking howling, whilst still gripping the bike so hard that Jon had to peel my fingers from the clutch lever one by one! Sensibly, all the blokes retreated to look at the view, leaving Jon to prise me off the bike. It didn't last long and I soon had Jon and Matt laughing when Matt asked was it the heights I had a problem with? I replied that no, it was the drops! And there was no point me going in the Jeep 'cos that made it even worse because I then had nothing to concentrate on to take my mind off it! Matt assured me that we were now heading down onto the plains (although we did seem to go UP quite a few times to get DOWN to the plains – men and hills again...). The bout of hysteria really did help release the tension and my riding was much smoother once we re-started and I felt much happier that we were heading down.
Lunch at the Mehfils Café was another excellent veggie chow mein. Whilst we've been in India we really have had some of the best chow meins and chop sueys ever – perhaps it's because China is very close, or because the ingredients are absolutely fresh and everything is cooked to order – I don't know, but what I can say is that they were delicious. Outside the café there was a chap selling freshly squeezed orange juice by the roadside. He carefully pared the pith from the oranges and had to hand-crank an old fashioned mincer to juice them, so every glass took a few minutes to prepare but cost only a few pence. Iain stood us a glass each and it tasted wonderful.
The afternoon ride to Rishikesh was on flat roads, with good quality tarmac, through towns – just what I liked! I've mentioned already that you pip before you overtake and pip as you overtake, basically I made as much noise as possible so that no one had an excuse to knock me off! Actually, things will move aside for you: Matt always held his ground and trucks would avoid him; Nick came round a blind bend and found a truck overtaking a bus, leaving him with nowhere to go, but they parted in the middle and he went straight through! It's not in their interest to have an accident because the trucks and buses are trying to get somewhere as fast as possible and if they hit you it's going to put them several hours behind schedule. You do have to keep your wits about you for cars pulling out, animals wandering across the road and the vagaries of the road surface.
But I was in my element. Given that I don't filter at home it's hard to say what came over me – picture Steven Gerrard virtually single-handedly winning the FA Cup for Liverpool against West Ham, picture David Beckham in the 2001 World Cup Qualifier against Greece - I was 'In The Zone', 'On A Mission' and 'Up For It'. I was having a great time and picking off the other vehicles one by one was rather like playing a computer game: cars – pah, Tata trucks – eat my dust, buses – losers (and 'I eat losers for breakfast!')! The Housemartins' 'The Light is Always Green' was playing in my head “Pretending to be pilots in the war, pretending to weave between the flack...”. Anyway, the upshot was that I ended up first in the group after Matt when we stopped for the others to catch up! It's hard to say who was most surprised, Matt or me, and he gave me a big slap on the shoulder that almost knocked me off the bike! (Matt, very kindly, later said to Jon that it had made his day when he turned round and saw me behind him!) I was still first when we got to our evening destination of Shivpuri.
Rishikesh was very busy but luckily we were staying at a campsite by the river Ganges at Shivpuri a few miles beyond the city. We saw quite a few western faces as we drove through Rishikesh because, although it's a Hindu holy city, it's been the haunt of hippies since the Beatles visited in the '60s and is billed as 'the yoga capital of the world'. It was also the only place on the whole of the journey where Matt said in the evening, “Take EVERYTHING off your bikes. Don't leave a thing on them.” Which I thought was quite telling and rather sad really. Everywhere else we'd left our bags on the bikes, helmets dangling from the handlebars, etc and the keys in them when we'd stopped for tea or lunch and never felt that anyone was looking at our stuff with an eye to stealing it.
The Ganges was a beautiful deep turquoise as it flowed past the campsite, the contrast with the gleaming white sand was very affecting. We had old-fashioned scout-type tents, but smaller than in Bir, with camp beds again. The 'dry-pit' loos and washing facilities were 'basic'... The loo was in a single tent and was a wooden box over a hole in the sand and when you'd finished you shovelled a bit of sand into the hole from the heap by the side of the 'thunder box'. Loo roll was provided. Jon managed a 'shower' from a glorified leaky can hanging from a tree; I made do with lots of wet wipes in the privacy of the tent!
Bev
the charity can reclaim on your donations we've already raised over £2,000 - with more still to come in. We'll keep you posted on the final total.
