Around the world with The Bear – Part 15

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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In Part 15 The Bear meets Skippy in Wales and makes the home run to the Guinness Brewery, before heading back to London to plan the next leg of his journey.

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Switzerland

There was a little hut at the border selling Green Card insurance, so we finally weakened and bought some. Of course, no one asked for it when we crossed. Our camp that night was right on the lake at Lugano, comfortable and quiet, and a pleasant change from the previous night almost literally on the Autostrada.

I made one of my famous navigational mistakes the next morning. We had a choice between the St Bernhard tunnel and the St Gotthard pass, and I thought: “Who wants to spend such a lovely day underground?”

The gentle landscapes of Europe are a bit of a change from Asia.

So up into the Alps we went, past the trucks cleaning the roadside gravel (it’s true! they do, in Switzerland) until it started to drizzle. With wet-weather gear on, we continued. The drizzle turned to snow, and we were still nowhere near the top. Instead of turning around like sensible people we pressed on and finally made the pass in the driving snow.

We were not exactly dressed for this kind of weather, and had even disposed of our visors some time before because they had become too scratched to be safe. Ice formed on our beards and my glasses. I have never been so cold in my life.

On top of all this, the Swiss have a charming habit of cutting parallel grooves in the road surface. No doubt this is useful in preventing cars from sliding all over the place in snow, but it imparts a weave to small motorcycles that is distinctly unsettling. Or would be if I had had any time spare from being cold to be unsettled. A welcome pub supplied coffee and brandy once we were below the snow line on the other side, and we continued to Zurich in the driving rain. What the hell, it was only rain…

History lurks everywhere – no doubt this Italian bridge has seen a lot of it.

The border with Germany was complicated. Our road first crossed to Germany, then back to Switzerland and then back to Germany again, all in the space of about 16km. It was lucky that we had bought Green Cards in Italy, because this time everybody wanted to see them. The Germans also pored over all the exotic stamps in our passports for a while and I thought they might decide to search us. But no, they’d just been curious.

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Germany and beyond

It was the middle of September by now, and Germany was quite cold. We slept in our clothes that night and the next. On the second evening, we found a pub which looked convivial and asked if there was a campground within walking distance. Always get your priorities right.

“Yes,” said the bloke behind the bar. “But it is perhaps a dozen steps,” and pointed at the orchard next to the pub. “It is also free, but only,” and he lifted a finger, “if you drink here.”

Charlie discovered the uniquely German tradition of the Stammtisch when he attempted to sit at it. In most if not all country pubs, the Stammtisch is reserved for regulars – and off limits to everyone else. It was no big deal, but an interesting introduction to a country where rules are rules. Charlie also discovered that bakeries usually served coffee as well, something that has become common in Australia but wasn’t then. We both approved.

After a long day on the autobahn, we arrived in Brunswick and my aunt and uncle made us welcome. They fed us up for a few days and my aunt dropped our clothes into the washing machine. We couldn’t believe that it was actually possible to get the stuff clean again. At lunchtime, my aunt produced what she knew was one of my favourite sandwich toppings: raw pork with salt and minced onions. I have to give Charlie top marks here; he overcame a lifetime of Australian conditioning and tried it – and even liked it.

We visited more relatives in Luneburg and Hamburg and then rode over to Amersfoort in Holland to stay a night with Frank, the Harley rider we’d met in Penang. A marvellous evening followed, recounting woes and laughing about mishaps. All very easy to do afterwards.

Markets have quite a different range of foodstuffs for sale, with asparagus here.

After crossing Belgium in something like an hour, we turned down towards Paris. The autoroute is quite expensive, and you can’t get a glass of wine in the restaurants – in France of all places! Our friends in Paris, Campbell of BMW R60 fame and Renee, were away for the weekend. We camped at the big campsite in the Bois and had a look at the famous city. When they returned we moved over to their flat and spent a few days being deluged with French hospitality.

Campbell wanted to go over to London to buy a bike, so when the time came we offered him a lift. The bikes looked like overloaded camels as we transferred some of my load to Charlie and Campbell crouched behind me. We still made good time to Boulogne, through the rain, but then the hovercraft didn’t want us. No bikes allowed on Seaspeed.

We took the normal ferry and actually had a dry road from Dover to London. Just out of Dover we passed an elderly bearded man in a shalwar kameez. Campbell dug me in the ribs and shouted, “Now I know we’re in England, there’s an Englishman!”

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England, Wales and Ireland

I bought some new wet-weather gear and we took off again, into a headwind to Wales and the lovely hills above Swansea. Then Charlie’s throttle cable broke. We had a spare, so it didn’t matter, did it? But the spare turned out to be a return cable, which is not interchangeable with the actuating one. Only Honda design engineers know why.

Kevin and Skippy, a young Welsh couple, came to our assistance. Skippy got her name from the fact that she’d spent some time in Australia as a child. They showed me a bike shop where I secured a new cable and then invited us over to their place. We spent the evening in the weirdest pub I have ever seen, the walls covered in comic book characters, and enjoyed ourselves drinking a lethal beer called Colt 45.

The stones collected from the fields are put to good use to build walls.

Welsh roads were as much fun as Welsh people, and our enjoyment of the ride was only spoiled by mysterious headaches the next morning. The crossing from Fishguard was uneventful, except that they sprayed us with disinfectant when we rolled ashore in Rosslare. With both bikes running noticeably rough now, we spent a few days exploring the south of Ireland, especially enjoying the Ring of Kerry and a priceless bed-and-breakfast place in Portroe.

This was where we heard the wonderful story of the elderly couple, holidaying in Portroe, who had been kept awake long into the night by some of the local boys fanging about on their bikes. In the morning they went to the Garda, the police, and complained, “What do you think about people riding loud motorcycles around town all night?” The Garda looked at him for a while and then replied, “As long as it’s just the two of you I suppose it will be all right…”

On to Dublin and a hero’s welcome at the Guinness Brewery, where they poured untold quantities of the precious fluid down our throats (including the rare and lethal XXX), stood us a truly magnificent lunch and had us interviewed for radio and papers.

Laden with gifts, we retired to our B&B and tried to come to terms with the fact that the trip, for now, was over. Just as well we were in Dublin. It’s hard to get depressed in a place with so many good pubs.

And here we are at St James’ Gate, the Guinness Brewery in Dublin.

We both returned to England and settled in London for a while. Charlie worked as a despatch rider, possibly the only one with a PhD (then again, possibly not) and I met up with Annie and got a job first in an advertising agency and then a publishing firm. It was almost like normal life…

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Uneasy lies the head that’s planning another bike ride; this time a rather different kind. Find out more next week.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 14

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Europe started somewhat inauspiciously, but then things picked up. Mostly. The Bear has now reached Greece, with the journey continuing on towards Italy in Part 14.

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Greece

In Greece, as in Turkey, they write your bike into your passport so you can’t sell it and disrupt the local economy. If, on your way out, you can’t produce the bike, they don’t let you leave. With this in mind, and knowing that Charlie would be flying out to attend a genetics congress in Moscow, we asked Customs to write both bikes into my passport. As I would be looking after them until Charlie came back, that seemed reasonable.

Not to Customs it didn’t. First they were very suspicious of this trip to Moscow, which Charlie had unfortunately mentioned. Was he going off to get instructions from the Kremlin? Then they decided it was against the law to bring in more than one bike on one passport. Then the bank at the border wouldn’t sell us any petrol coupons. Bikes didn’t entitle us to them.

We had not been used to much nightlife for quite some time.

Our first impressions of Greece were sorted out over a lunch of calamari and retsina in Alexandropoulos, and we weren’t sure we liked it. After the third bottle of retsina we mellowed, and that night in Kavala we decided it wasn’t such a bad place. We spent the evening sitting at a sidewalk cafe, listening to a trio with two clarinetty things and a bass drum playing something that didn’t sound in the least like ‘Zorba’, and had a few beers. Then we dossed down in the vineyards and slept under the stars.

We couldn’t quite work out what was happening in Thessalonica. There were tents everywhere, in parks, squares, even in parking lots. A Boy Scout convention? No, it turned out that there had been an earthquake, and nobody was game to go back into their houses. No wonder.

Greek building codes are honoured far more in the breach than in the observance. We had one building pointed out to us that had begun with three stories, but now had six – one added on at a time, ad hoc.

Even being able to buy alcohol without searching for it was a new experience.

Around this area bike cops abounded, mounted on machines as varied as Nortons, Moto Guzzis, BMWs and, of course, old Harley-Davidson Glides. The local bikers seemed to favour the mighty 50cc Kreidler Florett.

