Biking in India: the Rajasthani Road and the Coast

Biking in India: the Rajasthani Road and the Coast

a) The Rajasthani Road: Camels and Monkeys

The three main things that distinguish biking in India from biking in other countries are the wildlife, the villages and people, and the roads and traffic.

The Wildlife:

Biking in Rajasthan was remarkable for the wildlife that we encountered. We passed hordes of black buffalo, humped cows and bulls, slow-moving camels, and monkeys – and to a lesser extent, parakeets, goats, donkeys, horses, and elephants. The monkeys were very cool!!! The babies often played together, swinging on the tree branches, from their tails, upside down. Some came towards us as we biked by slowly, others just stayed put and watched us, while still others ran away. Towards Fatehpur Sikri, we saw dozens of black, furry bears with leashes through their noses, their owners running after us with the bears in tow, begging us to stop for photographs. The cows and buffalo generally sat or wandered about in the small villages, but the camels were used to transport heavy loads. We passed mating cows and monkeys, but also dead and decomposing monkeys, camels, buffalo, and cows. Dogs often tore into their carcasses, and birds picked up the remains.

The curled horns of the bulls were often painted red or purple, and the camels were sometimes painted. More often than not, though, their hair was shaved into special designs. The camels often wore little ribbons and colored yarn balls and jingling bells. It was not only the animals that were decorated – the trucks and tractors often had this honor, too. They were painted, filled with colorful words, adorned with rainbow-colored ribbons, tassels, and stickers (lots of them!) and sometimes with statues of one of the gods.

One thing that made me laugh was to see the camel-drivers who were so sure of their animals that they actually slept on the wagon behind the camel, lying down on top of their load, eyes closed, while large trucks and other vehicles, blowing their horns, whizzed by. They slept between towns as well as in the busy towns, where the camels kept a steady pace and a steady course!

Villages and People:

The majority of the villages were made of mud huts. Sometimes people just lived in makeshift tents that were open to the elements, aside from a flimsy piece of material that served as a roof. Entire mud huts, with various designs carved on their walls, were used just to house dried cow patties, and looked like they would run away with the first strong rain. Many people owned cows, buffalo, or camels. Candles and small fires were often lit at nighttime to provide light and warmth. Every village had its own temple, and oftentimes, several of them. They were generally small, and sometimes miniscule, being only a few feet wide or long – a simple compilation of bricks or concrete with a bit of paint – sometimes just a painted face or god, sometimes just a bit of paint. In fact, every single Hindu home has its own temple, even if it’s only a pile of bricks! In some of the towns, men sold fresh fruit and vegetables from wooden carts (bananas, pomegranate, coconut, pineapple, apples, tomatoes, onions, ginger, hot green peppers).

The people sometimes smiled at us, sometimes stared, were sometimes indifferent. But whenever we stopped for an instant, especially to eat, the crowds would gather around, sometimes staring at our bikes and playing with the gears and the bells, and sometimes just staring intently at us. In the villages and towns – and in-between – were roadside restaurants or small huts selling tea or pots of vegetables or potatoes that they would heat up when asked and serve with hot, freshly made chapati (Indian flat bread). Typical dishes had names such as “Potato-Cauliflower,” “Potato-Peas,” or “Dal” (chickpeas), always served in some type of curry sauce. Sometimes we’d sit down to eat in one of these restaurants, and 50 people would gather around, a few feet away from us, to watch every bite we took. Their stare is often quite intense, and if you stare back at them, thinking that it will encourage them to look away, it very rarely works. They stared at us as if we were animals escaped from a zoo, or perhaps aliens from another planet. I found it especially annoying when I was eating, so I tried simply to look at Stephane or at my plate of food, putting on “blinders” to cut off all peripheral vision – sometimes hard to do! As the old saying goes, “Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd.” We were thankful that the people in small villages didn’t own cameras, like they did in larger cities!

