Buenos Aires at 9.13pm and I am sitting in the café La Leyenda waiting for my coffee. It’s slightly retro with delightful art décor. Nothing is straight. Other than square tables the wall furnishing are oddly angled with irregular shapes. Mirrors are wavy and balustrades are of brass tubing with wooden collars. This is my first café I have been to in Argentina and one that shall not be forgotten.

The flight lasted 14 hours and because the route crossed the international date line the plane landed the same day it took off. Flying East we took off and landed in daylight, but now it is dark. The brightly lit Calle Esmeralda is a four lane one way route that bisects the city and is parallel to the main 9 de Julio broadway just two blocks north.

I feel unsettled, mostly because the strain of the journey sometimes wears through my very thick coat. I could do with a week on the beach, but I’m riding non-stop to North America instead. It was always like this. As a young adventurer – 27 years ago – all the travellers were journeying from chill-out zone to beach and back. I never slept in the same place twice. There was so much to see and do. So much energy to dissipate. Never enough time to get everything done and after three months hard cycling or motorcycling I returned home emotionally a wreck.

In retrospect I have understood Australia much less than I thought. Having ridden around this beautiful country no less than seven times it has been a rash presumption to think I know it. Yet, the morale of countries waxes and wanes. In the early‘90’s I remember Ecuador being a cool place to be and Peru a desperate place. Five years ago those roles have reversed. Central America was a no-go area throughout the ‘80’s, now you can take your cappuccino’s in El Salvador once riddled with a civil war. Colombia’s looking better, because prior to my first visit in 1996, I received a personal letter from the British Embassy in Bogotá strongly warning me not to go. Syria’s up, Jordan’s down. Zambia’s up, Kenya’s a mess. Sudan is safer than blighty and there are places in London you can’t go at night but Cairo’s ok? So what happened to the Aussies legendary sense of humour?

I said good-bye to Australia, to the harbour and to one of the most dynamic city entrances in the world. When you descend to cross the harbour on the bridge, the overpass weaves you through huge monoliths of modern buildings until you see the enormous tonnage of old bridgework that stretches across one the most magnificent city harbours anywhere.

Buenos Aires has other qualities and just reeks of old world charm. There is something extraordinarily cultured about this town and I’ve only walked down one street. The hostel is excellently appointed in a quiet part of the centre a two-minute walk from café’s that the ghosts of many lives lay hidden in their walls.

The bike should be waiting at the freighters and with luck will be processed through customs during the day. With luck I’ll be on the road first thing Tuesday morning heading North West through Paraguay and then across the Pampas. I might go into Bolivia or Northern Chile before turning North through Peru and Ecuador and then Colombia to fly out to Panama.

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In north-west Queensland there were lots of kangaroo kill. Every few hundred metres large bucks would lie with their bloodied bodies beside the road. When they migrate they cross everything at 40 mph, jumping 30 feet in a single hop. I have seen swarms at night crossing the road where it became impossible to ride. This time I didn’t see a single animal. The recent rains would have kept the herd by the water in the bush. In the dry they eat new shoots by the side of the road and become startled by lights and just jump, blinded. Hit a large roo and you’re dead. I missed a dead wombat by inches. Something had hit it, peeled off the skin and the bloody covering of its back was being gorged on by an eagle.

The planned route to Sydney should have turned south at Rockhampton on the coast, but local knowledge suggested the traffic would be a problem and I was advised to head south sooner on the Carnarvon and Castlereagh Highways to Dubbo. At Roma I found a Yamaha dealer who changed my tyres. The Road Attacks were beyond their legal limit but still performed after 11,750 miles. Tom at D & R Motorcycles was a stalwart Australian who couldn’t do enough to help me and effected a change in 45 minutes. It was now late in the afternoon and panic set in. I had elected to ride though the night and so turned to the coast where there would be less chance of an impact with an animal (truckers who disputed this and reckoned the area around Dalby was stiff with wildlife). On paper the coast was a good choice but nevertheless the wrong decision. If I had maintained my southern trajectory across country at 40 mph, Sydney would have come into my sights by noon the following day. The connection with the freight flight to Argentina would have happened, instead I lost two more days.

The coastal route was beautiful but twisty two lane and packed with trucks by night and cars by day. Overtaking was restricted to occasional areas of four lane and my average dropped to below 30. On the long straight four lane leading into Newcastle after Taree I was pulled by a cop for doing 90mph in a 70mph zone. The road was wide and straight without a car in sight. He stopped and came up to me.
“Where do you think you’re going?” He said.
“Around the world.”
“You’re not going anywhere now,” he said, “you’re 45kms over the speed limit and that’s an automatic ban,” and he asked for my documents and returned to his car to register the issue and call for a tow truck. He could have arrested me, it was that serious.