Time was running out—Charlie’s congress started the next week—so we found ourselves a campsite down on the Halkidiki peninsula and settled in.

I wrote to Annie, who was then supposed to be in Athens. Charlie went through all the Customs hassles that we had hoped to avoid, putting his bike into bond so that they would cross it out of his passport. The bond turned out to be an underground car-park. He even had to pay the parking fee when he came back.

Interesting case of ‘bollard’s droop’ here on a somewhat neglected wharf.

Once alone, I settled into a happy routine involving eating, sleeping and visits to the taverna, with a bit of swimming thrown in. Annie arrived, looking edible in her Chicago Bears T-shirt, and we spent an idyllic week together.

She had to go back and start her Eurail pass then, and Charlie returned. He had his tent, which an obliging fellow scientist had brought all the way from Australia. He also had a box of genuine Havana cigars and a bottle of Russian vodka, with which we celebrated his return in style.

New tyres, East German semi-trials pattern, went onto the bikes and we moved to Thessalonica to get something done about the stripped threads in Charlie’s cylinder. He had spotted a shop advertising helicoiling. The mechanic took a look at the bike and nodded, sure, he could helicoil that.

Then he retapped it to a larger bolt size. What happened to the helicoiling, we asked. Helicoiling? Oh, helicoiling. They didn’t do that, any more. We went and had another beer. The bolts worked fine.

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Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia looked great at first. Even the autoput, famous for its state of disrepair, was in pretty good nick. On the first night we hid away in a bit of forest, since free camping is not allowed in this country, and set up the tent. The rain started early in the morning, and it became obvious to me as we rode up into the dripping hillside forest before Prizren that my wet weather gear was due for retirement.

Just after Pec, the alleged main road turned into a gravel path, then a goat track and then it started crawling up and down an endless procession of ridges. It got colder, it got wetter, and I became more and more miserable. Charlie was at least dry! The bikes handled the ‘road’ quite well, but I’d hate to do that stretch on anything but a trail bike. I’d hate to do it again on a trail bike!

Roads in Greece and the old Jugoslavia were pretty good.

We stopped under an overhang to consider whether this could possibly be the main road. The driver of a battered locally-built Fiat that came along assured us that it was, giving us the left-fist-in-the air and right-hand-on-left-biceps salute to show us how tough he thought we were. I hope that’s what he meant, anyway. We headed back out into the cold rain.

A tiny pub saved us, high up on a ridge top. It provided brandy and hot bean soup, and it was warm. The scenery was chocolate-box pretty, and not much later the road improved as well. The last few miles to Titograd weren’t bad at all and we saw lots of other bikes, mainly touring BMWs with German plates. The Titograd campground had the loveliest lady at reception and hot showers. We camped under the damp trees and, feeling human after the shower, went over to the restaurant for some dinner.

Since there was a ‘music charge’ if you ate in the main restaurant, we settled for sitting with the help in the kitchen and listened to the strains of ‘Ramona’ and ‘Charmaine’ filtering through the door, for free.

The Kotor hill with its hairpins, rotten surface and steep drop impressed us greatly, as did the tour buses using it at breakneck speed. There was another cloudburst just after we left Kotor Bay and we arrived sodden in Dubrovnik. There was even water in our panniers, a most unusual occurrence.

We splurged on a pension to dry out. The pension made a good base for exploring the old walled city. We wandered around the steep stone paths, admired the medieval buildings and splurged once more, this time on a top-notch meal. Despite the heavy emphasis on tourism, Dubrovnik seemed a pleasant place to us. A pity that most of the tourists were so dull and conservatively dressed. The few Americans made a pleasant splash of colour with their bright T-shirts and Bermuda shorts.

Streetlight in Dubrovnik.

We had clear sky and sun most of the way up the coast. The hills are quite stark here, dry and infertile and the limestone ranges look as though they’ve been hit with a gigantic mallet and shattered. This is an early example of the dangers of clear-felling.

The Romans cut down all the trees, around the time of Christ or before, and the country has never recovered. The goats which were introduced subsequently helped by eating anything green. Jagged rocks are everywhere, and we had trouble finding a flat place large enough to put up the tent. We finally settled on the concrete base of a building that had never been constructed.

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Italy

Coming up to the Italian border, the temporary circlip Charlie had made in Turkey broke again. He had to use one of the spacers fitted to the bike to make another, which led to a great deal of play in the rear wheel. We jumped the two-mile queue at the border—motorbikes are invaluable for that – and got as far as Trieste.

No, signore, XLs are not imported into Italy. So there were no spares. What now? The bike was pretty well unridable in its present state, and eventually the rear wheel would of course fall off. Charlie, being an incurable optimist, decided we should make some spacers out of a spare inner tube. Being a decidedly curable optimist, I pointed out that Soichiro Honda would hardly make spacers out of steel if rubber would do the job just as well.

Riding along the coast was a real pleasure.

Unfortunately I was right. The bike ate the rubber spacers on the autostrada. We got the can opener out and made some more out of the tops of oil cans. Did you know that they use really thin metal for oil cans? We made dozens of infinitely thin oil can top spacers and hobbled along, periodically making more until the hopelessness of that solution finally sank in.

We camped in a layby near Vicenza and slept with our heads inches from the traffic roaring past. A bike shop came to our rescue in the morning; they turned a new, thick spacer and fitted a new circlip, and we had no more trouble. I was so grateful that I bought a set of rainproof overalls from them.

Cheered by all this success, we decided to get an idea of the real Italy by taking the back roads. After a number of suicide attempts under our wheels we returned to the autostrada at Verona. Italy was a bit too hectic.

Tolls weren’t expensive for bikes on the autostrada and we buzzed along in fine style, passing Milan’s enormous suburbs and turning up into the Alps. We forgot to use our last petrol coupons at the last station in Italy. Anyone have a use for a 10-litre Italian petrol coupon?

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Next installment we do business with the Swiss and continue to a hero’s welcome at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin. Trip over? Oh, no.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 13

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Last installment we left The Bear and Charlie in Turkey, and now in Part 13 they head on into Greece, where Charlie’s XL developed some mechanical gremlins…

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We suspect that Xenophon’s troops were more enthusiastic than we were about the Black Sea, but hey – the rest of Turkey was pretty amazing.

When we came over the last pass, we headed straight down into cloud and rain. It stayed with us until we left the Black Sea again. At the campsite in Trabzon we met an Australian couple in a Range-Rover who had just spent three weeks camped at a petrol station waiting for a delivery so they could fill their tank and go on. We carried every ounce of spare petrol we could from then on.

Picnic lunch with an Iranian family. We had many kind invitations to such meals.

Scenery along the coast was pleasant enough but hardly stunning, and the constant drizzle dampened our spirits. This is where Xenophon’s soldiers enthusiastically greeted the Black Sea as ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ – ‘The sea! The sea!’ but I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm. Charlie, intrepid soul that he is, had a swim in the Black Sea.

We then struck the touring rider’s bane—roadworks. There was mud on the road, and passing trucks threw up a fine film that settled on my spectacles and turned them opaque. Once out of that, we had a dice with a John Deere combine harvester; for once, we won. Back on the main cross-Turkey road, the traffic became a problem and I nearly killed myself when I misjudged the speed of a truck I was trying to pass.

Ankara was dreary and dirty, but the campsite was a welcome little oasis. The guard looked like Rochester from the Jack Benny Show and refused to let us camp on the grass—we had to put up our shelter on the rocky verge. He also claimed to speak six languages, but they all turned out to be Turkish.

That’s Mount Ararat in the distance, and a cigarette-mooching shepherd up closer.

Our next destination was Cappadocia and the rock houses of Goreme, so we turned south. We rode past the salty Lake Tuz on good but monotonously straight roads down to Nevshehir and Goreme – there was a little trouble getting petrol but not much and we made it through without major delays.

‘Paris Camping’ supplied hot showers on our first night, but then we moved down to the Rock House Hotel which was much more ‘authentic’. Some enterprising local souls had laid down a few carpets in one of the old stone houses and had turned it into an hotel. It was not exactly luxury class – the bathroom consisted of a puddle halfway up the hill and the toilets were the surrounding vineyards—but it was cheap and interesting.

We pottered around for a couple of days looking at the truly amazing carving – what could be more amazing than a whole carved house – and then continued south towards the coast.

Just out of Nigde, the spring clip holding the rear wheel spacer on Charlie’s bike gave out. In one of the neatest pieces of open-road surgery I have ever seen, he fabricated a new clip by hacksawing a piece out of the spare spacer from Penang and bending it together. A good man to have along is Charlie.

