Journey to the West

After a good night's sleep I was ready to face the world. And what a world! Emerging from my stupor in Varanasi I acquired a new pack of backpacking buddies from the hotel's communal balcony - Germans, Israelis, Spaniards and Frenchmen - and together we explored the city by walk and water.

Ah Varanasi! Sacred city on the Ganges! The last time I was here, six years ago, I was so sick I was transported into a state of euphoria, so I have some good memories of the place. I spent a couple of days this time simply leaning on my balcony railing admiring the Gangetic pilgrims, the baleful morning singing, the buoyant drifting candles, and... is that a cow floating down the river? Yes, and the bloated dead cows floating down the river. After this I was ready to accompany my new friends investigating their surrounds.

One such sojourn took us to the famed Burning Ghats at night where I was accosted by a group of local heavies discovering me taking photos of the crematory ceremonies. Their leader took me aside and demanded I hand over US$3000 to compensate his affronted religious sensibilities or he'd send his goons over to beat up my family. My first thought was how inconvenient it would be to transfer thousands of dollars into an accessible bank account, extract it into the real-world continuously maxing out my daily withdrawal limit over about a week, and then find someone to convert it all into US dollars. But of course that would be nothing compared to the inconvenience for this gentleman in front of me, having to fly his goons across to the other side of the planet to identify and locate my disparate family relations at moments of vulnerability. It was then that my German buddy, Christof, suggested that the most convenient proposition for both parties would probably be to just leg it, which we did with conspicuous abandon.

We celebrated our scrape on our shared balcony by ordering nine longnecks from one of the hotel staff. When it arrived the hotel management refused to allow beer on the premises, so, after a lot of heated discussion, we ended up having to drink it on the banks of the Ganges, hiding in the shadows to avoid the Beer Police (either secular or religious, in this city who knows?).

For the rest of my ten days in Varanasi I visited Sarnath, the alleged exact location of Buddha's first sermon (yes, quite a Buddhist pilgrimage I'm making here, a pity I missed the Bodhi Tree in Bihar) and took a cruise up the Ganges to a monkey temple.

After a few days fighting off touts and beggars whose numbers match that of locust plagues I embroiled myself in a conversation with my South African/Israeli friend Adam about our differing policies towards these parasites. I told him he was naive for getting involved with them, knowing their only object in communicating with us white guys (money on legs) is to extricate cash from our leaky wallets. He in turn accused me of being too cynical and negative about these sweet street urchins and honest businessmen.

And if it didn't happen that when I met him again a couple of days later that we'd reversed roles! Adam had finally become impatient with the sycophantic money-suckers after one too many unpleasant experiences, while I had decided that I had in fact become cynical and negative after 11 months submerged in third-world countries. Plus spending up to eight hours a day on my bike with nothing but my wandering thoughts for entertainment can sometimes mutate my reverie into internal rants. So I was determined to look at the world in a positive light, involving myself more in the people around me.

However, this resolution was dealt an early blow: one evening I found my own backpacker group adjacent to a new group - two Americans and two Spaniards. Being of a newly augmented sociable bent I suggested to the Americans (the Spaniards were off somewhere, stratagising probably) that we combine our efforts into one big group. The next morning the two male Spaniards were infuriated at me for thwarting (cockblocking is the technical term) their intentions towards the two American girls. I felt awful for being blind to their social dynamic and realised that I can still be quite out of it sometimes. I should take a leaf from my surroundings and get into Buddhist meditation, but I'm too scared of losing my internal monologue. After all, without that - what am I?

Still reeling from my social failure with the Spaniards, the Israelis invited me to take a boat ride with them to a deserted sandbar in the middle of the Ganges for a Frisbee game. Unfortunately, after exerting myself furiously throwing Frisbees before a fierce thunderstorm put a stop to the game I was dealt an additional blow to my nascent positivism.

Throughout the week I'd been dodging and weaving to avoid a plague of eye-swelling conjunctivitis sweeping through the city's permanent inhabitants and ephemeral visitors. Having dodged that bullet I came down with a massive head-cold and fever caught from one of the Germans (that's right, you, Fro, if you're out there!) that confined me to my bed through an accessible geohash and my intended departure date.

But soon I was ready to head. Packing up in the rain I hauled my bike through the unnavigable narrow streets and out to my liberty, pausing only to buy a litre of chain-cleansing kerosene. Ah, kero! Freedom in a bottle! Suddenly I felt I could go anywhere, get my bike as muddy as anything and still have the world at my wheels!

However, one of the unintended consequences of having possibly the quietest drive-train in all India is that I can occasionally freak out pedestrians when I pass them. I've thought of getting a bell, but my experiences with bells in places like the Main Yarra Trail in Melbourne is that they tend to transform predictable pedestrians into random pedestrians: "Shit, bike - freeze! No, run away! On second thoughts I want to die with my dog! Screw the dog, save myself - back to the right!" Splat. Much better to just glide past them before they notice you're there. On the other hand, in India there are so many people that awareness of my approach can often spread as a shock-wave through the crowd, traveling faster than I can ride. I suspect, though, that this is more due to my novelty as a white guy than a fear of getting squished by my 500 kgm/s momentum.

Already on my way, I still needed to figure out where I actually wanted to go. In Mirzapur I got out my printed Google Maps and drew up imaginary routes. Originally I'd planned to go all the way down to Bhopal because Dad said the stationmaster there once let him see the rail-yard scheduling timetable, but I soon realised that if anyone back at home knew I'd taken a week-long, 500 kilometre detour just to see some shunting schematics they'd probably de-friend me.

In lieu of that route I decided instead to make a lazy smiley-face down through Khajuraho and Orchha, and then up through Gwalior and Agra to New Delhi. The main problem with this plan was that I'd been to all those places on a previous trip to India - but cycle touring is about the journey rather than the destination, so it shouldn't make too much difference.

The next day was psycho. The nearest hotel was supposedly 160 kms along my route and I was still suffering from my vestigial illness. Heaping it on was a 500m ascent out of the Gangetic Plains to hinder my progress and, adding insult to injury, the road surface collapsing into a rocky mud pool a couple of Ks outside Mirzapur. And then I found the rain. I actually reached a line diagonally across the road where it was dry on one side and totally bucketing down on the other: I stopped my bike and stuck my arm through the interface. A very surreal experience.