The sun was shining and the fields looked very green. After five minutes a car drove past and then the road was empty again. The waiting was interminable. I was beginning to think this was the end of the trip. I waited. It was so quiet. Funny how you remember things out of context. I remember a black beetle walking across the road in the Syrian Desert. As I stepped back I inadvertently stepped back onto it and crushed him. It was upsetting for me and for him. It was remarkable that we should meet under such circumstances. That of all the desert to cross with it’s thousands of square kilometres of barreness, he chose to walk under my boot at the precise moment I got off my bike to stand.

Still, there was hardly a sound, then another car passed. A butterfly flapped and rested on the bars of the bike which made me begin to think. This was my fault and not that of the policeman. This was a principle route, the Pacific Highway and traversed the most populated area in Australia. It had to have cops guarding it. Essential, but how do they suddenly appear in your mirror when for miles there has been nothing? Does light bend around their vehicle in the way radar is deflected around a Stealth Bomber? Why was a conversation in my head so absorbing that it became impossible for me to know how far I’d travelled without knowing how I’d got there? It was still quiet. The butterfly had flown away. Not a car for minutes. I closed my eyes and breathed in Australia. I liked the place. I liked the people. Yet I also believed in the importance of passionate individual action that decided my views on morality and truth. That only by acting on convictions based on personal experience can you stand a chance of gaining some insight at arriving at some truth. The understanding of a situation, this situation, where a cop can decide for me everything I hold dear, is suddenly drawn from my control by a detached objective observer hell bent on systematic reasoning. The speed was an oversight and not real intent. I was superbly trained never to have an accident in seven circumnavigations in the most complex motoring conditions on earth and here we were in a desert of a drive with a man who would serve me notice without listening to what I had to say.

If anything was an existential moment, it was this.

Spiritually I was feeling more than general apprehension but real dread. It was angst. It was an anxiety that existential philosophers would say ‘leads to the individuals confrontation with nothingness and dealing with situations where it is impossible to find any justification for the choices he or she must make’. Sartre used the word nausea for the individual’s recognition of the pure chaos of the universe and it being a contingent one. This cop represented my nothingness, not in a personal way but a result of a decision I made and one he had to react to, as a professional and also the space he occupied as an individual. This was that contingent I feared. Speeding for him was wrong. For him, systematic reasoning prevails over everything. My experience and my clean accident free history in the toughest motoring conditions on earth was not relevant to this man. In Syria, Kenya, Tanzania, riding fast on an empty road would have had the police beg you to go faster. Such recourse to this man would command a prison sentence. What is appropriate in other countries was unimportant to him, but technically and morally right to me.

This commitment to freedom of choice confronts every individual at every moment and it is this opposite morality that creates anguish. This person had the power to strip me of my freedom and when he stepped out of that car it would be a defining moment.

“What did you say you were doin?” He said, as he walked from the car.
“Going around the world. I’ve got to be in Alaska in 25 days.”
“Well you’re registered and legal and I can see that your paperwork is in order, but you’re not on the computer so I don’t know what to do.”
“Let me off?” I suggested hopefully, and gathering speed I asked him if he was a biker.
“Yep, I’ve got a Harley.” My heart sunk a bit. If he had a sports bike we would have a greater confluence of interest. “I suppose you’ve got the Long Way Round?”
“Yep, got the DVD, sits proudly on my mantelpiece.” We diverge again. Spit out the worst. “Yep, when are you leaving the country?”
“Tomorrow.”
“OK, I’ll give you a break. I’ll give you the maximum fine which you need to pay in 21 days.”
“Certainly officer,” I said like a crawly schoolboy.
“And then I’ll take away all your driving privileges in Australia for six months starting 23.59 tomorrow night. How about that?” He looked at me intently, thinking he was doing me a favour and in a way he was. Philosophically I wanted to berate him for this stupidity and for the nothingness that he was making me confront. For the waste of time this whole charade was but said instead, “thank you officer, I really appreciate that.” I wanted to ask him whether his one percent point of generosity was simply because he couldn’t locate me on the computer or was it really his good will. If it hadn’t been for that lovely lady at Driving Services in Perth, who couldn’t understand how to programme an imported motorcycle into Western Australia, she just might have pressed the wrong button allowing Officer Dibble be thwarted in his attempt to throttle this adventure. So after 30 hours on the bike, I took his bits of paper and he drove away leaving me staring blankly into an empty road.

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Diary: Alice Springs
Left Jims at nine having finished off some work. Having a coffee in Alice Springs, trying to buy a flight from Sydney to Buenos Aires. Going to have to ride until six tonight at about 80mph so hopefully make 400 miles. Falling behind, have to get to Sydney for Tuesday morning and also need to get my tyres replaced. Otherwise it’s good. Sun out but cold. Wind has dropped. Fuel consumption in the main tank at 80 is 124 to the gallon and 112 at 98. In a headwind it’s worse. In fair spirits, jobs getting done, no problems at home, so far so good.

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The Stuart was quiet. It was easy to imagine this track from the sky, a single thread of tarmac that split the bush like a parting. At tree level it was a lonely experience but high up, the expanse of bush would only exaggerate the penetration of mans efforts across this huge continent and reinforce the capabilities of humankind to confront nature and survive. As the architects of our own destiny we are insecure creatures. Perhaps it takes explorers like Mr Stuart and civil engineers, surveyors and road builders to egg the ego on.

