Its been six weeks since we last wrote due in part to our not having the laptop with us.
We have a confession to make – purporting to be motorcycle travellers whilst really we have been scumming it on public transport.

Click here to see more of the delights of public transport
We ran out of rubber on the rear tyre but a helpful Goan tyre dealer promised he’d have one for us in a few days so we rode inland to Karnataka to check out Hampi, a ruined city set amongst a weird boulder strewn landscape.

Click here to see a temple at Hampi

Stayed there a few days checking out the temples, crazy carvings of Hindu gods, the river life and the usual beggars that go with tourism in India. When we got back to Goa to pick up said tyre we found our tyre dealer had been telling half truths and didn’t have one at all. We probably wouldn’t have bothered going to Hampi if we’d known there was no tyre at the end of it as the road was so appallingly bad – choking in red dust on an unsealed road behind trucks for the whole day over the Western Ghats and then potholed for the rest of it.

click here to see a Blazing Trails tour ready for departure

Pete Baird, a kiwi guy working for Blazing Trails (www.blazingtrailstours.com) – running tours on Royal Enfields out of Goa had contacted us through the HUBB to catch up whenever we were passing by. Suzie Lumsden, the owner of Blazing Trails kindly let us leave our bike at her gorgeous big 300 year Portuguese house (typical of houses of the wealthy in Goa) while we went backpacking in Kerala & Karnataka States (without the laptop as we only took one backpack).

We are perhaps unusual amongst bike overlanders in that we don’t carry hard panniers for our luggage. Rich designed and built our steel racks based on what the Enfield travellers in India use; big metal racks to strap your backpack to. This gives us the flexibility to park up and leave the bike if we want to go walking, or in this case if we have to, and the design has paid off.

click here to see biker monks

We jumped on an overnight train (needs to be booked about a week in advance at least to get a sleeper) and then a bus and finally arrived at Bylakuppe, a small township now the home of the largest Tibetan refugee settlement in India (around 30,000 people) and stayed at the Sera Monastery (home of 5000 Tibetan refugee monks).

click here to see Golden Temple

It was great staying at the monastery – we saw the monks debating, making incense sticks from natural herbs for puja offerings, praying, playing music and of course their incredibly colourful and detailed paintings.

click here to see monks debating

click here for a sample of the murals inside Tibetan monastrys

We had planned to visit Bandipur National Park to see some tigers but it was closed to whities due to threats of tourists being kidnapped for ransom. The popular tourist city of Mysore didn’t appeal to us – most cities don’t, so on impulse we caught an overnight bus down to Varkala, a beach in the south of Kerala where we hung out for a few days recovering from all the public transport stress.

We stayed with an old friend, swam and amused ourselves watching Indians at the beach. Indian women generally don’t swim, far too unseemly, and if they do, they go in sari and all up to their knees at most. Men go in wearing their dhoti or underpants, love it and act like 5 year olds but the lifeguard will blow his whistle calling them back if they go past their waist or stray more than 20 metres away from where he is sitting (and they obey – oh, that respect for whistles!). Children and babies are allowed to roll around in water up to 1 foot deep while 20 or so people stand around watching. They don’t seem to be taught to swim, instead just roll around until they get a mouthful then are hauled out to dry.

click here to see Indian bathers

We spent over a week at Fort Kochi, a gorgeous sunny town with a colonial Portuguese and Dutch atmosphere spread over a large harbour. It has old Chinese fishing nets along the beach; the oldest church in India; a 16th century Jewish synagogue; trendy art galleries and cafes; a Portuguese palace and spice and grain dealers, natural perfume merchants and antique hawkers selling from dusty, ancient shops.

Lisa and Harvey (www.chasingthesun.org), our Delhi friends and hosts to many overlanders flew down to visit us and we ate seafood, shopped and experienced the famous Kathakali theatre, a riot of bizarre make-up and costumes, high pitched screaming and music – a oncer which you can’t miss but hope the show doesn’t go on too long.

We hired a rice barge styled houseboat for a day and night, cruising the vast backwaters of Kerala, through rivers and canals winding past water edged farms and villages lined with coconut palms and complete with smiling, waving children. We felt thoroughly relaxed and spoilt with 4 staff to look after us.

click here to see comuting backwater style

In Kochi, the four of us caught up with Suzi & Simon Harby (www.mccs.co.uk/global), had dinner together and listened to stories of their African adventures on a Honda Africa Twin and a Honda Transalp. Lisa & Harvey and Simon & Suzi were all staying in the swankiest hotels in town so we got to enjoy their swimming pools and room service which was a lovely change. After they left we were sadly forced back to the reality of our budget.

click here to see what we ate for $5

We bussed in to Munnar, a town set amongst the gorgeous cool, green hills on the border with the state of Tamil Nadu, where there’s acres of velvety green tea plantations and cardamom farms. We had planned to do some walking but Rich succumbed to the horrors of eating rotten chicken so we spent a few days laid up watching BBC News and the National Geographic channel on the tele. We’ve been really lucky so far with this being the only really bad stomach problem we’ve had in the whole 7 months. He actually kept away from meat for a whole 4 or 5 days afterwards – amazing.

