The Dodgy Games

I've found that cycle touring in India is all about extremes: days are either good or bad. A good day is when the weather's cool but not wet, the roads small but maintained, people are friendly but not insistently obsequious, and there's more visible bitumen to look at than squashed dog intestines.

One of the best of these was an easy 60 km day from Khajuraho to the bus stop town of Chhatapur which began with a super-accessible geohash, continued with a narrow, leafy, naturesque laneway and concluded with a plethora of cheap ice-cream smoothies that were so delicious I began to doubt my perception of reality.

The day after that was also pretty awesome, but much longer. This one took me over rivers, through forests, along roads blocked off to all non-cycling traffic (Mwah-ha-ha!) and even past a thousand year old temple I was too lazy and templed-out to vist, the gate-guard watching me tangent away from his vicinity with an expression of total disbelief.

This day took me to the crazy Mughal palace town of Orchha where I spent a day checking out palaces I'd seen on my previous trip and deciding that since they were only built in the 18th century they really weren't quite old enough for me. On the other hand, the town was far more chilled out and relaxed than Khajuraho, where my blog would open if written chronologically.

I've no idea what did it but in this temple-smothered town many of the locals are rude, whiny and generally unpleasant to be around. One grabbed me by the arm and blathered ceaselessly at me until he accused me of not wanting to talk to him and stormed off in a huff. Another followed me around demanding to be taught English and, when I refused, expected an explanation. "Because I do not want to" was not good enough for him, he wanted a reason for THAT. Beggars shove their hands into your face, angry about being turned down before you even get the chance, touts shout inflated prices across the street and spit into the dirt when waved off and small boys explain how they'll shred your bike tyres if you try to park within their reach. Not a pleasant atmosphere.

Luckily, the actual reason these besieged tourists visit Khajuraho makes it (just) worth-while: thousand-year-old intricately sculptured temples. I took an audio tour for some of them and enjoyed hearing about the construction and artistry involved in carving out the gratuitous depictions of erotica in a voice that got slower and deeper like HAL being switched off in 2001 as the cassette player (remember them?) ran out of batteries.

Which brings me to some of the 'Bad Days' on my recent tour. Topping the list was my ride out of Orchha, through Jhansi to the fort city of Gwalior. The day started well when I was asking directions – every time it’s to somewhere more than 100 kms away I'm always pointed towards the bus station.

"Gwalior is a long way, you must take the bus", a learned pedestrian extolled.

"Look, I've cycled here from Kathmandu - I think I know my capabilities".

"Kathmandu!? It would be an honour, sir, to shake your hand. Please take the next right." Indians always become very British when they're being polite.

However, no doubt due to my hubristic tendencies, things went downhill from there: because of my Malaysian SIM card slipping out of place and causing my tube to swell up out of the hole in my front tyre (read the last entry to unscramble your brain on this one) I achieved a whopping record of three punctures in only 140 kilometres. At the final one of these I threw in the towel and got my front tyre replaced with a nobbly local one (getting punctures is a good problem to have really - unlike gears, suspension and disc brakes, tyres are actually understood locally). This tube luck might have been related to spending the entire sweltering day negotiating a 100 kilometre half-completed freeway segment that seemed to be having trouble constructing itself. Topping it off, some reprobate lobbed an M24 bolt at me as I arrived in Gwalior (engineers can tell by their pitch as they ricochet off the ground) - only one step above beer bottles at Ballarat.

To my relief I found an awesome pentagonal hotel room at the end of the day with windows overlooking the twin attractions of the Gwalior Fort and Ring Road Interchange where I recovered from the day by having multiple icecreams room serviced up to me and watching the teen angst movie Twilight on HBO (but doesn't anyone else think it's a little creepy that 17 year old Bella Swan is seeing a 120 year old man!?).

The ride to Agra was pretty exciting for about 10 kilometres (it having the Taj Mahal at the end of it), but this was ruined by being collided with head-on by another bike enterprisingly traveling down the divided highway in the wrong direction. He didn't even slow down as our eyes met for the unavoidable impact. Colliding with other vehicles always puts me in a bad mood for the rest of the day, and the locals are so blaze about it ("What? You want ME to get out of YOUR way?" they express with a sneer). I try to avoid main highways because of both boredom and danger, but they're just so direct I have trouble resisting.

Highways are also frustrating for the enormous amount of attention I get. Quite often a motorcyclist will ride up next to me and just stare obscenely. If they looked up at my face it wouldn’t be so bad – an acknowledging nod would even be somewhat flattering – but no, they just ogle my (admittedly impressive) geared drive-train, hydraulic disc brakes and remote lock-out suspension as though the human being operating these assets is a mere trick of the light. To all the shy hot girls out there, I sympathise!

