08-20 Oct: Chandigarh and Amritsar (Part 2)

Often distances can be deceiving, a simple 230kms to Amritsar sounds like the work of an hour or two, but nearly five hours and much sweating and cursing later, I was riding over an overpass into Amritsar with the recommended Tourist Guest House somewhere beneath. After negotiating a monster roundabout, finding a slip road down below the elevated road, the Tourist Guesthouse was hidden among a bunch of non-descript dirt covered concrete buildings. Surprise though as I rolled in to see Big Tom previously met in Delhi walking out a room to his big BMW 1200gs. 

The Tourist Guest House, a bargain at £2/night

A surprised Big Tom

Tom had been there a few days sorting out an issue with his carnet i.e. that it has expired. It was good to share some food and drinks with an Icelandic brother also staying there, especially as Tom has a huge bottle of Absolut vodka he needed to get rid off. Sadly this was because one of his factory fitted Touratech panniers had fallen off with cE1,500 worth of kit in it. Ouch!

The next day Tom set off with an ‘I’ve had enough of this’ to the reportedly clearer roads of Nepal. Before he went though we had time to go through a quick bit of biking therapy, just knowing someone else finds the same frustrations as you is relief in itself. 

Amongst others, we covered: 
 

-       - People riding alongside you trying to talk as you’re both avoiding oncoming traffic, then because they’re looking at you, they star riding into you without realising it shoving you off the road

-       - The fact there’s no sensible driving test, people just learn how to move a car forward and break, then to survive, so there’s no codified rules of the road (there are no traffic police or sign-posted instructions because there are no rules to enforce) which makes for the beep, head on dash into any gaps infront of you, beep, then jam the brakes when something’s coming and beeeep at it approach. That they’ve managed to broadly adhere to ‘drive on the left’ is something amazing.

-       - People beeping endlessly, especially when in grid-locked traffic. No-one can go anywhere, so why?? Just why! Also being at us on bikes when we’re in traffic, as soon as we clear the obstruction, it makes you give it some throttle just to leave the beeping offender half a mile down the road behind you – beep at that.

-       - The hope of finding 5 minute of peace to get a drink and scoff some lunch. As soon as you park up, a crowd appears either gawping or asking the same set of questions, how much, mileage, how much, petrol or diesel, how much, how many cc, how much, what make... We’ve both taken to dashing into a shop to grab a bottle of water, riding fast out of town and down a side road into a field to hide behind a tree to get a drink and just a few moments of peace. But still the come, out of the ground and thin air it seems. There’s no such thing as privacy or personal space.

-       - Trucks or busses that pull out to overtake another slow moving bus/truck, clearly see you coming  but then fully pull out and start to overtake at a snails pace, forcing you into the sand at the side of the road

-       - Potholes! Like the rest of India, roads are repair upon repair upon bodge upon repair and with the lack of lanes, surfacing and anything else to give some order, roads really shouldn’t work, but like much else, despite having the odds of reason and logic against it, despite potholes and all the rest, they somehow do.

-       - Lastly!! Bikers but usually cyclists who pull out of side roads or busy roadsides without looking, get to the centre of the road straddling both lanes, then pull a face of dumb confusion and mild terror as they realise there are vehicles coming at them from both directions at speed that now have to swerve to avoid the idiot. A simple glance, one second before pulling out would do!

Tom leaving en-route to Nepal

 Aaaaand relax, though thats just the tip of the iceberg, lets move on.

Amritsar has grown up around the Golden Temple, the holiest site for the Sikh faith. Sikh people with their colourful turbans are a joy to spend time with. Their faith is based around kindness, inclusion of outsiders and sharing which you can’t grumble at. The temple, as all Sikh temples gives food and beds freely to those that them and accepts donations from only those that can afford to pay. A small museum on site detailed the history of the faith that seems to involve an incredible number of martyrs. Being sandwiched between the Hindu’s of India and Muslims of modern day Pakistan, the religion that has never had its own state has survived despite many attempts to subdue it.

After taking your shoes off, storing bags and washing hands and feet, all explained by patient visitors who understand you don’t know the process, seeing the temple complex itself is sublime. A square shaped outer-building all white marble carved and inlaid with geometric and floral patterns, surrounds a holy pond, in the centre of which a temple laid with gold leaf holds the text around which the faith is based, their version of a bible. 

I actually spent hour after hour walking round the complex as the sun set sending the whole place into a purple and gold haze under artificial lights. I guess a kind of karma exists in India, and like Agra with the Taj, where there is a stunningly beautiful monument, so the rest of the town turns into a pit of equal filth to balance it out. I’ve not seen a more litter strewn city than Amritsar, and once you’ve seen the temple, the temptation really is to get moving. Even though the guest house was costing a friendly £2 per night, Chandigarh and the India v England game was calling. 

