Back to India

Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day! We left Kathmandu early in the morning to avoid the heavy traffic and headed south to the border. It was another glorious day as they all have been with temperatures in the upper 70s and blue skies.

We chose the long way down so we could have one last ride through the mountains. It was the right choice! The road was narrow and winding and there was very little traffic so we were able to relax a little and enjoy the spectacular vistas. It seemed that everywhere you looked, something was growing. The mountain slopes have been neatly terraced to make use of every bit of land and they were all full of lush crops ready to pick. Cabbage, radishes, rice, mustard seed, corn, peppers all grew in abundance and their variety of colour gave the valleys and mountainsides a checker-board look. In the small villages we rode through, people were busy packing vegetables into sacks, husking corn or drying cobs by hanging them in bunches from their eaves. Flowers blossomed everywhere and Ruth Ann, our resident horticulturist, was in her element.

This is one of the highest roads in the Himalayas, summiting at over 8000 feet and often we could see deep down into the valleys where the road snaked its way up and down. It was right out of a motorcycle magazine! At one point, I was leading and pulled over quickly and was able to get a shot of each rider and they rounded the curve into view. If they turn out, Ill post them to the blog.

All good things must come to an end and all too soon we reached the Indian border where we faced a huge traffic jam, broken roads and Indian immigration. The office was a table set up in an alcove just off the street and the officious official took great pains examining our passports and writing in a huge ledger while making small talk leading up to a request for some currency from our countries. Ruth Ann dug up some US coins and even some Canadian coins she had acquired during her visit to Tweed. While I carefully explained what each one (quarter, dime and penny) was and pointed out the portrait of the Queen, he inquired as to whether we had some paper money. Apparently, he was more of an extortionist then a numismatist!

After crossing the border, we had a long, dusty ride on a terrible road which really slowed us down so we didn't arrive in Chopra till dark. Unfortunately, when we got there, all the hotels were full due to some celebration. The next city was 75 kms away. We spoke to our bike rental agent in Delhi and he talked to the hotel, resulting in them putting mats and pillows down on their filthy confere nce room floor where we spent the night for the grand sum of 1500 rupees ($37Cdn).for all of us.

So we're back in Incredible India, as the ads say. And it is: incredibly busy, incredibly dirty, and incredibly entrepreneurial. Everyone is trying to make a rupee and so we are dogged constantly, specially in tourist areas such as we're in at the moment enjoying all the luxuries of a five star hotel to make up for the previous night.

Varanasi is another very holy city, this time for the Hindus where they come to bathe in the Ganges River or die and be cremated on it's banks. We took a row boat to watch the sun rise on the Ganges and saw tea lights floating down the river in the early dawn light. Hundreds of pilgrims lined the shore doing their ablutions among the dead bodies of people and animals. Several big birds were perched on the floating carcass of a dead cow and Ross named it An Avian Dinner Cruise = - (