But this was as nothing compared to my consternation at achieving the second flat tyre on my cycle tour. Rushing to the shelter of a chai shop and waving off the ten million small children suddenly materialising around me (where do all these guys come from?) I dealt with this hindrance in fairly short order.

But then it happened again only a few kms further on. For the next twenty kms I went through that agonising exercise all cyclists hate: pumping my tyre, riding a solid kilometre, then a squishy kilometre, then pumping my tyre again. Couple this with my residual illness causing my stomach contents to threaten regurgitation at every bump in the road and you get a good picture of the day, which poured water from the sky on me almost constantly (water from the sky!). Could things possibly get any worse? Well, I then thought, what if an undiscovered phenomenon in quantum physics caused the universe to suddenly have never existed in the first place? That would certainly be pretty un-fun for everyone involved, so stop complaining!

At the 100 km mark for the day I finally found salvation: a fairly crappy hotel. I went in and asked for the price of a room.

"1000 rupees" was the response after the manager saw the state of my tyre. Since I couldn't go anywhere this guy clearly had the upper hand and the satisfaction was written all over his face. My counter-offer of 200 rupees was met with a brick wall. So the only way to improve my bargaining position was to fix my flat. Which meant repairing the gaping hole in my tyre.

I don't know what happened to my brain at this point but I suddenly hit upon an inspired fix. My first move was to swap my tyres around - the back one has all the load but the front one just has my (now broken) suspension and (thankfully not broken) arms to worry about (an inspection of the front tube revealed it hadn't had a puncture in over three years - that's about 8000 kms of riding). The second move was to glue a SIM card to the inside of my back (now front) tyre, plugging the hole (which looked like it had been caused by riding over either a large pointy rock or a church steeple). Yes, my old Malaysian SIM did the job (don't call it) and gave me a good 500 kms of pumped-up, but thumpy, riding.

Throughout this experience I was honoured with a small crowd of scrutineers. One wealthy, educated Indian pulled up in his 4WD and demanded to know why I was debasing myself with manual labour. "See this man here?", he indicated a serious-looking arm-crossed fellow next to him. "He is The Master. The head of the Puncture Repair caste in the village. He and his family worship the Hindu god of punctures, Bisikishnu, at the temple across the street [I made that bit up]. He will even fix your flat for free since you are clearly a cheapskate." My response was that I too wanted to be a Master puncture repairer and needed practice, but I just couldn't cross this cultural chasm.

Now, ready to go with my tyres swapped and inflated, my prospective hotelier, watching on the whole time, immediately agreed to my very reasonable 200 rupee ultimatum (dreading to see this money rolling off down the road). All I had to do now was eat.

This proved to be no mean feat. Not knowing Hindi is a bit of a problem for me. On this occasion I sat down at a nearby restaurant and ordered some chapatis and veg and waited for an hour while staring at a wall for the food to arrive (the power was out - it didn't really matter in which direction I looked). When I tried to ask about it I just got offended looks. "Okay, it must just take a while" I thought. After a further 45 minutes I got up and asked an intelligent-looking customer what he thought was going on. My food arrived about two minutes later and this guy basically said, "Yeah, they were wondering why you were staring at that wall for two hours". Looking for patterns in the curry stains.

The next day presents a smooth road, shady trees and a hot southerly wind (for my friends back home this is like a hot northerly but coming from the south - yep, things are pretty weird over here). I open my eyes and lungs and take in the sensory experience central India has to offer. Leaves and dust swirl restlessly on the asphalt. A small boy squats by the side of the road, a steaming scroll of turd curls beneath his bum. A squashed dog's internal organs lie extruded from its many gaping orifices, acquired from both birth and death. A sacred cow, tied to a post, thrashes in agony and panic as a child repeatedly strikes it with a rod - his family watching on in hilarity. Cycle touring shows you the world at a comprehensible pace, but sometimes the fleeting frames from motorised transport can be a lot less confronting.

Navigation is another issue. Luckily, India uses the same Devanagari script I learned in Nepal or I'd be totally screwed trying to read the directional signage. But I've found that one of the annoying things about living on planets is that the horizon is always way too close. Why have we confined ourselves to the exterior surfaces of spheroidal objects? If we lived in a decent orbital, O'Neill Colony or even full-blown Ringworld we could at least see where we were going by looking up. "Excuse me sir, which way to Agra? Actually, never mind: I can see the Taj Mahal up there in the sky". On the other hand, when I got to my next destination of Rewa, I watched the evolution of a mind-blowing sunset and rainbow from my hotel roof that would be pretty tricky to emulate in an enclosed torus.

Then another short day, 45 kms, getting to the city of Satna - transport hub of north-eastern Madhya Pradesh. But despite this easiness I felt so lethargic I had to indulge in another rest day... which ended up being another geohash day. For those who have been reading these blogs for the last 11 months and still don't know what I'm talking about here, geohashing is the act of reaching a coordinate within a graticule (a degree of latitude by a degree of longitude) which has been randomly generated for each day using the Dow Jones Stock Index opening price.

Why? Well I've never understood people who say they just want to make life easy. Life already is easy! Financially unstressed educated white guys like me have nothing on the real people of the world. So, rather than devote my life to selfless acts of charity (which would be the sensible thing to do) I make my life more difficult and interesting by attempting to reach meaningless locations randomly scattered on the Earth's surface. This particular geohash involved a lot of mud, but ended in butterscotch icecream.

Leaving Satna I experienced the payoff from the 'rest day' - riding twice as far as intended and finally putting me beyond the reach of the horrifyingly bad tasting water of northern MP, so disgusting it seems to violate our current understanding of the universe. It's almost as bad as Adelaide water. I could now escape my diabolical choice between dehydration and regurgitation.

The 150 km ride to Khajuraho was one of the most spectacular of my trip so far. The gentle undulations beneath overhanging tree branches punctuated by small villages clustered around intersections and river crossings gave way to brief barren badlands and then, suddenly, a wet rainforest replete with rushing waterfalls and deadly tigers. Enjoying a drenched glide downhill I emerged into the surrounds of tenth century erotic carvings and another confrontation with tourist culture.

Milliard Nation

Okay, so it wasn't quite that simple. After I'd hobbled my way back to Kathmandu from the trek up near the Tibetan border (I thought it'd be cool to get all the way from right up near Tibet through to India under only my own locomotive power) there was still some serious partying and bike fixing to do.

