Indian bike trip or 'how shit are Enfields?'

So, many months ago Mssrs Martin and Carr started planning a motorbike trip across north india. Carr's idea really, sam bought in quite quickly and I was interested. I'd seen people riding around india on these beautiful old British bikes (now made in Chennai, India) and thought 'what a bunch of wankers' but secretly wanting to have a go. Sadly my contract didn't end in Lanka until October, and when they were planning it, would be term time for me :-( I thought about it for a few days and thought "fuck it", handed in my notice at work and agreed to join them. Mr Carr then rang the bell of C**t and pulled out due to some pathetic excuse that had something to do with large amounts of poo in his pants. Sam n I decided to go ahead. Nearer the date, I bought mr Carr's enfield 350 bullet from him for way too much money, cos it looked lovely on facebook and I was a bit drunk at the time.
I arrived in Delhi, to find the disastrous commonwealth games preparations well under way, in that the city was a bomb site with rubble, deep holes, large pools of mosquito breeding grounds, part finished metro tracks/stations and lots of 'workers' sat round drinking tea, while large machinery sat idle. I'd been looking forward to it, as I hadn't been in Delhi for 8 years and it used to be one of my fave places to wander around. This was my first view of pahaganj!




Not as I remembered at all. Went to pick up my new bike the next day, and it turned out to be a bit older than I'd thought (should have asked really!) but still a great looking bike!

Trip back to new Delhi from old Delhi was a bit of a mare, everything in the wrong place, gears on the wrong side and going the wrong way, back break not where it should be, and it stalled at every set of lights and had to be kicked back into life in the heat of a Delhi day. Not a good beginning.
Sam arrived 6 days later and we picked up his rental bike, and prepared to set off the next day.
First stop: Shimla, in the foothills and once prize hillstation of the old British army days, where the entire Indian administration used to move to en-mass went the heat if the plains got too much.
What a shit-hole! I'd been years before but had forgotten how much I hated it. I have no pics as it rained for the first 2 days of the trip and I wasn't getting my DSLR out in the monsoon. This is sam not far outside if shitla the following day, we were both caked in mud for this entire day.
On to Narkanda, a hard days ride through rain clouds and mud. Visor up, too dirty to see through, trucks splashing thick mud all over us and into our helmets. A woman at one point decided to jump from a low wall directly in front of my slow moving bike, the result being me on the road, cuts and bruises and giving her evil looks. This was maybe the first time of very many that I had to man-handle this heavy bastard bike upright after it lay in the road, often with sam's help.

Narkanda was lovely but we over indulged in the local apple wine (himachal pradesh is famous for its apples).
The 3rd day took us to Reckong Peo, place of permits to enter the valley beyond, our destination Spitti valley, high in the himal and close to the Tibetan border.

Our first view of the snow capped peaks from Reckong P. We had a rest day here and (in theory) got the bikes prepared for the rough roads and high altitude to follow.

Sam waits for bike repairs/maintenance to finish.

All a bit hazy around here, Tabo may have been next, I don't remember. We were heading for Nako, that much I do remember. This is where the brown smelly stuff starting hitting the spinny wind machine, and shortly after Pooh (yeah really) we failed, or rather the bikes failed to climb a hill. We returned to pooh, in the poo. After failing to get the bikes fixed for a day and a half we took out air filters, cleaned plugs, cursed a lot and attempted the incline again. We managed to get to the top and arrived in Nako. A fantastic little Buddhist Himalayan village adorned with prayer flags, prayer wheels and walls, with a nice little gompa to boot.




Walls full of carved slates, Om Mani Padme Hung (praise to the jewel in the lotus) a Tibetan chant/ prayer referring to the buddha's rise from the shit of life to enlightenment.
Part 2 to follow soon.

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A pictorial voyage of Tamil Nadu.

