Roorkee to Rishikesh - Aversion Therapy

This morning I started to worry about cycling in India.  When I'd observed the traffic here out of a car, a tuk tuk or a rickshaw, it just looked bonkers and dangerous.

After two days actual riding, I'd become completely desensitised to danger.  Things that at home would be classed as a near miss, and would leave me feeling alarmed happen to me every minute over here.  A truck missing me by a couple of inches seems good enough.

Too much driving and riding at home becomes automatic, and you can easily switch off but here no.  You have to pay attention the whole time, and if something nuts happens, or if you see something nuts, there's no point in trying to tell Dean, because while you're telling him, something even more nuts will happen.

Yesterday I overtook a crane on the inside in a scene reminiscent of Terminator 3, and I felt fine.  At one point I tried to follow Dean in between two trucks and the gap between them starting disappearing from a small V into nothing so I just calmly backed out of there.

This morning we had 42 miles to go to Rishikesh and it turned out to be all on single carriageway, and as far as Haridwar it was the same as yesterday.  Totally flat, with no signs, lots of crisps on sale, but no proper shops, unless you want to buy lumps of metal, sticks or bricks.

When we reached Haridwar we finally saw the Ganges and some of the heavy traffic tailed off into the town.

As we got closer to Rishikesh it started to look a lot more touristy, there were hotels, and the Indians we could see were dressed very much like Westerners, and there was a lot of kite flying going on.  And we started to see shops with things in them that you could buy, and we started to pass some internet cafes and then we went down a hill into Rishikesh itself, and it was manic and there was some sort of parade going on.

We went down to the banks of the Ganges, and it seemed altogether more tranquil, but we really wanted to stay at Bandari Swiss Cottages, and we had a lot of disorientation and we had a lot of trouble finding it.  After about an hour we took about our tenth wrong turn, and we passed a lady clearing rubbish from the roadside, who shouted 'Oh, Well Done!' at us.  She was obviously English and so I went back to talk to her and ask her for directions.  And she was lovely, she was called Lorna and she spends our winters in India and our summers running a youth hostel on the Isle of Islay in Scotland.  And she told us that it's quite normal to feel overwhelmed after only a few days in India and she seemed pretty impressed with what we'd done so far in only a week.

She told us to get ourselves down and have a dip in the Ganges and all our stresses will melt away.  And she also told us to relax into our stress, and we'd soon start to enjoy ourselves.  It was good news, and it was lovely to talk to another English person after being a stranger in a strange land for so long.

We found our accommodation shortly after, and it's cheap and on a beautiful hillside, and surprise, surprise it has a double bed.  And it has monkeys swinging through the trees outside the balcony, and birds I've never seen before.  And internet access.  So I'm catching up with my blog, and it feels good to be able to unload after such a bonkers three days.  But I made it from Delhi to Rishikesh, on a bike.  153 miles of craziness like you wouldn't believe but I'm here, and now it's time to relax.

Meerut to Roorkee - Welcome to the Twilight Zone

We didn't hang about in the hotel in Meerut on Friday morning.  We had a long way to go, and we didn't want to get more abuse by trying to get breakfast, so we cleared off.

Cycling-wise the first 30 miles after Meerut went pretty smoothly.  Not long after we set off we met a couple of cyclists on road bikes, one of them who races for a professional team in India.  He invited us back to his house for a bit, but we decided we'd better press on, as we had a long way to go.

It was dual carriageway all the way, and at one point I said that I preferred it to cycling in England.  The roads were wide with not much on, and apart from the odd cow or motorbike coming the wrong way down the road at you, the cycling was pretty relaxed.  At one point we joined a toll road, and this really seemed to thin the traffic out for a while.

However, the world outside the road was another matter.  One of the main problems I'm having with India is that I don't know what anything is, and I don't understand what anyone is doing.  We rode past mile after mile of rubble, dust and people but I couldn't tell if we were looking at houses, shops, restaurants, garages or what.  Lots of places sell pop and crisps, which are hanging outside, but there are no signs to tell you where you can buy anything else.

