Shanti Shanti. Cycling in India and Nepal

The minute that you step outside the airplane into Delhi Airport, you feel that you are in India. People are just standing, busy doing nothing. Even at midnight this is quite a busy place. The air is thick with moisture and Indian smells. It is hot and humid, just as you might expect in the post-monsoon. As we prepare our bicycles at the luggage take-off, I am sweating all over. After fixing the bicycle, we walk towards the exit.

The airport looks much bigger than three years ago. Through a big crowd of people we find our way and we are outside, in the night of Delhi. We have our cardboard boxes with us, hoping to keep them for a few weeks at a hotel untill we come back for our return flight. Unfortunately there is not a hotel on walking distance of the airport and it is also not possible to cycle with those cardboard boxes in our hands on the highway to Delhi. Within a minute we are surrounded by taxi drivers who offer to go to a 'very good an very cheap hotel'. Of course this is the tourist trap where you pay a lot for a short drive to a very expansive hotel. But after negotiating with the least agressive driver we have a deal. He takes the cardboard and we will cycle behind him to the first hotel in Delhi below 500 Rupees.

Dogs lie down, scattered over the ramshackled narrow alleyways of the neighborhood. Only few people are hanging around. There are a few simple hotels. We take one of them. The hotel room is quite okay. And it has got a fan. All in all it did not take too much time and now we can have a long rest. After a short midnight stroll we go to sleep. Soon I am drifting away in a long deep sleep.

At nine o'clock we get up and leave. We will cycle two weeks in Rajasthan, then we will go by bus and train to Varanasi from where we will cycle to Nepal and do some trekking in the Himalayas. But first we will cycle in Rajasthan. We will head towards Jaipur, the pink city and capital of Rajasthan.

The Old Jaipur Road is closed so we are forced to take the New Jaipur Road, which is an extraordinary busy highway. Luckily there is a service road which is much quieter. Cyclists, carriages with oxes and lots of walking people with loads of all kinds of luggage on their backs or on their heads: it is the really slow traffic that makes use of the two lane service road. In fact we are the fastest traffic on the service road. The highway itself is used by cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, scooters and taxis and has got a minimum of six lanes on both sides. I have never seen so much traffic in one view angle. Still the traffic does not look like a complete mess. There are no dangerous situations.

We reach Gurgaon, a new mega suburb with luxury shopping malls for the fast growing Delhi middle class. Gurgaon is a place which is spreading rapidly to all directions. Everywhere there are new buidings being made. And Gurgaon is a place that is attracting lots of people, also poor people. So all in all, Gurgaon already begins to look like an ordinary Indian city with bazaars, holy cows on the streets and an awful lot of people. It takes ages to cross the city. After thirty kilometer we have finally crossed all the suburbs from Delhi. From the center of Old Delhi, it would have taken us nearly sixty (!) kilometer to reach the end of the suburbs.

So finally we are cycling on a quiet road. We are cycling in the direction of Alwar a medium-sized Indian city in Eastern Rajasthan. It is quite late already and we will not be able to reach Alwar today. We will have to find out if there is a hotel on the way, otherwise we will arrange a taxi to take us to Alwar. We have decided that our cycling trip in Rajasthan will not be a cycling trip from A to B but more of a random exploration of the 'heart' of Rajasthan. Willem has got a borrowed GPS system in which he put way points of crucial places and crossroads from roads that are not on maps but can only be seen on Google Earth.

Or in real life of course. And in real life we are crossing such a road. Unpaved and obscure. We are certainly the first Europeans who cycle on this road. Immediately we are in the 'wild west' of India, the heart of rural India. The disadvantage of cycling on these way points without having an underlay of 'real' maps, is that we will always be insecure about having the right road and we will also be insecure about how much kilometer we have to cycle to reach 'civilization' with hotels and so forth. We will certainly be sure whether we will find hotels on the way point roads. We will not. So we will often have to rely on transport that we have to arrange in the villages. But I do not have to think about whether the advantages weigh up to the disadvantages of travelling this way. I simply have to look around me. We pass villages with chickens on the streets, pigs in the houses. Oxes still do the hard work on the land. There are lots of children on the road. Everywhere there are people, even in these remote rural lands.