We started in Chennai (state capital of Tamil Nadu) and went south by bus to Mahabalipuram (Mamalipuram( which is quite backpackerish)), but was nice and relaxing, we bought 'stuff', clothes and henna tattoo blocks etc. The room had the largest collection of mosquitoes I'd ever seen and no nets. We had to spray;  oh boy! they just rained out of the air covering the floor, bed and everything in tiny black bodies. Some nice ruins and old sculptures dotted about the small coastal town, like this; called 'Arjuna's Penance' i.e. one of the heroes from the Mahabarata and Bhagavad Gita. too give you some kind of scale, it's about 30 ft high and about 100ft long.

Follow the link above to read more about this 14C old carving.


We then headed down to Pondicherry about another 2hrs south along the coast, we did this in an ambassador as a treat, great old cars (still being built, I think, in India), much comfier than your modern pokey little taxis.

 Pondicherry has a French history as can still be seen from both the architecture, street layout and the roadsigns which are in both Tamil (the official language of Tamil Nadu) and French. It was lovely and wide and open, but...with a crazily wide, mind bogglingly long, stupidly dirty beach, so don't take your trunks.  I can, however, heartily recommend a little place called Kasha Ki Aasha where we went for breakfast before heading off to Trichy. Trichy has very little to offer, so here's a pic of a typical Indian scene, top bicycle loading and balancing skills, and this is just an amateur! 

We caught a bus to Madurai the next day, top Tamil script reading skills by Laura, my fellow traveller in the pics, made the whole finding the right bus scenario much easier. Good journey inland and south to Madurai and the famous Meenakshi-Sundareswar_Temple. An impressive Hindu temple with four towers, each highly detailed and bearing thousands of figurine sculptures, gods and incarnations of gods. 

Whilst circumnavigating the temple we stumbled upon a place, which I later read about in the guide book. A bustling little market in an ancient and intricately decorated piece of stunning building. (See pic at bottom of this post) Sadly, like a lot of things in this part of the world, it was being allowed to decay and fall apart, but it's things like this that make India wonderful, the mix of contradictions and opposites, ancient and modern, ridiculously poor and disgustingly rich, healthy and diseased. Amazing to experince.  

We then headed up to Kodaikanal in the western ghats for a spot of RnR for a few days. We had originally intended to go to Ooty instead but had forgotten just how big India is, so opted for somewhere more sensible. We were both mighty glad we changed out minds. We tried one guest-house at first which sounded reasonable in the book, the guy in the hotel had little time and a mobile phone stuck to the side of his face, he showed us a recently vacated, but not yet cleaned or tidied room in a casual "here's my best room" take it or leave it kind of way whilst carrying on his convo via aforementioned mobi. We left it; thanks. We ended up at the slightly more expensive, but worth every rupee, place called 'Villa Retreat". This was our view:

 Yes, those are clouds beneath us! The plain being 1.5km down, this to be fair, was shortly after sunrise the next morning, the time we arrived we were in the clouds and the scale was still impressive but not like this.
Talking of the sunrise, the picture below shows what woke us up, we left the curtains open so that it would. There aren't adjectives enough to describe sunrises or sunsets like this one.  The flat calm sea of clouds beneath a blanket of deepest blue with a large fusion explosion going off in the distance.

We then headed back to Madurai after a great couple of days in Kodai, to catch a train the next day for an 8hr journey back up to Chennai. Indian trains are superb, but we ended up in A/C cars and they were freezing and I was feeling quite ill by the time we got off, but that's another story. 
So I'll leave you with an assortment of images, all images were taken by me on my iPhone btw, so forgive the quality or goggle at the quality as you wish, the first one is a very common sight in India, but not one you're ever likely to see in the west :-) and yes he was driving down the road as I took this out of the window of a car, and yes again that's the baby sat on the tank it's not the other little girls doll. The last pic is also a little crazy but very common, wife on back of motorbike, dressed impeccably in Saree balancing sidesaddle and holding the baby, not a helmet in sight; Hari Ram!