We buzzed down through the ferocious traffic in the Cilician Gates, the main pass leading to the Middle East, and had a lunch of expensive half-raw roast chicken in Mersin. I demonstrated my masculinity (or stupidity) by eating an entire large hot pepper and lost, I estimate, a kilo with all the sweat that poured out of me

A café down on the southern coast of Turkey.

We regretted our decision to spend the night in the grandiose BP Mocamp at Silifke, too—the allegedly hot showers were cold and the staff must have been specially selected for insolence. And it was expensive.

Things improved after that, with the road becoming more interesting as the coast became more rugged. It’s pretty country, and campsites jump out at you from under the pine trees—unofficial campsites. We spent one night high up in the hills sitting around a fire and feeling thoroughly at peace with the world.

A quick look at the famous Crusader castle at Anamur and a dip in the Med prepared us for another day on the road, although it didn’t prepare us for the couple we met driving a camper van with an ‘Australia’ sticker on the back. I’d gone to school with Alex, and Charlie had gone to University with Carol’s brother. Do you want to say it or shall I? Small world, ain’t it….

Guerses, foiled again? Turkish roads were highly variable, but some were excellent.

In Antalya they were tarring both sides of the main road and the detour through the lanes wasn’t signposted. We saw every back street in that town at least twice before we got out. Then we came across a chilling sight—row upon row of little asbestos-sheet huts on the beach, behind barbed wire. We thought it was a concentration camp, but it turned out to be a holiday village.

The Kemer road was pretty again, with pine forests and cliffs and a little cafe under the trees by a waterfall. But our nemesis, road works, struck again and we struggled through bulldozed mudbaths to Kas. This picturesque little fishing village lies at the foot of a 300m cliff, is very attractive but lacks a campground, so exploring along the dirt track that pretends to be a main road west of here we found a sheltered beach where we could set up camp.

Charlie’s bike was beginning to worry us now. It was difficult to start and had begun to leak oil badly around the head gasket. Doing the timing didn’t improve things and it became obvious that two of the head bolts had stripped the thread in the barrel.
After a glass of tea at dozy Kalkhan we tackled the gravel section we’d heard of.

It was interesting, all right. I took it at speed and unusually got so far ahead that Charlie turned around to see if he hadn’t passed me without realising it. After we got together again, my bike went into a terrifying tank slapper at about 80km/h. I’ll say this, I didn’t fall off. No thanks to my riding ability; I just hung on, and I think I screamed.

Then Charlie was very nearly skittled by a tractor that turned across the road in front of him. But the people were nice to us, gave us vegetables and let us camp on their land.
A short but scary run with the traffic on the main road, the E23, took us to Istanbul and over the great new toll bridge to Europe.

Crossing into Europe when there was only one bridge at Istanbul.

At the Youth Hostel near the Blue Mosque our bikes once again found a home in the lobby. Istanbul traffic looks quite terrifying, but isn’t all that bad on a bike. We met a couple of sad-looking blokes at the post office who had been waiting for the third member of their party for two days.

On the way out of town, he and his 650 Yamaha had disappeared. These two were leaning on their BMW and Honda 500 twin hoping he’d turn up. As they were headed for Australia they still had quite a way to go.

We went for a ferry trip on the Bosphorus, ate hugely at a little snack bar specialising in shish kebabs, shopped at the Grand Bazaar and even sampled the nightlife. In one bar a Turkish seaman who had been to Australia insisted on buying us beers. When we finally demurred because we had to ride back to the hostel, he looked at us unbelievingly and said, “What kind of Australians are you?”

Finally we left for the Greek border. Then Charlie’s bike misbehaved again, spluttering and refusing to pull. For those of you who can no longer stand the suspense, it was the timing. It was checked later with a strobe and found to be way out. So don’t try to do static timing on an XL, OK?

On the beach in Greece. It didn’t feel all that different from Asia.

The border was boring. But then, very few borders aren’t, and I’d rather have a boring one anyway. Excitement at borders generally means trouble.

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And trouble there was at the Greek border. Not the kind you might expect, though.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 12

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Previous Episode: Looking for a hotel in Afghanistan? Ask the police, and they’ll put you up for the night. At a price… The adventure continues with The Bear heading from Afghanistan into Iran and on to Turkey.

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After a night in the hotel-cum-police station at Kelat (we couldn’t work out which it was, and it was probably both) as paying guests of the national police we made Kandahar without further incident. Except for the Attack of the Suicide Sheep, that is.

For some reason best known to themselves, a mob of these stupid animals tried to throw themselves under our wheels. This happened to me once in Scotland, too. Maybe it’s me. After a break in the appropriately named Peace Hotel in Kandahar we were ready for the 1000km Dasht-i-Dargo, the Desert of Death.

We couldn’t afford this kind of lunch service very often! Hardly ever, really.

Along the way we stopped for a swim in the Farrah River, the only body of water between Kandahar and Herat. When we took the bikes down the river bank, a Desert of Death thorn lodged in Charlie’s back tyre. When we were back in the mountains, it worked its way to the tube and caused a flat.

We drank something like five litres of water each (the total contents of our water canisters) in the time it took to fix the first and then the second flat, which we caused when we disturbed an old patch. It was hot; in fact, it felt hotter than the 52 degrees we’d experienced in India. The only shade was inside a drain under the road, so that’s where we did our repairs. I can see why they call it the Desert of Death.

Herat is an impressive town, with a more or less ruined fort in the middle and lots of other ruins around, as well as large, dusty but green parks. The electricity in Herat was a bit … thin, I suppose. An American chap we met had been using a 110-volt shaver in the allegedly 240-volt sockets without trouble.

Sunset over the desert which covers most of central Afghanistan.

The electricity wasn’t the only thin thing in Herat. Our patience ran a bit thin, too, as we rushed around from one government office to the next trying to pay our fine for overstaying and getting exit permission.

The border was easy in comparison. We had been warned of people hiding drugs on our bikes and then reporting us, so we stopped short of the border and searched the bikes ourselves. Nothing. At the Afghani border post they didn’t even search us.

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Iran

The Iranians were a little keener. They seemed set to give us the sort of thorough going over a Land Rover was getting in the next parking bay. But then, when they brought out their bit of bent wire to probe the insides of our petrol tanks, I pointed out that they didn’t need it. The plastic tanks were translucent and they could see that there was nothing inside. That impressed them so much they let us go on the spot. We left them prizing the lining out of the Land-Rover.

We made it to the holy city of Mashad’s campsite and sat down to calm our nerves with a beer, our first encounter with Iranian drivers behind us. Iranians, I’m sorry to say, are the worst drivers in the world, or perhaps just the most fearless; even more than the Afghanis.

They think nothing of pulling out to overtake a bus that’s passing a truck that’s passing another bus—on a blind corner. They are also unfamiliar with the use of the gears, or perhaps consider changing down an attack on their manhood.

On flat roads, they drive in top gear with the accelerator flat to the boards and they don’t change down for hills. As a result they were passing us on the flat and we were passing them as they were wheezing up the hills. This brought out the homicidal maniac in them, since it is apparently a deadly insult to pass a car on a bike.

They would chase us and run us off the road. Consequently, we spent a great deal of time in the dirt, getting up the nerve to go back onto the tar. Every police station has a stone plinth outside with a particularly badly mangled car on it still bearing the blood stains of its collision, presumably as a warning. Nobody appears to take any notice.

Camels are reputed to be pretty smart, but they don’t have much road sense.

Very carefully we rode up to the Caspian Sea and then back down through a deep defile and over a stunning pass to Tehran. In the evenings we camped with all the locals in the parks every town has on its outskirts, apparently solely for this purpose. The people who had been trying to kill us all day couldn’t have been nicer; they helped us to find water, offered us tea and melon slices and gave us cigarettes. Then, the next morning, they went back to trying to kill us on the road.

Tehran traffic is so bad that we didn’t even try to cope with it—we took the minibus to town from our campsite, the famous Gol-e-Sahra. Charlie managed to find some XL spares, including a new speedometer cable for mine. We also did some maintenance work. Then we decided to skip our planned excursion down to Esfahan – to be perfectly honest, I just refused to go – and headed straight for the border.

Our last camp in Iran was at Maku, behind the Maku Inn. It sticks in my mind because I managed to find some proper bread, thick and moist, a great treat after the dry stuff most Iranians eat. Once again people were most helpful and very friendly. I have nothing against the people in Iran—as long as they’re not behind the wheel of a car.

At Maku we also met a couple of Swiss guys on XT500s fitted with 31-litre tanks. They were going to tackle the middle road through Afghanistan, which not only has no petrol stations but no road either. Alles gute, Jungs.

