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...

The Spiti Valley

When organising this cycle tour in Himachel Pradesh's Spiti Valley – a remote Himalayan area of northern India on the border with Tibet – Steve asked me if he should bring bike lights.

"Well, I try never to ride at night," I explained. "In fact, I've only ever had to use my lights once in the last 4,900 kilometres."

It was a good thing Steve decided to take his lights anyway: on just as many nights as not we found ourselves struggling along poorly maintained and totally deserted dirt roads, often covered in ice and snow, fighting away the cold wrapped up in almost all our clothing and desperately searching for somewhere - anywhere - that could provide us with a bed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'd just got back from my crazy dry run of Himachel Pradesh and had a day and a half to prepare for Steve's arrival. My triumphal return to the dusty Indian capital marked the one year anniversary of my travels so far (in honour of which I changed the title of my blog) and I celebrated this great feat of overland locomotion with a last desperate bid for a Pakistani tourist visa.

Unfortunately, I ruined my chances by greeting the high commission official with "Namaste".

"I'm not a Hindu, I'm a Muslim! You must say 'Salaam'!" I was told angrily before being turned away.

Giving up on this I rode out on my bike to meet Steve at the airport. The traffic was quite light in the night-plunged city, but the road heading out to the terminal turned out to be a violently busy elevated tollway (which is free for me: big signs declare that those exempt from payment include the President of India and cyclists).

So it was with some disguised relief that I discovered that Steve, having arrived as one of the few passengers to have his luggage not lost by the airline, had forgotten to bring his front wheel's skewer, forcing us to take a taxi back into town.

Steve's troubles continued when he realised he'd left his GoreTex jacket (and only weatherproof item of clothing) on the plane, and then dropped half his D-lock onto the street below our hotel balcony. Although it was lucky he didn't kill anyone, Steve got an early lesson in Indian sociology when the useless U-bend of metal comprising his lock was stolen in the 20 seconds it took him to run downstairs.

Although I certainly can't complain about Steve's bike woes, having just discovered my pannier rack's bolt had sheered off inside my bike frame. The rack would continue to disintegrate over the course of our journey.

Sleeping away the train ride in a state of fear that all our stuff would get nicked, we missed the dead-boring scenery on the way to Kalka. I spent some of the time watching Starship Troopers on my ipod (through my new shaped earphones that give me the sense of being aurally penetrated), part of the 12 GB of new data Steve brought along with his good self from various well-wishers at home, and I had to fend off curious railway workers eager to witness the reputed rampant sex scenes of Hollywood films.

After missing our original narrow-gauge toy-train to Shimla and getting our tickets transferred to the next one (I'm used to it - just getting to this stage involved canceling ten-person-journeys worth of tickets before hitting upon the right permutation) we were on our way up the mountains to my old stomping ground.

The afternoon spent in this idyllic mountain city was far from ideal. Stress levels remained high even after we'd discovered our bikes hadn't been ‘disappeared’ but were amazingly delivered to the platform on the later train specified. Finding a bus that would take us as far up towards the Spiti Valley as possible was our first priority, as was fixing Steve's front brakes, the current state of which precluded him from being even remotely mobile.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in the primal search for foods and phones and fighting against the mosh-pit like crush of thousands of Indian pilgrims of tourism on Shimla's curving main bazaar, an experience akin to swimming up a waterfall or mining gold with a fork.

This third leg of our frantic transportation to the beginning of our now almost mythical cycle tour was by far the worst. We could sense it coming while standing in the urine-soaked bus depot while hastily cramming down take-away chowmein before our bus could depart without our bikes firmly ocky-strapped to the roof. The journey itself I found fine, learning afterwards I'd slept most of the way through it, but Steve bore the traumatic scares of its wild ride upon our alightment in Rekong Peo at 3:30am.

These were scares of sleep deprivation - after letting him expunge himself of them amongst wandering cows, random rubbish and an insouciant dero I found him a hotel in which he could complete his rest in warmth before the midday checkout time.