Diary: Cloncurry
Getting tired. Riding all day. Another 12 hours with two 15-minute stops. Writing the book, editing the film as soon as I get off the bike at the end of the day. No days off. Getting 5 hours a night sleep for weeks. Catching up with me. Just arrived in this small town and am shattered. Can hardly think straight. Walked into the Central Pub looking for a cheap room but they are full. Watch some TV. Order chicken and chips and sit blankly at my table waiting. Today has passed me by. Can only remember the road and the gas stations.

As I become calm, my mind steps back from having to survive to being able to remember. It’s like the two functions cannot co-exist. It isn’t the type of memory required to ride the bike that is now an acquired characteristic, more closely it is a type of memory that has the capability to save data on the move. If a human were somehow a wireless receiver translating signals from what it sees into something that could be warehoused until needed, that is the kind of memory you need on a motorcycle. The sole impediment to this isn’t storage, which is underused, but the strength of the signal and it’s capability like a mobile phone to roam across different environments.

The meal at the Central Hotel was good; chicken and chips with veg for A$10. In the bar, a chap told me that he was the descendant of the aboriginals that Captain Cook took back to England as examples of indigenous peoples. They bred two generations and his granddad came back and bred him. All the blackness had gone.

‘So what do Aboriginal people think,’ I asked, because they seemed to be in a world of their own.
‘Nothing,’ he said, and then left the pub.

On the road you get a lot of negativity. The wife haters, the tax dodgers, skankers and charlatans, the racists, rip-offs, those who say you can’t do things, the doom mongerers, the liars, blasphemers and the pr**ks. The moment you start to listen you hear of illnesses and death and all the sundry reasons why life is a piece of sh**. You become the conduit for peoples hard-earned stories, and like that message you give to your special tree, they all assume a stranger is going to move on, so it is safe to off-load secret stories.

As a traveller you become, psychologist, counsellor, futurologist, judge, diplomat and clown. It is the responsibility of the traveller to look sincere and caring at all times. You take a Hippocratic oath not to patronise or condescend or be too obsequious, whilst the most miserable looking lag weighs you down with yet more heinous tittle-tattle so he lets you get on your bike and move on.

The next day at McKinley I met a cattle train driver and we spoke about what it was like to be a truck driver.
“Alright”, he said.
“What sense do you have of feeling Australian?” I asked.
“What? Are you taking the pi**?” He said. Obviously I’d asked the wrong question.
“Where are you driving to next?” I asked more meekly.
“Down to Alice,” he said peevishly, climbed into his cab and drove off.

Further on I rode past the Walkabout Creek Hotel where Crocodile Dundee was filmed and when I said to the gas station attendant that he looked like Paul Hogan’s dad he told me to f**k off so I did.

Further on I met a fat Kiwi who said he knew Monmouthshire and had married a Welsh woman and said it was the worse experience of his life. How could I know? Further down at Winton, I popped into the Twylight Café, dinky on the outside but linoleum and plastic tablecloths on the inside. There were excellent black and white photographs on the wall and the photographer worked here so I asked if we could chat but she said she wasn’t interesting. So I ran across the dinky little road to the Royal Open Air Picture House but he didn’t want to talk. So I ran back to the café and ordered a cappuccino. 250 miles done, 500 to go.

176 kms South East and I made it to Longreach. It was an equally clean and tidy town. These towns are really main streets with small suburbs and survive on a diet of bottle shops, motels, cafes and garages and here in NW Queensland, saddlers and stockman’s goods. On the outskirts of town I fuelled up, ate a Mrs Mac pie and drank a carton of milk, before setting off once again. The plan to reach Rockhampton before nightfall was almost on schedule.

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At Cooper Pedy there were holes in the ground that led to sediments of Opal. Miners pit shafts, the depth of which represented time like the rings of a tree. A horizon of dirt piles that exhibited a type of magnificent obsession where men will spend whole lives underground to cherish particular types of hardened stone. The route to market is walking distance to the shops on the street. It was almost organic in the way a procession of men carried nothing more than a pocket of raw gems with which to trade. In return they got women and drink enough until spent up they walk back down to their holes and stay until they find more stones. Trucks with cranes stand like rusting animals that come to the surface to secrete half digested earth and so keep their worm hole clean.

Australia was also giving off more than her colour. Mrs Macs meat pies were in all the shops but it was broad expanses of salt pan that gave you the taste. Crystallized salt on top of a covering of mud met the clouds at the far end of the sky. Soil as red as a sunset lay like a strip along the thin covering of tarmac 1500 miles long. The Stuart Highway named after a man who walked the length of where I was riding was beginning to reveal nuances of personality that in successive trans-continental voyages I had never seen before.

I saw combinations of colour and sky that was like a painted desert. Giant water holders sprayed in reds and yellows, browns and greens all set against a cobalt sky turning to purple and ochre as the sun began to set.

