Mumbai to Udaipur
Added on Friday, July 4th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Vadodara close-up
There was an incorrect number on the bikes registration document, which tallied with the RAC Carnet but not with the engine. Both paper documents read the figure but stamped on the outside of the engine casing, the first zero was in fact a dash. I didn’t understand why the DVLA made a mistake like this unless ‘dashes’ were not part of their standard numbering process. Yet, if the engine’s name is such a figure then surely, I thought, the paperwork should identify this as such.
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The paperwork is the official representation of the motorcycle’s official numeric identity; the engine and chassis numbers are regarded as a permanent establishment of proof that no other bike can be similarly identified. Before I left, the bike was incorrectly plated but the machine stamped process is irrevocable (according to law but not in practise). So now I have a bike whose essential identity cannot be proved by my very expensive paperwork. In principle this gaffe is enough for a zealous customs official to refuse the bike entry into a country. In practice, some reasonable explanation should suffice or at least a subtle transfer of funds via an intermediary - known in these parts as a ‘freight forwarding handling agent’ to the individual who is in charge of the vehicles importation. It’s called a bribe.
I sat on the barely soft chairs in the unaccompanied baggage area of Mumbai airport. The journey this morning should have lasted an hour, but in monsoon rain and busy traffic it took three times as long to get to the airport. There was an hour’s wait whilst customs enjoyed their lunch break, no doubt from tiffin tins packed by their wives. Mr Nitay, made me sign a sheaf of papers and the process began. Five hours later the bike was still not released. The process could be done in an hour but in India, waiting is part of the process.
The next day it was raining. For a few moments as I packed the bike outside Nayak’s house the rain abated but soon started. Along the Western Highway out of the airport suburbs, the road was hedged in by tall buildings that looked as if they might be condemned for demolishment at the foot of which cardboard and corrugated slums sat in their stench. In front of me a rickshaw driver was carrying two nicely dressed children and their father when they stopped at lights. A beggar girl who could have only been five years of age stood with her hands out, silently. The little boy who looked eight just stared at her with complete disdain and then spat a green gob of flem all over her chest. The little girl who should have been tucked up with her teddies in a nice clean bed didn’t flinch. So hardened to such abuse, it was as if it hadn’t happened and as the rickshaw pulled away she went to another car window, something she would be forced to endure until very late or be beaten by her father or worse. Had the traffic not been so aggressive I would have found something to wipe off the flem but like everyone, I wanted to care but didn’t. It is times like this when I think the third most powerful country in the world is suffering from paranoid delusionment syndrome. That India has the temerity to say it is a consciencous, consensual democracy when a third of its one thousand million population live in conditions not fit for pigs.
A friend was with me. Caroline had tea with Nayak as I gathered our things. It was still strange travelling with someone even for a short time. Sitting pillion on an R1 is never easy but across some of the most extreme riding that is suitable for such a bike, it is daunting.
By six-thirty we had set off. The rain had abated but was to return until we left Maharastra state and enter Gujarat. The west coast monsoon started a few days ago then fizzled out over Mumbai but in Gujarat no rain had fallen and the season was already two weeks late. Fortunately there were no signs of that happening in the satellite pictures to indicate a thickening of cloud or some swirling dark mass coming in across the Arabian Sea. The Western Highway is already tough enough without needing rain to make it more hazardous.
Riding away from the airport the suburbs of Mumbai extend far beyond what most tourists imagine when they fleetingly come in at Churchgate or Bombay Central by train. The airport taxi takes you to the centre and an idea how long this city extends down the peninsula can be gained, but only by going north can you see how much she has had to grow, squeezed like a dirty rag into an oil can, until everyone is crushed in. The slums played heavily on my mind, which in a monsoon would be intolerable. All manner of the most unthinkable stresses must burst out like pus when you have to walk around in mud and sewage to beg a living then huddle under wet cardboard and corrugated tin until the rain stops later in the year. When you think of India this way she does not respond in my mind as a world force but some pathetic selfish creature that unconsciously continues a long past with scant regard for any cohesive future. One thousand million people are a lot but a third of these inhabitants have no access to clean drinking water; that’s 300 million. In context, Great Britain has a population of 60 million, a third of which is 20 million and this is the proportion of people the United Nations classify as living in uninhabitable accommodation. I would go further having seen pig sties in first world countries and categorically state that I would rather live there than a slum in India. I am being too shocking. It’s only because I love India so much that I feel she needs to be so chastised.
