The Cycling Bug's Tour of Lalitpur on a Mountainbike.
A bug bit me a few
years back, and since then it has made me restless.
It makes me travel just
like the wind.
It does not matter
where, to what direction, with whom. What matters is just how, and the
beginning of this story.
I had wanted to make a
cycling trip around the accessible part of Lalitpur since a long time, but it
mostly got postponed for one reason or another. At one time it was my
un-preparedness that held me back; at the other I simply had no heart to do it
alone. And so it had rested. Friends were busy: some with their busy work schedule,
some had their equipment damaged from the previous trip and needed urgent
repairs, and there were still some others who had health-related issues that
prevented them from getting outdoors and made them something like couch
potatoes with knee problems and joint problems. There were many other trifling
issues that prevented things from happening, and my travel plan simply got
postponed.
I was a bit tired for
quite some week: writing one proposal after another, trying this listing and
that, and being unable to make a sale… It was all mentally very depressing. I
just needed a change, and needed it fast.
But it just had to come by itself, suddenly.
June 18, 2016, and I
woke up at four in the morning, unusually. Another bad day, I was thinking half
awake. Why so early? Half naked, I looked outside the window. It was light,
alright, but the air felt gloomy white and the sky overcast with early monsoon clouds.
Once awake I am not the type that can easily crawl back into bed. A cup of
water, almost half a litre of that, and I got dressed, half of me wishing I
could go back to sleep while the other half of me wishing I could clear the
clouds of depression from the air, at least for a day. A camera, an extra
battery, emergency maintenance toolkit, a survival tool set, a few tablets and
water disinfectant together with some standard bandages for minor wounds, a
rain poncho, and a litre of water... all shoved haphazardly into my small
backpack and I was out with my bicycle in another half an hour. Local tea shops
were still not open and I soon hit the open road.
I had no idea what
cycling for a full day along a less-travelled road was going to be like but I
just wanted to get out of the dusty city and its chaotic traffic. There was a
group of cyclists taking the same road as I was and it cheered me a little just
to know that I will be having some sort of company at least. I did not know
what they would be like on the trail: friendly or reserved, helpful or
introverted. As it happens with me, I was mentally prepared for eventualities,
so I threw everything to the wind and continued pedalling. “Come on,” I would
tell myself from time to time. “It’s your road.” But then I would, from time to
time, keep looking back to see if there were any signs of others. They were
either already gone ahead of me – but that could not be the case as it was
still very early – or else they were just looking for each other. I pedalled on
for about an hour.
Half past six, a local told me at Chapagaon. Time
for tea, and a lubrication check-up: the chain was struggling a bit so I
squeezed out some drops of lubricating oil. It now felt smoother after the
treatment and a cup of tea served well. I kept my eyes on the road but there
was no sign of them. The locals had not seen any one pass by before me. Damn! I
retorted. They’re cowards afraid of the distance and the monsoon rains, so they
postponed their trip again, I tried to console myself. I was wrong, I would
discover later, but the impatience hit me and I ordered another cup of tea
before hopping on to my saddle.
The road sections were muddy with potholes full of
dark water. Occasional vehicle that passed simply splashed muddy water over you
and you cursed the driver as you pedalled along. The nice looking tarmac
suddenly turned into gravel and you started sweating even though birds sang the
monsoon songs all around you. The forest air was clean, the air cool and calm,
the trail enjoyable, and the bike was obedient to a large extent. I found the
black road again and soon I was in the small town of Lele.
A group of women were planting a paddy and I
managed to capture them in frame. Their song was beautifully melodic but I had
left my mobile phone behind and had no audio recording equipment. They made
jokes with me and my camera but that was easily passed with a burst of merry
laughter. A little way off someone was selling cucumbers and I got a decent
size from him for 30 rupees. It was a juicy treat before the long tiring climb.
There was still no sign of them. Boggers!
It happens. Panting for breath, stopping for water,
taking a few minutes in an attempt to relax the muscles of the groins aching
from the discomfort of the saddle, stretching the eyes along the trail you just
climbed to see if anyone is following you for company, and when you find out
you have a long way to go, you take the left turn from the fork and continue
along until you find a small hut on the right side just by the road and ask
whether they could provide some home-brew called “airak”. So nice that they did
provide it in a small stainless steel glass that helped me gulp down some bites
of the previous day’s samosas that I had carried for breakfast.
