India to Pakistan
Wow, what to say about India, and Uttar Pradesh! Where to start?? Well, I witnessed nearly every single cliche that I’d heard about the country on my first day. In the first 10 minutes of crossing the border, I nearly died riding into a group of people who walked out in front of me on the road. What were they carrying? A corpse! It was a funeral procession!! In the next hour I passed a car crash. I approached from behind and saw a man stumbling about all over the road absolutely covered in blood. He was in a daze and as I passed the wreckage, I realised he must have flown through the windscreen. The car that hit him had the drive-train hanging down from under the car, so I don’t know if that caused the accident, but there was a large, angry mob surrounding the still-healthy driver and one of the mob had him by the front of the shirt and was shaking him violently back and forth like a rag doll. He had a look of pure terror on his face and I immediately felt sorry for him, and at the same time very keen to vacate the scene.
About 30 minutes later I was approached by some POT (Parallel Oncoming Traffic) and there was an old guy on a pushbike to my left weaving madly. I beeped my horn to alert him I was approaching from behind and he rode off the side of the road and promptly flew over the handlebars of his bike, which landed in front of, and was promptly run over by, my bike. I stopped (slowed down) and watched him to ensure he wasn’t injured. He jumped up, ran along beside his bike and jumped back on it. Crazy.
Behind some Parallel Oncoming Traffic!!
So my first night in India was spent in the town of Gorakpur. I stopped at a cafe in the town and this man came up to me, introduced himself and his son, and invited me back to his house for lunch. I thought he seemed like a reasonable chap so I followed him home. The place was bedecked with obscene and faded kitsch and he proudly told me his wife’s hobby was interior decoration. I smiled and nodded. He fixed me some food and pushed his wife out of the room, then started asking me seriously uncomfortable questions. Not before he made me promise to take a picture of all of us together and send it to him in the post. Okay mate. At this point I started wondering about India a little bit, it’s roads, villages, villagers etc. were all starting to seem a little nutty.
I headed outside of the crazy guys place and walked around the back of my bike to find…. One of my Chacos (sandals) sitting on the top of the right pannier. Oh NO!! I remembered taking them out to search for some stuff at the border, I must have left them there and ridden off. These were my favourite, I mean all-time favourite shoes. They stood by me through my whole trip, hikes in the outback, dancing in Darwin and the incredible sand-covered dancefloors of Koh Phangan, The mean streets of Thailand, all this not including the five years I owned them before I left. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!! So day one in India became a day of fear, craziness and loss. This emotional rollercoaster defines India perfectly, you never know what is going to slip in and smack your head around.
First night in India – luxury!
I found a reasonably nice place to stay in Gorakpur and the next day headed down south to Varanasi. More crazy riding! The locals are pushbike mad and the bikes weave dramatically from side to side with each pedal. The busses are crazy and drive at speeds that imply the drivers give no damn about their passengers… Strangely, the trucks drive a lot slower and seem to care about their cargo. I have no idea how this works, anyway, Parallel Oncoming Traffic can be as menial as a car overtaking a bicycle, right up the madness scale to a bus overtaking a truck that is overtaking a truck. Survival means getting the hell off the road and hoping you don’t hit a *something*.
I hit Varanasi and the temperature was intense. I found a really nice hotel and stayed for 3 days, having felt the onset of some kind of sickness due to dodgy food/water. From waking up the first morning I felt awkward and lethargic, not really too keen to go out and see the sights. I went for a walk and found the Ghats where they bathe in the Ganges, very messy stuff. The water there is sooo filthy and you walk by and see kids just jumping in and spitting water about. I found a back alley with kids playing cricket and had a few bowls, full tosses as usual. Back at the hotel I had a kingfisher beer and it really didn’t mix well with the sickness so I went to bed and watched the World Cup.
Guys bathing in the Ganges
I met some Aussie guys and we decided to do a river cruise of the Ganga. We jumped in at the funeral ghat and watched as bodies were immolated into the atmophere for strange spiritual reasons, then tossed into the water. The scene at the funeral ghat is surprisingly grim, with piles of garbage and half-burnt funeral shrouds lying on the river-side. A stray dog might run down and grab some kind of grizzly souvenir from the mound of refuse while a melancholy cow stands nearby munching up last-night-curry from the dirty ground. As we pushed out to the centre, the boatman reached down into the river and scooped a handful of the putrid water into his mouth, swallowed and smiled at us, gushing “aaah, Ganga.”
The bathing Ghats.
The cruise went past about 10 bathing ghats, with kids swimming out to the boat splashing water. Whenever it looked like we’d be splashed, the three of us rushed to the opposite side of the boat, tipping it precariously off balance, to the fearfull screams of the boatman and the immense delight of the kids. A very scary and interesting ride to say the least. Afterwards we tried to find a temple to listen to authentic Indian music but ended up finding the “monkey temple” – a temple full of monkeys 
The morning I was leaving Hotel Buddha in Varanasi, I met a lovely couple on an Indian Enfield bullet: An Israeli guy Smir, and a Spanish girl Paola. They hooked up a few months before and had decided to tour northern India on a motorcycle. Things had been going wrong with the Enfield since they’d bought it new in Delhi five days before and I helped Smir with a couple of problems by loaning him my toolkit. He suggested we ride together and I took them up on the offer. They were all about riding slowly and I was all about not getting killed.
Random man at a roadside stop.