Unlike in Delhi where I was constantly being pestered by people wanting me to go with them, in the more rural areas outside the city we just got stared at a lot.  Some people waved and said hello, and a lot of motorcyclists pulled up alongside and stopped to chat and shake our hands.  One guy was really impressed that I was wearing short sleeves, but I told him this is as hot as it ever gets in England.  Dean said all the staring was good practice for having one of those type of job interviews where they try and provoke and unsettle you.

We did stop after the first couple of hours and buy some pop and crisps, and it seemed ironic to me that junk food that we try not to feed our children, is the only stuff you can buy at times over here.

Dean had wanted to stock up early on more coffee, porridge and some other essentials but I thought we'd pass somewhere on the way, so I wasn't too worried.  The road from Meerut turned out to be like one really big service station.  Millions of eating places with hot food in tubs, and lots of places selling crisps, but nowhere to buy stuff to cook yourself.  Or if there was, we couldn't tell.  There was lots of advertisiing on buildings, but it wasn't advertising things that were in that building.  We did stop at one place that looked like a shop, but it only seemed to sell tennis balls, and really small cardboard boxes, which could have had anything in.  We asked them where we could buy coffee and they told us to go 8 kilometres back where we'd come from.  They didn't seem to understand we didn't want a coffee, we wanted to buy some.

During the day we passed an overturned truck in a bag, a man blocking all four lanes carrying about 20 metres of pipes on a cycle rickshaw, as well as a million others things too mental to have even have absorbed.  We went past a metal bashing shop, a tree bashing shop, saw a boy eating a tree while he was listening to music on his phone.  There was too much to take in.

But the inability to buy anything was really starting to wear us down.  Then mental became mental squared as the toll road ran out and we were suddenly on single carriageway road.  Instead of just having to worry about cows and motorbikes coming the wrong way down the inside, we now starting having to dodge trucks and buses which were on our side of the road trying to overtake other slow vehicles coming the other way.  The hard shoulder was all mud and rubble but at times we had to swerve onto it to get out of the way of bigger things.

Eventually we found a building that looked like a supermarket, and went in.  It was like a supermarket inside as well except for the fact that the shelves were mostly bare.  There were about 7 shelving units, and 3 of them were full of crips and snacks.  After getting a taste for Indian crisps earlier in the day I picked up a few more bags of these but the shopkeeper pointed to a sign telling me that they were all out of date.  I tried to ask him where the non out of date crisps were, but he didn't seem to have any.  I was impressed to see that they had a computerised till but it didn't work, and every price had to be worked out manually.  Dean got some coffee although only a couple of small packets and we got some biscuits.  We also bought something that vaguely resembled pasta, but we couldn't find any porridge.

Although it meant doing 71 miles in a day to get to Roorkee, it was totally flat, so we kept up a good average speed, and on the outskirts of Roorkee we started to see adverts for hotels.  After 40 miles of only seeing shacks and rubble, and not really seeing anywhere unpopulated enough to camp, it was quite a relief to see a hotel.

We pulled in to the Hotel Godiwari and went to see the receptionist.  He was very friendly and spoke quite good English.  Again we asked for single beds, only to be shown a room with a double again.  It was up about 4 flights of stairs and again we couldn't be bothered going out looking for something else, so Dean once again got us a discount, this time down from 1200 to 1000 rupees.  Then a whole team of people surrounded us, at first I thought they were passers by, but eventually I realised they worked there, and they helped us inside with our bikes and bags.  Two of them hung around for ages in the room making conversation, I gave one of them a tip and after a while they cleared off. Again the receptionist had asked for our passport, but this time he did return it as promised, and he also gave us bottled water and some milk to make some coffee.  Half the price of Fawlty Towers and already a better experience.

We went for a meal in the restaurant and it was cheap and delicious (Paneer Butter Massala) with some Butter Nan and the service was good, and the staff genuinely seemed interested and wanting to make sure that we enjoyed our stay.  I left them a 110 rupee tip, partly because there were so many of them I thought it wouldn't work out at much each.  Then we went for a beer in the bar upstairs, which did actually exist, unlike the bar in Meerut, which was a figment of someone's imaginiation.

A bizarre day, but a good one.