A holiday from my holiday

After spending a week in Pune with the family of a good friend of mine, I decided to have a look around Goa and to work on my tan. Also, after the stresses and strains of 4 months on the road, some R&R was in order.
Having now spent two days in Goa, it is clear that I have picked the wrong time of year as the monsoon season is fully evident!

My radiator should arrive next week, so looking forward to getting back on the road. More soon...

Holy cow!

Twenty miles back into India, having cleared customs, I was carefully pacing myself so as to be steady on my chain when one of the cows walking across the road decided to change direction. I almost avoided him, but managed to nudge him with my radiator. These animals are so hard to predict, but the result for me was not good. I was fine, the cow was a little dazed and the bike was pretty much OK, but blue water spilled out of the radiator and I knew that a visit to a repair shop was likely, as was a wait for parts to be sent through.
Jim managed to wave down a truck, which, with the help of a couple of locals we managed to load the bike into. Sitting on my bike in the back of the truck, I contemplated how I would have rather had been riding this road, but the cow had thought otherwise! A somewhat disjointed journey followed, being dropped at a railway station, arranging to get my bike onto the train, then waiting 10 hours for the train to take me down to Varanasi, where I hoped that I would be able to have spares sent to. The train journey was comfortable enough, but took 6 hours before I franticly disembarked and had 10 minutes to sprint to the luggage carriage and get my bike off of the train without the availability of a ramp. My bike weight around 230kg and the train stands around 18" above the platform. This really is an adventure!
The next few days was spent arranging for parts and repairs to my bike and looking around the temples and ghats in Varanasi.
Varanasi is quite a small city, but it is very congested with both traffic and people. It is famous as being a direct route through to heaven, so many old people visit in their final years. This includes maharajas, and hence the various palaces surrounding it. A peaceful dawn boat ride along the Ganges is the ideal way to see the Ghats. Locals have their ritual baths there as the dawn breaks. I make it as far down as one of the body burning ghats. I had heard that this was a sight to see, and it certainly was. It is a very graphic experience as the bodies are exposed, but this is a deeply religious and traditional process. The holy men and the children are not burned, but are placed into the Ganges river. I watched only from a distance and then headed back towards Assi Ghat, where I was staying, contemplating how delicate life is. Later in the day, KK, who is a close friend of a friend of mine took me around the university here, which is one of the largest in the world. We then went to visit the Krishnamurti Foundation to make a presentation to the children on our trip. It was great to see the look of excitement in their faces as we spoke of the faraway lands that they could only dream of visiting. Many Indians that I had met had never been outside of their own country. This goes some extent to explain the reason why whenever I stop in the streets on my bike, I get mobbed by around 200 people! KK has been a great host during my stay in Varanasi and I look forward to welcoming him in London.
Arrangements for the bike seemed to go on and on, with numerous telephone calls. Eventually, I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to put the bike on the train to Mumbai and Pune, where I had a number of friends and there were more suitable workshops and to have it repaired there. Varanasi just wasn't equipped for my oversized motorcycle!
...and before you ask, my last words before bumping into the cow were NOT 'Holy cow'!

Nepal, briefly!

The direct route out of India and into Nepal turned out to be pretty poorly surfaced and took around double the time that I had expected. By the time that it got dark, I was only as far as the border and there was still almost 200km before the Royal Bhardia National Park in Nepal. The headlight on my bike is as good as useless, so I crept through the night hardly able to see where I was going until I finally found a hotel that was close to the border of Banbasa.
An early start had me across the rather unusual border before 10am. The border was down a narrow lane, then through some woods and over a small bridge. Heading over the border with me were pedestrians, cyclists, the odd scooter and rickshaws. It seems that Indians and Nepalese are free to shuttle between the two countries without the need even for paperwork. I, meanwhile needed to get my passport and carnet (bike paperwork) correctly stamped, so made a point of finding the relevant, but much unused, offices, attended by single individuals.
Having finally reached Nepal, I was expecting to find poorly surfaced roads but was welcomed with well maintained and little used roads. Little used by cars, that is. The roads were lined with women carrying heavy (50kg!) bales of grass on their heads, cyclists and yes, you guessed it, cows sheep and dogs. The difference in Nepal is that the animals don't seem to be as street aware as they were in India. They simply wander around regardless of what traffic may be coming their way. Given that the chain on my bike was looking the worse for wares, I was trying to keep a steady speed, and the constant slowing down was not conducive to doing this. The countryside is stunning here. Extremely verdant, but it is the monsoon season. This area had been badly hit by the monsoons earlier in the month and some parts of the road were flooded.
The people here are very warm. Their look can easily be differentiated from the Indians. Their faces are a little more rounded and smiley. The women are stunning. The way that they carry themselves, the way that they look at you, the way that they dress in their brightly coloured saris. The houses seem to be more solidly built than they were in India and the streets are cleaner. That said, the population is significantly smaller than that of India, so space is at less of a premium. During my visit to Nepal, I frequently found that my watch was incorrect, but it only seemed to be by a small amount. I couldn't work out why it was as it was not by a round factor of an hour, or even the 30 minutes that there is in India. I soon found out that the time differed from India by 15 minutes! Some kind of political message, I expect to demonstrate independence.
Riding into the national park towards the lodge was beautiful. It is quite untouched with a number of villages along the way. There were 3 river crossings to get there. The first two were only shallow at around 4" deep, but the third was nearer to 10" deep and 70 foot wide. Crossing it was fine, but it did result in water getting into my boots! It also reminded me that I was not on a holiday but on an adventure! The lodge in the national park was extremely quiet as I was out of the tourist season and the monsoons had scared away those that there were. All the more peaceful for me!
After a 2 day break, I northwards headed for Pokara, another wildlife area set around a lake. Unfortunately, the monsoon had again been at work. It had caused a number of major landslides along the road, meaning that I would have to head eastwards and go around. This road, however was also closed as the bridge had collapsed when the river had spilled over. Effectively, the west of Nepal was being separated from the East. I sat out the wait for repairs at a resort near to the town of Butwal. More time to relax before acknowledging that neither route looked like it would be cleared in the near future and I would need to head back into India before heading across and back into Nepal. Certainly a long route around. So, after just 5 days, I found myself leaving Nepal already!