We met two Swiss blokes with XT500s – very impressed by the bikes!

At the border, we buzzed past the enormous queue of TIR semitrailers waiting to be processed and got through the Iran side quickly and easily. Then we had to wait. There’s a two-hour time change at the border and on the Turkish side it was not yet business hours.

While we were waiting we chatted to the people going the other way, who were mostly Germans going to jobs in Iran. They gave us helpful advice as well as a couple of gallons of petrol and a map of Turkey. There are so many nice people out there.

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Turkey

Once the border opened, we asked about insurance and were told that, yes, we had to have it. But the nearest place it was available was Erzurum, 200km to the west. Mmm. We rode off without it and nobody cared.

At Dogubayazit—the locals call it ’Hozit, with rare good sense—we turned off the Asian Highway and headed up towards Kars. Although infested with cigarette cadgers and slightly longer, this road avoids the pass and the stretch of dirt road at Agri.

The road wasn’t bad at all despite a lot of gravel stretches and we spent the night at the rather nasty Pasinler Inn. Charlie was feeling unwell and went off to bed, and I had a major battle with the desk trying to change a traveller’s cheque. Once they realized they wouldn’t get paid if they didn’t cash it, it was no problem.

Erzurum looked grim, and we didn’t bother stopping for insurance.

It was exhausting getting to Trabzon on the Black Sea. The road was a fine example of the Turkish ‘too hard’ syndrome. Wherever it ran over flat country it was tarred and in good repair; as soon as it approached one of the three passes and went up into the mountains it turned to dirt and deteriorated alarmingly. My theory is that it’s easy to lay and fix flat roads, but mountains are too hard.

Lunch was at a little lokanta (bar or pub) in the hills, and a truck driver who had worked in Germany for a while, like so many of his countrymen, and spoke the language warned us about the other locals. ‘The Turks can’t drive, and they’re crazy,’ he said. They’re not as bad as Iranians, Mustafa.

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Would the blatant refusal to buy insurance cause us problems in this rugged country? Check next week.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part 11

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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When we last left The Bear, he was exploring the wilds of Pakistan, and now he heads into Afghanistan with an eye on visiting Bamian, despite some visa limitations…

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Afghanistan

There are only two categories of the compulsory Afghani vehicle insurance—vehicles with more than eight seats or fewer. This meant that we had to pay the same rate as a car. But we got our own back on the Customs bloke.

He only knew three words of English, ‘I must look…’, and he kept saying them as he stood in front of our carefully packed and locked machines. We said ‘OK, look,’ and ignored the fact that he wanted us to unlock everything. He was actually rather nice, and finally took readings from our odometers to cover his embarrassment and left, muttering ‘I must look…’ I presume he was headed for his English teacher.

If you don’t understand our glee at beating the Customs for once, you’ve never been through a bad border. Our joy didn’t last long, of course. Karma struck. Within a few minutes, still in the pass, I had a flat tyre, our first on the trip. There was a largish tack in the front tyre, which we fixed as quickly as possible, because it was hot again and there was no shade.

Kipling didn’t know the half of it. He’d never had a flat tyre, for example.

We were well and truly out of the monsoon now, and would see no more rain until the Black Sea in Turkey. Jalalabad, the first stop north of the Khyber, was a friendly if slightly rough town, and we stopped for one of the local hamburgers and 20 or so bottles of Coke. The old bloke deep-frying the meat asked us if we wanted salad. Is the Pope Catholic? Of course we wanted salad. He gave us each a great handful of roughly chopped onion.

Then on to the middle of town where there was an intersection featuring a lot of those fiddly little cement islands, meant to channel traffic in the right directions. We were still getting used to riding on the right—it changes at the Afghani/Pakistani border—and wove our way around in different but about equally wrong paths. The policeman on point duty watched, first with an open mouth and then with a huge grin.

We swam in the icy Kabul River just below Kabul Gorge, one of the most spectacular bits of road building around. The road just climbs up a vertical rock wall, with switchbacks and tunnels every few yards. At the top of the gorge an XL250 went past us, going the other way. Huh? Paul, the rider, was on his way home to Australia from Britain. He had made the mistake of riding at night in Iran. A broken arm had taught him not to do it again.

At a roadblock near Kabul, the army checked our papers. The officer in charge looked at our passports and said, ‘Aha, Australia. So you do not speak English?’ We solemnly shook our heads and he waved us through.

Next came our introduction to the Great Game, of buying petrol that is. To understand how this works, you must know that the pumps only show quantity, not price. So you fill up and give the attendant some money. He stands there and smiles at you. You hold out your hand and demand change.

He gives a little start – oh, sorry! – and gives you a little money. Then he stands there and smiles at you again. You repeat your act, he repeats his. This goes on until you either have all your change or give up in disgust. It’s best to have the right money in the first place. You can actually work out the cost because petrol costs the same all over the country.

There was no trouble finding a hotel in Kabul; we ended up in what looked as if it might once have been a substantial bank. Then it was out for dinner on Chicken Street, a thoroughfare full of shops selling genuine antiques. Once again, not that kind of genuine – although I once bought a sword here which was genuine if dilapidated and which got me into no end of trouble in Singapore.

We ate delicious minced-goat kebabs and drank delicious tea in one of the many filthy, comfortable chai khanas or tea houses, and took stock. Our visas weren’t long enough for us to take a trip up to Bamian, but we both wanted to see it – in my case again. One-week visa extensions took four days to get, which wasn’t really worth it, so we decided to simply overstay and pay the fine when we left.

A day was spent in the dusty and totally enchanting Kabul bazaar, watching absolutely medieval things like the water delivery—it comes in goatskins. Then it was off along the Mazar road, a well-surfaced and Russian-built tar highway to the USSR border. After about 100km, we turned off onto the 160km gravel track to Bamian.

The track winds through the Koh-e-Baba mountains, with some breathtaking gorges and blasted, lonely plateaux on the way. I was a bit too keen and encountered a minibus as I was taking a corner on the wrong side of the road. Result, one dropped bike with twisted forks. We straightened them by the roadside, watched by a trio of goatherds, and not long afterwards I had another flat tyre. But, let me add, none of this spoilt the ride for us.

A young teacher invited us in for a cup of tea and we discussed politics without more than three words in common, except for proper names. He was in favour of the Communist revolution (“kommunis [thumbs up]”) which had just taken place—the first of three which culminated in the Russian takeover two years later—but he was violently anti-Russian.

I wonder what he’s doing now…. Our landlord in Kabul had warned us to make sure that everyone knew we weren’t Russians. Otherwise – he mimicked cutting his throat – we would wake up dead. The teacher more or less confirmed this for us.

Bamian, which is nearly three thousand metres high, was cool and quiet. We moved in at the Marco Polo Motel—the owner insisted that the man himself had stayed there but admitted he didn’t know in which room—and went off to inspect the magnificent 50 metre high statue of Buddha. This was carved out of the rock in the fourth century, when the monastery here had thousands of monks.

Genghis Khan chopped its face off some 800 years later. Genghis also destroyed the old city of Bamian, now an eerie collection of ruins on a hilltop called the City of Noise. They remember the Great Khan well up here in Afghanistan, if none too kindly. His worst act, one of the guides told us, was not to kill practically everybody but to destroy the qanats, the underground irrigation water supply.

The Ayar Valley, around the new Bamian, is an oasis of fertility in the grim mountains, kept green by irrigation water brought many kilometres from the melting snows by more modern techniques. Tourism has done its work, unfortunately; the children greet strangers with ‘Hello, paise’. Paise is the local word for—money.

We looked at the Red City on the way back. This is another ruined hilltop town, built of red mud and now melting down the cliffs in the infrequent rains. Then, on the road again, I did something very foolish.

Thinking I had been seen by the driver, I made to overtake a truck on the right. Just as I was level with it, the driver pulled over and inadvertently (I presume) ran me off the road. I went down a ten-metre forty-five degree embankment, weaving my way through huge boulder, into a field, where I stopped the bike and shook for a while.

Back in Kabul, we couldn’t believe ourselves in the mirror. We were covered in a fine, grey dust and looked about 90 years old. A shower soon fixed that, but at a price. The Kabul water supply also comes straight off the melting snows, and you step out of the shower blue with cold. Still, as everyone says, it’s very refreshing.

The next day, we had cholera booster injections before departing. The clinic was in an unmarked flat in a concrete block on the fringe of town, which was a bit of a worry, but we had been warned and had brought our own, new needles. We donated them after the injections, which went over very well.