The traffic to where the Nagpur Road joins Highway 8 by Surat was only slowed by the rain. Trucks with poor tread would be nervous vehicles on corners, so lined up side by side as they shoved and pushed for best position, they sealed the fate of everyone trying to pass. Only when the drivers had finished jousting and someone gained an edge did they make way for us to pass. For hundreds of yards the route became clear until the process started all over again. Construction was everywhere and at every junction between Mumbai and Delhi there was a flyover in some process of construction. Hundreds of flyovers would make this route the fastest in India and facilitate the transport of goods to market to be much faster. Until then, and after the rain had stopped, the humidity and the heat began to take it’s toil. Single lane traffic encouraged the most audacious overtaking whereby trucks and buses missed head-on collisions by inches. So many times it happened to the vehicle in front of me so I presume that should it happen it would be shunted at massive speed into me.
Today I got into India. I don’t mean literally but figuratively and spiritually. This is how it started.
I woke up this morning feeling very tired. Vodadora is not a city known for its exceptional beauty. It is a functional city on the Western Express Highway, or simply ‘Highway 8′. Out of the forth floor of my nice and functional hotel room I see what seems like a farm on the outskirts of town. In fact the cows and goats wonder everywhere and the obviously temporary building covered in corrugated sheeting are probably a slum. That I am here having enjoyed a buffet dinner in a quite palatial dining setting and boys and girls run around down there without shoes, forces me to start thinking like an Indian. Either their karma means they are meant to be there, their caste determines their fate or the average Indian is so overwhelmed by the problem. What can they do?
I put on my kit. My Hein Gericke Prosports jacket and pants have kept out the monsoon and still look great. I go downstairs and pack my bike. I’ve got new tyres that should get me to Sydney and an air filter that should get me to Perth. All is good and I go.
Within a few hours I feel bored. The Highway is a disaster so the map indicates a yellow route across country to Halol, Godhra and then onto Malpur before rejoining the ‘8′ 139 kilometres before Udaipur where I intend to stay later. Still, the countryside is flat and scratchy. Even the bushes look homeless. Flat as far as I can see I soon realise that what I thought was a back way wasn’t. Well, it used to be, but, there is a new car in India, which you can buy for 1 lach (100 000 rupees, about £1200). The idea, like Henry Ford’s Model T Ford, was to make a car for the masses. India has the largest growing middle class population in the world. 500 million people now aspire to the things, which, because of economic uncertainty, were until now out of reach. Not any more. Every aunt and uncle can now drive their nieces and nephews on little trips into the country and back roads like these are excellent routes for that purpose. The route is peppered with these damnable stupid machines driven by people with the spatial awareness of spacemen on a remote cosmic colony. Uncle has no idea that indicating is a prerequisite to overtaking. Driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding a mobile phone is nothing to the distraction of three children sitting on aunties knee on the front passenger seat. As I ride past and peer into the window I see that no one is wearing a seat belt and the driver nearly accidents as he wishes me well nodding his head from side to side. Quaint but a little dangerous. Countless Rajasthan truck drivers, off their heads on amphetamine sulphate to keep them from falling asleep at the wheel, have big smiles. You have a recipe for catastrophe. India has one of the world’s worst causality rate for road traffic accidents per head of population.
I wrestled all morning with this soup of silliness. Little cars made from pressed steel of the minimum thickness with brakes that complied to the lowest possible standard of safety in order to be built to budget. Oncoming trucks use both sides of the road when overtaking. It is as if two-wheelers don’t exist. The closing speed of an R1 over a 2-stroke is something truckies have no first-hand experience, so I, along with my motorcycle colleagues are forced to the edge of the road to avoid head-on collisions. If a lorry wants to pull out he will, whether you are there or not. Vehicles routinely drive the wrong way down a two-lane highway like this or a four lane expressway. It’s the right of the farmer to do as he has always done before the damn road was built, and he does, smiling, nodding his head, as ever, from side to side.
On the 8, I stopped to take a photo of a truck that had slid off the road and shed it’s entire cargo of flour. Boys were carrying what sacks hadn’t burst onto an empty truck brought into continue to ferry the goods to market. The owner was there, a small, rotund man who when I spoke to him said that ‘India was great’ and introduced me to the driver by giving him a hug. ‘This is a gift from God,’ he said, ‘it had to be.’ That karma thing again.
A little way up the road I stopped to talk to a man dressed in an orange robe. He was carrying only a staff and a tin. This was a Sadu, a holy man, and he said had walked to the western and eastern most points of India and was now making his way to the Himalayas having walked from the south, 9000 kms in all and with no money. I took his photograph and gave him 100 rupees (£1.16) and wished him well. A little further up the road, a small people carrier was standing bashed up next to an ambulance. There was broken glass everywhere and looking at the tyre tracks, the vehicle had been hit violently and had then spun around, and standing in the middle of the mayhem was the same rotund boss that I spoke to by his flour truck. God had given him another present. Welcome to India. It’s great.
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