Another bad-mood inducing phenomenon is the rip-off. This can get pretty infuriating in tourist areas: in Orchha I was sitting outside at a cafe when the management started trying to coax an American walking by to get an overpriced fruit juice. "See", I thought, "He said no, why don't they leave it at that?" Suddenly, at about the fifth try, the American caved in and bought the juice. This man is the culprit for the misery of the rest of us.

Outside tourist areas the rip-offs are rare and half-hearted. A withering, “Listen mate, I’ve been in India for over a month now and everything costs the same. It even has the price written on the packet” is usually enough to elicit shoe-staring and meek acceptance of the correct payment.

At last I was in Agra, popping into a MacDonalds as a nod to my cultural heritage on the way in (a disappointing experience). Finding another awesome hotel room, this one with levels (like in Egypt), I excitedly awaited a morning visit to the Taj Mahal – I'd been to Agra before but was so incensed at the 'foreigner price' I skipped the Taj set-piece. Now that I'm richer and somewhat more chilled out I thought it was time.

Amazingly enough, the night before my planned Taj sortie, I was invited by my hotel manager to appear as an extra in a Bollywood movie to be filmed there, for which I would receive a free ticket, food and dancing lessons. With breathless enthusiasm I emerged at the agreed 5am for the filming but found everything closed up – they'd cancelled the day's shooting without telling me. I was so disappointed I couldn't even face a visit to the Mughal edifice of love until the next day.

Instead I ate. Cycle touring is supposedly a pretty cheap way of getting around, but hunger is one aspect that brings the costs up. Often on a rest day I can get up in the morning and eat solidly, hardly pausing for breath, until it's time for bed. Even if I stuff myself to the point of nausea, within twenty minutes I'm ready to consume the Virgo Supercluster again (that would confuse astronomers). In fact, the only thing that seems to slow me down is riding: exercise is an appetite suppressant. As you can probably guess, this only exacerbates the problem.

My other favourite activity for rest days is battling with bureaucracy. After I'd managed to resurrect my memory card's lost photos from the clutches of a computer virus I did my usual burning of them to a DVD as a homeward package - but when I got to the post office I was told it was illegal to post DVDs because they could contain, wait for it, 'Terrorism'. And I'd thought governments had already reached the bottom of the stop-everyone-doing-anything-in-the-name-of-terrorism barrel. At least they let me post my room key back to my hotel in Gwalior - I have to do that a lot.

India is like China-light. You have to provide a photocopy of your passport and visa every time you check in to a hotel, ID must be presented for every item posted, and if you want to use the internet, not only do you have to record every detail of your identity, including often having your photo taken, but you also have to self-report the sites you visit. For a democracy, these guys sure are paranoid about something.

After Taj-ing it up the next day until my eyes became incapable of resolving any colour beyond a shade of marble I was off to New Delhi. I'd toyed with the idea of skirting around it until finally I decided to give up and just see the friggin’ Commonwealth Games since they'd be starting just as I got there, supposed chaos and bombings notwithstanding.

But I was quite surprised to discover that New Delhi was actually an exemplar of counter-chaos: a paradigm of what Indian cities are not. Emerging from the toroidal shell of the furious construction of bypasses and hastily extending elevated metro sections I entered the eye of New Delhi’s cyclone to discover an immaculately clean city of broad tree-lined boulevards inscribing lazy roundabouts around the Indian capital’s monuments to government. It’s like Canberra but with people in it.

Eager to watch some hyper-charged professional badminton I jumped straight into Delhi’s new metro system (I’d been pretty excited by this since my old boss at EastLink told me he’d been one of the project engineers building it) and found myself instantly embroiled in the terrorism paranoia gripping New Delhi. Long lists of banned items, metal detection equipment to rival airport terminals and pat-downs by machine gun wielding military personnel accompanied every station’s entrance. This was duplicated by each of the games’ venues’ ‘vomitorium’ (a cute but somewhat clueless reference to Rome’s Coliseum).

Here the banned list was so large only an extremely long queue would provide the time to read it (which, of course, there was not). Forbidden items included ‘coins’, ‘bottles’, ‘any transmitting electronic devices’ and ‘food and drink’.

This latter item was especially a problem: at some events, despite the captured and thirsty audience, nothing was being sold. A vast entourage of smiling and helpful ‘volunteers’ (who have to spend most of their time desperately crowding and clutching at the one or two spectators who grace the games) were employed specifically to tell me that nothing was available and that they hoped my death from dehydration would be a pleasant one.

The cavernous yet spanking new venues were a sad sight to behold. The echoing chambers of awkward coughs and rustling. The cringe-worthy embarrassment instigated by 'crowd-exciting' pumping music amplified throughout the amphitheatres undampened by human sound absorbers. The ‘Hi mum!’ waves from the competitors to my only companion spectator. At the lawn bowls I watched Australia thrash Brunei with the elderly WAGs who took pity on my solitary spectation. At the hockey a New Zealander asked me to which of the participants I was related.