The Kandahar road is dull, but the surface is good. We had intended to stop in Ghazni, but the government hotel had no water and the alternatives were dirty and expensive, so we pushed on to Kelat. Along the way we saw an Afghan hound herding some sheep, the only time I’ve ever seen one of these beasts at work.

Further on a small boy thought he’d impress his friends by throwing a rock at me. Now I don’t think this sort of thing is a good idea at all, so I turned around to go back and point out the error of his ways. He took off across the fields, running for all he was worth, and lost his cap, his satchel and the respect of his friends all at the same time.

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Next week it’s, ‘go to gaol, go directly to gaol’ but we don’t mind one bit.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Ten

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Last instalment The Bear travelled from India into Pakistan, and now the journey continues, starting with some sound advice. Beware the ice and the hornets – those are among the lessons we were to learn in Pakistan.

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Pakistan

There was a dire shortage of pens at the Pakistani border post. All the guards kept borrowing each other’s, which tended to slow things down a bit. I finally donated one of my treasured Nikkos to the bloke who was processing us and we were through in seconds. My second case of bribery, but a cheap one.

On the dusty road to Lahore we noticed the difference in road manners compared to India. Everybody was much more together and aggressive, which made the traffic rather more predictable if also potentially lethal.

The Australian AA guide book gave us a bum steer to the location of the Pakistan AA guest house. They didn’t even have the right street. As a result it took us hours to find it, and we were sorry when we did.

It wasn’t so much the decaying cars outside or yet the mould on the walls and the broken windows, it was the constant drip of every tap in the place that bothered me. We took it anyway, because it was also dirt cheap. Then we set off to find some food and cheer ourselves up.

The Capri Grill in the Mall provided excellent chicken livers and terrible chips. The Mall itself was well worth a look, with the enormous Zam Zam gun referred to in Kipling’s Kim at one end and the slums discreetly tucked away at the other.

But even so Lahore is quite a leafy and attractive place; its Red Mosque is allegedly the largest in the world. You can go and look at it, too, which makes a change from all the closed houses of worship some religions go in for, which seems a bit self-defeating to me.

The road to Rawalpindi looked like a left-over set from a disaster movie. It was difficult to decide whether it was being repaired or had simply been abandoned. We weren’t clear of the monsoon yet, either, so we rode in a downpour most of the day. My speedometer cable broke, too, but at least the weather was warm.

All the cheap hotels in ’Pindi were mysteriously full, and we wondered for a while if we had a disease that the hoteliers could see and we couldn’t. A kindly gentleman explained that the government doesn’t allow cheap hotels to rent rooms to Europeans; whiteys have to go to the expensive ones.

His cousin, however, happened to own the Alia Hotel, which was not too expensive, clean and comfortable and had room for the bikes in the lobby as well as an ensuite bathroom and toilet. This turned out to be just as well…

At dinner across the road, while trying to choose between the usual gristly mutton, athletic chicken and slimy marrow curries, we drank some bottled water with ice in. The ice, as we should have known, was a mistake.

Our reward was a painful case of the Rawalpindi Runs. Both of us featured delicate pale green faces, dizziness, diarrhea and vomiting – for three days. Hence the convenience of the ensuite conveniences. It had actually never occurred to me that, when someone says “I turned green,” they might be speaking literally. As Eccles says, you learn something every day.

Somehow amongst all that we still managed to get out to the Afghani Embassy in nearby Islamabad, Pakistan’s Canberra, to apply for visas. Here they explained that the visa section was at Nigeria House, across the town.

Who said there’s no cooperation among Third World nations? On the way we had to stop several times and remove our wet weather gear. Well the pants anyway. We reached Nigeria House and, yes, we could get visas, for seven days.

Come back tomorrow to collect them. It beats me why you always have to wait for visas, when all they are is a stamp in your passport. It’s just attempted intimidation. But then I wasn’t exactly in the best possible mood.

We picked up the visas when we had recovered a little and headed for the border. Within the first couple of miles we were both stung by monster wasps, the side of my face swelling up until I looked like a Dick Tracy character. Bubbleface, perhaps.

Fortunately I got my helmet off before the swelling really got going; otherwise I might have been trapped in it. Apart from that the road north was pretty dull, but enlivened by the marvellously colourful trucks and buses; the paintings on some of them would be the envy of any California customiser.

Peshawar, especially the military cantonment, was pretty and green.

At the gate to the Khyber road, there’s a sign that warns you that once past the gate you’re on your own — the government takes no responsibility for you. During the hours of darkness nobody is allowed in at all. It’s not terribly hard to see why they’re so careful.

All the male locals carry bandoliers and well-used .303 rifles, and they look tough. These are the Pathans of song and story, and they’d make it to president in any bikie patch club I’ve ever seen – without even riding a bike.

The road through the pass is surprisingly good, although infested by cars and pick-up trucks all carrying more passengers than you’d think possible. They take the boot lids off the cars and passengers sit there and on the roof rack while the family of the driver travels inside. Everybody grins and waves, which takes the edge off the universal toughness a bit.

Up through the pass the cliffs are lined with the badges of British and Indian regiments that fought here. There are a lot of badges. Villages feature high walls and watchtowers.

The border town is called Tor Khan and consists of a number of mud huts collectively defying gravity. One of the more ragged-looking edifices is the Tourist Hotel, which, while it may not have running water, does have cold beer as well as a very entertaining proprietor.

Another form of entertainment in Tor Khan is gun shopping. Every shop – even the soft drink bar – has its display of small arms. These are all locally made, despite the lovingly forged “Smith & Wesson” and “Birmingham Small Arms” badges featured on the guns. Beautiful workmanship, though. I guess it would have to be. A warranty problem could lead to some pretty serious results up here.

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Will we find ourselves at gunpoint in the Khyber Pass? No, we’re just forced to buy insurance… Tune in to Part 12 to read the full story.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Nine

The King of Every Kingdom – Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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There was more to discover yet about India, and about XL250s if they’re not treated properly. In this instalment The Bear also heads to Pakistan.

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Our stay with Paul’s family in Chandigarh was enjoyable – they were non-orthodox Sikhs, very middle class and very kind. We also had some more maintenance to do.

Charlie’s bike was still showing a slight oil leak at the head gasket and my shift drum stopper bolt had shorn through. A friend of Paul’s got his father to make us a new one out of surgical steel, far better than the old with a small ball bearing, and Paul’s brother JP arranged for me to go to the hospital and have a nasty boil on my arm lanced. You know, housekeeping.

By the time we left, the local boys had become rather dissatisfied with their bikes. The Yezdis they were riding, locally built Jawas, lagged rather noticeably behind the Hondas in sophistication. We left them trying to devise a way of improving the rear suspensions to XL standards. The Grand Trunk Road swallowed us, on our way to Jammu and Kashmir.

At a truck stop on the main road we finally managed to get a really hot curry. Indians tend to be very solicitous of Europeans—they don’t believe we can eat their curries.

Should you attempt to order one you will usually be served a boiled egg on toast instead. In this case there was no option, they only had one pot. Charlie and I, being experienced curry consumers, amazed this lot by going back for second helpings.

Just before Jammu we found a back road that would cut a few miles off the run to Kashmir, and followed it up into the hills. We also found that Charlie’s engine was covered in oil … he’d done the tappets in Chandigarh and only finger-tightened some of the bolts. Then my clutch started to slip.

We still managed to enjoy the little back road, surrounded by fantastic cliffs carved out of the soft soil by rapid erosion. A bit dangerous, though. I can well imagine entire sections of roadway disappearing downhill in a rainstorm.

Staying at the Green Hotel in Udampur seemed like a good idea at first, until we discovered that there was no water for showers or washing and the room next to ours was being used for a party by a crowd of very drunk Sikhs from a nearby army base.

Sikhs are not allowed to smoke, but boy do they drink… Charlie refused to pay more than half of the bill in the morning and read the riot act to the proprietor in a way I still admire today.

The road to Kashmir is rather like a badly tarred motocross track, and about as much fun, which is to say that we enjoyed it as long as there were no trucks trying to run us off the edge of the road. Sometimes there was a drop of hundreds of metres (I kid you not) straight down from the edge of the road to the river, and no safety barriers.

Some of the mudslides across the road had been here so long they had been given names, on little concrete markers. I suppose it’s easier than doing anything about them…. Just before we got to the 2.5km tunnel that leads to Kashmir we passed a military convoy of well over a hundred trucks.

The tunnel itself is a nightmare with very poor orange lighting, no reflectors and icy drips from the ceiling. Remember we were on XLs, with their notoriously dim headlights.

