"How on earth am I going to write India up?" A question I asked Georgie about a hundred times in the 5 weeks we were there. She struck lucky, getting nice positive experiences in Nepal and Pakistan to describe, but how should I handle our voyage through a living hell? I bet a number of readers have stiffened at this point, having “visited and loved the country, although some parts were difficult”. I admit that we added a number of hardships to our trip (travelling on a bike, going to the most populous part and arriving in the pre-monsoon heat) that could have been avoided, but there is no denying that India was the most extreme place we have visited, EVER. And even though we chose a route that would take us through some of the highlights of Northern India, the downs far outweighed the ups.

So the usual style of travelogue (went here, did that, blew the bike up this way) is pushed to the end of this document, while I get India off my chest…

The first and continuing shock was the riding. As we crossed the border from Nepal, the “suicidal pedestrian” gene (“I’ll just wander out into the road without looking”) that we’d encountered throughout Nepal was completely absent, obviously bred out in a country-wide Darwinian Traffic Accident experiment over the past 50 years of car ownership. You step out in the road without looking and you die - end of dumb gene - fast evolution!

That was a relief until we discovered that we had twin scourges to deal with. First, Indian's are big on "Karma" - that is the philosphy of "if something happens to me it is because I did something before and one of the god's wants payback" and "if my Karma is good, I can do what I like with impunity". Second, Indian drivers’ road sense is based on the ‘walking through a crowded market’ ethic - “I’ll drive wherever I like, bump into things and push things out of the way, and if my Karma is good, I’ll make it home”.

So the whole road system is like a dodgem-car ride, and they play dodgems with trucks. On average we saw a freshly wrecked truck (with its load still onboard) every 25kms.

We knew in advance that this would be a problem, and had fitted the bikes with extra loud horns (Georgie’s bike now has 6 horns and mine has 4), but that still did not get rid of the problem of cars just pulling into the space that we were occupying. Cars would try to overtake us and the 3 buses ahead of us, then realize that the trucks heading towards them on the other side of the road would seriously threaten their karma and then they’d pull into us; time after time, every time. In such circumstances the local bikers all head for the side of the road and allow the bigger vehicle to be an idiot. But being stroppy euro bikers we stood our ground with horns blaring, to the AMAZEMENT of the offending drivers. They were even more amazed when I started to kick in their passenger doors as we rode (a dangerous thing to do by the way - you have to avoid kicking the wheels). In all but one of the 20 times I ruined car doors the drivers slowed down and started behaving properly. So much for being ‘ambassadors for your country’ - better to be a live hooligan than a dead ambassador.

The roads themselves were well surfaced but every time we got to a village or town, all the traffic would snarl up around the buses and taxi-jeeps that would just stop anywhere to drop and pick up people. I would put forward several sections of the Indian Grand Trunk Road as ‘a vision of hell’ - they combined heat, fumes, engine and horn noise, filth, death and infirmity with a 'humans going about their daily life’ - we even passed Hieronymus Bosch sitting by the side of the road, painting the carnage.

India was the first place on this trip where we have calculated the number of days driving left and triumphantly ticked the days off as we rode - like a prison sentence.

But hey we could avoid riding too much and we could enjoy India for itself, as long as the people and the sights were as wonderful as we'd been led to believe. Nasty surprise number 2! What a difference to the people in Nepal, where EVERYBODY greets you with “Namaste” (this ‘hello’ literally means “I salute the god in you”) and the same word is applicable in India. As usual when we stopped the bikes we drew crowds, but in India the crowds were big. People would stop on their bicycles, scooters would do u-turns and come back to see us; others would appear from nowhere, often filling the roadside and the road. People were actually willing to risk their lives standing in the road to see us. This should have been welcoming - but it wasn’t. We smiled, we said “Namaste”, we held out our hands to shake - not a reaction - just blank stares. It was like being ‘the next victim’ in a zombie film. The same happened in cafes. We’d enter an empty cafe and within minutes it would be full of people, nobody eating or drinking, just sitting staring at us; and no one willing to interact with us. Very intimidating and unlike anywhere else on the trip - it made Russia seem friendly - at least there were friendly drunks there! To keep myself sane I’d ask the crowd “is there nothing on the telly today?” That never got a response either.