And as I was gulping my
breakfast down, they whizzed past. “Your friends,” men inside the little hut
shouted. Wow! I jumped, almost. They were not exactly my friends, but I knew
one or two of them. They did take the road after all, and that felt comforting.
Dark red plums loaded
with magnesium salts and vitamins lingered in the mouth even after minutes had
passed as I descended downhill. They travelled just for the sake of travelling
and many of them complained about this or that and this or that not being
available to their liking. If you wanted city service all along why come here
to these remote parts, I wanted to ask, but I had a camera and I loved
photography. Why waste precious time talking about deep matters and things they
barely understood. I would rather, when the sky permitted, wait a minute or two
just to capture a local woman walking down the road with a huge load of fodder
on her back. And she would complain why I had taken a picture of hers with such
a load and such a thick coat of mud on her legs. I would keep smiling, trying
to evade the scrutinizing questions.
It was a great day for mountain-biking with cloud
cover for almost the whole day but a sad day for photography: as soon as I took
the camera out of its waterproof bag, drops would start falling down. And I had
to shove it back in, under layers of rain-proof fibres. However, the journey
was pleasant. Some occasional motorcyclist would whizz past with high revving
engines, giving such a queer look to me as if he had never expected to see
someone cycling in that weather in that part of the mountain. Perhaps he
thought it strange that someone would for reasons unknown choose to cycle those
mountain sides with the thin tyres spraying dirt all over. It was a tiring job,
he barely knew and hardly understood. “Pheeewwwww!” I sighed and continued
along until I saw a tiny hut by the road side. I was hungry as hell.
Men were drinking white liquid in an equally white
battered aluminium bowl. “Chhang”, I understood as it needed no introduction.
Asking a bowl for myself, I sat down and dug into my bag. Yeah, there were two
pieces of samosas left. The bites felt so good, and the bowl of home-made beer
was heavenly. They were far behind me, and I only saw the small white pick up
truck coming. Out of a group of 23, three of them had managed to carry their
bikes along on the back of that smoke-belching metallic beast. The devils! They
couldn’t even cycle a few hours. Ten rupees a bowl served quite well that
afternoon.
Then it was downhill,
one of the best trails after Bhardev, to Chaughare, or Char-Ghare as many
called it. The road twisted to the right and left, and then to the right again,
and then to the left, in numerous bends as green paddies far down the valleys
on either side were occasionally interrupted by a house or two. An almost empty
road, punctuated only with the sound of rubber rolling along the black surface
of the asphalt tarmac. From one scenic wonder to another, the road took me
along a journey that somehow felt like trans-Alp tour on a mountain-bike: I
have not been there but the similarities are marvellous: the Alpen-Cross, you
could easily call it.
The climb again on the other side of the gorge with
thick forests and I wished I had company: to sit at some local house asking for
the traditional sauerkraut and maize-flour pudding. Alone, I just had no heart
to do it as the journey was still too long to make. Asking a young driver for
directions, I left the main road and took the heavily rocky one to the left.
Pedalling was difficult; my bicycle had just to be pushed along the bumpy
slope.
The sky offered no comfort for photography and I
had my rain-poncho on. Such bad luck. Ten minutes turned into thirty, and
thirty minutes into ninety but the climb would continue on and on. And finally,
in the misty mountains, long dome-roofed brown coloured bunches of straw huts
appeared. Mushrooms?!! It was a huge surprise at that remote spot. Where would
they take the produce to sell? But the answer to my inmost question at that
time came by itself. As long as there is life, there is hope; and as long as
there is hope people will keep doing things that they believe will better their
lives. And here, in front of my eyes, were the exact manifestation of that
truth: people will carry loads on their back for hours to get to the road, then
wait another series of hours to take their produce to the market that takes
another series of hours to reach. Just to keep the hopes alive, just to feed
the dreams. And that is life, a great reality.
“Hello,” someone came
along. A little voice.