Kashmir is a beautiful place and it’s easy to see how it gave rise to the legend of Shangri-La, the paradise high in the Himalayas. Everything is green, there are majestic poplars lining the roads and the ground seems to ooze fertility. It has its problems, though, for the visitor. Kashmir is a holiday resort for thousands of people from India and is set up accordingly.

The touts trying to sell you souvenirs, a hotel room, a bed on a houseboat or leather clothing can become very trying. They nearly threw themselves under the wheels of the bikes, business cards clutched in their hands, when they saw us coming. Ignoring them, we stayed in the faded Victorian splendour of Houseboat Golden Rod, our every wish catered for. Well, nearly.

The Mughal gardens and floating palaces are worth seeing and shopping is good. We had some leather clothes made by Aruga The Robber (his shop sign) very cheaply, but alas not very well.

The road up is also the road down. We played chicken with another military convoy, buzzed through the heavily fortified town of Jammu— it’s near the Pakistani border—and back out onto the plain. A South African bloke we met was travelling on a Dutch passport because South Africans weren’t allowed to enter India.

He had a two-day-old Indian Enfield 350 with which he’d covered 200km. In that distance he had broken the throttle and front brake cables as well as losing the battery cover and the bolt holding the exhaust in place. He didn’t think that was bad, and anyway there were bike repair shops everywhere.

It would have been an understatement to say that we were hot, and we attempted to order a couple of bottles of beer that night to go with our dinner. The waiter waggled his head and indicated that this was in fact a “dry day”. A number of Indian states have various kinds of prohibition, and we were unable to buy beer.

In at least one state you have to register as an alcoholic to get a drink at all. “Strictly for medicinal purposes…”

I looked the waiter in the eye and said, very slowly and with minimal inflection, ‘I don’t think you heard me. We would like two bottles of beer…’ He folded and sent the eighty-year old ‘boy’ out for the amber nectar. When he returned and placed the bottles on the warm marble tabletop, they were so cold that one exploded. He shrieked and ran and we made do with one bottle.

There was an enormous crowd around when we loaded the bikes up in the morning. In a country of crowds, where foreigners seem to draw them like honey does bees, you get used to them. This one was extraordinary though—commerce ceased all over town as everyone watched us. We had to deliberately tread on people’s toes to get to the bikes. It was scary, even though there wasn’t the slightest feeling of hostility.

A little later, the skies opened and the monsoon proper had begun. Within a few minutes the carriageway was 15 to 20 cm deep in water—muddy water. This meant that not only was the rain obscuring our sight of the way ahead but the potholes were invisible too.

In the Amritsar Youth Hostel we met Jajime, a Japanese chap who’d ridden a Yamaha DT125 from Calcutta to Kayseri in Turkey and was now on his way back. He thought the DT was ‘perhaps a little slow for the long roads’.

While in Amritsar we duly admired the Golden Temple, spiritual home of the Sikhs. One distinguished-looking gentleman took my hand at the entrance to the temple, squeezed it and pushed a Sikh bangle over the hand onto my wrist. He charged me a rupee for it, which I thought was reasonable seeing it’s stainless steel and can be used as a crown seal bottle opener. It is still on my wrist after 40 years.

We then headed for the Pakistani border. On the way, I swerved to miss an elderly gent on a bicycle and fell over. My chain came off and the inevitable crowd gathered while we replaced it.

Charlie finally lost his temper and hit a young bloke who obstinately kept getting in his way. Not very hard, but I was concerned how the crowd would take it. They fell about laughing.

We crossed the border at the same time as an unbelievably well equipped party of British Army mountaineers. They were Royal Engineers returning after a few months in the Himalayas on full pay.

Could it be that there’s something to be said for the army after all? Indian Customs and immigration processed us politely, though not promptly – they weren’t together enough for that – while they bossed a motley crowd of hippies around rather brusquely. The Border Safari Suit Ploy works again!

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Did you know that you can bribe your way through a border with a pen? Find out all about it next instalment.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Eight

The King of Every Kingdom – Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Last episode we discovered that the beer was warm as The Bear and Charlie explored Nepal before heading on into India – this week we find that the food is hot!

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Having arrived in Varanasi last time, we now retreated to the Hotel KMM, which had been recommended to us, and drank several gallons of tea and fresh lemon drink. It all went straight out again, mostly through the pores, and it kept us awake and buzzing.

On an evening stroll through the crowds of holy men and peddlers we acquired a friend, an eight-year-old boy who wanted to sell us some silk. He tagged along down to the river and introduced us to his father, who had just had his evening dip in the holy river. We sat watching the sunset reflecting in the river as the father told us some stories about Varanasi and the Hindu gods.

The next day was devoted to looking over such unique Varanasi attractions as the ghats on the riverbank, where corpses are burnt before being consigned to the sacred embrace of the river—a very quick look at that. Fighting off prospective guides took more time than anything else.

We returned to our little friend’s shop, in fact the family living-room and no doubt bedroom, and I bought some silk batik scarves for presents. They were beautiful, with motifs from Hindu mythology in rich colours. One hangs on my office wall to this day.

It seemed to us that the best way to deal with the heat was to get up early, do most of our riding in the cool of the morning and rest in the afternoon, and with that in mind we rose at 4am to discover that there was a blackout.

We loaded the bikes by the light of our torches. The electricity came back on at about the same time as the sun came up. This little scheme did work quite well after that, though.

It was still cool when we stopped in Mirzapur for a cup of tea at the railway station and the road outside showed us the reason for the blackout. There must have been a storm the previous night, because a number of poles had come down and filled the streets with a tangle of wires.

We ordered the ‘Vegetable Preparation’, which is a selection of violently coloured pastes, presumably originally sourced from vegetables, in an aluminium TV dinner tray. It has little flavour beyond ha… ha… HOT!

We had a good road that day, still lined by mangos, which were inhabited by monkeys, and quite spectacular where it climbed the edge of the Deccan. Our host for the night was a retired lawyer-turned-spiritualist who now ran a hotel in Satna. He assured us that, wherever we went in the universe, we would always find people who spoke English. I guess a spiritualist ought to know.

A look at the erotic carvings on the temples at Khajuraho, which are incidentally very good and actually quite erotic, was followed by our hottest day to date. We pulled in to the courtyard of an Irrigation Department rest house and tried to find out from the chowkidar—the caretaker—if we could stay the night there and get something to eat. No luck. Our recently acquired few words of Hindi didn’t seem to mean anything to him at all. What was the world coming to.

Lady Luck chose that moment to arrive in the shape of a short chap driving a locally made Fiat with a hang glider on top. He told us later that it was the only one in the country and he had brought it in under the pretext that it was a tent – substantial aircraft import duty would otherwise have been due on it. Tent duty, it seems is more reasonable.

It appeared that we had not been able to communicate with the chowkidar because he only spoke the local dialect. Our newfound friend then reached into his car, where the thermometer (in the shade) read 52 degrees C, and produced two bottles of beer in dry ice and wrapped in a back copy of the Times of India, which he invited us to share with him on the verandah.

The beer, that is. I could have kissed him. The bungalow, he explained, was not set up for meals. We thanked him for the beer and rode on to Jhansi. The heat, all the worse now we knew just how hot it was, was coming up off the road like laser fire.

Jhansi’s Central Hotel was pretty basic, with those dreadful short charpoys – beds made of timber and rope and designed for Indian not Australian bodies – but there was quite a good curry to be had downstairs and we were entertained by a wedding across the road. A lot of the wedding seemed to involve firecrackers.

Next morning, road works gave us a bit of trouble on the way to Agra. A row of stones across the road can mean one of two things—either there used to be a broken-down truck there that’s been repaired and moved, or there’s a bridge out around the next corner. It’s not always easy to tell if the road ends dramatically a few yards farther on. We were also getting sore bums in the heat; XL seats are not comfortable at the very best of times and this was not one.

But the Taj Mahal took our minds off our worries. It is the only building I have ever seen that lives up to the tourist hype, and we were fortunate enough to have a full moon to see it by. There were fireflies in the gardens, too, and it was almost unbearably romantic. Charlie and I would gladly have exchanged each other for female company. Sadly, this was not to be.

We found lots of mail waiting for us in Delhi, but the money that should have been sitting at the bank had allegedly not arrived. I checked every day, and one day in the lift at the bank, an aristocratic-looking Indian gent looked me up and down, said hello and ascertained that I was Australian and then asked: ‘What is your purpose in life?’ I was still frantically trying to formulate a reply when we reached my floor and I beat a disorganised retreat.

The Tourist Camp in Old Delhi looked rather more comfortable than most of the cheap hotels, so we pitched our flysheet there over a large bit of carpet donated by the manager. Charlie did a bit of maintenance work on the bikes, among other things replacing the rubber seal on one of the fork legs of my bike. It had been weeping oil and proved to be rather badly scored.

