Bombay to Beijing by Bicycle (13 page)

‘No, no!’ I handed them back. He swapped it for another box – suppositories.

‘No! Um …’ He gave me a piece of paper and pen. I wrote out in big block letters like you do on a tax form: H-A-E-M-O-R-R-H-O-I-D-S. He took it and gave it to a well-dressed man and his well-dressed wife standing at the far end of the counter.

‘Haemorrhoids!’ the well-dressed man erupted as if he had just won bingo.

‘Yes.’ I said quietly, not wanting the whole world to know. It turned out that the well-dressed man was a doctor.

He uttered an explanation to the pharmacist whose eyes lit up immediately and jumped to the back of the shop. He returned eagerly with a tube of cream with an extra-long nozzle. It looked like an enormous dart.

The doctor explained how I was to … er … to apply the remedy by making lots of upward movements as if stabbing an imaginary villain to death.

‘Anything else I can help you with?’ the doctor asked.

‘Yes,’ Uros said. ‘Do you have any Vaseline?’

‘No, Uros, no!’ I wanted to say. ‘You’re giving the doctor ideas! Me with my sore arse and you wanting lubricant!’

Fortunately, the doctor didn’t have such a base mind as mine and procured the Vaseline.

‘It’s seven o’clock.’ Uros opened the door the next morning. A fearful wind had struck up overnight and dark clouds hung over the
gorge-cradled
town. Lightning crackled and I caught a glimpse of it forking into the mountains. Uros turned, said nothing, flopped back into bed and threw the covers over himself. I followed his lead, curling up under the blankets. I hadn’t wanted to cycle and had been thinking of all kinds of excuses not to. And so we hid from the day … well almost.

‘I need a bell for my bicycle,’ Uros told me as we battled the bluster of Butwal’s foul afternoon winds. ‘Like yours.’

‘Believe me, Uros. There’s no going back. Once you’ve got that thing on there, every Indian in the country will ring it night and day.’

‘But everyone moves when you ring the bell.’

‘That’s because I’m also yelling.’

‘Oh … but I must have one, Russell!’

‘All right, all right,’ I said and pointed to a bicycle stall. Uros fumbled among an assortment of bells fastened on a rail; some were as big as a satellite dish, others too flexible in their construction to withstand a day of hard ringing. He decided on the loudest. Happy with his purchase, Uros almost skipped back to the hotel, where he spent the next hour trying to attach the bell to his bike. His pride and joy quickly turned on him.

‘Bloody bell!’ he muttered as he moved it again, trying to find a place where his handlebar bag would not ruin the finely tuned clanging resonance. After a while, he found the spot and stood up triumphantly.

‘My new bell!’ he beamed and rang it again.

The next day as we rode through the cool morning, Uros finally got a chance to use his bell as an old woman hobbled across the road with a load of wood on her back. He flicked the bell but all that came out was the sound of a cricket caught in a jar.

‘They sell me shit!’

‘You can go back and get a refund,’ I teased. It was a good 30 kilometres back to Butwal. ‘I’ll
waiiiiiiit
!’

He scowled and we continued on, fading into the heady heat of the Terai.

Nepal is flat. I don’t care what anyone tells you. It is flat. FLAT! FLAT! FLAT! Those mountains you keep hearing about are FLAT! Believe me, as I believed the Nepalese when they told me this, as I, in puddles of sweat, heaving and wheezing, walked deliriously with a glass of
chai
in my hand, spilling most of it down my arm as I waved to where I had just come from, down there, in that mist called a deep valley.

‘Yes, flat! You go Mugling. Bicycle, no problem,’ Govinda assured us. We were just short of Narayangadh, a crossroad town that fed traffic from India up into Kathmandu through two routes. ‘You not take the Hetauda way. Very hill. Oh! Too much!’

Govinda was a Nepalese farmer who had kindly let us stay the night in his house after we had brazenly knocked on his door and asked if we could camp on his lawn. The light was fading and the buses seemed to be getting bigger at every near miss. After the town watched us put up our tents, Govinda invited us to stay in his house.