Unfortunately, we encountered a few hassles roadside. Mostly from dishonest men who would quote you one price for a meal (we would always ask first) and then double or triple it once you went to pay. Probably their minds would start working overtime once you were actually in the restaurant, sitting down to eat, and they would regret giving you the “local price.” It happened more often than not at the tiny roadside restaurants where we ate, and it caused some friction with angry restaurant owners, who assumed that we should just pay whatever price they later settled upon. Unfortunately, India doesn’t exactly have a reputation for its honest people….

One funny thing that we encountered quite often was the Indians asking if our bikes were bicycles or motorcycles. The Indian cycles have no gears and no mirrors; hence, the confusion. Most Indians had never before seen gears, our bikes looked big and bulky (like motorcycles) with our bags, and our mirrors were the same as the ones on their motorbikes. They mistook our water bottles for bottles of gasoline. They often seemed quite amazed when they saw us pedaling!

It is quite hot biking in India, even though we were biking during the wintertime. The Indian winter feels like our summer. Hot and sweaty, we stopped at one place at the beginning of the season for a soda. The man said to us, “We don’t have any soda now – this is the winter! We have only hot tea!”

The Roads and Traffic:

Biking in India wasn’t quite as frightening as I had imagined it. We had been told horror stories involving truckers playing “Chicken” with smaller vehicles, driving them off the road and into ditches. Before biking, we spoke to someone who had crossed India by motorcycle several times in the last 10 years, and his view was a bit different. “The drivers – and especially the truckers – are aggressive,” he agreed, “but mostly because of driving long hours on terrible, one-lane roads, which makes them very impatient.” They pass at any chance they can get, but it is mostly out of impatience and imprudence rather than a malicious desire to drive other traffic off the road. By all accounts, the roads have greatly improved in the last 3 years or so, making them not only easier to navigate but also much safer. Many have been widened into two-lane roads and their general state has been improved. Because many of the roads are wider and drivers can now pass more reasonably, the accident rate has gone down (although India still has the highest accident rate in the world).

So it was a bit better than I had expected, and we encountered no games of “Chicken,” but we were still driven off the road many times, anyway. It can be frustrating, this utter lack of disregard and respect for other people and vehicles on the road, but once you learn to accept it as “the way things are,” it becomes a bit easier to deal with.

“Might makes Right” is definitely the rule of the road here. The trucks and tractors slow down for nothing and for no one, passing three at a time in two lanes, in the middle of a turn! The simply barrel ahead, honking their horns loudly and counting on their size to save them. The trucks pass frighteningly close! A hundred times, I thought I was going to witness an almighty explosion, blowing everyone to bits, and yet they somehow manage to avoid each other at the very last second (although we did see enough carcasses of devastated cars).

The roads varied considerably. Some were small and bumpy – one-lane roads bordered by dirt shoulders and lined with trees. They were sometimes quiet and peaceful – green, bordered by fields. Traffic was generally at a minimum on these roads – mostly bicycles, camels and bulls pulling wagons, but few trucks. A lot of tractors and buses shared the road, though. People crammed into the back and on top of the tractors, hanging onto the sides. Men squatted by the dozens on the roofs of the buses.

Other roads, a bit larger, were relatively new and had a paved shoulder. Near Jaipur, we biked along a large road under construction – heavy with traffic, noise, and terrible pollution. Horns honked incessantly and hurt our ears. This is the first country where we’ve seen women construction workers, working alongside the men, filling up large bowls with dirt by hand, then carrying the bowls on their heads to dump the dirt off the side of the road. They sometimes swept dirt from the road with small brooms or sometimes just pushed it away by hand. From what we saw, they do the same work as the men. They worked in their colorful sari dresses and gold jewellery.

The road between the Muslim pilgrimage city of Ajmer and the Hindu pilgrimage town of Pushkar was interesting. The quiet road went past the Ajmer Lake, where men bathed and wild pigs ate trash, and then continued up over a mountain pass and many temples, where hundreds of black-faced monkeys sat beside the road. They are aggressive. At one point, after I got off my bike, a monkey came to settle on the wall near it. When I tried to get back on my bike, he bared his teeth at me and wouldn’t let me get near. They are more human-like than the red-butt monkeys; they sit upright with their arms and legs crossed – pretty funny!

