Motorcycle Diaries Page III

Flashback time.

You see, when we arrived in Bangalore, back in the middle of 2006, we had no bikes. I had a Yamaha that was pretty much in the ICU then, and Noel had nothing.

Taking pity on our impoverishment, Noel's uncle, who lives in Coorg, cast around in his garage for a bike that we could use. He and his willing helpers found a bike that they did not use. Which he decided we could use. If you know what I mean.

Trouble is, turns out they did not use that bike for a reason.

It was light, it was flimsy, it was old, and it was ill suited for the long rides that Coorg necessitated. Poor old Uncle, while giving the bike, gave Noel a comforting pat on the shoulder and told him to chill, Noel would be using that bike for city riding only, so it was all OK.

Heh heh.

Now, the other thing that I must mention in the flashback is that the bike had tyres that had not been replaced for a long time, and the tyres carried within them tubes that, well... how shall I put this diplomatically.... were bloody well ancient. Yeah, that's a nice understated way of putting it.

I like my readership. I really do. I admire the way they discern almost immediately the direction this blog is going to take. I can see you now, nodding your heads wisely and saying "Aha! The poor sods. Course they were going have a puncture."

Sure enough, about half an hour or so after I had taken over, and I was burning some serious rubber, I went ahead and did literally that. Burnt rubber. The bike slid, and it skewed. It slithered and it slipped. It skidded and it swerved. After it did all of those thing and then some more, it finally resorted to some moves that would have impressed Prabhu Deva. At which point, the two Neanderthals astride it applied their formidable intelligence to the problem at hand.

Neanderthal 1: "There seems to be some problem"

Alarming tendency on part of the loyal steed to swerve out into the lane of a fast approaching truck.

Neanderthal 2: (Ever alert) "Huh? What?"

Definite wobbling at the back.

Neanderthal 1: (The cogs up top spinning furiously) "DUDE! I think we have a flat!"

Sharp braking, sharper twist of handlebars, and some sharp intake of breath. Loud honking, and some rapid inclusions in list of words that our Mums would never have taught us.

A quick professional, ocular inspection and comparison of the two tyres revealed that the one at the rear was decidedly flatter than the one up front. No toolkit, so no way were we going to able to remove the tyre and roll it along.

Frantic waving of hands at passing trucks resulted in zero response rate.

There was a petrol pump a little up ahead on the other side of the road that Noel visited. He woke up some people, asked if there was a puncture shop, and was told that there was one, about 3 kilometres away, back the way we had come.

So Noel stayed on that side of the road and started walking back. There was a rather large stretch of road in between us, with a divider thrown in for good measure, and then I on this side of the road, pushing for all I was worth. Pitch black darkness, and a long walk ahead.

About fifteen minutes into the walk, I noticed that Noel was nowhere to be seen. No signal on the cell, and slight "Now I be Middle Fingered" kind of feeling.

So yours truly sets off, bike firmly in grip, walking back towards Bangalore, waving desperately to every approaching truck driver, and yelling out "Noel! Noel!" every 500 metres.

Oh, the wonderful joy that is a bike ride.

About an hour later, when I'd about given up hope and was thinking of starting a small farm around those parts, I spotted what I thought was the outline of Noel, walking towards me.

And right then, if you gave me a choice between a scantily clad Angelina Jolie or the hazy outline of Noel Castellino...

I mean, think of the headlines.

"Scantily Clad Jolie and (Fully Clothed) Kulkarni To Take Up Farming in Rural Karnataka".

Wah. Wah Wah.

But to return to a more prosaic blog. We hugged and shed some tears, and went off to wake up the puncture dude, who robbed us blind, repaired the puncture, and we were off again. What was supposed to have taken a maximum of fourteen hours was now overshot by about 3 hours.

The time: 5.30 a.m.

And at six, we were at a town called Chitradurg, where we stopped for tea.

Coming up next: The Awesome Paranthas and the Sons of Bachelors.

Motorcycle Diaries - Page II

Scared.

You should always be scared. If you feel no butterflies at the bottom of your tummy, if you do not glance around in apprehension at the traffic around you, if you do not scan the road ahead repeatedly, alert for the slightest sign of trouble, if you do not run over a checklist of what you have and what you should have got, in your head, over and over again, then turn back and go home.

Never set out on a long ride unless you're scared.

Of course, sixteen hours into the ride, you're dead tired, you wish the trip was through (am I infringing on copyright here?) you are no longer alert, you no longer scan the road, and you wish you'd left yourself back home, but that's beside the point.