And so with the riding and the people being a nightmare, all of the rough stuff that you can normally excuse or ignore in a third world country came crashing in on us. We were expecting poverty, poor housing, malnourished people and untreated disease but not in such abundance. And the rubbish and sewage everywhere was amazing. It took us a while to work out that rubbish is not rubbish in India; it's seen as a potential raw material for someone further down the social (caste) ladder, who might recycle it. The effect is like living in a land full of "the mad person down the road who collects rubbish in their back garden". The place is a huge rubbish tip - totally crazy.

And what about those "sacred cows" which famously wander around India, where do they come from? Simple really - people are allowed to keep cows for milk production (the god Krishna was a cow-herder and regularly chased the milk-maids), but once the cows dry up there is nothing to do with the cows and they are protected by law so you can't kill them. The only thing to do is to turn them out on the street, to eat some of that rubbish, to crap everywhere and cause even more traffic chaos.

India is a shambles with not enough money to go round. That wouldn't be a shock in a place that been seriously messed up like Cambodia; but India is a fertile land, democratically governed, with a history of good education and no significant wars in living memory - so what is with this country? Some serious reading was required, which was OK because it was too bloody hot, dangerous and smelly to go outside!

India has more than a billion people and around 60% of the population are farmers - that’s 600 million farmers - almost twice the population of the USA! And 50 million people die every year, and as each cremation uses about 300kgs of wood they go through about 15 million tonnes of wood for funerals every year. These numbers are scary until you realize the population density is only about 25% greater than the UK. So the country’s problems, although not helped by the large population, are probably not wholly caused by gross overcrowding.

What we discovered is that India runs on mass ‘avoidance behaviour’. That is the philosophy of ignoring a problem and hoping it will go away. And to reinforce that the major religions Hinduism and Buddhism (the foundations of India’s notionally secular society) are conspicuously rule-free. Do what you like, nobody will stop you - it's starting to sound like a school without discipline?

But what about the rule-makers; politicians, policemen and bureaucrats? No use looking to them as they are all notoriously corrupt, self-serving and arbitrary. The only institution that is universally respected and incorruptible is the army - they get wheeled out in dire emergencies when real law enforcement is needed.

So what do the poor bloody Indians do when faced by the daily mountain of intolerable obstacles? They do 2 things. First they shrug and say “what to do?” with an air of resignation, and wander away from the problems. The second is they build themselves sanctuaries to hide away from the pains of India. The rich build physical sanctuaries, and this is where many of the beautiful parts of India are found. If you’re a posh tourist you can get luxury transport from one sanctuary to another and avoid all the filth and chaos.

The poor have to find solace in religion and the two major religions (Hinduism and Buddhism) have a trump card for people who live an awful life. They both believe in Karma (fatalism - if something happens to me then I must have deserved it) and reincarnation. Now reincarnation seems like a good thing to rich Indians and westerners but not so good if you’re a poor Indian - who would want to 'go round again' in such an awful place?. But both of the religions have ways to make sure that you break free of the never-ending cycle of rebirth and get the hell out.

So where did all that leave us foolhardy travelers? Well ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’, so we shrugged and said “what to do?” and planned our trip to make life as easy for ourselves as possible, with as little riding as possible so that we wouldn't get killed and find ourselves reincarnated as an Indian peasants - argh!!

TRAVELOGUE

As you’ll have guessed, the number of highs and lows in biking in India for 5 weeks would take up volumes. So I’ll stick to the highs, so we should be done in a paragraph or two!?

The one thing that kept us sane in India was the food. Wonderful veggie curries and freshly baked naan, whenever and wherever you want it. Thank heavens for our rigorous training in curry houses in England. When we get home we'll look out for some new tastes we've acquired - paneer (buffalo cheese like mozarella) curries, dahl (lentil stew), maater (peas) and super sweet deserts. You can even order Maater Paneer curry - yes, cheesey peas!!

A disgusting habit in Nepal was replaced by a slightly less vile variation in India. In Nepal EVERYONE seems to enjoy hocking and spitting with the courseness and power of a Megadeath concert - really earth shattering when they start at 5 in the morning and continue all day. But in India they chew 'Paan' - betel leaf and nut. When this slightly narcotic mix is chewed, the mouth gradually fills with bitter, brick red juice which eventually needs to be spat out, staining the pavement. But it's not always convenient to spit the juice out, so people have to continue conversations with the mouthful of red spit. The effect is like talking to someone in a dentists chair "ay car eerly alk oo ell", "nurse, can we have some suction?"