The Golden Temple sat in the holy pond

Sun setting

I always feel self-conscious about taking
photos at religious sites, but here loads of
kids and adults wanted to get in the shot

Dusk at the Golden Temple

Lit up at night

A typical street in Amritsar, rubbish strewn and dusty

Retracing the same road as a couple of days ago, but this time with insect bites from the cheap but infested with ants and flies guesthouse, four nights in a decent hotel in Chandigarh were in order. Sadly a cold and the bites ruled out pretty much anything other than wandering from the hotel to a coffee shop because it was in range whilst wearing flip flops. No matter though, the days flew and the 20^th came round.

The match, a one day international starts at 2.30 making it a day / nighter finishing probably at about 10.30. Fearing another mozzie attack after the sun set, I went in jeans and long sleeves, a bit warm through the day, but bearable, and it certainly did the trick with no new bites after all.

Despite apparently no cameras being allowed in the ground (they were very clear), I took mine in no problems, and as everyone ignored the seating arrangement, I moved around to find two fellow brits over in India to watch the series. The game was tight with England loosing narrowly in the last over, a much improved performance on the first two matches. The real joy though was spending a day chatting in natural English, drinking tea and snacking on samosas in the warm evening air.

Cheering for the TV cameras

Alistair Cook opening the batting...

... and is out for 3! (Some Indian fans paid to
get my face painted outside in the queue)

The kids next to us getting excited

England accumulating runs

Dominoes pizza delivery in the stand!

An outnumbered group of England fans

England take the field under lights

India making good progress

Indian fans making some noise

Argh, we're done for...

Really there was no better way to say bye to India, a day with nothing that could have been better, except perhaps the form of Tim Bresnan who had a shocker! Arriving back at the hotel at 11ish after having my photo taken about 50 times with fans outside the stadium who do the same to any foreigner (how do you like it here? Can I/we get a photo? Cue about 30 mobile phone cameras jostling for space), there was just time to pack and get ready for departure the next day. 

Ahead is about a week of constant riding morning to night to get to Kathmandu in Nepal in time to meet my friend Asia who’s coming over for a few weeks, hiring an Enfield and joining me for some walking, maybe the Annapurna circuit for a month or so.

08-20 Oct: Chandigarh and Amritsar (Part 1)

I was reading through some of Paige’s travel blogs (who I’d met in Abanheri a few weeks ago) and really enjoyed all the small details of Indian life she’d picked up and put across from food to details of roadside life. Then I kicked myself because I’ve been on the go for months and completely missed the chance to put across anything like that that really gives a sense of place from the minutiae of daily life. 

Then I saw her description of adventurer and this and that which gives pause for thought. I’d agree that booking onto an Exodus bus tour in Asia is something brilliant to do and certainly adventurous, but does a bus tour with all accommodation, food, tour guiding and generally everything apart from deciding where to point a camera really get you the Scouting badge of an adventurer? Possibly it does, however I’m just using it as a point to excuse my at times near total lack of interesting notes about the places I’ve been to in favour of blander “well it was a long day in the saddle” twaddle. There are times when it would feel great to be chauffeured on a bus to a site, dropped off for 20 minutes, snap some photos, reloaded, type up some notes on the bus ride, then fed and hotelled for the night. The point is when I get to type these updates, it’s invariably at the end of a few days having seen so much, but also at the end of several scorching days battling through you-would-never-believe traffic to find somewhere to stay before the ‘you can never let it happen’ scenario of being stuck on the roads after dark.

Daily traffic grind, hour after hour!

So anyway... Chandigarh has the benefit of being one of the last major cities you’ll come to in north west India, so to some degree, all roads head there which made for a long but reasonably straight forward navigation-wise two-day ride there from Nainital. Ever optimistic I’d hoped to do it in one day, but here 250-300kms is about the limit you can make in a day simply because of endless congestion reducing average speeds to a touch over 30miles an hour (50km/h) if you’re lucky. 

I’d planned to stop at Rishikesh on the way as a friend Stuart from work had mentioned it, but seeing an  unexceptional town full of yoga places, ashrams and spiritualists, decided it really wasn’t for me and ploughed on to fortunately find a roadside motel as the sun was setting.

Arriving in Chandigarh the next day was such a pleasant surprise. Set on a rigid numbered grid system, the city is a breeze to ride round and find exactly where you need to be simply by counting off the 1,200x800m grid squares as you ride Milton-Keynes like from roundabout to roundabout. 