When you walk through a city you often see things that are invisible if you take the bus. On my way back into town I stopped to get a fruit juice from a street-side stand and a bunch of army dudes came out and started beating the crap out of one of the fruiterers. I used the little Nepali I had to the best of my abilities but was unable to figure out from the fleeing fruiterers what was going on.

But I soon forgot the incident with the mountain of preparations I had to engage upon. This smashed into a brick wall as, again, my impeccable timing landed me in Kathmandu on a Saturday - Nepal's day off. I had only four days left on my visa, so this meant I had to stay an extra day in Kathmandu and skip Buddha's birthplace at Lumbini while instead heading straight for the nearest border.

So during the day I spent some time to chill out, and during the evening I met my trekking buddies Antonio, Adam, Tashi and the Frenchpersons and hit the town. Even Nigel, the Welshman cycle-touring Gosaikund, turned up - and turned out to be a Melbourne bike courier in his spare time. Also, amazingly, just before heading out, I discovered a girl I knew from school called Sue staying at my hotel, so I invited her along too. This is only the second time I've accidentally bumped into someone familiar from home on my trip so far.

As nights go, this one was pretty awesome, nicely symmetrising my birthday on my second night in Nepal, this being my penultimate. We dined out on vastly expensive pizza, hit the bar scene for beer and gin, then wandered the streets until the early morning looking for somewhere to drink and chill, avoiding the curfew cops.

The next day I had assigned to doing things. One of which was buying a pair of sunglasses for the first time in my life. Up to now I've preferred to squint into the sun, deeming myself not quite cool enough to sport the ocular shading devices. But now, I reckon, I've finally made it. I AM cool enough for shades, so bring 'em on! Of course, within the next couple of days I both scratched them to translucence and then actually destroyed them, so I figure the time is still not right.

Next I posted my pack, hiking boots and ridiculous glass dioramas home by 'sea mail' (yes, I am aware that Nepal is landlocked). I was given a 90% success rate for the package arriving. Since it contains nothing of actual monetary value I told them I would send it even if it had a 1% chance, as long as I could say I tried.

Finally, my bike. After having my hub cleaned out again (a washer had broken), a brand new drive-train was deemed necessary due to the ravages of muddy northern Vietnam. I downgraded to Deore (if that means anything to anyone) since, carrying FIVE KILOS of novels, I had already decided weight was not an issue. A night consuming Coke and chocolate while watching Avatar and Anger Management on DVD with Antonio presaged the next morning's departure.

Well, getting stuck in traffic, heading up and out of the Kathmandu Valley, and then embarking upon the wild descent to the valley below on the only road out of Kathmandu that does not lead to China (and one I'd traversed on six previous occasions), I discovered that the route I was planning to take straight to the nearest border was a no-go. The locals were unanimous: no bike can cross that pass (and they didn't even know about all the books I was lugging!). The next pass was a whopping 150 kms further on, necessitating a trip to Lumbini after all - but with one fewer day. Faced with having to ride 350 kms in two and a half days before my visa expired I friggin' got the hell on with it, stopping only at the half-way restaurant from my 27th birthday party trip to Annapurna for nostalgia's sake before practically wheely-ing it all the way to Mugling (wheelies are easy without front panniers).

The next day was a killer. Getting up early I navigated the beautiful winding road juxtaposing several rivers amongst towering bulbous mountains to the main Terai highway. As it started to rain at Bharatpur I instantly acquired a flat tyre - my first in over 2000 kilometres of cycle touring in Asia. Having patched the puncture my valve then broke, forcing me to free up much needed pannier space by installing a spare tube, all the while with locals hovering around me demanding rupees for getting in my way.

Making up for lost time, and now with a new sense of paranoia about my tyres (I eventually had to ration pressure checks), I sped on towards the distant Butwal, Nepal's most nicely named town. At the 100 km mark, with 50 to go, things got dire. The sun was now out in full force, baking and boiling me simultaneously, and I started to get nausea and a massive headache. Uh oh - dehydration, I've been there before. I quickly pumped myself full of water until that made me feel sick. All the while a large rash was developing on my right arse-cheek from not shifting positions enough on my seat.

Once the extreme exhaustion set in after a particularly massive and rather pointless hill I started to think that, well, at least things couldn't get any worse. Hey, I suddenly thought, that's just hubris - of course things can get worse! The sun could unexpectedly crash into a black hole killing all life on Earth (except those lifeforms living on sub-oceanic vents, the rotters). That would be shit, so be thankful!

Finally I got to Butwal. What a day! Here I spent what would later become my regular compulsory hour searching for a hotel, and, once found, bought myself two litres of Fanta to inject both sugar and fluid into my system. Usually my principle here is: Why buy one when you can buy ten for ten times the price? Dainty sub-litre servings of sweet substances are more tantalising than satisfying. This time two litres of Fanta was just way too much - I couldn't even stomach dinner afterwards, causing me to become weak and slow the next day.

During which time it rained. This was the last day of my visa and the day I had to visit Lumbini - an extra 50 km side trip. Doing some quick maths I reckoned I could just make it and headed off into the rain and mud. Here I came down with that unusual disease: hub mud. My bike's hub was filling up with mud. The bike shop guys in Kathmandu had only pointed out my problem of a broken washer and not, as I had assumed, replaced it. My bike was gradually destined to become a trendy fixy - like a moon tidally locking to its planet.

But that was for the future, now I had to concentrate on standing over the alleged exact birthplace of The Buddha. That done, and having not mystically attained some sort of enlightenment as a result, I headed back to my bike (I'm always nervous when I leave my bike anywhere - unlike most of my stuff it provides its own getaway vehicle), and over the border to India.

Yes, India. Land of a billion people. This is my third visit to the great nation in the last decade and my first cyclo-border-crossing. Nepal is really hung up about India. I noticed that while Tibet is hung up (for good reason) about China's influence and look to India as their cultural saviour, Nepal is hung up about India's influence and look to China as THEIR cultural saviour. Well, at least a stabilising force.

On the Indian side I quickly ensconced myself in a nice large government hotel (India being that sort of country where they have those sorts of things). A lot of the hotels in India are vast cavernous buildings, often with no guests and bored staff. They look like the abandoned gymnasium in Chernobyl, complete with hurriedly strewn debris and enterprising tree saplings. The government ones are even more so (although usually cleaner and more ominous), like something out of a Milton Friedman textbook.