“Hey, come. See there’s a foreigner,” he was soon
shouting to his friends. And soon a bunch of them surrounded me.
“Look, look,” someone
added, “it’s a bike with disc brakes.”
“W—o—w! What an amazing
bike.”
“Just look at the colour.”
And they continued in their own childish manner of
innocence. No doubt very few outsiders visited their place, and very rare few
with mountain bikes. But nonetheless, some actually did, and that is how these
curious little minds filled their young brains with at least some knowledge of
things they barely got a chance to touch. Yet again, there were motorbikes
parked on a side stand in the mud. In all likelihood, the parents and guardians
of these little children use the Indian-made beasts to carry their produce to
the markets.
"Where you going?” One
of them asked me.
“Me?” I asked. They
nodded their heads in affirmation. I did not feel it appropriate to disappoint
these young minds by revealing myself as a fellow countryman, and so I chose to
answer them in the same language as they had picked. “I’m going to Batase
Da(n)da. You know where that is?”
One of them pointed to the left along a red muddy
trail littered with huge muddy potholes. I had guessed as much, recollecting
the memory of studying the map of the trail online just the previous evening.
Had there been some old people, I might have stayed for a little while asking
for a glass of buffalo milk or things like that, but I did not see any grown
up, and my heart felt uneasy going into serious business with the kids. Even
the grown-ups in the mountains would not talk to strangers oftentimes, so I
decided I better move on. But they ran on either side of me following my
bicycle. “Go back,” I shouted at them. I did not want them to fall and get
injured. “Go home,” I shouted again and again until their voices faded in the
distance and the muddy trail changed into a rocky one taking me down the
mountainside of Khar Bhanjyang. My brakes started making uneasy noises on the
bumpy downhill trail and I had to stop. Damn! The pads on the front were worn
out, and it took me more than half an hour to change the pads and to tune them.
Luckily, a local farmer provided a glass of thin watery very sour whey for
which I was very thankful.
I saw the bunch as I hit the road again after the
stop but one of them had a bad fall breaking his helmet and getting bruised on
his hips and arms. He was lucky he had a lot of muscles covering up his bones;
otherwise, had he been a thin twig like myself, he would have perhaps broken at
least a few of his bones. I offered a piece of fabric to cover up his wound,
and also gave them a spare shoe-lace to hold it in place. Then I gave him a couple
of ibuprofen tablets as pain-killer but their leader would not accept my offer
of disinfectant. They perhaps though of me as an intruder, and finding no way
out to help him any further I chose to leave them, feeling very uneasy inside myself.
I am an endurance runner, and so instead of pushing
myself too hard, I prefer to do it slow and steady maintaining a more or less
constant pace all along. I also have my own way of moving along: I talk to
people, I share their stories, I capture a few shots, I share laughters and I
build relationships. But here, in the thick rain with heavy clouds of vapour
rising from the ground as the drops from heaven beat hard upon the rocks, I
kept pushing my bike along: me and my bike along the trails of Chhepare Da(n)da,
Batase Da(n)da, DhungKharka... and all along, the misty mountains never raised
their veil of rain-clouds for what might perhaps have been some majestic
scenery and some great frames captured with my camera. The trail, the bike, the heavy downpour, and
the breathing was all that I had. Then the last descent down the bumpy stony
track to Panauti and it got quite dark. The batteries in my torchlight were
almost dead, and as I sought newer replacements in the local shops, the boys
disappeared without saying a word. I did not see them later in the dark.
It was a great trail
all along; a very memorable mountain-biking experience. They had been some sure
company along the way and I was never a part of their long planning since the
very beginning. They had their own group and if they preferred it to be like
that, I would better be myself as well; with a faint headlight and a red
blinking tail lamp I simply chose to continue along the highway as the night
progressed.
(Text
and photographs by Subarna Prasad Acharya. Portion of the map has been taken from Google Maps. Detailed
map of the route is available here:
[The author is an avid traveller,
cyclist/mountain-biker, photographer, writer, and freelance guide. He has a
blog (this one in particular), an Amazon author’s page, a National Geographic Your Shots page, and also
a YouTube channel.]