The rest of the day was spent absorbed in the horror of Indian bureaucracy as we failed to book a return train ticket to Delhi but eventually succeeded in gaining permits to enter the Spiti Valley. Sadly, this ordeal took several hours, being walked into and out of offices, having documents stamped, signed and ignored and clinging to the skirts of nonchalantly powerful town officials, until we found ourselves with miss-matched permits at 4pm with 60 kilometres still to ride. On the other hand, we had cutely managed to procure matching woolen jumpers for this experience, enveloping ourselves in the illusory layer of invincibility these garments bestowed.

The fun began immediately. We were in a deep valley, negotiating a road scalloped from a vertical cliff-face, surrounded by towering Himalayan protuberances, the sun setting behind a few whispy clouds clinging lugubriously to their peaks. As it got dark we were plunged into that type of despair reserved for riding along a dangerous road at night in the Himalayas without a definite bed at the end of it, but, as usually happens, when it stopped getting dark and was just dark we felt much better. Finding a truck-stop hot meal and later a guesthouse and beer helped too.

The morning produced excellent weather and more incredible scenery, all the better to spend fighting with my pannier rack to prevent the opposite bolt from sheering through. But soon we were on our way, passing through the town of Puh and either ricocheting off Tibet or entering its disputed border region, depending on which map you look at (hence the permits). It didn’t escape my notice that if we’d been positioned properly within our respective countries I could have met my mum here as she’s now living in China.

Possibly the coolest part of the day was climbing up from the bottom of the Spiti Valley into a narrow, precipitous gorge. The road was barely a lane wide and its shape, gouged out from the cliff, produced an eerie wind-tunnel effect. Steve chose that moment to finally divest himself of his now useless D-lock half, hurling it ceremoniously into the river far below us.

The arduous switch-backed climb to the hillside town of Nako, amid panoramic views of vast mountain ranges beyond our reach, marked not only the point at which Steve expressed his wussy desire to hitch a jeep ride, for which I'm still unable to forgive him, but also my epic kilometre-stone of having cycle-toured 5,000 Ks through Asia. To put this in human terms, this is a respectable one 60 trillionth of the distance to the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. You certainly can't say I'm not making progress.

The final seven kilometres of this ascent, again at night, produced one of the most amazing northern star fields I've ever seen, unhindered by intervening atmosphere (although the north looks away from the galactic core, missing all the action).

A lazy morning produced some serene scenes of the Tibetan town, with which we were so delighted I accidentally left my non-folding spare tyre in our room (Steve had brought it for me from Melbourne but I'd been so lazy I never installed it for the trip at all). Before I rushed back for it Steve asked me if I wanted him to push on ahead up the road, being slower than me. "No," I said, "It's best if we don't get too separated."

Flying back down the hill, my panniers left in Steve's care, I encountered a rare fellow cycle tourist (and the only other westerner for the whole valley) whom I didn't stop to greet, choosing to catch up with him on my way back.

Returning, tyre in hand, to the small shrine where I last saw Steve an unpleasant chill passed across my skin. He was nowhere to be found... and nor were my panniers. Searching the roadside temple, the steep cliffs and a small hut nearby, no trace would present itself. I scoured the opposing cliffs for signs of either Steve or my panniers up ahead, but to no avail. Realisation hit me: Steve had left them on the roadside to push on, and they'd been stolen by a passing vehicle. Hastily re-planning my trip to be compatible with the loss of my wallet, passport, books and other luggage I opened out my lungs to the cold Himalayan air and screamed an invitation for the mountains themselves to sexually violate my friend.

Resigned to my fate I pushed on until, rounding a bend, what did I find but Steve, carrying all four panniers and chatting to our new cycle touring buddy. He'd elected (rather uselessly in my opinion) to carry all our gear 50 metres up the road instead of sitting idle, for which I cannot thank him.

Our new friend turned out to be a Canadian cycle tourist by the name of Nathan, a mechanic by trade, who'd managed to cycle all the way here continuously and circuitously from Nairobi. Having toured on his own for the last year and a half (30,000 kilometres he estimates) he was very happy to join our small group for the day, sharing some incredible touring stories with which my own experiences cannot compete.