But the main thing I noticed upon reaching India was the mosquitoes. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a mosquito magnet. A mosquito nirvana. A mosquito supermassive blackhole. If mosquitoes see infrared as colour my feet, fingers and right ear would light up as a violent blue. Lathering myself in an absurd quantity of repellent might bring it down to an aggressive cyan, but that would be it. From anywhere within about five parsecs of me I can see them doing little double-takes, screeching to halts, and exclaiming in the tiny nervous systems, "Holy. Friggin'. Shit. This is it. The motherlode." You may have wondered why there are no photos of me at dusk. I'm unphotographable - just an opaque blur. This is the reason for my low blood pressure. If I wasn't taking antimalarial tablets I'd be dead in seconds.

I used to think exterminating mosquitoes was an acceptable justification for my otherwise meaningless existence, but now I've come to realise that I'm just removing the slow, stupid ones from the gene pool and thereby creating an undefeatable race of super-mosquitoes. So I've stopped doing that. Although it doesn't matter where in the galaxy I hide (they will find me), India is about the worst place I could be.

So, newly punctured with fresh mosquito bites, I mounted my now clean bike in preparation for the ravages of Indian cycle touring. All I can say is that every one of my expectations were proved gloriously wrong! I was warned of a 50 degree heat across the Gangetic Plains, epic monsoonal downpours, excruciating road surfaces and a constant stream of unwavering Tata Nanos (the world's cheapest car) determined to diminish my discernible dimensions.

But no! It's a dream! Well-compacted layers of CT road-base underlying brand new hot-rolled asphalt surfacing, perfect cool and cloudy weather with little rain on most days, and traffic comprised chiefly of occasional bicycles and motorbikes. And the street-side stalls! Little chai shops selling their wares in cute disposable terracotta cups, samosa stalls and sweet vendors filling in the gaps (they LOVE sweet in India - it's too much even for me). The riding is almost as good as Vietnam.

One complaint I do have though is the status of bikes. I'll never complain about the snobby sense of entitlement of Australian drivers again - these guys take Road Caste to a whole new level. On the (admittedly rare) occasions in which one truck or bus wants to overtake another in front of me the fact that I, riding in the opposite direction, also want to use a small part of the road is neither here nor there to them. That I might stand my ground rather than be forced into what is often a deep muddy ditch is never even a thought bubble - it is my responsibility to submerge myself in roadside mud rather than for them to choose a different 100m stretch of otherwise empty road to execute their sequence machinations. Mwaghhh!!!

I took a well-deserved rest day In the mighty city of Ghorukpur, which was somewhat blemished by my having to find a new hotel after it turned out that a festival next door was blasting terrifying Hindipop through my window all night ("To celebrate my God" the receptionist explained to me accusingly) - they like loud in this country, even when everyone has already. Left. The. Festival. However, my mood was tempered by an amusing anecdote I will here relate:

After checking in and washing my clothes I decided to head out on my bike to search for a camera repair shop (yeah, I'm still hauling that mangled contraption about, complete with cables and charger) when I discovered I had lost my bike key. Involving the entire hotel staff in the search and being on the point of bringing my bike inside my room in case the key was stolen I finally found it... wait for it... in the toilet! It had been washed with my pants, came out of my pocket, and then thrown with the dirty water down the toilet. Imagine my intense trepidation as I plunged my hand into the bowl's putrid waters to retrieve it! Courageously, the hotel manager gave me a high-five upon hearing of the key's recovery.

Sporting a new rear mudguard I then left the lakey city and headed towards the intriguing twisty streets of Azamgarh 100 kms to the south. On this journey I became unaccountably exhausted... until I realised I'd accidentally taken an anti-nausea tablet that morning which, you may remember from previous episodes, is actually a drowsiness pill in disguise, thinking it was an anti-diarrhoea tablet (hey, this is India, what can you expect?).

Recovering from this the next day I embarked upon my final leg to Varanasi, my intended town of rest, 640 kms and seven days from Kathmandu. Here I enjoyed one of the many charms of riding in India: the attitude of the locals. In Vietnam people seemed shocked and confused by my cycling existence, but here they're more curious and affable. They cycle or motorbike up to me, match my speed, ask me some fairly banal questions about my identity, origin and bike value ($100 I tell them, wary of revealing that my bike actually cost almost as much as a new Tata Nano) and then ride away.

Of course, as usual, there are exceptions. One motorcyclist I encountered went through the usual motions and then wanted to know if he could ask me a question. Thinking he was going to extol my immense cricketing prowess, me being Australian, I permitted him to speak. Wrong! When anyone asks if they can ask you something, or if they can give you advice, the answer must always be 'No!' - they invariably want to insult you and then blame you, the victim, for allowing them to speak in the first place. In this case my friend wanted to know why I hate Indians. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. Well, he reasoned, If I don't hate Indians, then why do I go out at night in my homeland and bash up unprovoked ones at train stations? This has been the only time I've ever considered passing myself off as a New Zealander.

Another annoyance often occurs when I stop for one of my many breaks. Like a disparaging simile I won't use it only takes a few seconds for me to accrete an expanding swarm (I'm allowing metaphors) of curious onlookers. Although they thankfully grant my person a metre of breathing space, not so my bike whose personal space shrinks to negative one metre. They particularly enjoy discreetly (and discretely) shifting my gears into chain-stretching configurations. Often their insistent snippets of personal data become galling and I admit I have to adopt the attitude that if I was at all interested in any of the billion inhabitants of this country I'd look up demographic statistics on the web.

But soon I was on the Ganges in the sacred city of Varanasi. I celebrated this fact by first ordering a beer at my hotel and then popping off for 40 kms to do a geohash. Upon my return I left to their own devices the narrow laneways packed with pilgrims, the tilting temples submerged by the swollen Ganges and the crowds of devotees hurling themselves into the putrid waters as I sunk into a deep torpor from which I would not rise for several snoozetastic days.

Mud

The worst thing about cycle touring is that there's so much that can go wrong.  When backpacking or bushwalking the worst that can happen is you miss your bus, or your legs get tired or you contract syphilis.  When cycle touring you've got to watch out for your tires being pumped, the gears to be aligned, the drive chain not worn, the seat position to be correct, your brakes to stop you (but not all the time), your knees to work properly, your physical condition to be not exhausted, your spokes tuned, your bike not to be on fire and for you to be heading in the right direction.  And you have to be aware of all of these all of the time. 