Visas were a headache. The Afghanis weren’t issuing any, having just had a revolution. The Iraqis wanted our passports for three months, to send to Baghdad for approval, so we decided to give them a miss. At least the Iranians only took two days.

Outside the Iranian Embassy we met Paul, a fellow biker and a Sikh from Chandigar who also intended to ride over to Europe. He invited us to come and stay with his family when we passed through Chandigar, and we gratefully accepted.

We had a lot of trouble with our money transfers to Delhi and waited for over a week. It was partly the fault of our bank back in Australia, but the Indians certainly weren’t overly organised.

After we had covered Delhi’s tourist attractions we whiled away the time in the US Information Service and British Council libraries which offered air conditioning and newspapers.

We also bought some sheepskins and made them into seat covers for the bikes. Our money came eventually; Charlie found the advice for his while glancing idly through one of the file folders in the bank. Like they say, if you want something done…

Crossing the bridge out of town over the Yamuna River was like riding through a suburb of hell. It was a closed, boxy steel affair and hot, claustrophobic, slippery with dung, and predictably enough it stank. The roads up to the foothills of the Himalayas weren’t much, either. We passed a totally flattened three-wheeler van lying in the ditch.

We were on our way up to Rishikesh, yet another holy town. Hardwar, at the entrance of the valley, looked interesting with its hundreds of little shops in booths lining the road, but Rishikesh itself was more like a Hindu Disneyland, complete with helicopter pads for the affluent gurus.

Down by the river we met one who was still working his way up. “I have only one disciple so far,” he said, “A Swiss man. But there will be more in time, do not fear.”

The road over to the old British hill station of Shimla was better. Lined by pine trees, it was chiseled into the sides of the hills. Every now and then the fog lifted and opened out spectacular views of hillsides and forest.

There were some river fords, too, crossed amid much white water, and very little traffic, a great relief after the crush down on the plains. For a while the road ran parallel to the Shimla railway, which looks like a big toy with its narrow gauge.

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Next time we manage to score a full-on hot curry at a roadside stand and impress the locals.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Seven

The King of Every Kingdom – Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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We left our heroes last week as they readied to fly out of Bangkok in Part 6. Will Nepal welcome them with open arms?

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Nepal

I enjoy flying with Thai, not only for the free scotch and champagne but also for the friendly cabin crews. We had a relaxing trip and arrived at Tribhuvan Airport in Kathmandu in good shape, where I discovered that I had not only packed my ticket in the pannier but my passport photos as well. The pleasant Immigration man shrugged, waived the requirement of a photo for the Nepalese visa and let me through.

An amiable three-hour wrangle with Customs followed about the bikes. They finally accepted our Carnets and we were free to pick up the machines. ‘Pick up’ was right, too. Our carefully constructed pallets had disintegrated and the bikes were on their sides, Charlie’s leaking acid from the battery.

A friendly bystander brought us back a gallon of petrol from town and we wobbled off on near-empty tyres looking for a service station. We finally found air at a tyre shop. Service stations don’t stock it in Nepal.

Which reminds me, don’t ever ask for air in Malaysia when you want air. Air means water. So the Malaysian air force is actually the navy. True! Would I lie to you?

Once in Kathmandu, we parked in Freak Street and looked for accommodation where the bikes could be parked off the road. A young Australian woman, a computer programmer turned trekking guide, recommended the Blue Angel. Being Marlene Dietrich fans, we checked in there. It was roomy and clean and had a carport where the bikes could be chained up.

Despite being one of the most unsanitary collections of buildings in the world, Kathmandu is a comfortable, relaxed town. It’s fashionable to think that all places are spoilt in time, but Kathmandu seemed better to me in 1978 than it had in 1970, when I’d last been there: fewer out-and-out derelict hippies, apparently less hard drug usage and a less frenetic street life, but all the little chai bars and restaurants were still playing Dark Side of the Moon.

I introduced Charlie to the peculiar Nepalese idea of European cuisine. We ate things like mashed potatoes with mushroom sauce, buffalo steak, lemon pancakes like citrus-flavoured inner tubes and cast-iron fruit pies. Not as bad as it sounds, actually.

Gives your jaws a workout and it’s bound to be healthy. Restaurants with names like Hungry Eye, New Glory, Krishna’s and Chai ‘n’ Pie still abound. The New Eden reminded me of an exchange I’d listened to in there a few years back:

American voice No. 1, in front of counter: “Ah, how much are the cakes, man?”

American voice No. 2, behind counter: “Chocolate two rupees, banana two rupees, hash one rupee.”

No. 1: “Ah . . . how come the hash cakes are cheaper than banana cakes, man?”

No. 2: “Because hash is cheaper than bananas.”

One morning we got up very early to ride out to Nagarkot, a hill station near Kathmandu. We had hoped to get there before the mists rolled in and hid the Himalayas, but I got lost on the way, and all we saw was an enormous wall of cloud with Everest somewhere in the middle. Other daytrips went to Bodnath, the monkey temple; to the giant stupa at Swayambu; and to the river temples at Dashinkali.

We also ‘conquered’ Pulchwoki, a 9050-foot hill behind town, on the bikes, travelling on a 14km dirt road up to the top. Wherever we went in the countryside, the sealed roads were covered in freshly harvested grain sheaves. The locals thresh in the simplest way possible—by letting the traffic run over it.

There was a bike shop near the Blue Angel. I peered in one day and was invited to inspect the premises. The tools consisted of a screwdriver and a complete set of shifting spanners.

We secured visa extensions and took off for Pokhara, Nepal’s second city. The road was awful, more potholes than tar, until we passed the turn-off to Birganj and thence India.

After that it improved dramatically and was serviceable even despite the occasional mud slide or washaway. It was built by the Chinese and follows the shoulders of the river valleys over three low passes until it gets to the plateau that holds Pokhara. Charlie went off trekking, walking up in the mountains along the paths that serve the local people as roads.

I checked in at a small, two-storey mud hotel and took it easy, bartering with the Tibetan pedlars, reading and writing. Tibetans are magnificent-looking people, like idealized Red Indians. They also have a great sense of humour. Or seem to, anyway.

I couldn’t understand their jokes, being totally ignorant of Tibetan, but their laughter was nice and inclusive and I never felt as if they were laughing at me. Could have been wrong about that, of course…

Being a little worried about drinking the water, I asked for a glass of boiled water at the hotel. I got it, too. A glass of boiling water—not quite what I’d intended, since I wanted to drink it. After that, I collected water from the roof during the frequent thunderstorms.

The family running the hotel was very kind and kept offering me places in the buffalo stall for the bikes. I didn’t think that was really safe; those buffs might have been good-tempered enough but they were also enormous. The thought of one of them sitting on or leaning against a bike was a bit worrying.

Pokhara itself is a long, narrow town as yet little touched by modernisation. At one end it runs through large mango trees down to Lake Phewa, where the small hotels and shops catering for Europeans are.

My shoulder was finally recovering, even though the torn muscles were still sore, and I just wandered around quietly. There was a lot to photograph, from the farmers arriving at the lakeshore in their dugout canoes to Machupuchare and the Annapurnas lifting their peaks high in the clear morning air.

It’s easier to see the mountains from Pokhara because the town is higher than Kathmandu, although you can’t see Everest, which is too far away.

Charlie returned refreshed by his days in the mountains, and we took to the Siddhartha Highway, heading down to India. Nepalese friends had warned us that the road was ‘not very good’: built by the Indian government, they shrugged.

How right they were. The road is a nightmare of once-tarred dirt and gravel, but the scenery is superb—I think it is, anyway. As we came down through the deep river gorges, I wasn’t often game enough to take my eyes off the road to admire it. Might want to go back there some time, like when I think it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil.

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India

The Nepalese customs man glanced at the souvenirs we’d bought and asked, ‘Where’s the hash?’ with a grin and waved us through. We had donned our safari suits and the Indians were duly impressed; nobody asked for driving licenses, insurance, vaccination cards or anything else except our passports—we were through in minutes.

As we rode along shaded by great mango trees we diced with the traffic as far as Gorakhpur. Indian roads are alive with every kind of human, animal and motor powered transport imaginable. The truck drivers, being Sikhs, are pretty well unbluffable and all else moves too slowly to be worth bluffing.

The Standard Hotel provided a welcome cool room. A gentleman I took to be the owner insisted on buying us breakfast next morning and involved us in a political discussion. It was his theory that Indians are so keen on politics because they can’t afford any other kind of entertainment— politics is free. It also uses relatively few calories.

