How to fall in love with yourself again and again. ( PART 1 ) Travel, especially by cycle , is an amazing experience. Something i suggest everyone try, if only once. i would have been born cycling, but just could not fit the tricycle into my mums womb. i think biology was not ready for such an endearing feat. while i was in school, which was ,truth be told, a deeply joy filled experience, quite a few world cyclists came and presented their tales and pictures of them biking from Holland, Germany and other far off places. In those days, it was possible to bike across Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the world really misses the peace and the kindness one gets by being able to interact with people from there. I was 9 when i first saw these cyclists. Tall and thin, with the sun clearly having a say on their skin colour. They were always, very very thoughtful and kind people. Did my tiny brain get ignited by all of this and say. Ooh, one day i will cycle the world? hahaha, nope. my brain, then and now, has no consideration for tomorrow. There wasnt a semblance of a plan or thought about it. But yes, i was very excited to listen to and learn about their journeys around our tiny planet. Cycling is humbling. Very deeply so. It humbles you in so many ways. The very fact that one can move, from place to place, carrying everything one needs to survive, be it in summer or winter, with you. To know that there will be extreme winds and temperatures and yet carry on. How can this not humble you? i started touring in 2010. It began with me sharing excitedly to a girl I had just met about the Tour De France. Surprisingly , she had never heard of it. i said. Ooh this and aah that,and that its something i always wanted to do. Cycle and cycle on. i have noticed that sometimes, people get very excited by my over excitement,which is my normal way of being, and that their reasoning and thought process sometimes stops completely. this happened with her! the longest distance she had biked before this was a mammoth 20 or some kilometres .me? 60 perhaps. Did i have a plan as to where to go? ummm. ya. Why not Italy, its only 1600 or so kilometres. she, being German, wanted to plan. i being me, didnt know what that meant. now before i go on, i must tell you what it is to date a German. its like dating a beautiful clock. its intricate, methodic, beautiful and always on time, and yes, every hour a cuckoo can introduce itself to you as well. when it says 1 o clock. it means 1 o clock ... ( only louder), not only do i come from a land called india. where one 0 clock could mean just about anything. we also have a culture that kal means either yesterday or tomorrow. This one word( and parso... so two words ) gives you much insight into the indian mind and way of thinking of time. Coming back to the biking. She charted out (somewhere, somehow, cause i wasnt listening) a route that used back roads and went almost completely over the alps, including, what turns out to be the tallest few mountains (including the tallest - Grossglockner) in Austria. i either nodded( off ) or said yes at the appropriate moments when she mentioned each of these things. coming to the second bit. i had a cycle that i found thrown away in a garbage dump. so i was nearly certain it could not do long distance trip. Just so you know, I didn’t know anything , any single thing at all about long distance cycling at this point. Did it worry me? Hah, nope. Why? Cause worry, it turns out, is about tomorrow. And I was not there. I went to the local flea market and bought the cheapest bike i could find. it cost me exactly 20 euros. when i told the man that i planned to bike from Berlin too Rome across the alps, he laughed and laughed till he had tears in his eyes and said son. thats the funniest thing ever. And when he realised i was ... just perhaps serious. He said. Don’t. You will die or something as delightful as that. This bike will be ok for Berlin but cant do anything else. i assured him it could . i also bought a pair of water proof track pants and jacket for 6 euros *( in total ) a cheap helmet and ultra cheap lights. i also found bike bags...called panniers ( by the French...who else ) for 12 euros. European weather is very much like the stock market. (lot less shouting ) it has many a mood swing in one day. it can be sunny, raining, snowing and more all in one day. so I really needed a pair of waterproof boots...the cheapest of which I found were a pair of football boots that i found for 10 euros. now, i know what you are thinking... 1- Is he mad? (Yes) 2-football boots are not designed for cycling. (well done ). But then my bike wasnt either. and me being a maths geek thought. two negatives make a positive! (True story ). My gorgeous bike was originally a 16 speed bike and in its hey day would not have made even one head turn. But it was functional ( and cheap ) after trying to fix it myself. I got 8 of the gears to work. The others i decided worked... for the government. The handle bar was rusted and came off if you showed too much testosterone. so i carefully duct taped it and also tied it to the bike frame. I did this to any part that looked like it wished not to take part in my adventure. it turns out that it was the gloomiest summer in 60 years in Germany. And so it led to a gloomy autumn and it was cold. Ever seen a dog that has just found the juiciest bone EVER? Well, now you have an idea of how I look almost anytime I am cycling. After 4 consecutive days of rains and near 0 degree temperatures. My girlfriend asked me through gritted teeth. Why are you smiling and singing ( I can’t whistle ), I said, well, its beautiful, I am cycling with the most beautiful women in the world, doing just what I want, not slaving over a desk ( I have never owned or been owned by a desk in my life), poor girl could not handle it and started to cry and say, do you know what a holiday is ? I said, yeah, this! She said, no... I imagined it to be all easy