That's what the first few days of my time in Ha Noi was all about. I got my pannier rack welded back together, gave my drive train a general service and allowed my left knee some rest before the next stage of the ride.  But before I could head off I had to wait for my Chinese visa to be granted and my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia.

Some of this time was spent in the hill town of Sapa.  I took the long and scenic day train and mini bus to arrive at a viewtastic hotel room.  Walking around town the next day I encountered an official demanding to see a ticket.  "What for?" I asked.  "Tourist Mountain" was the response.  'Tourist Mountain'.  Who goes to a place with a name like that?

I was tempted to climb Mount Fansipan - a REAL mountain, and the highest in Vietnam - but my twin excuses of a sore knee and terrible visibility forced me to wuss out.  Plus my friend Tom has climbed it so I knew it couldn't be much of a challenge.  Instead I went on a two day guided trek along a rice-paddied valley.  Nice as it was, my group soon discovered that our tour guide was actually rushing through interesting river beds, rice paddies and local villages in order to get to our home-stay so she could watch a Korean soap opera on TV.

Despite this annoyance I had an excellent time.  My small trekking group met up with a bunch of other groups and proceeded to ensconce ourselves in a Big Night involving copious beerings and the ever popular game of 'I Never' which quickly got out of hand, as it's supposed to.  One other advantage of the trek was being given a first-class sleeper train ticket back to Ha Noi by a generous American who had decided to go to Laos instead.  It was luxury.  I felt so American.

Back in Ha Noi I discovered that the backackers' I was staying at had morphed into a construction site while I was away and the constant drone of jackhammers chipped away at my sanity.  Still waiting for my Chinese visa and spare brake pads I occupied my time by searching for the internet cafe where I'd left my camera, agonising over whether or not it was worth getting up early to see the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh and trying desperately to get to what eventually turned out to be the world's worst river-front.

On the plus side, being surrounded by tourists I honed my new-found skill of being able to pick from their accents which V-Line district Australian tourists grew up in (it's safe to assume that any Australian tourist here is Victorian).  Oh, and also showing off my Vietnamese language skills: if you bargain with a local by hurling out numbers the tourists around you think you're speaking fluently.

I also bumped into my old friend Mel from Laos.  The last I'd heard of her she'd got some sort of flesh wound on her leg and a local witch-doctor had treated her by blowing dust on the affected area, the healing of which she had boasted about endlessly.  The post script of this story turned out to be that her leg got infected and she had to see a real doctor.

Finally, after several days of being told it would be ready tomorrow, my Chinese visa arrived.  I decided to abandon my spare brake pads and beer magazine being sent to me by my old housemate Tim.  This would not end well.  A brief stop off at the post office to send the bulk of my luggage on to Hong Kong and my hotel key back to Sapa (whoops!), and I was away.  Following the coast towards China.

The first day of the ride was like most first days cycle touring: pretty uninteresting.  I very gradually extracted myself from the extenuated suburbs of Ha Noi and clung desperately to the feebly offered hand of the wilderness - a hand that would later grab me and refuse to let go.  An eerie sight presented itself in this awkward interface: a modern township that had been completely abandoned with the roads ripped up and given to pastures.  Couldn't get my head around it.  Ironically, I saw there was a storm coming and so found a hotel early in the afternoon to avoid it.  This storm was to last for the rest of my trip.

The next morning saw me riding off into the maelstrom towards Halong Bay, which started as gentle rain and soon became a torrential downpour.  It was lucky that the hotel staff at my last stop had generously built a mudguard for my bike (they're like that, the Vietnamese) or I would've had to ride the whole way with my eyes shut.

Halong, the town at Halong Bay, was a pretty dead town - in both senses of the term.  Half-constructed dripping skyscrapers and empty streets soaked with rain.  My hotel was quite nice, with a viewy balcony, but it suffered from having a terrible mouse problem: after a few half-sleeping hours of battling it over control of my left-over food it eventually took the offensive and attacked my hair (presumed to be the enemy's high command).  When I tried to complain about this to the young receptionist in the morning she thought I wanted to exchange email addresses ('a mouse', 'emails' - same same).  I eventually gave up and went along with it to prevent embarrassment.  Bad move.

Halong Bay was amazing.  Very rainy and foggy, but very awesome.  It was like global warming had flooded Pandora (yes, this country reminds me of Avatar a lot).  Thousands and thousands of densely vegetated karsts jutting vertically from the ocean.  Initially I was annoyed that I could only get a four hour boat tour, but it soon became apparent that a pair of rich Koreans had bribed the tour operator to give us all eight hours.  To keep my schedule I ended up having to ride to the next town into the night to the point where finding a hotel became a desperation.  I eventually found one in the guise of a decaying block of Soviet-style flats.

The next few days got worse and worse.  I initially rode 20 kms along an island that, contrary to my map, turned out not to be connected to the mainland at both ends, forcing a long and dispiriting backtrack.  To make matters worse, the mainland road I had to take, the highway, became mud within a few kilometres.  Although there's humour in every situation.  Every now and then a crazy dog would rush out onto the road and bark at me.  It got so muddy here that one dog couldn't stop itself and slid straight into my rear spokes, nearly toppling my whole bike.  I laughed for kilometers.

After cycling consistently for a few weeks you tend to extend your nervous system beyond your biological body and into the machine you rely on for transport (nerds: yes, just like in Neon Genesis Evangelion - but without having to fight alien monsters).  Every clicking sound, grinding feel, oily smell, loose sight and greasy... taste... is part of your sense of self and problems with these are equivalent to pain.  Getting off this beautiful and well-roaded island I suddenly sensed what I'd been dreading: the metallic scraping sound of naked disc brake.  My rear brake had worn through and I'd have to remove it.

Still, I had my front brake - two is just for redundancy right?  Well, riding along this muddy, rocky, wet, winding, undulating highway I needed all the braking power I could get my hands on.  Typical of Vietnamese road-building, they first tear up the old road, then wait five years for the paperwork to come through, then slowly start work on the new road.  And the traffic!  Huge Chinese freight trucks passing back and forth, sometimes getting bogged in the up to 300mm deep mud ruts and occasionally backing up for hundreds of metres at a bottleneck.  If I could stay on the road when they went past they would spray a thick waterfall of mud at me.  Although I knew it was futile I would still have my bike cleaned in every town, just to give my gritty chain a few metres' rest.  I was a mess.  But in the midst of all this, one Chinese truck driver gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up, as if to say "Hey - that's cool!" - it was a welcome revelation that however bad things got here, nothing could detract from that.