Appreciative as we were, there was a price for Govinda’s generous hospitality. For most of the night, Govinda pestered me to get him a visa for Australia, and he made us stay in a room where unimaginable things crawled across our faces, both of us bolting upright in the night shouting, ‘What was that? Just what the hell was that?!’

Govinda’s plump wife and his mother made us chicken, spicy vegetables and
dahl bhat
(lentils and rice). The family – they had three small children – watched us eat before beginning their own meals.

Afterwards, I entertained the kids by drawing cartoons while Govinda tried to teach me Nepalese numbers, tapping my knee every time he drew a numeral. He showed me a photograph of his parents; they had lived in Japan for some time, a world away from the mud huts and small towns of Nepal.

Two weeks had passed us by since we had left Delhi. To avoid the heat, which was growing interminable, we spent our mornings cycling and our afternoons lying on bench seats in mud hut restaurants until the heat had given up.

Despite less traffic in Nepal, we had seen more accidents here than anywhere else on the trip: buses overturned on corners and down ravines, or horrid head-on collisions on perfectly flat, wide roads.

Perhaps the high number of accidents had to do with the way Nepalese vehicles were slapped together rather than constructed. I had seen buses hurtling along, barely able to stay on the road, their chassis skewing off in one direction and the undercarriage in another, as they took turns suicidally fast, occupants bouncing along inside, hair and clothes flapping around them.

As a cyclist, I had absolutely no idea where to throw myself when one of these strange aberrations of the road came bearing down on me – I opted for closing my eyes, gritting my teeth and repeating, ‘You’ll get through! You’ll get through!’

And it wasn’t just trucks that looked for fatalities. The day before, we passed a pile of rags lying on the road in the shade of a tree. An orange TATA truck blared past it and rags flew up to reveal an immobile lump – a body.

We parked our bikes and reverently inspected it.

‘Is she dead?’ Uros asked. We saw no sign of injury, though it wouldn’t be long until she would be squashed by a careening bus.

‘
Namaste
?’ I asked, and the figure stirred and looked up. It was a woman. Her hair was cropped short, her dress was dark with filth and red sores dotted her brown legs.

‘Hello?
Namaste
?’

She barked then rolled over. A bus approached in the distance, tooting. I grabbed her arm, trying to pull her off the road.

‘Move! You’ll be hit by the bus!’

‘Nah!’ She pulled her hand back, scowling. I grabbed it again. She sat bolt upright and yelled, her sudden energy startling me. The bus tooted and boomed past, missing her bare ankles by a few feet. I pulled at her again but with more force.

‘Come on! MOVE!’ She snapped her grip away and buried her face in her arms.

‘She wants to kill herself,’ Uros said. Another vehicle, an orange TATA truck, swung around the bend, tooting. I motioned it to slow down. Miraculously it did, and then stopped in front of the woman momentarily before driving around her. We stayed for the next hour trying to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. In the end we gave up, trying not to look back when another bus passed us.

It was later that day that another traffic hazard erupted. Trying to cheat the blast of wind from a truck, I bent my head down, only to look up to see a water buffalo, scared by the truck, bucking and kicking towards me. I froze and coasted quietly towards it.

I waited for impact, mouth agape; at the last second, with wild eyes, it switched direction and galloped across the road, down into a gully, tripping and crashing through small trees and paddy fields.

So after saying our goodbyes to Govinda and his family, we rode the easy ten kilometre distance into Narayangadh. Over a breakfast of curd,
jalebis
(deep-fried treacle),
masala
omelette and a hot glass of
chai
, we discussed which way we would go, as I wasn’t convinced of Govinda’s Kathmandu via Mugling route. Instead I proposed going through the town of Hetauda and up a very hilly 60 kilometre climb.

‘There’s less traffic,’ I argued. ‘And the ride is supposed to be good, according to the guidebook.’