But I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the events themselves: despite my claims that I’m more of a political animal my inner sports fan emerged with shouts of “Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!” and similarly encouraging shibboleths that could actually be acknowledged by those with the power to affect the outcome (not that it was needed: Australia kicked the arse out of anyone foolish enough to contest them). I saw at least one event per day and got quite familiar with Delhi’s roads and railways as a result.

And it’s bureaucratic annoyances: after a heated argument with an army officer over his creative inclusion of my ipod on the Banned List I was told to leave it with my ‘driver’ – I’m white, therefore my claim that I’d come by public transport must be false. At long last I was allowed to put it in an envelope and hand it to an organiser who, as I eventually discovered, left it unguarded on the street. Amazingly it was still there when I got out.

On my way to the table tennis, one of the most exciting games I’ve ever witnessed: an impossibly tight match between England and Malaysia, I miscalculated my metro fare and found myself with change in the form of a few proscribed coins. In a desperate act of needless preservation I secreted them in my shoe so that when I went through the metal detector for the event I could point to my cycling cleats as the culprit for its alarm. In retrospect, the stress and panic resulting from lying to a machine gun shoved in my face about the existence of these coins as they actually searched (although luckily not too thoroughly) the very shoe in which they resided was probably not worth the 5 cents or so I saved from the clutches of some street beggar. This regret was exacerbated by the horrifying clinking sounds that emanated from my footwear whenever I passed by a military battalion inside the event.

For the cycling marathon I followed the perimeter of the track through central Delhi on my bike, hoping to get within the 300m exclusion zone for the event to see some of the action. The only way I eventually managed this was by being mistaken for a competitor by the hapless military upon eyeing my fancy, yet bulky and muddy, bicycle and I was waved through all the road-blocks. Eventually, right at the climax, one of them came up and asked why I wasn’t in the peloton and threw me out when he realised his mistake.

But for all this supposed security, they certainly couldn’t have stopped an actual terrorist attack. Aside from the fact you’d need a MIRV cluster-nuke to get more than two people at most of these events, when the going got tough they gave up. For instance, at the athletics metro station – the only time I saw a number of real Indians inside a venue – they let the solid block of humanity through unimpeded, the metal detectors screaming in alarm at the kilos of inducting material passing within them (there was a greater danger from a crowd stampede than an actual bomb). The athletics itself was a further embarrassment for security: a stray dog gave them a comically long run-around on the hurdles track before taking a dump on the javelin field, the crowd embroiled in hilarity all the while.

It all sounds very frustrating and difficult (and I was just a spectator, imagine the officials trying to justify to themselves why they chose to host these games in the first place), but there was something that kept my spirit strong through all this: the Delhi Milk Scheme. Since the conclusion of the Great Thai 7/11 Milk Special in January I’d been suffering from a diary withdrawal that would rival going cold-turkey on oxygen. Not getting my mandatory two litres of milk per day was bringing me to the edge of either insanity or a desperate flee from Asia. So imagine my ecstatic euphoria when I discovered a state scheme to bring milk to the masses! Despite the heavy subsidies reducing the price of milk to about 60c a litre a sizable proportion of my daily budget was diverted to the white gold.

But throughout this lactic Elysium I had serious work to do: convincing the Pakistani High Commission to grant me a visa. After weeks of attempts it looks like I’ve failed, being told to fly back to Australia and apply there. However, it hasn’t been all bad – standing in front of me in one of the queues was a friendly Sydney couple, Nick and Trina (who did manage to get visas – yet more discrimination against us bachelors). Coincidentally I re-met them on my only tourism excursion, to the Ba’ha’i Lotus Temple, and we quickly discovered how similar our trips are: both a year old, visiting and appreciating exactly the same places (sometimes within a day), and both with an irrational aversion to flying anywhere – these guys actually drove to Perth and took a cruise to Singapore, besting my efforts. Even their blogging format is the same as mine and incredibly, out of all New Delhi, it turned out we were also staying in the same hotel.

Apart from the beers and meals we shared we also went to see a Hindi movie together: Crook. To my amazement, it turned out to have been filmed in my home town of Melbourne, inducing wistful homesickness within me. The storyline involved the madness of the Indian bashings saga, cutely expanded to involve riots, massacres and exploding strip clubs. Our Indian heroes somehow induced the local Melbournians (for some reason adopting horrible American accents) to hip-roll their way through some Bollywood dance moves though, so all is forgiven.

Finally, the games almost over, I was off on another cycle tour, this time beginning in the Sikh heartland of Amritsar in the Punjab, heading north through the mountains of Himachel Pradesh and finishing back in New Delhi. I leave you with the scene of me depositing my bike with a few languid blokes at the back of a warehouse next to the railway station and telling them to put it on my train’s luggage van. Not knowing the fate of my bike elicited one of the scariest train-rides I’ve ever experienced - stay tuned to find out if I've been hiding its loss all this time!

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.