After more than an hour we find ourselves on pavement again but the road is not busy. This is pleasant cycling country. After hundred kilometer we are quite salty and sweaty. But this was an interesting first day, with huge contrasts between Delhi and Gurgaon on the one hand and rural India on the other hand. In Tijara, the biggest town on the way to Alwar, we do not find a hotel. We have got only two hours of daylight. We have to take our first taxi.

After one day we have our first rest day. We still have to sleep because we have had a very short night yesterday. The days are short and Alwar looks interesting enough to spend a day.

Alwar has got a very pleasant atmosphere. The city is surrounded by lush green hills. The sky is gray. The last remnants of the monsoon are still lingering on. Alwar has got 260.000 inhabitants but the city is compact. The old city has got a lovely array of small alleys. Alwar has got a huge palace, the City Palace, a highly atmosheric place. Especially the artificial deeply green lake with its temples around are really special. Despite the pretty ambiance there are no tourists in Alwar. Maybe we will see even prettier places the coming days but will they quite match the atmosphere of Alwar? We will see the coming days...

It is raining cats and dogs, the kind of rain that never seems to end. We take our time for the breakfast bur after we have eaten and we have loaded our bicycles, there is no improvement. We decide to leave whatsoever. It is not cold so in fact it does not really matter that it is raining.

Despite the road is very bumpy, we soon reach the outer area of the Sariska Tiger Reserve. The inner area cannot be visited by foot or on a bicycle. The outer area is also very interesting and sometimes truly beautiful. We are passing green flatlands that are surrounded by dark green hills. Rivers are wide and have extremely high water levels. The levees are only a few centimeter higher than the water level of the river. We see some parakeets and painted storks and lots of monkeys. There are no tigers in the park any more. Or so it seems. I have heard that they there are tigers again since a few months. Whatsoever, we will not see tigers in the outer area of the park.

We are lunching a few kilometer before Sariska. We order a few dry samosas. Or at least: they look like samosas. But what is the teastall owner doing? He crumbles the samosas in his hand and throws the pieces in a yellow sauce with lots of red streaks. Chilli. The sauce is burning spicy. It is still good to eat though. But it takes some time before I am able to cycle without feeling completely spiced up.

After Sariska we have to cross some hill ranges. In fact the hills are looking higher than they actually are. It is not really hard climbing here. It is not raining any more but we are just as wet because of the sweating. After a very bumpy descent the pavement improves and we make progress easily. At 3 o'clock we reach the Delhi-Jaipur highway. The road does not look busy so it is possible to cycle here. We have got only three hours of daylight left so we must hurry a bit to reach Jaipur, which is still 64 kilometer away. We take a chai for some mental preparation.

Cycling on the highway. It sounds ridiculous but in fact this is one of the quietest roads we have had so far. And also one of the best roads. The road is smoother than a Sam Cooke song and it seems that we are flying over the road. The sun is breaking through and red rays of sunlight give the hills a dreamy glow. Just a few kilometer before Amber we pass a few elephants. Elephants on the highway? I try to picture myself what would happen if people take an elephant ride on a highway in the Netherlands. I simply cannot grasp the image. After a while we go further and reach Amber.

The palace of Alwar was big but how can I describe the palace of Amber? It has got a scale beyond imagination. And it is simply extraordinary beautiful in the twilight. Behind the palace is a big hill with a big wall that had to protect the palace against enemies. It must have taken a heavy toll for the citizens of the region to pay the taxes for building such an enormous work of art. But the people who built it and the Maharadja's who lived in it have long been gone. The history has passes and now only the stones remain. And they are wonderful.

It is getting late and it is getting dark. We go further to Jaipur, only a few kilometer from here.

We descend to the capital of Rajasthan. On the way we pass another architectural highlight, the floating palace. A palace in the middle of a huge artificial lake, completely surrounded by water, an eerie effect. We get on and ride into Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan with over three million inhabitants. It is dark now as we have to cross the city to the hotel area. On the way we pass the pink Palace of Winds, the most famous palace of Jaipur. It takes quite some time before we have cycled from the one end of the town to the other end. The last kilometer an old police officer on a scooter helps us by riding the way with us. And the reward after a long and diverse cycling day is there. We find a pretty hotel and we meet two nice women, a Swiss girl and a Belgian woman, Jasmine. Jasmine will also stay one day in Jaipur before moving on to Pushkar, so we will be able to meet again the coming days.