There were roads so long and straight their vanishing point was too far away to be seen. Across a swath of foliage so vast it covered a continent, these feats of civil engineering had to be seen from outer space to truly appreciate their meaning. To say that the Stuart Highway is not one of the great highways on earth, comparable with the Panamericana or the Trans Gobi to Ulan Batar is not to know what it took for men to build it.

At Stuarts Well Roadhouse I saw Jim Cotterill and his singing Dingo and outside I saw the night sky like I’d never seen before. The revelation was in the re-discovery of things I’d seen many times before but now in a different way. That what looks like a swath of cloud is actually the leading edge of the Milky Way where a compressed view through unquantifiable amounts of stars give an impression of solidity in the sense of a gas having more substance in a vacuum than nothing at all.

In my cabin it was midnight, as it was outside, but here, in a warped space that was loaned just then only to me, I was once again so excited that I couldn’t calm down. Instead of thinking, in comparison to so many galaxies containing billions of stars, how pointless it could be thought our short lives were, I felt emboldened by the fact that most of the life of which I am told might be up there, is probably the size of a virus that can withstand the heat of molten mercury. Well I am substantially bigger having a lot more fun, and with that in mind I closed my eyes and slept.

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Hi Guys

I’m tired, it’s getting to me a bit but I’m fine. Trying to keep abreast of all the work that has to be done. Got a 304 page book on the go as we speak and I will post examples of the revised work most days until the end of the project. Mandi my editor in London is revising the words, Dave my picture editor is cleaning up the photos and Louise in Cornwall is starting work on the design. We also have Jamie in Bristol doing the graphics and as you know, Caroline in South London, holding things together.

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Diary
Sometimes cities marked on maps give no idea of scale and size until you get there. Only then can you see how big or how small it is. In India, small dots are cities of Brobdignagian proportions. Australia it’s the opposite. What looks large on the map is just a hamlet of wooden buildings. It’s as if the cartographers pen hasn’t a nib fine enough to indicate smallness in such a large space.

Perth was restful. As the bike went through the customary entry procedure I went to Cinema Paradiso to watch films. When the customs and registration process was eventually completed I took the bike to Yamaha Causeway where Grant gave the bike a service. The next day I headed out of town.

That night I made it to Southern Cross and the next day passed through Norseman. The sound of a train swept across the small short main street and at the bottom of Princep where three small cafes and a newsagency made up most of the town. It was a peaceful looking place - Railway Hotel at the top end and the Memorial Garden at the other. Small African villages had more happening than this sorry dump. I felt harsh because as the journey progresses, there is more history from which to compare the present. At the beginning everything is fantastic whereas now, places like Norseman had to compete with the rest of the world.

That night I made it to Madura Oasis Roadhouse and a sweeter nicer set of lodgings you would not find. Deep velvet red table clothes dressed small tables in the cute restaurant. The blond waitress was an annoying cow but I worked well in my room and watched two episodes of The Bill and an Irish police drama called Murder Prevention. Slept at 2am woke at dawn. I got dressed, jumped on my bike and went to work. The sun was out, the wind was blowing and the trees on the edge of the Nullorbor were getting shorter and fewer. A bluff appeared on my left and before Eucla the road climbed and swept to the right before settling flat and straight along the 90 mile straight to Border Village and the crossing into South Australia.

After an overnight in the East West Motel in Ceduna I completed the ride across the Nullarbor and had tea and cakes in a confectioners in Wudinna. I am making slow progress. In all honesty I am struggling to keep to any schedule because of other comitments. I wish that all I had to do was ride my bike, but it’s not as simple as that. There are cakes to eat, a business to run, a book that has to be written and podcasts and blogs have also to be posted.

It’s been a long time away from home and even though I’m surrounded by people I am alone. Always being on the edge of other peoples lives makes you feel like an ‘outsider’. Am I allowed to be fed up? Well I am! The essential nature of bike riding is solitary so maybe it takes a biker to really understand what this means.

I am now in Port Augusta about to head north-west and then north towards Darwin on the Stuart Highway. It’s midnight and I need to sleep.

It wasn’t a difficult decision because I hate walking and I’ve never had a ride with a girl that’s really taken me anywhere whereas buses are extremely useful. Sitting on the top deck of a double-decker I crossed Singapore imagining it was a tour bus. There were great views but I was a bit groggy from all the riding and needed a nurse to make me feel better.

We whizzed past the elaborate art décor building of Parkview Square to Bugis Junction at Rochor Road, and then the bus continued on past Raffles Hotel on the way to Harbour Road. Twenty years ago I had a fling with the niece of the manager of the Raffles Hotel and that won me a complimentary week’s stay. Now, I’d be lucky to get past reception. I was tired looking and had the hard look of the road all over my face. There was nothing soft in my demeanour; the tough riding had eliminated all need to be gentle. With just one companion there is the chance to share the pain and isolation of being so far away from home and for so long. Alone you are hostage to your own thoughts, and it is this for which you have to do battle.

