Freighted

Travelling from one country to another on a cargo ship is a pretty awesome way to get around. After being refused a Pakistan visa I had been feeling pretty awful about having to fly over that intransigent nation, as if my whole trip had been a failure. So it's testament to how much this voyage meant to me that when I first realised I could take this ship, way back in Rajastan's Udaipur, my mood jumped into a higher orbital and has pretty much stayed there ever since, despite numerous subsequent set-backs.

The first night before my departure was celebrated with a small party at my usual Mumbai haunt, the Parsi-run Universal Café (which I flatter myself still misses me), coupled inversely with the discovery that a local foreign bike shop had once again destroyed my bike's bottom bracket. The following morning began with my last skirmishes against Indian bureaucracy as I had a US$50 traveller's cheque converted to Omani riels at a bank advertising a good rate, but had to have the money transformed into first US dollars and then Indian rupees to get there, incurring large commissions and dodgy rates at every metamorphosis until I had barely anything left (and that's ignoring what I had to go through to get the traveller's cheques in the first place!). It was worse than transmitting electricity to Tasmania under Bass Strait.

But soon I had gathered my gear and was creaking and grinding (that bottom bracket again) my way to the Mumbai ferry terminal from whence I would be ferried to the mainland port of Nhava Sheva.

The rest of the day was spent waiting for hours in car parks and container fields, presumably because those were what I was supposed to be during each successive stage of the administrative process. But suddenly, at sunset, I was clambering up the gangplank, and then I was on board. A passenger of the CMA CGM Coral.

I immediately met the disembarking group: two other cycle tourists. In the frantic minutes of our brief encounter we exchanged maps, currency, tips and itinerates: we were riding almost identical trips but in reverse directions. I later discovered that the 'small change' UAE dirhams they handed me (they'd boarded at Dubai) were worth almost $50. I love cycle tourists.

For the next six days life on board was like living in the hotel from 'The Shining' (halls of blood not-withstanding), or on the mining ship Red Dwarf. The few people on board weren't enough to even half-fill the massive floating office-block and they were pretty much always working on far-flung regions of the 280 metre long ship anyway. In fact, at times I worried that I was actually on board the spaceship from '2001: A Space Odyssey' and that some computer was about to switch off the life-support system.

In other respects it was like living in a Soviet submarine. While the crew was mostly Filipino, the officers were all Croatian and Ukrainian and they spent most of the rare periods in which they succumbed to my polite attempts to engage them in conversation reminiscing about the good ol' days under the Communists when the crews were large and the workloads small – plenty of scope for games, music and vodka.

Today, sadly, these cargo ships slide silently through the sea like ghosts. My entire floor, 'E Deck', was empty. I was the ship's 'Spare Officer (A)' according to the sign on my door, and fit somewhere in the hierarchical limbo between superfluous officer and steam-pipe mould. In one telling encounter I'd just finished putting on a wash when I turned and saw the captain standing in the laundry doorway. He looked at me, then at the washing machine.

"Err… do you want to go first?" I asked. He stared at me blankly.

"I'll get my stuff out. You go first."

The ship could also be quite spooky at times. The constant movement and vibrations of the vessel at sea seemed almost human. I often got the sense that someone had just sat down next to me or even gotten into bed with me. Objects placed on tables would march slowly but resolutely towards the edge, finally hitting the floor with a bang that invariably ejected me from my skin. Another concern, only slightly more legitimate, was of pirates. The first mate took me on a guided tour of the rest of the ship one day and pointed out all the anti-piracy apparati: riot hoses, rope ladder axes and even dummy security men equipped with fake rifles. The mate even related some stories of work colleagues who'd been taken hostage in these waters, sometimes for months.

Otherwise I spent my time reading, listening to podcasts, stuffing my face full of the excellent food prepared especially for me and watching movies from the 'Ship's Library'. They had the rather pointless but somewhat interesting 'Darjeeling Limited' about a train journey in a fictional country bearing no resemblance to India, and the much more excellent film 'Chopper', which toyed with my Melbournian homesickness. I filled in the gaps gazing at the hypnotic immensity of the ocean – a desert in flux. One night I saw swirling bioluminescent fireworks being churned up in our wake, mirroring the brilliant starfield above. I often watched leaping schools of fish shadowing our slow progress but I never saw the dolphins diving in the waves that the preceding passengers reported.