Chandigarh's grid squares

Chandigarh is a relatively new city, commissioned in the 50’s after the British helped Unified India split into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Punjab and Haryana provinces lost their capital Lahore to newly formed Pakistan, so Chandigarh was commissioned as a new shared capital for the two Indian provinces.  A huge design team led by Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, famed for massive schemes best understood as ‘monsterous 60s crap flatbocks’ to most people. Schemes like this rarely work in Europe because they look too perfect on paper, you live here, work over there, go here for leisure and draw some neat roads between the zones and bingo. Build Le Corbusier’s ville de trois millions d’habitants and the trois millions would only pee in the stairwells and spray graffiti, but in India, you’ll end up with ten million people squished in and the whole ‘plan’ takes a back seat as daily life over-comes and dominates it in a way it never could in the west. 

Most buildings in India look as if someone found a secret Ugly command in AutoCAD - Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U - and kept hitting it repeatedly. Chandigarh though has some genuine interest with state buildings in particular stunning examples of ‘truth to material’ modernism (picture from the internet as I caught a cold and couldn’t face hiking over there sadly!!). Unlike most of the rest of India where you find an amazing sight in the middle of chaos and mess, Chandigarh is a lot more even, no incredible world heritage spectacles, but instead a clean, green city with a walkable city centre and some excellent coffee bars and cafes. 

Chandigarh theatre

Neat, clean streets - a rare sight here

The rose garden (sadly out of season)

Secretariat building (pic from the internet)

So after a few days looking round various sites including Nek Chand’s brilliant rock garden (a bit like the forbidden corner but more arts and crafts) with everything made from recycled waste I actually felt really relaxed. In a city that’s a doddle to find your way round, with little hassle from streetside vendors, lots of greenery and parks it’s easy to get comfortable, but I was there for a reason, to grab some tickets for the forthcoming one day international cricket match between India and England. 

Nek Chand's fantasy rock garden

Sculptures in Nek Chand's fantasy rock garden

Waterscape in Nek Chand's garden

 After a long wait hearing they were on sale on either the 11^th, 12^th, 13^th or 15^th, it turned out the 15^th was the big day. Packing my kit and riding down to the PCA stadium across town, I bagged a ticket and set off for a couple of days in Amritsar for a change of scenery and to tick off a final big sight of my time in India – the Golden Temple.  

Quick update

Just a quick update because finally I've got a ticket in hand for the India v England one day international cricket game at Chandigarh (Mohali)!! This is great news, it was pure chance that England were here while I was in India where I'd hoped to catch just any game, never mind one this big, even though England have been thoroughly thrashed in their first two tests in other cities here! So I'll be in Chandigarh until the 21st then heading directly to Nepal for the next stage of this trip up in the Himalayas. Proper update to follow in the next day or so.

A ticket in the hand is worth 2 in... well 1,500 rupees
but well worth it, a great way to say bye to India

03-07 Oct: Jaipur to Nainital

To get away from the heat in Rajasthan, leafing through Lonely Planet I noticed a little place called Nainital described as like an English Lake District town. A former hill station - a retreat for the old British colonials up in the hills - it sounded perfect as at 2,000 meters it was bound to be cooler and a bit quieter than the madness of the triangle between Delhi - Agra - Jaipur.

So it turned out! The ride there would take two days but having made it to within 80kms on the first day, a town called Rudrapur was effectively closed off due to rioting. Something to do with tensions between Muslims and Hindus burning each others sacred items had meant the army moved in and road blocks were in force. There was no easy way round, and with the sun setting, just no time to go investigating side roads for fear of getting marooned in the middle of nowhere in the pitch black.

Monkeys on the road

Marriage advice

Riding up into the hills

The rain starts

One of many landslides on the way

Finding the nearest hotel, the manager knocked 30% of the rate which was fortunate given how plush it was, and fortuitous that such a place was sat on the roadside having not passed anything like it in the previous few hours! A bit of last minute planning showed two options, a long detour round several cities totalling over 200kms, a decent days riding at least, or a shortcut through farm tracks to then re-join the original road to Nainital. Trying and coming up with two dead ends (a river with no bridge) it was third time lucky and off to the mountains. For the first time in India the roads became interesting, well surfaced, twisty and quiet for about 30kms, heaven!

The track then wound up to Nainital over increasingly broken up road as mudslides had taken chunks out of it. STaying in a small cheap hotel room complete with mouse scurrying around, the town was lovely. Trees just turning autumnal, cool air in the mornings and evenings and a pleasant Lakeland look was a huge boost to morale. Fortunately, a local festival was underway which brought parades out to the streets in the day and fireworks and more at night.