So engrossed, jousting with these thoughts I overshot my intended destination and had to get bus #80 back four stops. The Peoples Park Complex was a good place to buy a last minute airline ticket and I needed to get to Perth to meet the arrival of the bike Monday afternoon. Having dragged myself down the Malay Peninsula sleeping rough with no rest after India, and not a lot to eat since Bangkok, I had a headache. I wondered just then if that Indian woman practised first aid? It would pass.

After buying the ticket I walked past a faux Scottish Bagpipe Band and then took the MRT to Raffles Place. Climbing up the escalator, the scale of this mini Manhattan revealed itself. The OUB building appeared on my right opposite the Clifford Centre and Ocean Towers. It was panoply of civil engineering and architecture that was a testament to mans genius. In Singapore, small may be beautiful, but order is power.

After a coffee I started to walk around the Waterfront, looking and hanging about. Light faded and this metropolis became illuminated. Singapore turned into a city of colour. After the bleached skies of India and south east Asia, Singapore’s dark blue night sky was deep and intense. After riding thousands of kilometres past dirty browns and greens, here there was suddenly a spectrum that had broadened. Reds and yellows competed for attention with turquoise and tamarind. When I saw this colour I immediately felt something, in as much as colour cannot allow you to feel nothing.

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Driving to and from various buildings, nobody seemed to know what to do with the ASA carnet. A custom official got into the car next to me, his mouth full of pan. Made up of fresh betelnuts, catechu, cardamom and lime it’s the perfect mouth freshener but when tobacco is added the concept changes. An Indian will keep the package tucked neatly in his mouth absorbing the nutrient before gobbing out accumulated saliva that has sat under his tongue as a pool of red paste. Most corners of India’s buildings and streets show the strain of generations of men who leave it there as a part of the rhythm of their life. “Carnet, tikka, achcha!” I think he said, and nodded sideways to indicate that everything was fine, even if it wasn’t. Bishur told me that not all the officials has seen a carnet before and we were working with the ones who knew nothing. Five hours later the job was done. On the way back to the city we stopped at lights where an old begger woman stuck her can against my cab window reciting a mantra of poverty. This carried on until the lights changed and we drove off she swore at me with a scowl.

Calcutta is one of my favourate cities. It’s an odd choice because it isn’t clean and tidy and in a hundred years it probably will look the same tired old place but it’s where I finish my journeys across India. Any journey across this vast sub-continent is challenging, not just the clichéd way in having to deal with the poverty, but more in having to ride in such a contained way in what is the most extreme traffic conditions in the world during the monsoon which is one of the most uncomfortable climates.

Different expeditions have different issues so crossing the North Pole or any Arctic walk will be cold and frostbite or falling down a crevasse is an ongoing problem. Here, the trucks are like wild animals and every day, thousands of local people are killed in road traffic accidents. It’s a fine line between accident and manslaughter because the rules of engagement are so extreme. A truck will aim for it’s position and it’s up to you to get out of the way and if you don’t you will be crushed. Dogs fly out into the road all the time but are street wise in the way a polar bear understands the power of a gun. Water buffalo and cows continue to walk whichever way they were going while goats tend to run back to the road edge if threatened and donkeys don’t move. Smaller animals make a dash for it and birds fly low in front of your visor always looking for scraps.

Children have road sense but adults often walk across the road without having looked if any traffic is bearing down on them. I’ve missed people who had no idea I was riding at speed and would have hit them had it not been for me taking avoiding action. Fate and destiny are wrapped up in their thinking so if it’s meant to be then it will happen whatever they do. That’s the uneducated view of fatalism because in Hindu culture you are allowed to make choices but having made that choice, then that is your fate whatever happens.

The poverty does affect you, or more specifically the dirt and the debris. There is little national identity among Indian people, certainly the concept that ‘India is Great’ is known, but people are concerned mostly with their immediate environment, their homes and family, and the catastrophic landscape is not their problem. This is a fair point of action because the problem is so over whelming it cannot be contained. There are no council garbage collectors in rural areas and in the cities; the poorest people on the food chain who recycle the rubbish supplement the few that do exist.

To a westerners mindset this is debilitating. The lack of beauty is not often by the roadside. In the arctic, pristine wilderness is at your fingertips so psychologically there is an important and positive psychological imperative that has real magnitude. In India, as a road wallah, sifting deeply into your own road movie, the sh** and carcass of what is otherwise a magnificent and pleasant land dulls your appreciation of this. Yet, and yet, because of the difficulties you face riding your bike across this monumental rubbish bin you are forced to look elsewhere, to drag out of your observational skills an ability to see beyond the filth to the beauty of the people. Given the difficulties of having to survive their own massive burden of population, there are no friendlier inhabitants on earth.

And so the need to end a journey in a place like the Fairlawn, where for 27 years I have been staying with Violet and until recently her late husband Ted. At 4pm the gong sounds for afternoon tea and then again at 6pm for dinner. Just after Violet invites select guests for gin and tonics on her balcony where they both used to regail you with stories from the past. For a few moments, a day or two at most, I am safe, and alive, drinking my tea and eating my biscuits.