‘But it’s uphill 60 kilometres! The other is flat.’

‘Yes, but the Nepalese version of flat is hills! How many times have they told us it was flat when we’ve spent hours on a hill?’

Outside, a calamity of buses hooted and braked. ‘And I don’t want to face that.’

‘But you are faster than me on hill.’

‘No, we get our energy at different times. You’re in the morning and I’m in the afternoon.’

Which was true. I had my bursts of energy lying flat out on benches in mud hut restaurants, swatting flies off my knees with a dinner plate.

So, we set off towards Hetauda through the heavy traffic; it eventually thinned out and we were soon among paddy fields, where farmers were up to their knees in mud, water buffalos ploughed through brown water, and women planted clumps of iridescent green rice like hair transplant surgeons on a giant balding scalp.

Hetauda was a busy, noisy town and, like Narayangadh, it intersected highways to India and Kathmandu. We found solitude at the Avocado Hotel, which had bungalows set among a spacious garden for 500 Nepalese rupees per night. Uros baulked at the price.

‘Do you have a special rate for cyclists?’ he asked the manager.

‘Cyclists!’ the manager lit up. ‘Yes, for double, only 300 rupees!’

We were in heaven. The room was moderately sized with an ensuite, and was quiet (well, except for the sound of someone snotting out their entire frontal lobe). It would be our first glorious long sleep since Bardia National Park.

Showered and dressed, we plonked ourselves down in the restaurant. ‘I’m going to order a steak,’ I said to Uros, who was busy combing his long wavy locks, now free from his ponytail. He looked like a Renaissance aristocrat.

My legs were killing me, as was my bottom from the bike seat. I ordered a beer, a plate of finger-chips,
lassi
,
tandoori
chicken (there was no steak!) and, unnecessarily,
nan
bread. Despite my exhaustion, I was in a good mood. The manager came over and dumped two notebooks on our table.

‘Cycle books.’

I opened the dog-eared notebook to find a collection of stories from cyclists – German, Dutch, French, Australian, Welsh, Singaporean – who had cycled the world, but most messages were about Kathmandu. Someone had underscored entries with ‘wanker, tosser, bollocks’ at the horror stories of climbing the Tribhuvan Highway. One entry had me in hysterics:

You think that ride was hard? You should try pogo-sticking. I’ve bounced non-stop from Paraguay on my 17-speed Cannondale
super-spring
Pogo-Tourer. No punctures for me, amigos. Next year I am unicycling to Yugoslavia.
Tom Paddy from Swanbourne, UK – a little village in England famous for nothing, and Phil from Swanbourne, Australia – a little village in Tasmania famous for even less.

A number of entries cursed Blackburn pack-racks, which frequently broke. This made Uros smile. ‘These are the same as yours!’

‘Shuddup, fuckface!’ Ah, we had become firm friends!

Interestingly enough, I came across an entry by a friend of mine, Krista, who had passed through this very hotel some years ago. She had cycled from Melbourne, up through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India and through to here. She hadn’t been having a good time of it, lonely as the road was for her thus far.

Ah, the next day, day of rest. I sat in a gazebo and wrote furiously for the whole morning. I ordered a pot of tea, pancakes, poached eggs on toast, a cup of coffee and a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Uros busied himself by trying to find an Internet café. When he returned and looked at our bill, he said with dour accusation, ‘You eat a lot.’

‘I’m making up for the crap we’ve had to eat for the past two weeks. Besides, tomorrow is a big day and I thought I’d get in early.’

The Tribhuvan Highway (popularly called The Rajpath) was the first highway to connect Kathmandu with the rest of Nepal and India. My guidebook suggested we tackle the 150 kilometre distance from Kathmandu so that we could enjoy the 60 kilometre descent from the 2322 metre pass. That’s fine for those coming from Kathmandu, but, as we were heading to Kathmandu, it meant a full day of relentless climbing.

‘It is like Everest,’ Uros moaned, sketching up an altitude profile with his ruler with the skill and efficiency of his upcoming career as an engineer.