Further down the road we were stopped at a checkpoint and asked to show our papers. Like the previous time this happened we were forced to assume each other's identities so the photos printed on our messed-up permits matched our names and details. When interrogated on this point, Steve floundered around guessing my birth date while I unsubtly gave him hand-signals under the table. When it came for my turn to guess Steve's birth date it slowly emerged from desperate mutterings and cryptic finger configurations that it was the 28th of October, 1980.

"Hey, what a coincidence - that's exactly thirty years ago from today," I noted once we were safely away from the checkpoint. "Wait a minute! That means that today is your 30th birthday! Happy Birthday Steve!"

Okay, I dramatise: I did have some idea Steve's birthday would fall sometime during our trip. But that didn't prevent the three of us from partying it up at the next town of Tabo. We found ourselves staying in a beautiful monastic guest house, although this didn't seem to excite the qualms of the Tibetan Buddhist monks in serving us a few celebratory beers.

We split up with our friend Nathan for the following day's ride (and were not to see him again until discovered on our last day in a pitiable state), but not before enlisting him in the fight against mechanical breakdowns. Sadly, his expertise did not extend to hydraulic disc brakes and I spent the day without trustworthy stopping power. Some of the unprotected sheer ledges by the side of the slippery, gravelly road caused concern bordering on terror.

It wasn't long before we had ascended well into the snow-line. We marked this occasion with a picnic to consume the half kilo of oil-soaked tuna we'd bought in the regional capital of Kaza. This was almost not enough to get us through the rest of the day: a painful slog into the cold wind while climbing up snow-scoured glaciated valleys and through desolate Tibetan villages. When at last we reached rest, at the gompa town of Losar, we were warmly welcomed into the hearthy home of a local family and fell into a languid heat-embalmed repose in front of the kids' cartoons. I, sadly, was committed to my mandatory two hours bike maintenance per day that this tour inflicted on me in order to ensure the road-worthiness of my escape vehicle.

Setting off in the morning for the dreaded 4,551 metre elevation Kunzum Pass we asked a local whether the town of Batal on the other side had accommodation. His answer, that there wasn't and we'd have to continue on for another 30 kilometres to the even smaller town of Chattru, was immediately dismissed. If we believed that we'd be totally screwed. So we put him and his helpful comments out of our minds until sunset when they came smashing violently back down upon us like an icy sledge-hammer.

It was actually a great relief when we began the climb through the snow up to this feared pass: the sun was shining, my brakes were working again and the thin air was causing oxygen to pool in the back of our brains causing a mild delirium. As our wheels crunched the ice encrusted puddles and sank into road’s deepening dusting of snow we admired peripherally the curly frozen rivers beneath us and the soft white mountains above us. And at last the pinnacle of our efforts: Kunzum La! With impeccable timing this achievement coincided with the compete destruction of one side of my pannier rack. The side containing Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.

For the excessively exciting downhill ride to the town of Batal Steve was kind enough to suggest a swap of panniers – his were half the weight of mine and would impart less pressure on my rack. However, as we descended from the pass, past waterfalls frozen mid-air and into the deepening desolation of the cirrus-enshrouded glaciated valley, a new concern consumed us: Batal had been abandoned for the winter, its walls buried beneath a metre of snow. And the sun would soon set.

Picking up our pace alongside the crazed glacier following us downhill, we spent the next six hours struggling through darkness with only Jupiter’s unimpressed glare to keep us company, hoping to encounter some sort of vehicle. I don’t have much memory of this time, except for a few snapshots of Steve smashing at the ice encrusted on his frame with his pedal spanner and fixing a few flats while I kludged up my rack with packing straps.

We awoke in the tiny town of Chattru, finding ourselves curled up in beds at a general store: the only inhabited structure for over 30 kilometres. What miraculous luck had brought us here late last night? It was all a blur now.

We began that morning, after many hours’ bike maintenance, thinking we’d just have an easy day to the village down the road, but when we reached the turnoff for the next pass – Rohtang La at 3,978 metres, a 600 metre climb – we just couldn’t resist, even if it meant another night descent. The trudge to the top took three cold, windy hours, passing trucks on the way to Leh and periodically peeking over the peaks to Kashmir. Having loose snow blown off the slope into our faces competed with deep muddy bogs to bring down our enjoyment of the spectacular scenery, but at last, as the sun set, we rounded the summit. Stopping briefly to warm our fingers at a fire somehow connected with a nearby vehicular collision we began our controlled fall to truck-stop town Marhi. Luckily, this sunset descent was much easier to cope with than the previous night’s, with our destination invitingly shining out to us the whole way like a comfy-looking globular cluster.