Outside in Sudder Street, the traders do their noisy business. I would have my breakfast in the hotel but lunch and dinner at the Blue Sky Café across the road. There, the wireless signal from Net Freaks next door would allow me to internet. My friend Biswajit was sorting out the paperwork to export the bike to Bangkok so my route across Calcutta was from the Fairlawn to his office and back. The next day I was to fly out to Bangkok.

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21.50 First Food Stop, 1200kms south of Calcutta

Bought two small onion omelettes, two cokes and a tea. I feel wide-awake, don’t want to sleep. Had a power nap on some bloke’s desk in a gas station at about three in the afternoon and that perked me up. Now don’t know where I am. Obviously going north on the way to Calcutta. Think about 1200kms to go.

The road is very quiet and it’s dry and warm. Might as well arrive in Calcutta as soon as I can and go straight to the freighters office. It’s a public holiday in Thailand over the weekend and I expect I’ll lose a day. Suddenly I am aware that my schedule is tightening. Can’t be on the road forever, got to remind my three little kidlets that they’ve got a dad. Also got a secret plan about another trip. Going through the night does this to me! God, their goes my big mouth again.

Outside there is a watery weak moon and lines of trucks on the side of the road mean the drivers are having their rest. Once they get going it’ll be like wacky races again but in the dark.

In the cafe the music blares out from the TV. Noise is part of the lack of privacy thing. The small and exceptionally good waiter comes and shakes my hand and asks my name. He is called Mr Rahul and he said ‘fine’ about six times. How many Europeans has this man met? How many travellers stop in this one cafe ever? How many serious bikers are there riding around India right now? No one I bet. In my head I imagine it must be all right being a bit famous, but it’s better being a bit rare.

Tired, unkempt, dirty, alone, vulnerable and anonymous. Sometimes I like my job.

1am
Small place not on my map in Orissa but called Chilika Dhaba
Earlier, I got myself a soda at a grimy food joint on the side of a dirty litter-strewn road. One of the restaurateurs (a loosely applied term) started giggling and wouldn’t stop, so I glared at him and that did the trick. Psychopaths apart, stupid people just need to be treated like naughty children and they calm down. Outside the highway was now an apocalyptic mess. The road surface had deteriorated from a smooth four lane highway to a track so badly eroded it was almost inconceivable to call it the main and only truck road to one of India’s largest cities. You could bomb it flatter. A young man tried to dissuade me from continuing, saying it was too dangerous to travel here at night. He was inferring there were bandits but I wondered if he were one. It’s a good ruse to offer hospitality at an unfamiliar location by someone you don’t know. Now that would be an easy robbery behind closed curtains.

For miles and miles I clattered down this efernal one lane track. If Orissa were one of India’s poorest states after Bihar, it showed. I once heard a lady sing on the radio across a paddy field and that was my last memory of Orissa. Now I see how little progress this state has made compared to most of the rest of India. It looks like a bankrupt opportunity.

With some hindsight there was some danger. A fall might facilitate an opportunist mugging but generally, a moving target is a hard one to hit and a difficult one to catch.

Further up the road I find another enclave of bright lights across the way from where the truckers have parked so I stopped for another omelette, a soda and a tea. Passengers from buses, truck drivers all congregate to eat.

The front fairing on the bike has worked loose and the back sub-frame has snapped, such is the severity of the road. I am riding at 15mph and there is not a good stretch of tarmac. It has started raining and I am in very isolated countryside. I feel chilled. In 80kms the four-lane highway will start again.

4am Try to Sleep
The fuel boys are all asleep by their pumps. I find a small space behind the main building. I am being bitten but I slumber a little. Progress in the dark is slow so it makes sense to wait a little for some daylight.

I arrive in Calcutta, a city I like. Over the new bridge the shape of the city is vast. For 10 days it has rained without a break until this night. Damp is in the air and all around but the road is dry as I drop into the city and into Sudder Street and my favourite hotel, The Fairlawn. I wash and go to bed feeling shaky. After two hours I get up and phone the freighters and arrange to meet the next day to go to the airport. The bike needs cleaning, the film needs downloading from the camera and my diary needs to be written. Emails have to be sent and a bit of business and later I can sleep again.

815 miles in 27 hours. That’s ok. I’m pleased.

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The next morning I gave myself time to film in the city and sat pillion with Niranjan. We left early morning for the Barista coffee shop in Koramangala, a prosperous suburb of the city. I wi-fied for a couple of hours while the lads planned a day for me. We tried unsuccessfully to take some photographs at the Embassy Golf Club IT Park where Microsoft and IBM have located their India headquarters. Security guards are paranoid in such areas as they are sensitive locations for possible terrorist attacks. So the lads led me along the ring road and then the old airport road towards Leela Palace, one of only two hotels in India with seven star facilities. At $550 a night it’s one of the biggest and most expensive hotels in India, some say the world. They also disallowed me to film there so we moved on again in some hope that I might be able to film somewhere in Bangalore without a security guard asking me to move on.