At the start of the journey, your blood pressure should be a distinct point of worry for the family physician.

I believe I have mentioned this in passing, but especially so if the whole hullalaboo begins past midnight.

My helmet (which deserves a blog of it's own, and which it shall get one day) was in Pune, and while Noel had got one for himself; I'd used one that was lying around the house. Grey in colour, with a fake sticker of Castrol on it, it was designed for those with extremely small heads. And while the contents of my cranium (or the lack of it. Yes, of course. Ha ha.) would have fit in there a zillion times over, the packaging itself was rather large in size.

As is the case with the rest of my body, but leave that be.

Haan, so the point being, I was wearing a helmet that was decidedly small in size. And therefore bleeding uncomfortable. And when the journey takes about 19 hours to complete, that's no nice thing.

Noel was driving first, and the first challenge was to figure out which was the way to Hubli. No, no road map. Naturally.

So by a long drawn out process of iterative questioning, we finally got ourselves onto NH 4.

It's a smooth enough road to start with, rather heavy in traffic, even at odd hours of the night, with depressing uniformly ugly buildings on both sides of the road. In India, there is no surer way to tell that you are in the outskirts of a city. Small ugly, squatting buildings, painted either in an off putting faint yellow or a hideous pink, with small cast tiron staircases by the side. Mile after mile of the same, until finally the quality of the buildings begins to improve if you're heading into a city, or, the Lord be praised, they disappear, to reveal the Indian countryside.

Which is beautiful, peoples.

This took about an hour to complete, and we were finally in the Karnataka countryside. Not that we could make out much of it, since it was pitch dark, but now what to do?

Now for the twist in the tale. One of many, obviously.

The previous night, self and doppelganger had gotten palpably plastered at the residence of Soumya Mahapatra. Rum and beer, and other consequential odds and ends. I had slept through the day, but Noel had not. He had gone for work, and had been there for a good fourteen hours.

So why was he at the helm? You see, it was the devil or the deep sea types. Either we could count on the adrenalin lasting for a couple of hours, and he could then take it easy at the back, or we could let him take it easy at the back for a couple of hours, and then let him take over. One way or the other... and we chose the one.

Which was fine for the first hour or so.

After which, Noel's supply of adrenalin ran out.

The road had narrowed perceptibly, and it wasn't exactly smooth going either. I was at the back, eyes firmly shut, belting out one song after the other.

This has two advantages. One, you, with your eyes shut, are resting yourself. You ain't driving, you ain't concentrating on anything, you're taking it easy. Which is good news.

Plus, Kulkarni Junior trying to make it like Rafi Sa'ab or Kishore Da is guaranteed to frustrate the Buddha to bits. So anybody in the vicinity, like Noel, for example, is pretty much going to be awake.

But Castellino Junior is to plis not be underestimated, thankoo very much.

Bhaisaab, having spent a long hard day at work, finally decided to let the bike run on auto-pilot for a bit.

See, contrary to common sense and the laws of physics, it is possible to sleep while riding a bike. You can't, of course, sleep as in slumber. But you can let your eyelids become heavy, you can let your head drop, and you can be at the borderline of sleepfulness and wakefulness. I wouldn't advise it, and I didn't write that last sentence, but every guy who has gone on a long bike ride knows what I'm talking about.

What you can't do.. and decidedly so, is try and overtake a lorry on a blind curve. We suddenly found ourselves blinded by rather strong headlights and some frantic honking all around us. I unclenched my eyes and nearly emptied the old bladder right there, because we could make out a rather large and formidable truck bearing down upon us.

Noel woke up about half a second after that, and both of us contemplated the afterlife awhile.

But like I said, the entire pantheon up there was frantically working the cosmic levers and pushing the heavenly buttons, and they did a good job, because a deft zig by Noel, coupled with an adroit zag (for those truly in the know, that last turn of phrase was by way of tribute) by that wonderful specimen of Tata Engg. saw us home and dry.

There might have been the odd shaken fist and perhaps an ill-judged word or two about our ancestry, but you know how those truck drives are.

I patted Noel on the shoulder, a little shaken, and asked bhaisaab if all was OK.

Bhaisaab, who seemed a little James Bond Martini-ed himself, naturally replied in the affirmative, and we set off on our merry way again.

And all was right for the next twenty minutes.

After which, the road curved sharply to the left, and we didn't.