and sunny . this is tough. I asked her if we should cancel it and go back, if that would make her happier, but she calmed down after sometime ( I may have sung to her a bit and fed her some dark chocolate ( it’s my secret weapon ), most of the cycling was in the alps, which are spectacular and as we got closer and closer to the famous Grossglockner. Austria’s tallest mountain. We were told by many people that it is impossible and when they heard where we had biked from , they burst out laughing. The night before Grossglockner, there was no place to wild camp as we had being doing so far. So we went to a camp site. There we met a wonderful British couple who had been motorbiking across Europe...in some 5 days at that. We set up our tent next to this quaint table and bench for tea, where they had already set you their tea kettle ( they were English after all ) and after fixing up our mats and sleeping bags, we stepped out of our tiny ( it was called little dreamer for a reason) tent and gasped... the brits had set up this gigantic tent that could accommodate not only them but both their motorbikes and a couple of stray elephants...and a small tea estate to boot. I suddenly had this picture of how someone living in dharavi must feel looking at a tall building with large flats. When we told them what we plan on doing, they said with all sincerity, mate, that is totally mental, we just came down that mountain, and it is STEEP, so much so that we were braking nonstop and my brakes burnt out and I had to get my bike towed off the mountain. Plus the winds are mighty there and you can get blown off the top easily, especially on a cycle.plus the temperatures are very low, well below zero there. Did any of this worry me? Not one bit. I cant tell you why. I can only tell you is that this is the way I am. perhaps I am slow, I tend to only remember this sort of stuff once it happens and say to myself, sometimes giggling. Ah, this is what they meant. Well, good for them! Grossglockner is steep and was built with the original purpose of keeping Austrians busy (there was a recession going on and this was one way to keep employment going) the average incline is 12 degrees and the steepest incline is well over 22 degrees. Now, you may wonder how steep is this... I’ll give you a visual. Look up. And try imagining a ‘road’ reaching from where you are standing to your point of vision. Sounds mental right? Well, good news is. It feels like that as well. So...we did not exactly cycle up this Godzilla of a mountain but mostly heaved it my cycle broke down and spectacularly at that.the tire nearly came off at one point ( I had many other issues with the tire that I have not mentioned here) 3 different people stopped and tried to help us but nodded gravely and said a few words. i understood catastrophe ridiculous,[said with much enthusiasm at that],mental. all in vain.cause i was cycling or pushing or clawing no matter what. saw all the things you chaps mentioned. the crazzzzy stilts to hold up what looked like a wall and turned out to be some sort of sadistic Austrian joke which they call road . The back tire on my moved like beyonses backside, only a lot less grace and a lot more effort on my part. after a few hours of pushing and the relentlessness of the incline,my gf was getting very tired and i did what any silly and so called chivalrous man does.i took her bag as well[15 kgs plus my bag which was about 22 or so]and put it on top of mine. burn baby burn .my back brakes were also holding onto the tire like it was in a horror film. so i just took them off :)[ the brakes, not the tire] . was it sunny and nice and warm...yes...in the Caribbeans though.here it just RAINEEEEED and a LOOOOOOOOT of wind[ enough at times to literally blow u off,my helmet blew off at one point, and i had to go down some distance to get it back] and later on snow tried to show us how foolish we were. But press on we did. reaching the top past 10 pm too cold to feel any colder, we cycled down in pitch dark[ and that was in a way a good thing, cause if we had seen how steep it was, we would not have done it, as the saying goes, ignorance is bliss][ and me without breaks too and i remembered the sign saying -brakes ok- more like breaks ok yeah. hit me with it man we finally reached the ONLY place that had lights on at that time of night [ still at a height of 2400 metres or so] . and asked the only occupant who was shocked to see us and also asked us if we were mental if we could sleep in the parking lot.he said you ‘ll freeze to death. an idea to which i was not warming up to one bit... Thankfully he had sense. which means we got to slept in the museum. How many people have slept inside a museum ? not as a mummy or a dinosaur that is. Which was great. and life saving of sorts. too tired to even eat, we tried to find anything warm to wear, only to find that they had gotten wet, so we wore whatever we could find, including a couple newspapers i had saved up from the last three days cause i had once been told on a trek to the Himalayas that if it gets too cold and you don’t have any warm clothing, use a newspaper, it will help you keep warm. to which i remember replying, if i can get a newspaper in the bloody mountains, why would i be foolish enough not to get a sweater, but here i knew that the sweater was out of the question, and hence...newspaper, turned out to have some pictures of naked girls too,( the closest to 300 breasts I have been to at any given time) wonder if that added to the warmth at all onwards we continued our rather comical journey. part of which resembled r2d2 and c3po s relationship and part of which looked straight out of lord of the rings when they go to mordor, our rings being our bikes and Grossglockner being mordor. i have no idea who sauron was though. perhaps the chap who build the road ... ahoy , i see ...
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 09:51:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015