However, the next day really sunk the boot it.  My front brake wore through.  This was the one that had had plenty of wear left in Ha Noi - the abrasive mud scourers all.  I was forced to hobble the next 80 kilometres with no braking ability whatsoever, suffering the shame of walking my bike down the hills (for those not used to dealing with hydraulic disc brakes - the pads are practically unique).  My aim:  Mon Cai on the Chinese border - the only real population centre for the 200 kilometres of this jungle-encroached 'road'. 

Thankfully, the knowledge that there was no way I could continue riding to Hong Kong released me from all my worries about my bike, the constant driving rain and the road conditions: I became happier than I'd been in days and was suddenly able to enjoy my surroundings - and they were amazing!  I eventually rolled into Mon Cai to the tuneful screeching of my front brakes (they seem to clamp shut when worn through) where I found a hotel that allowed me to take my bike onto the balcony.  I cleaned and repaired it one day and posted it the next.  The destination: Nepal.  The only place I knew I would be in the next few months.  The postage cost $370.

On the other hand, I was now a backpacker again and welcome to rejoin polite society.  Although, as I walked across the border into China, I realised that I was more accurately a 'pannier-er', and those things are pretty damn hard to carry around.

Oh yes, and those spare brake pads?  They'd arrived in Ha Noi two days after I'd left.

The Solo Tour

I spread out the tear over my cheek so it would dry faster.  I'd just seen the backs of my four cycling comrades anonymising amongst the railway crowds.  From now on, I was alone.
 
Getting back to my hotel the first thing I did was consume an evening meal consisting entirely of a can of stout, a litre of milk and a kilo of chocolate ice-cream while I watched a chick-flick marathon on HBO (that's the sort of stuff I wouldn't be getting away with in a pack of guys... well maybe the stout).
 
There was one thing keeping me in Hue: my camera.  I think now is as good a time as any to indulge myself in the tale of my camera's quest to stay alive.  For the first month of its existence in my possession the memory card refused to fully recognise its union with the hardware until I gave up and bought a new card.  Clearly in retribution for all this stuffing up I began to treat it badly.  Firstly, I crashed my bike with it on the road to Dam Rong, filling it with dirt and breaking the battery cover.  Then in Da Nang I dropped it onto concrete, bending the extended zoom to comically resemble the leaning tower of Pisa.
 
As it happens, my camera was still not quite destroyed: it could be rebuilt - we had the technology.  I Found a guy near the station to repair it and he finally showed me the result after two days, several attempts and $15 (the distended but still operating camera channeled Robocop 2) during which time I had been cycling around to the sights of Hue (the best way to see a city is to get lost and then try to get home again).  When I finally got it back I was too nervous to use it for a few days - and sure enough, the auto-focus cog had disengaged.  Magically, it clawed back to life after a bit of tinkering and so far continues in that state.  As an addendum, in Ha Noi a couple of weeks later I left it at an internet cafe for two days.  After searching for hours for the establishment's location I discovered they'd kept it for me all that time.  The battered camera limps on to this day.
 
The first couple of days of my solo tour have been blanked out of my memory - the most fascinating thing about them was that they were so boring, riding along the shoulder of Highway One for hundreds of kilometres with nothing much to look at.  But when you're riding solo you do get into an interesting state of mind - you lose yourself in your thoughts, and your emotions are free to spin off unchecked by people or activities.  Alone with the Universe.  And 90 million Vietnamese.
 
On the ride I started to categorise the Vietnamese responses to my presence, it being so much more overt than when riding in a group.  There's the stunned staring; the polite "Hello?"s (you have to reply in exactly the same tone or they won't understand you); the uncontrolled laughter - probably by people who think Westerners only come in packs of tourist bus; the stop-what-you're-doing-and-look-confused look (a personal favourite); school boys clapping each others' backs and laughing haughtily when they get a response, coupled with school girls collapsing in embarrassed giggles; the dreaded "Hey!" which strongly resembles the 'Hey' as in "Hey!  You're pannier's fallen off!/You're bike's snapped in half!/You're heading towards a tsunami!" but instead intended to mean "Hey!  You're white!"; and finally, the worst of all (other than not getting a response in the game 'Hey Cow'), the delayed 'Hello' - you can see it on their faces: they're stunned for a minute, then they chase after you shouting... but you're too far ahead to respond easily and have to choose between being rude and straining your neck.  Always the former.  They had their chance.
 
As the days went on I got so into the rhythm of cycling I lost interest in stopping during the day, pretty much at all.  When I was with the others we'd find any excuse to rest for an hour, drink coffees and talk crap.  But on my own there's only the prospect of language wrestling with curious onlookers, asking the same questions they always do, to entice me to put on the brakes.
 
Also, the true extent of my stinginess came out, not in money, but in conservation of momentum: with heavy panniers it takes some time slowly accelerating up to full speed and I didn't want to waste that.  I'd ride for up to 70 kilometres in three hours or so without even slowing down.  Combine this with 6am starts and you go a long way, on many days up to 150 kilometres.
 
Finally, I reached the seaside resort of Dong Hoi and parked myself in a hotel with a balcony overlooking the beach.  It being a hot day I went for a swim, losing my one good (Caucasian-skin-coloured and hence sand-coloured) knee brace in the process.  This would have later consequences.  Afterwards I went for a meal, that, like most meals cycle touring, didn't quite satisfy, so I went elsewhere for another.
 
Do you ever get that fear in restaurants that don't have prices on their menus that when the waiter produces the bill it's for 3 trillion dollars?  "But that's more than Brazil's GDP!" You protest.  "I'm sorry sir," he replies, "But we are an exclusive restaurant, I do hope you enjoyed your meal.  We have a no refund through regurgitation policy of course, but most customers prefer to pay it off as a loan."  So there you are having to quickly build a drug and arms empire from the ground up to raise the $7 billion a month interest repayments until you get enough capital to finance the extrusion of a space elevator and mine the asteroids (actually that sounds kind of fun).
 