We passed a funeral on the road that morning, the body wrapped in gold brocade from head to toe—a rather sad display of affluence among the drabness and obvious poverty. But each to his own. If you gotta go, go in gold brocade!

In Ghazipur we had intended to change some money, and consequently went looking for the bank. Despite repeated sets of directions, we couldn’t find it. Eventually someone took us right to the door. We’d been past it several times, but there was no indication that it was a bank. It looked like army barracks.

It might just as well have been one, too; they would only accept US dollars, which we didn’t have. Not even Sterling, and this in the land that remembers the Raj so fondly! We revised the name of the town, in our minds at least, to Khazipur and left. “Khazi”, I understand from a British ex-soldier friend, is British Army slang for toilet.

On into the increasingly hot day to Varanasi, where one of the banks had a ‘late branch’ in a hotel. We spotted a sign saying ‘cold beer’ just outside, and Charlie was dispatched to investigate while I changed money. Not much luck for either of us.

The bank clerk tried to give me rupees for $40 instead of the £40 I’d given him and turned quite nasty when I pointed out the ‘slight’ discrepancy, and Charlie discovered that the beer shop hadn’t had an ice delivery for a couple of days and all the beer was warm.

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Next installment, discover why tea is not the ideal go-to drink when you can’t get cold beer!

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Six

The King of Every Kingdom – Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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Last issue The Bear made the journey from Malaysia into Thailand, which wasn’t without it’s mishaps included a motorcycle crash and broken shoulder blade. Now the trip continues in Thailand.

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You know how people are always saying, “You should have been in Bali (or wherever) back in the day”? Well, you should have been in Patong.

Hangovers abating, we rode through country like a Chinese woodcut with giant, almost unbelievably steep limestone outcrops flanking the road. Entertainment at our lunch stop was a couple of local lads trying to teach us how to pronounce Phangnga. You try it!

They were agog when we lit our pipes. The Governor of the province, it seemed, smoked a pipe, so no one else did—the neighbours might think they were getting above themselves. We had another beer in the Governor’s honour and then the lights went out—just a power failure, not a sign of official disfavour. Well, I guess.

The next day we rode on to the ‘Holiday Paradise’ of Phuket Island, where we got directions for Patong Beach, the alleged hippy hangout, and rode out along an atrocious dirt track for a few miles. Right at the end was Patong Beach; we knew it was that because there was an enormous neon sign saying ‘Patong Beach Hotel’.

The hotel was inhabited by Germans on package tours, but we checked in at the rather more modest Palmgarten and invaded the bar pavilion to sample some more Mekong—some people never learn—and watch the first squalls of the monsoon bending the leaves of the palms.

This is a somewhat melancholy occupation, but in a good way. A few days of it convinced us that we’d better move on or be rained in, so we said goodbye to Sai Jai, the Thai lady in charge, and her assistants.

Charlie had become rather, shall we say, friendly with one of these ladies and left her an esoteric Australian T-shirt. Both of us felt better for the rest and made an impressive 573km to Thap Sakae on our first day. On my bicycle tour, I had inadvertently spent a night in a brothel here, which had turned out to be a good hotel as well. I couldn’t find it again, so we settled for another lovely old timber hotel, all the wood lovingly oiled and spotless.

By the time we got to Bangkok, I had something else besides my shoulder to worry about—sunstroke. How do you get sunstroke while wearing a crash helmet? By exposing the base of your neck to the sun in the space below your helmet, that’s how.

I had been wearing only a singlet on top and the vicious sun had cooked my spinal fluid. It sounds worse than it was, actually; I just felt deathly ill for a few days and couldn’t keep any food down. One way to lose weight. After I recovered, Charlie picked up a case of Bangkok belly. Another way to lose weight.

The city itself was, and I imagine still is, slowly disintegrating. Roads and footpaths were crumbling, the klongs or canals were stinking cesspits and as for the power lines… there was a bit of a thunderstorm when we arrived, and some of the power lines were being blown together by the wind and were fusing, spitting sparks across the road and writhing in the air as they melted.

Most street corners have their tangle of old, discarded wires aloft, ends waving in the breeze. Who knows which ones are live? We booked into the pleasantly third worldly Sri Hualampong Hotel at the main railway station and our bikes once more found a home in the lobby, the desk clerk lovingly spreading newspapers under them.

While I was getting over the sunstroke, I lay in bed and listened to the frequent rainstorms drumming on the tin roof of the factory next door. I also drank gallons of the fresh tea that comes with the room.

Once recovered, I sat downstairs in the lobby restaurant drinking beer and making occasional forays out into the city. Strange as it may sound, Bangkok is a stimulating, fascinating place even though it is falling apart or perhaps because it is….

The only thing that really makes it possible to live in Bangkok is the fact that it’s inhabited by Thais. No one else could possibly be so stubborn and yet so gentle and relaxed in the insane traffic. No one else would be cool enough to survive. My hat goes off to the lot of them.

Not being Thais, we were quite glad to be taking the road out and heading north to Chiang Mai. Within the first 30km we counted four buses that had dived into the rice paddies by the side of the road. One of the locals with whom we discussed Thai road safety – by pointing and shaking an open hand – indicated to us that that was life. Or not, of course. Mai pen rai.

After that, as we turned off to the ancient capital of Ayutthaya, traffic eased up a little. So did the rain. Ayutthaya is worth visiting for its more or less well-preserved temples and Buddhas, monuments to the lavish devoutness of Thailand’s Buddhist rulers. But don’t buy the soft drinks.

Being located at a major tourist stop, the refreshment stand charges up to ten times the prices common elsewhere…

For some reason I developed a craving for a tomato sandwich on black bread during our ride on to Tak. Thai tomatoes are weedy, weevil-eaten woody midgets and Thai bread is dry, sweet and indescribably awful. So that was one impossible dream.

Our hotel in Tak was another of those marvelous all-timber buildings, the wood hand-polished and lacquered; probably a dreadful fire risk, but so lovely. We reached Chiang Mai the next day after dodging in and out of the clouds along the mountain road between Thoen and Li.

Like most Thai roads this one was quite well surfaced and twisted enough to make for interesting riding. It was also lined with forests of dripping, ghostly mountain bamboo.

I’d love to know why they put direction signs so far past intersections in Thailand. Why not right at the crossroads? This way, you never know if you’ve taken the wrong turn until you’re a hundred yards past the fork, where you have to turn around and try your chances on another track, and go through the same thing again. It’s like a game. Hey ferang, you think you’re so smart?

Our base in Chieng Mai was the Chumpon Guest House, a spotless building with a common room, a garage and constantly available iced water. They did our washing for us, too. We found ourselves a tailor in town and ordered polyester safari suits with long sleeves. You think this is weird? It is not.

I have this theory that you get better treatment at borders when you dress up, so we were taking advantage of the cheap tailors. A couple of days passed pleasantly with visits to the working elephants, who unlike the ones in ‘ elephant refuges’ in Malaysia seemed pretty well off and content, the waterfalls and the endless ‘antique’ shops that dot the town.

I bought a Buddha’s head which, I was assured, was a genuine antique. When I expressed concern about being allowed to take a genuine antique out of the country, the salesman assured me that it wasn’t that kind of genuine.

A reminder of a few years earlier when I was shopping in Chicken Street in Kabul and overheard a salesman insisting that “Of course it is a genuine antique! I made it myself!”

The night after we picked up our suits, we went on a spree. This mainly involved having dinner at the Chalet, a ritzy French restaurant. We felt we deserved it, and what’s the good of new clothes if you can’t show them off?

Dinner was a huge success with pepper steak and steak Dijonnaise set off beautifully by a ’73 Medoc. It cost a fortune, but we felt like kings when we walked out. This sort of thing is highly recommended on any bike trip. Get out there and live it up every now and then, and a tent in the rain will be all the more acceptable for it.

I sent my mother a buffalo leather cutout figure from a shadow puppet play. The Australian Customs opened it, I later discovered. I wonder what they thought I was sending my saintly old mum from Thailand?

On the way back down to Bangkok we visited another ancient capital, Sukothai—Thailand is lousy with ancient capitals—which was pretty, with the ruins all laid out in a grassy park that rather reminded me of Khajuraho in India.

At the entrance, a policeman showed a rather unhealthy interest in the contents of my camera case. I fought off his increasingly stern demands to let him dig through it and was greatly relieved when we got away.

At this stage, apart from my spark plug burning out and being replaced and a slight oil leak around the head gasket on Charlie’s bike, we had had no mechanical problems. That wonderful state continued, too.

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But while the bikes did their job well, our riders didn’t always… read about it next installment….

Source: MCNews.com.au