Sightseeing Jaipur. After visiting the Pink City and the palaces I feel unwell. I feel that I am having a fever. We return to our hotel. I go to bed. Despite a temperature of 35 degrees Celsius in the shadow, I am freezing cold. We will have to see tomorrow how seriously ill I am.

I am not feeling too good but not too bad either. We decide to try, we will just see what will happen. Whenever I feel ill, we can always take a taxi to a place with a hotel. The road out of Jaipur is relatively quiet. From our hotel it is not far to the railway station. A regional road leads us from the station out of town. Within ten kilometers we are in rural areas. Another ten kilometer further the landscape is even scenically interesting. We are passing villages but also nomadic tent camps. Everywhere we come, the faces of the people have true character. Clothes are traditional. Women are wrapped in long, colourful veils. The dress code of the females must reflect their social and family status. Men often wear colourful turbans. Especially the older men. The cycling is slow in these areas. The road is often unpaved and in villages it is trial and error before we find the right road to the next village.

The teastalls are a special experience. These roads are not found on the maps so the people are not used to tourists or travellers. Whenever we sit down in a teastall, children and men tend to shyly look for contact. Sometimes the children are not shy at all. Quite often we are surrounded by ten or more people. Only the women do not make contact. Women tend to behave conservatively in contacts with men. Rajasthan has very traditional views about relationships between men and women. In these areas it is the man who has fot rights and the woman who has got the duties. For us, travellers, it is difficult to find out how women feel about the inequality between man and wife. Is it really a problem? Is the man able to handle the woman with love and respect as the woman has got a weak social position in society? We will not find the answers from the women in this journey.

We are able to make contact with men and they are mostly quite open about their social ideas. In general, they tend to find western women 'loose' and western men 'soft', because they obviously are not able to have their women under 'control'. Most marriages in India are arranged by the parents of the married couple. And still the majority of people find that a better basis for a long and satisfying relationship than a 'blind' love which is based on physical attraction or romantic dreams. The Indian people live out their romantic dreams by looking at Hindi films, which are usually as sweet as syrup.

So the woman has got to take most of the social responsibilities and the woman has to take care of the children. But the woman has also got to do most of the physical work. We see a group of thirty women, carrying stones on their heads for road improvements. Even during this hard physical work they wear their most beautiful colourful clothes. Only two people are sitting quietly on a chair in the shadow, men. They look whether the women are working hard enough.

After one o'clock it is really hot. It must be around 37 degrees Celsius. The heavy windless air does never give any refreshment. I am sweating all over. Everything is wet, especially the contact places with my bicycle. The salt irritates the skin. I am still feeling a bit ill. In fact I have a stomach problem, probably a parasite. The fever from yesterday was probably a first response to that problem. I do not have any control about my thoughts. I am more or less drifting on stream of conciousness. Or more appropriate: a stream of dreamlike images. Still the overall feeling is not too bad, especially because this was a very interesting day so far. But I feel that I must take it easy now. We decide to ride to the Delhi - Jaipur - Udaipur highway. From there we will easily find a taxi to Pushkar where are a lot of hotels. In Dada we reach the highway. We sit down in a tea house. After a few minutes we are talking and discussing with a group of men and then we slowly come to business. I drop the suggestion if there may be a possibility for local transport to Pushkar. Ten minutes later there is a man with a car and ten minutes later we have a price and we sit in a car on the highway to Pushkar.

In the atmospheric city of Pushkar we meet Ysmine again. We stay in Hotel Pink Floyd, a nice gimmick. We have heard the bad news that Rick Wright has died a few days ago, so we stay in the 'Atom Heart Mother' Room, the album which is most in the vein of Rick. And it is a nice album whatsoever. But Pushkar has got lots more to offer in the musical realms. In a square right before our hotel a group of people are making music to the memory of an old lady who died exactly twenty years ago, obviously a family member of some of the people. The people who are playing and singing are really crafted musicians. There is a trancelike beat which slowly develops in a more and more powerful way with ever more details. The intensity is further enhanced by the powerful vocals of the two main singers. The power of the music is that the complex structure of the rhythms and melodies is made accessible by the steady rhythm and by the repeating 'yells' which are modulating all the time to build up meaning and intensity. So this music is at the same time accessible and complex. A hundred people are sitting down to listen. We too are asked to sit down and listen. When we leave, my head feels empty and I feel upligted by a euphoric, catharsic energy. A once in a lifetime experience.