Well that's (sort of) similar to what happened at this place.  The first restaurant charged 15,000 dong (reasonable), the second 180,000 (unreasonable) with barely anything to distinguish them and served on plastic chairs outside a garage on the street.  It was like paying $200 for a pub parma.  It's the only time I've considered doing a runner, but my bike was in the guy's garage (conveniently).  This put me in a bad mood for most of the next day.
 
This mood was finally broken when I intruded inland and almost instantly found myself surrounded by the most epic karst mountains I've ever seen - here I stopped every two minutes to photograph them (see them on Flickr!).  They emerged majestically from a sea of mist, like when you watch Avatar standing on your head.  Tragically, most were in the process of being dismantled for their limestone, so I'd check them out before they're all leveled (challenge: can humanity flatten the earth faster than it's uplifted?).
 
A few days of clemently overcast weather allowed me to cover even greater distances by removing the need to seek shade during the heat of the day.  I still had to have lunch though, and one thing about lunch in central Vietnam is that it invariably involves a lot of rice-wine.  For nearly a week I had shots forcefully offered to me by groups of drunk men, while their women-folk looked on shaking their heads in shame.  Does the male half of Vietnam contribute anything to its economy?  And rice-wine is such an inefficient drink - you get drunk without the pleasure of drinking.
 
When the weather cleared for a day I made an error of judgement.  The previous night I'd been up at all hours finishing off Jane Austen's 'Emma' (which I think is the best Austen novel, and I've read most of them now - it really gets the reader into Emma's head), and so the next morning I foolishly drank a Thai Red Bull to compensate (far more potent than the western rip-off).  This had the effect of making me deliriously happy, like most energy drinks, and I spent the day listening to Fat Boy Slim on my ipod as I rode through iron-age villages and around buffalo-ploughed rice paddies - safely, the only other traffic on the road was other cyclists.
 
When school finished at lunchtime (the rotters), all the kids were out on their bikes and, as usual, wanted to race me up the hills.  This time, high on Red Bull and House Music, I took up the challenge and left them and their un-panniered bikes in the dust... but wrecked my newly unbraced left knee in the process, forcing me to hobble up to Ha Noi very carefully for the next three days and ruining my dreams of cycling to the hill town of Sapa.  It is STILL recovering.
 
At last I reached Ha Noi and was congratulated by the Australian owners of my backpackers with a free beer.  I'd ridden 1,980 kilometres in 28 days.  Suddenly I was thrust back into touristland, meeting an Australian buddy I met in Laos, and Kye and Emma from the Mekong Delta Tour.  Waiting around for my knee to repair, for my spare brake pads to arrive from Australia and for the Chinese bureaucracy to grant me a visa, I began to realise that I have an inner need for progress, and without the tangible experience of knocking off kilometres on a map I feel like I'm wasting my life.  I had to get back on my bike...

Bikes in 'Nam

Ah Vietnam. The longest, spindliest country of all (after a few more earthquakes in Chile that is). It looks like an interplanetary spacecraft, divided into two halves and spun on a linking thread to provide artificial gravity. Alternatively, it resembles someone spooning Laos and Cambodia, which also conveniently resembles its cultural relationship with those two countries.

After finding my Melbournian buddies Dave, Nathan and Morley coming from the Ho Chi Minh City Airport with their bags and bikes we heading off on a Mekong Delta tour to Can Tho. Here we learned that the three letter acronym of our tour company which I forgot a moment before I heard it is supposedly easy to remember and that the reason Vietnamese families are so large is because couples struggle to invent activities under the mosquito net whose outcomes don't involve the manufacture of more Vietnamese.

Here we met a charming Australian couple named Kye and Emma who were to reapperate to me later on like cockroaches swatted with an inadequately wordy paperback novel, as do so many of my other traveling acquaintances (hi guys!).

It was in Can Tho that I finally lost my beloved sun hat to the pleading whimpers of a small drunken mob. But that was not to deter me from enjoying the lengthy explanations of which construction companies had been responsible for the numerous cable-stayed bridges of the region and how whilst coconut sweets are "Very good for ladies", banana wine (read: undrinkable rice-wine with a slight banana taste) is very good for men. That took some experimentation but proved false.

Once we were safely back in Ho Chi Minh City we were met by Phil, fresh from his move from Saigon to Singapore, who was keen to introduce us to the cultural wonders of southern Vietnam, such as his former workmates, wild nights on the town, supposedly non-dodgy massage parlours and the delights of eating turtle.

Once these important cultural introductions had taken place it was time to get into the serious business of acquiring and reconstructing our various bikes from airport luggage, a Saigon bike hire business and cold storage respectively. Possibly unwisely, Phil and I had decided to head to Phil's friend's house which had been harbouring my precious mode of transport (after Phil had graciously taken my bike to Vietnam from Australia months ago in preparation for this ride) having consumed several beers over our long reptilian lunch. The first result was a sever cross-threading of the crank where one of the pedals was attached, and the second was my pedal actually falling off into busy highway traffic on our ride back into town, forcing me to use my remaining usable cleat with abandon to one-leggedly power my bike home.

After a brief flurry of excitement in which Dave and I went to the post office to post our unnecessary luggage for our respective year-long trips to our future-selves in Hanoi (it's quite hard to translate that concept into Vietnamese), we were off to the only serious bike shop in Vietnam to collect Dave's bike and fix mine - as it turned out the proprietor was a practicing Melbournian construction engineer looking for recruits. But the next day we were on our way.

The first stage of our epic cycle sojourn across Vietnam involved the necessary four hours of faffing around revisiting the post-office and having an emergency bike shop stop but...

...Suddenly the five of us found ourselves hurtling irrevocably north towards the ambitious (too ambitious as it turned out) destination of Hanoi. The first few days went fairly well with no major incidents so I'll skip through them quickly: the first day was mainly about traffic getting out of Ho Chi Minh City; the second day was a lot nicer - following the shoulder of Highway One to the coastal town of Phan Thiet where we were embroiled in the trip's only real argument (concerning wake-up times - the party representing the least flexible sleeping schedule inevitably prevailed over that of the most); the third day was much more scenic with views of giant wind-turbines, rice paddies and coastal mountain ranges; and on the fourth day we rested.

The most exciting activity of that day, which chiefly involved sleeping, eating, train spotting and mucking around in the ocean behind our faded 60's beach motel, was spectating for a giant crab which had escaped from a restaurant and was making a desperate bid for freedom by crossing the highway to the sea: we were all half hoping it would make it and half excited by the prospects of it getting squished by a truck. It got squished.