Farther south in Rajasthan, fields of yellow flowers and cactuses dominate the scenery. The tall cactuses served as fences around the fields. Palm trees sprang up here and there, tall above the fields, and we rode along calm, quiet roads with few people. Women carried earthenware jars and bundles of sticks on their heads. Sometimes we would see a lone man plowing his field with the help of a yoked ox. We passed a few elephants in the cities – especially Jaipur – and one walking along a quiet country road, with an aged Sadhu sitting atop him.

Hilly, small roads turned into VERY small roads, bad and bumpy, bordered by tropical vegetation: swamps, lakes, yellow flowers, dry rivers, small rice fields. Buffalo swam in the small lakes. We were in the backcountry; there were no roadside restaurants or even tea stands. On one small road, completely bordered by cactuses, we passed a herd of about 800 goats and 5 shepherds. A motorcycle got stuck in the middle of the herd – and so did we!

It was in this backcountry that we met the “King of the Village” (you can read about this colorful character under the journal entry entitled “The Locals”). As we followed a tiny path away from the King’s house, the scenery changed from palm trees and cactuses to sand, rocks, and cultivated fields. The road was more bumpy and hole-filled than ever, and very slow going. The scenery grew wilder, and though we didn’t pass many villages or people, we saw camels and donkeys, herded by several very brightly dressed women. Their costume was different from what we had seen before: their dresses were fuller, in different patterns – a lot of red and purple. They sported large, round, nose rings and camel-bone arm rings that covered their arms from the elbow to the shoulder and adorned the wrists. A young girl and a baby lamb rode atop a mat bed on top of one of the camels.

One morning, just after sun-up, we passed another camel herd and gypsies with their makeshift tents. Oxen with enormous horns walked down the road with men that had shawls wrapped tightly around their shoulders and pulled closely around their ears and their throat. It was, after all, winter, even though it felt like summer to me!

Many small hotels lined the road in Rajasthan. Thus, it was relatively easy to find a place to sleep in the evening. We would search out the cheap rooms, which generally went for about $2.25 along the roadside and $3.50 in the cities. The rooms had a private bathroom and were clean or otherwise (depending on your luck), and almost always covered in red spit stains, which came from years of men spitting their red chewing tobacco on the floors and walls. We often shared our room with other critters – perhaps lizards or mice or cockroaches, and always mosquitoes (we love our mosquito net!). We used our own bed clothing – clean sheets were rarely provided, and most sheets were obviously used and dirty.

We pitched our tent only a few times in Rajasthan. The first night was the worst. Darkness was falling, trucks were barreling by hazardously and laying on their horns, and few vehicles had working head or taillights. We deemed it safer to stop where we were and camp on a little pathway, just off the side of the road. We had our tent up and were in bed by 8 PM. But sleep didn’t come. Trucks drove by all night long, blaring their strange music at ear-shattering decibels. Other strange, otherworldly sounds filled the night air. We laid awake all night, trying to figure out what the different noises were. The alarm went off at 4:45 AM, but I was already awake. I went out to a black sky full of bright stars and packed up in the dark, ready to go by daybreak. What a bizarre night.

b) On the highway, south towards Mumbai:

We entered the state of Gujarat on the bumpy, Rajasthani road, only to continue on a busy, 4-land road under construction. The wind covered me from head to toe in a fine covering of dirt from the construction, but the waving of smiling children from their school bus jeeps made me happy. It didn’t take long for the dirt to turn into mud, and it seemed as if the trucks took a special pleasure in aiming for me. I was soon covered in splattered mud – it gravitated towards my ears, my nose, my hair. A flat tire stopped us dead in the heat of mid-day. Again. We had unending flat tires during a three-week period in Rajasthan (from thorns on the road), after having survived 1½ years without any at all!

The highway started about 100 km. after we entered Gujarat. It was devoid of interest – heavy traffic, pollution, and potholes were the hallmark of the trip. The last 200 km. to Bombay, in the state of Maharashtra, were miserable. The sun is especially strong in India, and I had continuous, almost daily, heat migraines. The pain is intolerable, and the heat never-ending.