Another day of rest. Not that I need a rest day - I am feeling well now - but because Pushkar is worth a visit. Pushkar lies idyllically between the green Aravalli Hills and has got a holy lake. Pushkar is one of the holy cities for Hindus and attracts thousands of pilgrims each year. And also thousands of tourists. The lake is very scenic. It is surrounded by white temples all around. At sunrise we take a look in the ghats before the temples, where the pilgrims are bathing to wash away their sins. We try to transcend our spiritual feelings in a musical way by doing a percussion session with a local master. A way of giving back to the Earth and the people. Willem and Yasmine are already on the roll as I join them. For Willem and Yasmine this is not the first time to use percussion instruments. For me it seems like they are true masters on the instrument, although it does not sound like that. But as I start to make noises, it becomes crystal clear that they are way ahead of me. The master gives me an intense look.
>>> You must not be so concentrated. You must treat the drums as if they are a lady.
If you want to make love with a woman, are you tense then?
> To be honest... in those circumstances I am usually very tense.
>>> You must not think. Let the rhythm simply flow out of you.
> Just like making love???
>>> You have to be shanti shanti. You must feel one with yourself and your environment. You must be on with the rhythm.
Despite we truly feel euphoric about our improvements on the local percussion instruments, occasional passengers are looking rather compassionate than positively thrilled. But more and more we get into the flow. Slowly we build up to a climax, the master makes improvisations while we slowly build up the rhythm. We continue, a massive rhythm rolls out of our drums. The inside world merges into the outside, or is it the other way around? The flow just takes over. The rhythm reaches a climax, goes beyond, goes even further. There is no inside world and there is no outside world, just one massive rhythm. And then suddenly everything is shanti shanti...

In two days we want to cycle to Jodhpur, the blue city and second city of Rajasthan. After a cracking thunder storm yesterday night there is a strong headwind today. A thick shapeless cloud mass is rolling in. We descend into a huge flat area, a kind of savannah with sparse bushes and acacias. The flatlands before us look spooky in the grey weather. The people are not too friendly. For the first time the people along the road are begging, in a quite hostile way. Sometimes children try to stop us by clinging to our bicycles, quite dangerous behaviour in fact. They are asking for pens and Rupees but in fact they simply try to make problems.

After one and a half hour we leave the road for an unpaved road. From now on the atmosphere on the road is much better. In fact the villages are poorer but now we see smiling faces. Here we see people that want to talk instead of making trouble. Our road however is more and more troublesome. In fact this is not a road any more. At the best this is a sand track but sometimes we cycle on bare rock. Mostly flat, but still difficult to cycle. The trails split up all the time, sometimes the tracks come together, sometimes not. It will be increasingly difficult to find the way back, in case of need. Then there lies a river before us. It is not a river with fast flowing water but it is more like a lake. Still we have to cross it if we want to reach Jodhpur tomorrow.

So we try to wade through the river. After a while we find a place to cross the river. The water level is above our knees for a long stretch but we reach the other side of the river. From there it is very steep upward to climb up the river bank and then we have to find a way through the bushes to reach a dirt track again. But we are able to continue again. We are glad that we reach a village but it is a lot of hassle to find the proper way out. The next village has a tea house, where we can finally drink something and have some sweets to eat.

As we sit down, a thin man with a huge snake comes to us. He walks to me:
> Would you mind to hold my snake? I want to order some tea.
>>> Mmm... no, if you do not mind...
> Okay.
Indeed he does not seem to make a problem. He just asks a local gut but he also refuses. The snake is more than a meter long. Of all the things that I could do, holding the snake is one of the least likely. The atmosphere in the tea house is highly exotic. There are only very characterful faces here. We are sitting here for more than an hour. The people are interested in what we are doing. It is difficult to explain to these people what is good or nice about leaving your work and your family to just cycle around. But to be honest, in Europe that is also difficult to explain sometimes.