Again as we crossed the border from Nepal, the geography changed. Out of the claustrophobic Nepali valleys and into wide open Indian countryside. The advertising painted onto buildings immediately changed from promoting instant noodles, to mens underwear - a nation united by the need for knickers.

And hello, what's this roadblock? Looks like the police and "hell, what you doing with that black paint?" Seems that there is a law that requires all vehicles to have the top 25% of their headlights to be blacked out. This is because Indian drivers have a weird philosophy about using headlights (shared by many other nations). Simply put the rules are 'never use your headlights because it uses more fuel. Don't use them at night unless you think you see another vehicle (without its lights on), then get the main beams on and blind the oncoming driver. Then turn you lights off again'. Consequently riding at night is even more dangerous, and riding with lights on during the day was treated as almost criminally negligent. People would literally run out of their houses making a flashing motion with their hands to tell us we had our headlights on. All other stupidity we might attempt on the bikes would be ignored, but riding with lights on - never! It seems to be linked to the national obcession with thrift - not once we were asked about the top speeds of our bikes (180kph has no meaning in a land where to go above 80kph is suicidal), but we were constantly asked about the bikes 'average' - its fuel consumption. All bikes in India are advertised on the basis of how far they can go on a litre of juice. 60 to 90 km/l seems to be par for the course, so the stereotypes of us 'rich westerners' were reinforced by the fuel consumption of 16km/l of the BMW.

Our first destination was Varanasi, a sacred site on the river Ganges. Hotter than a hot thing. Suddenly we were having to deal with 44 celcius. It took us too long to realise that we needed to upgrade to aircon rooms in hotels. The main reason for visiting the city was to see holy quays (ghats) by the river, where Hindus visit to bathe and collect water to take home. As I mentioned before Hinduism has ways of ending the cycle of rebirth, and a major one is to 'die in Varanasi and be cremated on the banks of the Ganges'. So some of the ghats are 'burning ghats', where you can watch newly dead people going up in flames. Weird - an American we met in Kathmandu told us of the shock of having to arrange a funeral for a friend there - "you literally set light to your friend and watch him burn". The serenity of watching the locals making their ritual ablutions was somewhat dented when we discovered that the Ganges water contains 250,000 times the maximum recommended level of poo bacteria, and we saw people bathing 10m from a corpse floating in the shallows - either the bacteria got him, or he was too poor to afford the 300 kilos of wood to be burnt. Whatever, the corpse was bobbing next to a fishing boat that was offloading some seriously huge fish - I wonder what they eat - note - don't eat the fish in Indian restaurants!

The other reason for seeing Varanasi was for Georgie to buy some locally produced silk for a wedding dress. An interesting experience, taking her to all sorts of back street weaving shops, run by terribly nice Moslems. Silk posted home, now all we have to do is avoid killing each other before the wedding.

Next to Allahabad, another holy bathing place - the famous 12-yearly Khum Mela festival when millions of people all visit to bathe together. We avoided any bathing and just visited the past home (sanctuary) to the Nehru family. We also enjoyed an evening of curries and powercuts with a fellow overlander, Paul Philips on an XT600, doing some serious daily mileages on his way to Nepal and then to southeast asia.

Next to Agra to see the Taj Mahal and Red Fort (both sanctuaries). Along the way we started to collect photos of various types of man-made (actually woman-made) dung-hills. We'd first seen cow-poo being collected for fuel in Mongolia, but in India they have perfected the practice. The dry poo is collected (there are always cows around, even in the heart of a city), and then rehydrated and mushed up by hand. The refreshed poo is moulded into 'ideal sized' pies and either left to dry on the ground, or preferably stuck to a wall. No wall is safe, we even saw poo pies drying on the boundary walls of the Taj Mahal! Once dry the pies are stacked and then covered against the oncoming monsoon rains - the prefered covering were either another a layer of poo, or a nicely thatched roof and walls.