Well, I hear you ask, how much did this crazy sea voyage end up costing me? First, think of the carbon footprint: a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts my personal CO2 contribution at an additional 500 mils of fuel for the whole journey (although that's enough for over 2,000 kilometres of chain cleaning). Beyond that, let's just say that if I'd chosen instead to fly it would have required one fifth the money and one fiftieth the time. But stuff that. This was totally worth it.

After six days at sea I was at last disembarked at an Omani port half-way up the end of the Arabian Peninsula. It was 4:30 in the morning and I was thirty kilometres out of town. Miraculously, my ailing bike got me into the city. This was not helped by multiple shells of port security refusing to believe either that passengers could travel on cargo ships or that I could just ride on my bike into the country – but that's fine, by now I'm used to people not believing that what I'm doing is possible. Shortly after arriving in the delightfully named city of Salalah my bottom bracket actually disintegrated on me, flinging my left crank to the ground and grounding me where I stood.

I looked around at this strange new country. Oman is pretty much the opposite of India, the Indian underclass here even ride their bikes on the opposite side of the road (still the wrong side). Another contrast was the distinct impression I got that Salalah had just been hit by a neutron bomb and I was among the few survivors: loose sand blew across the streets; traffic lights flicked red and green unheeded; beige blocky buildings stood silently defiant in the centres of unnecessarily large urban properties.

In other respects Oman is like America. Everyone drives big American cars, there's fast food and enormous freeways all over the place and the materialistic yet deeply religious people are brash and loud while at the same time generous and helpful. They also practice polygamy, just like in America, as I found out from the young Arab civil engineering student sitting next to me on the night bus taking me to Musqat. He boasted that he would one day surpass his brother's acquisition of three simultaneous wives once he graduated and became rich.

The morning after the night's interminable drift through the vast Arabian Desert left me wandering the streets of Oman's capital for six hours, burdened by my unridable bike, looking for a reasonably priced hotel and a decent bike shop and being briefly stopped by the police while the Sultan of Oman drove past (he must never discover that there are other road users). The highlight of this depressing trudge was meeting three independent pairs of cycle tourists within a few minutes of each other. This highlight was soon surpassed when my bike was completely repaired by a Dutch-run cycling shop across town. I was now ready to head to Dubai.

Along the way I had pretty much all of the stereotypes I'd accumulated of Arabia confirmed. All except one: it was raining. For a solo cycle tourist with no tent, no sleeping bag and no sign of any hotels this was a problem. My brain seems to have exorcised the memories of trying to sleep under these conditions, often on freeway construction sites or by a drift of sand beneath a date palm, but I can still feel the occasional crisp sensation of the cold creeping under my skin. One night, just after crossing the UAE border, I awoke to a large motionless dog staring belligerently at me from the darkness. I won't even begin to describe the tenor of my dreams after that experience.

One afternoon in Oman as I was sitting on the coast of the Persian Gulf snacking away at a two kilo mass of date ooze (I was feeling a lot like I was part of an old Arabian caravan, riding through the desert on a diet of dates) I was accosted by a large local family eagerly inviting me into their home. After a long lunch they extended the invitation to the wedding of my English-speaking host's brother the following evening and, as the rain had yet to let up, I readily accepted. In the intervening time I was given the customary Arab tour: I met the family's prized camels, was taken four-wheel-driving on the nearby dunes (with my bike in the ute's tray, nerve-wrackingly) and was encouraged to fire a rifle into the air in preparation for the ceremonies (I never found out where the bullets landed).

Apart from receiving the traditional Arab garb as a gift I found the actual wedding to be a let-down. After the six grooms were simultaneously married without their brides on a football field crowded exclusively with men I stood outside a women-only reception hall with all the males waiting for their womenfolk to get bored and need a lift home (they can't be seen at all by a non-family member). Part of this waiting involved being driven up and down the freeway, whose speed limit of 140 kilometres per hour was universally ignored, doing the odd doughie. These Arabs also have a pathological need to spend ninety percent of their driving time talking on their phones. My old formula, cheap petrol equals bogans, has been proved correct – petrol here costs 40 cents a litre.

However, I had an excellent time with these generous people, learning the Arab culture and language, although the patriarch tried hard to convert me to Islam. One topic often came up though: people kept pointing out that Australia was 'against Iraq'. At the time I tried to explain to them the divergent public opinion on this issue but they all pulled perplexed expressions. It's only now that I realise they were talking about the soccer.

And it seems that love was in the air: as I was departing my host told me he'd just proposed to his uncle's family for their daughter. I later learnt he'd been accepted – his first of perhaps many wives.