Parked up for a few days

Boaters on Naini lake

Lakeshore at night

Looking like the Lakes

Sail boat on the lake

A parade passing through

Prayer flags in the hills

Hire boats on the shore

Fireworks at a local festival

Getting set for fires

Crowds watch the effigies on fire

After a day walking in the hills (sadly too cloudy to see the famous Himalaya views) and one walking the loop around the lake its time to move on to Chandigarh for a few days. A large city thats meant to be somewhat different to most in India, more ordered and laid out on a grid pattern which will be great, it's so hard to navigate around places here for lack of signs and general cutter / mayhem on the streets. There's also the small matter of an India v England cricket match there that I'm really hoping to get a ticket for!

25 Sept - 02 Oct: Gwalior to Jaipur

Woah, where does time go, a lot to fit in from just a couple of days so here’s pretty much a diary entry from 25^th Sept to 2^nd Oct.

Having ticked off the big sights of Agra, my next stop was south to Gwalior, known for its huge fortress. The ride down was easy enough, such as it can be here and included crossing railway lines surrounded by deep sand, always fun on a loaded bike, but no major issues. 

Despite apparently being a fairly common tourist sight, people round Gwalior were extremely interested, just in me rather than the bike. Looking for some food on the way to the fortress, a guy on a scooter saw I didn’t really know where I was and gave me a lift half way across town to a parade or cafes near where I needed to be. Then on the way up the hill to the entrance, a young guy on a bike started talking, bought me some bananas and introduced me to his family. Finally a salesman from the Honda Hero showroom gave me a full tour and offers of any help needed. It’s all lovely of course, but the second guy, with the pushbike, like a guy on the Delhi metro, was a bit odd in that they get so excited they’re almost whipped up into a religious like fervour and start slurring their words which gets a bit much. 

The fortress, its huge indeed, great to look at, but the day was too hot to go walking around every nook along the almost 2km length, so I took in the main gate and palace parts before calling it a day – you really can’t aim to do much at all in humidity like this.

Gwalior fortress

Gwalior town

Carved rooms in the palace

After just a day in Gwalior, it was back on the road, this time towards Jaipur ‘the pink city’ that everyone gushes about how beautiful it is. Finding a decent looking hotel for £7 a night, I planned a few nights there after a visit to Sariska Tiger Reserve, or so I thought.

Reading that the tiger reserve, once famous for having no tigers in it, was now fully stocked, I set off on the 300km route through the first India countryside I’d seen. Lovely as it was, the potholes and patches of gravel and dirt road became frustrating for slowing progress not least because my bike was starting to surge, the revs would blip up then die for a few seconds, making control a little tricky but not impossible. Then starting to stall at low revs, all clearly wasn’t well and I was clearly a long way from any useful source of mechanical help.

Things came to a bit of a head when I hit an unsigned, unmarked and all but impossible to see speed bump literally in the middle of nowhere and a pannier fell off. Quickly stopping, turning round to go pick it up before a truck driver some way behind would run it over (they are pure crazy) I propped my bike on the side stand in the rough at the side of the road, ran to get the pannier, then heard the crunch of it falling over. Happily another bunch of guys appeared out of nowhere, helped pick it up and get the pannier firmly back on without too much hassle. 

All this added to a tough days riding that didn’t improve when I arrived with the sun setting at Sariska Tiger Reserve gates, to be told there was no way I could go through and I’d have to go back to the nearest small town for the night. This was a nightmare situation as there is no way round meaning a 50km ride over pure rutted track, no lights, no road markings, just a bumpy rocky track. There was just arguing so it had to be done in rapidly falling spirits – at the end of some days, you just want to be off the bike as soon as possible and get your feet up, you really don’t have the energy for the extra effort. Watching the kms tick down unbelievably slowly as the light faded. At the end of it all, found a hotel that was more than it should have been, but when you’re in no mood to shop around, it had to do.

So that was the hardest days riding so far, having a pannier fall off earlier in the day and cutting my hand to bits fitting it back on, my bike then toppled over again in some soft sand at the side of the road). With the now ever-present mozzy bites on my feet, it’d been a bit of a day all in all! 

Desperate to get to Jaipur to just stay somewhere for a few nights in a row, I was up early and off to the only stop off on the way (being cheesed off at the Tiger Reserve for sending back down the dangerous road, I wasnt going to try again). Despite not being on my sat nav, and marked as about 20kms in the wrong direction on my Indian road map (which I now have no confidence in!) the little village of Abhaneri was the target. It has one of the largest ‘step-wells’ in India. I’d seen these for some reason on the internet in England and wanted to see one in real life. Build in the 7^thcentury, they provided a permanent well of monsoon water over the long arid summer to farmers and sometimes also served as religious sites. It was certainly spectacular to see and well worth the diversion (really wish I had more time to write about this but I've got a 1 hour internet connection and its ticking down quickly!)

