Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (12 page)

‘He’ll change his mind when we cycle up the driveway,’ I said, absolutely sure of myself.

Uros’s eyes split open and he groaned, reluctantly gathering himself up. He packed his things without a word and we wheeled our bikes past reception. I waited for the ‘Okay, okay, two seventy-five,’ from the sullen manager but nothing came. I made a loud coughing noise, pretending to adjust the gears. Nothing.

‘Bugger him,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

He yawned. ‘Okay, I guess.’

‘We can make Moradabad easy,’ I said with mad optimism. ‘It’s only 60 kilometres. We’ll be there in three hours. It’s only two o’clock. We could make it there by six.’

However …

Four hours and 184 kilometres later, we arrived at Moradabad, utterly shattered and coughing up dark phlegm from the clouds of diesel exhaust puffed into our faces. It was dark, and for the next hour we were blinded by the high beam of trucks and for contrast, near misses with local cyclists who tore out of the darkness like wraiths. When we found a hotel, we hauled our bikes up two flights of long stairs, heaving with exhaustion.

‘How much is it for a room?’ I asked breathlessly, dark spittle around my mouth, streaks of filth across my face as if I had been run over by a convoy of trucks.

‘Four hundred and seventy-five rupees,’ replied the manager with a dark toothless smile.

‘Uh-huh,’ I exchanged a defeated glance with Uros. ‘That sounds about right …’

We showered then collapsed on our beds, aching. Every minor movement seemed a colossal effort. I was summoned to fill out numerous hotel forms, leaving Uros to trying to make sense of
The Smurfs
jabbering in Hindi on the television. One question on the arrival form nearly gave me an aneurysm: ‘If left Indian, when’?

When I returned, Uros, corpse-like, croaked up. ‘You said to me we only do 50 kilometres today …’ He trailed off and fell asleep, and soon I was with him in an achy unconsciousness.

During the night, I had a slight fever and reached out for my drink bottle only to grab something warm and meaty.

‘AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!’ I screamed.

‘AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!’ came another scream.

It was Uros’s hand, also reaching out for his bottle of water! We lay there laughing like boys on a scout camp.

In the morning, we were stiff as ironing boards as we roused our way out of Moradabad, a crowded town full of blue ruin. I couldn’t stand the smell, the feeling of sandpaper in my lungs, opening me up for cancer or something else horrid and terminal.

‘Let’s do not so much,’ Uros said tonelessly through a mask of tiredness.

‘Kichha is only 70 kilometres away,’ I said. ‘Should be there by two.’

Up ahead we happened upon a crowd staring into a pond. A TATA goods-carrying truck had overturned and lay half-submerged. It seemed lucky that anyone had made it out alive, but the driver was standing by the edge laughing and gesticulating the story to an eager crowd. A rainbow slick of fuel floated on the pond like a visual aroma.

Nearly every day I’d seen a wrecked vehicle of one kind or another. Most of this is attributed to trucks and two-wheelers, drunk driving being the major cause. Perhaps this is why the driver of this mashed truck couldn’t seem to care less.

We continued on, climbed a hill and as we coasted down it, Uros explained the Slovenian national anthem called ‘Zdravljica’.

‘There is this writer, France Prešeren. He is in love with this rich woman and she not want him, so he write a song about her and it become our song. It is a drinking song.’

‘Now that’s my kinda national anthem!’

He burst into an uplifting rendition. I was hooked, and by the end of the day we were singing joyously through villages, scaring water buffalo and inciting ragged children to chase us with stones.

Kichha turned out to be just like Moradabad – a pool of pollution, traffic, beeping taxis,
samosa
stalls and decrepit buildings. It was five o’clock and we had covered 92 kilometres.

‘You said 70 kilometres!’ Uros accused me then stopped his bike. ‘Ah, a puncture. Again! Second time in two days.’

Within seconds, Rent-A-Crowd swamped him like a dark cloak, and all I could hear were his muffled cries becoming fainter, ‘What are you looking at? It is only a puncture! What do you want? Russell! Russell! What do they want? WHAT DO THEY WANT?’

Kathmandu is actually lower latitude-wise than most people think. I had it firmly plucked somewhere in the heavens, an unattainable Shangri-La, lost in a mist of mountains, way north and away from the heat. The reality is that it is actually lower than New Delhi, thus, as we cycled through the treeless humid farmlands of sub-tropical Terai, oppressively hot. None of which impressed Uros.