The final four days of the tour had me riding over the rugged mountains separating the real Arabian Desert from its kinder coastal cousin and then heading into the most appalling headwind I'd ever encountered. At one point during this muscle-liquefying slog I looked up to see another solo cycle tourist gliding along in the other direction. Immediately we stopped each other to express great relief at finding company in this desolate landscape (although I can tell you there was more relief on the downwind side).

My companion's name was Lukas, a young Austrian riding to Kathmandu (or so he thought). He'd just come through Iran and gave me all his maps and guidebooks, his now superfluous second sleeping bag and many excellent tips of how to survive the Islamic Republic (leaving out one important piece of advice I will get to shortly). In meager exchange I donated the Indian SIM I'd fought so hard to retain. We ended up camping together in an old riverbed far from the obscenely brightly lit highway, staying up to all hours over an ebullient bonfire – an excellent night before my descent into Dubai.

For fifty kilometres I scrutinised the dune-strewn horizon for signs of civilisation. It took a long time before I realised that the ever-receding electricity pylon perpetually obscuring my view was no short pole… it was the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building. As I approached, this structure's true scale emerged. I kept on having to remind myself that it was human beings who built this thing (specifically Indians).

Now, rather than stay in the vastly overpriced city of Dubai itself I instead made for a hostel in the neighbouring Emirate of Sharjah, spending the afternoon searching for the place amongst the many and varied normal-sized skyscrapers of the sister-city. But at last I was walking through the doorway. To my left a couple of zombies stared at the TV while they mumbled Koranic verses. On the TV was a live feed from the Kaaba in Mecca which, I can now inform you as a true connoisseur of this cable channel, is really not that interesting. One of these devout pilgrims, a non-English-speaking Shiite Algerian, was sharing my dorm and would not only wake me up each night at three a.m. when his alarm went off for his morning prayer (which I could tolerate out of religious freedom) but kept hitting the snooze for an hour afterwards (which I couldn't). When I at last expressed my annoyance by threatening to throw his phone out the window all our communications were channeled solely through death stares. At least this stopped his constant disapproving gestures during each romantic comedy I put on to feed my unhealthy addiction of that genre that he thought the characters should be married (which would defeat the whole point of the movie).

During the day I made the long bike commute to Dubai – a distance of almost 100 kilometres both ways – along freeway shoulders, failed road-construction projects and floating bridges. It was only while returning to Sharjah on the second day, into another headwind, that I decided that, actually, this journey was too uncomfortably dangerous to do again (although I hasten to add that UAE drivers are surprisingly gregarious on the roads).

Dubai is still the desert. The traffic and bustle at street level don't seem to match the vast forest of empty-looking skyscrapers above. The city is a vertically exaggerated Arab village. Wherever there isn't an army of Indians to sweep the sand away the dunes shift and grow under flyovers and against buildings: it's a desert in the sky.

I spent my two days here checking out the local sites of the Dubai Mall with its huge shark aquarium, the luxurious Burj al Arab (from the outside sadly), the deceptively enormous Palm Jumeirah and the base of the Burj Khalifa. Interspersed amongst these activities I frantically organised for the rest of my trip. At the Iranian Consulate I almost lost my cool on discovery of their visa cost: $210. I inexpertly stifled an outburst while spitefully wishing John McCain had won the 2008 US federal election and had fulfilled his promise to bomb the country. Awkwardly I had to return the next day to collect my passport, but by then they'd already forgotten me. I then had a new pannier rack installed on my bike. When the South African bike mechanic discovered my rear brake pads had suddenly clamped shut during the installation he threatened, oddly, to make a scene in the shop before I even got the chance to accuse him of causing the problem. What an emotionally fraught day! At least my brakes mysteriously realigned themselves on the ride home.

But it wasn't long before all my troubles were forgotten and I was crossing the Persian Gulf to the Iranian port of Bandar-e Lengeh.

Unfortunately a new set of troubles are about to kick me in the teeth when I realise that economic sanctions against Iran mean I cannot access my bank account. I now have to survive the next few weeks on the small amount of cash I happened to have on me during the crossing.

In the next post learn how I have had to hurl myself on the hospitality of the Iranian people. See you then!

The Konkan Coast

Finally I had arrived in Mumbai, clambering through the chaotic streets and across freeway merges until I reached the calmer inner core of the central city - jutting out on reclaimed land into the Arabian Sea.

Immediately I was launched back into the stressful world of Indian bureaucracy. I take a deep breath...