Abhaneri step well

Me at the step well

Drawing a few people on arrival

And quite a crowd on departure

My bike had been attracting a bit of a crowd as ever when I stop. It’s nice in one way, but the same questions every time soon wear a bit thin, and there’s some English hesitance I always have when everyone’s first question is ‘how much?’. You get this absolutely everywhere from everyone. Luckily, an American lady on an Exodus tour bounded over to say hi which took some attention away. Paige McMahon (http://www.turnthepayge.com) adventurer and all round bundle of energy was a pleasant diversion and had the local guys nudging and winking.

And your wife sir? 

The thing is, everyone also asks ‘where’s your wife sir?’ and generally stare in a stupor when you say you’re travelling alone. Whilst there are apparently still issues with too-young child brides in India, the general tradition seems to be towards marriage at a young age of high-teens early twenties. So particularly rural people have a quite childish sensibility to men meeting women which causes a stir when someone like Paige comes along. The idea not falling into a Bollywood style romance and running off to get married post-haste is a bit of a strange one to swallow. That’s probably a bit unfair, but closer to the situation than it is wide of the mark.

Anyway, so onto Jaipur, the most non-pink of all famously pink cities. Staying here for a few days was good relaxation apart from having a sauna of a hotel room that just couldn’t cool down. The old city, supposedly painted pink from top to bottom, like many things in India, clearly hadn’t had a lick of paint to refresh it for quite some time. It has turned the same dusty red colour that the earth is here and therefore most places have touches of it around. 

Aware this post is going on a bit, here’s some photos of the Jantar Mantar, a highlight of the city, a huge astronomical park build for the Maharaja who was very much into this just opposite the city palace. There are several impressive forts around, but I was a bit ‘forted out’ after Delhi, Agra and Gwalior so gave them a miss. 

A sun dial and true north arrow at Jantar Mantar

Astrological charts

A huge sun-dial at Jantar Mantar... and me

A small shrine in a leafy corner

Jaipur 'pink city' walls

What was worth a look though was the Irani cup, a cricket match between Rajasthan and a Rest-of-India team to kick off the domestic cricket season. The match was free, just turn up and watch, with a few some star names on the go. It was a good morning watching the fanatical crowd go crazy anytime a player walked anywhere near the stand, but lacked the interest of having your own team involved (am hoping to catch an India v England One Day International in Mohali later in the month). Sensing a stomach ache coming on, I headed back at lunch. One great thing about India is the love of cricket - 3 full time TV channels, everyone knows the English counties, and that Leeds is the home of cricket in Yorkshire. Also when they ask my name (Stuart is really unusual in Europe and nobody gets it right), here they just say 'oh. like Stuart Broad'!

Irani cup cricket match in Jaipur

Drawing a bit of a crown on the way home

Well unfortunately that was it for the next two days after what I’m now certain was a dodgy cup of coffee, am sure the milk must have been well off or something was in there, regardless, it knocked me back for two days. One of those was spent in a panic as I’d downloaded a map of Nepal in preparation for heading there onto my Garmin, great but it also deleted my map of India in doing so! It took forever to re-download the 500mb India map over an, at very best 30kbps intermittent internet connection, but it eventually worked to much relief. 

Panic over it was time to leave on the 3^rd, heading to a lesser known part of India called Nanital – time to get some fresh air up in the mountains!

As a side note, though I don’t speak Hindi, I’m doing fine in India so far with this simple rule of thumb:

BEEEEP: I’m overtaking you, stay there

BEEEEP: I’m driving the wrong way down your side of the dual-carriageway, move

BEEEEP: Hey, unusual bike, what is it, how much? Petrol or diesel?

BEEEEP: I’m on a broadly working, relatively fast German bike and overtaking you, stay there pal

BEEEEP: I’m swerving to avoid a massive pothole and will be swinging into your path, move.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEP: I’m not moving for you

BEEEEP: I’m a taxi and have space, want a ride?

BEEEEP: I’m a taxi and fully loaded, out of my way

It might be a while before the next update as I’ve no idea how freely available internet connections will be in the mountains. Also I have no idea how long I’ll be spending on the road, its impossible to work out because dual carriageway’s often become single lane roads with the left hand lane being used by locals to set up shops selling the same stuff in each town to traffic that now is moving more slowly, handy for a bottle of water but keeps average speeds down to about 50kmh which isn’t great!