The final day down to Manali was one of the most satisfying. The road was the best sealed bitumen we’d come across so far, allowing a consistent downhill glide, and the mountain-enclosed landscape had a real European Alps feel to it (not that I’d know) – so different from the harsh Himalayan hostility on the other side of the pass. It was during this decadent descent that we coalesced once more with Nathan. Just after we’d separated at Tabo he’d suffered extreme hypoxia from the altitude, and as a result contracted pneumonia. Luckily hitching a ride on a jeep to Marhi he’d had just enough strength to endure the glide to Manali before we checked him into the local hospital. It’s been over three weeks and the last I heard he was still there.

Finally it was getting time to return to New Delhi. I'm pretty sure this was the most amazingly awesome and crazy cycle tour I've ever done - these eight days and 430 kilometres were really quite emotionally challenging in a way no other tour has even approximated. I was pretty glad I didn't have to do it alone. Due to the awesomeness Steve and I had spent over two full days recovering in Manali: drinking bad wine, eating icecream, fussing over Nathan's invalidity and watching an awesome trans-American mountain biking cycle touring DVD Steve had brought with him. Unfortunately the next night’s movie, Starship Troopers 3 on HBO, was so terrible it took me a week to get over the sense of betrayal.

Skipping the view on the way back by taking the night bus, we struggled to hold our bikes together for the final leg back to our hotel. To wish Steve farewell, India put on a spectacular Diwali festival that night: as we returned from a nocturnal urban geohash we were greeted by a post-apocalyptic war zone as random fireworks were giddily activated through the gunpowder haze. We felt like we should be taking down a government or something.

But in the sadness of Steve’s departure for a work conference on the Gold Coast, a Queensland cycle tour and then home, some good news: his GoreTex jacket had been recovered at the airport, keeping him warm for his flight back.

Wild Road

In my last post I left my readers dangling precariously on the fate of my bike as it and I took the train to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar. I'd decided to head to this Punjabi city and ride back to New Delhi through Himachel Pradesh as a dry run for my later cycle tour up in those parts with my friend Steve, flying in from Australia ten days later.

But on this uncertain journey I did not know if I’d be collapsed into a universe in which I was privy to the whereabouts of my bike or one in which it had been nicked by the New Delhi railway staff. Only observation at Amritsar would determine this.

It was during this time that my pants started falling apart, possibly out of sheer terror. Like the king pin in Ford's Model T car before them these pants seem to have been designed to fail catastrophically after a specific period of time: the material wore out in several places at once, the pockets all developed holes together and, crucially, both of the pocket’s zips broke within a few days of each other. These tough cycling shorts I'd been wearing for my entire trip were on their deathbed, pathetically kept on life support out of a perverse sense of poignancy.

I hadn't realised how much I'd relied on the zippability of these pants until my train ride to Amritsar, where, during the packed bustle and confusion of getting on and off different carriages in my attempt to find the one on which I was booked I sensed a hand casually inserted deep within my right pocket which contained my wallet... and the hand's fingers had wrapped themselves around that wallet... and those fingers, together with the hand to which they were attached, at that moment carefully maneuvering this wallet out my open pocket to its illusionary freedom. Ironically I only noticed this activity because I'd just been to an ATM to fatten my wallet up with cash, thus creating some geometrical difficulties in extracting it from my disintegrating pants. As soon as I became aware of this enterprise I used the only weapon I had at hand to prevent it: my right pannier overloaded with Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, to crush the thief onto the floor of the train, leaving him to scuttle away through the fluxious forest of feet. Who says violence never solved anything?

Wallet secured I attended to my other major possession before departing the Amritsar station just before midnight. Thankfully I did end up being the lucky parallel Felix: after a brief panic I observed my bike being taken for a joy-ride along the platform by a member of the station staff (whose disappointment at being deprived of this exciting item was palpable). I was then presented with a new problem: finding somewhere to sleep in a city closed down for the night.