Applying for a visa to Yemen I was told that all I needed was a letter from the Australian Consulate and it would be arranged for me that afternoon. Being redirected from my consulate for this service to a visa-organising contractor near Chowpatty Beach, to the Australian High Commission in New Delhi, I finally hit a bureaucratic brick wall. It took me a week to remember I'd developed a contact there who was keen to help me out after bungling my Victorian Election ballot paper, and he directed me to the proper person... back at the Mumbai consulate.

Sadly, $30 letter in hand, this ended up not being enough to placate the Yemeni Consular-General, who was offended by the letter being addressed, 'To whom it may concern' and not to himself. After riding my bike back and forth between the consulates for two days getting the letter subtly reworded my visa was eventually denied on a whim. This was even after an Australian Consular official argued my case over the phone to her Yemeni counter-part - a very kind gesture of my government considering they had a 'Do not travel/Get out now' warning against the country. The Yemeni officials asked why I'd want to visit their fine nation anyway, "To get blown up?"

Actually, the answer was so that, after arriving in Oman's port city of Salalah by cargo ship I could travel overland to Africa. I am now heading north to Iran instead. However, I still had a couple of weeks before my ship departed from Mumbai's port of Nhava Sheva - plenty of time for more bureaucratic wrangling.

All my efforts to acquire a Djibouti visa were now of course moot, as was, I found, wrestling with my travel insurance provider to fill out all the forms required to be reimbursed for not only the cost of seeing a doctor for a sore throat, but also my multiple subsequent visits getting him to sign all the relevant forms for reimbursal - only to discover that it came to less than my coverage's excess. My frequent visits to both the GPO and the Foreign Parcel Office ended up in angry exchanges over why my Christmas present and magazines hadn't arrived. Then, climbing my way up the hierarchy of AirTel's head office to discover why they'd cancelled my pre-paid SIM (immovable bureaucracy meets my bloody-minded obstinacy), I found that the form-checker had looked at one of my signatures upside-down and thus concluded it had been forged. They made me fill out a new form, provide new photo ID and again photocopy my passport before again cancelling my service on a different administrative pretext - this also took an entire day to rectify.

The reason I still sport any hair at all after this is because although by day I battled bureaucracy, by night I partook in the personalities of the peripatetic people of this party polis.

It all began with a night out on the town with Melissa, a young acquaintance of my dad's through his Zen meditation group - we got stuck into Mumbai culture by dining out on beer and pizza at the city's brightly lit foreshore. Amazingly, I again came across my old school friend Sue whom I'd met by chance in Kathmandu. A pair of world-encircling cycle tourists staying in my hotel was next, and, along with several others congealed from my dormitory, we hit the hip scene of Leopold's Cafe, still smarting from terrorist bullet holes, before puncturing the more insane of the nearby nightclubs.

For contrast many of us went on a slum tour the next day, but either Mumbai houses some fairly comfortable destitutes or our guide was grinding an axe over countering portrayals from Slumdog Millionaire and Shantaram, for it seemed no different to all the other Indian cities I'd been cycling through over the last four months.

Armed with my newly repaired bike I took the ferry from the Gateway of India to the mainland and was instantly transported into a world of wide beaches, undulating headlands and fishy villages.

I spent my first night in the failed beach resort town of Kashid where I luxuriated away the afternoon on my first decent beach since Thailand. Here I taught a hybrid French/Indian family how to construct dribbly castles - a vestigial skill from my childhood not improved by my later career.

The next day I was till doubting the wisdom of taking the coastal route (whose roads appeared on no maps and whose motorised traffic seemed to be entirely comprised of autorickshaws sporting bladed hubcaps in the style of Boudicca or Ben Hur) rather than the much more clear-cut Konkan Highway, when I came across a seemingly impassable estuary. As if conjured up by sheer will a small ferry materialised to take me across for a pittance. It was here that I first realised that my Konkan tour was something special: from the ferry roof I took in the surreal sight of small sailing ships meandering around an ancient fort rising straight up out of the sea as an old man next to me sang a quiet call to alms.

These estuarine crossings became ever more frequent on my coast-hugging route. Occasionally they'd manifest themselves as enormous car ferries, or I'd be greeted by a rickety two-stroke wooden boat (in one instance being bailed out more slowly than the inflow leakage), but my favourite were the somnolent gondoliers lugubriously poling my bike and me across shallow swampy inlets, scaring off the coastal birdlife.

Getting between the ferry-heads often required tackling the trickiest tracks through jungles and wetlands, extruding streets from a non-existence even the locals swore by and, in some extreme situations, being forced to ride on the sand itself (the surface is always the least soft as the tide recedes). At one time I was almost caught out over a long beery beach lunch with some local medical students as the tide turned and swamped an inlet I'd previously thought cycle-able. I ended up having to wade across holding my bike high above my head to keep it dry. No such luck for a German heading in the opposite direction attempting to do the whole coast on foot.