After the hotel we connected to Whitefield along the same airport road and then onto the Marathahali Road to try and shoot at the International Technology Park. This is the area where ten years ago the hi-tech boom in India started. 30% of the business has now moved up to Hyderabad, but nevertheless, 25% of the world’s best software engineers are Indian, and specifically are trained in Bangalore. I had ridden 3000 kms from Delhi to experience the other-side of India, with its cutting edge reputation, but it was Sunday and everywhere was closed. Even clever people have to go home for their tea. So I had a chat with the lads and asked them the hardest question of all; what is it like to be an Indian?

To put this into perspective, it’s like trying to acknowledge being English by referring to cricket and the fact that we like drinking tea. This is a clichéd attempt to define one’s nationality, it’s like saying Americans only like baseball. It all has to go deeper than superficial ruminations such as this. KK thought being an India is all about taking up a challenge. There are one billion people in India. 65% of this huge population are also straining to take up this challenge in every possible way. Education is a key channel along which the educated middle class Indian can better himself. Consider this genetic pool as the size of a sea and you are plankton. When the good ones emerge at the top of the food chain they are superb achievers indeed. If you survive the challenge of fighting off a thousand million other people, you’re good.

Skoda said this challenge was amplified at every level including sourcing food and shelter. A billion people are 15% of the world’s population housed in just one of the 212 countries of the world. China with a similar population is geographically five times bigger. Being the world’s largest peninsula doesn’t help. As an aside, income per capita is 43 times less than an average North American and fuel prices are about the same.

India is full of tremendous facts. Its charm and character go hand in glove with something approaching the unbelievable. Some of the cleverest people on the planet commute to work past people who live off less than a dollar a day.

We then rode back across the city to the Forum Mall, the biggest indoor shopping centre in Bangalore. It is the happening place to be for young people encompassing every available imaginable item for sale along with an 11-screen cinema multi-plex. It was noisy and crowded. Here, a security guard came up to us as we chatted outside the men’s loo. He wanted to know what we were talking about. KK wants to be a politician and instinctively remonstrated with the man on the basis that it was none of his business. In Bangalore there is a law prohibiting the gathering of more than three people so he was entitled to question us. Four months ago there were several bomb attacks on the Hyderabad Metro and India is on some high alert.

We all adjourned to Coffee Day, a national chain of coffee house evident in all major metropolitan cities. They also refused my taking any photographs, saying I needed permission from the manager, who of course wasn’t there. After that we rode back to Skoda’s uncles place in the west of the city.

The next day the lads escorted me to the outskirts of the city. Skoda and the lads were very kind and were typically emotional when we said goodbye. Indians hide their feelings poorly and they all decreed lifelong friendship and brotherhood to me as we parted on the road to Chennai. In a state of calmness, Indians are the ultimate gentle people.

210 kms from Chennai on the road out of Bangalore, the real rains started and I had to stop to shelter. The rain was heavy and saturating and was different to the showers I had so far experienced. It was always going to be like this, wet in the east and had it not been for a delayed monsoon, wet in the west, so I had been fortunate to be dry for so long. Stopping in a small roadside garden restaurant I ordered a chai and waited for the rain to stop. These heavy bursts should only last half an hour and it had the advantage of cooling down the air. As I drank my tea, crows barked their parched sound and water on the leaves around me made them look preciously green. Palm fronds are particularly luxurious in the wet; broad, sharp and tropical.

130kms from Chennai I went into an STD booth in the town of Vimal and called the Royal Enfield factory. I was put through to Mr Faravana who said he’d need to get permission from his bosses before he could agree I turn up and film. India was turning into a land of permissions. Presumably some invisible sub-manager would ask his over-manager to ask his boss to see if his boss would find someone to talk to who might be able to make a decision. The chain of command is necessary as it soaks up the unemployed. 300 million people without work is a tall order to remedy so perhaps it’s better they are not entered into any statistics other than the state of their poverty.

As this permission was going to take an hour or so, I was not going to get into the factory tonight so could slow the pace a little. Time-wise I am just over half way around the world but my mileage has still to improve. This journey is not a sprint, but a way of thinking.

Across the way from the phone booth, a bakery and sweet shop looked like a good place to hang out. Inside it had a 1950’s feel with its solid woods and substantial furnishings, just, that it looked tired. Through a big window I watched the village do what it did as the afternoon sun began to set behind the palm trees. Schoolgirls in their green shawls queued for their bus. Here, in country towns in the south I wasn’t mobbed. Either the population was less dense, or the level of education and literacy was higher than central areas, but I began to enjoy my privacy however snatched it seemed.

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I left Rahul and his family before noon and set off for as far as I could get in the direction of Bangalore. Sagar looked a possibility via Jhansi, and perhaps with more excitement in my heart than for several days I sprang into action and almost leaped onto my bike. The R1 looked bedraggled, tired and worn but she wasn’t. If we think of her as a woman, she could remonstrate with a crowd and still get to journeys end. Her make-up had run but I was back on top form.