‘In Delhi you said going this way would be getting colder, not hotter.’ He wiped a huge drop off sweat out of his eye.

I tried to look incredulous. ‘Did I say that?’

Hard to believe how the weather had changed since we crossed the border some days ago, bracing ourselves as the wind blew through us, the rain spraying our faces and bare legs. It was liked we had suddenly opened and closed a door into a new world, for even the traffic disappeared and along with it, the stares and the crowds.

The Nepalese just seemed to be too concerned with their own existence than with us: cycling to work, heating up
chai
, carrying heavy baskets of wood roped over their foreheads while women in their red saris drowned in waves of green tendrils of yellow fields, disappearing momentarily as they bent over to pick up their babies.

The only attention we received was from children who ran after us in their red uniforms yelling ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ but then ran away when I pulled out my camera.

‘I don’t know if I want to cycle India again. Here, this is little. I like this,’ Uros pointed to the greenness, the hills, the quietness. ‘I don’t like India with all the trucks and bad roads.’

However, Uros, like myself, whether we liked it or not, would cycle India again.

We were now on the edges of the Bardia National Park and following a battered Jeep driven by Mundi, the manager of the Racy Shade Hotel, on the suggestion of a Belgian woman, Anit, who had insisted that it was the ‘best in the park’. (The fact that Mundi was her boyfriend had of course not influenced her recommendation at all.)

I had heard that we could catch a glimpse of tigers, and Mundi had promised us as such, and included a day’s rafting.

An hour later the Jeep stopped outside a collection of simple but pleasant mud huts with a garden and an outside dining area. The Racy Shade Hotel had no electricity, so kerosene lamps waiting by our door lit the night in dim quiet glows.

We took a small but cool mud hut. It was surprisingly comfortable and clean, and boasted new mosquito nets on the bed heads. We showered, then headed to the open dining area and ordered a meal. A group of young French women noisily sat down around us as we ate. They played ‘Saint Germaine’ on a tiny Walkman with tiny speakers, and passed joints around while hanging off their Nepalese lovers – guides, Jeep drivers and hotel staff. It was like one big love in.

Mundi gave us the lowdown on the safari.

‘This is tiger you are going to see,’ he said with a big feline smile, ‘Is not pussycat. Okay? Do everything your guide say. Also very danger, is rhino. Very fast. If you get in the way of the rhino it will be the full stop for you! Hahahah!’

‘I’m starting to get worried,’ Uros said, turning to me. ‘You say to me this safari is safe.’

‘It is,’ I reassured him. ‘Mundi, we are doing this in a Jeep, aren’t we?’

‘Oh, no, no, no!’ he laughed. ‘Too expensive. We go on foot.’

Uros and I blanched.

‘What are you going to give us to protect ourselves?’ I asked.

‘A stick and a packed lunch,’ he smiled.

‘How are we supposed to protect ourselves with that!?’ my voice shot up. ‘Throw the lunch then while it’s eating it whack on the head?’

‘Don’t worry. Nothing can happen,’ Mundi smiled, then said as if offering a guarantee on a set of steak knives, ‘After all, I am your guide!’

The next morning we waited by a waterhole. There were two others in our group, a lovely New Zealand couple, student doctors Mark and Anne. The air was thick and hot with the smell of
sal
trees burning in the midday heat.

Sal
trees – tall, big-leafed, and gnarled – were found along India’s Deccan plateau and as far as Assam and Burma. Buddhists and Hindus worship them because, it was claimed, Buddha attained enlightenment among them. However, as Uros and myself had seen before the national park, encroaching agriculture and illegal logging had reduced what was once a lush area to scattered lonely patches, all the way to the darker blue-browns of the Himalayas.

Mundi, in his green fatigues and a floppy hat, climbed a tree and scanned the forest with a pair of battered binoculars while a younger guide sat above him on a higher branch. Uros sat in the shade with binoculars around his neck, head to the trees, looking desperate for a cigarette to fall into his mouth.

‘Where are they?’ he huffed.

We had been here for four hours and had had no sight of a tiger so far. And not surprisingly either, thanks to poachers and illegal loggers destroying their habitat. There were now less than a hundred breeding tigers in Bardia National Park.

Just as I was dozing, head resting on a log, langur monkeys started barking somewhere above us.