In this fashion I passed Christmas Day, marked with a three dollar beach hotel and a large tub of choc/vanilla ice-cream (alcohol was a no-go in the strict Muslim town of Guhegar), but my appreciation of this auspicious date was surpassed by its successor. While riding over a bridge late in the day I suddenly encountered three other cycle tourists: an English brother-and-sister pair, Pete and Keara, along with a Canadian cyclist, Eric, they'd just met mere minutes before. I was so astounded to have found cycling company I ignored the fact that they were heading in my direction's opposite and backtracked 20 kilometres with them to a small fishing village set beneath a massive Moghul fort. This turned into one of the most awesome evenings I've had on my trip so far.

After eating over-sized thalis we stocked up on beer and set off for the fort after dark. As the ruins were right on the beach we of course had to go for a swim to wash off the layers of grime we'd all accumulated over the day. As we each nuded up and waded in the ocean instantly greeted us with the most spectacular bioluminescent show any of us had seen. Even submerging a limb was enough to set off an under-sea firestorm of phosphorescence so diving underwater elicited thousands of trailing flashes like an air raid on a sparkler factory, the foamy surf exploding around us from the darkness. It was other-worldly.

Returning to our well-defended fortress campsite we lit a fire with the aid of the last of my kero and sat around drinking and sharing touring stories until two a.m. - although we were interrupted briefly by separate pairs of suspicious locals checking to see if we were Pakistani terrorists.

Not only was this night amazingly awesome in itself, it also opened my eyes to the world of Indian stealth-camping. The next night, arriving late at the local tourist town of Malvan, I was just about to settle down for the night beneath a wooden fishing boat's outrigger when I encountered a middle-aged Austrian couple inviting me to stay at their palm-shaded beach resort. It was so beautiful and relaxing I ended up staying for two nights during which time I swam, hammocked about reading all day and engaged the Austrians in philosophical discourse (often diverging to debate their outlandish conspiracy theories).

Actually I achieved my first solo Indian stealth-camp the following night in the grass under some headland palms, falling asleep admiring the slowly rotating star-field above me.

And in the morning I was in Goa, crossing the border by ferry on New Year's Eve. I'd been recommended Mandrem beach by some Melbournians in Mumbai but it turned out to be a lot sleepier than I'd expected. Luckily I ran into some trans-Atlantic backpackers with whom I shared the New Year on the beach over some beers. We ended up joining an Indian Army detachment on leave and hit the nightclub scene until the not-so-small hours. Things ended on a slightly sour note when one of the drunk Indians accused the Western girls of being sluts based purely on them being girls... from the West. They then tried to sleaze onto them on the dance-floor. Indians often have this idea about our culture. It reminds me of the misconception a Nepali girl once expressed to me when explaining why she never wanted to travel to a Western country: from the movies she saw our surroundings were always exploding - it looked too dangerous.

In the morning (the light part of the morning) I rode off hung-over through Goa's capital of Panjim and towards Colva Beach. The last few kilometres were through the surf after dark having failed to find a vacanceous hotel. Luckily a nearby restaurant, the Silver Spoon Beach Shack, kindly let me sleep to the sound of the surf on one of their lounges, interrupted only by a curious army patrol rudely poking assault rifles in my face before being waved away.

I ended up staying at this restaurant for a day and a half, swimming, eating Hakka noodles whose incredible flavour transported me to a new plane of existence, sipping port and languidly admiring the predominantly Russian clientele which comprised women so spectacularly beautiful they defied the principles of physiology... chaperoned by men so disgustingly ugly they resembled overfed slugs (think Jabba the Hut). The two extremes held my discreet attention with equal fascination.

Finally I was to return to Mumbai by train (otherwise I'd miss the boat). My arrival at Margao Station presaged the sequel of my Bombay bureaucratic battling when the station-master told me the train had no luggage van for my bike. But in India anything (and everything) is possible and I managed to wedge it in the corridor between two carriages - its articulation matching the train's so as to avoid bending the frame.

And more good news: mere hours before I left Mumbai to sail the Arabian Sea on a cargo ship, my magazines finally arrived at Poste Restante. I'd been published in two of these, both on the subject of Nepal - one for the Melbourne Uni Mountaineer, the other for the Australian Beer and Brewer magazine. A fine addendum to what was almost certainly my most satisfying cycle tour so far.