We did have several good experiences with the people that we met along the way, though. The people seemed to get friendlier as we traveled south. We met Soni and Sunil and their parents – the family that gave us great Christmas memories. We stayed two days in a tropical paradise at Arjun and Jyoti’s Sunday Farmhouse, thoroughly pampered and spoiled. You can read more about the people that we met under the section entitled, “The Locals.”

Finding a hotel in Gujarat was not the piece of cake that it was in Rajasthan. It was not so easy to put up our tent, either – we were on the highway. (The highway in India means that it is a main road, but in no way comparable to our highways at home – they are often only 2-lanes and the traffic moves much slower.).

Hotel prices also mounted steadily as we neared Bombay. We had been used to paying between 100-150 rupees in Rajasthan and between 150-200 rupees in Gujarat. In Maharashtra, they were asking between 400 and 1500. We longed desperately to stop and get out of the heat for a while, but the steep prices kept us moving. We spent one night camping at a gas station. The next day, as a dizzy spell came on with the heat, we decided to take a hotel at any price. Just then, a police officer came to our aid. Seeing us stopped for a break at the top of a mountain, he told us to follow him – he could provide us with both dinner and a hotel room in a nearby resort!

The traffic intensified as we neared Bombay, and then, we found ourselves in the city itself, heading towards the southernmost tip, where the cheap hotels and the tourists sites were located. We biked through India’s largest city and the world’s second-largest ghetto – miles upon miles of misery. But you can read more about our adventures in Bombay under the section entitled, “Bombay.”

c) Along the Maharashtra Coast: Palms and Coconuts

We took a ferry from Mumbai across the Mumbai Harbor to a tiny village called Mandwa. The road along the coast and then inland was small, with tons of palm trees, some cactuses, many mangroves, and many resorts by the coast. Certain areas were heavily forested, and, after Mumbai, it was a surprise to see animals again.

We initially followed the Mumbai-Goa Highway, a narrow, two-lane road little used by trucks simply because the roads were too steep for most trucks to make the climb and because there was a parallel highway farther inland. Though called a highway, the road was enjoyable – peaceful and quiet. It ran through forested mountains and miniscule villages, passing a couple of small, flowing rivers and some dry riverbeds. Palm trees and coconut trees seemed to be the principal vegetation, though we also saw banana trees and cactus fences. Mangrove trees, with their long, hanging roots, provided us with shade along the road, which eventually turned into a narrow, one-lane road. The tropical vegetation seemed to come right out of “Jurassic Park.”

We passed chartreuse rice fields and other fields that were plowed by white, humped bulls and barefoot men ankle-deep in mud. On Republic Day, a national holiday, we passed through the center of a village parade, and we seemed to be just as much a spectacle to the local people as they were to us. Bulls pulled wagonloads of people down the country roads, a few people picnicked, and boys and men played cricket, sometimes with goats or roosters in attendance. A silent funeral procession walked down the street of a small town. Several men carried the draped corpse on their shoulders, finally depositing it by a small river, where it was burned.

We passed some cultivated fields, and the coloring of the earth became a beautiful, deep red. The mountains were steep and never-ending. We biked our longest uphill ever – 14 km. straight up, without a single downhill dip. It was extremely hot. We took several breaks to rest and enjoy the peace and quiet of the mountains and forests. The views were spectacular. Thatched roof houses sat off the road, with the broad leaves of palms to provide shade.

Stephane grabbed onto the side of one of the slow-moving trucks that was fighting its way uphill, hitching a “free ride,” while I struggled all alone behind, sweating with each turn of the pedal, too nervous to try it myself, for fear of falling under the wheels. Nothing is more discouraging than advancing at a painful 4 kph and seeing Stephane being pulled along at 4 times that speed.

We decided to head for the coast at the first intersection. We traveled 30 km. west to the town of Dapoli Camp, where the road was so steep at one point that I thought I would breathe my last. Though the mountains were never-ending, the one-lane road was still enjoyable, as there was no car or truck traffic, and the way was shaded with mangroves. As we headed south, we spent one night with the local people, but we mostly camped on the forested hillsides.