Our first night stop was in Juanpur, which was a huge 38km from Varanasi towards Lucknow. We arrived early and Smir made comment of his suspension being too mushy. I suggested he increase his spring preload, which began a huge mission involving removing the two back springs and twisting the collar that tightens up the spring. The first spring went well, but the collar broke on the second due to some corrosion and lack of foresight from us (not lubing it up before twisting it, and leaving it in the hands of a boisterous Indian pseudo-mechanic). We tried everything to fix it including a vice, pliers, bender bars, breaker bars, breaker milkshakes and other local vices (namely beadies). None worked and so we were pointed to a dark little cave of a workshop, grease stains reaching out from the darkness creating the impression of a gaping mouth in the dusk-light. A couple of beady eyes blinked in the darkness and a grizzled old man with big hands slided out, grabbed the shock, grunted and quickly dismantled it, remantling and adjusting it in under 10 minutes. We thanked him with a 50 rupe note and he glided off, seemingly footless, into his now completely black cave. Smir and I looked at each other, shrugged, and went and put the bike back together.
The next day was a mammoth, leaving early we pushed on at the breakneck speed of 40km/hr the 250km to Lucknow. An uneventful day, mainly hot and chai-laden, we cruised in at 7pm as the dark encroached. We were running on instinct and questions to find our way into town and I sped off to ask directions. I stopped to wait for the other two to catch up and after maybe 15 minutes, realised something was wrong. A man stopped on his bike and I thought he was just being the usual nosy Uttar Pradeshian so waved him on, but he wagged his head and said “no, sir, your friends are back there, there is a problem”. Oh crap, hoping they were okay, I sped back and discovered they’d caught a bad case of flat tyre. By this time it was pitch black and we were surrounded by maybe 20 curious locals.
Some crazies on their Indian-flag debecked jalopy!
After testing the tyre for the state of flatness, we discovered it was shagged and made a plan to have it fixed. The locals were already on their mobiles to brothers, fathers, uncles, friends of uncles and Vishnu himself, so we decided Smir could look after the bike and tyres while Paola and I would go find a hotel to ensure a place to stay. We loaded all of their gear into a cycle rickshaw and headed off into the night. Following the cylce was harder than I’d expected for he actually knew how to ride in Indian city traffic. I ended up with scrapes, bumps, dints and a hoarse voice from shouting at all the crazy auto-rickshaws that pounded into me. We eventually got to where we thought we were going and discovered the cycleman had gotten us completely lost. Paola exercised her right to get frustrated and we ended up catching a ride back to a guesthouse, checked in and realised we still has Smir to find. It was two hours since we’d left him.
After leaving Lucknow I had a bad case of the Delhi Belly and had to leave Smir and Paola to their 40km/hr. Unfortunately I lost them, but we were headed in different directions anyway. I carried on to Ramnagar and spent a day at the Corbett Tiger Reserve. I jumped onto a tour that three Delhi boys had booked and managed to see a couple of Royal Bengal tigers off in the distance, such beautiful animals. Jim Corbett was a hunter who eventually decided that the tigers were better off alive than dead and became a big conservationist for the Indian people. He set up a massive reserve where maybe 20 tigers are roaming freely and hunting barking deer and other such tiger nibblies.
One of the guys from Delhi
After the Tiger Town I headed to Rishikesh, home of yoga and Sadhus etc. I was unimpressed with this town. An Aussie girl I met describes it perfectly: A place where people come to sell their religion. I think the Beatles song Across The Universe is having a go at all of the money-grubbing priests that try to fleece you: “Jai Guru Deva, Om… Nothing’s gonna change my world”. The place was full of begging Sadhus and yoga gurus offering full yoga couses for 5000 euro, I didn’t find myself but I did lose my credit card there. Karma dude. Then I headed on to the home of the Dalai Llama, Dharamsala. Again this town was a tourist mecca useful only really for its relaxed atmosphere.
Kids on the roadside.
The final stop on my tour of India was the Punjab/Pakistan border city Amritsar. I took a 100 rupe tour out to the border to see the crazy ceremony they perform every evening where the Pakistani and Indian border guards would strut and yell their might and on each side the spectators could jeer the other country. It was very funny and a little bit sad that the Indian spectator side was full and the Pakistan side sparse… Says a lot about the Indian sense of self importance and the Pakistani indifference to it. The Golden Temple was amazing and I managed to stay at the home of some Sikh guys and watch the world-cup final. It was here I discovered my credit card was missing, I had a flat battery and when I went to buy a perfect replacement, no card. I managed to recharge the existing battery and by the time I rode to the border it was closed. Horror day, but I managed to leave (with a sigh of relief) into Pakistan the very next day.
Golden Temple.
Border antics.
What to say about India… How do I sum up my opinion of this country of 1 billion people. In general, I didn’t like riding the roads because of the immense danger and disrespect for human life. Each day something would happen that would make me feel incredibly frustrated, often close to losing my temper, but also every day something would happen that would make me smile and be glad to be visiting. Every time I’d stop my bike, I’d attract maybe 30 or 40 villagers who would stare with docile eyes onto what they could only imagine to be a spaceship and some weird white alien-dude. I lost my temper many times, and laughed at the craziness of the people many times. I hate the way they worship cows, but let them wander diseased and hopeless around their cities. I don’t like the way they spit blood red pan-juice in public places and stairwells of hotels. I love the way they smile and greet you with that funny little sideways nod of the head and ask you if everything is okay with that one-word question “problem?”. You can break the language barrier by saying “I am from Ricky Ponting” and stop your bike to give the batting kids out in their street cricket games. I think I’ll head back to India one day, but maybe on a train and definitely with someone else so that I can use them as a respite from the swarming, full-on nature of the collective consciousness known as the Indian people.