A Close Look at India

The sun never sets on New Delhi. At about fifteen degrees above the horizon it just fades away into the haze.

This malaise relates to my emotional state during the two weeks' recovery I took from Steve's and my astonishingly epic Spiti Valley cycle tour. I was largely locked up in my hotel room finally finishing Vikram Seth's obscenely obese novel A Suitable Boy (reviewed in my Book Blog) and emerged only to tour the town's old forts and mosques, to vote in the Victorian state election, to launch the local graticule into history as November's most successful (along with Germany's Frankfurt) and to finally have my bike fixed.

It was on this latter outing that I gleaned one of my many insights into Indian culture I was soon to accumulate. As Vikram Seth had recently wryly warned me, Indians want employment, not work. The staff at the Firefox foreign bicycle repair shop rolled their languid eyes in their sockets at the expectation of an interruption to their sloth. The job they did was so pathetic it left my decaying pannier rack to occasionally wobble into the back tyre, my gears reduced from 27 to three and, most excitingly of all, my left pedal crank to come off onto the freeway as I attempted one of my four geohashes.

Returning home to my hotel room, powered by a single leg, I further soured my mood by cutting off the tip of my left, little finger while making apple/yoghurt salad. Weirdly I felt no pain as the knife sliced through my skin, but annoyingly I couldn't find the chunk of flesh to have it sown back on - it was lost in my meal (which became damned tough to stomach, I can tell you). Apart from a small dimple it's grown back now, including the fingerprint, so it can't have been as bad as I'd remembered it.

These signs indicated it was time to leave. However, almost at the moment of departure I suddenly found myself with a social life. My new companions included an English backpacker whose passport had been stolen in Dharamsala (those slimy Buddhist monks...) and a German team who knew my friends the Blundys from working at their Melbourne bushwalking gear shop.

And so, gingerly maneuvering my bike through the sticky haze and hectic traffic I left New Delhi to cycle 1,650 kilometres to Mumbai over the next three weeks. Leaving the city's protective perimeter of cargo elephants and wild dogs I emerged from the irritation-inducing cacophony of car-horns to the calm of the countryside.

I can only account for how annoyed I get at the horny sound of Indian traffic by having grown up in a land where horns are used mainly in anger. In India they're used as reverse sonar: not to acquire information of the vehicle's surroundings but to inform the surroundings of the vehicle's arrival.

The easy ride to Jaipur should have been a metaphorical walk, but two days into the trip I found myself punching through a wall of water on a major highway, waving my hands in front of my face to ward off the rain. The traffic was so bad one crash had trucks backed up for several kilometres and I had to snake may way between them to make any progress at all. A knowledgeable Jaipur local told me it was the heaviest rain this desert-state had experienced in 129 years. The mechanical fallout from this rain-ride was quite severe: the muddy water undid all the good work done by a decent bike shop in Delhi and ultimately inflicted eight punctures on my brand new tyres.

Arriving in Jaipur, the capital of colourful Rajastan - a state delineated from its neighbours at the bullock-cart/camel-train boundary - I set out to find a suitable hotel. One potential candidate refused to store my bike anywhere other than on the street out the front, explaining that all their 25,000 rupee motor-scooters are kept there and my bike "must only be worth 2,000 rupees at the most". Never having my bike so insulted in its life, I bitterly explained its actual cost as I turned away: rupees a half-lakh.

I ended up spending a rest day in Jaipur while waiting for the rain to be relinquished, checking out the palaces and forts and hanging out with an English/Dutch couple who'd hit the 'India Wall' and were willing to whinge (and good on 'em too, I'm always up for a good whinge).

Back on the road, I stopped off at a cute town named Tonk a few days later where I met a young gentleman calling himself Prince who was all too keen to show me around his beloved environs. I was amazed when he instructed me to lie about my Melbournian origins - instead introducing me to his friends as a Londoner - due to the anti-Australian sentiment wrought by the Melbourne Bashings Saga. Were the atrocities of the British Raj so forgettable?

It was during this time that I suffered the most from my failing bike. Luckily, although running out of spare tubes and tyre levers for my flats, I discovered the joys of the puncture-professionals: every two kilometres or so along even the smallest roads (which I preferentially traversed) a waiting shack effected fast and cheap repairs.

Later on, when I could no longer endure the rattliness of my crank shaft, I surrendered my bike to a more formidable bike shop. The repairmen immediately began dismembering my bike with a hammer and chisel - I tried to stop them but they held me back like bouncers at a bar-fight, yelling at me in Hindi "Five minutes! Five minutes!" Not only did they completely fix the problem, but they refused any payment, communicating with one graceful gesture, "What mongrels would we be if we charged you, a guest of our great nation?"