The next day we pelted along the scenic coastal road to Phan Rhang, where we immediately set to work faffing it up to 90's classic tunes from the west, which the Vietnamese seem to always play whenever we turn up somewhere, and surfing the web for a few hours. We then headed inland for the beginning of our epic ride up to Da Lat, which was tempered only by us being rejected by the town right at the bottom of the climb, forcing us to backtrack 10 kms to a town with a guest house.

The 1500m climb up to the French-Alps inspired Da Lat was grueling but satisfying, apart from the 30 kms of dusty road works Phil reckons has been on the go for over three years. The town itself was very picturesque, but we spent most of the rest day sleeping off the ride up, visiting the market for snacks and, in my case, enduring the irritation of Phil's new discovery that my Vietnamese after two weeks in the country is of a slightly lower standard than his after two years (grr...).

However, the next day is when the real action began. It began with me throwing up in the basin after a combination of ill-timed malaria tablet consumption and a beery previous night. This was to be a foretaste of the future.

The ride down from Da Lat was a beautifully scenic sojourn around dams and through pine forests on a quiet newly sealed five star highway. This was to end abruptly at the bottom of the climb to 1812m where it became a rocky unsealed dirt track, during which the only surcease to our struggle was a spot of tea with the park rangers (all their other activities seemed to involve large amounts of whiskey). We celebrated our success at the maximum elevation with 'Rum on the Hill', but no cannon-fire.

The ride down though. That was something. We all hurtled along the dusty, rocky and occasionally muddy track towards our destination: a town aptly named Dam Rong. The views were spectacular: we were mostly riding through thick tropical rain-forest often broken by views of the surrounding mountains and mountain villages. Here I made a foolish mistake: I was using my camera to video the others on their descent by riding one-handed and overtaking them. After the easy success of the first video I upped the ante with a faster one. This inevitably led to me skidding into a turn and seriously grazing my elbow, snapping a tube on my pannier rack and breaking open my camera filling it with dirt.

Luckily Nathan did such a good job of patching me up that my wounds didn't get infected, and I managed to turn my camera on and off enough times that it started working again.

The rest of the day just got wilder. After clearly missing the 'correct' road we found ourselves being directed down a steep single-track (often meeting the criteria for a creek) through the forest that had us all silently contemplating a scenario of spending an untented night in the bush.

After many hours we suddenly found ourselves on a sealed road at Dam Rong, just as the sun set. Little realising that our troubles were only just beginning.

After three hours of hot discussion between our guest house and the police, which in Vietnam must okay all requests for anyone to sleep anywhere at all, we were politely informed that not only were we not welcome in the town, but we had to leave the entire ward those cops patrolled. Immediately. No reason was given (although they might as well have just said 'Communism').

This proved to be a difficult directive to follow because the only road out of town was blocked by a river crossing for which the ferry does not run during the night. Luckily my clearly visible Christian piety must have shone through like a beacon to the assembled masses who'd come to gawk at the white guys vs cops battle of wills as we were offered clandestine lodging at the local church. This turned out to be a real coup with the place being extremely comfortable and the priests all too generous.

Thinking that my troubles were over I and the others continued on our way the next day, but I was getting a head-ache (initially thought to be due to my massive stack) that got worse all day, and the sun was unrelenting throughout the undulating 70 km journey. When we got to a hotel in Lien Son I'd attained a new height of weakness and soon began throwing up. I'm going to skip the detail of how I vomited in the basin, which, like all Vietnamese plumbing, feeds directly onto the floor, causing my spew to clog the drain unnoticed while I had a shower - flooding the entire hotel room with spew water. That would sicken my gentle readers.

After a terrible fitful night sleep during which I continued to instantly regurgitate every mil of water or gram of food I took it became apparent that I'd be on the bus the next day. Thinking it was all over in the regional capital of Buon Ma Thuot I found that I still could not keep liquids (or solids) down and so the only recourse was to visit the local hospital. Here a lack of English skills was no impediment to getting on a saline drip for a few hours (extreme thanks going to Phil for his bedside patience and, *cough*, Vietnamese skills during this time) which seemed to completely cure me (not bad for $10!). This leads me to believe that I was suffering from dehydration.

The following day we kept the ride up, ending at a hostel watching 'Fool's Gold' on HBO with the rest of the rum. But the day after that we came to the conclusion that (partly due to my hospital day) we were one day behind schedule and needed to take the bus a few ks north to Kon Tum (but I'll gloss over that part in the hope no-one was paying attention). This riverside town proved a hit with the beering-it-up part of our brains, although the movie 'Marley and Me' was complete flop with the movie-appreciation part of our brains.

The next few days got steadily more scenic as we rode along ridge-lines, flood plains and river valleys on the Laos side of Vietnam. This culminated in the awesomest terrain ever during the day Phil retired to Danang to have a 'pussy infection', *snigger*, the size of a golf ball doctored up, clearly resulting from some impious remark to the Gods he must have made (or maybe they're just mean).

This day involved three climbs, each more awesome than the last, poking us well up into the clouds to soak in the rain we'd been missing for the last two weeks. Waterfalls, jungle, slippery roads - we had it all. We were so pumped from the ride - pretty much 10% grade all day - that at lunch, where we'd planned to spend the night, we made a go for the next town 50 kms down the road: a tangle of dam building construction activity and tiny village streets, crossing major rivers and negotiating small farms. Universally acclaimed as the best day of the trip (Phil abstaining).

After that it was an easy matter of spending the next two days hitting the tourist town of Hoi An where Phil rejoined us, destroying my camera at Da Nang whilst trying to photograph a ship beached along an uncanny Beaconsfield Parade imitation and negotiating tunnel tollers for safe passage for our bicycles before arriving at our updated destination of Hue. We'd cycled 1100 kms as a group in 18 days.

A morning of cyclo-sight-seeing presaged our somber separation, where my fellow cyclists took the train to Hanoi. From there Nathan and Morley headed home (they avoided the Tulla's outrageous airport shuttle fare by, brilliantly, riding their bikes), Phil flew back to Singapore to start his new life there and Dave, well, the last I've heard of him he'd crossed the border into China by the thinnest of visa margins (and has been popping on and off Google Chat's online list since then).

As for myself, I was to continue in my epic quest to get to Hanoi by one of the slowest methods possible (barring lip-crawling). But that's another story...