And so, the next morning we were up at five a.m. and as it was still dark, I led the way with my head torch. At this hour, locals were already walking along the quiet road. It moved into a stiffer climb, out from a gorge. We cycled slowly, conscious of not exhausting ourselves, while behind us a thin grey line – the road we had traversed – followed the river, a good 500 metres down. Mid-morning, we stopped at a little roadside shack, where an old man and his rather attractive daughter cooked us two boiled eggs for breakfast.

‘I marry you?’ I joked. She laughed then hacked her sinuses out.

‘Doctors without Borders, Cyclists without Manners!’ I shot out a fart that echoed down the valley. They all laughed.

Ah, farting. The unrecognised international language. Take that Esperanto!

We ate samosas while I lectured Uros on the benefits of nibblies instead of large meals when trying to keep energy levels up, then stuffed two boiled eggs in my mouth and kept them there in my cheeks while we cycled. I looked like a bullfrog with mumps. I slipped into my Marlon Brando impersonation from
The Godfather
.

‘I gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse!’

‘Eh?’

‘He sleeps with the fishes.’

‘What?’

‘Sonny! Never tell anyone what you’re thinking.’

‘What is this?’ he laughed. I tried to explain but … all was lost in the translation as they say.

Up and up we went, leaving the grey, cataract haze of Nepal’s hot season. The sun peeped through, a few feet above the ridge, and we felt the heat strike our skin. Above us on near-vertical hills, women were busy chopping down the last remaining bits of trees for firewood, the rustle of dead bush revealing their whereabouts, while grubby children – faces caked with sticky stripes of snot – ran alongside our bikes in a grating chorus of ‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’

We both tried to ignore them until Uros, the cool Slovenian rock, split in two.

‘Shut up!’ he snapped at one of them. But the child kept at it until he could run with us no longer.

If we weren’t racing away from kids, we were racing away from each other. It had become apparent that Uros and I were caught in an undisclosed race to be ‘King of the Mountain’.

I must admit that I had started it. I had led most of the morning, leaving Uros way down the mountain, struggling with every turn, his dripping face looking up to see me smiling back at him as I crammed my mouth with chocolate. Just as he neared, heaving and wheezing, his red face imploring me to rest, I would say, ‘Uros! You made it! Let’s keep going while you’ve got your momentum!’ and then jump back on my bike, tear ahead of him and repeat the whole routine again, his curses chasing after me.

But as the day wore on, my quick spurts got the better of me, and I stopped on a turn in some shade, sweat dripping off my helmet and onto my sunglasses, when Uros tore past, leaving me with the sound of his steady panting. When I caught up to him, he was resting on a big rock, splashing water over his hat from his aluminium water thermos.

Before I could put my foot down to rest, he was gone, leaving me breathless with exasperation.

The road became rough, disintegrating into patchy scabs and so steep in places that my front wheel, though loaded with 12 kilograms’ worth of baggage, lurched upwards over the bumps. I was forced to walk the bike.

When I caught up to Uros again, he was having a smoke and munching on a
samosa
by a stream. When he saw me he quickly got on his bike.

‘Wait!’

‘What is it?’ he stopped.

‘We need water,’ I said.

‘We do?’

‘Yes! Absolutely!’ I got out a collapsible water bladder from my pack, filled it up from a small stream above us and gave it to him.

‘You want me to carry it?’ he protested.

‘Why, of course. You have less stuff and I have nowhere to put it.’

He begrudgingly packed it.

This will slow him down … excellent, Smithers!

But if anything, it made the bastard go faster! When I did see him again, his bike was leaning up against a battered sign that read ‘2480 metres’. We had reached the very top, 60 kilometres after we started.

Uros was changing his sweaty shirt for a dry one. He threw on a fleece.

‘This is the most physical thing I have ever done’, he erupted as I took a photograph of him. I imagined that, somewhere in Slovenia, his mother was proud of him.