‘Tiger!’ Mundi whispered hoarsely. ‘The monkey. He go crazy when tiger is near.’

Behind us, elephants roared and trumpeted. Their keepers whacked their hides with sticks as they snaked along a tiny track.

It was deathly quiet. The hairs on my neck stood up. Uros was ghost-white. He handed me the binoculars. I scanned the forest and saw something orange move.

‘There!’ I whispered. ‘Straight ahead.’

But when I tried to re-focus, it was gone.

We waited another hour before Mundi suggested we try another waterhole, as we had most likely scared the tiger away.

‘
We
scared the tiger?’

Mundi said he felt guilty that he hadn’t shown us a tiger and promised to show us something at least worthy of some danger.

‘Up ahead are rhino. Grass very long. I go first.’ He looked at us hard. ‘If I see rhino I will say “RUN UP TREE!” So you must RUN UP TREE! No ifs or buts.’

Mundi pushed on, trudging knee-deep across a small river, and on to the other side. Anorexic trees, their trunks as wide as my forearm, dotted the plains. Mundi and his young scout disappeared into the long grass and we followed cautiously after them.

‘Ah, I bet we see nothing again!’ Uros sighed, his back pressed with sweat, binoculars bouncing around him. We walked for some time when all of a sudden we heard:

‘RUN UP TREE!’ Mundi was running towards us, pointing upwards. ‘RUN UP TREE! NO IFS OR BUTS!’

Everyone ran up a tree, everyone including Mundi (who got up his first, I must point out), everyone … except
me
!

Because the trees were quite thin they kept breaking! Or others limped over like forgotten carrots in a fridge crisper.

‘STOP FUCKING AROUND!’ Uros yelled at me. ‘THEY’RE COMING!’

Finally, I found a tree with some girth and frantically latched onto dry branches that snapped as I tried to pull myself up, scratching my legs, grazing my head and snagging my shirt. My hiking boots stripped at the bark.

‘HURRY!’ the guide yelled again.

Fear shot me up the trunk, which swung from side to side like a rubber stick, taking the sudden weight. I heard a crack.

‘Shit!’

From my vantage point I could see two pale grey rhinos, some 30 metres away, charging in. They stopped, looked around, snorted loudly to catch wafts of our scent before charging again and repeating the process. Later, I asked Mundi why they charged only three times.

‘I don’t know. Maybe …’ he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Maybe they can’t count to four!’

I tried pulling out my camera but nearly lost my footing completely.

They came nearer, stopped again and sniffed the air.

It was at this point I realised why rhinos have such bad eyesight. It’s because they’re a bit cross-eyed. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, with that big fuck-off horn in the middle of your face, always distracting you, always
there
! No wonder they’re almost extinct. Probably always banging into things, knocking each other out, trying to mate with their double vision.
xiv

The larger of the two rhinos looked around suspiciously, and then huffed as if to say, ‘They’re up in the trees again, aren’t they?’

‘Yep,’ replied his smaller friend, digging the ground with its foot.

‘Wanna stand under that Australian?’

‘How do you know he’s Australian?’

‘I can smell the Blundstone boots from here.’

‘Oh. What do New Zealanders smell like?’

It took a large breath and grunted. ‘Disappointment’.

We were only free of the rhinos when one of them got distracted by something really important. ‘Look, Albert! A butterfly! Let’s chase it!’

And off they went bashing diagonally through the long grass and small trees.

Leaving Bardi National Park a few days later we cycled to the windy town of Butwal. Pronounced
Butt-well
, our arrival couldn’t have been any timelier as I had developed, ahem, a scorching case of haemorrhoids.

‘Butt-not-so-well,’ I grimaced at Uros, clutching the area in question. He was in his own haemorrhoid mood – face taut, a blue vein bulging out of his temple. He demanded to know where a hotel was and when I told him I knew as much as he did, he popped and deflated there in front of me, limp and lifeless. We were two-thirds of the way to Kathmandu and the 100 kilometre days were taking their toll.

At a medicine shop (or, rather, a wooden shack with dusty pills spilling over benches), I tried to explain my delicate condition to a small Nepalese man.

‘Haemorrhoids!’ I pointed like one of those ‘Eat at Joe’s’ neon signs, arm going back like a piston to my rear. He stared glumly then fetched a box of laxatives.