click here to see tea plantation

In search of tigers, we went down to Periyar Wildlife Sanctuary. We had a days guided walk inside the park and went on a boat cruise around its lake, seeing a bit of wildlife but the stripy cats continued to elude us. This area is rich in farmed spices so we visited an organic spice farm and saw the trees and plants of vanilla, nutmeg, coffee, cardamom, insulin, cloves, jackfruit, allspice, peppermint, rubber, pawpaw, plantain, peppercorn, curry, cinnamon and of course coconut, banana and pineapple. The air was thick with birdsong, the scent of spices and muggy heat and we tasted the delicious, strong seed pods off the plants.

click here to see elephants at Periyar

Yet another day on a bus then an overnight train back to Goa we were reunited with the bike and spent a last couple of days at Arambol beach – no more beaches until Thailand.

click here to see Indian Railways showers

After our public transport experience its fantastic to be back on our own wheels. We see much more of the country on the bike since we can stop when we want. The train and bus service is efficient, usually running ahead of time and they are much, much cheaper than bike petrol, but we spent so much time pre-booking train tickets and having to decide exactly which date we will travel it became too tiresome and inflexible. Indian buses are crazy, dangerous and driven way too fast and we are relieved to have survived them unscathed and to not have to use them again – EVER.

One final journey on the train though, as the tyre isn’t fit to make it to the Nepalese border from Goa. We put the bike and us on the train to Jhansi (more about that in a second) and endured 36 hours of boredom and people watching. Got it off and had another 12 hour overnight leg up to Gorakpur, an uninteresting town near the Nepalese border. The Hindu festival of Holi, the ‘Festival of Colours’ was being celebrated while we were on the train. We luckily got to see lots of the goings on but managed (mostly) to avoid being doused in brightly coloured water (mixed from beautiful but toxic coloured powders) that is thrown over everyone and everything.

The picture of the smiling sadu with the Holi inflicted man behind was taken waiting on the train platform. He looked great and was happy for Rich to take as many photos of him as we liked, for a small fee. Rightly or wrongly we do occasionally pay for photos so Rich gave him 5 rupees – but no, he said he was a saint and his photo would bless our home therefore he commanded a higher fee. He was happy with 10 rupees which rather amused us.

We will cross into Nepal tomorrow, don’t have much riding to do there and can get a new tyre in Bangkok.

click here to see bike being loaded onto train

BIKES ON TRAINS
We chose a station where the train commenced its journey as we could be sure there would be room in the luggage carriage (they fill up quickly and you cannot pre-book space) and arrived at the station about 4 hours before departure as instructed. Railway luggage packers wrapped the bike up really well with straw and sacking, charging us far too much in the process (no fixed rates and no-one else for us to use). We’d bought tickets for our carriage a couple of weeks before but had to buy a ticket for the bike on the same day as travel, which cost slightly less than the price of our ticket. We also bought insurance for it but that’s possibly not worth the paper its written on even though it was worth almost as much as the ticket itself.

click here to see our fellow passengers

The train carriage was about half a metre higher than the platform and it took about 4 men to lift the bike up into the carriage. We had to unload it at midnight during the 20 minute station stop involving racing back to the last carriage in the train, which took about 5 minutes in itself – these are long trains! The bike was completely packed in with long flat boxes of gerberas bound for Delhi. These were being roughly thrown onto the platform by 4 luggage movers and as we approached they were attempting to drag the bike off by the front fairing. No-one seemed to speak English and Rich ended up having to yell at the unloaders to get them to stop damaging the bike. I had to locate the guard to tell him we had to get the bike off before he could let the train go and also get the train moved forward a couple of meters as it was about to be unloaded behind the end of the platform barriers where it would have been stuck. All the flowers ended up on the platform, the train was delayed, the bike was pulled and pushed off rather than lifting it but we only sustained damage to our 50 rupee mirror. We paid baksheesh to the 5 luggage men for helping Rich push the bike up a steep ramp from one platform down onto the next where we left it locked on the platform for the night. That’s the first baksheesh we’ve had to pay for the trip and it hurt but they were in charge of the bike for the night and we wrongly thought they would be the same guys who were putting it on the next train tomorrow.

click to see bike being loaded....again

As it turned out when we went to the station the following morning we were told that our 8pm train was coming from Bombay so there was no way there would be space in the luggage compartment by the time it arrived in Jhansi. We couldn’t change our ticket to the 1pm train as it was full so we had to send the bike on to Gorakpur alone. This was a bit stressful, as we couldn’t be sure they would want to unload a 240kg bike at 3am without us hassling them to do it or to give them baksheesh. However, when we arrived the next day we were pleasantly surprised to see the bike waiting in the luggage office for us. Multiple copies of signatures in big dusty hard-backed ledger books and we could wheel it away past the baskets of squawking chickens, maggots falling off sacks of rotting fish and hundreds of other 100kg bikes waiting to be rescued.

We unceremoniously unpacked the bike surrounded by the usual 30 - 40 or so curious onlookers and found that the luggage frame had been cracked and a mirror broken. Minor damage that was easily repaired and not worth the effort trying to claim on railway insurance.

So yes, the train was cheap, got us halfway up India relatively stress free in two days with little damage but it’s a bit of a run-around with the Indian railway beurocracy – something you can blissfully avoid if you have your own wheels.