Rude jolts underneath us shook us to wakefulness again, and the weak headlight offered us a terrifying glimpse of large boulders, gaping holes and a complete lack of asphalt. Five meters ahead of which, we could see the road again. Noel could either have braked sharply, resulting in a surefire tumble into God knows what, or he could have grit his teeth, fired up the accelerator for all it was worth, and driven the bike through those five meters, praying for deliverance.

Thankfully, the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost... or far more likely, all three of 'em, with some outsourcing thrown in, were on hand to answer those Speed Post prayers. I'm not saying it was like the parting of the Red Sea, and no manna fell from heaven. There wasn't darkness for six days and seven nights, and no floods were spotted in the vicinity, but we made those five meters and stood by the side of the road.

Alive and decidedly jittery.

Castellino took the helmet off, as did I. We got off the bike and stood looking around us. We peed, and drank some water. We watched the trucks rolling past. Barely an hour and a half done, and about fifteen more to go.

Noel looked at me.

I looked at Noel. Grimace and understanding grin duly exchanged, I took over the rudder.

And what a time we had.

Motorcycle Diaries - Page I

You guys ever seen the TVS Suzuki Max 100 R?

It's a 100 cc bike, small and compact.It's got a bhp rating that, well, can be sneezed at.

Small seats, unimpressive build, not too much power, decent enough performance, but overall, one of those thingies that you use to take you from Point A to Point B. So long as Uncle Euclid is on hand to verify that A and B have no more than 20 kilometres between them.

Anything more than that, and you'd be better off on a bicycle, is the general consensus of the know-alls in the biking world.

Messrs. Castellino and Kulkarni, unfortunately, are pretty much lumbering ignoramuses where the biking world is concerned.

There are people in this world who would argue with passion about how we are lumbering ignoramuses where considerably more than the biking world is concerned, but we (you, gentle reader, and us, Kulkarni and Castellino) shall hold our noses high in the air and ignore their rants. As always.

And make a plan to ride to Goa on that aforementioned, much admired excuse for a motorcycle.

Goa, as the crow, or any bird for that matter, flies, is about 500 kilometers away. Roadwise, it adds another 250 odd of the kms.

Though even the crow, or any bloody bird, for that matter, might think twice about making that foolhardy journey. Especially starting at 12.30 at night. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This particular bird-brained (do you notice an ever so slight tilt toward ornithology in this blog? I thought so) caper had it's roots in an insatiable desire to go to Goa. Given that one of the undersigned thinks of Goa as his spiritual home (think of our trip to Goa as one of those Mt. Kailash expeditions. In a more evolved form), and that the other's thoughts lie in almost perfect resonance... well, it's a wonder that we've been there only once.

Note to self and Castellino: More trips once you return from the Godforsaken land.

There came a time in our lives when a sudden and fortuitous confluence (is that the word I want?) of holidays enabled us to plan a trip to Goa.

We could have flown there, and we could have taken a bus. We could have hired a car, or we could have borrowed a friends car. OK, I made that last one up... none of our friends are rich enough to afford a car just yet, and even if they were, they wouldn't go around lending it out to the two of us. We have this... ah... reputation.

Deserved, I might add.

But still and all, anything being more plausible than planning to ride all the bloody way to Goa. And on that bike. And starting at 12 at night.

Thing is, we could only leave after finishing work that day.

Thinger is, Noel was planning to leave work at 8, but finally said he could leave only at 10.

Thingest is, Noel could only leave by midnight.

So naturally, we left at midnight too.

Neither of us are particularly devout, but Jesus and the entire pantheon of Hindu deities were to do overtime with a vengeance over the next four days.

We'd planned for this trip, as we do for all else in life, with a meticulous eye for detail.

We had two cloth bags, one of which had our clothes, and the other held our medical kit, and our toolkit.

Our medical kit consisted of one bottle of Dettol. We thought we had swabs, but we didn't.

Our toolkit consisted of one spoon. You see, the bike needs an injection of oil over and above the regular intake. This oil, in a fit of unimagination, is called side oil. Now in order to refill the side oil, the side panel needs to be side removed. OK, I got carried away.

In order to remove it, the side panel needs to be unscrewed. We had a spoon in the kitchen that fit our needs perfectly.

So that was our toolkit.

Yeah. Seriously.

Now, the thing is, about 600 kilometers into the journey, we found that our mechanic, during the last servicing, had removed this screw, making our spoon redundant.

Which, in hindsight, was a good thing, since we'd forgotten to take the spoon along anyway.

More later, people.
I'm hoping you can't wait to hear the rest.