We say goodbye and continue on the sand road. I feel that I am still not hundred per cent okay. Luckily the road is improving slowly. After every village, there are trails that join to become a slightly improved road. Just before Kurki the road is even paved. The pavement however is in such an awful state that the unpaved road before is less bumpy. On the worst stretches I tend to cycle on the dirt along the road than rather on the road itself. Sometimes that is not possible and I am literally shaking all over, a horrible experience when having stomach problems like now. The villages are still big fun, though. When the children see us, they come running towards us. They also try to stop us, like the kids in the villages near Pushkar, but here they just want to have contact. They are laughing shyly. Sometimes a father comes to talk to us. Every time we say goodbye, we have a group of ten or twenty kids, running behind us to wave us goodbye. At the end of the day we reach the small town of Jaraintar, a friendly place on the provincial road to Jodhpur. We find a simple hotel with a nice atmosphere but poor facilities. And tomorrow: we only have to follow the comfortable road to Jodhpur.

I have had a terrible diarrhea this night. Most of the time I had to sit on my ankles above the gap in the floor that is the toilet. The afwul smell in the toilet did not make me feel better, but there was nowhere else that I can go to. It was terribly hot also, there is not a fan in the toilet. So now it is morning, I am glad that we can leave, although I do not know if I am actually strong enough to cycle. Luckily it is an easy, flat day over comfortable pavement and at the end of the day we will have the luxury of a tourist hotel in Jodhpur.

The cycling day is not too interesting. I am strong enough to cycle and weak enough not to bother about the very boring road. Willem is completely bored and complains about all the kilometers that divide us from Jodhpur. For me it does not really matter. My stomach does not get any better by cycling, but it does not get any worse either. The last ten kilometer I feel that I am getting weaker, though. It feels good when we finally reach Jodhpur. The palace on the hill top is awe-inspiring. I feel that this could be a truly interesting place. We find the hotel where we meet Jasmine.

In the twillight we walk with Jasmine up the hill to the palace. Jasmine is a professional photographer; she has very interesting travel pictures on www.jadejade.be. It is nice to see a professional photographer at work. It gives me an opportunity to see how she organizes the processes to make pictures of local people and how she asks people before her camera. After the sunrise we return to our hotel to have breakfast. A few hours later we go back to the palace to come and look inside. It takes us hours to see the whole gigantic palace. This is surely one of the most extraordinary buildings on the planet. There are hundreds of rooms, full of Raj splendour. The building itself is full of intricate details and the views over the blue city are breath-taking. The palace lies majestically perched on a high cliff above the blue-painted houses of Jodhpur. It is easy to forget the rudimentary taxes that must have been needed to build a structure of this scale.

Today and tomorrow will again be rest days. We want to visit Jaisalmer in the thar Desert, close to the border with Pakistan. Cycling from Jodhpur to Jaisalmer does not seem to be too interesting. Three hundred kilometer flat area divides Jodhpur from the desert city of Jaisalmer. Jasmine, Willem and I take a taxi to Jaisalmer, so that we are able to visit the Jain temples of Osiyan. The temple complex is another extraordinary place in Rajasthan. It is not the vast volume that impresses but the overload of fine details. There are small sculptures everywhere, often these are erotic images. We are the only tourists during the two hours that we spend on the complex. Then we continue to Jaisalmer, a long and boring ride. But Jaisalmer itself looks very interesting. The old city lies on a hilltop is completely surrounded by the walls of a citadel. This looks like an Arabic city of the Middle Ages. We meet Akbar, a nice young man who lived for ten years in Australia and New Zealand and is having holidays in his birthplace now. He offers us to guide us around tomorrow. Nice things tomorrow!