The road to Jhansi was rubbish. The road to Sagar was worse. The route was described as an ‘expressway’ on the map, but on planet earth, away from the bottle-glass wearing boffins in dull-witted Delhi, there were pot-holes in the pot-holes with climbing routes well marked should you fall in and want to get out. Riding around such craters required a GPS, so it seemed that the map makers in their bungalows along the Janpath, must have entrusted to their junior clerks the verbatim press release from government road planners. That dusty old memorandum which junior clerks assistants memorise over their tiffin informs us that a new road is planned for such a date, then never gets built at all. This was it. I saw it first hand.

North of the Deccan Plateau, bushes and small expanses of water came up to the road edge. Occasionally puddles of muck and clay spread from the lakes fed by the monsoon, which had at last started. Falling more frequently from a sky dirty with rain, sheets of water creamed across the road.

Overtaking tractors covered in yellow tarpaulins and carriers with sheets roped down to their dirty brown bodies, I lurched across this, the worst road I’d seen since Kenya. Hit constantly by wave after wave of filthy wet weather, half of the dust of another state was sitting as particles on raindrops as it flew across Madhya Pradesh. Wherever I stopped, groups of people would gather, the size exponentially proportional to the time I stayed still. Two minutes and I would have ten jolly faces around me, assessing me for crossness until of course I had to smile. Ten minutes on and the ten people would have risen to a small crowd. If I did something other than sit, people would run from all directions, doorways and side streets to scan a look. ‘Fair and lovely’ is the phrase all India knows and whilst not lovely I am fair. Take out my movie camera and I am Bollywood and fair which is why millions of Indians pay their penny ticket at the cinema and you become the legend of frenzy.

If this sounds condescending to Indians, then come and see. Ride with me for five minutes and you will laugh and cry. As Pranab in Delhi said; “you only have to look into their eyes to know what they feel,” he said, “I see hope and I see sadness but more than anything I see in the eyes of my fellow Indian, the look of resignation.” That this is what it is and that this is what it will always be and it took an Indian to say it.

Jhansi looked tidy and prosperous and since leaving Delhi I saw the first restaurant with a glass front. Car and bike showrooms are the palaces of small town consumerism and patronise with their bloated importance the kitsch of the pan and beetle sellers. Colourful though they are, and whilst Indians are the corner shopkeepers of the world, I sense a similarity of sales sense that borders on functionality at the expense of any originality whatsoever. There are phone shops selling mobile phones and small sheet metal shops selling light engineering. Neat piles of thin tyres advertise a bicycle shop and electrical stores cater for the simplest needs. Everything can be bought in this great country but at village level a sense of shopping deja vue highlights function over form. The industriousness of what I see is beyond reproach and apart from those taking a breather, you will never see an Indian standing still.

India is a charming place and Indians are the most charming people in the world. In my land of make-believe, an Indian’s most violent act to a foreigner would be to smile you to death. How much can I cram into a few sentences which condescends an Indian as much as it charms him: he is maddening when he drives a vehicle, emotional if he likes you, kind always, colourful and conservative, uncomprehending complex and noisy. He is child-like and gentle and loyal as a friend. Utterly likeable but so unworldly in their millions, it is like an assembly of aliens when we do get the chance to meet.

Sagar was pumped up with a wedding procession. Men with neon lights wrapped in polythene bags walked like sentries around the bride and her groom. Seated on a small white horse she only looked thirteen. Chewing her fingernails as her husband passed by the gas station where I was re-fuelling, she already looked bored. So distorted was the music it was the cultural equivalent of flu, and the drumming was like beating on a dustbin, yet somehow it worked. Inch by inch, drive shafts linked to their horn, trucks and buses honked their way forward whilst two-wheelers gathered in fields of traffic like mechanical corn. The town was jammed to a standstill. So compromised was the normal pattern of everyone’s chaos that you forgot for that moment what it was that had made you cross. Invaded by such vital testimony to an instinctive past, all I had to do was sit on my bike in a bubble of smiling calm and that was enough for folk to think I was joining in.

The first hotel I tried was full but the second had a room. Fuel consumption for the bike had been markedly lower, so much so I suspected a leak. Underneath the sump a pool of petrol was forming whilst a crowd of people stood around. One dropped beedy and the whole lot would blast a bit closer to God, so taking a bit of Indian’s population with it. I went to change and without my asking, the management had phoned for a mechanic. An allan key nut had worked loose underneath the tank and was something I felt qualified to fix, but alas the Monkey God of nimble thinking had beaten me to it. Suddenly, a young teenage lad stepped out of the crowd and shook my hand which he then refused to let go, “my heart is sensitive to you I have to be telling, please sir is it that you can tell me your name?” Yes doctor.

Indeed, there are a billion inhabitants in this rather pointy country and if a tenth of a tenth of one percent are not like the rest, that’s a lot of special people of whom I have the oddest fortune to be meeting every day. To bed, and it all starts again in the morning.

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