Poo pies a-cooking

The Taj was serene and beautiful, with the lawns kept neat by cow-drawn mowers. The aircooling in our hotel kept us serene and beautiful, except in the long minutes between powercuts and the hotel's generators being fired up. We became very interested in emergency power supplies, UPSs and voltage regulators during our stay in India. Visits to the city's red fort (most big towns in India seem to have a Red Fort) and the nearby Fatipur Sikri satisfied our need to grand mughal (Islamic) architecture.

Then off to Jaipur - the legendary Pink City breaking new records for the trip as we rode into Rajasthan and 49celcius heat. As we're not superhuman we 'installed' aircon on our bikes. Every 40-50kms we'd stop and soak our tee-shirts (worn under our vented biking jackets) with water. The wind blowing over the wet cloth would keep us cool for an hour or so, until the next soaking stop. Aircon powered by Newtonian Forced Convection. And a side benefit is that Georgie won prizes from several impromptu 'wet tee-shirt' contests.

Jaipur was too hot to enjoy, and when we did venture out the people were a bit on the aggressive side. I had one guy ride his scooter straight at me to make me jump out of the way, in front of his friends. But I stood my ground and then pushed him and his bike into a wall - his friends were still amused. One thing that we really hated about India was the way that it turned us into violent psychopaths. It took some time after leaving to return to normality. Whilst in Jaipur we went to the cinema to see a Bollywood film. When chose one called 'The Hero', which had a lot more money and plot thrown at it than most Bollywood films, where boy meets girl and they do lots of jiggy dancing. The film was all in Hindi, but was easy to follow; a spy romance with the Hero thwarting some dastardly Pakistani terrorists trying to build a nuclear bomb. To underline the education of some of the rich characters in the film, they would break out into gratuitous 'English'. When there was an accident at the nuclear lab, one scientist shouted "oh bloody hell, total radiation!". Only two people in the auditorium burst out laughing!

Scooter with stabilisers

Next a little real sanctuary for us in Delhi. We had heard that there was an motorcycle overlanding English woman, living in Delhi and more that happy to have other overlanders descend and stay. This angel called Lisa (Lisa with the broken leg, to those in the know) not only responded positively to our self-invite, but also let us use and abuse her luxury life-style. Big aircon appartment, cook/maid, driver, swimming pool, satelite TV and video collection. Just the job - we are eternally grateful. With such facilities to hand, India remained locked outside and Delhi's tourist delights went unvisited. We did manage to tear ourselves away from the aircon flat to be driven in the aircon car, to buy some panniers, spares and sexy seating for Georgie's bike, but that was the only 'venturing out' we did.

When I grow up I want to be a Harley

Refreshed but by no means ready for the road, we had to tear ourselves away from Lisa's oasis. Launching into the Delhi traffic at midday was not a bright idea and almost provoked 2 cases of heat stroke, especially with the Enfield refusing to idle when stinking hot. Up to Chandigarh, which is India's version of Milton Keynes, with the most orderly traffic system and most cow/rubbish free streets anywhere in India. But it was nowt to write home (very similar to Salford) about apart from the concrete sculpture park full of locals having fun.

By this point the temptation to make a break for the Pakistani border (just 2 days away) was almost unbearable. But we decided that we'd give India more time to redeem itself (and we were afraid of a similar disappointment in Pakistan), and continued on our planned route up into the Himalayan foothills. Up to Shimla, an hill station built by the British as the India's summer capital when we ran the place. Very weird - for all the world an alpine ski resort in summer, with hotels perched on the side of a steep hill, all finished off with a small parish church, a labour exchange, a narrow guage railway and thousands of Indian tourists enjoying the cool climate. And there was a golf course in a nearby valley, which is now a golf course with a few more divets after we played a round. Being in the hills the course was more like an army assault course with concrete channels, forests to drive over and a public road to play over 4 times in 9 holes.

Next to McLeod Ganj and Daramsala, home to the Tibetan Government in Excile. On the way we entered real mountain country again. People were more communicative, the driving was less homicidal and the countryside was terraced and green - almost like going back to Nepal. And even better, McLeod Ganj is full of Tibetans - smiley happy people - a breath of fresh air. Of course, not planning to visit Tibet, we knew embarrasingly little about the country or its politics. We were shocked to find out the level of oppression of the native Tibetans by the invading Chinese.