So today we have a sightseeing tour in yet another big palace. But I find out that I have seen a bit too much splendour the last days so I am passing all the rooms with Raj extravagance to enjoy the views over the golden coloured city. Akbar proves to be very nice company. After the visit of the palace we are walking through the alleys of the old city, along the Jain temples and over the city walls and down to the new city. We find a good tea house where we have a simple but very tasteful lunch. The kind of place that only locals know, where we eat the things that most tourists never find the opportunity to eat. After the lunch we pass some interesting havelis, the ornamented houses that rich businessmen have built in the nineteenth century. At two o' clock we need to get the bus back to Jodhpur. So it is thanks to Akbar. And we have a long and boring bus ride back to Jodhpur. In Jodhpur we have our last dinner with Jasmine. She will head north to Amritsar and Dharamsala, places where we have been three years ago. We will go further south to Udaipur, our last stop in Rajasthan before we will travel by bus and train to Varanasi. From there we will cycle to Nepal. But that is all later.

We get up early as we know that we have to cycle at least 140 kilometer to find a hotel in Ranakpur. The area between Jodhpur and Ranakpur is a highly obscure area where we will certainly not be able to find a hotel. An added difficulty is that we do not have a clue about the distance. It could easily be two hundred kilometer as well. And the road could be difficult to find. The road quality could be poor. So we get off on a mission impossible. But we try to believe that we could be able to reach Ranakpur. As the road deteriorates after fifteen kilometer we still believe. After the road gets unpaved after ten more kilometers we still think we have chances. As we get lost another five kilometer later we say that if from now on everything goes fine, we could still possibly have a chance. After we have to walk for half an hour through loose sand flats, and after we have to wade through a wide river and after repairing a flat tyre we know that this is a hopeless affair. But still at times it is interesting, especially if we ride through the villages. Sometimes there is a crowd of children, but this time we have at least sixty school children around us. We are sitting an hour with alle those kids around us. We try to entertain them and they give us fresh fruit. They have two giant water melons and some strange but delicious sweet fruit. We cycle somewhat further, where we again get lost. It is really difficult to find the way when you are cycling on roads that cannot be found on maps. So far every time we found out sooner or later but today is really hopeless. We have cycled a hundred kilometer, it quite late already and we are only halfway. We have to take a taxi in Bujinath. The landscape that we pass in the taxi is sometimes really gorgeous. It is really a shame that we are not cycling this stretch but what can we do? We arrive in Ranakpur as the evening falls. Tomorrow we will cross the Aravalli Hills to Udaipur. We will not get lost tomorrow at least: tomorrow we will ride on a major road, a road that is actually a road and one that can be found on a map.

This time it is Willem who has got stomach problems. Willem says he is still good enough to cycle today. We decide to leave today, we can stop at any time and place today. After only two kilometers we reach the Jain temples of Ranakpur. The white temples are situated beautifully in the valley between the green Aravalli Hills. Like the temples in Osiyan, the ornaments and details are stunning. We hang around for a while and then we proceed in the direction of Udaipur. First we have to climb to a pass over the first of the hill ranges. It feels good to climb, this is the first time in the holidays that we are really climbing. Unfortunately Willem feels ill on this day. But all in all we get on well. When we reach the pass, we find out that there is not a descent on the other side, followed by a new ascent. There is a kind of flat area on 900 meter elevation. There are hills and valleys to the left and the right but the road winds at more or less the same elevation. At times we have good views to the left, at other times to the right and sometimes to both sides. This is a strange place. the hills are all green as grass and the people are a little different from elsewhere in India. It feels more like Africa than India.

After a few hours the road goes down finally. A new highway is being built here and on the highway we go down to Udaipur. There is not much traffic now because the road is still under construction. And maybe there is not a highway needed here. The only city in the surroundings is Udaipur. To our surprise the highway is passing by without a possibility to get off for Udaipur. There is no traffic at all right now. We find an obscure track that finally leads to bigger roads and finally we reach the firy-tale city of Udaipur, the palace capital of India. The Lake Pichola has got two extraordinary floating palaces and is partly surrounded by a sheer wall of palaces. Tomorrow we will do the sightseeing. Now it is time to have a good drink to the end of our Rajasthan experiences. Tomorrow we will start the journey to Varanasi, 1.500 kilometer to the east. We will not cycle these flat kilometers, which will take us two weeks at least. We will go to Varanasi by train and bus and from there we will cycle to Nepal. It was nice to be in the hills today, now we like to see mountains...