Sadly, most of the gestures I encounter are quite infuriating. Like the way they always try to get me to stop by patting their hand at the road and hissing as though they're taming a goat. Another great Indian gesture is the 'Why?': up-curled fingers of the right hand poking the air as though passing a cricket ball to itself. I try to answer their incredulity by explaining that only through cycle touring can one truly appreciate the scale of the landscape, that an India emerges that's hidden from monument-hopping train travellers, and that the freedom, pace and openness of a push-bike allows an integration with one's immediate surroundings impossible in a fast, enclosed vehicle. They walk away muttering to themselves, "Money troubles".

Also causing confusion is my solitude. Indians never do anything alone and are only ever seen in large groups.

"How many people are you?" They often ask.

"How many people do I look like??" I retort, feigning offense.

These questions I can cope with - I'm always amazed at the destructiveness of Indians' curiosity. They play with my gears and cables when I stop for chai, they try to bend the brake's discs even when I'm standing right next to them (one guy actually fetched an enormous spanner for the job, no doubt interested to test the yield strength of Western alloys), and, if I fail to satisfy their questions, they will occasionally drive their motorbikes just in front of me and slam on the brakes, forcing me to engage them in extended, if animated, post-collision conversation.

They are also obsessed with money and status. Since I have no caste (other than 'untouchable' for having travelled over water) they can only befriend me if they can place me in their hierarchy. I try to explain that I really don't feel comfortable detailing my annual salary, bank balance and wealth of relatives, yet they persist. One insecure member of the 'scheduled castes', who had nevertheless hit the big-time, interrogated me for over an hour to determine if he was 'higher' than me.

Physical money is also a frequent obsession: I try in vain to explain that after fourteen months on the road and constant requests for 'Australian money' I am completely out. In fact, as you may remember from my Airport Dramas, I began my trip with less than one dollar on me - the only souvenir I have from Australia is the key to my parents' house, a reminder that I can always go home (unless they've changed the locks on me). In frustration at their disbelief I'm often forced to wave my ATM card in their face, saying, "See this? THIS is my Australian money!".

Occasionally, in the smallest towns, this currency sentiment extends to extremes. The following is a common conversion I have in broken Hindi (expressive hand-waving also translated):

"Hi, do you have a room?"

"No, go to the next town"

"What about that room over there? That looks nice"

"You can't stay there, it costs money".

"That's fine, I intend to pay with money".

"Oh! You have Indian rupees!? Come on in!"

It's amazing how many un-touristed locals seem to think we can only spend money in our home-nation's currency.

Continuing the journey, I worked my way along tiny roads through the Rajastani partial-desert that looked like they'd last been sealed at independence, the remnants of ancient bitumen protruding on pedestals like meteorites in Antarctica. It was during this time that I experienced one of only two thefts of my whole trip. Having locked my bike in the supposedly safe garage area of one hotel I emerged in the morning to discover that person or persons unknown had broken into the compound at night and stolen... my handlebar grips!

Apart from the feeling of violation that besets victims of burglary I felt triumphant that my grips were the only items these vagabonds could run off with without employing any tools (or understanding the concept of quick-release). Of course, my mood changed when I realised I had to hold the bare handle-bar for the next thousand kilometres until I found fitting replacements.

However, soon I arrived in Udaipur: one of the most beautiful places in India - a blue city on the banks of an ancient artificial lake surrounding Moghul palaces and gardens. For James Bond fans out there, this is where Octopussy was filmed, and it is this, the silliest of all Bond flicks, that is shown nightly at over half-a-dozen restaurants - no doubt boring the pants off the staff. Udaipur is also plagued with Australians. One Melbournian pair accompanied me around a luxurious island in the central lake, and I was invited by my extremely obliging hotel manager to his nephew's wedding party along with four Sydneysian girls, another year-long traveller named Ally as their ring-leader (thanks for winging that one, Ally!).

This was quite an experience, with supposedly 1,400 guests arriving from all over Rajastan but providing absolutely no alcohol - it being a strict Muslim affair. The food, however, was incredibly delicious and never-ending. I somehow got roped into chanting a prayer to Allah at the marriage signing and cheesy Indian dancing with the young male set at the night's end. The guys kept on asking in hushed and impressed tones how it was I'd managed to acquire an entourage of four beautiful girls - it all comes down to class, I explained.