In McLeod we were back on the 'Israelis on Enfields' tourists route. India and Nepal are full of young Israelis on holiday - it is cheap and safe. And many of them decide to go for a grungy, hippy roadtrip of a holiday. They typically fly into Goa or Delhi, buy a tatty old 350cc Enfield for $500 to $700 and ride it to the the north of India and into Nepal. At the end of their trip they return to Delhi or Goa and sell the bike back to the dealer or to another Israeli for about $200 less than they bought it for. The bikes are knackered at the start of the holiday and need lots of small and large repairs along the way. New parts are bought and fitted, and the bodging Indian engineers cause more faults while they are fixing whatever the original problem was. Gradually the bikes get overhauled, but they NEVER work properly - but what the hell, it's an adventure owning one for a while, and when your bike breaks down you're forced into all sorts of interactions with the locals. Perhaps that is where we went wrong - we should have got less reliable machines!?

!! ROADTRIP !!

To spice up our departure from McLeod, we had our second puncture of the holiday. Yes, only 2 punctures so far, comparing well with the dozens which some bikers seem to suffer. And the main reason we get so few is that we have tried to replace the tyres well before they get very worn right down. The bikers we have met who have moaned about repeated punctures are also the ones running round on bald tyres. As the yanks would say "go figure!".

To Amritsar, the nicest place we found in India. The city is the home of Sikhism, a relatively new religion which is a spin-off from Hinduism, with a load of Islam mixed in. Gone are the plethora of gods and in comes a proud, warrior-race ethic with rules to match. And what nice people Sikhs turned out to be. Respectful, helpful, well educated and prosperous. The rest of India should take note! And Amritsar is the home of the most sacred site for the Sikhs - the Golden Temple. We visited with more than a little trepidation, but were warmly welcomed by the other visitors and soothed by the Temple's atmosphere; musicians play inside the temple all the time and the music wafts over the surrounding ponds. Finally we felt relaxed in India.

Just time to have the Enfield serviced by the professionals - the main Enfield dealer in Amritsar. The prevailing heat and shop's well equiped workshop made it seem like a good idea to let the dealer do the work, rather than do it ourselves as we'd done in Kathmandu. However, we later found out numerous things they'd done wrong: They had used too much of the wrong grade oil in the primary drive. They sealed the oil filter cover with sewing cotton and shellac (REALLY!) even though the O-ring was perfectly ok (but latterly crispy with solid shellac) - we are still removing loose cotton and bits of shellac from the oil strainers. They misaligned the rear wheel and didn't have a clue that a chain could have a odd number of links when we tried to buy a spare (the 500 bullet has 95 links whereas the 350 has 94 links) - we spent an amusing hour watching their best engineers unsuccessfully trying to fit both a 94 link then a 96 link chain to the bike. At another main dealer we saw the 'engineer' removing the valves from a cylinder head with a hammer and screwdriver, even though he had a perfectly good spring compressor on the wall. The reason for resighting all this - if you're going to buy an Enfield and ride it home, learn to do your own servicing and you're more likely to have the bike running well as it crosses the Pakistani border!

Take me to the Enfield shop

And to round things off before our escape, we visited the nightly display of jingoism and strutting at the border between India and Pakistan. What a hoot!? The tallest soldiers from each country are selected for duty here and every evening they get dressed in 'number 1s', complete with wildly silly cockerel hats and then they formally close the border with as much 'ministry of funny walks' pomp as they can muster. One side slams the gate with a swinging gate, the other has a sliding gate. And to accommodate the crowds, both sides have built grandstands and recruit rabble-rousers to make the crowds cheer on their side more noisily than the other. The best thing is that when we talked about Pakistan with Indians and vice-versa, EVERYONE said "yes they're nice people - it's just the governments who hate each other". 55 years apart has not clouded the peoples' vision.

Pakistan beckoned and we could now allow ourselves to escape, full of hope that our past experience with Islamic states would be repeated and we'd find Pakistan a pleasant place to visit.

Number of weeks = 5.5
Miles in country = 1,636
Kilometres in country = 2,618
Total miles so far = 25,707
Total kilometres so far = 41,131