The obvious solution was to stay at Amritsar’s Golden Temple – headquarters of the martial Sikh religion. I’d heard they never close and allow pilgrims to eat and sleep there for free so I rode up to the gates, parked my bike in a cavernous bike-parking dungeon, deposited my panniers and shoes in enormous and efficient cloak-rooms designed for such things and donned the mandatory headscarf for entry. Inside the temple I was led to a patch of floor with a blanket over it upon which I quickly fell to sleep.

The morning afforded me an appreciation of my templous surroundings: the Golden Temple itself, sitting in the centre of a koi-filled lake surrounded by marble colonnades was aesthetic but not terribly exciting. What interested me was the food hall. Here, thousands of pilgrims were fed simultaneously while squatting on the marble floor in rows as indefatigable and exuberant volunteers dressed in outrageous purple turbans globbed food onto their plates.

Not quite ready to depart on my tour, whose route was still to be decided, I stayed for the rest of the day, exploring the town, getting into the local soft-serve ice-creams and even ignoring a perfectly accessible geohash right on the Pakistani border.

That night I found myself sleeping next to a guy who was not only a Melbournian, but also on a year-long trip having left on exactly the same day as me (and thus, weirdly, the same day as Nick and Trina from the previous post - what was it about the 21st of October 2009 that made people want to flee the sunburnt country?). However, the only coincidence that seemed to excite this amiable ex-high-flying-lawyer-now-professional-backpacker was the fact that we both barracked for the North Melbourne footy team (of whose fortunes the shame of my ignorance was matched only by my ineptness at hiding it).

Tearing myself away from my new friend from home the next morning I was away, off through the Punjab to the border town of Pathankot from where I would launch either a sober meander through the Himachel Pradesh foothills, a mad dash into Kashmir to prove how cool I am, or a suicidal puncturing of the Pakistani border in frustration at being barred legitimate means of entry. After first being politely yet firmly interrogated by the border police (whose information gathering techniques involved asking me questions while under the duress of disgustingly bitter vegetables), and then spending a terrifying night beneath the sonic booms from wave after wave of fighter jets screaming over the border a few kilomtres away into Kashmir, I decided to opt for the former choice and just ride into the peaceful Himalayan foothills.

Crossing the border into the Himalayan state the first thing I noticed (other than the sudden dearth of the Punjab's spectacularly delicious lassis) was that things instantly got a lot hillier. Since none of my maps were topographical I hoped this wasn't going to be a trend here. Exhaustingly, the rest of the day's undulating hills' eventual break into a solid climb two vertical kilomtres high to the Dalai Lama's home of McLeod Ganj near Dharamsala proved this trend to be almost asymptotic.

And no, before you ask, I did not get to meet Mr. Dalai Lama himself, meeting instead an A4 sheet of paper sticky-taped to his gate telling me he was too busy and that I should go away (my helpful plans for the Tibetan conquest of humanity left unheard).

On the glorious ride back down onto the plains I got quite lost, with one woman (a shaved British convert to Tibetan Buddhism) offering me directions to the low road and informatively pointing out I'd save petrol on the way down.

The next few days clarified an important aspect of my personality for me. Whenever I attempt something difficult it looks like I'm going to achieve I massively increase the difficulty until I'm pretty sure it can't be achieved. I had to be back in Delhi to meet Steve in six days' time, and my route would get me there in just over five days, assuming I rode 100 horizontal kilometres and climbed a vertical kilometre every day. I therefore lengthened my trip to include an additional climb to HP's capital Shimla, fully aware that this would turn a relaxed cycle through this scenic state into a panicky and exhausting dash.

However, this trip ended up being one of the most satisfying cycle tours I'd done, exclusive of events described later. The days were long and strenuous, riding up and down hills continuously, but the views were amazing, the people friendly and the roads smooth and largely empty. Along the way I met sadhus and school groups painted orange or dressed in Hanuman monkey suits roaming the streets in celebration of something, shared chai with local villagers inured to their spectacular views over the Gangetic plains and hobnobbed with English-speaking process engineers at a hilltop cement factory town.