One interesting conversation I had with an otherwise charming young woman was about the differences in marriage culture between India and the west. "In India, our parents choose only the best husband for us - that's why our divorce rate is so much lower than in western countries", she told me. I bit my tongue.

Another way in which I think Indian culture is in the wrong is on the roads. Yes, being a former Arts student I should say it's all relative and that no culture is better than any other and whatever. Well tough, on the roads India has got it wrong. In many respects I've found that while India is a nation of hard-nosed pragmatists, I'm a romantic idealist. I was so infuriated by people driving on the wrong side of the road in the impressive port city of Surat I stopped each one and explained to them in unintelligible Hindi how their dangerous actions diminish traffic-flow. Long lectures are also unleashed upon rubbish lobbing locals of city streets. The most insane example of their hawkish road culture is at railway crossings: while waiting for the train to pass, not only do they queue up on the left side, opportunists also jam up the right. This means that when the gates open the traffic is completely stuck - often until after the NEXT train has passed (although, as a cyclist, I'm largely immune from the gridlock).

Having said all that, the locals are always eager to help me out and are never interested in charging for it. I'm over-run by offers for village tours and chai chats, most of which I must refuse. They're always tolerant of my poor Hindi skills and obliging when it comes to directions (although I always have to ask at least three people and take the average). India as a culture, though, can be a real selfish prick, even if the individuals themselves could not be more well-meaning.

Leaving Rajastan behind I had entered the coastal state of Gujarat, just as my left shoe finally rejected its cleat. Because of this the next three days forced me into a state of exhaustion as all the muscles I'd built up in my calves slowly migrated to my thighs where they were now needed.

My major destination during this time was Ahmadabad (lodged on the intriguingly spelled Rann of Kachchh) where I'd arranged to meet a friend-of-a-friend who was new to India and needed some tips. For this I lost a couple of days to detour several hundred gut-busting kilometres to meet her at our arranged time and place. Unfortunately, not only was she a no-show, but I never heard from her again. My annoyance is tempered slightly by my concern her flight may have been consumed by an expanding black hole, but no doubt she decided to terminate our nascent friendship due to the embarrassment of her epic stand-up.

In the end the detour was worth-while anyway, Ahmadabad being a very different and intriguing Muslim city of tranquil mosques and intricate wooden facades. Leaving the city a day later I embarked upon my next quest: finding the ocean. For this purpose I as usual bought a state road atlas for navigation which allowed me to explore roads invisible to my national map. In fact, the state atlases were so detailed they described roads that weren't even rendered in the real world.

One such sojourn into the nether-world of non-existent roads took me to the coastal micro-state of Daman & Diu. When the winding roads ran out I was directed to haul my bike through thick scrub along an animal track for several kilometres, cross a precarious railway truss bridge over a wide river and was then forced to push my bike along several kilometres of railway track. It was with some concern that I realised that the concentration required to keep my bike on its rail severely limited my ability to detect on-coming trains.

The low-point of this desperate lunge towards the old Portugese colony of Daman was when I fell flat on my side trying to ride over a slippery ford, soaking the left-half of my luggage. The local villagers stood around giving me the "Why?" gesture, an image burnt into my brain.

When I finally got to Daman I almost immediately executed my emergency zombie invasion procedures (precisely honed after hundreds of hours of careful planning while riding through Rajastan). The entire state seemed to be comprised of stumbling brain-hungry corpses, some even collapsed in ditches - this told me a lot about the enclave's liquor licensing laws.

My rest day in Daman was amazingly refreshing (despite the beach's suffocating reek of rotting fish). Watching the sun set over the sea finally ended an ocean drought since Hong Kong and a beach-drought since Vietnam. This also marked the beginning of my long cyclo-beach-tour of the Konkani coastline.

Sadly, on my last day before Mumbai, staying in the atomic town of Boisar, I was forced by the cops to rejoin the highway on suspicion of being intent on Maharashtra's nuclear destruction, or perhaps on having a desire to steel some uranium-235 for my own atomic ambitions. Anyway, I was happy to leave: the town seemed to harbour the largest density of mosquitoes on the planet. They must be breeding in the cooling ponds.

On my final approach to Mumbai, topping off 22 days from Delhi, I was pretty worried about getting creamed by the traffic of Rushdie's 'failed metropolis'. With fifty kilometres to go I was just wishing I could get it over and done with... until I saw the vast ominous wall of flats emerging from the gloom like an oncoming sandstorm.

But I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the next blog post to find out if I survived the onslaught...