There were few people, few animals. Just as we thought we were all alone, I heard the sound of barking dogs, quite unusual in that area. They were quite excited and it made me a bit nervous. Then, as we rounded a bend and continued the ascent, we saw what all the commotion was about. A monkey – a large, fully-grown adult male monkey – was stuck up in a tree, running back and forth like mad between the branches of two different trees. Two dogs were chasing it from below, following it back and forth across the road and barking wildly. We passed by, and the dogs were oblivious to us – they had their eyes on the monkey. As we were rounding another bend, we looked back to see the monkey make the high leap from the trees and run down the mountainside, the dogs in hot pursuit behind. I didn’t wait to see which one could run faster.

We reached the coast, which was fabulous! Isolated villages, deserted beaches, clean blue water, fishing boats, coconut trees. The palm trees multiplied and became veritable palm forests. The woods were dense, and many of the palms were tall and thin, straight as an arrow, while others were bent over in the wind. We found villages that seemed to come out of the movies. Thatched-roof houses lined the narrow streets and were shaded by the large mangroves and generous palms. Roosters and buffalo shared the streets with motor scooters and rickshaws. No cars, no trucks – only a few pedestrians. There were a few tiny shops selling crackers and cookies, but little else. The villages were so small that we couldn’t even find bread. There seemed to be a sizeable Muslim community, noticeable by their clothing – the men in all white and the women in all black.

We crossed one river by boat – there was no bridge. The mountainsides of the port town were scattered with tents, or huts, made of wood branches, coconut leaves, and plastic. After the port town, there was no one.

We reached a little place called Guhugar in the early evening hours one day. We had planned on continuing and finding a place to pitch our tent, but the village was so picture-perfect, its deserted beach lined with an unending row of palm and coconut trees, that we decided to stay on for a bit. The sand was soft and warm, the beach clean, the water blue. The sound of the sea was calm and reassuring. We watched the sand crabs dart back and forth, read and wrote and took the occasional dip, and hung around to enjoy the sun set like a ball of fire into the sea at the end of the day.

It was slow going after Guhagar. Our map showed a perfectly straight road along flat terrain; in fact, the road was anything but straight and the terrain anything but flat. The road didn’t actually follow the coast at all. It went inland, twisting and turning up and over steep mountain chains. We had to guess at distances because there were no road markers. Locals estimated the distance between Guhagar and the next town at between 90 and 220 km. There was no way of knowing because there was more than one road and we were given different directions. From our map, I thought that we could make it to the town with one day of hard biking; it took three full days. The road stretched and stretched into eternity. Eternity because we were running low on food and all we could see in front of us was another mountain, with no place in sight to buy any food. The couple of teeny villages that we passed had huts made of sticks and branches and dry leaves (I wondered what they did during the monsoon season!). There were no shops, no restaurants, no tea stands, no soft drinks, no fruit, no bread. We were forced to make our own bread from flour and water in order to fill our stomachs.

As we climbed higher and higher, the palms and coconuts gave way to cactuses with red flowers, mango trees, and other fruit trees and gnarled trees that we couldn’t identify. We picnicked in the fields and camped at night under an immense blanket of bright and twinkling stars.

Though we had greatly enjoyed the quiet and solitude of the coastal mountains (very rare in India!), we were happy to finally reach civilization because it meant that we didn’t have to worry about where our next meal was coming from. We spent several days at a town called Ratnagiri, then continued south to join up with the Mumbai-Goa Highway. We crossed several rivers and two small fishing villages with boats and palm-lined beaches. Otherwise, the area was heavily deforested. Along the highway, we read signs such as, “Safety on Road means Safe Tea at Home,” “Highway not Die-Way,” Control your Nerves on Curves,” and “Good Driver We Proud of You.” The steep ups and downs of the mountains made our ears go “Pop, pop, pop,” and then we crossed one last river to arrive in Goa….