But the following day disaster struck: my right pannier (yes, the one containing A Suitable Boy, which I was yet to even begin reading) fell off onto the road. I searched in vain for the lost bolt holding its clip together but was eventually forced to resort to an octopus strap. It took many days and several attempts at finding a bolt that would fit the counter-screwed socket before I was able to dispense with my bouncy kludgemanship. Little did I realise that this would be a foretaste for much worse pannier trouble to come.

I arrived at Shimla with a sense of elation. In fact, almost euphoria - I've found that whatever happiness turns out really to be, the two sure-fire ways of enhancing it are good music and physical exercise - having lost the former to a cable break in my ipod earphones I was getting my endorphin fix from the latter, and a solid ride up to the 2200 metre elevation Himachel Pradesh capital definitely gave me an overdose. The city's setting certainly increased this: poised precariously over a curving ridgeline mimicking a devastating landslide from a distance it looked as though the town planners had dropped it there from the sky without consulting Google Maps' terrain view.

Annoyingly, all these extra happiness units were wasted on battling with banks and railways: I think there should be a new triathlon for the Commonwealth Games involving riding 100 kilometres, climbing up a 2000 metre high mountain and then wrestling with Indian bureaucracy for three hours. Amazingly, there is a railway station up there in the clouds and it was my job to ensure Steve and I would get there with our bikes in a few days' time.

After several hours of standing in queues and filling in forms I was ready to hit the hay, reserving my dramatic tumble back down to the plains for the following day. It would be hard to top the descent I'd imagined for my himself, but three hours and 100 kilometres of virtually continuous downhill gliding later I knew I'd managed it. In fact I'd got so into the ride down I skipped both breakfast and lunch (apart from a bag of milk and a few apples), started racing cars and trucks, and failed to even slow down for my negotiations with the potholes and pointy protrusions crossing the border into Haryana. It would be two days before I discovered the resulting sheered-off bolt from my pannier rack in my bike's frame, also on the side of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy – having explained the cause my next post will describe the consequences.

Passing through Kalka caused more queuing pain, having to cancel and re-reserve several sets of train tickets (all on the waiting list) after I discovered that my preferred Shimla train lacked a luggage van for bike transportation - but I was sure glad I'd checked the conditions on the ground!

That afternoon I raced along Highway 1 to Ambala - the Haryana dust, newly constructed freeway flyovers and vast yet slow-moving trucks gave the journey a post-apocalyptic Mad Max feel. When I finally found a hotel with a vacancy that night I negotiated with the manager unkowingly sporting Australia’s favourite racial comedy, blackface, accreted from the dusty road - I can only imagine how it went down with the Indian staff.

But the joke was on me: while showering I got a knock on the door that wouldn't be put off. Indians only ever knock if the door's actually locked - usually they'll just open it without warning regardless of your state of dress on the other side. Annoyed at the management for interrupting my ablutions I turned off the tap and exited the bathroom dripping and half-dressed... only to be confronted by three heavily-armed police officers. They'd come to check my passport for visa invalidity. They wouldn't leave until they'd traced my entire trip through Asia from my randomly stamped entry and exit dates - not a mean feat.

The following day's long and seemingly boring 120 kilometre journey from Ambala to Samalkha turned out to be one of the most emotionally involving days on my whole trip. Working my blood up early in a fight over five rupees with an omelette-wallah I settled into the left lane of India's premier highway as the traffic streamed along beside me. Lost in thoughts of train schedules, Punjabi milk products and the engrossing novel Crime and Punishment I noticed a motorbike overtake me from behind and scoot around a slow-moving truck I myself was planning to supersede. At that instant a speeding car travelling at twice the traffic's average velocity rammed into the back of the motorbike.

I can recall the next few seconds in vivid slow motion: the motorbike was launched vertically into the air in front of me, shedding shards of plastic and metal, with the elderly couple riding it flung off like heavy dolls. The centripetal force of his ejection was enough to spin the man's arms outwards and he hit the bitumen shoulder-first, the abrasion ripping his shirt and flesh apart as he slid to a halt. His wife was also thrown clear of the motorbike which bounced and tumbled down the road in front of her. Horribly, she landed head-first on the asphalt, with only her skull protecting her brain from the impact. The rear-ending car not only did not stop, it accelerated away as fast as its gears would allow.

Since I was the first on the scene I dropped my bike onto the roadside and ran over to the woman whose head was now at the centre of an expanding puddle of thick, black blood soaking into her sari, passing cars smearing it into tracks on the asphalt. At first I was sure she was dead, but eventually her eyes stopped staring and looked at me. As I stopped the traffic another man ran up and we both pulled her off the road, my arms dripping with blood as I tried to keep her head from scraping the ground. Her husband had by now got up and was standing next to us in shock. I tried to call an ambulance but the number in my phone wouldn't connect.

But by now several people had turned up with some dragging the motorbike off the road and others tying a torn piece of the woman's sari around her head as a bandage. Soon a small sedan pulled up and the couple were bundled into it and driven off, their mangled motorbike left on the side of the road. I picked up my own bike and rode on, my handlebar grips still sticky from the blood - a reminder that I hadn't just woken up from a sudden nightmare. It took me a long time to shake off the image of the woman hitting the road - she was amazingly lucky to live, but I'll never know the true extent of her injuries, or her husband's. After this I became cautious to the point of paranoia.

Recovering from this shock I stopped an hour later to look for another bag of milk and a better place to wash my arms than an oily roadside puddle where I was ushered, somewhat against my will, into a nearby Hindu ashram with cries of "English! English!" (despite all my attempts to tell them I was NOT English). Interestingly, I was introduced to a real Englishman in the form of the ashram's guru: he'd moved to India in the 60s and converted to Hinduism a few years later. Since this was the first westerner I'd met since the Buddhist woman at Dharamsala I was glad for some conversation. However, this was nothing compared to the Englishman's astonishing good fortune: since his own, now deceased, guru had banned him from speaking English I was about the first person he'd conversed with in that language for over a decade.

He was an interesting man - his ornate robes and headgear were not enough to hide his pasty white skin and wild orange hair. Our topics ranged over American politics, life in an isolated ashram and, naturally, the murderous idiocy of India's road culture. But soon I had to go: I'd only ridden 85 of my scheduled 100 kilometres that day and when I make up my mind to do something I cannot be dissuaded. It was only when I was well on my way did I realise that the Englishman's invitation for me to spend the night at the ashram, with all meals provided, was more than just politeness - I was depriving him of an extremely rare chance to catch up on world events and to speak in his native tongue. However, I would soon be punished for my obstinacy.

Passing one hotel-saturated town near dusk because it was at 99 kilometres for the day rather than 100 I found myself at sunset in Samalkha, a fairly major town with a train station and bus terminal, searching in vain for somewhere to stay. I wasted over an hour being directed back and forth by kids with no real idea where any hotels existed before I was told by a group attracted by my growing irritation that I would have to backtrack twenty kilometres to the last town. This was the closest I've ever come to actually losing it on my trip so far. I practically yelled at the crowd that there was no way I would be riding twenty kilometres on a dangerous highway at night and that I was going to stay here even if it meant sleeping on the street.

The only suggestion I got was to try the train station. Pleading with the railway staff I asked to be shown a bench upon which I could wait out the night. Kindly, the station chief offered me his office and made a bed from a few blankets on a desk. Exceeding all expectations of hospitality he then invited me to have dinner with his family. The food was cornucopic and delicious, surpassing some of the best food I've had in India yet, and his educated and extensive family were so incredibly charming and charitable it made me wonder how I could have been satisfied with a hotel. This was a day in which I'd experienced both the best and the worst of India.

Finally, heading off in the morning, I made the relatively uneventful trip back into New Delhi, stopping at a recommended restaurant on the way, riding through the northern torus of construction and traffic mayhem and into the familiar tranquil streets of Connaught Circus. Checking back into my old hotel, the New King, just as a wild thunderstorm ripped through the city, engulfing Delhi's washing lines and scared sacred cows (even uprooting power poles), I decided that I had just completed the most intense and emotionally exhausting cycle tour I'd ever been on - little realising that Steve's arrival the next day would initiate a tour even more extreme.

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!